Tangled Mind

and while your house grew with gifts -
a rooster crowing in a bayong,
a sack of corn, whiffs of ripe jackfruit, 

     a patient woke
     and accused me of stealing
     her job; 

[from 'The Shaman, the Servant: for my grandfather']

I first became aware of Ante's poetry via the Guardian's Poem of the Week column, and liked her interweaving of Filipino and British culture. Ante, who's from the Phillipines, has worked as an NHS nurse.( Read more... )

"I've heard that if you whisper a question into their ears, you'll be sure to find out the answer. Though it probably won't be an answer you want to hear."

"Is that what the stories say?"

"That's what all stories teach us. [p. 49]

A brief, calm and uplifting interlude on the edges of the Greenwing and Dart series. Hope Stornoway, who's in love with Jemis Greenwing's friend Hal (who happens to be the Duke of Fillering Pool) is staying in Ragnor Bella over the Winterturn festival. In order to claim her inheritance, she needs to discover her true name ... 

Luckily Ragnor Bella's reputation for dullness is wholly undeserved, and when Hope goes for a walk she encounters interesting rocks, a two-tailed fox and a bookseller who offers oddly specific philosophical arguments in answer to Hope's dilemma. Short and sweet: I'm really looking forward to the next full-length novel in this series!

‘When I was little, I wanted people to listen... Some did, but they were no help. I told a story. Not one I made up, though everyone said I did. I convinced myself I had made it up. A thing couldn’t have happened, so I decided it hadn’t. I tried to figure out how it got into my head, then gave up. I thought it was done with.' [loc. 790]

Seasonal novella: Angie and her teenage son Russell ('it's Rust, Mum') live in an isolated cottage. Angie is a best-selling author of self-published thrillers: Rust has a podcast about strange phenomena. They share a fascinating array of Christmas customs: Christmas cruels (like carols but nastier: 'Away in a Mangler', 'The Worst Noel'); putting down rotten biscuits for Santa's reindeer so he won't visit Angie's childhood frenemy; mince pies are too-much-mince pies... 

While other Ukrainian stars played an express part in the protests, Zelensky remained non-partisan...‘I am keen to demonstrate, but my support is for the people, not for promises by the Government or the opposition.’ [loc. 726]

I suspect there are better biographies of Zelensky, but this fleshed out the 'comedian turned politician' story that's been doing the rounds since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022.( Read more... )

Féonie was from a very, very poor part of inland Mgunai. Her family had nothing: she was the only one who had ever been more than ten miles from home, bar two cousins who had gone to the city and never been heard from again. [10%]

Short story about Féonie, a minor character in The Hands of the Emperor and its sequel At the Feet of the Sun, and very much a major character in her own life.( Read more... )

...it made perfect sense to me how I, a man who for so many years had walked the line between the quick and the dead, might be able to hear their voices in the silence when others could not... [loc. 1833]

The bulk of this short novel is Freddie Watson's first-person account of an evening in the small village of Nulle, in south-west France: it's framed by events in 1933 (five years after that evening at the fête de Saint-Étienne), when Freddie is recounting his story to an antiquarian bookseller, explaining the provenance of a document written in medieval Occitan.

The train gave a long whistle, then a bewildered, long drawn-out howl, like a red ribbon stretched across the seafront. [p. 122]

Félix Ventura, an albino, lives in a crumbling mansion in Luanda with his best friend, Eulálio, who happens to be a gecko.( Read more... )

... there was nothing really unusual about the main details, especially when compared with what happens daily in a place dominated by the roar of occupation and ceaseless killing. [loc. 748]

A short, powerful, harrowing novel, in two halves, that examines helplessness, brutality and occupation.( Read more... )

If young men didn’t die there’d be too many... Young men must die, just as young Animals must die when we hunt them. If there weren’t so much death we’d all perish, and not be able to come back. I’d always known that young men must die. But not my son! [loc. 258]

Set in Mesolithic Scotland, around the time of the Storegga slide, this is the story of Nekané and her family, who are of the Auk People: her daughters Haizea and Alaia, Alaia's partner Amets, Nekané's dead son Bakar, and Kemen of the Lynx People who joins them after his home and clan are swept away by a monstrous wave.( Read more... )

In the absence of easily accessible natural resources to exploit, stories were what polar explorers extracted from these barren icescapes. And the best stories weren’t the ones in which everything went well. [loc. 2192]

An enimently readable account (I stayed up past midnight to finish it!) of a Belgian expedition towards Antarctica from 1897 to 1899. ( Read more... )