Darling by Rachel Edwards

When Rachel Edwards suffered racial abuse the day after the Brexit vote, she decided to write this domestic thriller. Darling is a British Caribbean nurse who launches into Lola’s life when she marries Lola’s father after an absurdly speedy romance. Lola is an indulged teen with serious issues in her social media pocket. What follows is a story of mistrust and mistakes, told by these two women who are struggling to build a relationship. Or are they? Because of course there are some odd happenings buried in the day-to-day and we are not sure who to believe.

Darling wants to spread a fierce protective love around her young son Stevie, suffering from a muscular wasting disease, and this grows to encompass Lola too. True to her roots, she piles on the Caribbean cooking, equating food with love. Teen Lola is disgusted, and wants Darling to butt out of her life with dad. But Lola is confused, vulnerable and layering one mistake on another in her search for adulthood. We are taken through twists and turns as we believe first Darling and then Lola, never quite knowing who is hiding the most dangerous secret. I liked the atmosphere, and the descriptions of all that spicy food made me hungry. The family tension between these characters and what plays out is telling. Rachel Edwards manages to broach racism, abuse, mental illness – some hefty issues without making a mis-step. What’s more, we learn right at the start that one of them is dead, but which one?

The Mermaid and Mrs Hancock by Imogen Hermes Gowar

I expect this will cause a lot of book club discussion and win some awards. It’s certainly very accomplished, quality writing, good sense of place and time. We follow the fortunes of prostitute Angelica Neal, ex-siren of Mrs Chappell’s bawdy house, who has ambitions to go it alone as a great courtesan since her protector, the duke, has died. Meanwhile, Jonah Hancock a canny shipping merchant is dismayed to find himself handed a curiosity in the form of a dead ‘mermaid’ instead of his returning ship and cargo. Of course, the clue is in the title, and these two eventually form a partnership, but how they get there is a series of mis-steps. The bawdy house is well portrayed, as we see inside the lives of these girls, in a world where women are possessions whether wives or whores, and I did feel for Angelica as she tries to overcome her circumstances. The real mermaid when it makes an appearance is intriguingly there but not there, which is clever. Although she speaks to us intermittently, which is where the book wanders into magical realism. I always want to know at the end of a historical novel, whether there is any basis in truth – was there a ‘mermaid’ doing the rounds of Georgian London, which started this idea – but we’re not told. Along the lines of The Essex Serpent, so if you liked that give it a go.

Wilding by Isabella Tree

I hardly ever read non-fiction, but found this in my mum’s local Waterstones. It’s all about the area where I grew up, a beautiful area of West Sussex in South East England: the ‘hammer pond’ mentioned is where we used to go for family walks, the village names, Shipley, Henfield, Partridge Green resonate with me. When Isabella Tree and her husband Charlie Burrell took over the land that his family had farmed for generations, Knepp, they were convinced that modernisation was the answer. They spent heavily to bring the farm up to speed, but still teetered from year to year, never really making it pay. Eventually, horribly in debt, they had to admit it was over and a new idea began to emerge. Wilding. It all began with an ailing oak tree, adrift on a tiny island of grass amidst their ploughed fields. As they began to understand that they had caused the sickness, by removing any connectivity the tree had with the surrounding surface soil that nurtured it, a bold plan emerged: stop farming and let the land go back to nature, introducing free-roaming cows, deer, rootling pigs, to make a livelihood. I rarely read non-fiction, am not an eco-warrior and know nothing about farming, but Isabella Tree walks us through the steps to what Knepp has become – a beacon of bio-diversity and returning rare breeds. Turtle doves, peregrine falcons and purple emperor butterflies have appeared from nowhere and started breeding. Scientists and ecologists alike have been shocked at how fast the habitat can return to sustaining all types of rare and almost extinct species, from fungus, to otters. Time and again, when there appeared to be a problem with some particular plant or breed running out of control, another unforeseen event – weather, predator – would remove the problem without intervention. The message is clear. It’s not too late, there is hope. But it will take a political will to roll this benefit out to a wider sphere. Knepp, after all, has benefitted from various countryside grants. Isabella Tree challenges our preconceptions of the countryside we love, manicured, tidy, a vista of rolling hills and golden squares waiting to be harvested, with the occasional picturesque hedgerow. An idyllic sort of countryside that we think is timeless, but in fact is quite recent. Wilding on the other hand, makes things messy. Like life.