Booker longlist – Cristina Sanders' blog

One Boat – book review

One Boat, by Jonathan Buckley

What, was the cover designer on holiday this week? I could have done that.

One Boat, by Jonathan Buckley, was on the longlist for the Booker this year. It didn’t make the shortlist, which I think is the right decision. Nice book, but not a winner. The Greek Island setting is lovely, reminiscent of holidays past, the writing evocative and I almost really enjoyed it but there was something a bit too clever about the way we jumped around in different time periods. It felt like an editor had switched some chapters around to make the book more exciting. It didn’t work. The book is still slow and introspective. And also jumpy.

Creation Lake – Book Review

Creation Lake, by Rachel Kushner

Very nearly an excellent book, but…

I’m intrigued from the start with Sadie, our kick-ass narrator. She’s a singular character, I’ll risk a bit of woke chastisement and suggest she felt masculine: decisive, job-focused, practical. Her job has no ethical element to it, she abuses trust for financial gain. A drinking driver, but she tells us she knows how much she can take, and a slovenly eater – warm beer, fast-food, the rubbish piling up around her. She’s very low on empathy, callously uses men for advantage, talks about her body like it’s a weapon. Got a breast enlargement and knows how to use it. Fantastic mercenary women agents have been turning up for a while, from Tomb Raider to Black Doves (mostly male creations I think), but these usually have an compassionate flip-side, perhaps to feed the male fantasy. Sadie is just unbalanced. This makes her interesting. Her narration is straight-forward.

This Other Eden – book review

This Other Eden, by Paul Harding

Such an interesting book, such a dive into the lives of people ostensibly at the very bottom of the pile. The story has its roots at the end of the 1700s, when Apple Island is settled by an escaped slave called Benjamin Honey, and his Irish wife. A hundred years later their descendants and a smattering of other (often a bit too closely) related families still shamble through their lives in this place. They’re a stone’s throw from the coast of Maine, close enough that they can forage on the mainland but, in the eyes of the mainlanders, who consider the islanders an inbred, mixed-race of starving, ignorant, degenerate squatters, they’re too close for comfort. The islanders are an amorphous blight, a problem in need of some kind of resolution. We learn that each islander is, of course, an individual, with different wants and needs and talents.

This Thing of Darkness–book review

This Thing of Darkness, by Harry Thompson

Sometimes you have to stick your hand up and here we go.
I hereby award This Thing of Darkness the title of my best book ever.

For sheer meatiness, immersion, characterisation, research, story telling, and adventure. For the immensity of history involved. For the reach of these lives and the illumination of their development over the years and the way things build and unravel – all understandable in retrospect but so uncertain and risky at the time. For all the surrounding stuff that comes with historical fiction and the extraordinary passing detail. For the way it made me re-evaluate my life and life in this century generally. For the way it made me feel.

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