Early September Reads
The beginning of September brings unexpected warmth, blue skies and gorgeous shafts of sunlight and with it, three beautiful books. I spend the balmy evenings of the first week of the month with two novels and a short story sampler, each of them drawing me deep into story and characters so uniquely theirs.
Kathy Biggs’ Scrap, published by Honno Press, is set in a Swansea scrapyard where the main protagonists feel trapped, assigned to the scrap heap themselves. In a novel where family relations are unconventional, flawed and challenging, where domestic violence, death, fear and loss cast shadows over the characters, it is friendship that saves and bonds individuals, highlighting the power of hope, of kindness, and the possibility of second chances. Mackie, Sharon and Trev prop each other up through the daily grind of scrapyard shenanigans and the demands of their impulsive, unpredictable boss, Tranter. Beyond the scrapyard, Mackie and Sharon continue to keep each other afloat, and dare to dream about new experiences. And when ‘the kid’, with his special gift for reading the future, suddenly enters their lives, things take an unexpected turn.
Scrap is a novel which is action-packed, darkly funny and deeply moving. The author intersperses the everyday Swansea vernacular with poised moments of poetic beauty when ‘the kid’ enters his ‘white room’ and takes flight through threads of premonitions. It is a beautiful, sharply observed novel, an evocation of a working-class community and the grit and grind of souls where people are there for each other.
Found in a Bookshop by Stephanie Butland was an unexpected, gorgeous find in a mid-Saturday afternoon sale. Any book about a bookshop and book lovers brimming with book recommendations is always going to do it for me. Like Scrap, this is a novel about spirit, kindness and compassion, about feeling less alone.
Loveday Carew runs the Lost for Words bookshop in York and is hit by the emptiness and silence of the shop when a global pandemic keeps book lovers away. It is then that Loveday and her team decide to set up their very own bookshop pharmacy – they invite people to send in letters and emails, or to make calls, outlining their situations so they can prescribe books that might help – books that bring escapism, that help them sleep, that teach them new cookery recipes, that make them and their children laugh.
Here is a novel that allows you to delve into the happiness and heartache of a whole cast of characters from a wide range of backgrounds: some alone, some together fifty years; some young, some old. And while books can’t stop the devastation of a global pandemic that claims loved ones, or the hurt that comes from a broken heart, they are still there as characters enjoy moments of elation, of joy, and as they weep when their worlds fall apart. Here is a novel that prescribes its readers, as well as its characters, books that we just might need some day.
My final recommendation is a shout-out for the debut publication by Llanelli writer, Joshua Jones, to be published by Parthian Books in November 2023. I’ve been very lucky to get my hands on a sensational three-story sampler of Local Fires courtesy of the publisher (thank you, Parthian!).
Joshua Jones is one to watch. These interlinked stories are rooted in the author’s birthplace in South Wales, and in the three I’ve read so far, there is a blaze of originality in style, tone, voice, and observation. I cannot wait for the rest of the collection.