Orbital – Samantha Harvey

Twenty-four hours in a space station in a low orbit round the Earth. Six occupants, technically four astronauts and two (being Russian) cosmonauts. The latter, Roman and Anton, are both male, but their western colleagues are evenly split by gender – Shaun is American, Nell is British, Pietro is Italian, and Chie is Japanese.

Twenty-four hours, but in that time sixteen ninety-minute orbits. Each orbit whizzes them through day and night on the planet below, experiencing sunrise and sunset continually. In between, in daylight, the sea, land, mountains, ice caps, forest, desert, savannah, rivers, and seas pass below. In darkness, only man-made illumination tells the land from the sea, the remote from the teeming cities. Each orbit shifts west revealing a different strip, which combine to cover the whole planet.

The views from space feature large, but so do the thoughts of the six crew – thoughts of home, of family, of the tension they feel between the pull of home comforts and the lure of the mission. But there are daily routines, chores, duties to distract them, from maintaining scientific experiments to cleaning the bathrooms.

The short book reads nicely, oscillating between the profound and the mundane, placing the reader in a strange but relatable environment. And though the zero-gravity workplace is interesting, and the musings of the crew thought-provoking, it is the descriptions of the panoramic views of space, the moon, and the blue pearl that is Earth, that most stir the imagination.

A Quiet Contagion – Jane Jesmond

Phiney Wistman, a nurse living in Coventry, gets a message at work. Her step-grandmother, Dora, has phoned from Derbyshire to say her husband, Phiney’s grandfather, is dead and she is on her way to see her. At the railway station Phiney gets some more details – killed by a train, fell from a bridge. At the police station they gat the full story – Wilfred Patterson committed suicide; he didn’t fall, he jumped. Phiney can’t believe it, but there was an eyewitness, a local freelance reporter, Matt Torrington.

In going through Wilfred’s things, Phiney finds two items of interest. A bill dated the day he died from a Coventry hotel and an old newspaper cutting from 1957. The latter shows a group of staff from Poulter’s, a local pharmaceutical company, including a teenage Wilf who had worked one holiday there with his dad, Harry, the Warehouse Manager. Also in the photo are company owner Richard Poulson and his son, Michael, along with three scientists and another boy on a holiday job.

Phiney, Dora, and Matt set off looking for answers to questions – why did Wilf kill himself, why a secret stay at the hotel, why was he looking at an old photo, who were these people? When they learn of another death in the group, they suspect they share a secret that one of them does not want revealing.

The mystery unfolds steadily as the amateur sleuths stumble from clue to clue, unsure who to trust of believe. The key reveals come late, surprising despite being well-trailed. Now, armed with the truth, Phiney turns from hunter to hunted in a tense climax.

It is well crafted, the secret quietly spreading like a virus and with deadly effect. The pace is good, the characterisation passes muster, and there’s even a dog involved.

What’s not to like? Well possibly the resolution may not satisfy everyone, but I was fine with it.

Odyssey – Stephen Fry

The victorious Greeks are on their way home, fighting through storms whipped up by grumpy gods. Agamemnon to Mycenae, carrying with him the captive Cassandra; awaiting him are the resentful Queen Clytemnestra and their cursed children Orestes and Electra. Menelaus sails for Sparta, returning Helen to her rightful place but an uncertain welcome from those whose menfolk have perished at Troy in her cause. And Odysseus, heading for Ithaca and a reunion with his wife, Penelope, and son, Telemachus.

Not just Greeks on the move. The escaping Trojan prince, Aeneas, is on the run, sailing the Mediterranean in search of his destiny to found the greatest city ever in far off Italy. That is after, of course, he’s had his dalliance with Dido in Carthage.

Fry covers all of these, succinctly and with brio, giving both men and Gods their due. But it is the cursed wanderings of Odysseus and the trials of Penelope and Telemachus that occupies most pages and supplies the title.

The perils of Odysseus are familiar enough – the one-eyed cyclops, the lure of the sirens, Circe’s enchantment, and the twin terrors of Scylla and Charybdis – as are the wiles of Penelope keeping the suitors at bay pending the hero’s return. And return he does (surely no spoiler) with bloody vengeance that we shamefully applaud.

So, an end of sorts to the Trojan reading journey. Stephen Fry and Pat Barker have had their say, but we will give the final perspective to Margaret Atwood and her Penelopiad – to follow shortly.

A House Through Time – David Olusoga & Melanie Backe-Hansen

Although this book uses the same title as the TV series presented by Olusoga, it applies not to a specific house but to the generic. The three properties in Bristol, Liverpool, and Newcastle featured in the programmes are often referred to but only incidentally to illustrate a point.

After a chapter detailing useful tips and sources for those interested in house histories, the authors plunge into a comprehensive canter through the history of housebuilding in Britain. From the early cottages and houses in villages it moves to the Georgian and Victorian heyday of town and city development - grand mansions, elegant terraces, and workers’ hovels.

They tie the next phases of development to the social forces at work – industrialisation, labour demands, transport systems, and developer profits – to explain the growth of the slums and the exodus to the suburbs. The effects of the two world wars are discussed along with the gradual acceptance of housing as a government responsibility, leading to council house building, slum clearance, and tower blocks.

It is an interesting and enlightening thread of history that affects us all, giving insight into the built environment we, often unthinkingly, inhabit.

Trespasses – Louise Kennedy

Cushla Lavery is a young primary teacher in Northern Ireland. Miss Lavery to her pupils, who include Davy McGeown, a bright child from a troubled home. Troubles are all around. It is the 1970s, and though where Cushla lives, just outside Belfast, the sectarianism is less violent, it is there, bubbling away.

Her family is Catholic. She teaches at a Catholic school, but her brother runs a pub where the clientele, reflecting the community, is mainly Protestant. It is a good pub, so tolerated. And Cushla is an efficient and attractive part-time barmaid, less troubled by sectarian bias than by over-familiar punters, all too ready to take advantage of their ethnic majority status.

One customer is different. An older man, Michael Agnew, uses his natural authority to slap down the banter. Cushla is grateful. He’s attractive, the feeling is mutual, and before long nature takes its course. But in addition to being Protestant, he is married and old enough to be her father. So, it doesn’t auger well.

Throw in her mother’s alcoholism, her professional differences with Father Slattery who pulls the headteacher’s strings, and her well-intentioned but fraught involvement with the McGeown family, and it makes for a heady and emotional six months in her previously stable life.

The narrative hangs together well, moving smoothly between episodes while in the background the sectarianism, prejudice, and military presence provide an oppressive brooding atmosphere. Cushla has her flaws. But they are human flaws that in a different place or at a different time would not have their effect so tragically magnified.

A tense, illuminating, and enjoyable read.

The Voyage Home – Pat Barker

And so, to part three of the trilogy, and the baton of carrying the narrative forward passes to Ritsa, a Trojan woman of mature years. She is in servitude to Agamemnon due to her usefulness as a healer working with his physician, Machaon. These three are on a fast ship back to Greece, along with Agamemnon’s prize captive, Cassandra. She is the daughter of Priam, the slaughtered King of Troy, and she is sort of married to Agamemnon, despite him having a wife, Clytemnestra, back home.

Machaon and Ritsa have their hands full with both Cassandra who is crazed with visions of the future, and Agamemnon who is racked by guilt over his sacrifice years since of his daughter Iphigenia to secure fair winds for Troy.

Back in Mycenae lies more trouble for them. Clytemnestra, ten years ruling the roost, is preparing a royal welcome suitable for her bigamous and filicidal husband. And for his upstart Trojan concubine. She, Cassandra, has her own murderous plans for the king.

Where will all this leave Ritsa? Clytemnestra and Cassandra are like a rock and a hard place. Ritsa needs to ensure she, unlike Agamemnon, is not caught between them.

Pat Barker continues to successfully meld the classical with the modern. Characters’ motivations are relatable to today’s world, and the dialogue is snappy and includes modern usage. An excellent finale to the trilogy.

[So much for Agamemnon’s voyage home, what of the rest of the Greeks? On next to Stephen Fry’s Odyssey to continue the Trojan reading journey.]

Jimi Hendrix Live in Lvov – Andrey Kurkov

Each 18 September, in the Ukrainian city of Lvov, a handful of ex-hippies, or rather surviving hippies (once a hippy always a hippy) gather in the small hours at a disused cemetery where, they believe, is buried the hand of one of their musical icons, Jimi Hendrix. Alik is a regular, but this year (2011) there is a new face, who reveals himself as Captain Ryabtsev, ex-KGB officer, or maybe that too should be surviving KGB officer. Ryabtsev used to monitor dissidents such as Alik, but secretly he admired their lifestyle and now wants to befriend Alik and make amends.

As the two of them leave the cemetery, Alik is clipped by an erratically driven old Opel. Thus, we are introduced to the other main character, Taras. His driving style is deliberate. After dropping out of medical school he now operates an unconventional therapy – the shaking loose of kidney stones and their forced expulsion by micturition, all brought about by drinking cognac and being driven at speed over the cobbled streets of Lvov. At night, obviously!

More characters are introduced including Alik’s neighbour Yezhi, and his actress friend, Oksana. Taras, whose fees are paid in cash and in a variety of currencies, frequents a 24-hour exchange booth in the city, where he falls for the pretty cashier, Darka.

So far, so Kurkov. Then more so. Something is amiss in Lvov. Anomalous for a landlocked city six hundred kilometres from open water, there is occasionally a salty taste in the air, a smell of rotting seaweed. Seagulls gather, caw, swoop. One of them even attacks Oksana’s aquarium. Alik and Ryabtsev decide to investigate.

Combining wackiness with precise prose, Kurkov convincingly paints lives lived on the periphery of Lvov society. Strangely compulsive, the activities of Alik, Ryabtsev, Taras, and Darka would hold the interest even without the narrative hook of discovering the source of the seaside anomalies. There is a resolution on that, but the grave of the Jimi Hendrix hand remains a mystery.