dittybox

  Many of us have heard snippets of family history from our parents and grandparents, and now we have access to historical records online, we can dig a little deeper and trace the line back a little further.  It's fascinating stuff, but at the same time deeply frustrating, because there are always so many more questions to ask and nowhere to go to find the story that lies behind the documents. Simon Mawer's answer to this is to write an informed fictional account of what he thinks would have happened, and although he already has the bare bones of the story mapped out, I can assure you that this is not as easy as it looks.  I tried it myself when I was putting together a history of my side of the family, and as I went forward I realised I was creating the ancestors I wanted to have and the reality was probably something wildly different. There is always a great temptation to have people conform to modern standards, especially with the women.  Women from every era can ...

  A tale set in the old west of America, at a time not long after the Civil War, where vast numbers of the Indian population had been murdered and those few who were left behind had no land or legal rights to protect them. Winona Cole, who had once been know as Ojinjintka, has been taken in by two men who are trying to make a new life for themselves growing tobacco on a small piece of land.  They are kind to her, and treat her like a daughter, but many in the town think nothing of hurting an Indian even if she is just a little girl.  The men can keep her safe as long as she is on their land, but as she grows older and starts walking out with a young man, they can't watch over her as much as they would like, and around the age of seventeen she is attacked and bought home badly hurt. Winona can't recall who was responsible for hurting her as everything about it has gone from her memory, but her injuries told the story of what had happened and the people of the farm wanted j...

  I loved this book as it is the work of a real story teller.  This is the first sentence: 'She is twelve years old, and she will be married in the morning.' Who would not be instantly drawn in by that?  Shocking by today's standards, but in India in 1900, this happened, and it didn't always turn out to be a bad thing. A marriage broker had arranged the marriage and the groom is a man of forty whose first wife died leaving their baby son with no-one to look after him.  By marrying again, the man will immediately have found a nursemaid, cook and housekeeper and the bride's mother (who is a widow) wants to give her daughter the security she cannot provide herself.  The bride and groom have not set eyes on each other before the wedding, and the man is shocked to find his bride is just a child and he storms away from the altar.  He is only persuaded to return after being persuaded that the shame of being left stranded on her wedding day will mean that no-one el...

  The take-away from this book is that bad things can happen to good people and none of us should get too comfortable in life as you don't always end up where you expected to be. Faith and religion are tricky subjects to tackle in a novel, but Elizabeth Strout understands her subject, and her portrayal of a young Christian Minister in his first church perfectly captures how theological expectation does not always survive contact with real people. Tyler Caskey is an idealist who has to learn that not everyone's moral compass is set in the same way, and even his young wife surprises him sometimes when she makes judgemental remarks about people in the congregation.  He is also aware that the women in town like to gossip and the slightest hint of scandal is enough to get their telephones ringing as there's nothing they like better than building something out of nothing.   Tyler doesn't like to correct people individually and hopes to get his teaching across through thoug...

  As you get older you start feeling a responsibility to preserve what you know about family history and this is why Michael Palin felt he he had to write the story of his Great Uncle Harry.   Some years ago an elderly cousin of his father passed on to Palin a box of photographs and papers that had come from down from her grandparents (his great grandparents), and as she had no children, she gave it to him to keep it in the family.  For a long time everything just sat in a box as there were other more pressing projects to deal with, but when working on a documentary about the last days of the First World War, Palin found his great uncle's name carved on a memorial at the site of the Somme battlefields.  When he discovered that there was no grave to visit and Harry's final resting place was 'Known Only Unto God', he knew he had to know more. Writing a book like this is a lot harder than it looks because the old family notebooks and papers only gave the bare outli...

  This one surprised me.  After reading the first few pages I was starting to think that I didn't much like the writing style and I didn't really like the characters and if it had been a Wednesday (library day) I may well have taken it back and got myself something else.  Then all of a sudden it perked up.  It was a bit like one of those films that starts in black and white and then flips into colour when the story gathers pace - and it certainly gathers pace! By the time I got to the last third of the book I could barely put it down. The Birnam Wood of the title is a gardening collective of people who go around planting vegetables on little pockets of land that don't seem to get any attention from anyone else.  The produce is then used to help feed the group and the remainder is sold to raise funds for anything they can't get by upcycling things discarded by other people.  It's all very small scale until they receive an offer of funding from a billionaire ...

When I started reading this I thought it was a translation because there was something about the writing style that reminded me of translated books by Isabel Allende.  Turns out the author is American, and when I think about it, the first name 'Dave' is probably not a traditional Spanish or Basque name so maybe that should have given me a clue. There are great swathes of history that I know nothing about, so the title Guernica meant nothing to me, although many of you may be aware that the Spanish town in the Basque region was heavily bombed by Hitler's German Air Force acting in support of General Franco in 1937.  There was no specific military purpose for destroying the town and many innocent civilians lost their lives during the prolonged raid. The Spanish artist Picasso (who I have heard of) was outraged by the bombing and within the same year produced a large mural as an anti-war statement.  Picasso and his painting 'Guernica' are mentioned many times and a rev...