Olive, the protagonist of Emma Gannon’s new novel by the same name is independent, loyal, and knows her own mind. She’s trying to figure life out, and doing it with the support of her three friends from university. But then their paths start to diverge, as they choose marriage and motherhood, and Olive wonders whether her choices are the right ones. Life according to Olive looks different.

Olive is a pacy novel that explores our own explorations – how we approach life, and what it means to live a good one. The journalist and author has long been praised for acute commentary on society and life, and weaves in her observations subtley. Olive is a journalist, which means she can ask questions as a character, allowing us to see more than just her own life.

At times I worried that the cliché of Olive being a bit of a party girl undermined her decision not to have children. A woman can be child free without being irrational or hysterical, without loving wine more than they love family, or being an obsessive career woman.

Whatever path you choose to take, it’s always worth being mindful of the fact that there are other options out there.  Even if your life is a good life, it doesn’t mean that someone else’s is bad. You do you. Olive does Olive.

For the protagonist in Gary Finnan’s debut novel, railways soon give way to rock’n’roll, Elvis, and The Beatles. Billy is swept up in a whirlwind of breathtaking intensity as he goes on an adventure to America to discover a new life. Through the story the issues of the class system, American culture, and relationships are all explored. Personal growth parallels social change, and our hero is tested by the new temptations of wine, women, and gambling. But throughout it all he keeps home and Meg and Mam at his heart.

Life changed for Billy as he grew up in the 1950s and 60s, like it changed for many around the word. However, this pacy novel does at times feel a little far fetched. It’s quite a steep trajectory from tapping rails to drinking with Elvis, even for someone with a lucky windfall. A flight of fancy for sure, and that’s fine, but it all seemed a bit too unrealistic. Glory is fleeting, fame ephemeral, and things soon change. But Billy is a likeable character, and throughout it all maintains his generous spirit and sense of what is right. Gary Finnan is a good writer, and knows the right beats to hit in this coming of age novel.

Set between 1900 and 1919 in picturesque Cornwall and war-blasted London, Maggie Humm’s Talland House takes Lily Briscoe from the pages of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse and tells her story outside the confines of Woolf’s novel—as a student in 1900, as a young woman becoming a professional artist, her loves and friendships, mourning her dead mother, and solving the mystery of her friend Mrs. Ramsay’s sudden death.

It’s evocative and engaging, sweeping landscapes simmering next to psychological interior exploration. Picturesque Cornwall and busy London are the backdrop for a young woman growing up, and an older woman reflecting back. We’re treated to details about the captivating Lily Briscoe and her relationship with herself, her art, and the women and men in her life. It’s a great read, from a clearly very knowledgeable writer.

I caught up with Maggie to find out more.

Why did you decide to write Talland House?

Everyone has a novel inside themselves somewhere. I wrote my first ‘novel’ aged eight, told from the point of view of an encyclopaedia who dropped on the head of a burglar to save a library. I didn’t get a gold star because the teacher said it was unrealistic ‘no-one burgles libraries Margaret.’ But libraries were my world and so I’ve always written books – before Talland House academic books. They say write about what you know and as an academic specialist in Woolf, I know about Woolf and about myself (all debut novels are autobiographical in some way).

Virginia Woolf has a very distinctive style – were you trying to echo this at all?

Initially, and almost subconsciously, I wrote with Woolf’s indirect discourse and use of multiple viewpoints. At my first reading in my Diploma of Creative Writing course the tutor Gillian Slovo quite rightly advised me to choose a less confusing style so that readers could identify with Lily. But Talland House is full of events, people and places Woolf knew and some vocabulary (‘granite and rainbow’ feature!).

Why are you interested in Virginia Woolf?

My first book Feminist Criticism: Women as Contemporary Critics has a chapter on Woolf and my interest grew from there. Like many people, I identify with Woolf’s politics: feminism, pacifism, socialism and her ideas about democratic education and living in touch with each other and with nature. In addition the Woolf societies around the world are very welcoming and sustaining with annual conferences which trigger further interest. This year even the fashion world loves Woolf with the 2020 Met Gala and Givenchy’s collection devoted to her novel Orlando.

Why did you take To the Lighthouse as your starting point, rather than another novel?

I first read To the Lighthouse as an adolescent after the death of my mother and fell in love with the mother-figure Mrs Ramsay. Later I discovered that Woolf’s mother Julia Stephen was 49 when she died and Virginia 13 – the exact ages of my mother and me when my mother died. There’s something so extraordinarily moving about mothering in To the Lighthouse, but Mrs. Ramsay dies suddenly and in parentheses (apologies to those who haven’t yet read the book!) and I knew I had to write a novel discovering how Mrs. Ramsay dies.

The book centres around Lily Briscoe’s painting – what interests you about this art form, as well as writing?

Although not trained as an art historian, I have long been a devotee of the arts in particular Bloomsbury’s dedication to different genres: murals, textiles, pottery, book design, as well as paintings, and to collaborative, decorative projects. Lily Briscoe paints Mrs. Ramsay’s portrait twice in the novel with the final version a more abstract painting, described by Woolf in terms of shapes, mass and colours, rather than only representational figures, much like her sister Vanessa Bell’s approach to art for example, Bell’s 1912 portrait of Woolf – Virginia Woolf. As Vanessa Bell said “artists, in the opinion of many are little better than lunatics [but] besides being rather mad, artists are apt to be revolutionaries”.

Did you have to do lots of historical research?

The research was huge but so enjoyable. As a Woolf scholar (my last three books focus on Woolf and the arts) I’d read all Woolf’s writings and writings by her family and friends. For Talland House I read Cornish newspapers for the times Lily is in St. Ives for weather, incidents, and atmosphere. I loved being in the airy map room at the top of the British Library looking at old photos of St. Ives for housing types and street scenes. I read artists’ memoirs, turn of the twentieth century art journals for a sense of artists’ lives and studios. I read everything on-line about World War I in London and how it felt to be there, for example, when the Germans suddenly switched from Zeppelins to Gotha bombers in 1917. Virginia Woolf herself experienced Gothas in Richmond December 1917. She wrote in her diary: “discussed the raid, which, according to the Star I bought, was the work of 25 Gothas, attacking in 5 squadrons & 2 were brought down”. I googled about music halls, other leisure pursuits, clothes, transport, and the accurate names of buildings. St. Ives and London became characters in my novel.

The most difficult task was keeping the research to a discreet underpinning not, as academics often do, glorifying it in long footnotes. Also difficult was that Lily gradually took over my life, my feelings, even my physical characteristics. She’s always early for appointments, she’s an only child herself with a dead mother, and her fingers are the shape of mine. Sometimes I wondered if I existed outside the novel.

But what the research did do was to bring me much closer than ever before, to a fuller sensation of Woolf’s worlds—the smell and feel of Talland House’s escallonia hedge, an almost bodily sense of the impact of bombs on London’s buildings, streets and inhabitants. This feeling for history and sensory experiences hopefully continues in my second novel, Rodin’s Mistress, about the tumultuous love affair of the sculptor Auguste Rodin and the painter Gwen John.

‘Fiction holds up a better mirror to the world than any list of facts’ says Mary. We see her adding in characters, musing on themes, deciding on plot twists, and creating the story that we are all so familiar with today. She roams the stage in a long leather coat, wielding her pen, reader to inflict drama and damage.

It’s a horror tale, but one that deals with so much more, such as the place of women, revolutionary spirit, what it means to be a creator, and personal responsibility. Mary asks outright ‘What are we? What is nature?’ Mary’s conscience is tussled by all of these issues, as her novel plays out behind her, sometimes taking over and causing her to query ‘is it real or is it a story I write?’ She’s funny, and wry, connecting with the audience through short and sharp asides. ‘Now that was a proper deathbed scene,’ she boasts. ‘You’re welcome.’

The stage is stark, off white, and chilling, acting just as well as the icescapes of the Arctic as the library of Frankenstein’s family. Eerie and provactive, it’s the perfect place for a psychological drama to unfold. The monster (Michael Moreland) is out for murderous revenge, and capers around with speed and ferocity as he seeks to harm. There’s always more to discover in the world, and Dr Victor Frankenstein’s (Ben Castle-Gibb) pioneering spirit comes across well. He’s an avid and ferocious learner, just like Mary Shelley, Percy Shelley, and Lord Byron were, without whom the novel would never have been written.

The actors double and even triple up, which can get a bit confusing, especially in such a fast paced production. The audience needed to know the story before attending – this is not a place to come to cold.

It is a story that has been told and retold in hundreds of different versions since it was first written, but at its heart is a rebellious and potent statement from a young author. ‘This is the story of a man facing up to his own creation,’ says Mary, early on in the play. It’s testament to her abilities that over 200 years later we are still exploring this issue through Frankenstein. This meta textual version is a great way to do that.

The production is touring until the end of November. It is directed by Patricia Benecke, with composition and sound design by Simon Slater, lighting design by Grant Anderson and designed by Becky Minto.

Mary has a secret life that no one knows about, not even Malachi and Tristan, the brothers she vowed to look after. Following the death of his mother, Malachi had to grow up too quickly. Between looking after Tristan and nursing a broken heart, he feels older than his twenty-one years. Tristan wishes Malachi would stop pining for Pamela. He’s falling in with the wrong crowd, and needs Malachi to keep him straight. Elvis is trying hard to remember to the instructions his care worker gave him, but sometimes he gets confused and forgets things. Pamela wants to run back to Malachi but her overprotective father has locked her in and there’s no way out.

Then their lives are transformed as plane crashes into the block of flats they call home, causing devastation. Who has survived? How do they cope? Why is life so unfair? How will their relationships change? All this is explored in Luan Goldie’s debut novel.

She was inspired to write Nightingale Point when in Amsterdam a taxi driver told her the true story about a cargo plane that took off from Schiphol Airport and crashed into a council estate It’s based on the Bijlmer plane crash in October 1992, and the Grenfell Tower disaster, and echoes of the aftermath of both play out in the book. But it doesn’t ever feel gratuitous, helped by a cast of likeable and flawed characters. It’s an easy read with tight prose and a pacy plot, probably helped by Luan’s experience of writing short stories. She won the 2017 Costa Short Story Award.

It’s a touching read and acts as a fitting tribute to those who lost their lives in Amsterdam and London.

Hannah, Cate and Lissa are young, vivacious and close to each other as only young people are. Living in East London,  they spend their days exploring romance, art, activism and merriment, and are convinced that the world to come will give them everything they hope for, and more. Truly best friends, they believe that they will be inseparable forever. Ten years on, and things have changed. Their once electric world is now faltering amid flailing careers and fractured marriages. Each longs for what the others have.

Hope’s prose is spiky and acute. She’s on form when writing witty prose, and gets inside the complex moments with tenderness and intimacy. Female friendships are the subject, rather than romantic, but these relationships are deep and meaningful, and underpin the lives of the protagonists.

The novel was inspired by American TV series The Affair.

It’s a warm and emotional novel that shimmers with brilliance. Well worth adding to the ‘to read’ list.

As you can imagine, things in Beth O’Leary’s novel The Flatshare don’t go according to plan. A crazy ex boyfriend, brother in prison, break ups, mad jobs and supportive friends all conspire to bring the two together, and ruin their well thought out plan.

This isn’t a deep and meaningful book, although it does touch on emotional abuse, the judicial system, and chaotic economic situation that brings someone to this situation. It’s fun and easy to whip through in a few hours, and the characters are warm enough for you to want to know more and follow them. The crisp and efficient Gerty, Tiffy’s lawyer friend, is a particular highlight, with a softness under the harsh veneer.

The plot is tight and fast, the prose compelling, and the dialogue believable. The characters are warm and well drawn, and there’s never a page that should have been skimmed. The novel got  Penguin Random House Children’s editor Beth O’Leary a six figure deal from Quercus, and a second book is planned.

The tale follows Polly, a 32 year old journalist working in an unfulfilling job for Posh! magazine, and perennially single. Her head is turned by Jasper, a member of the British aristocracy, at the same time as her beloved mother is diagnosed with cancer. One of these things has a better outcome than the other. But everything works out well in the end, as Polly realises what she wants, and seems to get it.

Written in a funny, at times deadpan way, it’s an easy and enjoyable read. Sophia was a features editor at Tatler, so it’s clear where she got some of her ideas from. As well as barely covered digs at some of the things the richest echelons of society get up to, it covers modern relationships, friendships, and life in London with accuracy and attentiveness. The mother daughter relationship is also sensitively portrayed, and one of the book’s highlights.

The novel’s been described as an updated Bridget Jones, but it’s unlikely to be as genre or era defining as that. But Polly is a character to care about, and I found myself wanting to know what happened next, keeping the pages turning. The Plus One is a good, fun, and easy read. Sometimes that’s all you need.

Harry isn’t a likeable character – he’s cheating on his wife – but his depression and subsequent suicide reveal deeper issues than simply misogyny. We’re dubious about Lily, the younger woman having an affair with a married man, but she’s warm, and tender, and loves with all her being. And there’s seemingly strong Pippa, the shunned wife trying to bring up her two sons, fighting despair and humiliation as her marriage falls apart. There are sad moments, and happy ones, complex times and simple pleasures – the range of human experience.

The themes of love, loss, and betrayal are timeless, but this story is very much rooted in modern London, and touches on issues of gentrification, work/life balance and city relationships. The streets of Hampstead are accurately drawn. It’s no Mrs Dalloway (yes, Emma Woolf does have a famous aunt), but it is detailed.

England’s Lane is a great example of good quality writing that will appeal to the commercial market. The boundaries between literary and commercial fiction are blurring, and this novel bridges the two. It’s an easy read, not because it’s simple or dumbed down, but because it’s good.

Published by Three Hares Publishing.

Lucy Foley’s Last Letter From Istanbul is a fascinating and engaging read. Told in chapters from the perspectives of each character, she builds up the story like a rich tapestry, each individual adding depth and detail to the novel.  

This is a story about people, but also about place. Foley’s description of the city (Istanbul can be traced to mean ‘the city’) is sumptuous and sensual, with the sights, sounds and smells richly described. Myth, secrets and history all combine in this sweeping novel of a fascinating time.