"The Other Side of Night" by Adam Hamdy

Preface - the narrator (Elliot's father) looks back on his life. What do we sacrifice for love? We can't choose. Harriet was 32, a policewoman, when she met Ben. She was lonely, mailing to herself daily. The narrator admits that he has access to the mail, that this book isn't a product of his imagination. Elliot was troubled, according to the social worker.

Harriet lived in a flat in Stoke. She had been dismissed 6 weeks before her story starts. Ben had harshly broken up with her a while before. She had loved him at first sight and thought the feeling was mutual. They had a love of poetry in common. Her work partner had been Sabi Khan.

She finds a withdrawn library book in a 2nd hand shop - a self-improvement book which mentions that we long for the familiar even if it's a bad pattern we've fallen into. It also mentions that sexual attraction weakens rationality because procreation is an instinct. A "he's going to kill me" message is written in it. She goes to the library and finds that it was last taken out by Beth Asher, who'd died of cancer a year before. Her husband David died later - an accident on a cliff, maybe suicide - the body never found. Harriet goes to their cottage and finds Ben there, looking after Elliot who's upstairs. Elliot resembles Ben. Had Ben been having an affair with Beth?

She discovers that Beth's body disappeared from the hospital the night she died. She, David and Ben all worked at the same physics lab from which some Cobalt 60 had been stolen. The lab boss asks Harriet to check Ben's cottage with a radiation detector. She finds a poem for her in the toilet. Elliot says that Ben often talks about her. His car sets the detector going. Harriet hopes that solving the case will help her get her job back. But Sabi makes the investigation official. When Sabi and she investigate they follow Ben and Elliot. Elliot gets away. During a fight, Ben pushes Sabi into a ravine.

Elliot tells Harriet he knows a secret. Ben reminds him not to tell anyone. Ben gives himself in, first passing Elliot to the housekeeper, Cynthia. In the courtroom Elliot shouts that Ben's innocent, that Harriet pushed Sabi over the edge.

Sabi tried to deal with a minor criminal, Monroe, who drew a knife and slashed at Sabi. Harriet hit Monroe. They fought. Monroe ran into the path of a train and died. An investigation suggested that she used unnecessary force and caused Monroe's death, hence her dismissal. Later she was sent a video showing her innocence.

Part 2. Elliot's a student at Lincoln college, Oxford. 2 profs talk to him, saying that he was wasting his time. He seemed very self-contained. Prof Hoight got a Nobel using formulae that Elliot had jotted while she was disciplining him. Next day Elliot disappeared. Dead?

Thanks to the video evidence, Harriet got her job back and her boss took early retirement. She replaced him. When Ben's released, Elliot goes to her, promising to tell her the secret if she came with him. She does so, but suddenly fears she's being led into a trap.

She's shown an underground lab. A screen there shows Ben. Ben had discovered a time travel device (cobalt 60 being an ingredient) and had taken his father back to the moment of Beth's death. Ben rushed them all 200 years into the future. Beth recovers and lives with David, having 3 kids, but Ben returns to look after Elliot so that Elliot (who is the younger Ben) can discover time travel. Ben/Elliot and Harriet go back to 1989 and live happily out of the way of paradoxes. Various loose ends are tidied up - it's easy to see now why Ben kept talking about fate and inevitability.

Other reviews

• Artis-Ann
• jenmed (somewhat of a departure from the usual high action stories ... made up of so many elements of so many genres – mystery, a touch of suspense, maybe a bit of sci-fi and a lot of speculative fiction)

" Tell Me Everything" by Elizabeth Strout

An audio book, set in Crosby, Maine. Post-covid.

It's a mesh of stories by old people with previous spouses and old friends (the characters and setting are used in other books by the author). They're still learning from past experiences. They share their fears, Couples still argue and make up.

Bob Burgess is 65, a retired lawyer. He's been married to Marge, a church minister, for 15 years. His father died when his brother Jim, a boy then, was playing with the car in the drive and it ran their father over. Bob took the blame.

Olive has 4 grandchildren. Her best friend was Isobel, who had to move to the other side of town.

Lucy, 66, has moved from New York with her ex-husband William (who had affairs). She's a writer, a friend of Bob. William is a parasitologist

Olive invites Lucy over to tell her stories - Olive's mother carried in her handbag a press cutting about the boy she wanted to marry; a woman whose husband was a closet gay took in her husband's young lover when her husband died, and left the house to him in her will. Lucy's interested in who knew what and how. She tells Olive that she sometimes feels she has a connection with someone she encounters at random, younger men mostly. Lucy wonders whether these unrecorded lives have meaning.

Pam visits Bob, her ex-husband. They've not been in contact for years. They talk for 4 hours. She says that she hates her life and friends, and was (is?) a secret alcoholic. One of her sons is a transvestite. She saw her husband having sex with a friend and didn't feel hurt.

Jim's wife has a month to live. Jim doesn't want people to know. Susan has told Pam who told Bob. Jim's wife dies. Jim apologises to son Larry for being a lousy father.

An old woman disappears. She'd been living with her unmarried son Matthew Beake. Bob offers to defend Beake, who stands to gain from his mother's death. He's a good amateur artist. One of his models was a pregnant woman whose credit card was stolen to hire a car that might have been involved with the disappearance.

Olive's upset because Isobel is moving away. She wonders about killing herself. Bob asks Matthew if he's thinking of killing himself - he keeps a gun in the house.

Pam, having gone to AA, falls off the wagon. Marge is worried about losing her job. Bob sees Matt Beake's sister at the airport and phones Matt, telling him to stay out of his house. His sister kills herself in the house. She was about to be arrested for the murder of her mother. Jim and Bob agrees that their memory of events around their father's death is unreliable.

As Lucy and Bob's friendship deepens, Marge and Bob become more distant. Bob feels guilty that he's falling in love. Lucy describes Bob as a "sin-eater" - someone who is drawn to people who have done wrong. After they have a little disagreement he hears from William has she's finally agreed to remarry him. Marge doesn't lose her job. Bob treats Matt a bit like a son.

The text reminds readers that there's a narrator - "Here is what happened -"; "As we have just mentioned", etc.

When I read her Olive again book, marketed as short stories, I didn't think much of it. I like this book more - perhaps because I'm older now and can empathize more with the (almost exclusively old) characters, or perhaps because I should have read her interconnected stories more as a novel.

Other reviews

• Mattis Gravingen (All of them feel lonely. But why? The novel seems to answer that their loneliness is interlinked with a withering United States that makes people struggle to connect. The characters feel a “terror”, not just about their decay as they grow older and more lonely, but also because their country is falling apart. ... But perhaps a better answer to why the characters are lonely is that none of them listen to others.)
• Elizabeth Lowry
• Judith McKinnon

"The Gilded Cage" by Camilla Läckberg

An audio book set in Sweden.

Prologue - Fay's ex-husband seems to have killed their daughter Julienne. This timeline is returned to every so often.

Matilda's brother Seb is dead (suicide). Her nasty father is in prison for having killed his wife. She starts a new life in Stockholm, meeting a DJ Victor and calling herself Fay. She becomes an Economics student (top student of the year), meeting Chris (female) and upper class Jack. When she breaks up with Victor, he threatens to tell Jack about her past. She starts a fire that kills him. Jack and Henrick (from a watching class background) start a company called "Compare", with Fay having an important role. She gives up her degree (and later gives up work) so that the company succeeds. 3 years after the birth of Julienne she's put on 10kg and the marriage isn't going well. She emulates the teen porn he watches, hoping to revive the relationship. She has a mutually satisfying quickie with an ex popstar. She's pregnant. Jack makes her have an abortion.

She discovers him having sex with a colleague, Ilva. He wants to divorce her. Thanks to a pre-nup she gets nothing - unfair, but she doesn't complain. She plots revenge. Her new landlady Kirsten was mistreated by a man (who hit her so she had a miscarriage) and helps her start a new life, planning the downfall of Compare. She seeks investors and influencers for female cosmetic products, calling her company "Revenge". 3 years later it's a big success. She gets Julienne (who lives with her) to install spyware on Jack's laptop. Chris has found the love of her life. She has womb cancer. At first she doesn't want to tell her boyfriend. When she does, he asks her to marry him. When Chris is already in his final coma, Fay tells her for the first time about her previous life. She kills Kirsten's nasty husband, who's been bedridden for years but seems to be improving.

Ilva is pregnant. Jack wants her to give up work to be a mother. Meanwhile, Fay's had a boob job and looks better than ever. She seduces Jack. Just before Compare's share are going public, Fay leaks info that hits the share value. Her plan is to buy enough shares when they are low to be the majority owner. She sends Ilva pictures of Jack having sex with a woman whose face can't be seen - her. When she finds nude photos of Julienne on his computer she fakes Julienne's murder, planting evidence. She sells up and leaves for the Med, joined by Julienne and Kirsten. Her mother is there too!

Other reviews

• Ewa Sherman (The Gilded Cage is about betrayal on many levels in urban environment with greed, and sex used as a powerful tool to manipulate and exert control, and as a result, many characters seem to be one dimensional, and various cliches abound)
• jackiesreading4leisure ( I just wish that there could have been a better way of seeing Faye, but I just couldn’t have any empathy for her at all ... if you are going to write a story that is with the #MeToo shouldn’t the character at least have some redeeming features? Yes she is a victim, but she also made some choices which really weren’t necessary.)
• westwordsreviews (Unfortunately The Gilded Cage becomes a farce instead of the glitzy, empowering feminist tale it attempts to be. ... According to Läckberg The Gilded Cage was based on The Life and Loves of a She-Devil, a 1983 novel by British feminist author Fay Weldon. [] The Gilded Cage has little of that ironic darkness and it loses the feminist message which Weldon might have intended ... Initially The Gilded Cage is an entertaining read, it’s well-written and has the potential for character development and a multi-faceted story. Even though it’s overdramatic and filled with clichés, one can look past this and the first one or two explicit, gratuitous sex scenes in the name of entertainment.)

"Full stretch" by Anthony Wilson (Worple Press, 2006)

Selected poems 1996-2006 from The Rialto, Seam, etc.

I think I prefer the older poems. The newer ones seem to have format-variety for the sake of it. "Spinach" is a sestina, which struggles. "We do not touch" is a loose pantoum. "Part-timer" is in loosely rhyming couplets ("vowels/careful", "piss/yourselves"). At the other end of the formalist spectrum is p.65 where there's "We are sitting in the blue Passat estate/ but we will not buy it./ It stinks of dogs for one thing (Labradors,/ at a guess) and the spec is really poor./ Sure it's got windows, sunroof/ and a boot the size of Alaska/ but the miles are wrong side of 65/ and for a K that's bargepole territory".

Leaving and arriving are common themes, uniting in poems where the narrator arrives after something's left, leaving remnants (evocative, mysterious). "What they left behind" is the most obvious example.

I like "The boot", one of a number of poems where mysterious remnants are found. "Leonard Cohen is my barber" ends the kind of imagery I'd like to see more of - "like fog lifting from a harbour/ or a woman's back, her dress/ sliding with hurry to the floor".

I think I don't understand the effect he's hoping the poems will achieve. Reading "February" or "The difference" my reaction is "So?". "Pay" is a dramatic monologue oddly shaped into 4-lined stanzas. Why? I don't think it's much good. Laid as prose the quality would be clearer. "Hiding" is better, but the layout (this time 5-lined stanzas - for a change?) again makes me suspicious. "A jogger" and "The Lodgers" are examples of another class of his poems - the thinly disguised list.

"Landmarks (NFFD anthology 2015)" by Calum Kerr and Angi Holden (eds) (NFFD, 2015)

60+ Flashes and Micros on the theme of Geography.

Much to like. Some pieces that stick most in my mind are "On location" (Jon Volkmer), "A curious state of affairs" (Ingrid Jendrzejewski), "Diverted" (Marie Gethins), "Landmarks" (Ian Shine), and "And a bottle of rum" (Garreth Wilcock).

"The Cuckoo Sister" by Alison Stockham

An audio book.

Maggie, ex-costume designer and a reluctant mother of Eliot (1) and Emily (2) spills boiling water over them by accident. She takes them to the hospital in Cambridge. Her sister Rose arrives, so does Steven, her husband who she's not getting on well with. She walks out, catching a coach to Scotland where she's stopped from killing herself at a beach by Ailsa who she knew online. Rose and Steven take the kids home, Rose looking after them. Maggie is out of contact but the police know that she bought a ticket to Glasgow. Laura visits the family's house weekly - she's a friend of Maggie who had discouraged her from her shotgun marriage.

Rose quits her job to look after the children. She realises that she hasn't been a supportive sister. She also thinks that whatever Maggie's mental state, it wasn't thoughtful of her to just disappear. She finds Steven physically attractive but not appealing. He accepts that he hadn't helped enough with parenting. They discover lots of pills at Maggie's bedside.

On Emily's birthday the phone rings. Rose takes it. There no voice but Rose assumes it's Maggie. She says that Maggie must be ill and that there's no rush to come back.

Maggie writes letters to her children weekly that Ailsa says she's sending. Rose starts sleeping with Steven. They don't tell the children about their biological mother. Some neighbours aren't impressed. When Emily starts pre-school, it's as if Rose is her mother.

Laura tracks Maggie down. Maggie returns. She's upset that the children don't know that she's their real mother. Rose and Steven say they did it for the sake of the children. There's an agreement that Maggie pretends to be their aunt from now on. She does this partly to wait for an opportunity to take over her old role. Sometimes this cover-story is put under pressure by a random meeting in the street, or by a mistake by Maggie/Rose's parents.

Steven walks in front of a car and dies. The news is given to Maggie, Rose and the children together. While looking for the will, Maggie finds her letters. Steven must have hidden them. They go to Scotland. Ailsa suggests that they visit the beach. Maggie thinks that a stay will help the whole family.

Surely she would have somehow arranged to get feedback from the letters. Surely she'd have kept in frequent touch with Ailsa. There's little observation (of the children especially) and lots of repetition as the characters think over issues without adding new arguments. I think there are some infelicities in the writing -

• "Emily rose her head"
• "fear rose the hairs on the back of her neck"
• I have trouble working out statements like "[the children] were more resilient than anyone had feared" - maybe it's correct, but shouldn't "feared" be "hoped"?

I wasn't convinced.

Other reviews

• A. J. Sefton (It is quite a slow book with the ideas and arguments being repeated often with no conclusions in a circular fashion. Not much happens either. However, the most disappointing feature is that there is no medical, social services or legal intervention. A new mother disappears without trace, her phone found in the street, and the police only manage to find a couple of cctv images and give in? No news coverage, even locally? A bit unrealistic in Britain I think. An easy book to read, if a little long winded)
• elspells (I sometimes found myself sympathising with a character, nodding along, only for them to go a step to far and for me to recoil at having empathised with them. It’s a morally grey, tangled situation, and I loved puzzling it all out and thinking about the wider implications.)

"Placeholders" by James Roseman

An audio book.

Boston. Aaron and Jake are colleagues, sharing a flat. Aaron's brother Mo died while being a soldier for Israel. He'd been studying to be a doctor at Harvard. That was 5 years ago. He hasn't talked to his parents since. Aaron meets Roisin (Irish). She's been in a controlling relationship with Brian and doesn't want to return with nothing back to Ireland. She works in a cafe. Her colleague Sofia is going out with Percy who's trying for an annual bonus of $50k. Her boss Charlie starts touching her. The first time Roisin and Aaron sleep together he has erectile issues. He's an hour late to their 2nd date. She invites her to the synagogue - he goes 3 times a year. Her mother's protestant, her father's catholic. They were ostracised by their parents. Roison was brought up without religion. Aaron explains the rituals and tells her about his brother and the bouts of paralysing sadness he experiences.

When she finds out that he takes cocaine, she breaks up with him for a month. Her visa expired 2 years before. If she goes back to Ireland she won't be able to return to the States. She contacts him after she's sacked. They sleep together again. She's pregnant. She wants to keep the baby. She's thinking of returning to Ireland. They stay with his parents, preparing a nursery in the basement, and he finds out that his father has inoperable cancer. Over meals he and his father argue about the UK's treatment of Ireland as a way of discussing Israel. She tries to understand Jews. Aaron tells her that 50% of Jews are atheists, and that Jewishness is as much ethnic as religious.

Over the phone she hears the Xmas sound of her family home at Dublin. When Aaron's father suddenly dies she realises that she's not been entirely integrated into the family. She returns home.

We learn nothing about the relationship between Aaron's mother and Roisin after she's made her decision. And we learn little about why she made the decision (at that moment, especially).

Other reviews

• Eliana Jordan