"Wish You Were Here" by Jodi Picoult

An audio book.

Diana (29) works for Sotherby's in New York, selling art (she used to be an artist). She has a plan for her life. Her partner is Finn, a doctor. Her art-restoration father died 4 years before. Her mother, who left years before that, returned with early onset Altzheimers and is in a care home. Diana and Finn have planned a holiday in the Galápagos Islands - she expects to be proposed to there. At the last moment he has to stay - Covid has broken out. When she arrives at the islands, her hotel is closed - lockdown. At old lady offers her a house. Her son Gabriel isn't friendly to her initially. She befriends his daughter Beatrice (14) who can speak English and (unknown to her father) is a cutter. The mother has left the family. Some messages from Finn get through but she has trouble replying. In the end the messages sound like covid-diary entries.

There are flashbacks to her career. Her best friend at work is Rodney, flamboyantly gay. In a side-plot, Kitomi had decided not to sell a painting that was on the cover of a Night Jars album, putting Diana's job at risk.

She has private talks with Gabriel and his daughter (who was bullied at school - later we learn that unknown to her father she's a lesbian). Her mother (a photograper, a Pulitzer prizewinner) has covid and soon dies.

Diana wonders why she's reviewing her relationship with Finn. Gabriel tells her that fishermen cut off shark's fins and throw the shark back into the water. She sleeps with Gabriel while feeling guilty that she doesn't mourn her mother's death. Beatrice sees them and runs away. Beatrice has hoarded (instead of posted) the postcards that Diana has written to Finn.

She wakes up and it is all a dream. While she had covid (she nearly died) in Finn's hospital she had vividly experienced months on holiday. She realises that parts of the dream had real-life causes - delirious, she'd told Finn about her doubts regarding their relationship, for example. Her mother isn't dead. but a few other parts of her dream are strangely true. She feels she's been saved for a reason. She tries to contact others who've had vivid "parallel world" experiences.

She tries to make up with her mother (via video link). When her mother contracts covid she breaks into her room, takes off her mask. Her mother recognises her for the first time in years. Diana's heard about "terminal clarity" - covid has given her mother a way to understand things, to remember other places. She soon dies. Because Diana's taken off her mask, she and Finn have to quarentine for 2 weeks. He's initially angry. He proposes. She says "you're perfect. You're just not perfect for me"

There's an epilogue. 3 years later she's an art therapist. She's living cheaply with Rodney. She visits the Galápagos Islands. She seeks correspondences with her dream.

There are many standard situations (especially the covid-related ones). There are some standard plot twists. These are often foregrounded, giving the book a literary feel. I was surprised that Diana didn't analyse her dream - why was Beatrice a lesbian? At times I felt that the author had done Covid and Galápagos research and wanted to find a way to use it. And yet, I remained interested.

Other reviews

• laurasbooksandblogs (I went into this book thinking that Covid was going to just be a small element of the book, the element that just gets Diana to the island by herself and causes this conflict where she is forced to choose between the life she had planned and the life that she fell into. ... Once the twist occurred, I began to try to predict where the story was going next. Surely, Diana had been transported to some limbo state with others who were dead or dying. And she was going to find that her found family on that island were no longer alive once she researched it further. Luckily, the story was a bit less predictable than that as the book makes a U-turn back into a standard romance book. ... we see her break her desire to plan her life out in advance and find a way to make peace with her past and move forward with her future.)
• ivereadthis (Despite these somewhat obvious developments, I found myself swept along by Diana’s life, and Picoult is adept at creating a character with obvious flaws, but much to love as well. The problems in her life plan are obvious as soon as you pick up the book, but she’s not an annoying character you want to see fail.)
• kirkus reviews (Picoult yanks this novel off life-support by resorting to a flagrantly hackneyed plot device. Somehow, though, it works, thanks again to that penchant for grounding every fictional scenario in thoroughly documented fact. Throughout, we are treated to pithy if rather self-evident thematic underscoring, e.g. “You can’t plan your life….Because then you have a plan. Not a life.”)

"Waiting for H5N1" by Jane Routh (Templar Poetry, 2007)

A pamphlet of poems from Rialto, etc

I like the pamphlet more than any particular poem. Several mention the counting of birds. Poems tend to end well (p.4, p.6, p.8 etc). My favourite piece is "Swan".

Other reviews

• Sue Butler (There’s a lot of worry and talk of culls but there’s also a lot of hope. I especially like the poem ‘Egg’)

"The man between" by Charles Cumming

An audio book.

Lara Bartok is interviewed about Resurrection - a group of 7 20-somethings who aimed to punish immoral public figures. Though chronologically this time-line begins when the other nearly ends, sections from the 2 time-lines alternate.

It's 1966. Kit Carradine, a young thriller writer whose father had been a spy, is walking in London when someone pretends to be a fan and wants to meet with him. Intrigued (he thinks the man, Mr Mantis, belongs to MI6), Kit agrees. They've been watching him, and ask him to extend a stay he's taking in Marrakesh to appear at a book festival. He easily succumbs to flattery, seeing himself as a latterday Graham Greene, the role of curious novelist being a good cover. He's close to his father, who had to stop being a spy after a Philby-related smear.

He's supposed to look for Maria, who the secret services lost touch with 2 years before. She likes books and might turn up at the festival. He's supposed to give her a passport and credit card. Seeing her picture, and having read the newspapers, Kit realises she's Lara Bartok, part of Resurrection, ex girlfriend of the dead leader Ivan.

He has some chance encounters on his flight, his train, and elsewhere, some of them suspicious. He feels lost "in a wilderness of mirrors". He uses the skills he learnt while researching for his novels. It's suggested to him that the Russians are trying to kill the Resurrection members and their relatives. He wonders whether MI6 want to save Lara or kill her.

He sees Lara. She says that Mantis works for Russia. Kit has a plan to help her escape before the wrong people get her, involving fans he met who have a yacht. They reach Gibralter then Lara runs off. He returns to London. It's surprisingly quiet. Then 2 spies talk to him, one of whom he met in Morocco. They say that Mantis has been killed. They discuss Resurrection. Kit defends their principles though like Lara he doesn't like their lurch into terrorism. They release him. He sees them with Lara. He begins to think that Lara was a British agent. He's kidnapped, meets Ivan. Whose side is he on? The Russians, and they funded Resurrection. Ivan wants to kidnap Lara with Kit's , hinting that they've got Kit's father. Kit thwarts them. Ivan's killed. Lara becomes a spy again, and Kit is invited to do more spy work.

I was hooked most of the time. I liked the Morocco details. It's also known as "The Moroccan Girl".

Other reviews

• pittenweemlibrary (He delights in the chance to perform the spy role for real and pats himself on the back several times for how well he is doing. ... Such clichés are send-ups by the author. It is fun to spot them in this clever and witty book.)
• Barry Forshaw

"Rattle" by Fiona Cummins

An audio book.

Clara (who has her middle 3 fingers missing) is abducted by the bone collector, a man whose family through generations has been collecting unusual bones. She's 5. Her mother had been against her having an operation. Her father, a doctor, has solicited under-age women in the past.

The man keeps Jakey under observation, awaiting an opportunity to abduct him too. His bone disease means that his life expectancy is 36 years. His father Erdman has been a journalist on a Psychic magazine. He gets sacked, assaulted by a gang, gets himself to hospital and disappears. His twin brother died about 30 years before of the bone disease than Jakey has. His body was stolen. His wife Lilith became an orphan in childhood.

DI Fitzroy, 37, isn't making much progress. Her father, an ex-policeman moved abroad 2 years before with his new wife. She and her partner David are about to have an appointment at a fertility hospital. But David doesn't turn up. Her sister pesters her, saying that her niece wants a visit. She decides that having a child is more important than preserving a marriage.

A year before a girl called Grace was abducted, though she wasn't known to have a bone abnormality. Now it's discovered from her mother that she had an extra pair of ribs.

Lilith finds Erdman drunk in a park. Jakey is taken to hospital because his illness has flared up. His parents go there. Jakey is abducted.

The bone collector would like to cut up a live body. He uses beetles etc to remove flesh from bones. He leaves rabbit skeletons as calling cards. The police study the skeletons and contact beetle sellers, leading them to think that the culpit works in a museum. From his PoV we learn that he has an ill wife and no children.

Erdman has worked out that the criminal works in the hospital and is the man who's been following him. He tries to find son to make up for his imperfect behaviour in the past. Fitzroy works out the hospital connection too, Brian Howley has been a cleaner for 40 years. His boss knows that his father died and left him a house. Brian suspects that they're on his trail.

Fitzroy had over-reacted during the Grace case, and is being kept away from the front line. She goes to Brian's father's house. He tells her about Grace then stabs her and carries her in. Erdman watches, and goes in to save Fitzroy. The two find the skeleton of Erdman's brother. [Would Brian really be so careless? Would they really not contact the police (who are outside the wrong house)?] There's a fire. The police arrive in time.

6 months later, Erdman and Lilith are happy together and Jakey is ok. Brian escaped from the police. Clara might still be alive. Her parents have separated. Grace is dead.

[The plot isn't always convincing. The writing's best when first-person women are worrying. "rectangular-shaped" isn't good.]

Other reviews

• nonsenseshewrote (a mess ... Rattle‘s biggest issue is not knowing what genre it wants to be. It’s an everyday crime thriller, without any supernatural goings-on, that still owes half its page count to horror stories. ... two-thirds of the novel is spent setting up these strange goings on and the last third utterly forgetting about them. Two-thirds of the novel don’t advance the plot or the characters in any way, choosing to draw out these creepy moments instead which, ultimately, mean nothing since the story doesn’t have a supernatural resolution. ... Coincidence-driven’, ‘stupid-decision-driven’, ‘otherwise-smart-characters-making-terrible-out-of-character-decisions-to-serve-the-weak-plot-driven’, sure. But Cummins drives her characters with all the subtlety of a freight train.)
• bibliomaniacuk (This novel flits between crime, psychological thriller and horror; nothing is ever overstated or over sensationalised, keeping the reader completely convinced and on tenterhooks from the beginning to end.)

"Cleave" by Nikki Gemmell

An audio book.

Snip Freeman, a wandering artist, 30, received a cheque and a note saying "Hunt him down". 10 days later she's in her new car, Dave (30) driving her across Australia to Alice, having answered her advert. He's an archeologist who's not had sex for 2.5 years. She has sex with him and leaves him in Alice going 650 miles further, where people know her, to find Bud. Snip knows the Aboriginal ways.

We learn that the money and instructions were in her gran's will. She went to a convent school and got top marks. She could have done law or medicine. She only paints men. Her mother Helen is based in London. She designs lighting for big buildings. Bud (Richard) is her father. He left home with her when she was 7. She went to school in Aboriginal lands as a boy until she was found out. Bud returned her to Sydney and became religious, not going out with women. Snip finds him. He does something that upsets Aboriginals and wants to leave for a while. He wants her to go with him. In the past she'd done bad things to attract his attention (she'd worked for an escort agency, and worse). She doesn't want to turn down this invitation though she'd heard that Dave was looking for her, which excites her.

They run out of fuel in the desert. They wait days for someone to pass by. She has the chance to kill a wallaby but can't do it. She asks her father why he left her mother. He says that her mother needs to tell her that. He gives her a letter from Dave that he's been keeping from her, a love letter.

He tells her that he found she was pregnant by one of his colleagues. He used a screwdriver to give her an abortion, which is why he's never forgiven himself. He walks off. She's saved. Dave is at the hospital. Helen pays for the search to continue after the police abandon hope.

She and Dave move to Tazmania. She gets used to sleeping with someone day after day. Bud's not dead after all. He finds her, then walks into the sea. She tells Dave not to rush in and save him.

The language is attractive -

• Snip opens a door, "letting the night rush into the room"
• She sees a white carrier bag flapping "like a happy ghost"
• Someone talks "like a party host trying to fill the silence"
• a person does something "like a doctor who can do no more"
• "like a tourist who's snuck into an empty church"
• a calf in the road with "the affronted look of someone caught looting"

Other reviews

• Louise Truscott (it has a timeless quality. It could have been written last year or 50 years ago. The prose is fluid and lyrical. But that appears to be where all the focus has gone. Cleave is 60% description, 30% character and 10% plot. The balance is off. It’s also full of women playing roles – good daughter, good mother, good girlfriend – without considering whether their parents, their children, their partners deserve their loyalty (they almost universally don’t). ... By the time I got to the end of the book, I realised it was a literary Mills & Boon ... It’s good writing lost in a poor plot. )

"The Men" by Sandra Newman

An audio book.

Men, boys and male foetuses suddenly all disappear. We get a list of episodes describing the moment - Jane Pearson, a 6 ft ex-ballerina, camping with her family, lists the male behaviours she misses; a woman is being operated on by a man; Ji-Won, who works in a shop, wants to be an artist, etc. There are mass suicides, a cult that claims that the men are still alive, arty videos online featuring men - a series called "The Men". Women think they're AI-generated until faces are recognised. Human-sized creatures are in the videos too.

Jane is infamous - in her mid-teens she seduced (and had sex with) teenage boys so that her dancing teacher could watch. She was then hit upon by men (including police) who thought she was loose. She tracks down Evangelyne Moreau. She'd been Evangelyne's muse when Evangelyne (black) shot police who killed her family. Evangelyne had helped her forget her past. They sleep together for the first time on the day they meet up again. Jane orgasms, to her surprise. Evangelyne wants to become president. Having a white colleague is advantageous. She wrote "The White Girl", an essay that was published in The New Yorker. The white girl in question wasn't her, but the girl who triggered events that led to the death of Evangelyne's family. Jane and Ji-Won meet at a meeting where woman watch the next episode of "The Men" looking for men they know. Jane sees her son being massacred by various men she knew, her husband not helping. Artificial insemination has progressed so that no semen is needed.

We learn about Poppy, Evangelyne's ex-girlfriend. Evangelyne's house was thought to shelter a cult - human sacrifice? Evangelyne was on her way to Princeton. Her mother's an academic. Poppy became a manic-depressive, famous among Seattle lesbians as a muse and relationship-breaker. She imagined beakless bird-like creatures (as in the videos). She set herself alight and died. Evangelyne pleads to Jane for help.

The men return. Not everyone can change the world. We let it change around us. That's enough for Jane in the end,

So it was all a dream, or at least an alternative reality. But before that revelation I think there are many sections that could be shortened - even removed.

"She took a selfie of herself" doesn't sound right.

Other reviews

• Alex Clark (It is also a novel about the lengths to which we might all go to assuage individual loss and grief; if the world turned out to be a better place without your loved one, would you sacrifice the greater good to turn the clock back? ... Evangelyne’s name is clearly meant to suggest HG Wells’s novel The Island of Doctor Moreau, but despite her evident desire for influence, she is not the book’s mad scientist, desperate to create beings half-animal, half-human. That strand of the story unfolds in the shape of mysterious video footage that appears online, featuring the missing men in a terrifying apocalyptic and savage setting. ... The novel caused trouble ahead of publication. There were vehement charges of gender essentialism and transphobia)
• Zachary Houle (It also starts out very slowly, and it will take many readers a long time to settle into the plot. It wasn’t until I was halfway through the book that I really started to warm up to this one. Also, potential readers should know that Newman spends an awful lot of real estate detailing women’s sweat ... Put that [video] experimentation on the printed page, and you wind up having to settle in for a massive snooze-fest ... It’s a bit confusing trying to keep character names straight for people we barely get to hear from. And, as it turns out, their stories really have absolutely no barring on the narrative at all! ... What’s more — because I’m on a roll here — the ending feels like one big cop-out.)
• motherbooker (They’ll publish anything if it’s a feminist dystopia these days. I’m absolutely sick of it. ... I expected the book to go into the consequences of this change. To analyse life without men and how differently women acted. It did to some extent but a lot of the book is preoccupied with reliving the past. ... There’s no easy way to say it but Jane isn’t an interesting enough character to be the main protagonist here. She’s so passive. ... Honestly, I think there were too many perspectives here.)

"Neon Manila" by Troy Cabida (Nine arches press, 2025)

Poems from "berlin lit", "and other poems", "Poetry Birmingham", "Ink, Sweat and Tears", "bath magg" etc.

• "I am all solution, empathy machine/ in a boomerang tiara,/ comic book scene at high noon,/ the one untouchable archetype,/ the one you cannot take home/ and dismantle" (the end of "Both wrists silvered, watch me deflect" After Wonder Woman). The tiara is Wonder Woman's. Maybe the cowboy "High Noon" and comics are being compared. Beyond that I'm rather stumped.
• "On a dry summer day/ my father calls me a [redacted]/ for the first time/ after he hear my friends/ call me a [redacted]./ He says it's because/ I can't shoot a ball/ or kiss a girl to shut her up./ Because I never play/ in the monsoon/ like the other boys do." (from Thalassophobia). Does this section earn its keep? Do the line-breaks? Should "hear" be "hears"? Should "says" be "say"?
• Is "Morning" enough for a poem?
• "Later, 4.1K tweets will disagree./ Before deleting said tweet,/ the American will ask/ what's wrong? Aren't all Filipinos/ forgiving? Aren't they meant to be so/ tolerant and hospitable? ...
  Before the second date, I texts you to ask/ if you could wear anything/ that isn't a turtleneck. He says/ he finds your neck so arousing/ the same way he finds your leg hair arousing/ and wishes you wouldn't be so formal/ about the way you dressed"
  (from "Neon Manila"). Line-breaks? The 2nd of these 2 extracts is the only text on the page!

The "Disco Ball Unbreakable" section has poems that cumulatively have an effect I like - like the facets of a disco ball maybe. The poet creates discontinuities that he then smoothly negotiates. It's hard to single out a favourite poem. The main theme seems to be flesh vs clothes - where flesh and clothes meet; how flesh feels just after clothes are removed; how clothes retain something of the body after removal.

There are 3 pages of "Acknowledgements and Thanks" with nearly 60 people named.