Category: Creativity

The 13-book longlist for the 2017 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction was announced yesterday, and I’ve listed the judges’ selections below.

Entries are limited to books published in the UK, Ireland, and the Commonwealth.  The original publisher was provided, and I’ve added notes with details on their US publisher, if it exists, as well as the historical setting.  Plus I posted some of my favorite covers.  The winner will be announced at the Borders Book Festival in Scotland in June.

Have you read any, and if so, what did you think?  I’ve only read one so far.

The longlist:

Jo Baker, A Country Road, A Tree (Doubleday) – also Knopf, 2016.  WWII-era Europe.

Julian Barnes, The Noise of Time (Jonathan Cape) – also Knopf, 2016.  The early 20th-c Soviet Union.

Sebastian Barry, Days Without End (Faber) – also Viking, 2017.  The US Civil War and American West.

Richard Francis, Crane Pond (Europa) – same US publisher. The Salem witch trials.

Linda Grant, The Dark Circle (Virago).  Post-WWII London.

Charlotte Hobson, The Vanishing Futurist (Faber).  Russia under the Bolsheviks.

Hannah Kent, The Good People (Picador Australia) – also forthcoming from Little, Brown, Sept. 2017. 19th-century Ireland.

Ed O’Loughlin, Minds of Winter (riverrun) – also Quercus, March 2017.  Victorian-era Arctic exploration.

Sarah Perry, The Essex Serpent (Profile) – also forthcoming from Custom House/HarperCollins, June 2017. Late Victorian-era Essex, England.

Dominic Smith, The Last Painting of Sara de Vos (Allen & Unwin Australia) – also FSG, 2016. Three centuries: 1630s Amsterdam, 1950s NYC, and Sydney in 2000.

Francis Spufford, Golden Hill (Faber) – forthcoming from Scribner, June 2017. 18th-century New York.

Graham Swift, Mothering Sunday (Scribner) – also Knopf, 2016.  20th-century England.

Rose Tremain, The Gustav Sonata (Chatto & Windus) – also FSG, 2017. 20th-century Switzerland. This is the only one of the thirteen that I’ve read and reviewed.

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In addition, the newly formed Walter Scott Prize Academy issued an additional list of recommended titles, and both this list and the longlist have international representation.

The WSP Academy’s Recommended List:

Carol Birch, Orphans of the Carnival (Canongate) – also Doubleday, 2016. Carnival life in early 20th-century Europe and America.

Emily Bitto, The Strays (Legend Press) – also Twelve, 2017. Depression-era Australia.

Jessie Burton, The Muse (Picador) – also Ecco, 2016. The Spanish Civil War and 1960s London.

Tracy Chevalier, At the Edge of the Orchard (Borough Press) – also Viking, 2016. 19th-century Ohio and California.

Emma Donoghue, The Wonder (Picador) – also Little, Brown, 2016.  19th-century rural Ireland.

Susan Fletcher, Let Me Tell you About a Man I Knew (Virago).  Late 19th-century France.

Anna Hope, The Ballroom (Doubleday) – also Doubleday US, 2016. England in 1911.

Lauri Kubuitsile, The Scattering (Penguin South Africa). Early 20th-century South Africa; has US distribution.

Lynne Kutsukake, The Translation of Love (Knopf Canada) – also Viking, 2016. WWII-era Canada and Japan.

Eowyn Ivey, To the Bright Edge of the World (Tinder Press) – also Little, Brown, 2016. Alaska Territory in 1885.

Ian McGuire, The North Water (Scribner).  Also Henry Holt, 2016.  The 19th-century Arctic.

Abir Mukherjee, A Rising Man (Harvill Secker) – also Soho, 2017. Calcutta in 1919.

S.J. Parris, Conspiracy (HarperCollins).  Paris in 1585.

Steven Price, By Gaslight (Oneworld) – also FSG, 2017. Victorian London.

Ralph Spurrier, A Coin for the Hangman (Hookline Books).  1950s Britain.

Andrew Taylor, The Ashes of London (HarperCollins). Also HarperCollins US, March 2017.  The Great Fire, 17th-century London.

Natasha Walter, A Quiet Life (Borough Press).  Mid-20th century England.

A.N. Wilson, Resolution (Atlantic). 18th-century world exploration.

Alissa York, The Naturalist (Random House Canada). 19th-century America and Brazil.

Louisa Young, Devotion (Borough Press).  Pre-WWI England.

I like seeing award longlists even more than the final results — more books to choose from!  And the “recommended” list provided by the Academy brings even more historical novels to readers’ attention.  I’ve only read four, the ones with the reviews linked above, and enjoyed them.

“Is a hundred years long enough to keep a secret?”

A novel that mingles past reminiscences with a contemporary storyline, The Johnstown Girls centers on the traumatic flood that devastated the village of Johnstown, Pennsylvania, in 1889, killing over 2200 people.

One of the fortunate survivors of the disaster, Ellen Emerson is a spry 103-year-old in the year 1989. Although her parents and brother were lost to the floodwaters, Ellen miraculously stayed alive after a mattress bearing her and her twin sister swept them both to safety. Or so Ellen continues to believe. The siblings were separated in the chaos, and young Mary’s body was never found.

To mark the centennial of the event, Nina Collins and Ben Braddock, two reporters from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, arrive at Ellen’s home to interview her. Ben’s editor wants him to dig up some new angle on her story. The pair succeed in doing so, but the research process takes some unexpected turns.

Ellen and her long, eventful life are the highlights, and the sections recounting her perspective are easily the most riveting. Both natives of Johnstown, Ellen and Nina develop a warm friendship that comes alive on the page. Ellen tells her long-hidden secret to Nina and Ben early on, so it doesn’t drive the plot, but the details on her life as a career woman in big-city and small-town America easily hold readers’ attention. The aspects involving Nina and Ben’s romance just can’t compare, plus it has odd emphases and digressions. There’s an explicit sex scene in the first few pages, when we barely know the characters – why? Do we need to be brought into a marriage counseling session between Ben and his estranged wife? In addition, the story occasionally slips into other viewpoints (like that of Nina’s mother) that don’t feel necessary.

The novel offers a wealth of information for anyone interested in the Johnstown Flood, the circumstances that caused it, and its effect on the region and its residents a century later. Just be prepared to put up with some meanderings and quirks along the way.

The Johnstown Girls was published in paperback by the University of Pittsburgh Press last week ($18.95, 348pp). This is a long overdue review, which I based on a NetGalley copy from 2014, which is when the hardcover edition appeared.

Author Bren McClain is here today with the moving family story that inspired her debut novel, as well as details on the research she conducted to make her novel’s world feel authentic to the place, period, and characters.

Understand this first – my daddy was a crusty, old-fashioned, Southern Baptist farmer in Anderson, South Carolina. He drew his life, all 89 years, from the land. Dirt ran in his blood. Be his little girl and find something funny while eating supper, start to giggle, and he’ll stop you cold and yell down in your bones, “You’re supposed to eat when you come to the eating table.”

Yet, ask him about this one day in March of 1941 when he was a fourteen-year-old boy, a photograph of him and his 4-H steer splashed above the fold and across the front page of his hometown newspaper, The Anderson Independent, and hear what he tells you. “Get your mind on something else,” his voice no longer yelling, but soft like it could break. Read the story below the photograph and find out the event is called The Fat Cattle Show & Sale and that my daddy’s steer, weighing in at 1100 pounds, was named Grand Champion. For that, he received 30 cents a pound, which totaled $330. He was a celebrity, of sorts, treated to free lunches all over town. Look back at him now, and see his eyes misted over.

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I had to find out why.

I wrote a novel, placed in it an innocent six-year-old boy, who enters the Fat Cattle Show & Sale for the big money it would bring him and his mama, if he won. The boy’s father has died, and the farm they live on is in danger of being foreclosed. They’re so poor, he’s lucky if he gets a pear to last him the whole day. I also placed in it another little boy, this one not so innocent, because his daddy forces him to enter, all for the glory of it.

But first, I had a ton of research to do. I chose to set the story in the early 1950s vs. the 1940s, because it better suited the story I was trying to tell. I wanted to give my antagonist, Luther Dobbins, enough time to establish a dynasty with his elder son’s long streak of winning, only for his son to age out and toss the family baton to his younger son. Let’s just say that the folks in the South Carolina Room at the local library got to know me. I put countless hours in front of a microfilm machine, where I fed in reels of The Anderson Independent and rolls and rolls of dimes for copying. Thursday papers were always terrific with their extensive grocery store advertisements that showed the prices of food and the name brands. One day, I ran across an advertisement for a product called “Retonga,” a tonic that I learned women, especially, drank back them, many for its high alcohol content (about one-third). I knew instantly that one of my characters, Mildred, the wife of the antagonist, would make a habit of consuming this liquid.

But the “find” that I loved to pieces was a notice of a weekly event in Anderson called “Shoe of the Week,” sponsored by Welborn Shoes, where women would visit the store, drop their name and telephone number into a box beside a featured shoe and then wait on Friday mornings for a call from WAIM Radio announcer, Marshall Gaillard, who would draw one name from the box. The lucky winner would get that shoe in her size. I gave this wonderful happening to my protagonist, Sarah Creamer, because I wanted something good for her and because shoes already were important in the story.

It was not only the time period that I needed to research, but also cows and the Fat Cattle event itself. Fortunate for me, every Monday, the paper carried a column by the county agent, H. D. Marett, called “Your County Agent Says.” I learned about the kind of grass to plant in pastures, when to put the steers on full feed, the best kind of grain mix, etc.

What did I do with all of this research? I organized it into 32 categories – for example, picking out a steer, feeding out a steer, cow biology and also by my character’s names. It was still too much to manage, so I cut out the salient information from each piece of paper, taped the info to 5 X 7 notecards and then organized them with tabs inside a box.

But the most important source of my research was my daddy. He finally came around to my writing this novel. In fact, I’d call him up on the phone and say, “I’ve got another question for you.” His answer? “Shoot.” That meant go ahead. I have a tab called Daddy’s Info. The brands of chewing tobacco, when the road in front of his house was paved, how to fit a burlap bag onto the down chute of a hammermill, how to crank a tractor with a flywheel, how to build a fence using cedar trees, how to kill a hog, the kinds of pistols.

And this one: What to do if a steer gets the bloat.

He had a steer with that condition once, when he was a boy, the animal bloating from eating too much grain. “You can try giving him a Pepsi Cola or two to see if it helps, but if it don’t, you’ll have to stab his stomach with an ice pick.” He talked of the triangular area between the animal’s hip bone and last rib, high up on its left side. “Rub your flat hand over it in little circles and get it all loosened up and then stab it right quick. And if you’ll put your ear right out from the hole, you’ll hear a little whistle when the gas starts to come out.” I followed daddy’s directions entirely when I wrote that scene.

Go back now and look at that first photograph and see the man wearing a hat standing behind the steer. Read the caption beneath and learn this is Bailey Trammel, manager of Ideal Super Market, “where the premium meat will be sold.” Therein lies the answer I had come seeking. Daddy had sold out his best friend, his steer. And I would come to know by reading about other boys, that he had spent a long year with his steer, feeding him, taming him, loving him. “Get your mind on something else,” he had told me.

But I couldn’t. I wrote a novel.

Bren McClain’s One Good Mama Bone is published by Story River Books of the University of South Carolina Press today.  Read more about the novel at the author’s website.

Cruising along the Italian Riviera in the 1950s sounds like a luxurious experience, and this feeling is conveyed to readers of Lucy Foley’s second novel. For the lovers at its center, the journey also entails revisiting their hidden pasts. Journalist Hal Jacobs first meets the glamorous Stella at an Italian contessa’s party in Rome in 1951. Escaping the crowds in a rooftop garden, these lonely strangers form a connection and later spend a single, memorable night together.

They encounter each other again two years later. Both are invited by the Contessa along on a publicity tour via yacht from Liguria to Cannes to promote a film based on her sea-captain ancestor’s diary. Hal is hired to document the trip for an Italian magazine, while Stella is married to the film’s major funder. Hal is dismayed not only by this unpleasant revelation but also because Stella appears diminished in her wealthy husband’s presence. As she and Hal are drawn together amid the high-profile social circle aboard ship, he yearns for her true personality to emerge—and to recapture their lost intimacy.

Stella’s traumatic history unfolds in steady flashbacks to the Spanish Civil War, while a painful episode in Hal’s past is revealed much later, with dramatic impact. Hal’s reading of the diary, which he recasts in narrative form, strangely seems to parallel what he sees. Among the stylish secondary characters who accompany and observe the couple—many have hidden pasts of their own—the elegant Contessa stands out for her understanding wisdom.

Each scene in this lyrically written novel is laden with emotion, and although the story glides along leisurely, the details are worth savoring. The Invitation is a perfect read for those who love traveling via fiction. Foley evokes the character of each city and village along the sun-drenched voyage, from the contrasting decadence and industrial grime of Genoa to the verdant cliffs of Cervo and beyond.

The Invitation was published by Little, Brown in the US last summer, with the gorgeous cover above. This review first appeared in February’s Historical Novels Review.

Any reimagining of the Greek myth of Medea, she who helped Jason acquire the Golden Fleece from her royal father and killed her children in revenge after Jason betrayed her, will never be a cozy read, yet Vann’s version is darker, edgier, and more discomfiting than most. It’s made up of prose incorporating both mesmerizing sentences and concentrated fragments.

A priestess of Hekate with no use for kings, Medea must depend on them and other men for her survival, to her frustration and fury. While ambitious, Jason still needs constant prodding to fulfill the destiny Medea creates for him by means of sorcery, cunning, and blood.

The Argo’s sea voyage from Colchis to Jason’s homeland of Iolcus feels overly drawn out, yet it allows for multiple opportunities to rework the traditional mythos in inventive ways—which often involve the characters indulging in their atavistic natures. The setting has an otherworldly feel at times, which heightens the sense of the tale’s ancientness.

Sensual and violent, often simultaneously, Vann’s novel evokes the primal force of women’s power.

Bright Air Black is published this month by Black Cat (the trade paperback imprint of the independent press Grove Atlantic; $16, 250pp). I reviewed it for Booklist, and the review was published in Booklist Online on February 3rd.

Some notes:

– It’s hard to tell from the image above, but the cover shows a ship with a full crew of oarsmen plying their way through dark waves, as seen from above.

– If you haven’t yet gotten the impression that this novel will be a challenging read due to the subject matter, let me repeat that. It is poetically written, though, so I found myself simultaneously admiring the prose and recoiling from the imagery in some scenes. I haven’t read Vann’s other novels but, from reviews, I understand that this is typical of his style.

– The novel’s set in the 13th century BC, and the author has made a good effort to re-create the atmosphere of that long-ago time.

– Would I recommend it?  If you’re a literary fiction reader up for something daring and different (and you have a strong stomach), then by all means give it a try.