It's been over a year since I added to my blog, and although no one seems to have missed it much, I feel that I've been slacking.
So, I'm back with a vengeance.
In the twelve months since I was in touch, I have written Salad Days, my homage to vintage fiction. If you enjoy books by Penelope Lively, Mary Wesley and Barbara Pym, I think you'll enjoy Salad Days. It's a gently nostalgic story about life growing up in the sixties and seventies - but with a gothic twist.
The book is set in a favourite spot of mine; the Scottish side of the Solway coast. The woods, the cove and the hidden-away little cemetery that feature in the book are all real, but Salad Days, the eponymous market garden, is not, and neither is Glenister Hall.
At the time of writing, Salad Days is reduced to $/£1.99. Don't forget that buying direct from me costs you no more but cuts out the middlemen. On the other hand, if you prefer to buy from your usual online bookstore, that's fine too, and at the moment the book is enrolled in Kindle Unlimited, so if you subscribe to that, you're quids in!
Either way, navigate the site to find the book's page, read reviews and an excerpt and then click the purchase button if you wish.
I've read a lot of books in the past year, and here's one I want to recommend to you:
Rachel Kadish's The Weight of Ink
This isn't a new book, but was recommended to me by a friend and boy, was I glad!
It is a double helix of a book, with two strong and immersive story lines connected by the big theme of life: its meaning.
1664, London, and Ester Valaquez, a Jewish girl just arrived from Portugal, is given the job her brother turns down. She is to be the scribe for Rabbi HaCoen Mendes, a revered teacher who, blinded by the inquisition, can neither read nor write for himself. For Ester to have the literary skill to fulfil this role is extraordinary for the era, but Ester has a brilliant, enquiring mind and opinions years ahead of her time on topics such as the condition of life and the existence of God—subjects only the bravest theologians and philosophers were daring to tackle behind closed doors almost a half century before the dawn of the Age of Reason. Heavily influenced by stories of the women in her family—her mother, unhappily if traditionally married, and her grandmother, who had rejected tradition, fallen in love and then had her heart broken by a mysterious Englishman—Ester chooses a life of study and enquiry, effectively debarring herself from the role of the obedient, Jewish wife.
Three hundred years later, the Rabbi’s letters are discovered hidden behind a panel in a house in Richmond, Surrey. Professor Helen Watt and post-grad student, Aaron Levi, race to decipher them before rival academics take the glory for uncovering their secrets—not only that their scribe was female, but also that she had an intellectual life far beyond the mere taking of dictation.
What I especially liked about the book was the way ancillary stories—like Ester’s grandmother, Helen’s early life in Israel and Aaron’s unsettled obsession with a one-night-stand—were drawn into the main plot like herbs, adding and enhancing the flavour of the whole dish. Sometimes they seemed like meandering alleyways that would go nowhere, but each one brought the reader unerringly back to the story the richer for the diversion.
There is also a beautiful thematic unity. While the Rabbi struggles to keep his wayward flock on the straight-and-narrow when false messiahs stake their claim, Ester is reading and even corresponding with the great forward thinkers of her day, such as Benedictus de Spinoza. Blind faith (literally, in the Rabbi’s case) wars with intellectual exploration, daring to think the unthinkable. Likewise, in the modern-day story, Helen, whose walking cane is an apt metaphor for her humourless, sticklike personality and the fact that she is a stickler for old fashioned academic processes, finds herself up against Aaron, who is impatient and restless, a Lothario eager to avoid the fate of most young men his age—settling down, marriage and fatherhood. But even this is too simplistic, because any good book must show change. And so, in the end, the Rabbi questions his faith and Ester finds a way to satisfy both her enquiring mind and the expectations of her Jewish community. Dry, spinsterish Helen comes to terms with having lost the love of her life years before in Israel and Aaron finds that the thing he thought he most wanted to avoid is in fact the thing her craves most of all.
The author’s descriptive powers are amazing: the filth and noise of London’s streets; the eye-aching greenness of the countryside in comparison; the experience of fever as the plague hits; the smell of old books.
This is an incredible story as well as a treatise on existentialism—the importance of independent thought, of truth that is validated by experience and feeling as well as by empiricism and on how, as part of the human condition, it is our fate to balance these matters and take responsibility for them ourselves.
If I've whetted your appetite, follow this link to get started on this really wonderful read: https://amzn.to/4dIARCT
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