Vendela Vida : We Run the Tides

San Francisco is the setting for this story of four girls coming into adulthood in the 1980’s. Eulabee and her school friends Maria Fabiola, Faith, and Julia live in Sea Cliff, a foggy beach side suburb. San Francisco then is not as it is now. Vendela Vida has described it thus,

Growing up in San Francisco in the eighties you felt like you were arriving at a party that had just ended. Wherever you went in the city, you were reminded of more romantic days. North beach had the beats; the Haight had the summer of love. You had nothing but the yellow Tower bag you filled with records hoping to capture another time and place. That’s the San Francisco I knew growing up-it was cold and foggy and gray, and kids had to make their own drama.

Stella Gibbons : Enbury Heath

Cold Comfort Farm, the book for which Stella Gibbons is best known, was published in 1932 when she was thirty. It is an extraordinary book for a thirty-year old; sophisticated, witty, a wonderful satire of Thomas Hardy, Mary Webb even D H Lawrence. It has been made into films, plays and audio books, and remains a favourite novel of many readers. Not many readers know that she published about twenty-eight books in her lifetime, as well as poetry and journalism. I am gradually dipping into her books, in no particular order, as they cross my path.

Suburbia

Kamila Shamsie: Best Of Friends

Margery Sharp : Cluny Brown

Mr Porritt is a plumber and Cluny Brown’s uncle and the sole person responsible for her well-being and safety. He worries about her, for she is a girl who does not know her place. She even went to the Ritz for afternoon tea on her own and spent the exorbitant sum of 2/6 just to see what it was like.

Homesick : Jennifer Croft

Homesick is a popular title for a book. We have recently reviewed a book of the same name by Catrina Davies which concerns her search for a safe place to live. Then there are other books of the same name by Eshkol Neve, Marc Raabe, Jenny Lauren and Kate Klise, and several titled Homesickness by Colin Barrett, Janine Mikosza, and Murray Bail. Many of the books have been written in languages other than English and concern migration and the loss of home. Croft’s book is different in that it was written by the author in both Spanish under the title of Serpentes y Escaleras (Snakes and Ladders) and in English as Homesick.

Painting Time : Maylis de Keregal

Maylis de Kerangal is a French author and Painting Time is her fourth book. She has a particular approach to novel writing in that she takes a topic, bridge building, in Birth of a Bridge, heart transplant/organ donation in the case of Mend the Living (now called The Heart in English) and the world of the cuisineur in The Cook and does exhaustive research into the subject. She then interweaves this into the personal lives of her characters .