"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.

"Armadillo" by William Boyd

An audio book.

London. Lorimer Black is a loss adjuster. He finds a client, Mr Dupree, hanged. Lorimer's mother was a Romanian gypsy. He sleeps in Greenwich University's Sociology Dept, in a sleep lab run by Dr Alan Bury, a neighbour, who wants Lorimer to have lucid dreams.

His 3 older sisters live with his mother, grandmother, niece and ill father. His original name was Milomre Blocj but he changed it after returning from University at Inverness - as far from his family as possible. At school his exam results had been oxbridge level.

His new colleague, Torquil Helvoir-Jayne, thinks that Hogg, a boss, was involved in a shady deal - an over-insured building caught fire before it was ready. Lorimer has been sleeping for 3 years with Stella, who has a teenage daughter. He's become infatuated with a girl he's seen on TV in the company's ads - Flavia Malinverno. He writes in his journal which is called "The book of transfiguration". He collects antique helmets.

This sounds picaresque, baggy, like a Martin Amis novel. The author, by adding extracts from the journal and from dreams, can easily include extra material without needing to care about continuity. Family and work offer ways to introduce a spectrum of 2D characters. The helmet hobby doesn't make sense - a symbolic use for it is anticipated.

He negotiates a deal with the owners of the burnt-out building. Hogg tells him he's going to sack Torquil. Lorimer's next job involves a rock star, David Watts. He sees Flavia in person and asks her out. She agrees, though she's married - to a juggler.

Dimfne, a female colleague, asks to have sex with Lorimer. He declines. Torquil's wife catches her husband in bed with a young girl. She makes him leave the house. He's sacked. He asks Lorimer for help. Lorimer lets him move in. Lorimer's car is torched. He's attacked in the street. Hogg becomes suspicious of him, puzzled by some aspects of the arson case. Flavia tells him that she's told her husband Gilbert about him. The sister of the hanged man says that Lorimer's pressure forced the suicide (though actually Hogg applied the pressure). His father dies. A neighbour dies - Lorimer looks after her dog. Stella wants to move away - she's bought a fish farm and wants him to go with her. Everything seem to be going wrong.

He goes to a party. Gilbert is performing there with injuries that show he was the one who'd attacked Lorimer. The arsonist thanks him. The rock star thanks him. Torquil thanks him. Lorimer's puzzled. He writes up the arson case, showing how his colleagues are implicated. Alan tells him that his sleep difficulties are because he equates sleep to death, and he fears death. At home, depressed, he puts on a helmet and can't remove it. He goes to hospital. Flavia is offered a job in Vienna and asks him to go with her. No promises.

Like Lorimer, the author had many plates to keep spinning. I felt sympathy/empathy for nobody, though in other contexts the writing would make me feel something. The author just about holds things together - the localised farce doesn't destroy the whole. His write-up of the arson case restores the coherence - there are multiple scapegoats, and he's one of them. He adjusts to his losses. He finally has a plan.

Other reviews

• Caroline Boucher
• A.O. Scott (Helvoir-Jayne ... is one of the great comic creations of recent literature)

"The Party House" by Lin Anderson

An audio book.

Joanne is visiting Greg in the Scottish Highlands. He's a gamekeeper on an estate. They met only 10 days before in London. She has ulterior motives for staying. Lockdown is coming to a close. Greg's boss wants to re-open the Party House. During lockdown, some guests had helicoptered in and 6 locals had died from the resulting outbreak, so there's resistance to the re-opening. Caroline, the shopkeeper, is grumpy about Joanne's presence. Greg fears that he had carried the virus from the house to the village, Black Rig. In the night he hears vandals (relatives of the dead) attack the hot-tubs. Investigating, he sees a body in the foundations - a girl who'd disappeared 5 years before. Ilsa.

A group is arriving. Some were part of the group who were there at lockdown (he'd joined in with some of their sex activities).

Joanne's escaped from an abusive lover, Richard - a defence lawyer. She fears she may be pregnant by him. Greg's lied about who found the body. He has secrets about events from 5 years before. He and Caroline need to agree a story.

Joanne's pen name is Maya. She writes a blog. Caroline tells her that she was pregnant by Greg when Ilsa died. She had a miscarriage. Greg finds out that Joanne is pregnant. Greg's arrested for rape and murder then released. Caroline has offered Joanne a bed for the night then a lift to the airport - she's found out that Greg's semen was on Ilsa's body. Greg goes in the wood with a rifle. Joanne follows him.

A forest fire starts. Greg, a volunteer fire-fighter, helps stop it spreading to the Party House. Richard arrives. Joanne tells him it's his child to stop him hurting her, and tries to escape. Then she says it's not his child. He attacks her. Greg saves her and says he'll marry her whoever's baby it is. Caroline confesses to the accidental murder of Ilsa - she was jealous. She returns to London and attacks him on her blog for his attitude to women.

The author's choices about teasers and secrets don't quite work for me. Consequently the reporting of too many of the facts seems unnecessarily delayed.

Other reviews

• literarytreats (The setting was wonderfully depicted; ... But the thriller itself just wasn’t very thrilling.)

"The Color Purple" by Alice Walker

An audio book. In the preface the author says it's about a journey she's been trying to resist - from spiritualism (love of nature) to love of God.

It begins with Celie's letters - "Dear God, I'm 14 years old." Celie's mother is ill. Her father makes Celie pregnant before the mother dies, then makes her pregnant again. She's married off to Albert (a widower with 4 kids) aka Mister, who never gives her an orgasm (she's never had one). Shug stays for a while, a supposed hussy, a Blues singer, who Mister had wanted to marry. Celie's happy for the two of them to sleep together. Shug teaches her about female anatomy and orgasms, and gets Mister to stop beating her.

Sofia is married to Harpo who wants to control her. Celie suggests that he tried hitting her. He ends up badly bruised. She goes out with a boxer and is jailed for punching the major - she didn't want to be a maid.

She finds letters that have been sent to her by Nellie, the sister she thought dead. The sister had worked for a childless pair of missionaries who adopted Adam and Olivia, Celie's kids. They sailed to Africa via England. She spent over 5 years in Africa, comparing the men's attitude to women with US white's attitude to blacks. The African husbands have multiple wives and there are friendships between the wives. A UK-funded road is built through the village, knocking down the church. Nellie learns that the man she thought was her father may not be. Reading that letter, Celie investigates.

Shug wises Cilie up about God - that the God learnt about in church may not be the real God, that God invented sex, and that the white Jesus of illustrated bibles wasn't true. But that's as far as she seems to get about understanding the male/socially constructed nature of Gods. The Africans have understood Adam and Eve differently - their word for "naked" is "white" so blacks can't be naked. Nellie writes about a rich England woman who became a missionary to escape her family's pressure to marry and to have time to write books.

Celie inherits a house. She's told "you're a black, poor, ugly, woman. You're nothing." Shug (over 50) goes off with a 19 y.o blues flautist boy. Nellie returns after 30 years with Sam as husband (Sam's missionary wife having died). Celie's children return too, one of them having tribal scars (and nearly genital mutilation)

Purple is a common natural colour that amazes each time you see it.

Doesn't seem much of a book to me.

Other reviews

• Goodreads
• Mel Watkins (Most prominent is the estrangement and violence that mark the relationships between Miss Walker's black men and women. .. it was largely ignored by most black writers until the early 1960's ... If there is a weakness in this novel - besides the somewhat pallid portraits of the males - it is Netti's correspondence for Africa. While Netti's letters broaden and reinforce the theme of female oppression by describing customs of the Olinka tribe that parallel some found in the American South, they are often mere monologues on African history. Appearing, as they do, after Celie's intensely subjective voice has been established, they seem lackluster and intrusive.)

"The Accident", Katie McMahon

An audio book set in Hobart. In the prologue there's a school trip. Sirens.

There are scattered extracts from a coroner's report through the novel but we don't know who dies until near the end.

9 months earlier, Emma (12) is with Grace (43), her plain mother. Emma's the result of a one-night stand that Grace had with Chris, who still does his duties. Emma has serious eating disorder issues related to bullying. Grace is a vetenary doctor. Chris and Grace move Emma to a school where her married lover Ben (a doctor) has a daughter Jasmine. Ben and Grace were friends from 18. He'd told her about meeting pretty Louise. Grace was 21 when her mum died. At the wake, she tried to seduce Ben. He turned her down.

Zoe, an art teacher in her thirties, has been dumped by David after nearly 10 years. She stays with cousin Clare then finds a flat. She works at the school Emma goes to. She meets Nick (a carpenter) at a party and starts sleeping with him.

Imogen is a doctor. Plain, she lost her virginity to Nick and slept with him a further 7 times. She's becoming careless at work, so maybe the "The Accident" is not to do with traffic but at the hospital. She changes her route to work so that she passes Zoe's. When she faints at work, she gives Nick as her contact. The fainting was fake - she just wanted Nick to drive her around.

Zoe tells Nick that David had spend 10k dollars on IVF because of her endometriosis. Clare becomes pregnant with twins.

Emma befriends Zoe at a poetry group that Zoe runs. Emma knows who Jasmine is.

At school, Imogen did homework for several of the boys and gave them blow-jobs. She tries to befriend Zoe. Zoe knows that Imogen and Nick were friends.

Imogen tells Zoe that she tried to cover up a mistake at work. Zoe thinks she should report it. She's worried when she sees Imogen at her school. Imogen threatens to reveal Emma's problems widely to get Zoe into trouble. Zoe phones Nick and Grace suggested they should talk. They immediately drive to the school in separate cars.

Grace is in a hospital bed - dying? She astral travels. Imogen dies - she drove on the wrong side of the road missing Nick but hitting Grace. Zoe splits with Nick, being upset how he and his friends exploited Imogen. Ben and Grace marry. In a post-death chapter Imogen tells us that Ben had harmed her career by giving her a bad reference.

The ending's over-long and the plot becomes more creaky.

Other reviews

• Goodreads