Books in the Media: Sally Hayden's latest is a testament to love found in disastrous situations
Irish foreign correspondent Sally Hayden’s latest book This Is Also a Love Story: Searching for Good in a Divided World (4th Estate) takes as its subject “the texture and breadth of love, and its ubiquity” and “sets out to present full, rounded portraits of people who live under or have escaped from war, disaster or authoritarianism”, wrote Louise Callaghan for the Sunday Times. “It is the stories of romantic love that are, for me, the most moving… [the stories] of ordinary people who, despite the horror around them, fell in love,” found Callaghan. The review concluded: “Covering conflict, and doing it well, is an exercise in trying to show readers that those affected by war are real people who love, make jokes and make mistakes, while at the same time not glossing over the horrors they have gone through.” In an interview with Hayden, The Bookseller’s Caroline Sanderson described This Is Also a Love Story as “profoundly affecting”.
Said the Dead (Faber), by Irish author and poet Doireann Ní Ghríofa, is “an expansive work inspired by and composed of myriad ghosts”, namely the “long-dead patients of a now derelict Victorian mental hospital in Ní Ghríofa’s home city of Cork”, wrote Lucy Scholes at the Financial Times. “This, however, is not straightforward non-fiction, but something tricksier and more slippery, in which the narrative of the lives of all involved are passed between and mediated by a chorus of storytellers,” explained Scholes. The Guardian’s Brian Dillon described the book as “an intimately researched but also wildly imaginative study of lives (mostly female) lived and often concluded during the hospital’s first 70 years or so”. It is a work of “extraordinary formal and ethical force”.
Tahmima Anam’s new book Uprising (Canongate) is a “return to form” wrote Ella Corry-Wright for the Telegraph. Set on a “sinking brothel on Bangladesh’s cyclone-ravaged coastline”, Anam’s novel follows a group of women, prostitutes, who are led to collective action against their owner by the latest arrival in their group, Kusum Khan. “Anam’s prose – a blend of rhapsody and cackling coarseness – is crystalline, never purpling and only occasionally sacrificing clarity at the altar of lyricism,” found Corry-Wright. The novel is “only a slim volume, but it throbs with mesmeric power”. The Financial Times’ Sonia Faleiro wrote of the novel: “Anam is an attentive observer of human life, but more significantly she is sensitive to the political conditions that define and constrain the world’s majority… Thoughtful and restrained, this slim, profound book is Anam’s best work yet.”
Wash (Salt), a fictional exploration of the life of civil engineer Washington Roebling by Erica Wagner, deputy comment editor at the Observer, was picked by Antonia Senior in the Sunday Times’ “eight great historical novels to read in May”. Roebling, who oversaw the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge after his engineer father died, was also the subject of Wagner’s “lauded” biography Chief Engineer (Bloomsbury). “Wash is a beautifully written illustration of the power of novels to tread where biographies cannot”, concluded Senior. John Sedgwick, reporting for the Financial Times, called Wagner’s novel “soulful”. He continued: “In the very first paragraph, she swiftly evokes a 10-year-old with all the delicacy of a painting by Vermeer.” Readers will, Sedgwick noted, “enter her fiction almost physically, as it is so solid and majestic, rather like the great bridge itself”.
