"Without you" by Sakia Sarginson

An audio book.

The prelude starts with "It was April when I drowned, a month after my 17th birthday."

Suffolk, July 1984. Faith is thinking about her sister Eva (7 years older than her) who drowned 3 months before (a sailing accident with her father in the boat). Her body hasn't been found. She knows about Selkie legends, and the local legend of a man with webbed feet.

Eva is being held captive by Billy on an island where the army used to do tests. A voice had told him that he'd find a girl and save her. He's awaiting further messages. She daydreams about her house, food and her boyfriend Marco, a Goth musician. There's the usual captive/captor relationship-building.

Her parents are coping - over-polite to each other. We learn how they met, when Max was a trainee solicitor and Clara was auditioning for acting parts having been brought up in Egypt then sent to boarding school after her parents were killed in a bombing. After 4 miscarriages they decided to adopt (unofficially, secretly - from nuns). They live in a 6-bedroom house. They start to employ a live-in au pair, Sophie (French). Faith argues with schoolmates who say bad things about Eva. She befriends a black boy Joe, whose mother is Sandra. They live in a caravan. She begins to believe that Eva's on the island and that Sophie (who's fatherless) fancies her father. She gets 2 boys (one of them Joe) to help her launch a boat to go the island. She can't swim. Joe breaks a limb. Faith's warts disappear?!

Clara is scared that Eva's family will reclaim her. She's dark-skinned. Faith was a surprise, a natural birth. Max wants to move away and start again. Clara finally agrees. She still distrusts Max about whether he'd made Eva wear a life jacket.

Bored Eva decides to learn about Billy. He was a soldier in Northern Island. He killed. His grandad, who he liked, was Eva's grandmother's boyfriend. She informs him that his grandad's dead. She was told by a barman that she was adopted. He tried to rape her. When she and her father were on the boat for the last time she told him that she knew she was adopted.

Faith canoes to the island. Billy finds her and takes her to his hide-out. When he's told that the girls are sisters (and he hears voices) he lets them go. They get back home.

Eva defends Billy. She's interested in meeting her biological family. The barman's found dead. Eva thinks that Billy killed him. There's a big explosion on the island.

It's difficult to be original about the captor-captive relationship. Faith's language doesn't sound like an 10 year-old's. It doesn't even sound like a 10 year-old's thoughts expressed in adult language. Some other uses of language are questionable too -

• "I don't know whom I'm apologising to"
• "the rigid craters of herself relaxing and expanding with relief" - uh?
• "after the rain, the air was complicated" - with smells, but I've seen the phrase and idea used before.

"The Italian secretary" by Caleb Carr (Little, Brown, 2005)

A Sherlock Holmes story.

Holmes and Watson are called to Hollyrood, Edinburgh. There's been 2 recent murders - Sinclair (an architect of historical building) and McKay (a plasterer). In the time of Mary (Queen of Scots), David Rizzio was killed in the same way - multiple stabbing. The train they take is attacked by a Nationalist Scot and a bomb thrown into their carriage. They defuse it and later meet Mycroft who tells them that 9 attempts have been made to kill the Queen, all by young men whose pistols were loaded with wadges of newspaper. One man, Alec Morton, escaped, last seen in Bremen - are the Germans behind the assassination attempts? Mycroft regularly talks to the Queen, who's at Balmoral. He leaves.

They stay at Holyroodhouse, lived in by Lord Francis. There's a skeleton staff which includes Hackett, a butler with a badly fitted glass eye and Robert, a ghillie. They examine McKay's body - so many bone breakages that it's floppy. They find a young girl, a niece of Hackett's, pregnant thanks to Will Sadler (brother of the ghillie). They hear a ghost. The niece says that someone gets money by doing ghost tours for tourists. Holmes and Watson book a place on a tour, finding out that the Sadler brothers organise them.

They discover that Lord Francis and Will run the tours, Robert an unwilling aide. The money they've earned is hidden in the haunted wing, in a mattress. The Nationalist Scot was the Lord in disguise. Mycroft (away with the Lord at Balmoral, where the Queen is), is at risk. Mycroft returns. He and Sherlock conclude that the 2 murders were to do with covering up the tours, and that the assassinations weren't orchestrated - they were copy-cat crimes. Will and the Lord would suspect by now that Sherlock is onto them and would attack. Sherlock has insufficient evidence against them for the murders. They prepare for an attack in the night.

A window's smashed. A crossbow bolt flies in with a note on it. They want their money back. A flaming body launched by a trebuchet hits the house. It's a security guard, his bones smashed by the impact. Police arrive. Perhaps a ghost appears, perhaps in the form of a goshawk. The girl escapes, jumping from a window, caught in a blanket.

Enough plot for a novella. Too many words.

Other reviews

• Tac Anderson
• krauser pua (For the first thirty or so pages it appeared promising as his prose style imitates the vocabulary and verbosity of Conan Doyle’s Watson but then it all starts to fall apart. ... It takes Carr fully three pages to convey the action of walking up a staircase and reaching the Queen’s old room. It should’ve taken one paragraph. This is painfully slow writing made all the worse that it’s utterly boring and none of the added details does anything to add richness to the scene, the characters, or the plot. The only deduction is Holmes recognising the face of a man he meets, a couple of hours after the same man stared right into his face but had a red beard. ... He finds out about the plot because they stumble into a girl who tells them the full story.)
• Colin Greenland (In the crowded field of Holmesian pastiche, Carr's characterisation is outstanding. ... Unfortunately, he's not such an admirable narrator. ... Though Carr's version reproduces superbly the peculiar éclat of Holmes's often absurd but spectacularly correct "deductions", he's a terrible windbag. The mystery isn't much of a mystery, and it's interrupted far too much by explanations of things Doyle could take as read: who Mary Queen of Scots was, for instance.)

"The Tidal Zone" by Sarah Moss

An audio book set near Coventry.

Emma (a doctor) and Adam (it's his PoV - he's the main carer) have a daughter Miriam (15) whose heart stops at school (earlier she'd had "episodes", but her mother had dismissed them). She recovers, staying in hospital while doctors try to diagnose the issue. They also have another, younger daughter Rose.

He has a PhD but only does a couple of hours a week lecturing on the Arts and Crafts movement. He wonders about things/buildings being venerated merely because they are old. Miriam suggests that his interest in history is an avoidance mechanism. He knows a lot about Coventry cathedrals and the bombings (he compares the war-time anxiety of sudden death to how he feels about Miriam). One of the designs for the new cathedral was for an underground "bomb shelter" building. The murals were made by a camouflage expert. Miriam is bright, vocal, political. Adam becomes conversant with hospital codes and conventions - some of the young staff look as if they're "entering a Fun Run dressed as a nurse". Other parents have "broken narratives".

His father went from commune to commune in the States. For him, Europe was more an art gallery than a continent. We're told (I don't know why) about Indigo and Rainbow in the commune, the need to fetch a doctor. He's comfortably off now, having inherited (American, with Jewish parents). Adam's mother died swimming in the sea - maybe her heart stopped like Miriam's did. After 2 weeks Miriam returns home. Adam's father is there. Miriam can't go back to school yet. She worries whether she should be buried or cremated. She may have permanent cognitive deficiency. Adam becomes over-protective. He hasn't had sex for weeks. He's the one who has to deal with the internal politics of universities, hospitals and schools. We see the world (things big and small) through Adam's eyes. He's often the only father at gatherings. He escorts other people's sons to the toilet.

Rose has a bout of wheeziness at a swimming pool. Emma says she wants another child. They make love. They visit his father on the Cornwall coast where he grew up. He and the girls explore rockpools while Emma looks at her phone. They think about holidays - "like a diagnosis, a story can become a prison".

Adam's explanation to Rose about what happened to Miriam at school repeats much of what we've already been told, which doesn't seem quite right. Other episodes are re-told too - not from a startlingly new PoV, but prefixed by "Once upon a time" with self-consciously narratological asides. And Adam ruminates. I know something about the internal politics of universities and hospitals, so those parts seemed rather tame to me. I didn't understand the fable at the end - the book hasn't used them before. Adam's father's life story is of some use to the main theme but I think that could have been reported in a paragraph without the father needing to appear.

Other reviews

• Penelope Lively
• Mandy Wright
• ellethinks (Adam and his wife Emma exist in our world, where their division of household labour is viewed as progressive and vaguely alien ... weaving poetic interstices among the episodes of action that draw them all together, give the reader a chance to breathe. The Tidal Zone is full of social commentary that passes off so casually, usually in dialogue and quite often in sarcasm, that you don’t see it until it’s already happened.)
• thefictionfox (What could have easily become a melodramatic or overly-heavy slog was kept light through its relatable and likable characters. Most easy to like is Miriam herself, as a smart and sassy teen, who doesn’t take any over-protective “bullshit” from her dad. But cautious and protective stay-at-home dad Adam, and rational Emma who uses her medical knowledge as a GP to build up a wall, also make for a lovable cast. ... some minor pacing-issues around the 60%-mark)
• Rebecca Foster (Just as tidal pools mark the boundary between the land and the sea, this novel probes the liminal space between survival and death ... The extraordinary first chapter opens with “Once upon a time” and narrates the quotidian miracles of conception, pregnancy, birth and child development before making this personal, proceeding from “the girl” to “you” and finally to “I” in the second chapter. On several (perhaps one too many) occasions Moss repeats that fairytale opener ... I felt a bit too much time was spent on Adam’s father, and in the back of my mind was the niggling thought that this First World family is never facing true disaster because they have all kinds of safety nets in place; Moss’s is a very middle-class vision. I also think some readers could struggle with the slight aimlessness of the plot, though by the end you do get the sense that the characters are looking to the future in simple ways.)

"Towards the waiting sun" by Glen Cavaliero (Poetry Salzburg, 2011)

Poems from Granta, Poetry Salzburg Review and Delta, though he's had other things in The New Yorker, PN Review, Stand and the TLS (he's a fellow of the RSL).

In the introduction, Peter Scupham writes that "In a poetic climate which is choc-a-bloc with relativism ... this collection obstinately assumes the need for poetry to move the human heart". The 4 sections are "Dissolution", "Unlucky Numbers", "Here and There" and "Springboard".

There's quite a range of difficulty - of language and allusion. This stanza for example starts simply enough, but the meaning of the final 2 lines is lost on me.

But spring's a cheat, old men agree, and sagely they eschew the whore, repenting of their little spree and doing crosswords as before, though some of them resent their loss since life itself prevents their rest - hosanna knowledge of the cross constricted to the second best. ("Lament")

Some of the pieces are easy-going - knowingly so sometimes, though not in this poem (from the "Here and There" section, which is the lightest of the 4) -

August here's not bad, the fields are golden, spread like enormous rugs around the contours of a bulge in the ground you would not call a hill. ... The elms are all down of course that used to stand beside the church. And that's marooned in a field Nobody wants to cross ("Thingworth")

"Crosswords" might be very clever/cryptic. I don't understand it. I don't understand "Left about Turn". And the following from "Among the Farthest Hebrides" sounds stodgy

Forlorn in the salty gale I retain the bitter sense that though I am watched whichever way I turn everything that I know and feel would still be met with an indifference so complete as to annihilate all but the safety of the dead

"Kelpdings" by Paul Maddern (Templar Poetry, 2009)

A pamphlet of poems by Iota, Poetry Ireland Review, The Shop, etc. Several (most?) of these poems later appeared in "The Beachcomber's Report". Looking back at my write-up of that book, I see that I commented then on what I still feel now - I think most of the pages include something interesting, but the variety of layout is distracting, making the reader think that there's more variety than is the case. I think some poems (e.g. "Of the vein") are beyond me.

• I like "The Beachcomber's Report"
• "Merrill Abroad" is 4.5 pages - I'm not convinced by it.
• "On being told by an Irishman that I overuse 'Oleander" begins with a list a 1/3rd of a page long that fails for me, though the rest of the poem (about cedar) is perhaps my favourite part of the book
• "Lines at Lacken Mill" includes the multi-layer "rain/ drops from the canopy to play the river like a drum/ and I'm absorbed by the performance/ of a wayward beat falling on the page./ The a in apple blossoms and the b/ in beauty blooms, infecting with the bleed/ all well meaning words".
• "Department of Human Tissue" includes "Look at our website regarding body donation. We went live last Friday"

"Somewhere inside of happy" by Anna McPartlin

An audio book, swiching between PoVs and timelines.

It's 2015. Ireland. Maisie is at a launch of her book. She has a daughter Valerie. Her son died violently on Jan 1st, 1995, when he was 16. We go back to 1992. Maisie's mother Bridie is showing the first signs of dementia. Jeremy happily cares for her. Fred (a policeman who helped her years before and has been helpful since) asks her out. We go back further. Maisie got pregnant. The father was forced to marry her. He battered her enough for her to require brain surgery.

1995 - Jemery's best friend is Rave, whose mother has disappeared - mad or a Moony. Jemery's next best friend is Derdrie, but she wants sex which is a problem. She says that "he's not like the other boys". Someone hints that Rave and Jemery are gay. The 2 boys go off together (to a cabin Rave has prepared in the mountains to escape from his father). Meanwhile Fred (who Bridie dislikes) and Maisie have sex on their 2nd date. Jeremy doesn't come back that night.

Next day the police start investigating. Maisie feels guilty that because of sex she didn't realise for 30 hours that Jeremy had gone. Valery feels guilty because she lied to her mother to cover for Jeremy, just in case. They go round to Rave's father Sid. He's a junkie. Maisie feels guilty that she didn't know earlier - she could have helped him. Her friend Lynn (even she has PoV sections) offers to looks after Bridie.

The press find out that there was gay porn in Jeremy's bedroom. Things begin to make sense for Dierdre. Maisie's husband Dan turns up. Fred tells Maisie that he broke Dan's leg with a club and threatened him with death if he returned - there's a suspicion about this earlier in the book. Rave has recently used a credit card - caught on CCTV.

We learn (rather late I think) that for years Rave has known he's gay. In the cabin Jeremy comes out to him and Rave instinctively pushes him away. He dies because of a protruding nail in the wall. Rave writes an apology to Massie and tries to kill himself. He's saved.

We end up back at the book launch. Rave is there. So is Arthur, the result of Fred and Massie's first night together. Bridie died a year after Jeremy did, never understanding his disappearance. In her speech, Maisie urges tolerance.

Other reviews

• sarahwritesaboutstuff ( although I loved Bridie (Maisie’s mother who is becoming senile), I didn’t really feel as if her parts added anything to the story. Same can be said for a few of the pieces from Jeremy’s group of friends.)
• Justine McGrath (the characters are so authentically portrayed that by the end of the book you feel you know them as if they were real)
• Sandra Danby (If I have one criticism, it is the Prologue set twenty years after the main story. It tells us so many things I would expect to discover through reading the book. My favourite character? Bridie. She is drawn with such affection, a ‘game old bird’ dancing with her sixteen-year-old grandson.)

"The Good Mother" by Rae Cairns

An audio book.

2014, Sarah, divorced from Evan and living in Australia, has daughters Alice (12) and Sofia (8), and a son Riley (16), who's offered 4 months of soccer training in Dublin. His father's prepared to pay. She doesn't want him to go - when she worked in Belfast she had to leave suddenly. She thinks that Riley won't be safe. But she relents.

She used to enjoy running. In 1997 Michael was her boyfriend in Belfast. Michael was exciting. Evan was solid and dependable. Michael was Dan's brother and defending lawyer. Dan's now high in the IRA. Her friend Jerry died.

For a month after Riley's departure, all's quiet. Stone, an Irish Dectective (whose aunt had been killed by bomb equipment that Dan McNulty supplied, and was connected with someone called Olivia) interviews her, and a plane ticket to Ireland is delivered to her - by Dan she suspects.

She decides to accept the offer, first agreeing to give Stone evidence provided her family's protected. She asks her father Max (ex-Army. She's not seen him for 17 years) to protect Riley. In Ireland she's taken to see Dan and (briefly) Michael. Dan tells her to get the case to court then say that he'd been sleeping with her on the night of the murder, otherwise her family will be killed. Max gets her a gun. She sees Riley. He's doing well at soccer camp. He has a girlfriend Siobhan. Sarah checks her out. She's 18 with a father in prison. She tells Siobhan that she knows she's spying for Dan (under duress?), and offers to pay her to leave, but instead, Riley orders her mother to leave. She becomes more friendly with Alec Stone.

We learn that her friend Jerry got away from a bad situation but was drawn back by at attack on his brother. Her friend Quinn is still around. His brother Liam deals in drugs. She buys drugs from him. She plans to plant drugs in Siobhan's car and tell the police. She gets drunk. Alec happens to be in the pub and gives her a lift to her hotel. She's flirty. He doesn't take up the offer. He says that if she asks about Olivia again he'll drop the case. Later he reveals that Olivia was her daughter who died because her estranged wife was high on IRA drugs.

Evan is assaulted. She throws away the drugs. She's abducted for 2 days, warned, then released. She sleeps with Alec. She's arrested for shooting at Alec (while she'd been abducted). Michael suggests to her that Alec told Dan about Sarah so that Dan would invite her to Belfast - all Alec cared about was Dan's conviction.

While in court she realises that Riley's been abducted. Max is killed. She helps Alec in a raid to free Riley and to get evidence that Dan's preparing a bomb. She tells Michael that Riley is his son. He doesn't believe her. She's caught. She tries to make Dan's gang to see that he's a psychopath, not interested in family or Ireland. He kills Michael (who hHad been protecting her). He gets her to drive a car with a time-bomb in it to the city centre. Unconscious Alec is in the back of the car. He revives, tells her that Riley is safe in another country thanks to Michael, then gets out. She drives back to the hide-out.

Days later, recovering in hospital she tells Alec that she sees no future for the 2 of them. A year later she and Riley return to put a stone on Michael's grave. The police and Dan's organisation have been purged. She first cold-shoulders Alec then asks him out.

There are some unlikely details. Would she really fall for Alec? That the gang left Alec in the car puzzles me. Max seems little more than a plot device. There's a standard sentence pattern to deal with emotions - "Stiffness entered his voice"; "Pain seared through her skull"; "Words dissolved in her mouth"; "Acid curdled in her stomach"; "Heat seared up her chest"; "shock fired up in his eyes"; "Sorrow darkened his eyes"; "her insides seared with heat", etc. I think "Sarah swallowed the knife in her throat" is going too far.

Other reviews

• debbish (There’s a strong theme of family loyalty here – in Sarah’s relationship with her children, and her father (Max’s) to her and her family. As well as Sarah’s former love interest and the moral dilemma he constantly faced – committed to upholding the law but supporting a brother intent on subverting it and believing he is justified in doing so. I liked the way Cairns portrays the relationship between Sarah and ex-husband Evan; the life they lived together and the end of their marriage. It felt very real… and surprisingly healthy. I also liked Irish cop Alec Stone who’s seemingly obsessed with bringing down those involved in the murder(s) years before ... I would have liked a little more information about Sarah and her father Max.)
• scatterbooker
• Goodreads