I Am Sovereign by Nicola Barker

What an audacious writer Nicola Barker is. Equally, how bold of her publishers to put this oddity of a novella out into the world. In an era when plot is king, Barker has typically, joyously, dispensed with one. She has also chucked out nearly everything you might expect from fiction. At almost the end of the book, she declares “The overriding concept for I Am Sovereign is that it should take place, in its entirety, during a twenty-minute house viewing in Llandudno”.

Charles is a 40-year-old Welshman of Bulgarian descent who is a boutique teddy bear maker and is trying unsuccessfully to sell his house, not least because he keeps telling prospective buyers about an attempted burglary 12 years previously. This is all slightly beyond meta-fiction: the characters fight with the author to be represented differently, to not have their names corrected by spellcheck or the copy-editor, and some of this is amusing.

Forgotten Fiction Book Club: Sleepless Nights

A series of fleeting images and memories ... united by the high intelligence and beauty of Hardwick's prose'—Sally Rooney

Forgotten Fiction is a monthly book club where we travel back in time to rediscover 'lost' literary gems of the 20th Century. Hosted by me, each session is curated around a specific theme and features carefully chosen books to provide the basis for our discussion, which is always light-hearted, informal and fun.

July's club, themed 'Life Writing', will discuss Elizabeth Hardwick's Sleepless Nights, a unique collage of fiction and memoir, letters and essays, portraits and dreams. Originally published in 1979, this handsome new Faber edition comes with an introduction from the brilliant author of the Women’s Prize-winning novel, A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing, Eimear McBride

Numbers strictly limited, please book promptly to avoid disappointment. Tickets are £8/£6 (students) and include a gin cocktail

Live a Little by Howard Jacobson

Howard Jacobson’s previous novel, Pussy, was a hastily written response to the election of Donald Trump. I can’t help but feel he could have left his new novel, Live a Little, to brew a little longer too. 

Things begin promisingly enough: Beryl Dusinbery is to all intents and purposes a wicked old woman near the end of her life. She fancies herself as a filicide, or at least claims to have named her sons Pen and Sandy after Pentheus and Tisander (figures from Greek mythology who were both murdered by their mothers, Agave and Medea respectively). 

Shimi Carmelli is an elderly bachelor much sought after by the widows of north London as his hands are steady enough for him to do up his own flies (which is lucky, given how frequently he needs to urinate). He uses a deck of cards to predict the future to Jewish widows every Friday night in a Chinese restaurant in Finchley Road. 

Starling Days by Rowan Hisayo Buchanan

Rowan Hisayo Buchanan has achieved that rare feat, in her second novel Starling Days, of writing a convincing novel about depression which manages, miraculously, not to be in itself depressing. Her success is partly due to the fact that her protagonist, Mina, is not flattened by her despair and remains alive enough to become fascinated by another woman, Phoebe, her husband’s best friend’s sister. When Phoebe asks her to say something about herself, Mina considers what she might voice:

I want to run my tongue along the dent in your collarbone that your top has made visible. Nope. Sometimes I want to die and sometimes I want to buy a box of tomatoes and stand by the fridge eating them out of a paper carton and I don’t understand how I can hold both desires. Nope.

But Mina is brave enough to pursue this relationship, perceiving that it may transform her life.

The Travelers by Regina Porter

In the opening chapter of Regina Porter’s The Travelers, a small dozing girl drifts into the deep end of a pool whilst her grandfather is preoccupied. She doesn’t drown in the end, just as Harry ‘Rabbit’ Angstrom’s granddaughter didn’t drown in John Updike’s Rabbit at Rest. Porter has nonetheless managed to compress a span of 60 years into one novel whereas it took Updike four Rabbit novels to cover 30 years. Porter follows two families, one black and one white, from the 1950s to Barack Obama’s first term as President. This is an ambitious undertaking with a large cast of characters and, although a cast list is provided, it takes a while to establish exactly who’s who in the different strands of the story that will ultimately all overlap.

The Travelers is ultimately a frequently painful novel of great depth and lyricism.”

Miss Pettigrew Lives For A Day by Winifred Watson

It can be quite easy at the moment to feel like we live in dystopian times which is why this month we were in the mood for fiction that is anything but. Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day, our June choice, has been described by the novelist Tracy Chevalier as “irresistible, a perfect mix of wistfulness and joy, substance and froth.” As much as we like a fizzy escapist novel, it is the grit that really makes all the charm of Miss Pettigrew so pleasurable. We were intrigued to learn that the book’s author Winifred Watson had to wrangle with her original publisher Metheun to get it published in the first place: she had made her name writing steamy rustic romances (of the kind mocked in Stella Gibbons’ Cold Comfort Farm) and they were not at all sure about this adventure with a nightclub hostess that was more cocaine and comedy than passionate romance in a rural setting.