Toast | Nigel Slater

I have mixed feelings about this autobiography. I read it because it is well regarded and has won awards but for me it was an unsatisfying read.
Nigel seems to have had a sad and lonely childhood. He loses his mum at a young age and as he was really close to her, he suffers well into his teens from this loss. His Dad marries the housekeeper and life just gets worse for Nigel as he has a distant relationship with his father and a dismal one with the stepmother.
The only ray of hope in Nigel's life is food. There is a lot about chocolates and sweets, food he tried to cook himself and his mothers terrible attempts at cooking. His stepmother is far better at it but there is an inference that all the good cooking and baking caused Nigel's father 's heat attack and death. Amongst it all are the dubious sexual encounters, as a child and as a teen.
The title of each chapter is a food of some sort and the vignetter of life he describes centers around food, so we see and interpret the people in his life through a particular food group or disaster. the short chapters leave us wanting to know more and have some resolution to what he describes. It seems like we are looking at a photo album full of family photos of which we are given fleeting comments on before we rush off to the next photo.
He is now a renown chef, which I guess is the resolution of his obsession with food.

Buy at Fishpond.co.nz

Started early, Took My Dog | Kate Atkinson

Kate Atkinson is amazing. I've read everything she's written and each story shows how she's developing her style and adding depth to the novels.
This is one in the Jackson Brodie series. He's getting older, more musing, private investigator who has a lot of baggage and is trying to improve himself. And now he has a small dog....An innocent sounding email is sent to him from New Zealand asking him to trace the blood family of an adopted child. There seems to be no clue as to her provenance, but the more he looks into it the more threats are directed at him.
Tilly the aged actress, Tracey, the retired Superintendent, an ex-con, and a small girl are all wrapped up in the mystery of the adopted child.
As always with Atkinson, it's really well written, it tells a good story and has style. Not a graphic crime CSI style, but no less striking and page turning in it's accurate portrayal of human misery, ingenuity and compassion.
Well worth reading this and all her others: "Behind the Scenes at the Museum", "Human Croquet". Emotionally Weird", One Good Turn", "Case Histories","When Will There Be Good News?"

Buy at Fishpond.co.nz

Notwithstanding | Louis de Bernieres

This is one of my favourite authors and so I'm not surprised to have loved this, his latest novel. A Frenchman once pointed out to de Bernieres that Britain was the most exotic country in Europe and this sent him off on a journey of recollection. He grew up in what people call an idyllic country village which is in fact a community of eccentric people and landscape. He says in the afterword " On reflection I realised that I had set so many of my novels and stories abroad, because custom had prevented me from seeing how exotic my own country is. Britain really is an immense lunatic asylum. We have a very flexible conception of normality. We are rigid and formal in some ways, but we believe in the right to eccentricity, as long as the eccentricities are large enough. We are not so tolerant of small one. Woe betide you if you hold  your knife incorrectly, but good luck to you if you wear a loincloth and live up a tree".

In this novel each chapter is a story about someone in the village. Other characters from other chapters play a part as does the landscape and the village so as we read we get a feel for this place. Some of the stories are set in the past and some are of families in different eras. well structured and a pleasure to read.
This is an author who observes people, can spin tale and writes beautifully with a vast vocabulary. Well worth reading all his other work.

Buy at Fishpond.co.nz

The house at Sugar Beach | Helene Cooper

I like autobiographies because everyone has a story to tell, but only some people get around to writing them. Helene Cooper has an amazing story to tell of her childhood in Liberia in the 1970’s. It begins in idyllic childhood memories of a well off family who were part of a big extended family, integral to local high society, local business and were very well regarded.

Her ancestors were from the founding fathers of Liberia, freed slaves who deliberately and determinately forged a free nation of Africans. From this strong foundation came a strong nation which tore itself apart in a civil war which lasted 25 years.

Helene and her family are persecuted and dispossessed and flee to the United States. She writes with detail and feeling about what it was like before and after the war and we get a real sense for the hardship many families went through in her country.

Cooper writes well and we can see, smell and hear the things she experienced.

In America she has to reinvent herself, no longer part of the privileged elite. She becomes a journalist with The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times and while in Iraq on assignment the Humvee she traveled in was crushed by a tank. That moment was like a catalyst for her to confront the past and write her story, and it gave her the impetus to go back to Liberia. She returns to the ruins of the House at Sugar Beach, she discovers her foster sister and other survivors of the war and the years of poverty which followed in the wake of Charles Taylor’s government.

This memoir is well worth reading and insightful into a nation we don’t hear a lot about.

Buy at Fishpond.co.nz