Post-Brexit, critics fell over themselves to review a book that is part biography, part literary appraisal, but essentially an analysis of England and Englishness. “We are a nostalgic race, besotted by cornfields, gouty magistrates, comedy vicars … ” wrote Roger Lewis in the Times, reviewing Peter Parker’s Housman Country. In the Literary Review, Seamus Perry had the impression that “The English come across as agreeably odd”, while “Housman himself remains as elusive as ever”. The Sunday Times’s John Carey decided that “the ‘Housman Country’ of the title is not so much a geographical region as a country of the mind”, and worried that Parker’s “mishmash of make-believe rusticity … deflects attention from Housman’s poems, which are complex and subtle works of art, not to be subsumed into some loamy cultural trend”. However, the Mail on Sunday’s Jane Shilling found that Housman, and Parker’s book, “speaks with peculiar poignancy to our times … [of] an England beloved, elusive but still present in places where the rain falls, the blackbird sings and the blossom hangs like snow on the cherry tree.”
Nationhood and memory are central themes in Hisham Matar’s The Return – a non-fiction account of the Libyan novelist’s search for his father, who was kidnapped and imprisoned when Matar was 19 and studying in London. Many critics were impressed by the book’s novelistic qualities. The Evening Standard’s David Sexton found it “reminiscent of one of Kazuo Ishiguro’s puzzled, damaged narrators”, while Francis Wheen in the Mail on Sunday hailed it as “a love letter to his father, Jaballa, [and] also an astonishing political thriller”. Wheen found the book “imbued with … hope”, but Duncan White in the Telegraph concluded with a fearful note: “Those Libyan newspapers that flourished in the spring of 2012 are gone and the targeted assassination of foreign journalists means few risk reporting on what is happening. Once again Libya’s story is at risk of going untold.”
The ordinary made extraordinary is the skill of Sarah Moss, according to reviewers of her new novel The Tidal Zone. In this case, the ordinary is parenthood: “the partnership involved in bringing up children. It’s about the daily grind of loading the dishwasher, wiping jam smears off the kitchen table, sorting through laundry, making packed lunches for school and cakes for bake sales … ” The domestic drudgery is ripped apart when older daughter Miriam collapses and is taken to hospital, where she stays in a high-dependency unit. “Moss poses these enormous questions about life and death within the small, within the particular, within the everyday, and her method succeeds tremendously well”, wrote Lesley McDowell in the Sunday Herald. “This is grown-up writing for grown-up readers, the kind of story that makes you think about your own life choices and close relationships.” It “reads like the electric shock of a defibrillator, or the jolt of an EpiPen of adrenaline”, wrote Lucy Scholes in the Independent. In Scholes’s view, Moss is “one of the best British novelists writing today”. The Times’s Fiona Wilson called her “one of Britain’s most underrated … Could this be the book to win her a bigger audience?” Possibly not. “This might not be her finest work but there’s plenty to sink your teeth into,” Wilson continues. Still, if you haven’t yet read a book by Moss, go to Bodies of Light first.”
