Review: Vivien Horler

Restless Dolly Maunder, by Kate Grenville (Canongate)

Shortly before she dies, around the mid-1950s, Dolly Maunder looks back on her life.

Her generation was the hinge, she thinks: when she was born in the early 1880s the door of female aspiration had been shut tight. Then it began to creak open. “My generation was the hinge that it had to be forced around on, one surface grinding over another. No wonder it was painful.”

This is an Australian historical novel by an acclaimed author, and it was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2024. Kate Grenville has won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and been shortlisted for both the Booker Prize and the Miles Franklin Literary Award (named after the author of the brilliant book, film and now TV series My Brilliant Career).

She has written more than 10 novels and a handful of non-fiction books. As far as I can recall, this is the first of her novels I have read, and I loved it. Continue reading →

Review: Vivien Horler

The End of Normal – Witness to the unravelling of white power in South Africa, by Max du Preez (Jonathan Ball Publishers)

In 1976, just after the eruption of the Soweto uprising and the killing of scores of pupils by the police on June 16, the eminent academic Franklin Sonn said: “Today it is over for apartheid and the National Party… It’s just a matter of time.”

Fourteen turbulent years later, President FW de Klerk stood up in Parliament, unbanned the liberation movements and announced the release of Nelson Mandela and other political prisoners. It was all over bar the shouting (although there was quite a lot of shouting).

Pondering those 14 years, Max du Preez, journalist, editor, Afrikaner iconoclast and a man with a great sense of humour, writes in this sort-of-memoir: “How did it come about that the National Party government, a self-declared champion of Western civilisation and Christianity, descended into the murky depths of death squads, assassination, poisoning and kidnapping? This is how I understand it. After the 1976 Soweto Uprising, the white government realised that apartheid as an ideology had failed utterly. They understood that it was ‘the end of normal’.” Continue reading →

Review: Vivien Horler

Land – A novel, by Maggie O’Farrell (Tinder Press)

Maggie O’Farrell’s historical novel Hamnet has been on our big screens lately, and a great movie – and book – it was too. But I enjoyed Land even more.

Perhaps it is because in this novel she is unconstrained by the historical facts of the life of Shakespeare’s family. Or maybe it is a return to her Irish roots – in any case Land is a great saga of family and place.

It is 1865, and Tomas is a surveyor and draughtsman, mapping Ireland for the redcoats. He grew up in a workhouse, seized chances offered to him, and became a gifted draughtsman.

He has no illusions as to why the redcoats need him: while there are plenty in England who have his skills and more, there are few who have all that plus his local knowledge, who can speak to the people in their own language. Continue reading →

Review: Vivien Horler

On the Sponge Islands – Loss and restoration in the Aegean, by Julia Martin (Jonathan Ball Publishers)

Sponges – everyday utilitarian objects of no great interest or value. I have two in the kitchen, for dish-washing and mopping up spills, and another in the bathroom.

Yet natural sponges, harvested from the deep, once made many people extraordinarily rich (think of the analogy of ostrich plumes for the Oudtshoorn feather barons). Even today they can sell for around 30 euros (about R550).

In a prologue to this travel memoir, Cape Town-based writer Julia Martin refers to sponges as “the meekest of animals who live and reproduce without muscles, heart, brain or nervous system”, always retaining their defining quality: porosity.

Martin is charmed: “All day and all night, the ocean flows through, unhindered. Sponges are made of sea, of everything.” Continue reading →

Review: Archie Henderson

Empire of Ink: The printers, rogues, and radicals who invented the American newspaper, by Alex Wright (Basic Books)

Before there was the internet, there was the US Postal Service – the original network where cut-and-paste spread the news long before copy-and-paste ever did.

Alex Wright traces the arc of American newspapers from the 1790s, just after independence, to the late 19th century, when the press swelled to an annual US newspaper circulation totalling 3.6 billion before its slow decline at the most recent turn of a century.

But let’s not go there yet – the history along the way is far too rich to rush. Continue reading →

Review: Vivien Horler

The Child, by Alistair Mackay (Kwela Books)

I had never heard of writer Alistair Mackay until I read this, yet it turns out he’s written two novels as well as short stories and columns. And The Child isn’t even his latest book, although it’s pretty recent, having been published in 2024.

Perhaps I wouldn’t have read his first novel, It Doesn’t Have to be This Way, since it’s science fiction, but it was longlisted as best novel for the 2023 British Science Fiction Association, and was also shorlisted for the 2023 SA Sunday Times Literary Awards.

A collection of short stories, The Lucky Ones, was published in 2025.

One review I read of The Child says the narrative could be the reviewer’s own life story. That is not remotely so in my case – the protagonist Benji is a chap, gay while I’m not, married (to another chap), and desperate for a child.

But he’s also a white, middle-class South African who lives in Cape Town, who feels guilty about his good fortune while so many South Africans have none, and has a complicated relationship with Sibs, his and husband Adrian’s domestic worker. Continue reading →

Review: Vivien Horler

The Things We Never Say, by Elizabeth Strout (Viking/Penguin)

In primary school, in geography – we’re going back a bit – we had to use fine-nibbed pens dipped into black ink to draw maps. It was careful and painstaking work – you couldn’t rub anything out and didn’t want – literally – to blot your copybook.

This map image rose when thinking about Elizabet Strout’s The Things We Never Say. It’s delicate, fine, small – and yet tells us a lot about the world and ordinary people as they trundle through it.

Artie Dam is a high school history teacher in his 50s. He lives in a house which had belonged to his parents-in-law, on the coast in Massachusetts, and he likes to go out in his sailboat. He married well – his father was a caretaker of three small apartment blocks, but his wife Evie’s parents were a bit more upmarket – and Evie inherited the waterside home.

We see Artie in the classroom, a caring, perceptive teacher watching out for any kind of psychological bullying and pulling students up short on it.

Evie is a family therapist and their son Rob, who is very bright, studied at MIT and earns more than twice his father’s salary.

All normal, middle class, fine.

But it turns out Artie and Evie battled to have a child, and it was a great joy when Evie became pregnant during a holiday trip to London. All is going swimmingly.

Things turn upside down when Rob, at 17, is involved in a terrible car accident – under extremely unfortunate circumstances – in which his girlfriend is killed. Legally things are settled, but the family dynamics change. Evie decides to train as a therapist, and Rob seems to draw away from Artie.

Still, life goes on, as it does, although Artie feels increasingly unleashed from normality. He starts fantasising about suicide.

One night he and Evie are invited to a party at the home of old friends, and the guests include several colleagues. Artie is looking forward to it, but when he gets home he says grumpily to Evie: “I wonder why people never say anything real.”

When Evie asks what he means, he points out that no one referred to the fact that the Davenports’ daughter had recently had an abortion, no one mentioned the Merrill girl was in rehab, no one mentioned the high school principal had been having an affair for at least 10 years.

Evie replies: “Artie, don’t be an idiot. No one at a cocktail party is going to talk about their daughter’s abortion or the affair they’re having. Honestly.”

All this is against a background of Donald Trump – whose name I don’t think is mentioned – running for office for the second time. When he is re-elected – and when he ridicules Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the Oval Office (this novel is extremely current) Artie and his family are distraught.

There follow a series of events which in the hands of a different writer would be sensational but here are downplayed, as Strout does.

One day Rob calls Artie and informs him of a secret that tips his world upside down. He is stunned – how can he have not known this? How can this be the truth? Is he still who he thinks he is?

He realises: everything in the world seems to be filled with unspoken truths; all the things in the world people do not know about each other, even those close to them.

“And he understood that [this] could make a person lonely…”

A shout from the Spectator on the back cover of this fine little hardcover novel says: “Strout gets you to reassess every relationship you’ve ever had while you can still do something about it.”

Something to think about while you’re exploring the map of your world.

• Just afterthis review was published, it was announced The Things We Never Say was one of the baker’s dozen of novel titles longlisted for the 2026 Booker Prize. This is what the judges had to say:  “Set in the contemporary United States, Strout’s novel focuses on Artie Dam, a 50-something high-school history teacher in a small coastal town with decent friends and wholesome hobbies. The Things We Never Say quietly unpicks all that, to show that the ordinary is not quite as ordinary as it might seem. Strout’s prose is about as far from a rant as you could imagine, brilliantly understated and all the more powerful for that. It’s a devastating look at the dangerous cracks in family life and in the contemporary world at large.” Strout has previously won a Pulitzer Prize

Review: Vivien Horler

Book of Lives – A memoir of sorts, by Margaret Atwood (Chatto & Windus)

It’s a mark of her literary fame that by far the biggest text on the cover is the author’s name, followed by the title and subtitle in much smaller type.

Margaret Atwood’s output has been prodigious – she has written more than 50 books of fiction, poetry and essays and won the Booker Prize twice – once for The Blind Assassin, and once shared it for The Testaments, the sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale.

She has been a cartoonist, illustrator, librettist, playwright and puppeteer. Wikipedia tells us she is also an inventor – she came up with the concept of the LongPen, described as “a remote robotic writing technology” device, helpful for book signings. She cooks, she knits, has done various crafts, has been a wife and long-term partner, a stepmother, mother and grandmother. Continue reading →

Review: Archie Henderson

London Falling: A mysterious death in a gilded city and a family’s search for truth, by Patrick Radden Keefe (Picador) 

What made Zac Brettler, a privileged 19-year-old, jump to his death from the fifth floor of a glitzy London block of flats on the north shore of the Thames?

Who knows?  Scotland Yard bungled the investigation and the coroner appeared indifferent to the anguish of a family seeking answers. Not even the notorious London tabloids, who would usually smell out a story like that quickly, got a sniff.

By a set of coincidences, the story instead fell into the lap of reporter Patrick Radden Keefe of The New Yorker, a serious magazine that doesn’t go in for Second Coming-type headlines or lurid, racy, demotic copy. No Rich Kid dies in Upmarket Apartment Plunge for him or his magazine. The tabloids might even have had a strapline: MI6 saw death fall – and did nothing.

The facts of those imagined headlines would not have been wrong. Zac fell to his death, his thigh clipping part of the building close to where he landed. Did the injury on the way down render him unconscious, did he drown in the Thames? Or was he still alive when he landed? None of those questions were answered by those investigating his death. Continue reading →

Review: Archie Henderson

Test Cricket: A History, by Tim Wigmore (Quercus)

To write the history of Test cricket in one volume is a bit like trying to score a century before lunch, take a hat-trick by tea and win by an innings before close of play. Can’t be done. Now Tim Wigmore might have done it.

It had been done only once before, but at a time when there was a lot less to write about. A History of Cricket by Jim Swanton and Harry Altham was first published in 1926 when Test cricket had not yet reached its 50s. By the time of its 1962 edition it had grown into two substantial volumes.

The scale of Wigmore’s undertaking is enormous. To give an idea how difficult it must have been to contain Test cricket to a single volume, consider this: eminent historian and former first-class cricketer Andre Odendaal wrote three volumes on just South African cricket. And Wisden needs between 1 500 and 1 700 pages to cover one season. When the compact, distinctively yellow-covered almanack, which can also serve as a doorstopper, first appeared in the 19^th century, it was under 200 pages. Continue reading →