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.

The Whitehall Mandarin

Just as a lie is most effectively hidden in truth, so fiction can be at its most convincing when intertwined with fact. And in The Whitehall Mandarin, Edward Wilson adeptly weaves his fiction together with historically accurate detail to present a broad-sweeping canvas of espionage as thrilling as it is believable.

London in 1957 is mired in the Cold War. The British are watching the Soviets pretending to be Americans. This is a familiar world for Catesby, Cambridge-educated veteran of bluff and double-bluff, whose working class upbringing nevertheless tars him forever an outsider. When a Soviet spy ring in London stops sending intelligence to Moscow, Catesby is sent to investigate where those secrets are going and discovers that the charismatic Lady Somers, first female head of the Ministry of Defence, may not be all she seems.

The Whitehall Mandarin is set on an epic scale and demands your complete attention from the off, as it shifts from clandestine meetings in London back rooms to the all-enveloping Suffolk fog, from a hair-raising plane ride across America to assignments for Catesby in Moscow and Vietnam which may not include a return ticket. The air is thick with sexual misdemeanour and honey-trapped blackmail is rife, while other secrets are given up willingly enough through ideology or good old fashioned greed.

It soon becomes starkly apparent that not all communists are the same and, as the story swings into the 1960s, the repercussions of China's role in the undercover power struggle begin to crystallise. Cameo appearances by historical figures from Chairman Mao to President Kennedy are littered between spooks of all persuasions and particularly enjoyable are the many incarnations of Cauldwell, the ultimate shape-shifting spy.

It would be impossible to fully flesh out the whole mind-boggling cast list of characters, but while some are sketchy or elusive, Catesby is unfailingly well-rounded and engaging. A loner with few enduring relationships, he picks his way through this tangled web of near annihilation with uncanny intellectual shrewdness. All too often he finds himself an expendable pawn in a life-or-death chess game, reflecting

The wonderful thing about espionage wasn't what enemies did to each other, but the way allies stabbed each other in the back

The descriptions of Vietnam feel particularly authentic

a war waged largely by unformed young men slowly uncurling from adolescence

although this was the only section of the book where I felt in danger of being overwhelmed by historical and geographical detail.

Edward Wilson's writing is intelligent, action-packed and breath-taking in scope. He's a master of reinvention himself, having grown up in Baltimore and served in Vietnam before giving up US nationality to become a British citizen. The Whitehall Mandarin is his fourth novel in the Catesby spy series and, while his books are often compared to those of John le Carré, there's also a dash of Indiana Jones adventure thrown in for good measure.

By the unexpected and satisfying conclusion of The Whitehall Mandarin fact, fiction and conjecture have become impossible to separate and unsettling to contemplate. How did China develop into a nuclear power so quickly and why did Nixon really decide to visit? Many conclusions are drawn but others left open, hopefully for Catesby's next assignment. In the meantime I'm looking forward to discovering what I've missed so far, by reading some of his back-list.


The Whitehall Mandarin is published by Arcadia Books in the UK on 15th May 2014. Thanks to Arcadia Books for my review copy.

The shock of The Shock of the Fall

Everyone must have one.

A subject they don't like reading about. Something that hits too close to home. That threatens the tightly wrapped skin we all bandage ourselves in, to keep us from breaking apart.

A fatal crash. Cancer. The death of a parent. Or a child.

For me it's schizophrenia, the word that encapsulates a world of madness so terrible, it's hardly ever uttered. Except in association with mass murderers on the rampage, or when making crass jokes about Jekyll-and-Hyde-style split personalities.

When we were choosing our next book club read, I was the one who suggested Nathan Filer's The Shock of the Fall. It had just been selected as Costa Book of the Year and was at the top of my teetering To Be Read pile. I knew it was about mental illness. I thought I could cope.

Then I read the quotes on the opening page. And realised it was about schizophrenia. That's when I froze. My childhood was decimated by schizophrenia - my older brother's. It's the reason I can't bring myself to read about it in fiction.

Or hear The Dark Side of the Moon by Pink Floyd.

Or think about the amount of blood there is on a fist that's been plunged through a glass door.

Or the paperwork that comes with sectioning.

Or the side-effects of Electroconvulsive therapy.

Or be anything other than the child who's never any trouble, because this family has had far too much of it already.

What made me decide to go ahead and read The Shock of the Fall is that Nathan Filer is a registered mental health nurse. He's writing about this cruelest of illnesses from the inside - or the next best thing to it.

Matthew Homes begins by telling the story of his older brother Simon, how he died in an accident when he was a young boy, and how Matthew feels responsible. Gradually, we get to know the present day nineteen-year-old Matthew, piecing together his descent into mental illness. As for so many, his life becomes a cycle of hospitalisation, care in the community and attempts at independent living in a world where he still hears his brother's voice

He could speak through an itch, the certainty of a sneeze, the after-taste of tablets, or the way sugar fell from a spoon.

So often, schizophrenia sufferers are defined by their diagnosis and pigeon-holed as dangerously mad. One of Filer's many achievements is allowing us to see far beyond Matthew's symptoms, to feel profound sympathy for the sad and frightened boy that's underneath.

A schizophrenic's behaviour is frequently alienating and Matthew lashes out because of how the illness makes him feel. Not to mention the debilitating side-effects of his medication, dished up along with platitudes by those whose job it is to look after him. But he's also a talented and engaging story-teller who usually regrets his actions and tries to make amends. He's still able to make some human connections and has a fractured but enduring relationship with his parents and most of all his Grandma, Nanny Noo.

The Homes family have suffered the doubly-devastating blow of losing one beloved son, only to have the other afflicted with a terrible, incomprehensible disease. One of the many, many moving incidents in this story is when Matthew reads what his father has written on the bedroom wall, always anticipating it would be painted over before Matthew could see it

We'll beat this thing mon ami. We'll beat this thing together

Never give up. That was my Dad too. I was frightened of reading The Shock of the Fall because of the unhappy memories it would rekindle. After all, it's easy enough to cause an explosion but much more difficult to stick things back together again afterwards.

I can't even try to review this book objectively, other than to say it's a wonderful, astonishing achievement. The typography and drawings are thoughtful and lovely. Despite the many harrowing scenes, its pages hold laughter, tenderness and redemption within them too. Because there is still hope; my brother is much better now and living with minimal support. I'm so glad I found the courage to read The Shock of the Fall and, if you haven't already, I'd urge you to do so too.

The Shock of the Fall is published in the UK by The Borough Press.

Chop Chop by Simon Wroe

I'll admit to being a little wary when I spotted the pigs' trotters pulsating from the lurid cover of Simon Wroe's debut novel Chop Chop. I wasn't the only one - it was Penguin Bloggers' Night and some of the vegetarians round the book table were looking positively puce. Surely those trotters must be a harbinger of literary violence, a visual warning to the squeamish about the dangers contained within?

Then Simon read an extract and I realised Chop Chop is a darkly funny, insightful tale of life in a professional kitchen, a sort of Kitchen Confidential infused with humour and transplanted from New York City to Camden Town. True, it's fiction and the protagonist isn't a masochistic alpha male but an introverted young lad from 'a place where learner drivers come to reverse park'. But Chop Chop still dishes the dirt behind-the-scenes with some brutally eye-watering revelations.

The lowest of the low in the hierarchy of a north London restaurant, Monocle (his kitchen nickname) is commis chef at The Swan. He's a resting author so there's no way he wants the job, but he needs it to pay the rent on his grimy lodgings.

Monocle is escaping an unhappy home life, consisting of a feckless father, a careworn mother and an older brother-shaped chasm. Early on, it becomes obvious he's not alone, all the other chefs from psychotic Ramilov to Racist Dave are fleeing from something as well. The Swan's kitchen is a wonderful melting-pot of losers, including the particularly tall Dibden:

That small sad head of his looked further away than ever, pushed out of the top of his body like toothpaste from a tube.

What they've all escaped to is far from an ideal sanctuary. The kitchen is ruled by a despotic head chef whose favourite pastime is devising new tortures, from 'The Mark of Bob' on the back of the hand to lobsters at loose in the walk-in fridge. No sane person would want to work here, but these chefs share a common love of self-destruction and are already existing on the edge. They suffer to prove they're alive and their world is so insulated that, with one or two exceptions, the waiting staff and even the diners are unimportant. Only the grotesque 'Fat Man' stands apart, a being so powerful in Camden and with such legendary appetites, he is even feared by Bob.

As Monocle's story unfolds, it is in turns bleak, funny, vicious and ultimately poignant. Of a university relationship which failed before it ever really got off the ground, he says he was

not hurt by the presence of the firing squad, but by the sight of one soldier among them who had not bothered to shave

Simon Wroe has recreated an intensely macho world, a savagely enjoyable trawl through the underbelly of a professional kitchen. It's like asking for snow in the Sahara to wish it might have included at least one well-rounded female, neither love interest nor mother but a woman allowed to be as funny as the men. This aside, there's really no need to fear the trotters. Chop Chop is a debut novel to relish; fast-paced and absorbing, full of wit and larger-than-life characters, all wrapped up in a fresh and self-deprecating new voice.


Thanks to Penguin for my review copy. Images courtesy of Amazon.

Everland by Rebecca Hunt

In 1913, three Antarctic explorers set off from their ship, the Kismet, to investigate an unknown island. Their voyage is beset with difficulties from the first, and once on the strange and unforgiving Everland they need to muster every ounce of resilience they have to survive. In these hostile surroundings, new alliances are made and old tensions rise to the surface, threatening to tear them apart.

As the novel opens, the geologist of the group is rescued by a search party from the Kismet

Dinners cried for the miracle of being found. He cried for not being driven out of his collapsing body and made to die alone in the cold. And he cried for Napps and Millet-Bass; for the heartbreak and the pity of what had come before. 

Fast-forward to 2012 and an international community at the Antarctic base Aegeus are watching a classic movie about the expedition.The next day, a centenary fieldwork group of three will leave to survey the island's wildlife. Although arriving by Twin Otter rather than dinghy and equipped with the latest satellite communications, their experiences begin to mirror those of the original party. There are questions over selection and at first old hand Decker supports the inexperienced Brix with more grace than their field assistant, Jess. But allegiances shift again as, through storms and set-backs, the strong must support the weak, all the while trying to hold on to their own vitality.

In the movie version of their lives, each of the men in the first expedition has their character set in stone, based on the book written by the ship's Captain Lawrence

The common-room audience were offended by any affection or respect given to that bastard Napps. They knew what to expect and hated him 

Napps, the villain of the piece, is allowed a solitary line of self-reflection

How time tricks us into seeing who we really are...and what choices we make

This moment of soul-searching becomes eerily relevant to the 2012 party, as the harshest of environments takes its toll once more. Disturbing glimpses of the original expedition are uncovered, but it is the island which seems to be the most haunting enigma of all.

When a book has two distinct threads it's easy to prefer one above the other, leading to resentment of precious reading time expended on the second, less interesting strand. One of Everland's strengths is how deftly the overlapping stories of the two expeditions are woven together, with each being equally compelling. The lichen seen by the original expedition will have grown only a millimetre when it's discovered by the centenary party. While the first endures endless night, the second group labours under the harsh ultra-violet of a sun that never sets. There are multiple points of view and reversals of fortune, but the characters remain clearly identifiable.

As we gradually uncover what has happened to Dinners, Millet-Bass and Napps, we begin to appreciate the inaccuracies of the story passed down the generations. Napps has been mercilessly revised by Captain Lawrence into a callous cat-murdering swine, prepared to be equally ruthless with fellow crew-members. Those who could have saved his reputation have their own reasons not to do so, a theme which again finds its echo in the centenary expedition.

Rebecca Hunt's debut novel Mr Chartwell, concerned the black dog of Winston Churchill's depression and was well received for its originality and visual flair.

With Everland, she has again created a distinct and challenging world, one where the human condition is subject to the harshest of scrutinies. Time becomes elastic as the island's inhabitants across two centuries are tested beyond endurance.  Perceptions are manipulated and truth disregarded and if not everything is neatly resolved, it feels fitting that Everland should retain some of its mystery. This is another absorbing and strikingly original novel from Hunt, which succeeds in questioning and entertaining in equal measure.

Thanks to Fig Tree, an imprint of Penguin Books, for my review copy.