The Midnight Library by Matt Haig

Next up on our exciting Winti Bookworm booklist is Matt Haig's The Midnight Library...

...somewhere out beyond the edge of the universe there is a library that contains an infinite number of books, each one the story of another reality. One tells the story of your life as it is, along with another book for the other life you could have lived if you had made a different choice at any point in your life. While we all wonder how our lives might have been, what if you had the chance to go to the library and see for yourself? Would any of these other lives truly be better?

Nora Seed finds herself faced with several choices - the possibility of changing her old life for a new one, following a different career, undoing old breakups, realizing her dreams of becoming a glaciologist; she must search within herself as she travels through the Midnight Library to decide what is truly fulfilling in life, and what makes it worth living in the first place.

Matt Haig came to writing novels from a period of trauma in his life after suffering a metal breakdown in his 20s. He has been nick-named the 'accidental health guru' Greatly looking forward to reading this book.

Winter - review by Bookworm member Sarah

I love the beginning of this story – it opens with Sophia chatting to a child’s disembodied head that bobs cheerfully and politely around her. However, it soon begins to take on a more sinister note, as Sohpia considers how the head happened to be separated from its body, the head’s steady tap-tapping on the window when she locks it out and it’s slow morphing into something else as the face disappears and she finds clumps of hair on her bedroom pillow.

The presence of Charles Dickens looms large over this book – Sophia is indeed, a Scrooge type character – a retired businesswoman who now resides alone in a 15 bedroom house in Cornwall and is referred to her estranged sister as an ‘old miserly grump’ and Midnight continues to chime over and over again much to Sophia’s consternation.

She seems to wholesomely dislike her son Art when he arrives with his pretend girlfriend to celebrate Christmas with her. Art’s day job involves destroying artists by reporting them to a multinational corporation for copyright infringement. He also writes a blog on the side, Art in Nature, which is made of fabricated memories and journeys, and has recently been commandeered by Charlotte, his ex-girlfriend, with revenge on her mind. Art can’t tell his mum about his recent break-up so instead picks up Lux, an impoverished but enlightened Croatian student, at a bus stop and pays her £1000 to accompany him on his visit to his mum for Christmas.

Lux is the stranger in the midst of this dysfunctional family who shines a light on the family’s cracks and brings healing during a Christmas lunch fraught with tension between family members on all different sides. Lux and Sophia bond over Shakespeare’s late play Cymbeline, “about a kingdom subsumed in chaos, lies, powermongering, division and a great deal of poisoning and self-poisoning”, as Sophia observes. “I was telling you about it because it’s like the people in the play are living in the same world but separately from each other, like their worlds have somehow become disjointed or broken off each other’s worlds,” says Lux, referring to her keen insight into this fractured family before her.

The shadow of Brexit hovers uncomfortably over the whole story and key events in history are highlighted through the activist actions of Sophia’s sister Irena. Ali Smith’s anger is plainly evident concerning the treatment of immigrants, Brexit the Grenfell fire, Trump, nuclear war, chemical leaks and climate destruction. However, the overall atmosphere is not bleak. There is forgiveness, song, love and a kind of comic resolution as Art finds himself in the midst of angry texts between his mother and aunty – until then he hadn’t been in touch with is aunt for 20 years. There is also a question left over the future of Lux. Was she deported? Was she saved? With £1000 in her pocket we are hopeful for the latter and she can finally finish her literature degree and help save the country, and perhaps the world.

Above it all is the feeling of Winter…the ticking of the seasons and the abiding image of the tenacity of nature and light. For me, a beautiful, generous novel - this second part of Ali Smith’s seasonal quartet is a story of tenderness, righteous anger and a generosity of spirit that leaves you with a tingle while reading and a great sense of loss once you have finished the novel

Winter by Ali Smith

 As we head into the depths of Winter our book will be Winter by Ali Smith....

A family gathers in a large Cornwall house for a Christmas reuinion. With matriarch Sophia and her estranged sister Iris are her son Art and who they believe is his girlfriend Charlotte. Art has paid Lux to pretend to be Charlotte for Christmas. Sophia suffers from visions of a disembodied child's head which follows her around, Iris is in her 70s, one of the original Greenham women, Art is a nature blogger hijacked by the original Charlotte. Lux is a Croatian and is unable to maintain her identity as Charlotte. But, like a figure in a Shakespearean romance —there are many references to “Cymbeline” - Lux magically brings Art, Iris, and Sophia together.

November: Focus on Women's Rights

Clare O'Dea, author of Voting Day

We enjoyed a fab meeting last night at Paddy’s – we also saw my birthday twin again which was brilliant! Beyond Black largely had the thumbs up – we greatly enjoyed a lively discussion featuring the odious Morris and poor Alison having to put up with him and his nasty cronies. We thought the ending was perfect, once I had recovered from the disappointment of there being no Ghostbusters style explosive takeover by the underworld!

 And onto our next book for November – Voting Day by Clare O’Dea. Clare is from Ireland and now lives in Fribourg so we are hoping to meet up with her after reading the book. The story takes place on a very important date in the history of women's rights. In the author’s own words:

 In 2021, Switzerland celebrated 50 years of women having the right to vote. But there was another important date in the history of women’s voting rights – February 1st, 1959 – the day the men said no.

My historical novel, Voting Day, which takes place over the course of this day, tells the story of four women whose lives are connected by the fate of a foster child. While the men go out to vote, the women have other things on their minds – mostly.

Vreni (48) is a farmer’s wife and foster mother with grown-up children and abandoned dreams. On the eve of an operation, she meets her daughter Margrit in the city. Margrit (23) seems to have found success as an office girl in Bern but suddenly finds herself facing a terrible dilemma at work.

Esther (30), a Yenish single mother who was taken from her family as a child, works as a hospital cleaner. Now that her own son Ruedi has been taken into care, the future looks bleak. Esther’s boss Beatrice (61) has made a good career as the hospital administrator. She dreads the prospect of a no vote after putting her heart and soul into the yes campaign. Find out how the trajectory of all their lives changes on this day.

https://clareodea.com/

From middle class Italy to working class Brisbane

We thoroughly enjoyed Elene Farrante's The Lying Life of Adults, empathising with the teenage protagonist and laughing at our former teenage selves. 

And so onto Boy Swallows Universe by Trent Dalton, a story of brotherhood, true love and the most unlikely of friendships. This is a novel of love, crime, magic, fate and coming of age, set in Brisbane's violent working class suburban fringe. 

And so, Brisbane, 1983: a lost father, a mute brother, a mum in jail, a heroin dealer for a stepfather and a notorious crime for a babysitter. It's not as if Eli's life isn't complicated enough already. He's just trying to follow his heart, learning what it takes to be a good man, but life just keeps throwing obstacles in the way - not least of which is Tytus Broz, legendary Brisbane drug dealer. And Eli's life is about to get a whole lot more serious - he's about to fall in love, oh and he has to break into Boggo Road Jail on Christmas Day to save his mum.

A reet royal thumbs up for Shuggie

 We enjoyed a lively and interesting chat about Shuggie Bain last night. We all found it an engrossing story, if somewhat depressing, although there were mixed views on the first chapter. Some thought it felt a bit out of place and gave away far too much from the off – if it is obvious that Agnes dies at the end, why read the story at all? An alternative view was that the first chapter gave a good background to the start of the story, with the drunken group of friends, the entrance of the charismatic Shug and the realisation for Agnes that her husband was having an affair with a friend. 

We felt a mixture of empathy, grief and exasperation for Agnes, not least with the impact her alcoholism had on her children and her constant need to present a prefect appearance to others! And Eugene, the irony of him being the one ‘nice’ guy in the story to nudge poor Agnes back off the wagon with his need for her to be ‘normal’ and have a wee drink.

The death of Agnes when it came was well portrayed and extremely tender with Shuggie’s input, by her side as he always was, through it all. He was always hoping that she might one day get better, a poignant portrayal of this in the showdown when Agnes turns up at Joan’s house post suicide attempt and slugs a bin through the window, swiftly followed by a well-aimed shoe at Joan’s head. A great scene, at once hilarious and tragic. I forgot to mention another of my favourite scenes at an AA meeting (pg 232) when a woman leans over the shoulder of Agnus and whispers ‘Aye.. right enough. The bastards couldn’t burn Saint Agnus so they beheaded the poor lassie instead. Fookin men eh?’

The very end nods to the cycle of life, or the vicious circle of poor upbringings – when Shuggie seeks out his young friend who is already living rough, following her own alcoholic mother out onto the streets.

So all, in all, a big thumbs up for Shuggie Bain, but we are seeking a more positive, perhaps humorous book sometime soon, to counter the bleakness!

And onto our next book – The Lying Life of Adults by Elenea Farrante for March.

From the slums of the 1850s to those of the 1980s

David Copperfield by Charles Dickens was given a huge thumbs up at last weekend's ZOOM meet-up. We enjoyed a lively conversation about the wealth of characters, including the odious, obsequious (thanks for the very fitting description Anna) Uriah Heep. 

Author Douglas Adams

So, from the mid 19th century slums of London to the 1980s slums of Glasgow with Shuggie Bain, our very up-to-date read that recently won the Booker Prize. I fear the UK is slipping into this kind of decline once more with the backlash from Tory austerity, the Corona crisis and Brexit, so am reading this with a not so fond memory of the backdrop to my childhood and a dread of what's still to come! But enough of politics and back to books. Shuggie Bain provides a corker of a contrast to the writing of Dickens but of course still dwelling on those who too often fall through the safety net of an unfeeling and uncaring government and society at large (there I go again!)