Top Ten Tuesday: Genre Freebie

The beating heat of full summer in this one, as two elderly people – one of whom is labouring under a chronic progressive and ultimately fatal illness – head out from the home that has been repossessed to walk the South West Coast Path.

It is an informative and endearing tale of hope and faith and love… though I have serious misgivings about the wisdom of their ignoring all medical advice! But some lovely depictions of the area around which I live and visit often!

This is a book that changes the way you look at the world: a paean to and celebration of all that is forest – forests that communicate and live and breathe.

A twining of stories in and out of each other – like roots perhaps? – the novel contains some wonderful, awe-inspiring writing creating the natural landscape and is, just, breathtakingly achingly beautiful.

And not all nature is benevolent, as trees burst aggressively through the earth overnight in this novel, destroying homes and houses and civilisation.

And something mysterious and strange is lurking within the woods that now dominate the land.

I do like Shaw’s transformative writing – The Girl With The Glass Feet was wonderful on that count too – and the wildness of this was compelling and dangerous.

Heading to Nigeria firstly and there were a range of authors I could have chosen: Emezi, Achebe, Okri, Soyinka. But My Sister, the Serial Killer was a moving and compellingly vivid portrayal of life in modern Nigeria full of the sights and smells of the country.

And into Turkey for Shafak’s wonderful novel exploring the death of Tequila Leila, prostitute and victim and above everything else, friend.

Tequila Leila was a wonderful vivid vibrant creation, but perhaps the city of Istanbul is perhaps the most beloved character.

And oh the beauty of those final chapters!

And then heading into Syria, or at least splitting ourselves between Britain and Syria as Isma, Aneeka and Parvaiz – sisters and brother – struggle with a range of loyalties. When your loyalty to yourself and your own identity is in conflict with your loyalty to your country, your family, your faith, what wins?

The chapters from Parvaiz’ point of view in a jihadist camp is Syria are powerful and visceral.

This one seems very apt: the Krell are an alien race – possibly – who are suppressing the last of humanity by keeping them isolated in caverns beneath the surface of the planet Detritus.

The novel revolves around Spensa, a young girl struggling to escape from her reputation as the daughter of a coward, trying to escape the threat of the Krell, trying to escape the debris field that surrounds her planet…

As her father told her before his death, “trapped on this rock. Their heads are heads of rock, their hearts set upon rock. Set your sights on something higher. Something more grand.”

Some of the most alien aliens I’ve come across: crablike, insectile, fan wings and gift wings… and with two mouths.

Mieville is such a fantastic writer – deeply embedded in weird and speculative fiction – that the alien world felt like a homecoming!

A fantastic meditation on language, words, voices, identity; also a cracking science fiction yarn!

Sweet, moving, touching… Nina Hill is anxious without being frail, empathetic without being vulnerable.

And her comfort is books: the books she works with in Knight’s Bookshop, the books that fill her home, the books that she reads with her various book clubs…

In this world that is currently so anxious, take a leaf from her – well – her book!

This is just wonderful and amazing.

Who would not want to find a painted door which opened into a hidden metaphysical subterranean library housing all the books and tales and narratives and stories in the world, both told and untold.

In The Starless Sea, Morgenstern creates her own mythology of the story, bound together by the central tale:

“Once, very long ago, Time fell in love with Fate… This, as you might imagine, proved problematic. Their romance disrupted the flow of time. It tangled the strings of fortune into knots.”