And the Walls Became the World All Around by Johanna Ekström and Sigrid Rausing
The Swedish poet and artist Johanna Ekström died of cancer in 2022 at 51. She left behind 13 grey notebooks detailing the last years of her life: from October 2019 to X, the date on which she would die, even though she didn’t know exactly when that would be. It turned out to be 13 April and a week before she asked her oldest friend, the publisher and author Sigrid Rausing, to edit and finish the text. This book, part diary, part writer’s notes, part meditation on loss and vulnerability, is the result.
The book is also an extended posthumous conversation. Beneath each chunk of Ekström’s words is a commentary by Rausing, who explains what was going on in her friend’s mind and life at the time. There are loves here and dreams – both benign and menacing – and there are single-sentence thoughts that are almost aphoristic. As the book progresses there also runs an account of the ebb and flow of the cancer that started in her eye. Some parts were clearly meant to be read by others and some are painfully intimate. Spliced undemonstratively by Rausing, they make for a poignant whole.
By Michael Prodger
Granta, 336pp, £16.99. Buy the book
Barrowbeck by Andrew Michael Hurley
There is something peculiar about Barrowbeck. Across centuries its residents are persistently haunted by an unease that is difficult to shift and eats into their sense of place. This fictional village on the Yorkshire Lancashire border is the setting for Barrowbeck, a series of 13 short stories – vignettes of folk horror – by Andrew Michael Hurley, which first appeared as short plays on BBC Radio Four.
To read the stories is be transported to the darkest depths of this unwieldy valley. In the book’s opening fragment, we meet the first inhabitants, Celtic farmers who, after seeing some of their peers murdered by Anglo-Saxon raiders, have sought to settle on the land that will in time become Barrowbeck. But, seeking solace from the Gods, Barrowbeck’s new residents discover that this place is not, and will never be, their own. They are merely visitors.
Through each of the book’s 13 scenes, Hurley proves adept at binding his narrative to place. The town is the only character that appears in all of the stories. To live in Barrowbeck is to live in a perpetual state of wild dread – an emotion that the author will likely provoke among his readers.
By Megan Kenyon
John Murray, 304pp, £16.99. Buy the book
Collared: How We Made the Modern Dog by Chris Pearson
When did dogs become man’s best friend? Chris Pearson, in this entertaining and wide-ranging history, traces the relationship back a good 15,000 years to the Upper Palaeolithic era, when certain wolves began to hang around human settlements, scavenging for food. He points to carvings from 8,000 BCE in the Shuwaymis valley, lavishly decorated dog collars in Egyptian tombs and graves in which dogs and humans were buried together in Siberia 8,000 years ago as further evidence of our ancient history.
The relationship has not always been a friendship: dogs have worked for people through the centuries, from the hunting dogs that chased prey in the damp, cold forests of medieval Europe to the mine-detection dogs employed by the British army in the Second World War. If I could pick, I’d belong to a wealthy Georgian woman, like Katherine Howard’s Dutch mastiff, Poppet. When she died, Howard left her 12p a week and a strict schedule: “At Breakfast a little Bread crumbled on her… Plate” with “a Tea or Coffee” (the milk’s temperature to be tested with a toe), “Butchers meat” at noon and “a bone to please her all times”.
By Anna Leszkiewicz
Profile, 272pp, £18.99. Buy the book
Untold Lessons by Maddalena Vaglio Tanet
A teacher mysteriously disappears into the woods. The same morning, her pupils are told about the death of their classmate, Giovanna. Maddalena Vaglio Tanet’s debut novel, Untold Lessons, is a fictionalised retelling of a true incident and a heartbreaking story about individual choices and their consequences – some of which we don’t understand until it’s too late.
Set in the 1970s Italian countryside, the novel has a cast of characters that are immersed in fear, guilt and past trauma. The reader begins to piece the story together through different perspectives as the plot unfolds in a non-linear fashion: at times the events are told as they happen, at others through retrospective reflections on the world wars and the political unrest under Mussolini. At its core, Untold Lessons is shaped by individual and often conflicting perspectives in a roman d’analyse style: each action is supported by an event of the past and the reasoning behind why each character behaves the way they do.
Moody and enshrouded in a veil of obscurity, Untold Lessons subliminally explores the unconscious and how it allows us to process the world around us – be it to our detriment or not.
By Zuzanna Lachendro
Pushkin Press, 272pp, £16.99. Buy the book
[See also: From Jonathan Coe to Joan Smith: new books reviewed in short]
Content from our partners
Related
This article appears in the 27 Nov 2024 issue of the New Statesman, The Optimist’s Dilemma