books reviews


THE AERIALISTS Katie Munnik


(The Borough Press, £14.99)


musicians, and serves as a memoir too.


A fascinating moment in Cardiff’s history forms the basis to the The Aerialists, by Cardiff-based author Katie Munnik. This fictionalised ac- count reimagines the ill-fated jour- ney of 14-year-old Louisa Maud Evans, who in the late 19th century tumbled from a hot air balloon over the Bristol Channel.


Winwood has dealt with mental illness and addiction himself, and Bodies is candid when it comes to laying bare the faults of an indus- try which pushes vulnerable crea- tive people over the edge of a dark abyss, some never to return. The meagre income from online stream- ing, along with contractual advanc- es that must be repaid in full before any financial gain from album sales, leads to relentless touring on a dan- gerous, stimulant-fuelled merry-go- round – one which can’t be jumped off without career-damaging conse- quences.


Some featured within Bodies, such as Peckham band Goat Girl, appear savvy to these perils; for many others, any kind of support re- garding mental health is simply not forthcoming when there is money to be made.


DAVID NOBAKHT


The story follows Laura, who is discovered in Paris by aerialists Ena and Auguste Gaudron and invited to join them working for their hot air balloon business. After returning to London, they are offered the chance to exhibit in Cardiff’s Great Exhibi- tion of 1896, where there is pressure to perform at the highest level. Here we are introduced to Grace Parry – known as Louisa Maud Evans – who is keen to join the adventures and perform, despite the risks in- volved.


When a book is set in a location that you’re familiar with, it’s always an added pleasure, offering the abil- ity to bring the story to life, and The Aerialists is no different. De- spite the historical descriptions of Cardiff offering a slightly different outlook to today, there’s still plenty to recognise from the city within the pages. A tragic tale of courage and adversity and the power of innova- tion and adventure, this moment in history makes for a moving story.


RHIANON HOLLEY


BODIES Ian Winwood (Faber, £14.99)


CAST A LONG SHADOW: WELSH WOMEN WRITING CRIME


Katherine Standfield & Caroline Oakley [eds.] (Honno, £8.99)


THE MISSING WORD Concita De Gregorio [trans. Clarissa Botsford] (Europa Editions, £12.99/£10.99 Ebook)


ground where he shines. This is a non-fiction title, though


Short stories can be an acquired taste. The bad ones often feel like someone abruptly turning off the telly 10 minutes into an hour-long programme – and there are a couple of those tales in Cast A Long Shad- ow, an anthology of Welsh women’s crime stories published by Honno. But that’s the joy of a collection


Since the 1990s, Ian Winwood has travelled the globe writing about music for NME, Q, Kerrang!, the Telegraph and the Guardian. Many musicians Winwood spent time with and wrote about died young from drug or alcohol-related illness or suicide: grunge frontmen Chris Cornell, Scott Weiland and Layne Staley are just three of many more. Bodies is an informative investiga- tion into why drugs and alcohol are so prevalent within the daily lives of


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such as this – if you find yourself in the middle of a plot you don’t care for, flick forward a few pages to find one that you do. And with 20 short stories featuring everything from an avenging gorgon to a little girl impaling the schoolyard bully on a spike, there is enough crime on dis- play here to make even Wind Street at closing time look quiet. The story that gives the com- pilation its title is a deliciously old-fashioned and utterly satisfying whodunnit, while the anthology’s two standout works come towards the end. One masterfully explores the devastating effect English su- premacy has wrecked on Welsh cul- ture throughout time by twinning the miners’ strike with the (alleged) theft of Stonehenge, while the other is a modern-day melodrama involv- ing council houses, cannabis and the most distinctively Welsh voices witnessed since Dave and Shirley first joined the cast of Gogglebox.


RACHEL REES


Words have long been used to cat- egorise us and help explain our place in the world. But as Concita De Gregorio’s beautiful, beguiling novel The Missing Word makes clear, for parents who have lost a child there is no name: no label by which they might easily identify themselves or recognise others who have suffered a similar loss. Irina, the woman whose re- al-life tragedy is explored in this highly sensitive, deeply intimate fictionalised reimagining, is one such individual, striving to define herself in a world turned suddenly, and horrifically, on its head. When her estranged husband abducts and likely murders their two children, Irina finds herself brutally striped of the titles of wife, mother and law- yer that have characterised her for so long. Accused of having been too career-orientated by unsympathetic neighbours, and of being overly emotional by incompetent police officers whose poor handling of her case sees vital evidence overlooked, Irina now finds herself being de- scribed by a series of evermore re- ductive, overtly sexist epithets. Delving deep beneath the sur- of


face


leave a lasting impression, this heartfelt novel offers itself up as a much-needed space for a group of people who have existed without a voice for too long.


one woman’s grief to RACHEL REES


THE PREMONITIONS BUREAU Sam Knight (Faber, £14.99)


sometimes sketches its characters with a novelist’s pen, and was as- sembled with multiple interviews and access to documents held by the protagonist’s surviving family. Psy- chiatrist John Barker was inspired to found The Premonitions Bureau in 1966 after hearing of a Welsh schoolgirl who had foreseen the Aberfan disaster. Britons claiming to possess similar gifts were invited to submit their hunches about im- minent traumatic events, and if the success rate was tiny as a percent- age, within that number lay some genuinely eerie heads-ups. Shortlived due to Barker’s death in 1968, the philosophy and practise of the Bureau ties into the writings of Freud and Kant, mental health provision, and people’s tendency towards confirmation bias. One can be sceptical of the broad exercise – Knight often seems so, without ever explicitly saying it – and still find this book a perfectly entertaining portrait of a strange little sect mush- rooming in polite society.


NOEL GARDNER


RUTH & PEN Emilie Pine


(Hamish Hamilton, £14.99)


Set over the course of a single day in Dublin, Emilie Pine’s debut nov- el tells the separate, occasionally overlapping stories of its epony- mous characters. Ruth’s marriage is in crisis due to factors that are out of her control, while Pen is trying to navigate the murky, turbulent wa- ters of teenage love. Both women are feeling lost, trying to find their footing in the world and yearning for things that may always remain out of reach.


Despite being billed as a novel, the book is really made up of two briefly intersecting novellas. The chapters alternate between both stories, and occasionally shift to include the perspectives of Ruth’s husband Aidan, Pen’s friend Alice and Pen’s mother Claire.


The debut book by UK journalist Sam Knight grew from a longform article for his most regular publish- er, the New Yorker, and in painting a semi-hidden world – clandestine, not necessarily crooked – main- tained with a dry officiousness, The Premonitions Bureau operates on


These additional perspectives sometimes clutter the narrative, muddying its momentum, espe- cially in the opening third, which is the weakest section of the book, and there is a sense that the story takes a while to get going, that its opening could have more succinct, but Ruth & Pen soon becomes an affecting, at times very moving por- trait of love and grief, capturing the constant tussle between our interior lives and the hidden lives of others. The answer, as always, is connec- tion.


JOSHUA REES


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