Nicole Brossard, translated by Marlene Wildeman, The Aerial Letter
For the reader of contemporary literature, The Aerial Letter is a contribution of major significance. Combining twelve pieces developed since the mid-Seventies, it challenges feminist cultural experience and imagination. Brossard’s reflections on writing and the emergence and survival of lesbian identity are hard hitting and incisive.
( Courtesy of Google Books, 157 pages )
Christiane Northrup, M.D. Women’s Bodies, Women’s Wisdom
Tracy Chevalier, Burning Bright
Burning Bright follows the Kellaway family as they leave behind tragedy in rural Dorset and come to late 18th-century London. As they move in next door to the radical painter/poet William Blake, and take up work for a near-by circus impresario, the youngest family member gets to know a girl his age. Embodying opposite characteristics – Maggie Butterfield is a dark-haired, streetwise extrovert, Jem Kellaway a quiet blond introvert – the children form a strong bond while getting to know their unusual neighbor and his wife.
Set against the backdrop of a city nervous of the revolution gone sour across the Channel in France, Burning Bright explores the states of innocence and experience just as Blake takes on similar themes in his best-known poems, Songs of Innocence and of Experience.
( Courtesy of GoodReads, hardcover 311 pages )
Stacey D’Erasmo, Tea
On a spring day in 1968, eight-year-old Isabel Gold prepares tea for her mother, certain she will drink it and recover from her mysterious sadness. But the tea remains untouched. Not long after, her mother takes her own life. Struggling to understand the ghost her mother left behind, Isabel grows up trying on new identities. Her yearning for an emotional connection finds her falling in and out of love with various women, but it is not until Isabel learns how to reach deep within herself that she begins to listen to the truths of her own heart.
( Courtesy of GoodReads, hardcover 317 pages )
Shani Mootoo, Cereus Blooms at Night
Sarah Dunant, The Birth of Venus
Robert Clark, In The Deep Midwinter
November, 1949: In the aftermath of his brother James’s death, Richard MacEwan’s life is suddenly rocked by secrets involving his wife Sarah and daughter Anna. Among his bachelor brother’s papers, Richard discovers a letter from Sarah that hints at an infidelity. Then there is Anna’s affair with a married man, Charles Norden, which threatens to change her life forever. The story of Richard, Sarah, Anna, and Charles–along with the troubling legacy of James–is one of faith and doubt, profound moral and spiritual conflict, and the intricate bonds that hold families together.
( from the sleeve, 278 pages )
Robert Radcliffe, Under An English Heaven
Naturally, they do go further. Robert Radcliffe may be an old-fashioned writer, but he is not blind to the imperatives of modern fiction. But the tentativeness of their affair, and the calm way in which they end it when news comes that the schoolmistress’s husband is alive and well, is typical of a novel in which the principals want desperately to behave well.
For John Hooper, the airman with whom the schoolmistress falls in love, that means driving himself to the limits of his endurance. Having survived a crash in which all his fellow crew members died, he is so guilt-stricken that he cannot rest until he has led his new crew to victory and safety.
On paper, he has not got a chance. As US bombers carry the battle to Germany, flying deep into mainland Europe, attrition rates are terrifying. What hope for Misbehavin’ Martha, a battered Flying Fortress with a crew like something out of Sergeant Bilko: a navigator who cannot navigate; a co-pilot who cannot fly; an air-sick bombardier; and trigger-happy gunners who could not hit a fish in a barrel?
The descriptions of air combat are first-class. The author is an experienced pilot himself and, as well as knowing his way around an aeroplane, is able to capture the nervy comradeship of men at war. Humour and pathos are blended to superb effect. It is as vivid a recreation of the Second World War as I have read.
But the scenes on the ground are, if anything, even better. Everything rings so true: from bleak Suffolk winters to the rough-and-tumble of weekend trips to London. Radcliffe is not just a born storyteller, but one of those generous writers who look for the best in human nature; and if he allows himself a sentimental ending, straight out of Mills & Boon, he has earned it.
This marvellous feel-good debut will bring a glow to the most jaded cheeks.
( Courtesy of David Robson for The Telegraph, 440 pages )
Rebecca Abrams, Touching Distance
It is 1790. After ten years’ training in the great medical schools of Europe, Alec Gordon has returned to Scotland to take up the post of physician in the Aberdeen Dispensary. Alec has ambitious plans for modernizing medical practice in the town, starting with the local midwives, whose ignorance and old-fashioned methods appal him.
But Alec’s dreams of progress are thrown into disarray when a mysterious disease suddenly strikes the town, attacking and killing every newly delivered mother for miles around. Alec alone recognizes it as childbed fever, a disease more deadly than the plague, a condition that has baffled the greatest physicians of the age, an illness with no known cause and no known cure.
Desperate to save his patients’ lives, Alec sets out on an astonishing medical quest to conquer the disease. But while Alec struggles to find solutions that lie far in the future, his wife Elizabeth is increasingly lost in the past, prey to terrifying memories of her childhood in Antigua. As she knows and he will learn, some diseases lie beyond the reach of reason.
Based on a true story, Touching Distance is a stunning historical novel that brings to life a fascinating period in world history, exploring the tragic limitations of knowledge and the deep-seated tension between reason and passion in the Age of Enlightenment.
( paraphrased by GoodReads, from the sleeve 308 pages )