Tag Archives: writing

Publication day: Relearning to Read

October 1, 2025 By in My books Tags: , , , , , , , 15 Comments

It’s out! My fourth book, Relearning to Read: Adventures in Not-Knowing, officially hits the shelves today. It’s available worldwide in English and can be ordered through all the usual channels and bookshops, as well as directly through my publisher’s website.

Drawing on the interactions I’ve had through this blog and through the reading workshops I’ve been running for the last four years, it explores how embracing not-knowing can enrich our reading of ourselves and our world.

Each chapter takes an extract from a different book likely to be outside most anglophone readers’ comfort zones as a launchpad for exploring themes such as how do we read books written from political viewpoints or based on religious views we don’t share? What do we do if we don’t know if a story is funny? And why might taste sometimes lead us astray? I hope it’s playful, mischievous, a bit subversive and thought-provoking.

In the spirit of this, the book comes in three slightly different covers, reflecting the fact that there is more than one way of reading. If you order one, you won’t know what you’re going to get! And as a bonus, Renard Press is running a promotion: if you add Relearning to Read and the signed, limited-edition version of my novel Crossing Over to your basket on their website, and use the coupon ‘relearning’, you’ll get the novel half price. The offer runs until the end of October, so hurry if you like the sound of this.

Every book will have its pound of flesh – at least that’s my experience. This one certainly had some twists and turns in the early days of developing the idea. Once I had the form clear in my mind, however, the writing process was a joy.

There’s been some wonderful feedback. We’ve already had an international rights inquiry from a publisher in another territory. (If you would be interested in translating or publishing the book in another language, please drop Will at Renard Press a line.) Relearning to Read has already been included on the syllabus of a university course in the UK and I’ve been invited to speak about it at festivals in the UK, India and Hong Kong.

What’s more, I’ve been particularly thrilled to see writers I admire supporting the book with generous endorsements. These include superstar translator and novelist Anton Hur, who called Relearning to Read ‘a lively discussion on how to read books from around our increasingly fractured world – and how to live within the chaos,’ and novelist, professor, translator and former English PEN president Maureen Freely, who wrote:

‘Living as we do in the golden age of surveillance marketing… it has become ever more difficult to negotiate uncertainty – in life as on the page. With this beautifully imaginative guide, Ann Morgan makes an eloquent case for reading beyond the bounds of our understanding, not just to broaden our horizons, but to better understand ourselves. I shall be taking it to my next book group! I urge you to do the same.’

Not everyone has been impressed, however. When I told my eight-year-old that my fourth book was being published today, she pulled a face. ‘What? You mean you’ve only written four books in your adult life?’ she said.

Still, I hope other family members approve. In particular, my Dad. Sadly I can’t ask him: he died unexpectedly as I was preparing to write the final chapter, and this changed the shape of the ending a little. One of the earlier chapters also features the story of how his father, a native Welsh speaker, moved into the English-speaking world. I hope Dad would have enjoyed reading it.

Certainly Dad would have enjoyed the international angle. Travelling was one of the things he most wanted to do in retirement. He had renewed his passport a few weeks before he died and was looking forward to several trips.

I have dedicated Relearning to Read to his memory. As it sets off around the world, it makes me smile to think that, in a way, Dad is travelling with it too.

RLF Collected podcast

May 13, 2025 By in Events Tags: , , , , , , Leave a comment

One of the joyous things that has come out of this project is the way that I’m frequently invited to take part in discussions about writing and the ways stories travel. Often, these conversations take place at literary festivals or conferences, but they sometimes involve podcasts too.

Last year, I was asked to produce a new podcast for the Royal Literary Fund, a UK charity that has supported professional writers for more than 200 years and with which I’ve been involved since 2017. Over the preceding decade, the RLF had built a sound archive featuring recordings of hundreds of writers talking about the creative process, and the challenge and joys of putting words on the page. Now the team wanted a new format to bring this rich bank of material to a wider audience.

The Collected podcast is the result. Built around clips from the RLF archive, the episodes bring special guests into conversation with those recorded voices. Hosted by a brilliant team of presenters, including South Asia Speaks founder Sonia Faleiro, award-winning poet Julia Copus, and musician and crime writer Doug Johnstone, the conversations present a lively, funny, surprising and often moving account of what it means to be a writer in the early twenty-first century. The aim is to offer a more nuanced picture than we often see in the media, and it’s been wonderful to hear guests including Women’s Prize founder Kate Mosse, crime writer Howard Linskey, and visual artist and poet Ella Frears embracing the concept with warmth and frankness.

Although the writers RLF supports are UK-based, it’s been a joy to reflect my interest in international storytelling in the line-up too. Examples include discussions with Kerala-born novelist Deepa Anappara, who talks thought-provokingly about the gap between the expectations of mainstream anglophone publishers and the sort of writing that interests her, and Colin Grant, director of RLF’s WritersMosaic platform for writers of the global majority, who draws on his Caribbean heritage in his writing on race and migration.

Collected is available on all the usual platforms. I’d love to know what you think.

Blog tour: Where Snowbirds Play

May 4, 2025 By in Post-world Tags: , , , , , , , 5 Comments

I’m not really a book blogger. Yes, I write about books on this blog – and yes, I did once upon a time review close to 200 books in a year here – but the commitment, stamina and output of other book reviewers in the virtual sphere now leave me and my once-a-month writeups in the dust.

In the international-literature arena, some of the names that spring to mind include Marina Sofia, Stu Allen and Tony Malone. These bloggers and others like them maintain an astonishing pace, easily equally my efforts in 2012 in many cases. And they’ve been going for years, bringing attention to thousands of titles that deserve to be better known by readers of the world’s most published language.

Within the anglophone literature sphere, there is a whole raft of other, equally industrious reader/reviewers. I knew little about them until my publisher, Renard Press, organised a blog tour for my novel Crossing Over two years ago. For a month leading up to the release of the book, I had the initially daunting but ultimately lovely experience of seeing my story thoughtfully and generously reviewed by a different book blogger each day. It helped build buzz around the book and, at what can often be an oddly lonely and unsettling time for an author, allowed me to enjoy seeing my work going out into the world.

I was so impressed by the blog tour that I wrote an article about it for The Author, the member’s magazine of the UK’s Society of Authors. As part of my research for this, I interviewed former English teacher Linda Hill of Linda’s Book Bag. I was amazed by what she told me: the volume of books she features is such that she operates a traffic light and scoring system to help her keep track of them, and she schedules her posts many months in advance. It sounds like a full-time job, except that, of course, for Linda and most other bloggers like her, it is unpaid: the only material reward they get for the hours and hours they spend reading, planning and reviewing are free advance copies.

Because blog tours are less of a thing when it comes to international literature, and because I only rarely feature brand-new books (preferring to promote older titles that deserve a second look) and only do one review a month, I have never taken part in a blog tour.

This month, however, I am making an exception for a title that is close to my heart. Where Snowbirds Play, Gina Goldhammer’s debut novel (published by Renard Press’s imprint Hay Press on 6 May 2025), takes us into the privileged world of 1990s Palm Beach, where British graduate Philip has just secured a placement at a new marine life institute. But all is not what it seems both among the super rich who fund him and in Philip’s own story. Soon, secrets, rivalries and financial scandals are bubbling to the surface, and as hurricane season looms it seems unlikely that everyone will escape unscathed.

I love this book for two reasons. Firstly, I love it because I’ve had the privilege of seeing it develop over several years in my capacity as a mentor/editor to its author. Working with a writer and seeing their ideas fill and rise until they find their fullest expression is an extraordinary process, and one that I’ve had the joy of experiencing a number of times since I was published, most frequently as a mentor for the Ruppin Agency Writers’ Studio.

But I particularly love this book because it is so singular and true to itself. Only Goldhammer could have written it. As I say in the supporting blurb I gave for the book, the novel offers an arresting perspective on a lifestyle few experience firsthand. Taking readers into the heart of privilege, Goldhammer spins a compelling story that lays bare the tensions, frailties, desires and self-deceptions that drive human beings everywhere. Sumptuous, witty and surprising, this novel will transport you to a world that is at once absorbingly fresh, and a charming – and alarming – reflection of our own.

And I’m delighted to see that other readers are already recognising the book’s uniqueness. On one of the earlier stops in the Where Snowbirds Play blog tour, bobsandbooks wrote that they were ‘left feeling like this was something a little bit different’. I couldn’t agree more.

Where Snowbirds Play by Gina Goldhammer (Hay Press, 6 May 2025)

Dibrugarh University International Literature Festival 2025

February 13, 2025 By in Literature festivals, Post-world Tags: , , , , , , , , , 5 Comments

Last week, I got to chair my dream literary festival event panel. It featured Togolese explorer Tété-Michel Kpomassie (my Togolese pick for my original year of reading the world), Bhutanese author and publisher Kunzang Choden (whose The Circle of Karma I also read in 2012), and Bissau-Guinean writer, publisher and engineer Abdulai Silá, whose The Ultimate Tragedy, translated from the Portuguese by Jethro Soutar, was a book of the month of mine a while back.

Not only that, but the event took place in Assam, north-east India, at one of the liveliest and most inspiring gatherings of writers it has ever been my privilege to attend.

This was my second visit to Dibrugarh. The first took place in March 2024, when I was one of the cohort of writers from around the world invited to take part in the inaugural Dibrugarh University International Literature Festival. That event was such a success that the university committed to host a further two editions of the festival. The first of these took place last week.

This time, my involvement in the festival was bigger. Not only was I present as a speaker, but I played a small role in suggesting and inviting some of the other authors in the months leading up to the event. As such, I had the joy of seeing a number of writers whose work I have long admired take the stage in Dibrugarh. They included the Dutch linguist Gaston Dorren, who I met when our debut books came out in 2015; Northern Irish short story writer, novelist and playwright Lucy Caldwell, who I’ve known since we were aspiring authors in our teens; and Uzbek novelist and journalist Hamid Ismailov, who I had the great pleasure of interviewing for my first book, Reading the World.

In addition, the festival brought a number of other intriguing writers onto my radar. With a focus on Africa, the programme included Cameroonian novelist Ernis, Congolese-Norwegian poet and novelist Raïs Neza Boneza and award-winner Joaquim Arena from Cabo Verde.

I chaired several panels with South African writer Shubnum Khan. Her work has only recently become available in the UK, in the form of her engrossing second novel, The Djinn Waits a Hundred Years, but I was also delighted to have the opportunity to read her essay collection How I Accidentally Became a Global Stock Photo in preparation for our discussion. Funny and illuminating, the book sheds light on the challenges of moving through the world as a Muslim woman. It would appeal to fans of Nanjala Nyabola’s Travelling While Black and ought to be more widely available. UK and US publishers, I’m looking at you.

Having one or two authors from around 20 nations present, alongside a host of wonderful Indian writers, made for an unusually level playing field when it came to discussing international issues. It was powerful to hear perspectives on questions such as the legacy of colonialism and the realities of migration from such a wide range of people and places. I think all of us had our eyes opened over the course of the festival.

The fact that these conversations were so inspiring and frank was also down to the ambience the university and the festival team created. The welcome in Assam is always warm, but this time the organisers went the extra mile. From the student volunteers who showed us around and the banners with author photos lining the campus roads to the delicious food and the world-class Dibrugarh University folk orchestra that played at the closing ceremony, the guests felt celebrated at every turn.

The same held true outside the university. When a group of us ventured out into town, bookshop owner Pradyut Hazarika invited us all for chai. The shop was one of eight branches of Banalata employing 200 staff across Assam, he explained, and the business not only sells but also publishes the Assamese titles it displays. This makes for a personal touch that is often missing in the book industry in other parts of the world.

The personal touch is also at the heart of DUILF. ‘Having established contact with you, you are now close to us in more ways than one and we shall make every effort to make you feel at home,’ wrote curator Rahul Jain in his welcome note to authors.

As we all left Dibrugarh to return to our lives around the world, dispersed like seeds from a pod as Lucy Caldwell put it, I for one certainly felt I was leaving a home from home.

Dublin Book Festival

November 11, 2024 By in Events, Post-world, Reading the World (book) Tags: , , , , , , 6 Comments

Last weekend, I had the privilege of being part of the line-up at Dublin Book Festival, an annual celebration of all things literary in Ireland’s capital. My event was a discussion of reading the world with Literature Ireland director Sinéad Mac Aodha (pictured with me above), who helped launch Crossing Over at Hodges Figgis last year. But I was lucky to attend several other things thanks to the Literature Ireland team, who took me under their wing for the weekend.

The first of these was the launch of Your Own Dark Shadow: A Selection of Lost Irish Horror Stories at the Gutter Bookshop.

I don’t consider myself a horror fan, but I was intrigued by what editor Jack Fennell said in his speech about how horror is a way of articulating the sense that something is wrong in the world and helping people to feel less alone in this. My fiction bears hallmarks of this, so I am intrigued to see how this plays out in the collection.

I was also deeply impressed by the ethos of the collection’s publisher, Tramp Press, one of a number of indie houses making strides in Ireland. Their submission window is open now, so if you live outside North America and are looking for somewhere to place work, I would recommend checking them out.

The next day I attended an event on short stories with Jan Carson and Mary Costello (pictured above). In the queue outside I was delighted to bump into debut novelist Alan Murrin, with whom I did an event earlier this year. His recommendation of Mary Costello’s story ‘The Choc-Ice Woman’ was so enthusiastic that I lost no time in buying a copy of her latest collection.

The discussion in the event was illuminating and wide-ranging. Jan Carson talked about how word counts were coming down for many journals and competitions. ‘Watch yourself if you’re always writing to fit others’ requirements,’ she said. She explained that the way into stories for her is through concepts, and gave a brilliant example in the shape a story in her latest collection that was commissioned to explore how Northern Ireland is seen in the wake of Brexit. She had approached the subject by envisaging a baby drifting down a river separating the land of two farmer brothers who don’t get on.

Meanwhile, Mary Costello said that for her the spur to writing comes from thinking about the interior lives of her characters. It will often be physical exercise, whether walking or hoovering, that shakes problems loose in her work.

Next up was an event on the essay, chaired by Brendan Barrington, founder editor of The Dublin Review. I found this very inspiring. Over the hour-long discussion, in which panellists shared some of their favourite pieces from the publication, I was struck by the enthusiasm of these writers for this somewhat enigmatic form, and by their openness to people writing in several genres. ‘If you’re a serious writer and you don’t write an essay occasionally, you’re missing a trick,’ said Barrington at one point. I took this as a challenge. Watch this space.

My event was towards the end of the afternoon and it was wonderful to be greeted by an enthusiastic audience, featuring several familiar faces, among them author Rónán Hession, Africa Institute in Ireland programme director Adekunle Gomez and Lyndsey Fineran, who created my literary explorer role at Cheltenham Literature Festival and is now artistic director of the Auckland Writers Festival.

The discussions afterwards were particularly heartwarming. So many readers shared insights about how reading internationally connected to their experience, and I left with a list of book recommendations. I was also particularly delighted to make the acquaintance of translator Signe Lyng, who brings many of Ireland’s most well-known writers’ work into Danish. She subsequently sent me a list of Danish recommendations. I think I feel a book of the month coming on…

I left Dublin inspired and encouraged. What I’d shared in was an event founded on the belief that storytelling is valuable, not for the money it makes but because of the connections it forges – something that I hope also drives my work.

Irish writing has always had an important place on the international stage, and is perhaps enjoying a particularly powerful moment. At Dublin Book Festival, it was not hard to see why.

Dibrugarh University International Literature Festival

March 25, 2024 By in Events Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , 4 Comments

Last week I had a special experience. I was invited to the north eastern Indian state of Assam to participate in the inaugural Dibrugarh University International Literature Festival. It was my second visit to Assam. Five years ago, I was part of the Brahmaputra Literary Festival, a wonderful experience that I recorded on this blog.

DUILF was organised by the Foundation for Culture, Arts & Literature (FOCAL) and curator and chief coordinator Rahul Jain, who also masterminded the Brahmaputra festival, so I knew that it would be a special occasion. Even so, I was not prepared for the warmth and celebration that met the writers from 17 countries who flew in to take part.

Literature festivals can often be quite clinical and hierarchical, with the red carpet rolled out for the big-name writers and relatively little welcome extended to those with less following. In Dibrugarh, however, everyone was an honoured guest. Our faces were featured on banners lining the roads around the university campus, and we were all greeted and entertained as celebrities.

And there were some real celebrities in the mix. A number of India’s most revered contemporary writers were on the bill, among them the legendary Tamil author Ambai. She spoke incredibly powerfully about her experience as a feminist writer over a career spanning more than 60 years. I have since started reading her short stories and have been blown away.

I was also delighted to chair a session with prolific Malayalam author Benyamin, whose Goat Days (translated by Joseph Koyippally) is set to be a major film, and to speak to Goan author Damodar Mauzo, who writes in Konkani, the only language to appear in five different scripts. A winner of countless awards, including the Jnanpith Award, India’s highest literary honour, he is an inspiration. It was humbling to hear about his process – which draws on the fine observation of small details, many of them gleaned while minding his shop – and thought-provoking to listen to him talk about his experience of finding his stories celebrated in English decades after he wrote them.

From further afield, some of the other key figures included Ukrainian writers Irena Karp and Halyna Kruk, who heard she had been longlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize during the festival; Caribbean region Commonwealth Short Story Prize 2016 winner Lance Dowrich; and Australian writer Kate Mildenhall, with whom I had the luxury of a staged conversation about our writing journeys.

This session also delivered one of my personal highlights. During the question and answer section, a young man stood up and said that he had a confession to make: he had found The World Between Two Covers (the US edition of my Reading the World book) in a library in 2015 and been so gripped by it that he couldn’t bear to return it. He had it still. For me it was a moment of real joy – and a reminder of the extraordinary power of writing to link us across boundaries of all kinds.

I also had the privilege of taking my Incomprehension Workshop to the festival. I was a little apprehensive as to how it would be received: although I have run versions of it with readers of many different backgrounds, this would be my first experience of trying it with people raised exclusively in a rather different education system.

My fears proved unfounded. The audience, consisting largely of university students, proved to be the most imaginative and receptive I have ever worked with. Their responses and reactions were incredibly creative and warm. They taught me anew the value of this work, enthusing me for the final stages of drafting my next book on reading, drawing on my work with incomprehension over the last few years, details of which I’ll be sharing here soon.

As in Guwahati, at the Brahmaputra festival, my conversations with curator Rahul Jain proved inspiring too. I was particularly struck by something he told me on the last day, when a few of us were sitting in the hotel lobby, waiting to leave for the airport. The wonderful way the festival celebrated writers came up for discussion, prompting Jain to share his perspective. It was simple, he said. In Buddhism there is the concept of dependent origination: a thing can only be what it is meant to be by virtue of other things. He cannot be a husband without his wife; he cannot be a father without his children. The same is true of his role as a festival coordinator: he cannot be this without writers. Therefore it is his duty to honour them and readers because they make him who he is.

Refugee Week: Writers on Connecting Through Storytelling

July 10, 2023 By in Events Tags: , , , , , , , Leave a comment

During Refugee Week in the UK, I had the privilege of chairing a Zoom discussion about writing stories that cross national boundaries, and explore migration and asylum-seeking. Hosted by my publisher, Renard Press, the event brought together award-winning British playwright Diane Samuels, celebrated Dutch-Iraqi novelist Rodaan al-Galidi, and Kurdish-Syrian author Haitham Hussein. The discussion was wide-ranging, frank and thought-provoking. You can watch it above.

My novel: Crossing Over

September 13, 2022 By in Post-world Tags: , , , , , , , , 14 Comments

Book deals are a bit like buses, as the jokey British saying goes: you wait ages and then two come along at once.

That’s certainly what it feels like for me at the moment. A little more than two weeks before the launch of the updated edition of Reading the World: How I Read a Book from Every Country, I have happy news of another publication to share. This one in particular has taken a lot of waiting – five years to be precise.

I wrote my second novel, Crossing Over, in 2017, shortly after I’d moved to live on the Kent coast. Back then the reports of small boats crossing the English Channel were few and far between. The migrant crisis, as it was becoming known in the English-speaking world, was still mostly in the Mediterranean. So this novel, which centres around an encounter between a recently arrived migrant and an 87-year-old woman with dementia, was largely speculative.

It was my most ambitious project to date, and one that brought together a lot of the thinking about the role of storytelling in building our sense of one another’s humanity, different Englishes, and the limits and possibilities of mutual understanding that is at the centre of my reading-the-world work. It contained what I believed was my best writing so far; working on it had felt like spreading my wings.

But – despite a lot of great responses from early readers and interest from several major publishers – it failed to find a home with a big press. Audible was keen, so it came out as an audiobook in 2019.

For a long while, I resigned myself to Crossing Over not existing in print. But as time went by, this felt less and less satisfactory.

In the intervening years, as more and more boats began to arrive in this area, I had the chance to work with a number of people who had made the crossing, thanks to the support of the Royal Literary Fund and collaborations with local charities, including KRAN and Samphire. I also attended a vigil on the beach down the road in solidarity with the 27 people who drowned trying to make the trip last November. These experiences and the hardening of UK government policy towards those risking their lives for the hope of security in my home country made me feel increasingly strongly the importance of using stories to build bridges.

And so I decided to try again, this time approaching the kind of small, independent publishers who so often champion the extraordinary, boundary-pushing books I feature on this blog. A few months ago, I agreed a deal with the wonderful Renard Press.

Their publisher, Will Dady, told The Bookseller this: ‘I’m absolutely delighted to have acquired the UK and commonwealth rights to Ann Morgan’s beautiful new novel, Crossing Over. A stirring tale that considers the plight of those forced by circumstance to leave their homeland and cross the Channel in search of a better life, as well as the realities of living with dementia, the book is a real celebration of humanity, and leaves you reeling, thinking about what others are facing in their lives and the power of connection, even when language fails.’

Crossing Over comes out in April 2023. No doubt I’ll be pestering you about buying it nearer the time (in fact, those in the UK and Commonwealth countries can already pre-order it here). But for now I’d just like to say hooray and thank you to the many people who believed in this project, and to the hundreds of readers, writers and translators around the planet who keep my faith in the power of storytelling strong. Yes!

Book of the month: Deepak Unnikrishnan

November 30, 2020 By in Book of the month, Middle East, The stories Tags: , , , , , , 2 Comments

A few years ago, when I was in UAE for a conference, I took a taxi to check out one of the city’s bookshops. The driver on my return journey was an Indian national who had been in Dubai for more than three decades, having started out on the city’s building sites. As we swept through the sun-bleached streets, past numerous skyscrapers under construction, he painted a picture that jarred sharply with the luxurious surroundings of the hotel to which I was returning.

‘No money, no honey,’ he told me, before explaining the way the average construction worker sweltering on one of the building sites we passed would survive. After rent had eaten up the majority of their income, the worker would have enough to afford to cook some rice and gravy for an evening meal, which they would eke out over several days, taking portions to the building site for lunch. During a 12- or 13-hour shift in temperatures that reach as high as 50 degrees C in the summer, the worker would probably only have one drink, the cost ruling out any more. Any excess money would be sent to family overseas. ‘Life is nothing,’ the driver said. ‘What kind of life can you have like that?’ 

This is one of the questions at the heart of Deepak Unnikrishnan’s Temporary People. Stemming from the UAE-born and raised writer’s awareness that the experience of temporary workers (who make up around 80 per cent of the UAE’s population) has rarely been depicted in fiction, the book explores what it means to live at the margins of a society you never have the right to call your home. The many characters who throng the work’s pages vary enormously, from young girls caught up in abuse scandals to would-be dictators, yet they all share the quality of being sidelined, overlooked and denied the space to express themselves and answer their needs.

Language and word play are central. Although writing in English, Unnikrishnan folds terms from tongues including Arabic and Malayalam, as well as a wide array of references (everything from Fawlty Towers to the Ramayana), into the text. In so doing, he creates a series of idiolects informed by the experiences of the characters they depict. Meanwhile, the pointed misspelling of terms such as ‘Amreekun’ and ‘moonseepalty’ in certain mouths, implies a reader fluent in Global English, making many of the speakers outsiders even in their own stories.

The book itself does not fit the form prescribed for it. Although it is set out as a novel and divided into ‘chabter’s, each section presents a new situation and register. Poemlike lists jostle with gritty accounts of police harassment; Kafkaesque depictions of cockroaches becoming increasingly human sit alongside sharp, satirical (and extremely brave) attacks on the regime. There is a hallucinatory quality to much of the writing and yet certain episodes feel startlingly real. The bizarre and the bathetic rub shoulders with the poignant and powerful. There is beauty and humour too.

Inevitably, in such a varied work, some pieces come over more successfully than others. In the case of this book, the resonance and power of many of the ‘chabter’s will depend as much on the knowledge of the reader as on the quality of the writing. With so many references and linguistic games at work, it is nigh-on impossible for anyone to understand everything on a first pass – like the characters on the page, we are excluded from some things too.

The writing is also, at times, disturbingly brutal and graphic. The force of the frustration of so many lives eroded by the perpetual absence of the people and places that define them bursts out in violence and cruelty. From the misogynistic, racist taxi driver whose monologue fills an entire section to the annual purge in the desert (carrying echoes of Shirley Jackson’s ‘The Lottery’), the text is awash with long-suppressed desires breaking loose with often devastating consequences. For some readers, this will be too much.

But the humanity that flows through the text is ultimately this book’s most powerful force. From the celebration of the ingenuity that allows those denied the space to build a meaningful existence nevertheless to find humour and connection to the possibility of recognition between those coming from entirely different worlds.

Angry and damning though it is, this book is ultimately hopeful. These stories are worth telling, it insists. They are worth recognising and learning from. They deserve to be part of our imaginary universe. They are far from nothing, after all.

Temporary People by Deepak Unnikrishnan (Restless Books, 2017)

Picture: ‘Dubai Marina Construction’ by Anton Bawab on flickr.com

Book of the month: Mieko Kawakami

September 25, 2020 By in The stories Tags: , , , , , , 5 Comments

There are novels that force you to recommend them. My latest featured title is a case in point.

I first heard about Sam Bett and David Boyd’s translation of Japanese author Mieko Kawakami’s Breasts and Eggs several months before it was published. A number of writers and readers whose opinions I respect were buzzing about it on Twitter and their enthusiasm for what was billed by its British publisher Picador as a ‘radical and intimate portrait of contemporary working class womanhood in Japan, recounting the heartbreaking journeys of three women in a society where the odds are stacked against them’ was enough to persuade me to preorder it.

Something in the pre-publicity hype clearly stuck because, by the time the title spiralled down onto my e-reader in late August, I was eager to get into it. As soon as I did, I became engrossed in protagonist Natsu’s account of her tortuous search for fulfilment over years spent carving out a career as a writer in Tokyo.

Had this novel been written and edited in English, I suspect it would have been slanted rather differently. Given the anglophone market’s preoccupation with story hooks, I think it’s likely that, if it had been written by a British or American author, this book would have been presented not as a portrayal of the heartbreaking journeys of three working-class women but rather as an account of the struggle of a sexophobic single woman to have a child (which it also is). That more sensational and grabby premise would have been front and centre in an effort to tempt readers to pick the work off the shelves.

Instead, however, the novel starts slowly with a series of meandering encounters. Perhaps partly because the first half was originally published as a novella in its own right, the threads connecting the various elements and characters are so fine as to be almost imperceptible. Indeed, there are times when it feels as though we might be reading a collection of interlinked short stories, with intense accounts of experiences erupting for a few pages only for their subjects to disappear never to be referred to again. There are elements of the surreal and the random in the mix too – weasels drop from the ceiling of a restaurant and the three central characters finish one evening cracking eggs over one another. Through it all, however, Kawakami remains in control, drawing the threads ever tighter until at last she reveals the rich tapestry of the conclusion.

One of the author’s many gifts is her skill at depicting relationships that cannot easily be categorised. She gives us professionalism blurred with friendship; romance without sex; love in a range of hard-to-define forms. These ambiguous connections allow her to shine a light on the cracks and gaps in human society, interrogating – sometimes shockingly – many of the actions and processes most people take for granted. Yet there is a wonderful warmth underlying even the most clear-eyed of these explorations, coupled with a poignant awareness of the fleetingness of the opportunity we have to make sense of our surroundings. ‘We’re all so small, and have such little time, unable to envision the majority of the world,’ as Natsu puts it.

As a writer, I particularly enjoyed the novel’s exploration of creativity and the publishing world. From Natsu’s time in obscurity keeping a blog ‘collecting dust in a corner of the internet’, through her struggles with writing and dealing with feedback, to the outrageous behaviour of the literati at book-world parties, Kawakami’s insights are witty and illuminating. (Indeed, they made me rather sorry that I only had lunch with my Japanese publisher when I met him a few years ago in Tokyo!)

The irony is, of course, that all these struggles are captured in compulsively readable prose, flexible enough to be by turns hilarious, thought-provoking, moving and beautiful (credit to translators Bett and Boyd here). ‘We’d like to think that the books that merit attention find a readership – but after what happened with my collection, it felt safe to say that merit had nothing to do with it,’ reflects Natsu. It’s a sentiment that I’m sure writers the world over share. However, Breasts and Eggs, which was a bestseller in Japan, is proof that sometimes wonderful novels do get the recognition they heartily deserve.

Breasts and Eggs by Mieko Kawakami, translated from the Japanese by Sam Bett and David Boyd (Picador, 2020)

Picture: ‘Bookstore in Tokyo. They are not extinct!’ by chewy travels on flickr.com