Reads for 2016

This year I'm keeping it very simple. Over on my PhD blog, Care Leavers in Fiction, I have a tab 'Orphan Lit' where I have begun to review just that. I will begin 2016, by reading books about orphans, foundlings and abandoned children. Starting with:

My January read for #ReadDiverse2016

Butterfly Fish by Irenosen Okojie

I first heard an extract from Butterfly Fish at last year's Finchley Literary Festival. I knew immediately that Irenosen had the gift for storytelling. It's been on my #TBR list since then. The narrative travels back and forth from 21st century London to the 19th century kingdom of Benin with a splash of magical realism. As photographer Joy, now an orphan, tries to make sense of her dead mother's past.

Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs

A mysterious island. An abandoned orphanage. And a strange collection of very curious photographs. The title grabbed my attention some time ago, Christmas book tokens meant it crossed off my #TBB list.

My Name is Leon by Kit de Waal

My Name is Leon, features a child in foster care. Leon is nine, and has a perfect baby brother called Jake. They have gone to live with Maureen, who has fuzzy red hair like a halo, and a belly like Father Christmas. But the adults are speaking in low voices, and wearing Pretend faces. They are threatening to give Jake to strangers. Since Jake is white and Leon is not. This book has had a huge amount of interest and it isn't even due to be published until June! I'm very lucky to have received a copy from Penguin so will get to reading that immediately.

Under the Visible Life by Kim Echlin

Fatherless Katherine carries the stigma of her mixed-race background through an era that is hostile to her and all she represents. It is only through music that she finds the freedom to temporarily escape and dream of a better life for herself. Orphaned Mahsa also grows up in the shadow of loss, sent to relatives in Pakistan after the death of her parents. She finds herself forced into an arranged marriage. For Mahsa, too, music becomes her solace and allows her to escape from her oppressive circumstances.

The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt

Aged thirteen, Theo Decker, son of a devoted mother and a reckless, largely absent father, survives an accident that otherwise tears his life apart. Orphaned and alone in New York, he is taken in by the family of a wealthy friend. He is tormented by an unbearable longing for his mother, and down the years clings to the thing that most reminds him of her: a small, strangely captivating painting that ultimately draws him into the criminal underworld.

A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara

The story of a boy who is chronically, outrageously abused by a series of adults tasked with his care, and his struggles to forget the nightmare of his childhood. I usually steer clear of books about abuse, but as this was shortlisted for the Man Booker, and there has been a lot of discussion about it, I feel I will learn a lot from the writing.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson

The original title in Swedish is Men who hate Women. is a crime novel by the Swedish author and journalist Stieg Larsson (1954-2004) which, when published posthumously in 2005, became a best-seller. As a child, Salander was declared a danger to herself and others by the court at age thirteen, and sent for treatment at the St. Stefan's Psychiatric Clinic for Children. She was eventually allowed out she was sent to various foster homes. Larsson stated that he based the character of Lisbeth Salander on what he imagined Pippi Longstocking might have been like as an adult. I've seen the film and have been wanting to read this for some time.

Borderline's by Peter Hoeg

When I asked Twitter if anyone knew of any fiction with care leavers. Dr Yvon Guest, recommended Borderline's by Peter Hoeg. Yvon said: It was mind blowing. And that it changes one's perception of time.

The Rainbow Troops by Andrea Hirata

Recommended by Murni, one of the Greenacre Writers, when we were discussing orphans in literature. This book is partly autobiographical, and tells the story of a group of ten children, all from impoverished backgrounds who attend a small local school. Corrupt officials want to close the school down, but the children and their dedicated teacher Bu Mas who is just fifteen years old when the novel opens, triumph on. I'm looking forward to reading about Lintang, orphan and maths genius.

The Fish Ladder by Katharine Norbury

Katharine Norbury was abandoned as a baby in a Liverpool convent. Raised by loving adoptive parents, she grew into a wanderer, drawn by the beauty of the British countryside. Combining travelogue, memoir, nature writing, fragments of poetry and tales from Celtic mythology, The Fish Ladder has a rare emotional resonance. A portrait of motherhood, of a literary marriage and a hymn to the adoptive family.

Happy Reading everyone!!!

David Bowie, My Hero.

There will be thousands of tributes to Mr Bowie. I want to add my voice because he was such a source of inspiration and support when I was growing up.

Growing up in care in the 1970s, was no mean feat. As well as what goes on in a children's home, the weird relationships with staff and social workers, and the other children - all vying for the 'favourite' spot, there was also the outside world.

In 1934, when Friern Barnet Urban District Council, wanted to turn a corner house in Sutton Road, Muswell Hill, into a children's home, there was a major outcry. Residents of the neighbourhood, petitioned the council urging them to 'take immediate steps to oppose the acquisition of these premises for such a purpose'. Even the local council estate residents got involved, pleased that they could join the affluents for a change, instead of fingers being pointed at them. The Minister of Health inspected the house and approved its use as a children's home and that was the end of the protestations.

So you can probably understand that I most definitely felt like a freak, when I was younger. Not only felt it all around me, but I had mad bushy hair and definitely stood out in a crowd. Kids at school called me 'birds nest'.

When I glimpsed a tweet yesterday, from Paris Lees*, which read: 'I don't usually cry when someone famous dies but misfits everywhere should weep out on the streets today. RIP Bowie.' I did indeed empathise with those words, having been crying most of the day myself. The only difference being that now my misfittingness is a blessing. Normality, and all that goes with it, is an anathema to me.

Growing up in 1970s Muswell Hill with its own peculiar brand of North Londonish, was an amazing experience, though I didn't know it at the time. Hearing Space Oddity, when I was eleven, was like nothing I'd heard before. My musical knowledge at the time consisted of hits on the radio or musicals. We'd go to the local cinema or West End theatre and see the latest film or play being shown, like Oliver, or the Sound of Music. Somebody would buy the LP, and that would be that. I'd play the songs over and over until I knew all the words. People talk about the first record that they ever bought, but I really can't remember, because music was very much a part of being in the children's home. Trips out for the day or holidays, always involved singing songs, Oh, you'll never to get heaven or Michael rowed his boat ashore. I even pestered my local priest for hymns at the morning service like they had at the nearby Methodist church. We had a music room with a piano, a record player, and any other instrument that staff happened to play. Plus, I had piano and ballet lessons as well as being in the operatic society at school.

A poster from the 70s, still on my wall.

Soon after Hang on to Yourself, hit the charts, I became friends with a couple of boys in East Finchley, one of whom would go on to become writer. J.J. Donnelly, of Layer Cake, fame, and my first claim to fame. Though I just knew him as John, and that we were both crazy about Bowie.

My second claim to fame, would come fifteen years later when I was pregnant with my third child. The brother, of one of the staff in the children's home, who I was still in touch with, was involved with the video, Absolute Beginners, and they wanted a pregnant woman as an extra. I was so excited, I nearly gave birth on the spot. In the end I wasn't needed as they used a model. But hey, that was another nearly moment...

While Ray Davies was releasing Muswell Hillbillies in 1971, I was thirteen, and buying the Hunky Dory LP at Les Aldrich's record shop in Fortis Green Road. In 72, Changes, was released. The lyrics were perfect for young people who were going through turmoil and the changes in society. There was a huge shift from uniformity to an explosion of colour, music, clothes, and art.

And these children that you spit on

As they try to change their worlds

Are immune to your consultations

They're quite aware of what they're going through

[Changes, 1972]

As well as the music which had a deep rhythmic resonance for me, it was also the lyrics that made sense in a sort of nonsensical way. A kind of poetry in song:

He's so simple minded 

he can't drive his module

He bites on the neon and sleeps in the capsule

Loves to be loved, loves to be loved 

[The Jean Genie, 1972]

Meanwhile in real life, my mother had killed herself and I officially became an orphan. I was going to youth clubs, discos and learning to dance. In the rest of the UK, there were strikes and protests. Everyone was frightened to travel on public transport because the IRA were bombing us. The government raised the school leaving age to 16 which upset many of us. We even bunked off school and went into central London to protest.

In 1973, Life on Mars? was released as a single and like Bowie, I was experimenting with drugs and drink. A year to the day my mother died, I ended up in hospital with alcohol poisoning. 

At 15, the same age as Bowie's daughter, Alexandria Zahra Jones, is now, came Sorrow. I've thought a lot about David's family in the last 24 hours and their request for privacy at this very sad time. I hope they get their privacy. I also hope that eventually, they will at least get some relief, knowing over the last fifty years, he was such an amazing influence on millions of people all over the world. Not just that he was an influence, but that he helped weirdos, freaks and outsiders everywhere cope with their trauma, sadness and misfittingness.

I don't usually get upset when somebody famous dies so I was quite shocked at my reaction to the news of David Bowie's death. I quite literally sobbed. I can only guess that his voice; his words; his artistry; and his music became part of me, part of my growing up and when I heard the news, it was as if I had lost a part of myself.

In 1974, Rebel Rebel, was released. In effect it was Bowie's farewell to the glam rock movement that he had helped pioneer. Age sixteen, holding hands with my first boyfriend, I said my farewells to the children's home. I knew that even though I would never go back there, my relationship with David Bowie, would last a lifetime.

When I Live My Dream, 1966

*Paris Lees is a British journalist, presenter and transgender rights activist. 

My favourite reads from 2015

Everybody seems to be putting up lists of books they enjoyed reading in 2015. It's what a lot of readers and writers like to do. Here are ten of mine, in no particular order:

The Gap of Time (2015) by Jeanette Winterson

Winterson’s cover version of The Winter’s Tale is one of the Hogarth Shakespeare series, celebrating 400 years since the Baird was born. This fast-paced story is about a foundling, a stolen child, an abandoned child, and fits in perfectly with my obsession and PhD research about orphans and care leavers in fiction.

Half a Yellow Sun (2006) by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

I'd put off reading this text as I remembered the starving children from my childhood and was too frightened to read about the horrors of the Nigeria-Biafra war. Yet, once I'd started, and from the first page, I found myself transported and immersed in Adichie's vivid landscape and characters.

The Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend (2015) by Katarina Bivald

This is a book that I shall read again in a few years. It is a clever book and still has some way to go in being recognised as the future classic it will become.

But We All Shine On - The Remarkable Orphans of Burbank Children's Home (2014) by Paolo Hewitt

This was one of the first books I read last year, and that I had been anticipating for some time. It was worth the wait. After a childhood spent in care at Burbank Children’s Home, Paolo Hewitt embarks upon a personal journey as an adult to discover whatever happened to his close childhood friends.

Things we have in Common (2015) by Tasha Kavanagh

The novel describes a creepy tale of loneliness and teenage obsession. Poignant and darkly humourous, it was at times overwhelming - in a good way. Tasha was a guest at last year's Finchley Literary Festival*, little did we know at the time that not only would the book be shortlisted for the Not the Booker Prize, but also the Costa Book Award.

The Paying Guests (2014) by Sarah Waters

Greenacre Writers was selected as one of 12 book clubs who were shadowing the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction 2015. We were given The Paying Guests by Sarah Waters and some very nice Baileys!

The Girl with all the Gifts (2014) by Mike Carey

For the first half of this book I couldn't read past 6.00pm because I was absolutely petrified. The story seemed so real and I don't usually read books about zombies. When Mike appeared at the festival, some of us dressed up as zombies. He got us reading parts for the soon to be released film. I was Melanie, a young 'hungry' zombie, though in reality I was probably fifty years too old! Still, it was such fun and I can't wait to see the film.

A Month in the Country (1980) by J. L. Carr

On one of my recent trips to Waterstones, in North Finchley, my local bookstore, I got chatting with one of the lovely bookish assistants. We were discussing favourite books and he told me one of his was A Month in the Country. I decided to nominate it as the Greenacre Writers September Bookclub. It is the fifth novel by J. L. Carr, first published in 1980 and nominated for the Booker Prize. The book won the Guardian Fiction Prize in 1980.

The Ship (2015) by Antonia Honeywell

Antonia is one of those writers who light up a room. She attended the Finchley Lit Fest and I found myself truly inspired and moved by some of her writerly observations. The Ship is her debut novel but not her first. She has been on her writing journey for some years. In some ways, The Ship is scarier than zombies because the financial apocalypse could happen at any moment.

Liccle Bit (2015) by Alex Wheatle

Another FLF favourite guest. When I read this YA book, I was so impressed by the use of language I began raving about it immediately. It's both funny and heartbreakingly moving. It takes as its subject, the dangerous ease with which young boys can get involved with gangs. At its heart is family, or the lack of it and the dangers this can bring. Liccle Bit has recently been nominated for the 2016 CILIP Carnegie Medal.


All that is left for me to do now, is wish you a very healthy, creative, and booky New Year.


*We were thrilled that Finchley Literary Festival was awarded 'Best event of the in Barnet' by the Barnet Eye Community awards. For all the other categories and winners see The Barnet Eye Community Awards.

Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

I remember seeing starving Biafran children and babies with protruding stomachs on the television in the early 70s. I was living in a children’s home in Muswell Hill and two friends had come round for tea. We were chatting about the disco the coming Friday and practising the shuffle to Sex Machine by James Brown. Life was fun and we spent most of our time together bent over double, laughing hysterically. But when the horrific aftermath of war suddenly came into the living room I was shocked, first into silence, and then into floods of tears.

Recently, that memory came back when I began reading Half a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. I now have a context to that memory, the history of the Biafran war. Through the medium of television, I saw children much worse off than myself. Possibly for the first time, and I never forgot those children, or the ravages of war and what guns do to innocent victims. 

The novel recreates a seminal moment in modern African history: Biafra’s impassioned struggle to establish an independent republic in Nigeria, and the chilling violence that followed. Everything that happens within Half of a Yellow Sun has a cause, and often someone to blame along with it, with the British and the Hausa earning their fair shares. The reader is reminded that Britain and Russia supplied arms to the Nigerians. Adichie goes back in time through the remembered experience of her parents and family and those that didn’t survive. Beginning with the dedication:

My grandfathers, whom I never knew, Nwoye David Adichie and AroNweke Felix Odigwe, did not survive the war. My grandmothers, Nwabuodu Regina Odigwe and Nwamgbafor Agnes Adichie, remarkable women both, did. This book is dedicated to their memories: ka fa nodu na ndokwa. And to Mellitus, wherever he may be.

Mellitus, was Adichi’s parents’ houseboy during the war. She brings Mellitus back to life and tells his story, giving his memory a voice. Half of a Yellow Sun, is Adichie’s second novel and received the 2007 Orange Prize for Fiction. It takes its title from the flag for Biafra.

Red was the blood of the sibling massacred in the North, back was for mourning them, green was for the prosperity Biafra would have, and, finally, the half of a yellow sun stood for the glorious future.

The novel opens before the war, shortly after Nigeria wins independence from the UK, when middle-class life at Nsukka University is rich in food, booze, revolutionary rhetoric and hope. Ugwu, an Igbo boy from a bush village, goes to Nsukka to work as a houseboy for Odenigbo, a professor and radical.

Master was a little crazy; he had spent too many years reading books overseas, talked to himself in his office, did not always return greets, and had too much hair. Ugwu’s aunty said this in low voice as they walked on the path. ‘But he is a good man,’ she added. ‘And as long as you work well, you will eat well. You will even eat meat every day.’ She stopped to spit; the saliva left her mouth with a sucking sound and landed on the grass.

The book is written in four parts. Part One: The Early Sixties; Part Two: The Late Sixties; Part Three: The Early Sixties; and Part Four: The Late Sixties.

The narrative focus shifts between various characters attached to the university: Ugwu, Odenigbo, his beautiful girlfriend Olanna, and Richard, an English ex-pat who falls in love with Nigerian art and then Olanna's twin sister.

‘Nigerian food is quite all right, Harrison,’ Richard said. If only Harrison knew how much he had disliked the food of his childhood, the sharp-tasting kippers full of bones, the porridge with the appalling thick skin on top like a waterproof lining, the overcooked roast beef with fat around the edges drenched in gravy.

Food at the beginning of the book represents the affluence of their lifestyles, there is plenty of it, an abundance. As the circumstances change, so too does the food.

Nsukka University is evacuated, and Olanna, Odenigbo, Ugwu, and Baby move to the cities of Abba and then Umuahia. Their living situations get progressively worse as the war continues and Biafra’s food and money runs out.

Olanna glanced at the clutter that was their room and home – the bed, two yam tubers, and the mattress that leanded against the dirt-smeared wall, the cartons and bags piled in a corner, the kerosene stove that she took to the kitchen only when it was needed – and felt a surge of revulsion, the urge to run and run and run until she was far away from it all.

Food is symbolic of the progress of the war and the situation of the country. As distribution of food ceases and people start to starve, disease follows. Olanna meticulously searches Babie’s head for red hair and compares other children’s bellies to her daughter’s in search for signs of Kwashiorkor, malnutrition caused by lack of protein.

Were you silent when we died?

Did you see photos in sixty-eight 

Of children with their hair becoming rust:

Sickly patches nestled on those small heads,

Then falling off, like rotten leaves on dust?

The reader witnesses the role the media played in distributing images of starving children. “The world was silent when we died”, is a book that sometimes interrupts the narrative. It is being written by an unknown author who describes the larger political forces at work in the war. 

We are led to believe it is Richard writing the book, mainly because he is trying to write one throughout the novel. Adichie is playing with some reader's assumption that it is the white, western male that writes about Africa, rather than say a young, black village boy. She says: “I wanted to make a strongly-felt political point about who should be writing the stories of Africa.”

Half of a Yellow Sun has recently been named the best of the best winner from the last decade of the women’s prize for fiction both by the public and a 10-strong judging panel. Read more here.

I had put off reading Half a Yellow Sun, for quite some time. There were a number of reasons for this. The main one being the memory of the horror in the living room when I was thirteen. However, I was intrigued by Adichie and her stories and I wanted to read and learn more. The final push came a few weeks ago when a few bloggers and writers started tweeting about #DiverseDecember. You can read more about that here.

I found myself totally immersed in the lives of the characters who immediately came to life in my imagination. I understand how the war started, how those babies on the screen back in 1971 came to be there - even though the war had ended in 1970, their starvation continued for some years.

I'm looking forward to joining other writers and readers for #ReadDiverse2016 where I'll not only be reading BAME books, but also other diverse books and in particular books about care leavers who are totally under-represented in UK literature. The literature of the world should (by now) reflect the people of the world.

The Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend - Katarina Bivald

A strange woman is standing on Hope’s main street. ‘Hope’ presumably an optimistic place, but Sara isn’t staying there, only passing through to the aptly named Broken Wheel.

Her hair was a nondescript shade of brown, held back with a carelessly placed hair clip which didn’t stop it flowing down over her shoulders in a tangle of curls. Where her face should have been, there was a copy of Louisa May Alcott’s An Old Fashioned Girl.

The literary allusion to Alcott’s Girl, sees the protagonist, Polly, leave the country to visit her wealthy city friend, Fanny. Sara has left Sweden to visit the USA. There are parallels between the two - though Broken Wheel, is not much more than ‘one big street’ rather than a city. And although initially Polly is rejected by the Fanny’s friends, Sara, is pretty much accepted straightaway.

This is a book about books and clues, clues that are littered throughout the text as the narrator and the town decide how Sara’s literary life will pan out.

Sara is 28, and has never been outside Sweden – except in the (many) books she reads. When her elderly penfriend Amy invites her to come and visit her in Broken Wheel, Iowa, Sara decides it’s time. But when she arrives, there’s a twist waiting for her – Amy has died. Finding herself utterly alone in a dead woman’s house in the middle of nowhere was not the holiday Sara had in mind.

As Sara reflects on how she has used books to hide away from life, she remembers how classmates carved meaningless symbols into desks or on lockers, while:

...she had been a geisha in Japan, walked alongside China’s last empress through the claustrophobic, closed-off rooms of the Forbidden City, grown up with Anne and the others in Green Gables, gone through her fair share of murder, and loved and lost over and over again.

[A few pages later]

Reading books isn't a bad way to live your life, but lately Sara had begun to wonder what kind of life it was, exactly. She had first been struck by this thought when she found out that Josephssons would be closing. It was as though ten years of her life had disappeared along with the bookshop; as though everything she had ever been had only existed on the greyish-white bookshelves of that dusty shop, among the people who bought four-for-three paperbacks in the summer, and anything-at-all-that-was-shiny-and-wrapped-up at Christmas.

Amy accompanies Sara’s narrative journey so the reader gets to see how their relationship evolved. Here in this town so broken it’s almost beyond repair are all the people she’s come to know through Amy’s letters: poor George, fierce Grace, buttoned-up Caroline and Amy’s guarded nephew Tom.

Sara finds herself staying in Amy’s house rent free, a situation she finds intolerable. She tries to find somebody to pay, but nobody wants her money. Money is symbolic, because more than anything, this is a story about community, about being needed and about belonging and that can't be bought.

Sara quickly realises that Broken Wheel is in desperate need of some adventure, a dose of self-help and perhaps a little romance, too.

There was something sad about the town, as though generations of problems and disappointments had rubbed off onto its bricks and its roads…On the other side of the road there was an advert for a pesticide: Control corn root worm! it shouted to the world, two by three metres in size and at least twenty years old.

In short, this was a town in need of a bookshop. And just as there is a romantic interest in Alcott’s Girl, namely Tom, so there is a Tom in Broken Wheel. ’It is a truth universally acknowledged that a Swedish tourist in Iowa must be in want of a man.’ No prizes for guessing the influence of that sentence.

Sara remembers a colleague from the bookshop where she worked in Sweden saying that every story begins with someone arriving somewhere – and this too refers to what this story is, and what it will become. And so as the story weaves its spell, twists, plots and allusions to literary twists, spells and plots, the narrative sometimes acts like a play, complete with stage directions. The townfolk plot and whisper prompts from the sidewings, directing and deciding which shape the story will take.

Caroline closed her eyes. The innocent tone wasn’t fooling her. My goodness, she thought. The woman had barely been in town two days and Jen had already started offering up its young men to her altar. Though, to be fair, it might just as well have been the woman being sacrificed. Like the oaks, the town’s bachelors weren’t exactly a tourist attraction…[Jen’s] gaze was fixed somewhere above Caroline’s head. ‘Don’t you think a holiday romance would be just the thing to get her to enjoy her time here?’ 

The text is littered with foreshadowing and allusions as to how stories work, particularly romance. The Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend is a book about books. All sorts of books, from Little Women and Harry Potter to Jodi Picoult and Jane Austen, from Stieg Larsson to Joyce Carol Oates to Proust. It’s about the joy and pleasure of books, about learning from and escaping into them, and possibly even hiding behind them. It’s about whether or not books are better than real life. For book lovers, this metanarrative is a joy. One that has been expertly handled, for here is a narrator, who like Sara, has spent a huge amount of time with books.

Sara feels she never belonged anywhere – save between the pages of a book – but as she becomes more involved in the town and is embraced by the residents of this far-from-perfect small town, she discovers they need her as much as she needs them.

The Readers of Broken Wheel is a lovely book, and like The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, a joy to read. It is a book that would benefit from more than one reading in order appreciate the complex narrative and literary intertwining. After such an interesting debut book, I wonder if Katarine Bivald's second book will live up to expectations. I hope so, and look forward to her new novel some time in the future.