A Book Blog 2025 by Books do Furnish a Room

[Books do furnish a room]

Eerie East Anglia edited by Edward Parnell

Another British Library Tales of the Weird collection, this time focussing on a particular area. In this instance East Anglia covers Norfolk, Suffolk and Essex. Also included are parts of Cambridgeshire and South Lincolnshire (the Fennish part).

There are seventeen stories in total. Two are by M R James, including one of his more famous stories “Oh, Whistle, and I’ll come to you, my lad”. There are also stories by R H Benson, E F Benson (brothers), E G Swain, Gerald Bullett, Ingulphus, H R Wakefield, F M Major, Marjorie Bowen, Frederick Cowles, R H Malden, Robert Aickman, John Gordon, Penelope Fitzgerald, Matthew Holness and Daisy Johnson. Some of the stories are quite recent and the Daisy Johnson story is from her collection Fen.

The topography of the area feeds into the stories. The flat, wet landscape of the fens and the Norfolk Broads. Isolated sand dunes and a certain bleakness. There’s a lot of history as well and one story has links to druidic influences. M R James’s influence is strong and the understatedness of both his pieces stand out. Generally these are fairly rural tales and some good ones are included. Apart from James, the stories by Bowen, Swain, Wakefield and Fitzgerald are also good. 

8 out of 10

Starting Medusa by E H Visiak

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We are not Numbers edited by Ahmed Alnaouq and Pam Bailey

This is a remarkable collection of brief pieces of writing by some of those caught up in the genocide in Gaza. The writings are from 2015, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 202, 2022, and 2023/2024, before and after October the 7^th. Some of the writers are now dead, probably more now than when it was published in early 2025. There are dedications to five of the dead in the front of the book.

There are short individual pieces and some poetry. The writers are all young, under thirty, many of them in their teens. They write about everyday life: education, family, friends, love, children; the usual stuff of everyday life. However lived under unusual circumstances and under constant threat. One of the editors Ahmed Alnaouq explains it:

"I was depressed, it was after the 2014 war, and I lost my brother. I was asked to write about him, and I saw writing as a way to pin down all my emotions. I also wanted to challenge the way the Western media writes about us."

Alnaouq also lost twenty one members of his family in 2023. This extract is from Ismail Abu-Aitah:

“The next thing I remember is waking up in Shifa hospital (Gaza City). Confused, I asked about Mom, Dad and the rest of my family. The doctors said they were ok, and the relief of knowing they were safe was all that mattered to me: I could handle my own pain.

Shrapnel had lacerated my entire body, and I had suffered a severe concussion. The doctors took X-rays, cleaned and stitched my wounds, and put me to bed for rest. Meanwhile, I briefly saw my third brother, Mahmood, who was also hospitalised for treatment. He was discharged quickly, but I stayed due to my head trauma.

At noon in the first full day in the hospital, a few of my friends visited. I was in tremendous pain and couldn’t move. Yet I was happy because I felt I had somehow taken a hit for my family, sparing their lives. But after a short while, one of my friends broke the news. Despite my uncles’ hesitancy to tell me they had decided that I deserved to know: an air strike which had targeted our neighbour’s house had badly damaged my own home and killed five of my family members: my mom Jamila, my dad Ibrahim, my two brothers Mohammed and Ahmed, and my four year old nephew Adham. Ten other family members were wounded. Everything went black.”

There are shafts of hope as well and some of those who write have left Gaza over the years for education and jobs.

There is an ordinariness of life and an extraordinariness of trying to live amidst death and destruction. Many of those who write have been moved up to a dozen times during the war.

These accounts have impact and are very moving. They shed light on the death, destruction and genocide being wreaked on Gaza at the moment. They have power because they show the very ordinary aspirations of Gazans in impossible circumstances.

10 out of 10

Starting Domination by Alice Roberts

 

[Books do furnish a room]

An Orchestra of Minorities by Chigozie Obioma

“He had joined many others ….all who have been chained and beaten, whose lands have been plundered, whose civilizations have been destroyed, who have been silenced, raped, shamed, killed. With all these people, he’d come to share a common fate, they were the minorities of this world whose only recourse was to join the universal orchestra in which all there was to do was cry and wail.”

This was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2019. Its author is Nigerian and I think the best way to explain the novel is in his words:

“An Orchestra of Minorities is a novel that is firmly rooted in Igbo cosmology, a complex system of beliefs and traditions that once guided – and in part still guides – my people. Since I’m situating a work of fiction in such a reality, curious readers might decide to research the cosmology, especially as it relates to the concept of the chi. I must therefore declare that, like Chinua Achebe in his essay on the chi from which one of this book’s epigraphs is drawn, “what I am attempting here is not to fill the gap but to draw attention to it in a manner appropriate to one whose primary love is literature and not religion, philosophy or linguistics””.

The structure is also loosely based on Homer’s Odyssey. Chinoso, a chicken farmer falls in love with Ndali when he sees her about to jump off a bridge and intervenes. The novel chronicles their ups and downs (mainly downs it must be said). It is narrated by Chinoso’s chi, who is at the same time writer and reader. Chinonso seems to be one of the most unlucky and naïve characters in literature and this isn’t an upbeat novel.

It's an old tale being retold in Igbo form and told rather well.

7 and a half out of 10

Starting No New Land by M G Vassanji