Book Review: A Song for Issy Bradley by Carys Bray

A Song For Issy Bradley is a rare book, one with such emotional honesty that you feel it must have been ripped straight from the heart of its author and transplanted onto the page.

The Bradleys could be any other ordinary family living in the north-west of England - but they're not. They're Mormons and Ian, husband of Claire and father of the four Bradley children, is a Bishop so dedicated to his flock that he misses his son Jacob's seventh birthday party. Claire is preoccupied with preparations for the day and the older two children each have their own worries; seventeen-year-old Zippy thinks she's in love and son Alma would rather be playing football. Nobody notices little Issy, spiralling into the clutches of an illness that's far beyond the reach of a hurried dose of Calpol.

The death of a child can never be an easy subject to read or write about, but in Carys Bray's hands it becomes a sensitive and profound exploration of bereavement, unfolding from the perspective of each member of the Bradley family as they struggle to come to terms with guilt and loss. Claire begins to question the very basis of her faith which was never as strong as her husband's, while Ian sees death as a temporary parting until the family can be reunited in the Celestial Kingdom. Zippy and Alma are already questioning a world where men are expected to go on a mission to convert non-believers and women to marry and have children. But it is young Jacob, steeped in the power of miracles both great and small, who often touches the heart most of all:

Dad said he would understand it better when he was older. But Jacob understood something right then. If he wanted Issy back, he was going to have to make it happen himself.

From the very first page, it's clear that A Song For Issy Bradley is a novel which will force you to face some of your deepest fears and, in doing so, move you to tears. It's enhanced by an elegantly detailed sense of place, as when Claire walks along the beach near her home:

The track is sandier now, damp and sticky, gritty, like cake mix. It's stamped with a network of prints. There are wide tide-marks from cockling vehicles and thinner tracks from bicycles. There are footprints, paw prints and birds' prints, some tiny, others surprisingly large, pronged like windmill blades. As she continues, the texture of the sand changes; it is speckled with a mosaic of broken shell pieces which draw her towards the sea like a trail of breadcrumbs. 

What I wasn't expecting is that just as your tears are in danger of becoming a river, there's laughter to stem the flow. The Bradley family are contemporary, believable and so real that you begin to inhabit their characters. You feel Alma's frustration as he's expected to clean the chapel toilets on a Saturday afternoon rather than go to football training and touch Zippy's horror when a photograph of herself in her Mum's wedding dress ends up on Facebook. Most of all, you wish you could reach out and give Jacob a big hug, while at the same time suppressing a smile as his attempts at the miraculous go awry.

In this, her debut novel, Carys Bray writes about the Mormon church with an eye for the everyday and a fascinating insider's knowledge, having been born, brought up and married in the faith. If, like Ian, you accept its beliefs without question, there's clearly comfort in this certainty, but there's also no allowance for a doubt like Claire's nor for a way of mourning which deviates from the prescribed path. You can sense the restriction in adhering to doctrines at such variance with secular society, especially for teenagers like Alma and Zippy, who just want to fit in with their friends.

Carys and her husband lost one of their own children as the result of an inherited metabolic disease, a tragedy which brings a searing truthfulness to her writing. Yet, although she and her family have now left the Mormon church, her often forensic depiction of its members and routines still retains a great deal of sympathy.

From its cover to its final page, A Song For Issy Bradley is a beautifully balanced and delicately expressed novel both inside and out. Through tears and laughter, there is great courage in this miraculous book and it is this which, despite the depths of one family's devastation, makes it such an ultimately warm and uplifting read.


A Song For Issy Bradley is published in the U.K on 19th June 2014, many thanks to Hutchinson for my advance copy. 

If you'd like to find out more about how this book's lovely cover was created then click here.

The #Bookaday Challenge

The Borough Press's June #Bookaday Challenge on Twitter is a lovely thing, isn't it?

I thought it might be interesting to keep a weekly blog record, so here are my days 1 - 8

Day 1

My favourite childhood book was Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder, far better than on TV #bookaday pic.twitter.com/2dNyyTe1eh
— Claire Thinking (@clairethinking) June 1, 2014

Day 2

Bought these a few years ago at a jumble sale. I think they were 5p each, so they really were a bargain #bookaday pic.twitter.com/PyDFgp5YZY
— Claire Thinking (@clairethinking) June 2, 2014

Day 3

My #bookaday blue book was written under a pseudonym and inspired many feminists (Vera Brittain and Winifred Holtby) pic.twitter.com/FKR4KmAZwP
— Claire Thinking (@clairethinking) June 3, 2014

Day 4 (A bit of a cop out)

Least favourite book by a favourite author? Don't like being negative, so I'm going for Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird* #Bookaday
— Claire Thinking (@clairethinking) June 4, 2014

*Also my most favourite #bookaday
— Claire Thinking (@clairethinking) June 4, 2014

Day 5

Borrowed First They Killed My Father from my friend Liz; harrowing but uplifting Cambodian survival memoir http://t.co/osUr9GIThb #bookaday
— Claire Thinking (@clairethinking) June 5, 2014

Day 6

#bookaday Don't really have one book I always give - try to tailor to the person. Latest was Maggie O'Farrell's Instructions for a Heatwave
— Claire Thinking (@clairethinking) June 6, 2014

Day 7

Book I'd forgotten I owned - illustrated copy of Cranford from 1951, what a lovely thing to rediscover #bookaday pic.twitter.com/Aib3ga1l9E
— Claire Thinking (@clairethinking) June 7, 2014

Day 8

I have no fewer than four copies of Pride and Prejudice! The Pan Classic is my original @BoroughPress #bookaday pic.twitter.com/K0AeD6ZksA
— Claire Thinking (@clairethinking) June 8, 2014

Book Review: The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri

I'm sneaking in a last minute review, ahead of this evening's announcement of the winner of The Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction. Jhumpa Lahiri's latest novel is one of the shortlisted six, and if I don't write about it now, I'm afraid my opinion might be forever coloured by knowing the outcome.

The Lowland is the story of two Indian brothers, Subhash and Udayan Mitra, born in Calcutta in the 1960s. Close in age and 'similar enough in build to draw from a single pile of clothes', they're often mistaken for each other, conditioned to answer to either name. But their personalities are different; Subhash, born first, is placid and obedient, while Udayan is more daring.

Communist ideas are spreading civil unrest throughout the country and beyond, and, as they grow into adulthood, Udayan becomes increasingly involved with the Naxalites. They practice an ideology prepared to resort to violence in support of the peasant sharecroppers of West Bengal and, despite Udayan's attempts to get his brother to join him, Subhash cannot approve and decides to pursue his studies in America. Udayan begs him not to

'You're the other side of me, Subhash. It's without you that I'm nothing. Don't go.'

But despite this, it's Udayan who's first to leave, travelling outside the city. As Subhash departs for Rhode Island and a university campus where he's the only foreigner, their parents are left alone in their house in the district of Tollygunge, building an extension for a family that seems increasingly remote.

The first part of The Lowland sets out the prevailing political situation and, although it also introduces the two brothers, it seems quite slow to build. Once Subhash moves to America, his experiences as a stranger in a foreign land, building his first tentative relationships, are more engaging. And when Udayan's actions draw Subhash back to his parents' home in Calcutta, the impact of events really begins to take hold.

The overall effect is to catch you unawares; the narrative encircles you as it's told from multiple perspectives, layering its insights over the decades, until it has you in its grasp. Lahiri examines both the immigrant experience and the sensation of returning to a homeland which has moved on. She meditates on the ties of family, on love and loss, ideology and the pursuit of your own course regardless of the needs of others.

The beautifully descriptive and measured prose returns time and again to the lowland behind the Mitra's home in Tollygunge. Sometimes this land contains two separate ponds, choking with water hyacinth, but during the monsoon season it floods, so they merge and overflow. It is a childhood playground, a life-changing hiding place and a site for remembrance which might simply cease to be.

By the time I'd finished reading, although never quite shaking off a certain sense of detachment, I loved this book. Does its evocative ending make up for its slow beginning? I'm not sure, but we'll soon find out whether the judges of the Baileys Prize think it does.




The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri is published in the U.K. by Bloomsbury. Thanks to The Book Club (@_bookclub) for my prize-winning copy. 

Theatre Review: An August Bank Holiday Lark at The Everyman, Cheltenham

The verses of Philip Larkin's poem MCMXIV, from which Deborah McAndrew's new play takes its title, talk of 'sun on moustached archaic faces' and 'place-names all hazed over with flowering grasses'. This sense of a more innocent, bygone era is reflected in the opening of An August Bank Holiday Lark as, in the summer of 1914, the villagers of a rural community in East Lancashire prepare for the celebration of Wakes week.

This is a time when farmers and mill workers can rest from their year-round toil, the highlight being the annual Rushbearing festival, when a decorated cart is pulled through the streets accompanied by Morris dancers. The forces of war may already be mobilising around Europe, but they are as yet a distant rumble for these villagers. In this long established community, families like the Farrars and the Armitages have rubbed along side by side for generations; not without their hardships, as working conditions at the nearby mill have all too often taken their toll.

The first half of this play, presented by Northern Broadsides in partnership with the New Vic Theatre, is suffused with humour, bringing us a glimpse of life as it was. As their parents squabble over escaped hens, young Frank Armitage (Darren Kuppan) and Mary Farrar (Emily Butterfield) carry on their courting in secret, afraid that Mary's father John (Barrie Rutter) will disapprove. John is Squire of the local Morris men, a group so imbued with tradition that he counsels the younger generation against the introduction of any fancy new dance steps. Despite this, as the village men don their clogs, practices are often riotous and hilarious opportunities for teasing and flirtation. Women, not yet given the vote and under no circumstances allowed to join in the dancing, still have a role in sewing costumes and playing the accompanying music. It's infectiously rousing and, as the Rushcart is constructed before our eyes and paraded by men with hats adorned with fresh flowers and ribbons, the audience is soon clapping and cheering along with the imaginary crowds.

But we know too well that this rural community is set to be torn asunder. Many of the young men sign up enthusiastically with their local recruiting officer, keen to see more of the world in a war which will be over by Christmas. After the interval, the tone becomes darker; although there's still a wedding to enjoy it's cut short as the men who've completed their training are sent to fight in Gallipoli. And with the date of the next Rushcart festival approaching, the villagers who remain behind plan to hold it in honour of their absent men, only to find themselves in a world where such celebrations no longer have any place.

An August Bank Holiday Lark is a significant piece of new writing by Deborah McAndrew, who has collaborated previously with Northern Broadsides and teaches at Staffordshire University. It was originally performed in the round at the New Vic Theatre in Newcastle-under-Lyme, the theatre of my childhood where I still recall first seeing Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. The force that is Barrie Rutter (the man who cast Lenny Henry as Othello) not only commissioned and directs the play but also takes the role of John Farrar with great distinction and draws some excellent performances from his capable cast. Lauryn Redding in particular is notable as the often comic mill worker Susie Hughes.

The play's set and costumes are reminiscent of War Horse, with Joey replaced by a Rushcart; a marvel of construction built and dismantled again for every performance. Adapted for the proscenium arch, on a few occasions it does feel as though the cast has too far to run on and off stage. Then, in the wedding breakfast scene, the table is mysteriously set right at the back, so that even those of us in the stalls are unable to see clearly what's going on (my theory is that the cast have eaten all of the much admired wedding cake and are having to cover this up).

An August Bank Holiday Lark is by turns a funny, sad, wise and ultimately moving commemoration of the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War. It embodies the transition in Larkin's poem, to a world where those flowering grasses are 'shadowing Domesday lines under wheat's restless silence' and there is 'never such innocence again'. This play deserves to be seen and pondered over by as wide an audience as possible, lest we should ever dare to forget.


Photos courtesy of Northern Broadsides. An August Bank Holiday Lark continues on tour until 14th June 2014, details here.

Love, Nina by Nina Stibbe

I've mentioned before how certain books can be so mismatched with your life when you read them, that you find yourself right out of kilter. Like when I picked up Bridget Jones's Diary just after having my first baby, thinking it might provide some relief from the exhausting new routinelessness of round the clock feeding and mustardy poo. I was wrong and instead ended up almost projectile vomiting her annoying singleton obsessions straight out of the nearest window.

But sometimes book-timing can be serendipitously in kilter too, as I discovered while reading Love, Nina by Nina Stibbe. This collection of letters, telling of one nanny's real life experiences in a 1980s literary Camden household, proved to be an unexpected hit last Christmas; a wittily understated, welcome interlude in a seasonal best-seller chart more usually choked with vapid celebrity autobiographies. Sub-titled Despatches from Family Life, it has also proved the perfect comic antidote to the exam-related stress coursing through the collective veins of my own family this summer, as GCSEs take their toll.

Aged twenty, Nina moves from Leicester to Gloucester Crescent in north London to take a job as nanny for the two sons of Mary-Kay Wilmers, deputy editor of the London Review of Books. Separated from her sister Victoria (known as Vic) and without any convenient phone to hand, Nina writes to Vic about her new life with this endearingly unaffected family and their neighbours in the crescent - notably Jonathan Miller, Claire Tomalin, Michael Frayn and Alan Bennett, who often drops by for supper clutching a rice pudding. Bennett turns out to be surprisingly handy with household appliances and a general all-round dispenser of sound advice - even if he has subsequently disputed some aspects of this image.

Lacking the skills usually expected in a nanny, Nina quickly proves to be messy, disorganised, disingenuous, useless at cooking and overly fond of practical jokes.Yet she obviously fits in from the start and has a keen ear for dialogue. Many of her conversations are written verbatim, particularly those with Mary-Kay and her two boys Sam and Will; for example, when discussing Will's mark in a science test:

Will: My picture was OK but I dropped a per cent for drawing a smiley face on my sun.
Me: What's wrong with a smiley face on the sun?
Will: It's not scientific.
Sam: What's a water-cycle?
Me: An underwater bike.
MK: Don't tell him that.
Sam: It's not scientific.

The family comes across as funny, unpretentious and unflappable, while Nina seems intent on impressing her sister with anecdotes of London life. She often mentions famous people from the television that she's seen in passing - besides Alan Bennett, who's only just becoming well known, there's the likes of Joan Thirkettle (newsreader) and the posh bloke from Rising Damp. There's a great deal of food discussion, from the questionable qualities of turkey mince to the wisdom of making home-made chewing gum out of Blu-Tack and toothpaste. You wonder about Vic's replies to Nina's letters (do they still exist?), although there are often tantalising hints when Nina mentions her varied success in trying out her sister's recipes or the goings-on in the nursing home where Vic works.

Nina begins to study English literature and becomes a student at Thames Polytechnic. Developing strong opinions about her set texts, she dislikes Hardy, Chaucer and Shakespeare but loves many of the American playwrights like Arthur Miller and Edward Albee and the great Irish poet Seamus Heaney, whose pen she describes as 'an embarrassment to him for not being a spade.' 

If it seems at times that there's not much of a narrative drive, then this is deceptive - as Nina herself says (of the writing of J.M Synge)

Simple. Just telling what people are doing and saying. No moral. No symbolism.

For those of us of a certain age, it's great to remember Toffos (described as naked Rolos) and how we used to roam freely without the constant need to check in on a mobile phone. I worked in Camden in the late 1980s and was thrilled to recognise some of the landmarks in this slightly scruffy, Bohemian, not quite yet up-and-coming world. I can still remember my excitement at finding out that Alan Bennett lived in the area, having watched Single Spies in the West End (the double bill of his plays An Englishman Abroad and A Question of Attribution which he wrote, co-directed and appeared in).

There are hints of more serious themes; Sam has some disabilities and attends regular appointments at Great Ormond Street Hospital. Occasionally, it's mentioned that he's been very ill. One of Nina's tutors dies too young and when she dwells on another death, Mark-Kay tells her

Don't do that thing of making it an excuse to do less. Do more.

This is a warm, perceptive delight of a book by a writer with a huge talent for comedy. Reminded of the joys of the lost art of letter writing, never quite to be replicated by emails or texts, it also sent me scurrying to reach my dusty copy of Helene Hanff's 84 Charing Cross Road down from my bookshelves. Love, Nina is recommended for those suffering from the stress of exams, Christmas or virtually anything else where great gales of laughter are needed.

Nina Stibbe's first novel Man At The Helm is due out in August 2014 (those of us at the Penguin Blogger's night back in March have already had the privilege of hearing her reading an excerpt) and that too promises to be a treat.



Love, Nina is published in the U.K. by Penguin Books, thanks to Penguin for my review copy.

Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is already a force to be reckoned with in contemporary African literature, her work focusing an unblinkered gaze on her native Nigeria. Like a mother with an errant child, she knows her country inside out, well aware of its faults and failures but loving it nonetheless. Having lapped up her previous two novels and read a raft of glowing reviews for her latest, the 2014 Baileys Prize-shortlisted Americanah, there seemed little likelihood that I wouldn't enjoy it.

Ifemelu and Obinze meet as teenagers in a Lagos school. To stay together, they choose the same university in Nsukka, but Nigeria's military dictatorship is falling apart and extended strikes jeopardise their education. Ifemelu grasps her opportunity to study in America but events conspire to keep Obinze away. While she sinks beneath the weight of her immigrant status and the lengths she has to go to for rent money, he must settle for attempting a new life in Britain instead.

At its heart, Americanah is a tender love story, beginning in adolescence

she liked that he wore their relationship so boldly, like a brightly coloured shirt. Sometimes she worried that she was too happy. She would sink into moodiness or snap at Obinze, or be distant. And her joy would become a restless thing, flapping its wings inside her, as though looking for an opening to fly away.

It's a vital young bond which nevertheless struggles to survive once Ifemelu and Obinze are continents apart. With Adichie there's always more than one dimension, and in Americanah her writing develops into an examination of the immigrant experience. So deeply perceptive is she and her characters so vividly portrayed, that you become more than just involved, you find yourself inhabiting them

She woke up torpid each morning, slowed by sadness, frightened by the endless stretch of day that lay ahead. Everything had thickened. She was swallowed, lost in a viscous haze, shrouded in a soup of nothingness. Between her and what she should feel, there was a gap. 

As Ifemelu struggles on the edge of society, alienated yet clear-sighted, she observes differences of race and identity, regarding herself as black for the first time. In America, she envies others their ease, watching her friend Ginika

There were codes Ginika knew, ways of being that she had mastered...Ginika had come to America with the flexibility and fluidness of youth, the cultural clues had seeped into her skin and now she went bowling, and knew what Tobey Maguire was about, and found double dipping gross.

At the beginning of the novel, Ifemelu travels to a New Jersey salon to have her hair braided, an act representative of the themes Adichie is about to explode. Why should African hair so often be deemed unacceptable in its natural state and why does Ifemelu have to travel from tranquil, affluent Princeton into the depths of Trenton to find a place where it can be braided?

Of Igbo descent, it's only in America that Ifemelu becomes acutely aware of the distinction between tribes. Her observations are often wryly amusing, noticing the lengths many Americans take to avoid describing a person by their colour and their assumption that the foreign poor are all equally blameless and somehow canonised by their poverty. She starts an outspoken, often tongue-in-cheek blog about race and its hierarchy, the 'slippery layers of meaning that eluded her'.

Adichie could write about the contents of your sock drawer and make them fascinating and in Americanah she mines a rich seam with every act, every sentence full of nuance. Switching back and forth between Ifemelu's present and her past in Nigeria, the two eventually merge as she's drawn back to a homeland at once familiar and strange, where Obinze is now living the life of a successful, married businessman.

This is an incisive, often funny and always ambitious book. If, at times, I found it harder to recognise Obinze's snapshot of Britain, this is likely because my own experiences are very different to his. Americanah must be a very strong contender to win The Baileys Prize because to read it is so much more than simple enjoyment; it's an immersive phenomenon which leaves you with a sense of bereavement when you're forced, kicking and screaming, to put it down.


Americanah is published in paperback in Great Britain by Fourth Estate. The winner of the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction 2014 will be announced on June 4th.

Photo of Americanah courtesy of Waterstones.

NippleJesus at The Rondo Theatre, Bath

Shane Morgan's adaptation of NippleJesus, the tale of a security guard and his relationship with the artwork he's protecting, is as deceptively simple as the original short story by Nick Hornby.

In this one-man show Morgan is Dave, a nightclub bouncer who's jacked in his job after being threatened one time too many. Taken on by a contemporary art gallery, he's expecting regular hours and a quiet life but begins to suspect he's been chosen for a special sort of mission. Dave is a big bloke and the work he'll be guarding is controversial, but all he's told as he's led to a curtained-off side-room with a warning notice is to expect trouble. It's the complexities of his relationship with the picture behind the curtain, its creator and ragtag collection of visitors, which lie at the heart of this story.

Morgan begins his piece seated by a table at the back of an otherwise virtually empty stage, reading the newspaper and snacking on crisps and coke. As the story unfolds, with pared-back use of lighting and music, he very effectively recreates the curtained-off space and brings to life the presence of the picture.

Dave is your average man in the street with little interest in art, the first to admit that he'd usually be outraged if he read in the papers of a religious icon depicted through the medium of pornography. The beauty in this adaptation is how closely we're able to examine Dave's reactions as he grapples with the picture's meaning and develops protective feelings towards the work and its creator. Morgan is an entirely believable Dave and succeeds in bringing out the nuances and humour of Hornby's pin-sharp writing, the bigger questions behind this Everyman tale. He's the hard guy with unexpectedly intelligent and fuzzy edges, who finds them firming up again as the real reason behind his involvement becomes clear.

NippleJesus was first published in 2000 and the adaptation premiered at the Sidney Fringe Festival in 2001. It's been touring the world on and off ever since and the performance I saw was a preview of its most recent incarnation. It's still pretty faithful to the original story with only minor updating and deserving of the tour Morgan is working towards later in 2014.

I did mention a virtually empty stage. Let it be said I felt sorry for the onion*, but apparently, no vegetables were harmed during the course of this production. It's a clever and funny story, existentialism with humour so well delivered on the night. And that's never a simple thing to do.


NippleJesus is Shane Morgan's one-man show for Roughhouse Theatre. I saw it at The Rondo Theatre, Bath on 2nd May 2014. Many thanks to Shane/Roughhouse/The Rondo for my tickets.

NippleJesus is part of a short story collection Speaking with the Angel published by Riverhead Books.

*later humanely incorporated into a spaghetti bolognese.