Read: Seascraper by Benjamin Wood ★★★★★ 📚
Little waves are shouldering the cart’s tyres, spitting upwards at his face. The sea is patterned by the rain like honeycomb. He’s trying to make the best of it, but he can tell the horse is getting more reluctant.
A wonderful novella. A few days in the life of a young horse & cart shrimper working on a misty flat coast. Beautiful slow description of the daily grind in the cold & wet. The story unfolds slowly into drama, dreams & music.
Read The Ecliptic Benjamin Wood ★★★★☆ 📚
Strangely framed story of an abstract artist, from Clydebank, in a Sixties London art world. I was completely absorbed by the central section describing her life & art. The frame, a colony for troubled artists on a Turkish island not quite so much.
Read The Bellwether Revivals by Benjamin Wood ★★★☆☆ 📚
My theory is that hope is a form of madness. A benevolent one, sure, but madness all the same. Like an irrational superstition—broken mirrors and so forth—hope’s not based on any kind of logic, it’s just unfettered optimism, grounded in nothing but faith in things beyond our control.’
Sometimes uncomfortably gripping. A touch of The Secret History.
Read: The Young Accomplice by Benjamin Wood ★★★★☆ 📚
Wonderful queasy tension. Siblings, out of Borstal in the early 1950s bring all sorts of baggage to farm training centre for young humane architects.
