“Elevation” by Stephen King (Hodder & Stoughton, 2019)

In a small US Republican town, Scott Carey (divorced, 6ft 4, a web designer) goes to his retired doctor friend Bob Ellis because he's losing weight without his appearance changing. Not only that, but what he wears/carries doesn't add to his weight.

Married 30-something lesbians Missy (friendly) and Dierdre (pretty and a bit mad) live nearby. They run a failing restaurant and their dogs use his lawn as a toilet. He politely points this out to them (the first time they've talked). Dierdre over-reacts. Missy apologises.

We're already 30 pages into the novella - 25% through.

He overhears anti-lesbian jokes in his usual diner and causes a scene. He tries to befriend the couple. He learns that Dierdre used to be a national-level marathon runner, and is entering the local 12k charity run. He enters and would have won (being so light yet with the same muscle power - he's "never been happier in his life") except that he helped Dierdre win. Chapter 6 is entitled "The Incredible Lightness of Being". The publicity that Dierdre gets saves the restaurant. Dierdre's grateful. When he's almost weightless he asks Dierdre to help him float into the sky with a firework attached. He lights it.

No. Were it much shorter it might have had a chance.

"The A to Z of You and Me" by James Hannah

An audio book.

Ivo, 40, is being looked after in a room (which we later discover is in a hospice). He makes alphabetic lists of bodyparts and related memories to calm himself. These provide a backstory. He's often reminded of anatomy/science lessons. Mia (who he refers to as "You") was his girlfriend years before - a trainee nurse who was a house-mate of his friend Becka. Sheila is his favourite nurse now - the alphabet game was her suggestion. His father died early of cancer, her father was an alcoholic - they compared fathers as if they were playing "Sad Dad Top Trumps". Ivo was first diagnosed as a diabetic, then he needed dialysis. He offers advice to the young daughter of the woman dying in the next room. He tells her that Mia died 10 years ago.

His sister Laura's 5 years older than him. They haven't met since their mother's funeral 7 years before, because she chose Mal (11 grade A GCSEs) over him. She wants to see him now. This upsets Ivo's health. He doesn't want visitors but she comes anyway. She says that she stayed away from their mother at the end because it hurt too much, leaving him to deal with the funeral arrangements. Mal has been in jail for 6 years. Now he's out he's got a drug habit and is desperate to apologise to Ivo. Ivo refuses to see him. Mal was a drug dealer. Mia wasn't happy with Ivo's drug-taking (which he did while she was away). He was diagnosed with kidney failure.

We learn that Mal took him to Mia when he was stoned. Mal drove them to A&E and she died in a crash.

He starts having morphine. He talks about his funeral, wishing that he could have helped people more. He lets reality go, becomes delirious. Mia talks to him. He thinks Mal visits. He forgives him and feels better for doing so, then dies.

The amount of delayed revelation (about his location, Mia's death, the reason for falling out with Laura, the nature of Mal's crime) should have raised anticipation. Soon it made me distrust any piece of information because it might bloat into something else later (maybe Sheila was his aunt but we hadn't been told, etc). In the end though I was won over - the hospice details sounded convincing.

Other reviews

• Ian Sansom (Hannah’s debut is an excellent example of that genre of sophisticated and sentimental fiction in which the terrible perplexities of life are teased into pleasing fictional shape, a genre we might call the “heavylight”. The history of the heavylight can be traced back through Nicholls and Nick Hornby to Thomas Hardy and beyond, but it finds its perfect expression in the work of the undisputed heavylight champion of the world, Philip Larkin.)
• Natalie Xenos
• Jennifer Joyce

"The Daughter" by Lucy Dawson

An audio book.

It's 1999. Jess and Ben have a daughter, Beth (5), who dies in an accident at school where Simon is the head, his wife Louise is a teacher, and Cara their daughter attends. Jess and the older Simon had an affair while they were both married years before, neither knowing the other was married. Jess had been 19 and her mother had just killed herself. Jess had been thinking of leaving Ben but he and his family had been a great comfort. Just before the accident Simon tells Jess that he's sure Beth is his child (she had his looks and mannerisms). After, Simon tells Louise about the affair.

The day after the funeral, Louise visits Jess. She doesn't believe that it's a coincidence that Cara and Beth ended up at the same school. She threatens Jess with a knife, says that she must tell Simon she never loved him and must leave town, otherwise Ben will be told. Jess decides to leave.

17 years later, Jess is married to Ed and has a 2 y.o. son James. They're house-hunting. The house they visit belongs to Simon and Louise, who moved to the town when Jess did, about 9 years before. Louise can't believe it's a coincidence. Simon visits Jess after, saying that Cara has left home, Louise is an alcoholic, and he's divorcing her. Jess tells him about the knife incident. Simon wants to know if she ever really loved him.

Next day Louise dies - a side-effect of her attempt to stop boozing, apparently. Simon sells up.

Jess and Ed have an au-pair, Sandrine. Jess's friend Natalie is against young girls having affairs with married men. Natalie overhears Jess complaining about her and ends their friendship, telling others about Jess. Things in their house are tampered with. Ed says that on the night that Louise died he'd asked a heavy to go to her house and warn her away from Jess (subsequently Ed discovers that the heavy never went).

Jess is drugged, tied up and held at knife-point by Sandrine - who is actually Cara. She says that Simon has been passively obsessed by Jess, cyberstalking her, neglecting Cara. Cara's mother told her that Cara had been told to push Beth. Cara summons Simon. He arrives. In a tussle he's knifed. While he's dying he says he wants Jess to say that it wasn't Cara's fault. In an epilogue Cara is in recovery and asks Jess for forgiveness. She doesn't think she pushed Beth after all. Meanwhile, Ben has found out that Beth was likely not to be his child.

Clunky plotting - the Natalie sub-plot is unconvincing; Simon goes to such great lengths to achieve so little; would Ed really hire a thug? Would the thug bother meeting Ed? I can believe that Jess would deliver a long, detailed Jess's debrief to her sister Laurel, but something's wrong with the novel's structure if the reader needs to be reminded of all this.

Other reviews

• goodreads

"Run Away" by Harlan Coben

An audio book.

New York. Simon's teenage daughter Paige has run away - Simon's wife Ingrid had had enough of her bad behaviour. Simon's been looking for her. After a tip-off he finds her busking badly at Strawberry Fields, Central Park. She escapes. He punches her boyfriend Aaron who he blames for leading Paige astray. The episode goes viral - hipster assaults homeless poor. With expensive legal help he avoids a charge. 3 months later the police question him again. Aaron is dead and Paige is a suspect. Simon and Ingrid go to the murder scene. They're told to go to a shoot-up den for more info. Simon is recognised there from the video. Ingrid is shot by Luther. Cornelius (who had helped them at Paige's flat) shot Luther. Luther and Ingrid end up in the same hospital.

Another story is interleaved with Simon's. Ash and Didi have known each other since childhood - both fostered. Ash kills a man in his house, then kills another. Ash is curious about the connection between the two victims. When he gives Didi a lift back to her base, he finds she's living with a cult.

An ex-detective, Elena, asks about Henry, the second victim. Simon goes to Aaron's funeral. His stepmother Enid talks to him. Aaron's Italian mother is dead, and Aaron doesn't look like his father. He's told that Paige tracked Aaron down. Why? Simon returns to the hospital where Ingrid is still in a critical condition. Her sister hints that Ingrid used to be a junkie. Elena points out that the murdered men were all adopted. She tries to track down the adoption agency. Simon discovers that Paige had tried a DNA-testing service. He gets his 3 children tested. They're all his.

Didi tells Ash that the cult leader is about to die. He had lots of son with different mothers, but only needed 2, so he sold the others. But those others are now finding out who they're related to, thanks to DNA-testing sites. That why he's been employed. Ash kills Elena, finds out about Simon on her phone and decides he needs to be killed too. When he finds Simon he's with Cornelius to get info about Paige from Luther's group. She was last seen on her way to Buffalo.

There's a gunfight. Ash is killed. Simon is shot while trying to save Cornelius. Didi falls, goes into intensive care. A month later, Simon finds Paige at Ingrid's bedside. He learns that she'd been at a retreat for a month. Ingrid had taken her there - she's stayed there years before. Ingrid killed Aaron because he'd got Paige into drugs. A year later Paige tells Simon that Ingrid had been made pregnant by the cult leader. She thought the baby was stillborn. In fact it was Aaron. Ingrid and Aaron had found out that they were half-siblings. Should Simon tell Ingrid that she's killed her son? No.

A page-turner. Sometimes I felt there was a twist too many. Didi needn't have cult ambitions. The Elena subplot is nearly detachable from the main story.

Other reviews

• baddiebookreviews (An aspect I struggled with in the book was this little subplot that was going on while the main plot of Simon trying to find Paige was going on. It wasn’t exactly unenjoyable or anything, but to be honest it just made me feel a bit lost throughout at least the first half of the book. ... I just genuinely had no idea throughout a good portion of the book what these two were doing here. ... Look, I mean everything does come together at the end of it all, but I just wish it was a tiny bit more clear why they were here, or what they were after)

"The Codes of Love" by Hannah Persaud

An audio book, each section beginning with a rule about open relationships (perhaps the rules that Emily made Ryan agree to when they married).

In 2016 a couple (Ryan and Ada) get lost on a rainy Wales walk. They see a run-down cottage which Ada wants to buy.

Emily, 43, had been in a relationship with Charlotte at university. She'd wanted to be a writer. Charlotte left her for a man and died young. A lecturer, Emily has 2 teenage sons and an open marriage (her idea) with Ryan, a prize-winning architect. She's more highly sexed than Ryan, having slept with over 30 people before marriage. She's had 60 partners during their marriage. He only wanted sex each fortnight or so. She's currently interested in a male student, Leo. Leo formally complains about her. She's also friendly with Adeline (Ada). Ryan and Ada go to the cottage each fortnight, trying to renovate it "in character". Spending money, keeping secrets, and repeat performances break the rules, but Ryan has done that for 7 months.

While Ryan and Ada are at the cottage Emily phones him to say that one of their sons has gone missing. Ryan want to go home. Ada questions his loyalty to her. The son's ok. Ryan and Emily are becoming distant. They try a family holiday, which doesn't help. Emily has sex with Ada (she'd been attracted before. She thought she was only into men). She has a one-nighter with Leo - they'd agreed that he'd retract his complaint if she did so. She liked it but that's all. He gets clingy. She buys a hut - a sort of writer's cabin. She and Ada frequently spend time there. Leo meets Ryan.

Emily moves out, stays with her sister. She meets Tom. Leo meets Emily. He says he's written a novel, a character based on her. Ryan suggests to Emily that they could be together again. When the boys were about 5, Ryan had threatened to leave. Leo tells Ada that he'll tell Emily about Ada and Ryan. He hopes that Emily will return to him.

Ada had told Emily that Emily and Leo had had sex while Emily was drugged, which is why she was prepared to sleep with him again. but now Leo says it's not. Leo tells Emily about Ada and Ryan, giving Emily the address of the Welsh cottage, saying that Ryan and Ada will be there. Ada tells Ryan that Emily is the best thing that's happened to her, but she likes the Welsh cottage too. Both Emily and Ryan ask why Ada kept the relationships going on too long. She says she was hedging bets.

I'm not too content about the ending. The plot device of whether or not Leo and Emily had sex (when she was drugged?) feels strained. And I'm not convinced by the choice of when gaps are left in the time-lines, and when we're told about the Venice trip details.

"boats leave stretchmarks in the sea" is an interesting phrase.

Other reviews

• Elspells (Recklessness is an important theme here, and the isolation of the cottage is effective in upping the stakes.)
• samstillreading (While The Codes of Love is essentially about a failing marriage, it’s also about things within that marriage. Power. Responsibility. Ageing. Emily has always held the power in the relationship and to see Ryan happy with someone else leads to a reduction in that power. Their children are also becoming more independent where Emily can’t control their movements. )
• goodreads (currently 3.8)

"Old men" by Peter Daniels (Salt, 2024)

Poems from "High Window", "Ink, Sweat & Tears", "London Grip", etc.

There's rhyme (e.g. "Two Uncles"), there are poems where the approach seems to be "When in doubt spell it out" (his most common mode), and poems which leave much to the imagination: I wouldn't call them difficult or obscure - for a start, there's always a surface clarity - but it's unclear what the pieces are "about". There are prose interludes, some as long as a poem -

• In "A Map", sitting at the piano, he most likes looking at the music. There's a plan to go fishing with a friend, but he has no idea about fishing. At 7 he was interested in men but unsure why. Then there's "How what you like moves you into being/ who you've become: he has no idea what/ you might need to do to make it happen.// In the long days before growing up, he can/ spend the whole time drawing a map/ of an elaborate city that will never exist." (p.9)
• "I used to take evening primrose oil, which I thought was good for/ depression till I found it was St John's wort for that,/ and evening primrose is meant for pre-menstrual tension" (p.16)
• "In the shower" is the clearest example of prose set-up and poetic pay-off - the persona has set up their phone so that they can see some one else showering and vice versa. "I've propped it by its leather case, book-like, angled perfectly to open my own body like a book ... while you in your bathroom, somewhere I've never been, open your body ... and we watch each other shower down whatever held us back, and the water takes it away" (p.24)

Also,

• "A Metaphor" begins with "If old men are trees". It reminded me of James Lasdun's "The Locals" though they share no phrases - Lasdun's has "They peopled landscapes casually like trees, ... and their fate, like trees, was seldom in their hands."
• "Empty Boxes" begins the way I often begin poems - "A seashell has been emptied of its owner, but/ a box begins as itself, with a need to enclose". I'd suffocate the poem with o'erleaping imagery about Self. He calmly concludes with "The shoes and sweets/ are elsewhere now, but Pandora's things/ will still be jostling us, they mock our boxes"
• I like "The Laundry" - 16 "abab" stanzas starting with "As I was walking down Higgledy-Piggledy Lane/ I thought I smelt the truth,/ that beauty is the answer,/ and the rest is all uncouth." Shades of James Fenton.
• On p.55 there's "As the earth heaves, the clatter of syllogisms/ where it opens up, logic falls and consequences slide" which is a bit of a surprise because his symbolism is usually much more concrete than this.

In the 4th section of the book is a 13 page poem that I've written about elsewhere - see Happy and Fortunate

"A long way down" by Nick Hornby (Penguin, 2005)

Martin, ex Morning TV presenter, slept with a 15 y.o. girl, went to prison, was divorced by his wife. He has kids. On New Years Eve he goes to a London tower block roof to kill himself. He's interrupted by middle-aged Maureen, who looks after a chronically ill (never conscious) son Matty, now 19. She only had sex once, and Matty is the result. She's religious and has been planning suicide for months. They're interrupted by Jess, 18, who's suddenly had suicidal ideas. She misses Chas. She sounds a bit wacky. They're interrupted by JJ, a pizza delivery guy whose band made 2 albums. He's literary, American, and has suddenly had suicidal thoughts too. PoV switches between the 4 of them, a page or 2 at a time.

They bicker. Maureen realises that the only thing that would make her life livable would be Matty's death. Martin blames himself for his problems - though the 15 y.o. looked 18. Jess just wants an explanation from Chas. JJ has just broken up with his girl, but now that Jess has taken that role, he says he has a fatal brain disease - CCR.

They all get in a taxi and gate-crash an art-students' party looking for Chas. Martin and Maureen find him, hiding from Jess who's tried to kill him twice. They just want him to talk to her. He does. She kicks him. There's closure. The 4 go back to Martin's. His ex co-presenter Penny is there - he'd walked out on her that evening. They've been having an on-off relationship for years. While Penny shouts at Martin the others watch. It was like "when you're being torn a new asshole by your dad for some crime you've committed, while a pal watches and tries not to laugh? And you try not to catch his eye, because then you'll laugh too?"

"When you're sad - like, really sad ... - you only want to be with other people who are sad" thinks Jess. Maureen thinks that young people expect change, but she hasn't changed since Matty was born. She's bought age-relevant toys for him. They agree to meet up again on Valentine's day. But next day there's a story in the media - Sleazy Martin is sleeping with the daughter of a junior Education Minister (Jess). The 4 convene an emergency meeting at Maureen's after Martin meets with Jess's father (who she manipulates). JJ says there's no such thing as CCR - he was depressed that he's become a nobody. Jess says how her older sister Jen disappeared in suicidal circumstances when Jess was 15. Jess thinks she's still alive. They agree to let it all blow over. But then Jess tells the press that they saw an angel. She does it partly to test the loyally of the group. She gets £5k from a reporter as long as the reporter meets all 4 of them. They meet up again. The reporter wants Martin to say he saw an angel. In the end he doesn't quite deny it. He gets them all on his CableTV show. Then they decide to start a bookclub - suicidal authors. Then they holiday in Tenerife. Maureen's never been abroad and hasn't been on holiday since Matty's birth. She realises Matty doesn't need her. JJ realises that he can only get women if he mentions he was in a band. Martin checks out of their hotel because he's fed up with the lot of them. To JJ the group's break up feels like his band's break-up.

When they meet back on the roof on Valentine's day, a man's there. He jumps. They re-evaluate their situation. Maureen and Jess visit Martin's ex-wife Cindy to tell her he's sad. Cindy's new partner is blind.

Jess arranges a surprise meeting in Starbucks - her parents, Maureen and Matty, Martin, Cindy and the daughters, JJ plus his ex Lizzie and band partner Ed, and Penny. She storms out after talking to her parents, sleeps with a man as wacky a her, a squatter who was walking his dog. JJ angers Ed. Penny flirts with one of Matty's carers, who jealous Martin insults before leaving. Maureen goes home with Matty and the carers. The carers ask her to complete their pub quiz team that evening. A member asks her to do part-time work in his shop. Martin starts volunteering at a school. JJ tries busking.

90 days after their first meeting they meet on the roof again. Nobody wants to jump. They've improved enough to consider the effect their death might have on others. The book ends with them looking at The London Eye - "It didn't look as though it was moving, but it must have been I suppose".

I was worried that the escapades would become more extreme until only farce was left, but the pacing was ok. Even Martin's behaviour at the gathering came over as cringe-worthy and funny rather than silly. More than one of the characters address the reader. At one point Jess explains her reasons for expressing dialog in play-script form.

Other reviews

• Joanna Briscoe (A Long Way Down is a good novel struggling to find a way out of the limitations of its own gimmick, but ultimately the conceit is so off-beam that one can almost ignore it and flow with the farce. This is an enjoyably readable, bumpy ride of a book, paradoxically both dangerously contrived and genuinely moving.)
• motherbooker (Maybe it’s because the discourse surrounding mental health has moved on significantly in recent years but A Long Way Down feels quite dated now. The way it brushes off the group’s suicidal thoughts feels quite dismissive. It’s hard to ignore the feeling that Hornby missed the mark somewhat. Then there’s the fact that the rest of the story just feels like a mess. It’s all quite manic and disjointed. Obviously, this story requires you to suspend your disbelief and that’s not the problem. It’s just that it doesn’t really feel as if it knows what it’s trying to achieve. There are so many random plotlines that don’t necessarily follow each other organically. The only thing keeping them together is this one group. )
• Hugo Lindgren (What ensues is an odyssey that might best be explained as a modern, profane version of The Wizard of Oz. ... As in the original Oz, these characters are after something they already possess; they just have to locate it within themselves. But sadly, there isn’t all that much serendipitous fun along Hornby’s Yellow Brick Road. In fact, you can’t help wondering why these characters don’t just flee from one another the first chance they get ... the characters’ voices tend to blur into one that sounds distractingly like Hornby’s own.)