Book Reviews: March 2019

From a Low and Quiet Sea by Donal Ryan
Black Swan, £8.99
Farouk makes the decision to leave the hospital he works in, his country, his life, when he sees the crucified boy in the town square. He and his wife and daughter pay a trafficker to take them across the sea and away from Syria, and Farouk eventually ends up in a refugee camp. Lampy, a young man living in small town Ireland with his saintly mother and acerbic grandfather, is haunted by the loss of his ex-girlfriend, rage bursting out of him at inappropriate moments.
John is an old man seeking forgiveness for the sins he’s committed throughout his life, a life that darkened when his older, beloved brother died suddenly as a teenager.
Three beautifully written and minutely observed lives, all suffering loss and heartbreak, all come together in the powerful final section of the novel. Excellent.

Transcription by Kate Atkinson
Black Swan £8.99
Juliet Armstrong is reluctantly recruited to MI5 at the beginning of the second world war, working as an agent monitoring the movements of British Fascist sympathisers, and finding herself with handlers who nearly all appear to be living complicated double or triple lives themselves. After the war, working as a BBC producer, she encounters some figures from her past and discovers that a price may have to be paid for the deceptions created in her former life.
This novel is an intriguing mix of Atkinson’s detective Jackson Brodie series of books and her more recent Life After Life and A God in Ruins which explored the questions of chance and fate with lives played out in numerous permutations.
“A novel full of smoke and mirrors, of artifice and redirection” The Spectator.


The Go-Away Bird by Julia Donaldson. Illustrated by Catherine Rayner
Macmillan Children’s Publishing £11.99
‘The Go-Away bird sat up in her nest,with her fine grey wings and her fine grey crest.’
One by one, the other birds fly into her tree, wanting to talk or to play, but the Go-Away bird just shakes her head. She wants to be alone. But when the dangerous Get-You bird comes along with dinner in mind, she soon realizes that she might need some friends after all...
Julia Donaldson, who needs no introduction here, and Catherine Rayner, author and illustrator of Abigail, Augustus and his Smile, and Solomon Crocodile, have joined forces to produce an utterly beautiful, charming and witty picture book about teamwork and friendship, perfect for sharing with the toddler in your life. A real treat.

The Closest Thing to Flying by Gill Lewis
Oxford University Press, £6.99
Semira, her mother, and volatile Robel, are always moving from one place to another, Semira can’t remember any other way of living since she left Eritrea as a small girl. New place, new house, new school, she is practised at blending in and giving nothing away. But when Semira finds a beaten up old hat and a century old diary in a hatbox, she becomes enthralled by the diary’s writer, Henrietta. A teenage girl like herself, Hen has a different set of problems to contend with – overbearing parents, dissatisfaction with the stifling life of a middle-class Edwardian girl, but she and Semira both find freedom and release in riding bicycles, which are forbidden to both of them. And reading about Henrietta’s exploits gives Semira the courage to start questioning the status quo in her own life, and to find her own voice.
A sweet, thrilling story taking in women’s suffrage, birds and friendship, suitable for 9-13 year olds.