Reading of 2023

In 2023 I’ve read mainly after my daughters go to bed. I settle on the sofa with the monitor blinking at me, and try to resist the empty allure of social media. It's worked, mainly, partly because reading is and always has been so much richer in what it has given me than anything else. These are a few of my favourites, things that have lingered, things that have made me think, oh yes, this is how you do it.

I haven’t read his previous, Pulitzer prize winning All the Light We Cannot See, but I loved Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr. I found it so compelling, the interwoven storylines, the depth of the empathy for the characters. It’s made me think a lot about the effect of the short chapters, the way it drives your reading attention on, makes you think, oh go on then, just one more, keeps your interest and builds tension. A few other excellent novels I read this year used this form (perhaps influenced by our internet-addled attention spans?) and I’m trying to deconstruct it to see how it has that compelling, tense effect on the reader.

Science fiction and fantasy is in excellent health in the non- Anglophone literary sphere and I finally got my hands on The Liar’s Weave by Tashan Mehta, a writer from Mumbai. Beautifully written, about Indian astrology in a world where birth charts are everything, I’ve ordered Mehta’s next book which I am very much looking forward to.

Benjamin Myers does this kind of impressionistic thing with historical fiction that doesn’t try to mimic or reconstruct voices of the past but still puts you right there, in a way that ties you still to the present. Cuddy, his latest book about St Cuthbert, an Anglo Saxon saint who is buried under Durham Cathedral, is such a beautiful example.

The review called Birnam Wood by Eleonor Catton a ‘literary eco-thriller’ and I was like, oh come on, but it really was. There was fascinating, almost nineteenth century interiority to the characters with a really modern propulsion and complexity to the plot.

In Ascension by Martin MacInnes was recommended by someone I trust on social media and yet again, their taste has proven to be gold. Science fiction on the hugest, and yet also minutest scale, it has lingered with me for quite some time afterwards, pondering the ending, pondering the questions it raised.

I’m trying to read more short stories so I can understand the form better, and one of the best collections I read this year was Sing Your Sadness Deep by Laura Mauro. Recognisably from the same imagination but so varied and surprising, I found myself eager to start each new story which is unusual for me, as I find with short story collections I often flag in reading energy between each story and need something else on the go to swap out.

I picked up The Book of the Most Precious Substance by Sara Gran on a whim when I’d decided to treat myself to a new book on one of the rare times I actually went into a bookshop and it did not disappoint! A thriller about books and manuscripts and magic and sex, it was tense and so well plotted. Sara Gran is a writer I admire for the way she skates on genre borders, and I’ll be reading more of her next year.

I hardly ever re-read books as I’m usually in too much of a tizz trying to read new releases, books I’ve only just heard of but sound right up my street, or books I think I should be reading to complete my education. But this year I re-read two novels that I remember being stunned by before: Accordion Crimes by Annie Proulx (following an accordion made in Sicily on a boat to the US in the late nineteenth century which then makes it way through various different immigrant groups as the twentieth century progresses) and Fire and Hemlock (a loose retelling of Tam Lin) by my long time fave, Diana Wynne Jones. My other favourites of the year are all recently written and released but when you read older books you see quite clearly publishing fashions and trends and how they often don’t have much to do with what is ‘good’ literature or enjoyable narrative for the reader.

Reading of 2022

I feel like I’m a person who reads a lot, but when I look back over all my reading notes for the year, I don’t find as many books as I expect. Reading this year has been, as always, a refuge and a time in my own head, away from my toddler, my baby and the endless laundry pile. This is a selection of things I’ve loved this year - quite a few blockbusters and recent releases and not as many independently published books as I’d like, but something to fix next year. Reading goals: as good a new year’s resolution as any and better than most!

Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson.

This was the first book I read this year and it’s one I keep returning to as I’ve read news items, a rather simplistic thought echoing in my mind, ‘well, if they’d just read this book, they’d know how to do it.’ It’s not utopian, it’s highly realistic but there is also a fierce and passionate optimism too and a belief that humankind and our more-than-human kin could make a better society on this planet and figure out a way through climate change. I was also deeply interested in the structure of it, the way it focused on different characters to tell a wider story and the concepts it explained. It challenged narrative ideas of a novel and I loved that.

Tyll by Daniel Kehlmann

Puckish, interestingly structured, beautifully written and totally unique, I read this on a rare solo train journey and as I sped through the East Anglian countryside on my way between London and Norwich I could not tear myself away.

The Love Songs of WEB Du Bois by Honoree Fanonne Jeffers

The best multi-generational family saga I have read in a while, maybe ever. Just beautiful and I have recommended it to all my reader friends and family.

Saint Death’s Daughter by CSE Cooney

I love books like this, ones that are in love with words and their meanings and sounds, the more baroque the better. This has the added benefits of a thrilling world of lore, a wonderfully discursive style that delights in footnotes and asides and is generally an antidote to all those who say ‘less is more’. No, more is more and it’s great.

Gideon, Harrow and Nona the Ninth of the Locked Tomb series by Tamsyn Muir

VERY late to the party on this series, but that’s the wonderful thing about wonderful books; they stay wonderful no matter when you read them. These books are going to have be re-read at some point because they are so intricately plotted that I know I’ve missed most of what’s going on. Although I’m not massively optimistic that I’ll grasp all the clues on a second reading, at least I’ll be able to appreciate the razor sharp wit again and try to see how on earth she does it.

Babel by RF Kuang

Translation, empire, the courage to go against all you’ve known… I inhaled this. A perfect alternate history in my opinion and a great example of using speculative fiction to tell the truth about a matter.

Liberation Day by George Saunders

What strikes me always about Saunders’ work is the radical empathy of it. It’s something I strive for in my own writing, to dwell in the grey of things, to think deeply about morality and concepts of good and bad. You feel so strongly that Saunders cares about the people he writes about in all their glorious ordinariness and the result is a complex but somehow warm and caring reading experience that leaves you better after the last page.

A novel out in the world and a missing muse

My novel To Catch a Moon has now spent a hot and bothersome summer out in the world. Releasing a book is like throwing a stone into a sea, you let it go and it just lands wherever it lands. Whether it sinks to the bottom of the ocean, not to be disturbed for the next century or floats off with the tide is no longer up to you. What does control that mysterious movement, however, is unclear.

I take comfort in this aspect of writing and creating from who else but Remedios Varo herself. She endured long years of not being able to make her work, through political instability, exile and financial precarity, so when she finally got to settle and create the images that had been swirling around her imagination for so long she was more concerned about the paintings just existing than their reception in the world. So I think of her when I think of the readers the novel might or might not be reaching, as well as when I fail, again, to sit down at my computer to chip away at xmy work in progress. With a new baby, a toddler and the seemingly unending parade of admin and household tasks tugging at my attention, I’m not the first and I won’t be the last writer to wonder where my muse went and if she’s coming back.

So, as the baby grows and this unpredictable winter approaches, I’ll be settling in - wearing a thick jumper against the political winds and chills - to try to coax my muse back from wherever she’s been hiding or resting, hoping against hope that something’s been secretly writing about ballet, bells and the fae world (the subjects of my next novel) behind my back.

To Catch a Moon

I’m thrilled to announce that my second novel, To Catch a Moon, will be published in May 2022 by Unsung Stories. You can see the beautiful cover designed by Vince Haig here at the Fantasy Hive:

https://fantasy-hive.co.uk/2022/03/to-catch-a-moon-by-rym-kechacha-cover-reveal/

Remedios Varo was a Spanish surrealist painter who left Europe during the second world war and spent the rest of her life in Mexico city, where she created most of her famous paintings. 

If you’re interested in Varo’s biography then her wikipedia page tells the story of her life better than I can:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remedios_Varo  

And then you’ll probably want to see a gallery of her works and be able to click through to see the ones you’re drawn to most: 

https://www.wikiart.org/en/remedios-varo )

She was part of a group of female surrealist artists whose work is being ‘rediscovered’ and celebrated at the moment. It’s one of those beautiful tidal swellings of the collective unconscious (an image she might have made a beautiful painting of) that interest and appreciation for the work of artists like Leonora Carrington (A dear friend of Varo’s) Dorothea Tanning and Leonor Fini are giving a fresh retrospective on a movement that relegated them to the passive role of muse; but there is more to be inspired by than the work they left behind. These women lived surrealism in their bodies, hearts and minds. They enjoyed the kind of creative friendship where the lines of making art and domestic life were deliciously blurred; collaborating on paintings, dinners and puppet shows, looking after each other’s children and picking up each other’s post. They lived through the turbulence of their era, their marginalisation and their heartbreaks with their joy, imagination and thirst for life intact. This is what has seeped into me through my greedy research; a tiny morsel of their courage.

I can’t say where I first came across Varo’s work. It might have been on twitter. Or perhaps it was on a blog that I found after following a chain of links that started with a casual, mindless scroll through twitter, the kind of scrolling that, for better or worse, takes the place of daydreaming these days. Whenever I think about the way I encountered this artist who has taken up residence inside my heart, I think about the Surrealist worship of dreams, chance and fate. I can’t trace my first encounter with her work any more than I could remember the first time I saw a full moon or a murmuration of starlings. Now she’s just here with me, a quiet artistic familiar who knows more about most things that I could ever hope to.

So what’s the book about? It’s about the act of creation - of painting, writing, sewing, singing, birth, magic and dreams. It’s about love, and sacrifice and the destruction of the world. It’s about what we want to save at the end of things and why.

I strung together some of her paintings and made a story from them, a story I’m sort of convinced they already told. It is not a realist story, but I don’t know if I can claim the label surrealism for it either. It came from the charged space between the paintings themselves and the peculiar ways they hooked into my imagination and made themselves at home. There are moons locked in towers, men who roll around on a single wheel covered in hair, girls stitching the fabric of the world and a lion made of leaves. There’s a witch, a goat and a woman who is half owl. I didn’t make any of this up. Remedios did. So the book belongs even less to me than any book belongs to its author, and perhaps that’s why I’m so proud of it and so happy that it’ll be out in the world soon. 

Reading of 2021

I began writing these small ‘review of the year’ posts partly because I have always enjoyed summing up and thinking over things that have happened and how they might have changed me, and partly because I found that reading lots of other people’s similar posts - on social media, in newspapers and newsletters - was a brilliant way of finding recommendations. This is the 2021 version, a year in which reading has been my solace and my escape and my brain-rest while the world has been … well, we all know. 

The Rings of Saturn by WG Sebald

In May this year I stayed in a renovated medieval inn in Suffolk with my family. It had one of those bookshelves filled with the usual bestselling pulp for you to read in case of rain and finishing everything else and because it did rain and I did indeed finish the other things I’d brought to read, I picked this up. I am gradually becoming the kind of reader who can appreciate Sebald. I am coming to think he is like fine wine or a decent pair of shoes; melancholies which become pleasures with age.

I visited Dunwich with my family, threw stones into the sea with my daughter and we played peekaboo with a passing seal, then put her in her cot for a nap and curled up with Sebald’s thoughts on this once-vital trading port, now sunken beneath the water a mile or more out to sea. To read those characteristic meanders about a part of the world which I have only just begun to call my home, a place I have so far had little ability to walk and wander in, was a gift. 

Luckenbooth by Jenni Fagan

I just loved this book. The writing was beautiful, but what really felt important to me was the way she pulled together an ensemble cast all tied by something in common; a place, a tenement building in Edinburgh. The novel was like a quilt, different patches that echo and rhyme stitched together to make something beautifully cohesive. I’ve been thinking a lot about the way we structure stories and how that forms the way we see the world, how including the more-than-human, objects generally considered inanimate and a sense of collective voices telling a story can crack everything open for us. An honorary mention has to go here to another text published on XR Writers Rebel How to Tell a Story to Save the World by Toby Litt, which talks a lot about screenwriting but is applicable to all stories everywhere in all forms. 

Primeval and Other Times by Olga Tokarczuk (translated by Antonia Lloyd Jones)

Tokarczuk is another writer who is spurring me to think about narrative structures and storytelling in deeper, more intricate and possibly nourishing ways. I reviewed her magnificent The Books of Jacob, translated by Jennifer Croft here and in some ways I find these two books to be companions in theme and structures. It’s also of a kind with Luckenbooth in that the writers arrange their characters around a place, which is both specific in its culture and archetypal, a place that sings throughout the ages and you feel is still singing.

Black Sun by Rebecca Roanhorse

I read a lot of fantasy this year (which was a complete joy, it always is) and this was the one I’m still thinking about most, months after I finished. It’s the first in an epic fantasy trilogy set in a world inspired by pre-Colombian Mesoamerica which immediately hooked me. I think I’ll always be a sucker for the pseudo-medieval-Europe fantasy world but reading things set in imaginings of other cultures gives me this delicious feeling that they’re all talking to each other in some other world; that the characters of Black Sun could sail to the Mughal-inspired world of Tasha Suri, or battle the djinn of SA Chakraborty’s Daevabad. Now there’s something for me to dream about in 2022!

The first Penelope Fitzgerald novel I read was The Gate of Angels during my MA. I enjoyed it, but didn’t quite know where to place it in my own categories of this-book-is-like-that-one. Perhaps a little like my growing relationship with Sebald, this year I finally understood that Fitzgerald was seeking to write an entirely different book each time, each slim novel standing alone but not lonely. I read The Bookshop, the Beginning of Spring and The Blue Flower in the summer and  was bewitched by a sense of wit and whimsy that dances on top of and the sharpness of observation in her historical novels which wear their historical world-building details so lightly. Her novels have a spiral feel to them - obsessed as I am becoming with structures - in that they circle around something that is hidden at the core of the book, something its characters might never find and as a reader, you will only find when you are ready.

Lore and Disorder

On 7th July this year I was having a quiet browse of twitter with a cup of tea when I saw Magda Knight had posted this - 

I first met Magda in 2017, in a beautiful community garden called Phytology in Bethnal Green. I was organising a live literature event with a friend from my MA and Magda read one of her stories. Since then we’ve followed each other on twitter, a place where I often see what she’s up to and think it generally excellent.

So when I saw her post, I replied -

 She then said this -

and then I took the convo into the DMs, as maybe the kids say. 

Through different technologies available to us in the twenty-first century, Magda and I talked about what kind of collaboration we might work on together. Magda said she’d been mulling over the idea of mutated folklore, fiction that twisted old stories for new times and that struck such a chime with me that I knew I wanted to be a part of it. Then we talked what the concept of mutated folklore might mean to us. We talked about how we might go about creating such an anthology. We talked about our favourite creatures and stories, what folkloric traditions we knew and wanted to know more about, how we hoped the speculative fiction communities might receive such a collection.

We decided to solicit writing from people we knew were working in the kinds of realms we were looking for. So we ended up punching up (and up and up and up) and we (somehow) persuaded really amazing writers to come on board.

It’s important now that I emphasise that I have very little idea what we’re doing. Magda is more expert than me, having published anthologies as editor in chief of Mookychick, but together on this project we’ve been mostly feeling our way by instinct, hoping that the stories would be like potions in an alchemist’s laboratory and their meeting would create us a shining container of gold. Now, as we’ve collated these stories, we know we were right.

Throughout 2020 I was working on something that I wanted to turn into a novel. I worked on it haphazardly, baby in my lap or baby fitfully asleep in the other room and although I had a very strong guiding image for the novel- a creature who was half woman and half bird, stumbling from a marsh with brackish water dripping from her wings - I could not make it work. The story and the form and the tone kept slipping as I typed, shifting behind my back when I closed my laptop. 

At the end of the year I decided to put the loose collection of words I had gathered away. I put them in the place on my computer where I put stories that are not working, in the hope that if I turn my back on them they will turn into something I can use while I’m not looking. I turned my attention to something else (which, I am pleased to report, is working, whatever that means. So far.)
When I was thinking about what I might contribute to this anthology, I browsed that folder on my laptop, looking through the discarded remnants of old writing, trying to find something that would spark into something new. I tried out a few things and most of what I got was frustration at not being able to make them work, again. Then I came to the document called The Crane Wife and I thought, hmm.

The name of the anthology was a stroke of genius from Magda. We had a working title which was a lovely word but I wasn’t entirely sure if it spoke precisely enough to the tone we were trying to catch. I am entirely useless with naming things, so it was Magda - writing a long brain-dump list of possible titles - who threw Lore and Disorder out there for me to pick up and say yes, this is it, this is what we should call this thing, even though we don’t know exactly what its shape will be. Something mutated, yes; a pun in more ways than one, a riff on the peculiarities of this creole language all our writers are wrestling with. 

We’re donating all the money from the sales of Lore and Disorder to the charity Fareshare who are redistributing food to vulnerable people all over the country. Although we might agree the existence of this wonderful charity shouldn’t be necessary, it is; it’s vital, and we want to support that in any way we can. 

Creatures from dreams and myths don’t vote; they have no known political affiliation and no manifestos. But they come from the people who live with the land and sea, as all 7 billion and more of us do, and so their stories are deeply entwined with what is is to be a moral being. They speak of justice and injustice, love and hate, birth and death and the passages between. Their stories belong to us all - just as a decent meal should - and it is our pleasure to offer these gifts as we hope your offerings will be gifted on to those so much in need of them. 

Find out more at the anthology page HERE

AND on #LoreDisorder on Twitter 

Dark River shortlisted at BFS awards!

I’m completely bewildered and thrilled to say that Dark River has been nominated for best fantasy novel and best newcomer at the British Fantasy awards.

I often think about the way that the acts of writing and reading have a strange relationship to time. It takes days or months or years to write something in whichever culturally mandated way a writer is steeped in, and then it can reach a reader the very next instant when the tweet loads, a week hence when the letter arrives in the post, or two years hence when the novel is edited and published and sitting prettily on a shelf, waiting to be picked up and thumbed through. Or a hundred years later when a curious scholar digs deep into a dusty archive. Or a thousand years later when a part of a city is dug up to build a skyscraper and an archaeologist finds your silly message to your sister and extrapolates an entire civilisation from it. 

And as you scratch little marks on a piece of paper or press keys that translate into phonetic symbols on a computer screen or inscribe lines and curves into a block of stone, you’re not entirely sure which of those it’ll be. Perhaps you’re not entirely sure which of those you want it to be.

It feels like I wrote Dark River a long time ago, partly because I’ve been scribbling away at other things since-  but in book years Dark River is a tiny baby! When I heard about the shortlistings, I experienced that odd slippage of time. I was reminded that although I spent a year (a few years ago) writing about the distant past and the near future, readers who pick it up experience it in a few hours of their current lives, with all their current experiences and distractions and feelings. It’s a wonderful kind of paradox, and a huge responsibility. No one’s getting back that time they spend with your words.

So to hear that a few people did not regret their hours with Dark River in Shaye and Shante’s company, was a deep blessing and honour and honestly something I can hardly believe.

Now, to while away some hours buried in the pages of the other stories on the shortlist!

Reading of 2020

It’s been a perfect year to ignore the real world and dive into the pages of a book. The first half of the year was a bumper reading one for me. When she was tiny, my daughter loved to sleep on my lap and I would spend hours sitting in semi darkness, pinned to the bed by the weight of my snoring little girl. I should have minded, I should have done the sleep training people recommended, but instead I happily turned on my ereader and let my mind soar into the pages of whatever other world I found. 

In the second half of the year my baby learnt how to sleep on her own in her cot and I started - reluctantly - to use her nap times to do other things. Now I read in snatches when I’ve finished all my housework and the never ending parade of admin tasks and in the evening after I’ve put her to bed and I miss my long, languid hours of reading. I knew at the time they’d never come back.

That said, here are a few books that have stayed with me this year - ones I read in 2020, not necessarily published this year.

The Changeling by Victor LaValle

I’ve been entranced recently by stories that meld folklore and myth with our modern reality, books that acknowledge the uncanny in the everyday and the mythic structures behind our lives. This book, which works on multiple levels (like all fairytales) and is such a compulsive read, really felt like a new and exciting way of working with tropes of the fantastic.

Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer

For some years now I’ve been engaged in a quiet, long term project to learn more about the flora around me, to greet trees and garden plants and wild things when I know their names and habits; and to ask to be introduced to the green creatures I’m not yet acquainted with and this book was a fierce and loving nudge towards making that process an even more important part of my days. The author is so eloquent on something I’ve been thinking a lot about; the interplay of scientific thinking and intuitive feeling being more powerful that either paradigm alone.

This was the year I discovered Sylvia Townsend Warner, reading three of her books; The Corner that Held Them, Lolly Willowes and Kingdoms of Elfin. I was utterly intrigued by her writing about the supernatural, the sinuous structure of her books that felt utterly fresh to me, the complex morality in her work. 

A Ghost in the Throat- Doireann Ní Ghríofa

This book just spoke to me on the deepest level as a new mother, as a writer trying to scribble in the margins of caring for a tiny person, as a woman looking back in history to try to trace the trails of our foremothers’ stories. It’s also beautifully written, researched not just with the writer’s whole intellect but also her heart and soul too, and has a quality of light and empathy that is hard to parallel. One I’ll go back to. 

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk

This was given to my husband as a gift and before he could read it I stole it away to chomp through it myself. The black humour and the unique voice of the narrator felt so thrilling to me. One of my reading goals of 2021 is to read more of her work to appreciate all the different flavours and modes she works in. 

Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell

It was a deep pleasure to get lost in this story. There have been a few historical fiction books that have simply swept me away this year, but this one stands out to be for the simple lushness of the writing, the depiction of grief, the beautiful chapter on the arrival of the plague in Stratford upon Avon (a kind of bottle episode at the core of the whole book) and the sense of realigning what we think we think about someone so universal in our culture. 

The Old Drift by Namwali Serpell

This is multi-generational saga done better than I’ve read in ages, the characters wind around each other in encounters both fleeting and fixed and the language is exuberant and beautiful. Recommended to anyone and everyone!

Autumn

This is the first year I’ve had a garden to grow in, and what a year to begin growing. With surprisingly little effort, we’ve had quite a harvest already; broad beans, spinach, plentiful coriander and a solitary cucumber. Now autumn is sliding into winter and I like to take the baby outside to watch the leaves turn on the pear tree sapling and monitor the ripening of all four of my pumpkins. I made chutney with the green tomatoes left forlornly on the vine with less and less sun each day to ripen them and it is much more tasty than I had imagined. There’s still harvesting left to do, more spinach and chard that pops up after a rainy spell and of course, the roots. I like imagining the carrots and parsnips swelling in the soil, resisting the childish urge to dig them up to see how big they’re getting. It’s a bit like having a novel in progress; something growing in the darkness that you can’t yet name or describe, something that needs to be kept warm and watered to give sustenance in the spring. 

I was thrilled to be asked to talk a little about a flash fiction story of mine that appeared in The Nature of Cities anthology in 2019. We spoke about writing climate change and the possibility of optimism, and there was a surprise guest appearance from a member of the next generation! If you’d like, you can watch it here: 

https://www.thenatureofcities.com/2020/10/07/stories-of-the-nature-of-cities-1-2-hour-episode-2-sea-level-rise-2/

A message in a bottle

A book is like a message in a bottle. You stand on the shore and gently let your story drift out of your hands into the world on an uncertain tide. Then you watch it bob away, hoping it’ll land on some distant shore and be read and enjoyed. You have no idea if it’ll be found tomorrow or ten years from now and you can’t know whereabouts in the world it’ll get to, but you just have to trust. Trust in the tides, the hands that might receive your offering and the words on the message themselves. That’s where I am at the moment, trusting and waiting and hoping that my book resonates wherever it washes up.

Of course, it’s not easy letting a book go out on the kinds of stormy seas we’re being tossed about on right now. Particularly when the book is not exactly an uplifting read (or so I’m told!) But it is my hope that Dark River does have a grain of optimism it. There is love in that story, and care and devotion and sacrifice. It was certainly my intention to write something of what we’re seeing in our current troubles - that where there is darkness there is always light. 

To my great pleasure, that’s something that the reviewers of the novel have picked up on. It’s been a joy and a privilege to be reviewed so carefully and sensitively and to have the feeling that people have engaged with the book and considered it as its own being. My thanks to all the reviewers who have taken the time to read Dark River and write their thoughts on it -  their own messages in bottles that sail away to eager readers on all shores.

So now my novel is out in the world and I, like most of the rest of humanity, am inside, trying to protect myself and my family from this new thing to worry about. Self isolating with a small baby looks a lot like normal life with a small baby. I still spend most of my time on the sofa gazing at my daughter feeding or sleeping or being surprised that the object in her mouth is actually her tiny chubby fist. I still seek out gaps in the day where she’ll be asleep in the sling so that I can read, our chests pressed together, the soft rhythm of her breath punctuating the sentences of the novel in my hands. I still stand in my bedroom in the dark, rocking and humming and trying to guess at the magic seconds when she’ll be asleep enough to put into her cot.

Who knows how long we’ll be inside like this for? Who knows how big my baby will be by the time this is over? No one can say. But while I’m inside, I’m also spending my time wondering what kind of world we’ll emerge into when the virus has gone, how we’ll remake things with the lessons learned, or not. Until then, I’ll just keep sending out words on the tide, just to see how far they’ll go. 

(A little bit of) what I read in 2019

This is a shallow dip into some the things I’ve read and loved this year. Most of it was published well before this year, so it’s not at all a ‘best of 2019’ post, just a reflection of what I’ve been drawn to and influenced by during these twelve months, the books I think will have most effect on me and my writing in the year to come.

The Wormwood trilogy (Rosewater, Rosewater Resurrection and Rosewater Redemption) -Tade Thompson

I’m not the only one to feel like this trio of books is a game changer for the genre. Alien invasion in a future Nigeria, with an exploration of consciousness from multiple points of view and it is so pacey I felt a little breathless as I turned the pages towards the end of each book. I was enthralled by the way Thompson challenges the reader- he never apologies and never explains and the result is a more immersive, thought-provoking world. 

Rivers of London- Ben Aaronovitch

I discovered this series this year and hunted down each book until I was up to date, and now I’ve got the next instalment on reserve at the library. How to count the things I loved? The folklore, the magical creatures, the smart dialogue, the impeccable plotting, the depictions of my beloved home city, which I moved away from this year? These books feel like the creamiest of lasagnas to me: delicious and so easy to digest but nourishing for body and soul too.

A Scots Quair- Lewis Grassic Gibbon 

I’ve written about this trilogy before, but it just blew me away. It’s got a kind of rhythm that seamlessly evokes the landscape and the social world of rural Scotland in the early twentieth century. The first book, A Sunset Song, was the one that snagged at me most. The story of Chris Guthrie, a young girl growing up the daughter of sad, proud parents who then becomes the wife of a proud man made sad by war trauma. The way Grassic Gibbon invites the reader into the text, implicates you in the beaten down, but still luminous world he writes of is so beautiful. This will be a re-read in years to come.

Flight Behaviour- Barbara Kingsolver

This is a book about climate change, environmentalism and rural communities that seems to have predicted the conversations we’re having now about privilege, opportunity and climate chaos. It came out in 2012 but the politics of how we talk about climate justice, and what different people perceive to be just is precisely right for now. The North American continent’s population of monarch butterflies has migrated to the wrong place, almost certainly due to climate breakdown, and when Dellarobia Turnbow becomes involved with studying them it changes her life. Fiction, for me, has always been a kind of empathy practice, a way of seeing - or, really, feeling -  a situation from another’s point of view, and often many points of view at the same time. This book made it clear to me just how many competing interests there are stopping us from really addressing our environmental woes at a systemic level and has given me a lot of ways to think about my privilege.

Under Milk Wood- Dylan Thomas

I bought this book and then I listened to a recording of it while reading along and it stunned me. I’ve been listening to radio plays for the past couple of years, finding a lot of pleasure in the way I experience the narrative with a different part of my brain to when I read a novel, but this now seems to me the gold standard. I keep getting the book out to look again at the way he uses words - this special ability poets seem to have, to place words in just the right way to make their sense and sound sing together. Lines like these: ‘…the sloeback, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboat bobbing sea’ make me swoon. 

Middlemarch - George Eliot

This was one of those canonical books I often saw referenced and always intended to read one day, when I got around to it, when I felt as though I had the headspace to be able to dedicate to such a long, complex, involved novel. I suppose books choose you as much as you choose them; sometimes it feels like they come along at exactly the right moment for them to move you, sometimes it feels like they completely pass you by and you put them down wondering what all the fuss is about. I read this at exactly the right time in my life to appreciate it, although it’s the kind of book that will have wisdom to offer whenever you encounter it. There is so much tenderness in my empathy for Dorothea Brooke’s naive expectations of her marriage, the timelessness of her disappointment and her determination to live by her decisions. I think this is due to Eliot’s own tenderness towards her characters, the gentle way she presents all their complexity. The inhabitants of her provincial town are some of the most ‘real’ I have found on the page. I will re-read this one day and I know I’ll find more to chew on inside its pages as it grows with me. 

Underland - Robert Macfarlane

I had this on reserve at the library for ages before I got the front of the queue and it didn’t disappoint. We’re forever looking up at our world (although we might be forgiven, there’s just so much to look up at) in wonder, but this book has made me think about what I might miss if I don’t look down. Mycelial networks, catacombs under Paris and the poetics of burying nuclear waste, this felt like nature writing of the future; the human impact on our planet, the nature of the anthropocene. 

The British Fantasy Society Awards

This summer I was a juror for the category of Best magazine or periodical at British Fantasy Awards. I’ll admit that I signed up because I fancied a bit of free reading but when the magazines started to thump onto the doormat and pile up on my Kobo I panicked a little. But a quick reshuffle of the to-be-read stack, a woeful turning away of the podcasts I was now not going to get to listen to and a determined, never-go-anywhere-without-one-of-these-things-to-read attitude saw me get through all that reading on a deadline.

But soon I was back to my default position of utter pleasure at how lucky I was to be reading such great magazines (and feeling a little bit like I was getting away with something). I got the strong impression, from all the six shortlisted magazines, that the genre is thriving and becoming richly diverse in all sorts of ways.

I’m not always the easiest of audiences for short fiction. I find I often need a palate cleanser of a long narrative, or I’ll start to have the various universes of all those stories start to swirl in my head, all bleeding into each other and making a big mess. But these magazines had such a mix of thought provoking poetry, non fiction and criticism sprinkled among the high quality fiction that my mind was calmed. This, I thought, is like being in a perfectly curated museum full of my favourite things, and I like it very much. 

Inevitably, I’ve been thinking a lot about the very idea of judging works against each other to award a prize. Competition is not always so compatible with the artistic life and perhaps the whole theory of deciding what is ‘best’ just doesn’t apply when thinking about something so intimate as the stories one holds near to the heart. 

Of course, the controversy surrounding the awarding of the Booker prize last week has ignited a heated conversation about artistic prizes in general and literary awards in particular and I think this is healthy. We can acknowledge the paradox and cognitive dissonance of wishing that we didn’t live in world so consumed and defined by competition, knowing that we are far away from living in this kind of world and not having a clue what it would even look like if we did. 

I have a sense that given different people, a different season or a different question, any panel of jurors might come to a completely different decision about the winner of any kind of prize; an alternate reality scenario where it’s just possible that by making the decision to reward one work over another, we might just have changed the fabric of time and created a new world. 

That said, what prizes do very well is celebrate the health of an art form and get people talking about the books, genres and forms they have loved. When there’s so much airtime given in the media sphere to ideas that hurt, speech that divides and downright lies, it is so refreshing to see people come together to unashamedly gush about what they love and celebrate it with their community. 

Congratulations to Uncanny and to all of the shortlisted magazines. And more than anything, thank you. You have all given me so many absorbed, happy hours of reading over the summer, and I know I’m not the only one. 

A book and a baby

There’s a kind of personal essay on the internet that I devour every time I come across them; the kind of essay where a thoughtful, intelligent woman who is also a skilled writer and loving mother describes, often in forensic detail and with searing honesty, exactly how hard it is to be both of these things (as well as so much else) at the same time. They write of the incompatibility of the literary world and small babies, the difficulty in finding the energy and time to think and the way they feel fractures forming along the borders of all the different parts of themselves as the newest part - often mother - invades and conquers all the others.

After reading one of these essays, I sit and think about how I can avoid this kind of fracturing in my own life. I think about my wonderful, supportive husband, my talent for list making and organisation, the time I save myself by just not ironing any clothes. I shut the tabs and I open the word document with the fragments of my work in progress, determined not to waste any more time. Because in January, probably only days apart, I will give birth to my first baby and my first novel, Dark River, will be published. In January, I’m going to become one of those women trying to plaster over the fractures in my identity, trying to bring mothering towards writing and both of them towards all the other things that I am. 

The thing is, I’ve already found pregnancy to have a fracturing quality on my mind as well as my body. It hasn’t just been the sickness and the tiredness, it’s the redirecting of my attention through a fractal lens that shatters every one of my thoughts and scatters them to the winds. I used to think that pregnancy was essentially a slightly uncomfortable queue for your baby. Now, just over halfway through, I realise it has turned me inside out, with my new skin shocked and raw and unsure of how it is supposed to handle the world. And every bout of nausea, every craving, every fluttering somersault of the creature in my belly reminds me that it’s not over yet. 

I’ve wanted to turn to fiction, which is the place I always go to to see if I’m doing this humaning thing right, but I’ve found very little. There are births, and sometimes miscarriages or stillbirths, occasionally infertility, but I barely came across the humdrum magic of pregnancy, let alone this feeling of transformation, until a dear friend gave me Sunset Song by Lewis Grassic Gibbon.

I was already entranced by the language, the easy swirl of the Scots dialect and the way he describes the majesty of the highland landscape where his Chris Guthrie lives; but this bit, where Chris lies on her land and thinks about how her life is about to slip away from her, forced me to read it over and over again:

‘No night would she ever be her own again, in her body the seed of that pleasure she had sown with Ewan burgeoning and growing, dark, in the warmth below her heart. And Chris Guthrie crept out from the place below the beech trees where Chris Tavendale lay and went wandering off into the waiting quiet of the afternoon, Chris Tavendale heard her go, and she came back to Blawearie never again.’

And I thought, that is it, that’s how I feel, that’s how it really is. 

In my novel Dark River, I write about two women with young sons who do everything they can to escape catastrophic climate change and give their children a home. The women of the worlds I’ve made are not just mothers - for no one is ever just anyone - but their children and their motherhood are a fundamental part of their identities. What are they trying to survive for, if not for their babies, for their futures, for someone’s future, somewhere? It’s a question we can’t help but ask ourselves as we watch the children line the streets of cities rather than the corridors of schools, demanding a chance at some kind of future. 

I just don’t feel like myself, I told the midwife. Everything feels different. She smiled. Lots of women say that, she said. But you just have to kind of go with it. She looked at her computer and tapped away at her notes there before turning back to me. You have to grieve a little for who you once were, and then you’ll find you’ll be able to surrender to the you who’s going to be a mum. 

I wonder if grief is really the right word for this feeling, this shapeshifting, topsy turvy, utterly ordinary experience. I don’t really feel sad. I feel lucky, and I feel in awe of the biological processes that are taking place inside me, without me doing a single conscious thing to direct them; and I feel completely besotted with this tiny being that has done nothing yet to merit my devotion except exist.

But then I think about the writers of the essays and I recognise that there is grief in between the words, a guilty kind of grief that I’m not sure is the lesser for the writing of it. I wonder if I will someday feel that way, when motherhood has settled into something more mundane. And the only way to answer that is to watch the changing of the seasons and the growing of my child and wait. 

So the autumn has begun with a day and a night of equal length, rain that falls in sheets onto the seedlings I’ve planted in pots in my new front garden, and I settle down in front of the half-finished novel that has been tugging at my heart and my conscience for months now. Waiting for my book and my baby to finish burrowing in the darkness, ready to emerge with the light after midwinter. 

By the grace of anything in any realm that’s listening, this time next year I will pick up a shiny conker nestled among the crisp, bronze leaves carpeting the grass and I will hold it out for my child to clutch in their fat, sticky fist as we amble through a park in the pram. People will have read Dark River, and maybe they’ll have found something in it that speaks to their heart. The new novel will be finished, and maybe some of the other projects I’ve been dreaming about will have stepped out of the shadowy corners of my imagination and onto the blue light of my computer screen. And somehow, I’ll be both mother and writer and all kind of others too; even though I cannot yet see what those women will look like inside my skin.

Dark River

While I’m busy moving the commas around my paragraphs and gazing out of the window chewing the rhythm of my sentences over in my mouth , George and Dan over at Unsung Stories have been creating a beautiful cover and introducing it to the Unsung family of amazing books. I’ve been looking at this gorgeous work over and over and again and I think it captures the heart of the story perfectly. Have a look!

http://www.unsungstories.co.uk/dark-river-by-rym-kechacha

India

I spent the first two months of 2019 in south India, riding the trains between amazing temple towns, beaches, and national parks criss-crossed by elephant roads and tiger borders. The breadth and depth of history on the subcontinent was hugely inspiring and I’m finding myself cooking up a few stories sparked there!

Here’s a few highlights…

Regulbium

A while ago I went for a walk with my mum on the marshy north Kent coast. It was one of those days where the sand, sea and sky merge into one grey mass and the wind whips away the horizon and the shoreline so that all you can see is the marshy grass you’re walking through and the thick stone shape of the half ruined abbey in the distance, and we battled on through the mud and wind towards it, eyes stinging with salt spray, to read the vague visitors information board at the foot of the stone. I learnt there had been a Roman fort here, then an Anglo Saxon monastery and then one of the Cinque Ports of the South East. The sea took most of the settlement that used to be by the twentieth century and it became a quiet place where things used to happen long ago. A place where spirits lived unobtrusively, only visited by dog-walkers and people who like looking at the North Sea in all its moods.

There was something about the place that snagged at me, but by the time I got home I had let the feeling fade and I didn’t think of it again for some time. I can’t remember now how the ruins at Reculver rose to the top of what I like to think of as my imagination compost, perhaps that’s part of it, but for some reason that walk came into my mind and I began to research the place, knowing that I wanted to write about it in some way. I browsed google, looking for that spark of something interesting to me that made me think there was a story I might want to tell. I read that during an excavation archaeologists had found the remains of babies under the walls of the Roman fort. They thought those babies might have been sacrificed to make a kind of guardian spirit for the place. I had found what I was looking for.

I first read this story at an Unsung Live event at Kings Cross in July 2018 on a hot night where Londoners acted like Romans and stayed out in the streets, chatting and laughing with iced drinks on the tables hauled onto the pavements long into the night. It was far away from the drizzle that inspired the story, but somehow it didn’t matter. We know, if we live in the British Isles, that the drizzle is always coming back.

I’m thrilled to see the story here at the Wild Hunt, where I think it fits perfectly with the other weird and fantastic tales. Enjoy!

https://wildhuntmag.com/fiction/rymkechacha-regulbium

Debut novel coming in 2019!

I’m thrilled to announce that my debut novel will be published by Unsung Stories in 2019! It’s about climate change, motherhood and sacrifice with two twinned narratives; one set in mesolithic Doggerland and the other set in a future UK where infrastructure is crumbling.

The novel started to form in my mind in 2016 when I moved to Putney, on the banks of the river Thames. Most days I would cycle along the path on the southern bank to and from work and I became friends with the river. I got to know its tides, learnt the places where it would spill over the banks at the high flood tides and watched as the silt the floods left behind got washed back into the river by the rain. I started to recognise the trees lining the path in all their seasons. I gathered nettles and ramsons from the path and put them in a pasta sauce.

I thought about all the people who had moved up and down that stretch of water throughout the centuries; on foot, on wheels, on boats. A nineteenth century MP, John Burns, called the Thames ‘liquid history’ and I started to feel myself a part of that. I began to imagine what the banks would have looked like before the Victorian sewers were built, before horse chestnut trees came to Britain, when there was nowhere to cross the water other than London Bridge in the east.

At the same time, I was reading a lot about historical events that might have been the basis for the myths and legends we still know today. Archaeologists have found remnants of mesolithic and neolithic cultures under the Black Sea and the theory is that as the last ice age ended and the glaciers withdrew from the land, the sea levels rose to such an extent that there were huge floods across many civilisations, some of which were destroyed permanently when the sea levels stayed at their new height.

What if this event was encoded into our collective memory through the various stories of apocalyptic floods that exist in world mythology? There was the great flood of Gun-Yu in China, the flood Noah built his ark for, Manu’s flood in the Hindu Satapatha Brahmana, and high water drowning everyone several times over in Aztec and Mayan mythology. Every time I cycled along the river path at high tide I thought of those legendary floods, and then I thought of the latest climate change news stories. Which cities were projected to be under water by which decade of the twenty first century, what were the best case scenarios for 2 degrees of warming, what about for 3.

If we were really listening when we were told these old stories, we would know that we wouldn’t want to find out.

I found myself inside what the wonderful Alan Garner calls a ‘what-if corral’. What was south east England like before one of those huge floods, maybe one caused by a natural disaster like Storegga Slides in about 6200 BCE? What does it feel like to have your home slowly eaten away by the sea? How did people live so long ago? What did they value, what did they do all day? Did they accept the changes in their world more than we do, or did they fight against it?

I started writing to find out.

Unsung Stories are a fantastic, cutting edge indie publisher putting out some of the best speculative fiction out there and I think the book has found its perfect home. See more about them and their BFSS best independent press prize here:

http://www.unsungstories.co.uk/blog/2018/25/10/the-bfss-best-indie-press-2018-announces-new-books-for-2019

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