Books in the Media: Candice Carty-Williams returns to her iconic protagonist, Queenie
This week, an iconic character makes her return and a malevolent entity is discovered in the ocean depths, while in non-fiction Eli Davies’ "timely" book and Zahra Joya’s impactful memoir were well-received.
Queenie Is Working On It (Trapeze) picks up on the life of Queenie Jenkins eight years after the events of Candice Carty-Williams’ British Book Award-winning 2019 debut, Queenie (Trapeze). The Guardian’s Shahidha Bari found that Carty-Williams’ “keen ear for female friendships – the deep affection, the stubborn solidarity, the ribald humour – endures, as does her understanding of how the particular experience of race suffuses the ordinary lives of Black women”. Queenie is still “a work in progress” and, after researching Black women’s experience of IVF treatment, discovers she has “low chances of natural pregnancy… and is forced to confront her chaotic love life”. Her “sexual vulnerability is a serious theme that continues in this sequel, where erotic engagements with men are vain attempts to secure an emotional connection”, noted Bari.
Benedict Anning’s “impressive debut” Atomic Coffin (Bantam), a dark SF novel set on a Royal Navy hunter-killer submarine sent to investigate a Soviet nuclear submarine and the discovery of a “malignant presence” on board, was praised by the Financial Times’ James Lovegrove. He noted: “Atomic Coffin could have been just a bit of pulpy fun – and no shame in that – but Anning has chosen to elevate things by concentrating on the unravelling psyche of his main character, British spy Heidi Sperling, with the narrative becoming increasingly fragmented and hallucinatory as her grasp on reality slips.”
Davies’ The Spinster Cookbook: Culture, Politics and Pleasure in the Single Woman’s Kitchen (Indigo Press) is a “subversion of the domestic and the expected” stated Olivia Potts, writing for the Spectator. The book “sits in several different realms: it is Eli Davies’ personal narrative, edging into memoir; it is a review of spinster literature from the interwar period onwards… it is a meditation on what it means to make a home; and it is a manifesto on different visions for co-existing”. The Spinster Cookbook was written in the wake of a “seismic break-up” and is not, Davies writes, “‘about how cooking saved me’”, but “’an unflinching reckoning with ‘the burden of having to feed myself in this period, to make a decision every single day’”. Potts called the book “timely”, coinciding with the rise of one-person households: “Davies is not the first person to write about the pleasures of feeding oneself without it being an ‘act of service’… but she does so by taking in the breadth of the spinster experience, and with an honesty and thoughtfulness that make the reader reconsider the domestic space and what we take for granted within it.”
The Vanishing Girl of Kabul (Robinson), the “remarkable” memoir from journalist and founder of Rukshana, an all-female media company, Joya, was hailed by the Telegraph’s Lucy Thynne. Joya’s memoir charts the trajectory of Afghanistan after the Taliban seized power again in 2021. Thynne called the memoir a “systematic chronicle of these horrors, an account of her escape from Kabul, and a memoir of her life to date”. Amie Ferris-Rotman, a Guardian journalist and the memoir’s co-author, helped Joya escape Kabul in 2021. “Every British person should read the ensuing chapters” of what greeted Joya and her family when they arrived in England, wrote Thynne. The review concluded: “This is an important book, and Joya an important voice. She has a poetic turn of phrase that brings beauty to an otherwise horrific tale.”
The Times released its list of the “best books to read this summer”. Across 17 categories, the critics selected the likes of Claire Powell’s All In (Chatto & Windus), Lily King’s Heart the Lover (Canongate), Sarah Wynn-Williams’ Careless People (Pan Macmillan), Sara Wheeler’s Jan Morris: A Life (Faber) and Iqbal Hussain’s The Night I Borrowed Time (Puffin).
