The ‘Andy’ Awards for Best Books of the Year (that I’ve read), 2023

(Long and convoluted) intro

To paraphrase a well-known Leeds jokester, one-time Britain’s Got Talent hopeful, and past collaborator with yours truly (on a comedy about a boyband called Love Triangle – yes I’m talking Micky P Kerr – below) I love reading; reading’s really cool (Micky’s words were “I like drinking” which holds equally true for me).

I read a lot. For the usual reasons: escapism, to learn, to see where I could do better (if I ever start writing properly again… I nearly did, back in June, actually. Got two chapters deep into a crime thriller set in south west Wales… ran out of steam). I also read a lot because I’m a weirdo stats and numbers obsessive (like my Dad) who loves making lists (like my Mum) and who is overly competitive (with myself).

Customary SK sidetrack

How much do I love reading? A lot. More than my author-hero, in fact. Quantity-wise. In November this year, Stephen King tweeted (below) that he read around 60-70 books per year. So I’m winning… Mind you he also writes at least one a year… and I’m sure generally has other things to do.

I agree with King’s sentiment, above, though. And it is what I most like to do with my time. Other than drinking. Drinking’s really cool. So’s football. And podcasts (Top Flight Time Machine, Athletico Mince, some brilliant sports pods from the US – Lights Out, which is about American Football). And TV shows (The Bear; Fargo). Mags (United we Stand fanzine; FourFourTwo; Viz). Movies (actually I haven’t seen a jawdroppingly good one for ages). Check out my Twitter feed for my ‘winners’ in all of the above categories… #mybestof…

I do wonder just how much time I spend reading. But it’ll probably scare me to actually work it out. So instead let’s work it out in terms of volume.

Stats and stuff

This year I’ve smashed through 89 books, which is some going. July and October were my bookwormiest months – in both I read a grand total of nine books, which – stat fans – works out at nearly two a week. This month I’ve been a lot slower, getting through one a week.

So how does that compare with previous years? Well, I’ve beaten my total for 2022 (in which I read a grand total of 84 books. (Here’s the chart for the year – the winner was Dave Eggers with The Every.) But it doesn’t come close to my total for 2021, in which I read a frankly astonishing (until you remember we were locked down and had little else to do) 93 books. The previous year, 2020, I read a total of 77 books (again during various lockdowns, national crises, and the like). In 2017 I read 75; in 2018, 61; and in 2019, 57. That’s a shed-load of books all in all.

Rabbit-holes

And here’s where you can see those charts, if you want to get sucked down a rabbit hole. Here’s 2021’s chart (my winner was – at last – Stephen King for – miraculously – one of his shortest books, Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption). Here’s the 2020 chart (won by William Landay, for his book The Strangler). Here’s the 2019 chart: Dennis Lehane was my winning novelist. Here’s the 2018 chart: Paul Tremblay topped it, and you may – spoiler alert – be hearing more from him later in this blog. And here’s the 2017 chart: Dave Eggers won out here, and the same goes for him as goes for Tremblay. I’m nothing if I’m not an avid reader of works by authors I’ve previously enjoyed, and you’ll see lots of the same names popping up across these charts… but you’ll also see all kinds of new names too. I like to take a chance on writers who are new to me, and again some of the ‘randoms’ on my reading list this year have come from (an increasing number of) friends and family, from the Little Free Libraries which have popped up on several street corners round my way (like characters from The Wire) and from, well, at times judging books by their covers and not by the names which grace them.

But enough already.

I’ve kept you hanging long enough, haven’t I?

Well, without further ado, here’s my top twenty, and the best of the rest…

The Andy Chart 2023

1. Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin
2. Brazzaville Beach by William Boyd
3. Devil House by John Darnielle
4. The Shards by Bret Easton Ellis
5. Sort Your Head Out by Sam Delaney
6. We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver*
7. Three Women by Lisa Taddeo
8. The Running Grave by Robert Galbraith
9. Duncan Edwards: Eternal by Wayne Barton
10. Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver
11. Commonwealth by Ann Patchett
12. Black Cake by Charmaine Wilkerson
13. Middle England by Jonathan Coe
14. The Beast You Are by Paul Tremblay
15. Void Moon by Michael Connelly
16. What Just Happened?! by Marina Hyde
17. Boy Parts by Eliza Clark
18. Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes
19. The Long Knives by Irvine Welsh
20. The Dark Remains by William McIlvanney and Ian Rankin

Above: My winning book – and not only because the cover image is the same as a tattoo on my back. This book, about gaming of all things, made me cry. I read it voraciously on holiday, and wished I could start it all over again once I’d finished…

And here’s the best of the rest:

Act of Oblivion by Robert Harris; The Road to Little Dribbling: More Notes from a Small Island by Bill Bryson; A Heart full of Headstones by Ian Rankin; The Way Home by George Pelecanos; The Last Chairlift by John Irving; Shrines of Gaiety by Kate Atkinson; The Little Sleep by Paul Tremblay; Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng; Holly by Stephen King; Light Perpetual by Francis Spufford; American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins; Moving the Goalposts: A Yorkshire Tragedy by Anthony Clavane; The Jigsaw Man by Paul Britton; Mad Honey by Jodi Picoult and Jennifer Finney Boylan; The Dark Hours by Michael Connelly; Inshallah United: A Story of Faith and Football by Nooruddean Choudry; Good Girl Bad Girl by Michael Robotham; The Paper Palace by Miranda Cowley Heller; Sparring Partners by John Grisham; Yellowface by Rebecca F. Kuang; Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus; Darkest Fear by Harlan Coben; Uncommon Type: Some Stories by Tom Hanks; The Push by Ashley Audrain; The Eyes of the Dragon by Stephen King; When She Was Good by Michael Robotham; Big Girl, Small Town by Michelle Gallen; Nocturnal by Scott Sigler; I’ll Keep You Safe by Peter May; Lessons by Ian McEwan; McCarthy’s Bar by Pete McCarthy; Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk; Enough: Breaking Free From the World of Excess by John Naish; The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein; Gwendy’s Magic Feather by Richard Chizmar; The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes by Suzanne Collins; Parenting Hell: How to Cope (or Not) with Being a Parent by Rob Beckett & Josh Widdicombe; The Unusual Suspect: The Remarkable True Story of a Modern-Day Robin Hood by Ben Machell; The Last Thing He Told Me by Laura Dave; The Last Days of Jack Sparks by Jason Arnopp; The Pact by Sharon Bolton; The Judge’s List by John Grisham; Something Bad Wrong by Eryk Pruitt; Dark Hollows by Steve Frech; The Friend by Joakim Zander; The Killing Habit by Mark Billingham; The Funny Thing about Norman Foreman by Julietta Henderson; The Maid by Nita Prose; The Lost Man of Bombay by Vaseem Khan; Setting Free the Bears by John Irving; Fortitude: Unlocking the Secrets of Inner Strength by Bruce Daisley; Dadland by Keggie Carew; The Satsuma Complex by Bob Mortimer; What Never Happened by Rachel Howzell Hall; Redhead by the Side of the Road by Anne Tyler; 1979 by Val McDermid; The Snow Angel by Anki Edvinsson; The Holiday by T.M. Logan; The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins; The Family Upstairs by Lisa Jewell; In a Dark, Dark Wood by Ruth Ware; Rant by Alfie Crow; It Will All Work Out: The Freedom of Letting Go by Kevin Hart; Atlantis by David Gibbins; Hospital by Han Song; Friend Request by Laura Marshall; The Godfather of Kathmandu by John Burdett; The Silmarillion by J.R.R. Tolkien; Slaughterhouse Prayer by John King.

Notes and observations

• Weirdly, I read two jointly written books in a row in May (one by Jodi Picoult and Jennifer Finney Boylan, and one by William McIlvanney and Ian Rankin). Apparently the Picoult/ Finney collaboration came about as the result of a dream and a random Tweet on the part of Finney… If I were to jointly write a book, you know who I’d pick. Yes, it’s back to Stephen King…
• It wasn’t all fiction this year. Each year I’m trying to up my ‘input’ (in a Johnny Five stylee) by also reading some non-fiction. This has taken the form of a lot of self-help tomes, reflecting a bad year for me personally (see titles by Sam Delaney/ Kevin Hart/ Bruce Daisley), but it’s also taken in the trials and tribulations of parenthood (see Josh Widdicombe) or geography (Bill Bryson) religion (I finally got around to reading Dawkins’ The God Delusion, and found it pompous) environmental issues (John Naish), or politics (Naomi Klein). Of course, there’s also been plenty of sport, with Anthony Clavane’s Moving the Goalposts standing out, as well as Inshallah United and Wayne Barton’s excellent new Duncan Edwards biog. Special mention to the crime story about a ‘modern-day Robin Hood’, which I enjoyed tremendously.
• I’ve returned to short story collections this year after pretty much ignoring them for a few years. Great stuff by some familiar names – Paul Tremblay, John Grisham, and, of course Tom Hank’s surprisingly well-written Uncommon Type, which I feel recalls Stephen King in terms of voice.
• Two appearances by Ian Rankin in my top twenty… also Tremblay comes close to a double (again)
• There’s some ‘repeat offenders’ in the top twenty – authors who have appeared in several of my charts: Celeste Ng, Ann Patchett, John Darnielle, Paul Tremblay, Michael Connelly, George Pelecanos, and Kate Atkinson.
• But some ‘newbies’ too. Namely my winner Gabrielle Zevin. But also Sam Delaney, Eliza Clark, Charmaine Wilkerson,
• Finally, I’ve re-read a couple of old favourites – go-tos for my all time top ten, or so I thought. Fight Club didn’t stack up as well as it once had. We need to talk about Kevin was a different story. I’d read it before parenthood (way before) and now read it through a completely different lens, with two kids approaching double-figures in years… You’ll note that I’ve added an asterix by We Need to Talk About Kevin. I think I was quite hard on the book, having previously read it. If I’d have been reading it for the first time it would have probably scored higher.

The ‘Andy’ Awards for Best Books of the Year (that I’ve read), 2022

How was it for you? For me, 2022’s been another strange year. Though we haven’t experienced lockdowns, home-schooling, social distancing and all that jazz, it still feels to me like we’ve been kinda distant from reality as we once knew it. Known-knowns and certainties which we’d once thought were locked down, never to be changed, have altered inexorably. The Queen died – not many of us have known the UK with any other monarch. We’ve had about 13 Prime Ministers. The World Cup was fixed in winter. It’s seemed – just as the previous two years – to have been written by some sci-fi writer or satirist. Like an extended version of Black Mirror, or like we’re all living in Big Brother.

But onwards and upwards, my friends, and after that inauspicious start I’d like to wish you all a Merry Christmas and all the very best for the new year, for the very sci-fi-sounding 2023. And as it’s that time of year, as the one-time Big Brother contestant Craig Phillips once sung, I’m pleased to introduce my weird virtual ‘diary’ of the year which is my chart of all the books I’ve read across 2022. Yeah, I hear you, it’s little to late to get some of these suggestions onto your letters to the North Pole – even Santa don’t move that fast – but maybe if you get vouchers or book tokens (are they still a thing?) and you’re looking to maybe read something a little less ordinary as we move into 2023(!) then this chart could be of help to you. If not, then feel free to cancel me or vote me out or whatevs.

Where I talk about how weird I am…

For those of you who don’t know I follow in a long line of Kirbys (and Worthingtons) who are addicted to writing lists. The precocious (and probably intensely annoying) me of eight, nine, and ten produced early versions of this chart and I used to read it out to my parents around Christmas tme in a Bruno Brookes voice. Most of my winners and runners-up were very virtue-signally. I don’t think they were my actual favourites. I also spoilt many a family holiday in sunny Wales by obsessively charting our daily ice cream selections. The Cornetto ‘Big One’, Magnifico, was a perennial winner by virtue of it being massive.

More recently when I became a reviewer for The Short Review, a role which necessitated reading shed loads of short story collections to try and give them a bit of publicity – they’re always the poor relations of the fiction world – I put together charts of the best short stories I’d read that year. And that quickly grew arms and legs when I also started reviewing all kinds of books for the New York Journal of Books (amongst others). So my chart kept growing and growing, as did my reading list. What changed from when I were a lad, only knee-high to a grasshopper, was the virtue-signalling. See I wanted to be honest, and I no longer had to show off to my parents.

Before I reveal my chart, a bit more waffle from me, though. Because these obsessively curated charts which probably only get looked at by about three people are an act of extreme navel-gazing, perhaps even solipsism, let me indulge myself still further and reveal a little more of my madness. See, despite the fact I’m a creative type, I’m also a little bit obsessed with numbers, with data, with statistics.

Let’s break it down

In 2021, I read a frankly astonishing (until you remember we were locked down and had little else to do) 93 books. That’s nearly two a week, maths fans. The previous year, I read a total of 77 books (again during various lockdowns, national crises, and the like). In 2017 I read 75; in 2018, 61; and in 2019, 57. That’s a shed-load of books.

And here’s where you can see those charts, if you want to get sucked down a rabbit hole. Here’s last year’s chart (my winner was – at last – Stephen King for – miraculously – one of his shortest books, Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption). Here’s the 2020 chart (won by William Landay, for his book The Strangler). Here’s the 2019 chart: Dennis Lehane was my winning novelist. Here’s the 2018 chart: Paul Tremblay topped it, and you may – spoiler alert – be hearing more from him later in this blog. And here’s the 2017 chart: Dave Eggers won out here, and the same goes for him as goes for Tremblay. I’m nothing if I’m not an avid reader of works by authors I’ve previously enjoyed, and you’ll see lots of the same names popping up across these charts… but you’ll also see all kinds of new names too. I like to take a chance on writers who are new to me, and again some of the ‘randoms’ on my reading list this year have come from (an increasing number of) friends and family, from the Little Free Libraries which have popped up on several street corners round my way (like characters from The Wire) and from, well, at times judging books by their covers and not by the names which grace them.

This year I’ve read a grand total of 84 books. Which though not as many as last year is still a feck of a lot. And it wasn’t just quantity. There was a huge amount of real quality there too (but more on that later).

The above graph shows my most avid reading months. Relatively fallow periods tend to correspond with busy times at work or in my personal life. December, for example, wasn’t exactly heavy on the reading front. All those Christmas parties and – yes, despite my suggestion that I may boycott it – the World Cup. And it might look as though I didn’t read much in September, too, but I have to note that this was my Fat Book month. I read Robert Galbraith’s The Ink Black Heart (which weighs in at over 1000 pages) and the latest Stephen King (over 700 pages) in September…

For the third year running I read 10 books in January. Which is a pattern which probably says a lot about New Year’s Resolutions and about staying in a lot more after all those Christmas parties in December.

But enough already.

So I’ve kept you hanging long enough, haven’t I?

Well, without further ado, here’s my top twenty, and the best of the rest…

The Andy Chart 2022

1. The Every by Dave Eggers
2. The Pallbearers Club by Paul Tremblay
3. The Women of Troy by Pat Barker
4. Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell
5. Zeitoun by Dave Eggers
6. The World According to Garp by John Irving
7. The Promise by Damon Galgut
8. Drood by Dan Simmons
9. The Mosquito Coast by Paul Theroux
10. Misery by Stephen King
11. Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro
12. Treasure Island!!! by Sara Levine
13. The Invisible Circus by Jennifer Egan
14. The Lost Man by Jane Harper
15. The Book of Form and Emptiness by Ruth Ozeki
16. The Searcher by Tana French
17. The Sea, the Sea by Iris Murdoch
18. Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid
19. Plutoshine by Lucy Kissick
20. A Week in December by Sebastian Faulks

That’s a pretty nice cover there, yeah. Feel free to judge my winning book by it…

Anyway, here’s my best of the rest:

Midnight Sun by Jo Nesbo; The Furies by John Connolly; The Salt Path by Raynor Winn; Fairy Tale by Stephen King; The Quiet Game by Greg Iles; The House of Fame by Oliver Harris; Echo by Thomas Olde Heuvelt; The Ink Black Heart by Robert Galbraith; The Truth about the Harry Quebert Affair by Joel Dicker; Eleanor Rigby by Douglas Coupland; The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson; The Coffin Maker’s Garden by Stuart Macbride; Playing for Pizza by John Grisham; The Night Gate by Peter May; My Name is Yip by Paddy Crewe; The Nameless Ones by John Connolly; Luckenbooth by Jenni Fagan; A Slow Fire Burning by Paula Hawkins; Camino Island by John Grisham; Woman, Eating by Claire Kohda; Lambda by David Musgrave; Bellman & Black by Diane Setterfield; Their Little Secret by Mark Billingham; The Blood Divide by A.A. Dhand; Run Away by Harlan Coben; Sum: Forty tales from the afterlives by David Eagleman; The Night Fire by Michael Connelly; Change of Heart by Jodi Picoult; Full Dark House by Christopher Fowler; Book of the Dead by Patricia Cornwell; Pleading Guilty by Scott Turow; Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain; Shatter the Bones by Stuart Macbride; How to Kill Your Family by Bella Mackie; The Jealousy Man by Jo Nesbo; The Nature of the Beast by Frances Fyfield; A Darker Domain by Val McDermid; After the Crash by Michel Bussi; Love you Dead by Peter James; Hear no Evil by Sarah Smith; The Devil and the Dark Water by Stuart Turton; A Time for Mercy by John Grisham; Gone by Mo Hayder; Cold as Hell by Lilja Sigurdardottir; Stasi Child by David Young; Medium Raw by Anthony Bourdain; Innocent Graves by Peter Robinson; Burnout: Solve your Stress Cycle by Emily and Amelia Nagoski; The Lifters by Dave Eggers; Trying to Save Piggy Sneed by John Irving; Gone for Good by Harlan Coben; The Sanatorium by Sarah Pearse; One: My Autobiography by Peter Schmeichel with Jonathan Northcroft; The Hanging Valley by Peter Robinson; The Reader on the 6.27 by Jean-Paul Didierlaurent; Asking for It by Louise O’ Neill; The Cabin by WM Paul Young; The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives by Leonard Mlodniow; The Couple on Maple Drive by Sam Carrington; Beyond the Bailey by Alan Devey; Daring Greatly: How the Courage to be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent and Lead by Brene Brown; The Dinner Guest by B P Walter; Simple Genius by David Baldacci; Ash by James Herbert.

Some notes and observations

Dave Eggers magnifico of a novel – both in size and subject matter – justifiably carries off this year’s prize. It’s the companion book to The Circle, which topped the chart five years ago. Eggers also charts highly with his fantastic true-life story of New Orleans in the wake of Katrina and with a young adult book The Lifters. Paul Tremblay is another repeat offender – my 2018 winner rocks up in second place this time around. Completing my top three is Pat Barker’s The Women of Troy. This is the second book in her Greek trilogy: the first, The Silence of the Girls, was runner-up in 2019.

It’s not only new books which do well in my chart. There are four old stagers in my top ten too: The World According to Garp by John Irving, Drood by Dan Simmons, The Mosquito Coast by Paul Theroux and Misery by Stephen King. Modern classics, all.

It only remains for me to say have a wonderful Christmas and a great 2023. Here’s hoping for a little less madness.

The ‘Andy’ Awards for Best Book of the Year (which I’ve read) 2021

Well, my friends, it’s been another… um… interesting year in real life (which due to mostly remote working has felt like virtual life anyway). When I look back at this year personally I see some massive positives (I got married; we even managed to venture abroad on holiday; I got promoted, twice) but it’s had more than its fair share of grim-ness too (possibly less so than the vast majority of others, given the reasons listed above) and as we limp towards the line at the end of the year I find myself thinking, just like last year ‘let’s put this one behind us and go again in the new year’.

I hope. Spoiler alert, that’s the last line of a certain novel by Stephen King… but more on that later.

Another thing which has been positive this year has been the sheer volume of books I’ve been able to consume. One of the few plus points of remote working is the time you get back from not having to commute. With that, and the fact we pretty much ‘completed’ Netflix and for the vast majority of the year I haven’t been able to travel to football… well, it’s all added up to a big amount of reading time to fill the void.

And how. This year the quantity of books I’ve devoured scares even me. Scares me enough to put in a disclaimer here: no, I did not spend all day when I was supposed to be working reading books. And to be fair the number of screen hours I’ve racked up on Teams meetings, socials, the like practically forced me to pick up a paperback after work hours anyway.

The grand total

Last year I read a total of 77 books, during various lockdowns, national crises, and the like. Frankly I thought it was an unbeatable number. (Incidentally, in 2017 I read 75; in 2018, 61; and in 2019, 57.)

But this year I’ve topped it. I’ve read 93 books. (Incidentally II, The Guardian also tells me I’ve read close to 6000 articles on their website this year and I also subscribe to the excellent football magazines FourFourTwo and United we Stand.)

The above graph shows my most avid reading months. Relatively fallow periods tend to correspond with busy times at work or in my personal life (a wedding). March was my most active reading month. I can scarcely credit it now, but back then I was averaging an unbelievable three books a week, or near as dammit. The reasons why? I suppose home-schooling had ended (fingers-crossed forever) and spring was springing and I suppose there was positivity in the air.

Quality and quantity

But it’s not been all about the quantity, it’s also featured a great deal of quality. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed most of the stuff I’ve read this year. Mainly, I think, because of the sheer diversity of it. This is thanks to my regular use of the Little Free Libraries (four of which are within walking distance of my house), my subscription to the (free with Prime) Amazon First Reads programme, but also loads and loads of recommendations from friends, family, and colleagues. Every year I run The Andy’s I get more. Keep ‘em coming.

Resolutions

But as I do every new year I will resolve to read better, and more widely. My promise to myself this year was that I would read at least as many women writers as men, having spotted an imbalance in previous years’ charts. I haven’t managed this in 2021, but I will again make a concerted effort in 2022.

One thing I did manage was to read more non-fiction (my charts are completely dominated by novels). This year I’ve read completely random stuff over and above my usual sports-dominated agenda. There were of course a couple of footy books which sneaked their way in, but in fairness they weren’t all about Manchester United. I also read Ray Parlour’s autobiography, for example. I loathed him as a player as he played for Arsenal, our biggest rivals (on the pitch) at the time. I liked him in the book. You know what they say about reading opening the mind…

Beyond soccerball I also read autobiographies (John Cooper-Clarke), true life tales of a junior officer in Afghanistan, a Michael Palin travel book on North Korea, a book on the existential threat of big tech, a book on utopias, and a book on the malevolence of big corporations. I read books on the art and science of leadership. I read books I quoted in (successful) interviews: The Chimp Paradox (no, I wasn’t going for a role as a zoo keeper).

I also read No Strings Attached: The Inside Story of Jim Henson’s Creature Shop which just so happened to have been penned by my boss! I enjoyed it and I’m not just brown-nosing: it made me watch Labyrinth again and The Storyteller series. Which was handy after completing Netflix…

Another piece of non-fiction which stands out is The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper. This was recommended by my father-in-law, and I would in turn recommend it to anyone else. It’s about reclaiming the lives of the women so brutally murdered by Jack. Making them more than victims. But also about exposing how society at the time was at times as cruel as he was.

Patterns

Some weird patterns I noticed during my reading year:

In April, bizarrely I read two novels with cats amongst the main protagonists: the excellent The Last House on Needless Street by Catriona Ward and French Exit by Patrick ‘Sisters Brothers’ de Witt. And in October, two books on the trot which featured snakes (as an instrument of torture and as a part of a religious ceremony) in CJ Lyons’ Snake Skin, and The Nowhere Child by Christian White

But you don’t want to read any more of this build-up, do you? You want to know WHO’S WON!

So here are my top twenty:

1. Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption by Stephen King
2. Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart
3. Billy Summers by Stephen King
4. The Dirty South by John Connolly
5. The Mirror and the Light by Hilary Mantel
6. The Thrill of it All by Joseph O’Connor
7. The Children Act by Ian McEwan
8. The Mars Room by Rachel Kushner
9. The Last House on Needless Street by Catriona Ward
10. A Ladder to the Sky by John Boyne
11. Fair Warning by Michael Connelly
12. Summer by Ali Smith
13. NW by Zadie Smith
14. Thirteen by Steve Cavanagh
15. The Miniaturist by Jessie Burton
16. The Naturalist by Andrew Mayne
17. Beneath Devil’s Bridge by Loreth Anne White
18. Mystery Man by Bateman
19. The Dying Detective by Leif G.W. Persson
20. Cunning Folk by Adam L.G. Nevill

King’s coronation:

So finally my favourite writer lands a top spot in my chart. As well as the gold medal, he carries off the bronze medal, too. I mean, he had a podium finish last year (with his short story collection If It Bleeds) but this is something else…

I think the reason King so dominates my chart this year is – as well as being an obsessive, I’m also a completist. I realised that although I devour all of his new stuff on an annual basis, there are some gaps in my Kingly knowledge. So I’ve been back and revisited some classics from his back catalogue which I haven’t read. Which explains my number one choice. I mean The Shawshank Redemption has always been one of my favourite films and the images in my head of Red and Andy Dufresne will always – indelibly – be Morgan Freeman and Tim Robbins. But I don’t think that explained my resistance to reading the book. I think I was maybe just scared I’d be disappointed. That the hope would blink out.

It didn’t. Remarkably I’ve read seven novels by King this year but Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption is the ultimate. And I did start thinking of Red in a slightly different way and I did see Andy differently (he’s diminutive in the book: Robbins is massive). And now I have two massive favourites in two different media. So all round, a big win.

And the best of the rest (no particular order):

Dolores Claiborne by Stephen King; The Punishment She Deserves by Elizabeth George; The Nowhere Child by Christian White; The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper by Hallie Rubenhold; Later by Stephen King; Jpod by Douglas Coupland; Before You Knew My Name by Jacqueline Bublitz; The Law of Innocence by Michael Connelly; The Cove by Ron Rash; ‘Salem’s Lot by Stephen King; Lazarus by Lars Kepler; The Quarry by Iain Banks; Swimming Home by Deborah Levy; Nightingale Point by Luan Goldie; The Soul of Discretion by Susan Hill; Damnation Falls by Edward Wright; 1922 by Stephen King; The Castaways by Lucy Clarke; Gallows View by Peter Robinson; Love all the People: Letters, Lyrics, Routines by Bill Hicks Foreword by John Lahr; The Lost Village by Camilla Sten; The Second Sleep by Robert Harris; Pine by Francine Toon; Utopia for Realists (and How we can Get There) by Rutger Bregman; The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power by Joel Bakan; Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens; The Junior Officers’ Reading Club by Patrick Hennessey; Twelve Days of Winter by Stuart Macbride; The Good People by Hannah Kent; Good Bait by John Harvey; Borzois and Bevuardos or Kiss That Steak Slice Goodbye by Alan Devey; A Song for the Dark Times by Ian Rankin; Death in Summer by William Trevor; Ordinary Thunderstorms by William Boyd; The Noble Path by Peter May; The Girl Who Takes an Eye for an Eye by David Lagercrantz; Snake Skin by CJ Lyons; These Toxic Things by Rachel Howzell Hall; The Heatwave by Kate Riordan; Dead Pretty by David Mark; Vox by Christina Dalcher; Cycle of the Werewolf by Stephen King; The Resurrectionist by James Bradley; The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman; The Burning Girl by Mark Billingham; World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech by Franklin Foer; Girl A by Abigail Dean; The Girl Beneath the Sea by Andrew Mayne; Darksoul by Anna Stephens; The History of Bees by Maja Lunde; The Red Apprentice: Ole Gunnar Solksjaer: the Making of Manchester United’s Great Hope by Jamie Jackson; I Wanna Be Yours by John Cooper Clarke; The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman; French Exit by Patrick de Witt; My Uncle Oswald by Roald Dahl; Guantanamo Boy by Anna Perera; The Romford Pele: It’s Only Ray Parlour’s Autobiography by Ray Parlour with Amy Lawrence; The Broker by John Grisham; The Things You Didn’t See by Ruth Dugdall; No Strings Attached: The Inside Story of Jim Henson’s Creature Shop by Matt Bacon; Denial by Peter James; North Korea Journal by Michael Palin; Stranded by Stuart James; Still Water by John Harvey; Grantchester Grind by Tom Sharpe; Red Mist by Patricia Cornwell; The Reluctant Leader: Coming out of the Shadows by Peter Shaw and Hilary Douglas; Someone we Know by Shari Lapena; The Catch by T.M. Logan; Touch by Claire North; The Chimp Paradox by Dr. Steve Peters; Death on the Rive Nord by Adrian Magson

The ‘Andy’ Awards 2019

Merry Christmas, and a happy new year, all. Here goes… It says a lot about my writing year that my previous post on my writerly blog was almost exactly a year ago, and wasn’t about writing at all but reading. I haven’t written anything like as much as I’ve wanted to over the past few years. Life’s got in the way. And I know that ain’t an excuse. Stephen King doesn’t allow it to be an excuse – if you want to be a writer you write because it’s what you do, and you do it every day come rain, shine, hangover, kids or crucial derby match. But I’m going to cut myself some slack here. And if I’m not going to write, I can at least keep my eye in by reading, as often as is humanly possible, as voraciously as possible, and with as much variety as possible.

Hence this list, which allows me to track just how much I’m reading. For those of you who don’t know, the ‘Andy’s’ are my attempt to ‘chart’ my reading habits over a year. They’re supposed to help me read more and also make it easy for me to recommend good books to others. 2017’s chart expanded the qualifying criteria from short stories to novels, and 2018 went even bigger – I included all books I’d read. Fiction, non-fiction, short story collections, sports books. Yeah, the whole shebang. I’ve done the same again in 2019.

In 2017 I read a whopping 75 novels. Wowzers. Last year, my total fell some way short of that but I was still very pleased with my grand total of 61 books. This year, my grand totalizer is again down on the previous year, but still works out at over a book a week across the whole year. I’ve read 57 books.

The below graphic charts my most committed reading months. As you can see this year there’s been a pretty steep drop-off over the past couple of months. Strangely this has come in winter, when the nights draw in… You’d have expected I’d read more at this time of year. All I can say in response to that is that I’ve been reading some pretty epic tomes recently… And make of this what you will: one of the months in which I read by far the most books coincided with Love Island, which my partner watched religiously. There are probably other similar ‘coincidences’ for the other book-heavy months…

Anyway, I’ve thoroughly enjoyed my reading year. I’ve read some absolutely fantastic stuff, and some stuff which was maybe less so, so you don’t have to. Here in all its glory is my top twenty for 2019. Drum roll please…

1. World Gone By by Dennis Lehane
2. The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker
3. All that Man is by David Szalay
4. Macbeth by Jo Nesbo
5. The Chestnut Man by Soren Sveistrup
6. Lennox by Craig Russell
7. The Immortalists by Chloe Benjamin
8. My Sister, the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite
9. Lullaby by Leila Slimani
10. In a House of Lies by Ian Rankin
11. The Little Friend by Donna Tartt
12. Mr. Toppit by Charles Elton
13. The Power by Naomi Alderman
14. Child Star by Matt Thorne
15. Normal People by Sally Rooney
16. Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng
17. Kill the Angel by Sandrone Dazieri
18. Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps that tell you Everything you need to know about Global Politics by Tim Marshall
19. Manchester, England: The Story of the Pop-Cult City by Dave Haslam
20. The Institute by Stephen King

Honourable mentions to the other books I read this year: Slick by Daniel Price; The Tattooist of Auschwitz by Heather Morris; The Keeper of Lost Causes by Jussi Adler-Olsen; The Fix: Soccer and Organised Crime by Declan Hill; The Whisper Man by Alex North; Melmoth by Sarah Perry; Devoured by Anna Mackmin; To Rise Again at a Decent Hour by Joshua Ferris; Ghost Story by Toby Litt; Hot Milk by Deborah Levy; The Sellout by Paul Beatty; Dark Sacred Night by Michael Connelly; Gray Mountain by John Grisham; The Talisman by Stephen King & Peter Straub; Salem Falls by Jodi Picoult; The Last by Hanna Jameson; The Gargoyle by Andrew Davidson; The Devil Crept In by Ania Ahlborn; Class of 92: Out of our League by Rob Draper (with Nicky Butt, Phil Neville, Gary Neville, Ryan Giggs, and Paul Scholes); Everything Under by Daisy Johnson; Stone Cold by C.J. Box; What we’re Teaching our Sons by Owen Booth; Scrublands by Chris Hammer; The Hunting Party by Lucy Foley; My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante; Mr Penumbra’s 24-Hour Book Store by Robin Sloan; My Dad Wrote a Porno by Jamie Morton, James Cooper, Alice Levine & Rocky Flintstone; The Gestalt Switch by Alan Devey; Milkman by Anna Burns; The Boy in the Suit Case by Lene Kaaberbol and Agnete Friis; Heap House by Edward Carey; New Fears Ed. Mark Morris; The Player of Games by Iain M. Banks; I See You by Clare Mackintosh; Water Shall Refuse Them by Lucie McKnight Hardy; Cari Mora by Thomas Harris; Cottingley by Alison Littlewood.

Some observations: So, the Paul Tremblay show is over. After boasting two out of my top three in 2017, and winning the damned thing last year, this thoroughly modern horror writer misses out in 2019. Mainly this is on account of he hasn’t published anything. Therefore we have a new winner: one Dennis Lehane, whose World Gone By stood out like a sawn-off (sore) thumb in terms of quality, story, and readability. I’m a sucker for a good crime fiction, just as I am a horror yarn, and this is damned good crime fiction.

The only book which pushed Lehane’s remotely close was Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls, which is a new perspective on the Trojan War. Trust me: you’ll never see Achilles in the same light again. In any other year, Barker would probably have carried off my top honour, but this year, for one reason or another, I craved crime.

This leaning towards crime bears out over the list in general. The top of the list is much more weighted towards crime fiction than last year, with heavyweights such as Jo Nesbo, Ian Rankin and Dennis Lehane charting highly, allied with new (to me) writers such as Scandi-noir’s Soren Sveistrup, Nigeria’s Oyinkan Braithwaite (who turns the traditional crime narrative on its head) and Scotland’s Lehane-a-like Craig Russell also doing very well.

Speaking of crime, notable repeat offenders on the Andy list were the aforementioned Lehane (who last year charted well with Before the War, a previous title in his crime series) and Sandrone Dazieri, who made the list back in 2017 (with a previous title from his own series). Look out for work by both of these writers. Other authors across all genres who’ve appeared in multiple ‘Andy’ lists include Michael Connolly, Jodi Picoult, John Grisham, Alan Devey, and of course Stephen King.

You’ll notice there wasn’t much non-fiction: just three titles made my top twenty-five (Tim Marshall’s excellent Prisoners of Geography, Dave Haslam’s Manchester, England: The Story of the Pop-Cult City, and Declan Hill’s The Fix: Soccer and Organised Crime) but that speaks more to my particular tastes more than anything, and it’s no coincidence that two of that three are about topics close to my heart: Manchester and football…

And amazingly, for a former critic of short story collections (I worked for the Short Review) there’s only one short story collection in the whole list. Again, there’s no rhyme nor reason for this. It’s just the way things have fallen this year. My reading list is very random.

The reason for the randomness of my reading list: It must be said that the diversity of my reading has been much improved by the ‘little library’ at the end of our road. My neighbours read some very weird and very wonderful shit! My neighbours probably say the same about me. The little library down our road always contains hidden treasure and this year it’s really broadened my reading horizons. They’re a fantastic concept. The other reason I mention them – other than their all round brilliance – is this year Carry Franklin (above), the founder of Leeds Little Free Libraries, died. Her obituary was in The Guardian. And in the Yorkshire Evening Post. 

And I’d like to encourage all of you to carry on her legacy if you’re in Leeds or anywhere! Go on, take a chance on a new book… I’m told there are now free little libraries as far afield as Lormes, in Burgundy, France, and in New Mills, Derbyshire (God only knows what the neighbours’ll be reading in those places!)

Find a little library near you in Leeds here.

Roll-Up, Roll-Up for The ‘Andy’ Literary Awards 2017

A few years back when I had a whole lot more time on my hands I used to compile a chart of the best short fiction I’d read during the year (as a reviewer, fellow writer, and avid reader). I kept this going for five years consecutively (you can read about all of them in this blog right here). But two young kids put paid to any ideas I’d do very much reading at all, and I thought ‘The Andy’s’ might have ended back in December 2013, when I published my last Top 20.

But all that changed as 2016 rolled into 2017 and I made a new year’s resolution (which wasn’t, as it possibly should have been, to drink less booze). I decided that by hook or by crook I’d read more this year.

Amazingly, I’ve followed through on this resolution throughout the year (whereas if I’d have said that about the booze I’d have fallen off the wagon halfway through the first week of January). And I’ve kept going and kept going…

NEW FOR 2017

This year’s chart is a little different from my previous charts. Back before kids I wanted to really talk up the short story. I had an ulterior motive for this: I wrote a lot of short stories myself and I wanted to see them, and their authors, getting a a little bit more credit than they usually did. But I’m not reviewing any more (yet), nor am I publishing as many short fictions as I used to and as such I don’t feel like I have my finger on the pulse of the short story scene. Therefore in 2017 I decided to concentrate on novels.

This year I’ve a grand total of 75 novels. Long and short. From all kinds of genres. Most of these books have been released in 2016 and 17, but there are some classics I’ve always wanted to read in there too… And here’s where it gets all kinds of anal – I’ve even put together this graph which shows my readingest months (December’s a bit light as you can see, but we’re not yet all the way through the month, are we?)

Anyway – (drumroll) – this is my TOP TWENTY:

1. The Circle by Dave Eggers
2. A Head Full of Ghosts by Paul Tremblay
3. Disappearance at Devil’s Rock by Paul Tremblay
4. The Three by Sarah Lotz
5. The Long Home by William Gay
6. His Bloody Project by Graeme Macrae Burnet
7. I’m Travelling Alone by Samuel Bjork
8. The Cormorant by Stephen Gregory
9. It Can’t Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis
10. Nod by Adrian Barnes
11. Wolf in White Van by John Darnielle
12. Moonglow by Michael Chabon
13. Before the Fall by Noah Hawley
14. Hex by Thomas Olde Heuvelt
15. Sleeping Beauties by Stephen & Owen King
16. Seveneves by Neal Stephenson
17. Thin Air by Michelle Paver
18. The Girls by Emma Cline
19. Hag-Seed by Margaret Atwood
20. The Loney by Andrew Michael Hurley

Honourable mentions to the other books I read this year: Let the Right One In by John Ajvide Lindqvist; Universal Harvester by John Darnielle; The Troop by Nick Cutter; The North Water by Ian McGuire; Carrion Comfort by Dan Simmons; Bonfire by Krysten Ritter; Black Widow by Chris Brookmyre; Galveston by Nic Pizzolatto; Kill the Father by Sandrone Dazieri; The Couple Next Door by Shari Lapena; The Fireman by Joe Hill; Gorky Park by Martin Cruz Smith; Ice Lake by John A Lenahan; Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman; The Essex Serpent by Sarah Perry; My Name is Leon by Kit de Waal; Day Four by Sarah Lotz; My Sister’s Grave by Robert Dugoni; Dragon Teeth by Michael Crichton; The Wonder by Emma Donoghue; Stickleback by Mark Connors; The River at Night by Erica Ferencik; The Fourth Monkey by J.D. Barker; The Thousandth Floor by Katherine McGee; Black Water by Louise Doughty; Absolute Friends by John le Carre; Winter Moon by Dean Koontz; How to Stop Time by Matt Haig; The Searcher by Chris Morgan Jones; The Small Hand by Susan Hill; The Blade Artist by Irvine Welsh; A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms by George R.R. Martin; Into the Water by Paula Hawkins; Give me the Child by Mel McGrath; Night School by Lee Child; Stone Cold by David Baldacci; Zodiac by Sam Wilson; Baby Doll by Hollie Overton; The Murder Road by Stephen Booth; Shadowfires by Dean Koontz; Under the Knife by Tess Gerritsen; Let the Dead Speak by Jane Casey; Find Her by Lisa Gardner; The Collector by Fiona Cummins; The Doll Funeral by Kate Hamer; Pendulum by Adam Hamdy; The Nowhere Man by Gregg Hurwitz; Run by Mandasue Heller; Others by James Herbert; Under a Watchful Eye by Adam Nevill; Relics by Tim Lebbon; Crisis by Frank Gardner; The Breakdown by B A Paris; Strangers by David Moody; An Honest Deceit by Guy Mankowski.

 

 

 

April Book of the Month: ‘Kidney Punch’ by Andy Jacobi

My April book of the month is the dark, muscular Kidney Punch by first-time author Andy Jacobi. The book was winner of the White House Press First Novel awards and it is an utterly original work. At times painfully moving, at times exhilarating, the prose is tightly wrought, the characters well drawn, and the fight scenes are breathtaking.

You can purchase Kidney Punch here: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Kidney-Punch-Andy-Jacobi-ebook/dp/B00JQ5RPEE/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1397720995&sr=1-1&keywords=kidney+punch

Here’s the synopsis:

“Shane Jackett is a fighter, born and bred.
He’s had to fight for everything, all his life.
It is all he knows how to do.

But when his family is threatened to be torn apart for a second time, Shane faces a terrible choice.

Unflinching in its honesty, and often brutal in its outlook, ‘Kidney Punch’ is the story of Shane’s coming to terms with his own masculinity in a world where there are a severe lack of adequate role models.

It’s a story about men escaping from responsibility, through drinking, fighting, running away.

It’s about trying to do the right thing when things get so bad it is not even clear what the right thing is.

This is the first novel by North-West England-based author, ANDY JACOBI, and it is already garnering high-praise from critics.”

And here’s Andy Jacobi’s author bio:

“Literary life began at 40 for Andy Jacobi. They say everyone has a book in them, but until Andy had reached middle-age that was where he believed that book would be forced to remain.

A keen MMA fighter, and exponent of the martial arts, Andy had always thought his creativity resided in more physical pursuits. But then, injury forced him to retire from the fighting scene. And suddenly Andy itched to do something else… to write…

Andy served his writing apprenticeship at the Ravenscar Mount Writing School, where he penned a number of short fictions, some of which were published. Having graduated, he began work on his magnum opus, Kidney Punch.

The novel would eventually win White House Press’s inaugural First Novel Award.

Andy is now working on his second novel, provisionally entitled Dustbustin’.”

You can purchase Kidney Punch here: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Kidney-Punch-Andy-Jacobi-ebook/dp/B00JQ5RPEE/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1397720995&sr=1-1&keywords=kidney+punch

October Book of the Month: ‘Police’ by Jo Nesbo

My October Book of the Month is Police by Jo Nesbo. I’ve reviewed it for the New York Journal of Books here: http://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/review/police-harry-hole-novel

And here’s a brief excerpt:

“. . . the series’ crowning glory, its pinnacle achievement.”

Unless the author is highly original, unless the characters are interesting and engaging, unless the stories immediately hook the reader by the time a series of novels reaches its tenth installment it might have begun to seem stale. Formulaic. Samey.

By the same token, if the author is at the top of his or her game, if the characters still have the capacity to intrigue and confound expectation, if the stories don’t just hook the reader but club them on the head until they sit up and take notice, by the time a series of novels reaches its tenth installment, it might truly fly.

Police by Jo Nesbo is a case in point. This is the tenth in Nesbo’s Scandinavian noir crime fiction series featuring the inimitable detective Harry Hole. In the previous novels, Mr. Nesbo has already built one hell of a foundation and here he provides the series’ crowning glory, its pinnacle achievement.

This is, quite simply, a must-read book.

Book of the Month III: ‘Cartwheel’ by Jennifer duBois

Rounding off my Books of the Month for September, I’m delighted to feature the gripping, and controversial Cartwheel, by Jennifer duBois. I’ve reviewed the novel for the New York Journal of Books here: http://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/review/cartwheel-novel

And here’s an excerpt from the review:

“. . . an astonishing, breathtaking, and harrowing read.”

It’s all about momentum with Cartwheel by Jennifer duBois.

The novel quickly hooks the reader into the narrative and then continues to hold our attention as we roll with it, as though on a downhill slope, heading inevitably, inexorably, toward its devastating conclusion. Cartwheel inspires a cartwheel of changing emotions in the reader as it introduces us to morally complex characters in terrifying situations that are often completely out of their control. It leaves our heads spinning.

Cartwheel tells the story of Lily Hayes, an American foreign exchange student in Buenos Aires. Lily is arrested by the Argentine police, accused of the murder of her fellow exchange student—and roommate—Katy. The narrative is prefaced with an admission: “Although the themes of this book were loosely inspired by the story of Amanda Knox, this is entirely a work of fiction.”

Book of the Month II: ‘Levels of Life’ by Julian Barnes

My second Book of the Month is Julian Barnes startling and incredibly moving book, Levels of Life. You can read my full review of the text here, on the New York Journal of Books website: http://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/review/levels-life

And here’s a brief excerpt:

“Levels of Life is heartfelt and raw . . . angry . . . witty . . . always memorable.”

“You put together two people who have not been put together before; and sometimes the world is changed, sometimes not. They may crash and burn, or burn and crash. But sometimes, something new is made, and then the world is changed. Together, in that first exaltation, that first roaring sense of uplift, they are greater than their two separate selves. Together, they see further, and they see more clearly.”

Levels of Life is a poignant, extended metaphor of a “story,” by the “uxorious” Julian Barnes, winner of the 2011 Booker Prize for his novel The Sense of an Ending.

Set in three, distinct acts, which at first seem wholly separate—the first act is a historical piece regarding the “balloonatics,” “the new Argonauts,” who engaged in hot air ballooning in 19th century Europe; the second homes in on a (doomed) romance between one of the principal “balloonatics” and the actress Sarah Bernardt; and the third is a moving elegy to Barnes’ wife, the literary agent Pat Kavanagh, who died in 2008—but which together eventually come to form a “nice pattern” of a narrative.

Read more of my reviews for the New York Journal of Books here: http://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/reviewer/j-kirby

 

Book of the Month: ‘Jane’ by P.F. Jeffery

‘Jane (The Warriors of Love)’ by P.F. Jeffery

 Product Details

• Paperback: 436 pages
• Publisher: Chomu Press; 3rd edition (15 May 2013)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1907681221
• ISBN-13: 978-1907681226

Link to purchase on Amazon – http://www.amazon.co.uk/Jane-The-Warriors-Love-Jeffery/dp/1907681221

The Review

It had been on life-support for some time. Comatose. A little over a week ago, they turned the machine off. It flat-lined. There wasn’t so much a death’s rattle as a gentle passing over into that good night.

Patriarchy was declared dead by the author Hanna Rosin. You can read all about it in a critical article (not an obituary) written by Lola Okolosie and published by The Guardian: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/sep/17/patriarchy-hanna-rosin

Taking this premise “thousands of years in the future”, P.F. Jeffrey’s Jane focuses on the continuing division between the sexes. By now it has become “entrenched, turning to warfare.”

Most of you will have heard of the famous feminist slogan – attributed to Gloria Steinem – suggesting that men are superfluous to women’s needs: “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle”. Perhaps you’ll know it from the Guinness advert from a few years back. In Jane, “The future is female. (…) Males have become unnecessary…”

“Many technologies are lost and much history forgotten, but gynogenesis (by which two women may have a child) is becoming the scientific foundation for the Empire of Her Majesty, Berenice I.”

Jane is, then, a true origin story. It is a narrative which explores the growth of matriarchal society. It is a work of towering imagination, staggering wit and vital energy. After a relatively slow start, the narrative positively crackles with energy, most of which seems to stem from the vitality of our narrator and protagonist, Jane Brewster.

Unfolding “amidst the haunted marshes of outlying Essex, the routine and romance of homes and offices in the Surrey heartland, and the crumbling feudal heritage of Lundin town, the action unfolds like the panorama from a stagecoach window”, Jane offers the reader more than a glimpse of Jeffery’s carefully constructed new world.

“Jane is a sixteen-year-old civil servant under Her Majesty. Sent to audit the spoils of battle, she falls for Captain Modesty Clay, precipitating a maelstrom of events that force her to grow up fast, and in which she catches the eye of the Empress herself.”

It is a coming of age tale, a tale of the journey from innocence to experience. Initially naïve, Jane’s intellect – both social and academic – grows the more she is exposed to the different strata of society in this new world. She is Jeffery’s version of Frodo and Sam, setting out into the unknown, eyes wide open. She is C3PO and R2D2 all rolled into one.

At first Jane is wide-eyed: “It was the first time I’d seen men girt for war. For a moment, the sight struck me as more unnatural than alarming, as though beasts should engage in human activity.” (Which subtly recalls Steinem’s fish and bicycle quote). Like many girls her age, she has been reared on “too many Jacqui Blood stories.” (For Jacqui Blood read  that other famous literary JB, James Bond)

But eventually her character undergoes change: “My journey, as explained in these pages, has taken me from homesick girlhood to becoming a young woman setting out on life’s greatest undertaking – although not doing so without trepidation.” (That origin story again).

Jeffery’s world-building is well done. The text is full of neat touches like the real/ imagined place names (Lundin etc.), the songs and the threatre, and the new names for days of the week, months: “Briday evening”, “Selday morning”, “the fifteenth of Swellbelly”. There is a real, believable empire, culture, literature, economy here. God – the traditional idea of Him at least – is dead. Now He is simply an “Old Time godling”.

Not only is God dead, but Jeffery also shows us women destroying the old signifiers of patriarchy in Lundin (including throwing rocks at portraits of men who formerly occupied positions of authority, one of whom, Cornelius Lock, seems to resemble Cromwell). This is the overthrow, the sacking, of previous ways of doing things, of running the world. Jeffery draws interesting parallels between women and slaves (both of whom were seen in patriarchal society as not much more than “semi-intelligent domestic animals”). This is some slave’s revolt.

This is a move towards a new world order. Towards “the essential matriarch code (…) emphasized modesty amongst other virtues.” Not everything is perfect. There remain stark class distinctions. But Jeffery shows us a more sensory/ sensual world. Each chapter begins with an appeal to all of our readerly senses: “Bright sunlight, warm on my bare arms, shone from a blue sky flecked with white wispy clouds. Geese, bustling through the marshes in huge numbers, filled the air with a honing cacophony. The taste of a typical camp breakfast lingered in my mouth – sausages, eggs and mushrooms. A plume of steam rose from the mug of sweetened rosehip tea, cradled in my hands. Its honeyed scent teased my nose.”

Jane is a very visceral read. It is subtitled ‘The Warriors of Love’ and there is a great deal of sex (and Games of Thronesian sexploitation) here which Jeffery doesn’t exactly shy away from (I’ll never look at a cream cake in the same way). Jeffery, in an authorial note which concludes the text writes: “There were certainly downsides to 1950s England, in which I grew up. That said, some of the significant improvements since then affect adults, rather than children – notably relaxations in censorship and in the control of sexual behaviour.”

Jeffery yearns for the 1950s in the text. “On balance, 1950s England was a good time and place to be a child. In fact, I feel sorry for twenty-first century children. Our parents sent us out to play, allowing us extraordinary freedom. And there were such places to play – wasteland of kinds one no longer sees. There were, of course, bomb sites – but I think that my favourite playground had been used, in some way, by the British military, and then abandoned.” The author’s future world looks a lot like a nostalgic older world. Technology, as we have seen – gynogenesis apart – has disappeared. It’s a back to basics world.

Jeffery’s created world then, is wildly different from ours. But there are interesting meeting points. Jeffery refers to a Credit Crunch, for example, and debt collection companies. Ultimately though, as is noted in the speech of one of the characters: “The world is a stranger and more complicated place than you imagine. And the human heart is about the strangest and most complicated place of all.”

And Jeffery is most powerful when writing about the human heart, through the protagonist Jane. I mentioned Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland earlier. In Jeffery’s explanatory notes, the author admits this was a favourite book in childhood. “Writing this, I’m irresistibly reminded of the Caterpillar’s question, and Alice’s answers:

“Who are you?” said the Caterpillar.

This was not an encouraging opening for a conversation. Alice replied rather shyly, “I – I hardly know, Sir, just at present – at least I know who I was when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then.”

“What do you mean by that?” said the Caterpillar, sternly. “Explain yourself!”

“I can’t explain myself, I’m afraid,” said Alice, “because I’m not myself, you see.”

Jeffery shows us a human heart which is changeable, which is fragile, which is sometimes false, but one which beats positive and true.

Though at times Jane was a difficult read, at its own heart this is a brilliantly original and bold text, which stands apart. Recalling, by turn, the postapocalyptic south England of Will Self’s Book of Dave, the ‘into the rabbit-hole fantasy of Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, and the futuristic vision of Margaret Atwood, Jane is a book which provokes thought, inspires discussion, and most of all, deserves to be read.