Month: January 2023
Dornoch Take on the Dinosaurs
Secrets and Students by the Seaside
‘A Notable Omission’ by Isabella Muir
A 1970s debate on equality is overshadowed by a deadly secret…
Spring 1970. Sussex University is hosting a debate about equality for women. But when one of the debating group goes missing, attention turns away from social injustice to something more sinister.
It seems every one of the group has something to hide, and when a second tragedy occurs, two of the delegates – amateur sleuth Janie Juke, and reporter Libby Frobisher – are prepared to make themselves unpopular to flush out the truth. Who is lying and why?
Alongside the police investigation, Janie and Libby are determined to prise answers from the tight-lipped group, as they find themselves in a race against time to stop another victim being targeted.
In ‘A Notable Omission’ we meet Janie at the start of a new decade. When we left Janie at the end of ‘The Invisible Case’ she was enjoying her new found skills and success as an amateur sleuth. Here we meet her a few months later, stealing a few days away from being a wife and mother, attending a local conference on women’s liberation to do some soul-searching…
“My daughter Lucy wishes to spend her next long vacation on a kibbutz. Or perhaps I should say, as she’s at the University of Sussex, another kibbutz.” (Jim Hacker, Yes Minister, season 2)
There was something in those red bricks, wasn’t there? Sussex had the reputation alluded to in that episode of the greatest sitcom ever (fact: not opinion. Honest) My own alma mater, Stirling, was the place where the Queen was egged. Malcolm Bradbury and Tom Sharpe built literary careers on skewering the absurdities of the new universities and their idiosyncrasies.
And here, Isabella Muir reintroduces our heroine, Janie Juke librarian-turned-amateur sleuth Janie is a young Miss Marple, here married and back on the prowl as she attends that famously louche institution, thrusting the stifling Sussex atmosphere of the respectable classes with those long haired, rebellious students.
Picking up mere months after The Invisible Case, https://pajnewman.com/2021/02/09/aunty-and-niece-on-the-case, Muir continues her rich vein of form. Rattling along and wearing the writer’s love of Agatha Christie on her sleeve, the crime fighting duo of Juke and reporter Libby Frobisher are always welcome on the winter nights.
Purchase Link
UK – https://www.amazon.co.uk/Notable-Omission-Janie-Juke-mystery-ebook/dp/B0BQCLRYS6
US – https://www.amazon.com/Notable-Omission-Janie-Juke-mystery-ebook/dp/B0BQCLRYS6
Author Bio –
Isabella is never happier than when she is immersing herself in the sights, sounds and experiences of family life in southern England in past decades – specifically those years from the Second World War through to the early 1970s. Researching all aspects of life back then has formed the perfect launch pad for her works of fiction. It was during two happy years working on and completing her MA in Professional Writing when Isabella rekindled her love of writing fiction and since then she has gone on to publish seven novels, six novellas and two short story collections.
This latest novel, ‘A Notable Omission’, is the fourth book in her successful Sussex Crime Mystery series, featuring young librarian and amateur sleuth, Janie Juke. The early books in the series are set in the late 1960s in the fictional seaside town of Tamarisk Bay, where we meet Janie, who looks after the mobile library. She is an avid lover of Agatha Christie stories – in particular Hercule Poirot. Janie uses all she has learned from the Queen of Crime to help solve crimes and mysteries. This latest novel in the series is set along the south coast in Brighton in early 1970, a time when young people were finding their voice and using it to rail against social injustice.
As well as four novels, there are six novellas in the series, set during the Second World War, exploring some of the back story to the Tamarisk Bay characters.
Isabella’s love of Italy shines through all her work and, as she is half-Italian, she has enjoyed bringing all her crime novels to an Italian audience with Italian translations, which are very well received.
Isabella has also written a second series of Sussex Crimes, set in the sixties, featuring retired Italian detective, Giuseppe Bianchi, who is escaping from tragedy in Rome, only to arrive in the quiet seaside town of Bexhill-on-Sea, East Sussex, to come face-to-face with it once more.
Isabella’s standalone novel, ‘The Forgotten Children’, deals with the emotive subject of the child migrants who were sent to Australia – again focusing on family life in the 1960s, when the child migrant policy was still in force.
Find out more about Isabella and her books by visiting her website at: http://www.isabellamuir.com
Social Media Links –
https://www.facebook.com/IsabellaMuirAuthor
Tough Test When Invergordon Come to Town
Six of the Best for Fort
Questions and Answers with Tim Parks
You can read a review of Tim Parks’ latest novel, ‘Hotel Milano’ here: https://wp.me/p4pQjs-pB
You can buy Tim Park’s latest novel Hotel Milano – and support the blog – by purchasing the book from Bookshop.org https://uk.bookshop.org/a/10526/9781787303409
PAJNewman (PAJ): ‘Hotel Milano’ tackles Coronavirus head on and is set in a very specific time period. Yet, most novelists I’ve spoken to recently, say they have decided to try and skirt the pandemic. When did you know you were going to base your latest work so directly in this time frame and, I suppose, what was the thing which drew you to it as a topic?
Tim Parks (TP): Well, I’d beg to differ. Neither Coronavirus nor Covid are mentioned in the book. Nor does the word lockdown occur. Yes there is an epidemic, yes people find their movements drastically restricted. But the only thing that interested me was the dramatic situation that this circumstance allowed me to explore: an older man, who doesn’t follow the news, suddenly finds himself isolated, then forced into a relationship with people of a different ethnic community whom he would never otherwise have met, in a drama that immediately presents itself as crucial for their survival. It was this existential drama that interested me. Not a grand novel about the pandemic. It’s too soon for that I suspect and anyway it wouldn’t be my kind of novel.
PAJ: How was your own pandemic? Did you adapt fairly well to lockdown?
TP: Like everyone else I hate being shut in the house. But for the purposes of the book, what mattered was understanding just how fragile normality is, how swiftly the circumstances of your life can change.
PAJ: In terms of the novel, it has a first person, stream of consciousness narrative. Do you begin from a position of wanting to write in that form or, for you, does the story dictate the narrative?
TP: For many years, Frank, an ageing journalist, has refused to follow the news in whatever form. Newspaper, radio, TV, internet. He’s isolated and he’s sought isolation. Hence what happens is an even greater surprise to him. Given this situation, the first person seemed the way to go. I imagined it this way. A person locked in their own private world. It is not a ‘stream of consciousness’ in the Joycean sense. Joyce wrote in third person and includes a lot of passive perceptions that waft through the mind. The first person in ‘Hotel Milano‘ is very much a man debating with himself. What we get is what he consciously articulates. But I always have fun playing with the way the voice works. It’s one of the pleasures of writing.
PAJ: Based on reading some of your previous, non-fiction works, it appears to me like there are a number of biographical parallels with your own life. Are those resonances important for you as a novelist?
TP: For sure one can imagine things more easily when there are parallels with your own experience. One can play with turns your life might have taken and so on. It’s rare to find a good novel where the author doesn’t have some intimate knowledge of the places and people in the story.
PAJ: It seems like a novel of the now, encompassing loneliness, the migrant crisis, the role of the news in the narratives of our lives, grief and the virtue of caring for others. Were these threads you planned to explore or is there a more organic discovery as you were writing Frank’s journey?
TP: My novels aren’t essays. Perhaps they dramatize phases in the arc of a life. In this case old age. One of the things that most perplexes me in Milan is how separate the various ethnic communities are, how little we meet each other or know about each other. We presume this or that about the lives of others, but it’s another thing entirely to be forced to engage with people in dramatic circumstances. Frank suddenly finds himself in a position to do something noble, but dangerous, this when he’d presumed his active life was over. What would a situation like this feel like? How will Frank respond?
PAJ: You have a varied career as a man of letters, encompassing roles as a university professor, translator, reviewer, writer of non-fiction and celebrated novelist: do you have a favourite role and what dictates your next project?
TP: My ambition was always to be a novelist. Then I realized that it’s much more fun to write a range of things, and to teach and translate, though I’ve given up teaching now. Life is richer if one keeps it varied. And all these professions feed into each other. Generally what determines the next project is the requirement that it be refreshingly different from the one before. You could think of some kind crop rotation. I leave the novel field fallow for a year or two, then come back to it. But novels remain ‘the ambition’.
PAJ: Following on from this, do you have a “typical” writing day?
TP: Write in the morning. Go to the gym at lunch or early evening. Other stuff in the afternoon. But nothing’s fixed. There are times when I’ll write all day and others when I’ll drop it for a week.
PAJ: What advice do you have for aspiring writers?
TP: I know so little about the situation for a first-time writer these days. What matters above all, I think is a profound sense of vocation, a determination to keep learning and improving and trying. I had written five or six novels before I was published.
PAJ: Obviously at least two of your non-fiction books – ‘A Season with Verona’ and ‘The Hero’s Way’ have required enormous time and commitment just in order to complete gathering the raw material for. Were they enjoyable and are they artificially dreamt up or things which you would have done organically without the objective of a book at the end?
TP: I have never done anything in order to write a book about it. But when I decide to write a book about things I’ve planned to do anyway, I might start getting more deeply involved than I would have done anyway. In the end, the thought, Perhaps I could write a book about this walk (‘The Hero’s Way‘), allows me to engage in the whole adventure much more intensely. In the same way, I read more excitedly and carefully when I know I’m going to write a review about a book, or an essay on its author. Life and writing are wonderfully mixed up for me.
PAJ: On the subject of ‘A Season with Verona’, to a certain subset of readers, this is still perhaps the work you are best known for in the UK. Now 20 years old, I was wondering do you still support the club and are you still able to make it to games? Do you ever re-read your older work?
TP: I live in Milan now, so I’m hardly a regular at the Bentegodi. But I certainly keep my eye on Hellas and watch anxiously for each result. A melancholy habit this year. Only very rarely do I pick up an old book of mine and look at a couple of pages. Perhaps because I have to mention it in an interview or at a presentation. I like to stay focused on what I’m doing now.
PAJ: Books like ‘Italian Neighbours’ and ‘An Italian Education’ can now seem like postcards from the moon to UK-based readers post-Brexit. As a long-standing Brit-abroad, how do you reflect on the changes to your country of origin?
TP: I’m not sure I understand this question. There was no free movement of people in Europe when I arrived in Italy. I had to fill out endless forms, apply for permission every three months. Today, I see plenty of people around me in Milan who have come from non-EU countries, Britain and the USA included. The days of travel are not over. Nor is my affection for Britain, though I wouldn’t claim to ‘understand’ the place, having been away so long. It’s always a great pleasure to me when I go back for a few days.
PAJ: What is the question you wished interviewers and readers would ask but never do?
TP: Really, I have no such wishes. One hopes readers will find one’s books a pleasure. The aim is always to intrigue, to establish an intimacy, to keep the reader guessing about what the story is most deeply about. Perhaps because the greatest pleasure for me as a reader is the book that stirs the greatest activity of mind. As for interviewers, they must ask what they want to know. Fortunately it’s not a police interrogation and I don’t have to make sure my answers are consistent.
Purchase Links:
Amazon: https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/1787303403?tag=prhmarketing2552-21
Blackwells: https://blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/product/9781787303409?a_aid=prh
Bookshop.org: https://uk.bookshop.org/books/hotel-milano-booker-shortlisted-author-of-europa/9781787303409
Biography:
Born in Manchester in 1954, Tim Parks grew up in London and studied at Cambridge and Harvard. In 1981 he moved to Italy where he has lived ever since. He has written nineteen novels including Europa (shortlisted for the Booker prize), Destiny, Cleaver, In Extremis and, most recently, Hotel Milano.
During the nineties he wrote two, personal non-fiction accounts of life in northern Italy, Italian Neighbours and An Italian Education, books that won acclaim and popularity for their anthropological wryness. These were complemented in 2002 by A Season with Verona, a grand overview of Italian life as seen through the business and passion of football, and Italian Ways, on and off the rails from Milan to Palermo.
A regular contributor to the New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books, in recent years he has been publishing a series of blogs on writing, reading, translation and the like in the New York Review online.
Aside from his own writing, Tim has translated works by Moravia, Pavese, Calvino, Calasso, Machiavelli and Leopardi; his book, Translating Style, which analyses Italian translations of the English modernists, is considered a classic in its field. (Biography adapted from www.timparks.com)
Social Media:
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Tim.Parks.Author
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/timparksauthor/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/TimParksauthor
You Absolutely Cannot Check Out Any Time you Like
‘Hotel Milano‘ by Tim Parks
You can buy Tim Park’s latest novel Hotel Milano – and support the blog – by purchasing the book from Bookshop.org https://uk.bookshop.org/a/10526/9781787303409
You can also read an exclusive Question and Answer session with Tim Parks here: https://wp.me/p4pQjs-pJ
From the bestselling, Booker-shortlisted writer of ‘Italian Ways’ and ‘Europa’, a classic novel about a man’s emotional reckoning in a changed world far from home
Frank’s reclusive existence in a leafy part of London is shattered when he is summoned to Milan for the funeral of an old friend. Preoccupied by this sudden intrusion of his past, he flies, oblivious, into the epicentre of a crisis he has barely registered on the news.
It is spring, his luxury hotel offers every imaginable comfort; perhaps he will be able to weather the situation and return home unscathed? What Frank doesn’t know is that he’s about to make a discovery that will change his heart and his mind.
The arresting new novel from Booker Prize-shortlisted Tim Parks, ‘Hotel Milano’ is a universal story from a unique moment in recent history: a book about the kindness of strangers, and about a complicated man who, faced with the possibility of saving a life, must also take stock of his own. (Synopsis courtesy of https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/447542/hotel-milano-by-parks-tim/9781787303409)
There are some writers who you just come across at an important time. I stumbled upon an American edition of Tim Parks’ autobiographical book, ‘An Italian Education’ on a holiday in Venice in the early 2000s. The weather was hot, the partner I was travelling with was tetchy and the scenario was doomed.
That relationship did not last: the one with Parks the author endured.
Both in his non-fiction and in his novel, as brilliantly exemplified by his latest offering, ‘Hotel Milano’, Tim Parks is a writer of deceptive simplicity.
In this work, the first person narrative of Frank Marriott, see the words carefully chosen: building sentences, sentences carrying the cadence to paragraphs until you have a rhythm which carries the reader through the narrative. “One cannot meet people and talk and remember without paying the price.”
Overlaid on this are the words of Tennyson, quoted as Marriott begins his gallant folly to the funeral of a sort of friend. “All things are taken from us, and become / Portions and parcels of the dreadful past.”
The almost gothic sensibilities of the Victorian poet mesh beautifully with this novel’s meditations on loneliness, the migrant crisis, the role of the media in the narratives of our own lives, grief and the virtue of caring for others.
Marriott muses at once point. “For years, I thought, you have lived alone without the word loneliness so much as crossing your mind.”
As someone with mixed fortunes in the pandemic – a “happy” (mostly) lockdown in a beautiful location on the plus, the death of a relative on the negative – this is a novel which tugs at a number of heartstrings. Incidentally, I also stayed at an hotel not unlike the one around which the book is centred. I’d never encountered accommodation with a pillow menu before. Quite the eye opener.
A truly underrated quality of Parks’ writing is the humour, a quality as an aside all too often missing from “literary” fiction. Marriott has a wry line in observations which do an excellent job of skewering the idiosyncratic tendencies of the modern world, “One must live in a state of outrage. Not to do so was outrageous,” or, “Between the fifth and fourth floors an oriental woman was using the stairs to stretch. With dumbbells in her hands. The Grand Hotel Milano had become a five-star hamster wheel.”
A personal favourite aspect of the carefully constructed narration is the way Marriott’s mind jumps between the serious self-involved introspection of the man stranded on a quest he’s not sure he wants to be on and the trivial realities of the every day needs. “I saw all this again, lying on my bed in the Grand Hotel Milano, with the clarity and serenity of a waking dream. You are washed up like a bone on a beach, I thought. And I thought, Time for lunch!”
Finally, more characters in serious fiction need the pomposity pricking of the women which Marriott encounters. Picking up his trusty Tennyson, a character reads, “And I, the last, go forth companionless, / And the days darken round me, and the years, / Among new men, strange faces, other minds. Bit over the top, she smiled.” Well, quite…
There is nothing about ‘Hotel Milano‘ which is over the top. It is a quiet triumph of a novel, reflective, moving and contemporary in its reflection of a world we are all still processing.
Purchase Links:
Amazon: https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/1787303403?tag=prhmarketing2552-21
Blackwells: https://blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/product/9781787303409?a_aid=prh
Bookshop.org: https://uk.bookshop.org/books/hotel-milano-booker-shortlisted-author-of-europa/9781787303409
Biography:
Born in Manchester in 1954, Tim Parks grew up in London and studied at Cambridge and Harvard. In 1981 he moved to Italy where he has lived ever since. He has written nineteen novels including Europa (shortlisted for the Booker prize), Destiny, Cleaver, In Extremis and, most recently, Hotel Milano.
During the nineties he wrote two, personal non-fiction accounts of life in northern Italy, Italian Neighbours and An Italian Education, books that won acclaim and popularity for their anthropological wryness. These were complemented in 2002 by A Season with Verona, a grand overview of Italian life as seen through the business and passion of football, and Italian Ways, on and off the rails from Milan to Palermo.
A regular contributor to the New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books, in recent years he has been publishing a series of blogs on writing, reading, translation and the like in the New York Review online.
Aside from his own writing, Tim has translated works by Moravia, Pavese, Calvino, Calasso, Machiavelli and Leopardi; his book, Translating Style, which analyses Italian translations of the English modernists, is considered a classic in its field. (Biography adapted from www.timparks.com)
Social Media:
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Tim.Parks.Author
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/timparksauthor/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/TimParksauthor
UK’s Number One Podcaster Helps Out With School Project
Changes Afoot at Claggan Park
Simply the Best of Berkmann
Marcus Berkmann has consistently been one of the best comedic nonfiction writers working today and this quick read volume about his life as a writer is zippy, engaging and delightful. Whole heartedly recommended.
How to Be a Writer: Baths, Biscuits and Endless Cups of Tea https://amzn.eu/d/cAfrrKB
Buy the book – support this blog: https://uk.bookshop.org/a/10526/9781408713839
PAJ Newman 