Go Tell It on the Mountain, by James Baldwin

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In this debut novel, described as semi-autobiographical, we meet John Grimes on the morning of his fourteenth birthday. It’s a Saturday, but he is consumed by thoughts of the family’s Sunday routines, dominated by attendance at the storefront church founded by his stepfather. We sense the tension in the family as he wonders if anyone will remember it is his birthday.

Although everyone has always expected John to become a preacher too, his stern stepfather Gabriel constantly demeans John and favors his own son, John’s younger brother. But Roy is wild, running the streets of Harlem with his gang and uninterested in the church. Over the course of the next 24 hours, John wrestles with the conflicting expectations laid upon him and with his newfound sexuality.

In doing so, he has to sort out for himself what is holy and what is good, and whether they are the same thing. Gabriel’s strict Pentecostal religion demands that members forgo worldly pleasures, forcing John to decide where he stands, as he considers the people he knows at church and his friends at school.

The second of three parts consists of extended flashbacks where we learn about the early lives of John’s aunt (Gabriel’s sister), Gabriel himself, and John’s mother Elizabeth. This unconventional structure not only gives us needed background, but also heightens the suspense as we wait to find out what the long night will bring for John.

My book club agreed that this book was hard to read. The overwhelming context of harsh Pentecostal Christian teachings, preached by Gabriel at church and at home, and Biblical references made for heavy reading. Outside of the religious doctrine, though, Baldwin’s language is stunning.

He was ill with doubt and searching. He longed for a light that would teach him, forever and forever, and beyond all question, the way to go; for a power that would bind him, forever and forever, and beyond all crying, to the love of God. Or else he wished to stand up now, and leave this tabernacle and never see these people any more. Fury and anguish filled him, unbearable, unanswerable; his mind was stretched to breaking. For it was time that filled his mind, time that was violent with the mysterious love of God. And his mind could not contain the terrible stretch of time that united twelve men fishing by the shores of Galilee, and black men weeping on their knees tonight, and he, a witness.

My soul is a witness for my Lord. There was an awful silence at the bottom of John’s mind, a dreadful weight, a dreadful speculation. And not even a speculation, but a deep, deep turning, as of something huge, black, shapeless, for ages dead on the ocean floor, that now felt its rest disturbed by a faint far wind, which bid it: “Arise.“ And this weight began to move at the bottom of John’s mind, in a silence like the silence of the void before creation, and he began to feel a terror he had never felt before.

Even more than the preaching, it is the anguish that makes the book so hard to read. A controlling parent, emotional and physical abuse, being the one child out of several who is hated by a parent: these are experiences we know about, though the knowing doesn’t make them any less heart-breaking.

One person noted the outsized anger that consumes many of the characters. That reminded me of our last book, Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns, where she talked about how those who were part of the Great Migration found themselves crammed into overflowing segregated areas. Also, there was the disappointment of thinking they would escape racism by going north, only to find a different kind of racism. No wonder there is anger.

Like others in my book club, I found much of the preaching tedious. However, I was interested in Baldwin’s use of music in his prose. Here it is the music of hymns and the King James Bible, the one that I grew up on. In his later work he uses jazz rhythms but, as one person pointed out, we can see the influence of jazz even here in his riffs and solos.

We also appreciated his experimental structure, perhaps influenced by the modernism and post-modernism of the time. One person noted the similarity to the structure of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway.

Most of all we were struck by the honesty of the book, its brutal honesty, as one person put it. Baldwin doesn’t sugarcoat anything or anyone, even his own avatar.

Have you read this classic? What did you think of it?

The Tradition, by Jericho Brown

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I am astonished by these poems, the power and sheer artistry of them. They are personal and political, specific and universal.

Brown deploys the tools of poetry—enjambment, white space, personification—boldly. Some of the poems take up hardly any space, lines only two or three words long. Yet even with that limitation they are remarkable, the fragmentation creating a rhythm in counterpoint to and with the rhythm of the words.

He uses enjambment more fiercely than I would have thought could work, and by doing so, introduces ambiguity. The end of each unfinished line introduces a gap that invites the reader to leap across it, as Robert Bly described in Leaping Poetry. The reader’s mind begins to fill in what comes next, only to get to the next line and find it something else entirely. Here are the first lines of “Second Language:”

You come with a little
Black string tied
Around your tongue,
Knotted to remind
Where you came from
And where you left
Behind photographs
Of people whose
Names now buck
Pronouncing . . .

Constantly being pulled up like this as we form sentences in our head reinforces the ideas in the poem. It also introduces what Donald Maass terms micro-tension, irresistibly drawing the reader forward. Plus the original thought lingers, a soft echo sounding through the poem.

Brown creates his own tools, complex forms that defy gravity. Some poems are in invented stanza forms, invented indentations, all of which carry meaning. The most outstanding are in the form Brown created: the Duplex. It combines sonnet and ghazal forms: fourteen lines in couplets, where the first line of the couplet is the last line–more or less–of the previous couplet, and the last line of the last couplet is the first line of the poem. Couplets two, four, and six are indented.

Such a form should be impossibly repetitive, but in Brown’s hands each Duplex is an experience like no other: the subtle changes between repetitions, the force of the ideas, and the return at the end, the words the same but the meaning irrevocably changed.

I’m struck by the physicality of these poems. Brown gets at emotion through our bodies, reminding me of Resmaa Menakem’s nonfiction book My Grandmother’s Hands where he locates what Wendell Berry called this country’s Hidden Wound in White and Black bodies, in the trauma held there. See for example these first lines from “Correspondence:”

I am writing to you from the other side
Of my body where I have never been
Shot and no one’s ever cut me.
I had to go back this far in order
To present myself as a whole being
You’d heed and believe in . . .

These poems are all infused with love, even when they are exploring heartache or calling out injustice. Capturing the currents that have been roiling out society in the last few years, and before, the poems may rock you, as they did me, but you will still feel cradled by the love.

What poems astonish you?

Out of Wonder, by Kwame Alexander

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Subtitled Celebrating Poets and Poetry, this marvelous collection is suitable for all ages. The poems, written by Alexander, Chris Colderley, and Marjory Wentworth, are supplemented with stunning illustrations by Ekua Holmes.

Like all great poems, each contains many layers. Young children, including my preschooler grandchildren, can enjoy the music of the words and universal subjects, such as this homage to Robert Frost by Wentworth which begins:

In every season I have wandered
on paths that wind through fields and woods . . .

Older children and adolescents will see themselves, too, in poems ranging from the celebration of Rumi to the tribute to Gwendolyn Brooks.

Walk out of your room
beneath the morning sky;
let the sun enter your heart,
. . .
Make a song from the light
falling through the air,
and dance even when
you are alone . . .

—from “Spin a Song,” by Marjory Wentworth

Bronzeville lady
Way past cool
Voice like butter
Melting blues . . .

—from “Hue and Cry,” by Kwame Alexander

Older teens and adults will thrill to the intricate construction of the book. In the first of three parts, the authors contribute works written using the style and rhythm of the selected poet. In the second part, the poems “incorporate the feelings and themes” of each poet. The last part, titled Thank You, includes poems about the poet being honored, such as this one celebrating William Carlos Williams that begins:

the hurried days
of two lives
crammed
into one

a modest man
in Rutherford
New Jersey
a doctor poet . . .

—from “No Idle Days,” by Chris Colderley

I find it hard to imagine the courage necessary to take on this threefold challenge, and applaud the authors not only for taking it on but for accomplishing it so brilliantly.

Older readers will also enjoy the secret notes in the colorful illustrations, unnoticed at first but when seen add yet more layers to the poem, such as this one celebrating Chief Dan George where a forest scene holds rocks and rivers, swirling leaves and woodland creatures, including the poet.

. . . Listen to the rivers,
the raven’s song,
the woodpecker’s knock,
and your beating heart.

Walk softly, mind
the leaves dancing
in shaky hands
of an old maple . . .

—from “For Our Children’s Children,” by Chris Colderley

The book is designed to introduce readers of all ages to these twenty poets and their work, inspiring us to explore more of their work, and that of other poets. I heartily recommend it.

What book has made you want to read more about the subject?

The Confessions of Nat Turner, by William Styron

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As the title suggests, this 1967 novel about the slave revolt of 1831 is told in the first person by Nat Turner, leader of the revolt. It starts with Nat in jail, chained hand, foot and neck. In meetings with his White lawyer, Nat dictates his confession, and we learn something of what sent him on this mission to kill as many White people as possible. But we need his whole life to get past the surface and truly feel what motivated him.

Nat’s life, brilliantly written, is a litany of injustice and often cruelty. Some of his owners treated him well, some viciously. He has joys and pleasures too: his friendships with some of the other slaves, his study of the Bible, his deep satisfaction in his carpentry work.

While reading, I was fully immersed in Nat’s consciousness, yet at the same time swept by my own horror and grief and shame. None of it was a surprise—I’ve seen, heard, read too much for that—but the effects of continual trauma brought to life like this affected me deeply.

Having grown up in the Tidewater area of Virginia during the Jim Crow years, Styron had been interested in the story of Nat Turner since childhood and “haunted by the idea of slavery.” His good friend James Baldwin encouraged him to write this story and to do it by taking on the persona of the protagonist.

Nat Turner has usually been presented as a fanatical madman, and apparently he truly did fast obsessively, see visions, and believe that he had been divinely appointed to this mission. Styron’s great achievement is to give us a credible and relatable individual within the confines of those facts. Two other recorded facts gave him some clues: Of the fifty-five White people killed in the revolt, Nat Turner himself only killed one, near the end, and the revolt “ran out of speed” after that.

Those facts indicate a moral consciousness at war with Nat’s mission. Throughout the book wee are in his head, thinking his thoughts, and he is always presented as rational and intelligent. By letting the reader merge into his life, taking each step with him, the author makes Nat’s actions seem reasonable, almost inevitable. Also, Nat’s thoughts are sprinkled with verses from the Bible which is his only reading material, verses which reinforce his decisions.

A third way this feat of characterisation is accomplished is by finding common ground between our experiences and his. Often Nat’s thoughts reflect insights that seem familiar to me, such as this one:

Does it seem a hopeless paradox that the less toilsome became the circumstances of my life the more I ached to escape it? That the more tolerable and human white people became in their dealings with me the keener was my passion to destroy them?

It took Styron five years to research and write the book. With little hard information to go on—the actual 7,000-word document produced by that lawyer being the only meaningful record of Nat’s life and thoughts—the author had to imagine himself into the mind and soul of a slave in antebellum Virginia. His intentions were good: he wanted to “fashion . . . an imagined microcosm of the baleful institution has persisted into this century and become the nation’s central obsession.” The book quickly became a bestseller and a Book-of-the-Month pick.

Yet only a few years later it was denounced as racist by a group of Black writers. I’ve not read their book yet and am not qualified to say one way or the other. What I do know is that it is no surprise that a book about the experience of slavery by a prominent White author would be considered proof of the privilege awarded to White voices by the publishing world.

Having already read many books about slavery, Jim Crow, and today’s injustices by Black authors, having grown up myself in a racially segregated time and place, I’m grateful to have this story too. It deepens my understanding of the early 1960s, when it seemed to me that things would never change. In some ways, sadly, they haven’t.

One thing I didn’t know before reading this book and the author’s Afterword is that in 1831 Virginia was poised to abolish slavery in the state, but Nat Turner’s revolt put an end to that. As Styron says, “the impact on the future (especially in terms of the possible avoidance of events leading to the Civil War) is awesome to contemplate.”

At this moment in time, when our democracy seems at a tipping point into destruction, largely because of deeply engrained racism, it’s daunting to consider how much can turn on a single event.

What novel have you read that gave you new insight into an historical event?

The Warmth of Other Suns, by Isabel Wilkerson

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In 1937 Ida Mae Gladney left Mississippi for Chicago. In 1945 George Starling left Florida for New York City. In 1953 Robert Pershing Foster left Louisiana for Los Angeles.

They were part of the Great Migration. From 1915 to 1970 almost six million Black citizens left the south for northern and western cities looking for better lives. For the first time Wilkerson’s monumental book gives us a history of this remarkable movement.

The book is long but eminently readable, due to Wilkerson’s approach. By closely following stories of three individuals, she captures the reader’s attention and sympathy and keeps us turning pages. There are historical sections complete with supporting statistics, but these are kept to a minimum and related to the stories we’re following. The author brings all the tools of fiction to keep us interested in this meticulously researched history.

World War I is usually considered to precipitating cause of the Great Migration. Black soldiers serving in the military and in Europe discovered that it was possible to escape Jim Crow. At the same time, factories and businesses in the north and west were desperate for workers since the flow of immigrants had basically halted and the military claimed many of the remaining men.

The scope of the Great Migration was not recognised for a long time. The effects were felt locally, in cities such as Baltimore, Chicago, Detroit, New York, but it wasn’t until southern businesses found they could no longer hire enough Black workers—whose wages had been kept artificially low by Jim Crow laws and local corruption—that the outcry began.

The last part of the book, almost one hundred pages, includes Wilkerson’s notes on her methodology, acknowledgments, endnotes and index, attesting to the solid underpinning of research. She says:

This book is essentially three projects in one. The first was a collection of oral histories from around the country. The second was the distillation of those oral histories into a narrative of three protagonists . . . The third was an examination of newspaper accounts and scholarly and literary works of the era and more recent analysis of the Migration to recount the motivations, circumstances, and perceptions of the Migration as it was in progress and to put the subjects’ actions into historical context.

It is that historical context that is the takeaway I most value from this book. Much of the information here was not new to me. Yet what stands out is how I now have a framework for all the pieces that I was already familiar with. I felt them slotting into place as I read.

One area I wish Wilkerson had covered in more depth, though obviously there wasn’t room for it, is the Black communities that flourished during segregation and then dissipated, partly through “urban renewal” demolitions and partly through integration. Wilkerson mentions it briefly in a few places, such as speaking of Harlem’s rise and fall. Robert Foster’s story, too, shows it in microcosm: as he aged, he left his prosperous private practice, where he was popular among his mostly Black patients, to join the staff of a Veterans’ Hospital. He missed being in charge and disliked having to answer to higher-ups who he believed discriminated against him, eventually forcing him out.

I will remember Robert’s story as well as those of Ida Mae and George for a long time. They brought to life the indignities of the Jim Crow South they fled and the different kinds of injustice and prejudice they found in their sanctuary cities, far worse than the discrimination that immigrants from other countries faced. Through these individuals, I have a better understanding of the people around me.

What nonfiction have you been reading?

Generations: A Memoir, by Lucille Clifton

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Lucille Clifton is one of my favorite poets and a huge influence on my writing. I was privileged to hear her read more than once. In this memoir, originally published in 1976 and now a new edition from New York Review Books, she brings a poet’s sensibility to crafting her story.

The chapters, while prose, in their brevity exhibit the conciseness of poetry; anything not absolutely necessary is pared away, leaving the kernel. And you, the reader, bring your own understanding and experience to fill in the spaces. Each anecdote, each sentence becomes something precious because you know it is there for a reason.

She begins with an anecdote of a White woman who, after seeing a notice in the paper, thinks they might be related and offers to send Clifton a history of the family that she has compiled. Yet she does not recognise the name of Clifton’s father. “Who remembers the names of slaves?” Clifton asks. “Only the children of slaves.”

Unlike autobiography which covers your entire life and is as objective as possible, memoir includes only a small piece of your experience, usually a limited time frame, sometimes restricted to a particular theme or relationship. It is more subjective, understood to be the author’s perceptions.

Clifton, writing just after her father’s death, intersperses fragments of the family gathering for the funeral with the stories he has told her about the family members who shaped him, especially Caroline Donald, who was “ ‘born free among the Dahomey people in 1822 and died free in Bedford Virginia in 1910.’”

“Mammy Ca’line raised me,” Daddy would say. “After my Grandma Lucy died, she took care of Genie and then took care of me. She was my great-grandmother, Lucy’s Mama, you know, but everybody called her Mammy like they did in them days. Oh she was tall and skinny and walked straight as a soldier, Lue. Straight like somebody marching wherever she went.”

You can hear the poet’s ear for the music of words, the way she captures the rhythm of a person’s voice, suggesting dialect without tortured punctuation.

Through traces as delicate as sumi-e, Clifton gives us other family members: Genie, her father’s father with his withered arm and success with the ladies; wild and headstrong Lucy who was hanged for killing a White man; Clifton’s mother Thelma, brother Sammy and half-sisters Jo and Punkin.

The details are what break your heart, such as a teenaged Caroline married off at to another slave, 45 years older than her. “ ‘Oh slavery, slavery,’ my Daddy would say. ‘It ain’t something in a book, Lue. Even the good parts were awful.’” There is much that is of the time: Clifton’s father came north to work in a steel mill during a strike, part of the Great Migration, and bought not only a house but also a dining room set, the first Black man in Depew to do so.

Clifton draws strength from her ancestors. It is Caroline’s clarion call that echoes through the generations: “ ‘Get what you want, you from Dahomey women.’” Clifton’s bold choices shape her adult life; she is the one to comfort her sisters and assure them that their daddy will not haunt them.

The quotes from Walt Whitman for each section help make this memoir a celebration of the lives intertwined through the centuries and going on. With this powerful memoir, we will remember their names: Caroline, Lucy, Samuel, Genie, Thelma, Lucille.

Have you read a memoir that seemed like poetry?

The Transit of Venus, by Shirley Hazzard

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This most unusual novel, published in 1980, breaks many of the writing guidelines that have become common today.

The story ranges over wide spaces of time, leaping in and out of various characters’ lives. Similarly, the author head hops without apology, jumping between the thoughts of multiple characters in a single scene. Also, we get flash-forwards, meaning we are told in an abrupt aside of what is going to happen in the future. All of these usually pitch me out of a book, but so engaging is the prose here and so unusual the story that I was irresistibly pulled on.

The Bell sisters from Australia, recent immigrants to post-WWII England, seem to have their new lives sorted. An English-rose sort of beauty, Grace is engaged to Christian Thrale, a young bureaucrat. Caro, who is preparing to take the exam for a government post, is beautiful in her own way, a way that fits her strength and independence, Grace being more conventional.

They are staying with Christian’s parents when their plans become muddled by the introduction of two men: Ted Tice, a young astronomer from a working class background, and Paul Ivory, an up-and-coming playwright and the son of a semi-famous poet. Ted falls in love with Caro, and she with Paul, who is engaged to a wealthy neighbor.

This novel could have become a simple love triangle. However, what starts as a comedy of manners quickly becomes something more profound, as the author takes us on a fierce ride through the end of England’s empire and the attendant issues of women’s roles, colonialism, class divisions, marriage, power and the corruption it incites. Love, as well, of course—Venus is after all the ruling planet of the story—but explored in surprisingly subtle ways.

The transit referred to in the title is the rare occasion when Venus passes in front of the sun, a dark planet crossing a flaming sphere. The secrets in that dark heart are boldly drawn out in this vivid story. And its tragedies are hinted at by the early anecdote of a French astronomer who traveled to India to see the transit but missed it due to delays on the journey. He stayed there for eight years until it came around again, but the day was overcast, completely hiding the planet. The next transit wasn’t for another hundred years.

The story is rich with betrayals and subtle conflicts, as when Caro interrupts Professor Thrale’s peroration, pre-empting his reveal, and he goes on as though she hadn’t spoken. The interactions between the characters leave unusual gaps, forcing the reader to step up and fill them. Conversations are spiced with asides such as this about Mrs. Thrale:

She did not choose to have many thoughts her husband could not divine for fear she might come to despise him. Listening had been a large measure of her life: she listened closely—and, since people are accustomed to being half-heard, her attention troubled them, they felt the inadequacy of what they said.

I had a little trouble finding my footing at first, rereading the initial few pages because I thought I’d missed something. No, the author takes our intelligence for granted, giving us the opportunity to navigate her unusual and thrilling sentences in our own way.

One of the things I have come to look for and enjoy in stories is when the author treats their characters—protagonist, antagonist, and everyone else—with respect and compassion. We have that here. While it may occasionally undercut the drama, this approach finds deeper currents and insights about society in the second half of the twentieth century, shown through the lives of these two sisters, and the human condition itself.

What book have you read that, as soon as you reached the end, you turned back to begin it again?

Best Books I Read in 2021

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As a writer, I learn something from every book I read. In no particular order, these are the ten best books I read in 2021. Please check the links to the blog archive for a fuller discussion of those I’ve reviewed.

1. The Winter Soldier, by Daniel Mason
While this is a story about WWI, it is not about trenches and battles. It is a small, human story powered by big ideas, not just the romance/reality of war itself and the emergence of what we now call PTSD as a recognised illness, but also the unlikely connections that save us, the small mistakes that have large consequences, hubris, guilt, atonement. It is a brilliant evocation of this moment when everything about the world changed.

2. This Is Happiness, by Niall Williams
At 17, Noel Crowe goes to live with his grandparents in the small rural village of Faha in County Clare, Ireland. Sixty years later he remembers the events of that remarkable season which started on Easter Sunday when the rain stopped. I have not enjoyed a novel this much in a long time. It took me a little while to adjust to the pace, somewhat slower than we might be used to, but appropriate for this tale of a time measured in a horse’s clopping hooves or a bicycle ride. There is conflict and suspense, too, as in any story, and mysteries to be explored.

3. Deacon King Kong, by James McBride
The story opens with Sportcoat, a deacon at Five Ends Baptist Church who is perpetually drunk on the local moonshine called King Kong, entering a courtyard at the Cause Houses, a Brooklyn housing project. He takes out a rusty handgun and shoots Deems, a young drug dealer whom Sportcoat used to coach on the project’s baseball team. While some reviewers have considered this story a farce, to me it seemed utterly real. The characters are much like people I have known, and their world—so vividly portrayed— one I am familiar with.

4. The Fire This Time, by Jesmyn Ward
I read this collection of essays and poems three times over before I allowed the library to repossess it. Subtitled A New Generation Speaks about Race, it provides a nuanced portrait of racism and race in the U.S. today. The book’s title is a play on Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, which in turn takes its title from an old spiritual: “God gave Noah the rainbow sign / No more water, the fire next time.”

5. Notes to the Mental Hospital Timekeeper, by Tim Mayo
Mayo’s most recent collection of poems helps me find a way through this difficult time. From his work as a teacher and mental health worker, he brings us encounters with the delusional and with our own pasts. Because it is sometimes hard to tell if the poem is written in the persona of a patient or a staff person, Mayo narrows the distance between the two, finding our common humanity.

6. The Madness of Crowds, by Louise Penny
Penny latest novel of Inspector Armand Gamache and the village of Three Pines in Quebec is simply extraordinary. More than any other book I’ve read, it captures this unprecedented time, while still being an engrossing mystery.

7. North River, by Pete Hamill
James Delaney is a 47-year-old doctor practicing in Depression-era New York, living alone in a house gifted him by a grateful patient. All he has left is his work and, after the carnage of the Great War where he served as a medic, he is determined to save what lives he can and comfort the dying as best he can. Then one morning he returns from the hospital to find a baby in the entryway. I loved this novel. For once, I could simply relax into the life of single person, one who is complicated and flawed but whose basic moral code is evident.

8. The Possible Pleasures, by Lynn Valente
In these poems Valente’s language is simple, yet her images are startling and fresh. In addition, exquisite care has been taken with the ordering of the poems. It’s no surprise that the prestigious Finishing Line Press chose to publish this chapbook. It embeds simple truths in experiences we can recognise and phrases that catch us by surprise.

9. Klara and the Sun, by Kazuo Ishiguro
Klara is an Artificial Friend who, in the first part of this new novel from Ishiguro, is chosen and taken home by 14-year-old Josie as a companion. The use of AFs harks back to the use of governesses, servants, and slaves to do the emotional work some parents, such as Josie’s mother, are too busy for. This theme of service and its evil twin power—the effects on both the servant and served—is one Ishiguro has explored before, notably in The Remains of the Day.

10. We Are as Gods, by Kate Daloz
The story of Vermont’s Myrtle Hill commune provides the narrative backbone of this nonfiction book. Daloz follows the group from its idealistic beginnings through the gradual disenchantment, conveying their stories realistically yet with sympathy. The book combines the focus on Myrtle Hill and its neighbors with a wide-ranging summary of the counter-culture of the period, the growth and brief life of the commune movement, and the gradual recognition among the commune members that no one is actually self-sufficient. We all, including their original Vermont neighbors, rely on our community.

What were the best books you read last year?

Hamnet, by Maggie O’Farrell

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The year is 1596. Hamnet carefully, quietly descends the stairs, searching for an adult, anyone other than his abusive and often drunk grandfather. The child needs help because his twin sister Judith has fallen suddenly and disastrously ill. He doesn’t realise that his mother is off tending her swarming bees.

O’Farrell’s tour de force focuses on Agnes, Hamnet’s mother, Shakespeare’s wife, and in so doing immerses us in the day-to-day experience of raising children and managing a household in Elizabethan England. Agnes herself is an outlier in her society: the first thing we learn about her is that she keeps a falcon, unheard-of for a peasant much less a woman. Independent, strong-minded, more at home in the woods than anywhere else, she is an herbalist and a healer. She also has a mysterious ability, presumably from her long-dead mother, to read people’s fates.

What makes this novel so stunning is the author’s evocation of the details of each scene. Instead of tearing through a scene to keep the reader hopping, the author takes the time to richly imagine the sights and sounds, the minutest actions, staying with the scene until we are there, and stays there before moving on.

Suspense comes from our foreknowledge about Hamnet’s fate—perversely denied to his mother—and from the dual timelines: one being the year of Hamnet’s death, and the other the 1580s when Agnes and William begin a life together. A lengthy middle section describing how the plague made its way from a glass-blower in Italy to Judith in Stratford-upon-Avon may at first seem unnecessary, but it serves to increase the suspense as we long to return to that house on Henley Street.

That middle section also adds to our immersion in the period, envisioning how and why goods are packaged and transported, and what the costs are. I couldn’t help but be struck by the many people felled by the plague during its journey, people whom we don’t have time to mourn as we mourn for Judith and Hamnet.

What we know about Shakespeare comes mostly from his work. What we know about his son Hamnet is simply that he died at the age of 11, four years before Hamlet was written. What we know about Shakespeare’s wife is only a name, which is probably wrong.

The way the author uses names, starting with the title, gives us the frame for this book. The epigraph, a quote from Stephen Greenblatt, tells us that Hamnet and Hamlet were used interchangeably at the time. Similarly, his mother, who was called Agnes in her father’s will, is the woman we know as Anne Hathaway. Shakespeare himself is never named in this novel, instead called the glover’s son, the Latin tutor, her husband. My book club debated why, deciding that the book was not meant to be about him. One person astutely suggested that the author didn’t want us to think about Shakespeare the bard, but Shakespeare the man.

Our name is tied to our identity, so by introducing this uncertainty, the author reminds us how little we can know of each other, whether that other is in the past or our present. Members of my book club could not help but be struck by how many of the playwright’s works deal with misunderstandings and misinterpretations, switched and mistaken identities.

Every reference I’ve seen to Anne Hathaway depicts her as an older woman preying upon young Will, forcing marriage on him by getting pregnant. In truth, though, we know almost nothing about this woman—basically just the mentions of her in her father’s will and her husband’s—as we know nothing about the many women who loved, married, and bore children in obscurity.

Thus, though I am usually wary of fictional representations of real people who are not alive to defend themselves—per Milan Kundera’s masterful Immortality—here I welcome this reimagining of a woman and her passionate relationship with her husband.

In his review of Carole Angiers’ Speak, Silence: In Search of W.G. Sebald in the London Review of Books, Michael Wood writes:

Sebald’s deep preoccupation is with what his character Jacques Austerlitz calls ‘the marks of pain’, psychological and physical, in human and other animals. These marks are indelible, and for some people unforgettable.

Similarly, O’Farrell writes:

Every life has its kernel, its hub, its epicenter, from which everything flows out, to which everything returns. This moment is the absent mother’s: the boy, the empty house, the deserted yard, the unheard cry . . . It will lie at her very core, for the rest of her life.

Speaking from experience, I can say that the wrenching pages after Hamnet’s death truly capture a mother’s grief: the stunned emptiness, the guilt (contrary to all logic), the obsessive replaying of the child’s suffering, the eventual return to being able to function though changed, profoundly changed, forever.

As I am changed by this story. I was afraid to read it, despite the glowing reviews and recommendations, because I feared the pain. I’m grateful to my book club for giving me the impetus to gather my courage and begin. As Agnes discovered, art can help heal our heart’s wounds. So I say to you, go ahead. Give yourself over to this extraordinary book.

What book have you put off reading?

The Darkest Evening, by Ann Cleeves

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In the teeth of a blizzard, DCI Vera Stanhope of the Northumberland & City Police sets off for home but becomes disoriented in the tangle of snow-covered rural roads. For a while she is able to follow the lights of another car, but then they disappear, and she finds the car veered off onto a farm track, the driver’s door standing open and—upon investigation—a toddler strapped into a carseat.

Assuming the driver has gone for help, though surprised they left the child, Vera takes the child with her—I could identify with her struggle to connect the carseat in her ancient Land Rover!—and continues along the now-familiar road. It leads to Brockburn, the Stanhope family seat, but one Vera knows little of since her father had become estranged from them before she was born. Her cousin Juliet reconises Vera and welcomes her and the child, even though there’s a party going on, hosted by Juliet’s husband, theater director Mark Bolitho.

Then the dead body of a woman is discovered just outside, found by a local farmer come to pick up his daughters who’ve been helping out with the party.

This is a satisfying mystery with a fascinating cast of local characters, lots of buried secrets, and settings that feel entirely real, whether we’re in woods, mansion, or cottage kitchen. There are constant surprises as Vera investigates. For example, the murdered woman seems to be estranged from her parents and they from each other, but there are unexpected emotions roiling beneath that surface.

Two aspects of this mystery make it stand out for me. One is the information about Vera’s family. I knew her now-deceased father had been the black sheep of the family, but hadn’t realised his aristocratic lineage. His brother Crispin left the house to daughter Juliet with the condition that her mother could live there. Browbeaten by her mother, Juliet is also miserable over her inability to have a baby, while Mark is absorbed in his plans to fix their financial woes by turning the mansion into a theater venue. Vera’s interactions with each of these relatives illuminate the family’s dynamics.

The other is the way the theme—how much about a family is invisible to an outsider—is woven into the plot. It takes an expert geologist to see beyond the surface of a happy family or an estranged one, to sift through the buried layers of past actions, tangled roots and resentments. But Cleeves weaves the theme in subtly. It is only in looking back that I see how it is embodied in the rich characters and their public and private relationships, even in their homes. There are only a couple of places where the idea of family becomes explicit. This is something I struggle with: how much to trust my reader to see what isn’t stated outright.

Having enjoyed the Vera television series I decided to try one of the books on which it is based. I chose this one because it takes place around the winter solstice, and enjoyed it very much, though of course I heard Brenda Blethyn’s voice in my head. That’s one reason I usually try to read a book before seeing its dramatisation, so I can form my own images. I didn’t mind that here because the performances of Blethyn, David Leon as Joe, and especially Wunmi Mosaku as Holly provided extra texture to the story.

There’s plenty of suspense, looking out for danger where it isn’t and being surprised by where it is. With several potential solutions, there’s much to think about. As with the best mysteries, it’s not so much about identifying the murderer as it is about finding the correct narrative among the many possibilities that could have led to this outcome. I found it the perfect read for this season.

What do you think: read the book first or see the show first?