Hardcover, 336 pages Published May 2nd 2019 by Fourth Estate ISBN13: 9780008293871
‘I am a fat person and I love my body. I feel lucky to be able to say that – it has taken a lot of work and a lot of time. I want to tell you what I have learned and how I got here.’
In Happy Fat, comedian Sofie Hagen shares how she removed fatphobic influences from her daily life and found self-acceptance in a world where judgement and discrimination are rife.
From shame and sex to airplane seats, love and getting stuck in public toilets, Sofie provides practical tips for readers – drawing wisdom from other Fat Liberation champions along the way.
Part memoir, part social commentary, Happy Fat is a funny, angry and impassioned look at how taking up space in a culture that is desperate to reduce you can be radical, emboldening and life-changing.
My Review
I ordered myself this book last year when it was published. I’ve just had the time to read it, and I read it fairly quickly. The early chapters made me cry because they covered some very distressing topics, and the later chapters have information that I already knew from reading Health At Every Size by Linda Bacon and The F**k It Diet by Caroline Dooner. While those books are focused on the diet industry, this book is more biography and encouragement to self-love. I found the writing moving and amusing by turns. I enjoyed the inserted interviews and the illustrations. It’s a good introduction to the fat liberation movement.
Paperback, 300 pages Published April 1st 2019 by Orenda Books (first published September 2017) ISBN: 1912374315 (ISBN13: 9781912374311)
Jan Nyman, the ace detective of the covert operations unit of the National Central Police, is sent to a sleepy seaside town to investigate a mysterious death. Nyman arrives in the town dominated by a bizarre holiday village—the “hottest beach in Finland.” The suspect: Olivia Koski, who has only recently returned to her old hometown. The mission: find out what happened, by any means necessary. With a nod to Fargo, and dark noir, Palm Beach, Finland is both a page-turning thriller and a black comedy about lust for money, fleeing dreams, and people struggling at turning points in their lives—chasing their fantasies regardless of reason.
My Review
I got this book at the Orenda Roadshow in Southall, Nottinghamshire, in late February. Just before Lockdown started. I met Antti and a few other Orenda authors and got the book signed. I was quite pleased with the trip away even if the place I stayed wasn’t very good. The library at Southwell was, and the bookshop that supplied the books was run by some lovely ladies. Karen, who runs Orenda, and Anne, who runs Random Things blog tours was there, so I actually knew a couple of people, sort of.
The Rosie-Synopsis
Olivia Koski has inherited a rather run down house on the coast. After a couple of failed relationships, she’s had enough, moved home and just wants to renovate her family home.
Jormo Leivo has a dream – Palm Beach, without the irritating heat! But to complete his dream he needs Olivia’s land, and for the boat club to disappear. And Olivia won’t sell. So he decides to scare her away, with the help of failed musician ‘Chico’ and cook Robin.
That’s about the point when it all goes wrong. Because the lads ain’t the sharpest tools in the shed and accidentally kill a burglar when they go to vandalise Olivia’s house (this is not a spoiler, the author tells us right at the beginning that this is the case).
Jan Nyman, undercover police officer, is sent to Palm Beach, Finland, to investigate after the local and regional police fail to find anything. They didn’t bother asking if anyone was threatening Olivia. Jan’s boss is convinced she’s behind it all, and Jan isn’t so sure. Until he meets her.
The dead burglar’s adopted brother comes looking for answers too, flashes cash and threatens a few people.
What follows is a comedy of errors, dark comedy.
The Good
The stupidity of it all! Robin and Chico should have just gone to the police in the first place, said they say something suspicious while out for a walk, couldn’t get a signal to call the police or Olivia so went to investigate/scare off potential criminals and while wrestling with the burglar they accidentally killed him. It would have saved everyone a lot of trouble and they’d probably be considered minor heroes.
But Jan and Olivia wouldn’t have met, and it wouldn’t have been a very long book, so it’s probably best that they didn’t. I liked the way their relationship developed and the realisations they make. All the characters, except Leivo, develop in some way, making sense of their bizarre situation and realising how they got to that point. Leivo still dreams of his ‘Palm Beach, Finland’ at the end. Giant flamingos everywhere, it’d be hideous.
There were comic moments sprinkled liberally throughout, moments when reality and people’s beliefs about themselves clashed mostly. The descriptions of events were funny, and some of the major events and turning points were situationally hilarious. But it’s a dark humour – Robin and Chico trying to start a small fire and blowing up a shed while getting scorched faces comes to mind. Even the initial killing is humorous in certain lights.
I really enjoyed the plot, the way it all sorted out in the end, and the character development.
It’s the first day of Ramadan in heat-soaked Bangalore. A young man begins to dress: makeup, a sari, and expensive pearl earrings. Before the mirror he is transformed into Bhuvana. She is a hijra, a transgender woman seeking love in the bazaars of the city. What Bhuvana wants, she nearly gets: a passing man is attracted to this elusive young woman-but someone points out that Bhuvana is no woman. For that, the interloper’s throat is cut. A case for Inspector Borei Gowda, going to seed, and at odds with those around him including his wife, his colleagues, even the informers he must deal with. More corpses and Urmila, Gowda’s ex-flame, are added to this spicy concoction of a mystery novel.
Paperback Published April 30th 2020 by Zaffre (first published June 13th 2019) ISBN: 1785764500 (ISBN13: 9781785764509)
In the sleepy village of Babel’s End, trouble is brewing.
Bilal Hasham is having a mid-life crisis. His mother has just died, and he finds peace lying in a grave he’s dug in the garden. His elderly Auntie Rukhsana has come to live with him, and forged an unlikely friendship with village busybody, Shelley Hawking. His wife Mariam is distant and distracted, and his stepson Haaris is spending more time with his real father.
Bilal’s mother’s dying wish was to build a mosque in Babel’s End, but when Shelley gets wind of this scheme, she unleashes the forces of hell. Will Bilal’s mosque project bring his family and his beloved village together again, or drive them apart?
Warm, wise and laugh-out-loud funny, This Green and Pleasant Land is a life-affirming look at love, faith and the meaning of home.
n 1893, there’s no such thing as witches. There used to be, in the wild, dark days before the burnings began, but now witching is nothing but tidy charms and nursery rhymes. If the modern woman wants any measure of power, she must find it at the ballot box.
From performing in the alleys of LA, Keith Antar Mason recounts his experience of getting on stage at the ICA in London with The Hittite Empire Performance Art Collective, an all-Black Intergenerational Men’s Cultural Elite.
The narrative of the London trip and snippets of the author’s experiences back in LA is effortlessly interwoven with visceral and evocative images from Black History, as memorised in his genes:
We are the nightsticked
Billyclubbed
Strangeways
Strangefruits
Survivors
Every summer is a Red Summer
Medusa’s Children is a one voice rant, a prose memoir, a wish poem.
This is a memory written in
Ashes and Fog
Our Life on Mars
Stone cold word killers
Spitting Knowledge and Truth
Mother Medusa
Make us
Subliminal Seducers
MEDUSA’S CHILDREN will be published in October 2020
Walthamstow, 1902: Archie and his police sergeant pal Frank Tyrell investigate the disappearance of teenager Lilian and the discovery of a corpse in the River Lea – Eleanor ‘Nell’ Redfern.
Did her father’s ambitious plans to marry her to a rail magnate cause her to run away to her watery doom? And what about Lilian Steggles, a star swimmer with her eye on the 1908 Olympics – what prompted her to disappear from home and where is she now?
Archie uses his artistic skills to identify Nell and thence to track down her story and that of the other victims of a dastardly scheme to exploit young girls for the benefit of lascivious older men.
Sixteen-year-old Jasmine Barrington hates everything about living in Kenya and longs to return to the island of Penang in British colonial Malaya where she was born. Expulsion from her Nairobi convent school offers a welcome escape – the chance to stay with her parents’ friends, Mary and Reggie Hyde-Underwood on their Penang rubber estate.
But this is 1948 and communist insurgents are embarking on a reign of terror in what becomes the Malayan Emergency. Jasmine unearths a shocking secret as her own life is put in danger. Throughout the turmoil, her one constant is her passion for painting.
From the international best-selling and award-winning author of The Pearl of Penang, this is a dramatic coming of age story, set against the backdrop of a tropical paradise torn apart by civil war.
Historical novelist Clare Flynn is a former global marketing director and business owner. She now lives in Eastbourne on the south coast of England and most of her time these days is spent writing her novels – when she’s not gazing out of her windows at the sea.
Clare is the author of eleven novels and a short story collection. Her books deal with displacement – her characters are wrenched away from their comfortable existences and forced to face new challenges – often in outposts of an empire which largely disappeared after WW2.
Her latest novel, Prisoner From Penang, was published on 17th April 2020. It is set in South East Asia during the Japanese occupation in World War Two.
Clare’s novels often feature places she knows well and she does extensive research to build the period and geographic flavour of her books. A Greater World – 1920s Australia; Kurinji Flowers – pre-Independence India; Letters from a Patchwork Quilt – nineteenth century industrial England and the USA; The Green Ribbons – the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth century in rural England, The Chalky Sea – World War II England (and Canada) and its sequels The Alien Corn and The Frozen River – post WW2 Canada. She has also published a collection of short stories – both historical and contemporary, A Fine Pair of Shoes and Other Stories.
Fluent in Italian, she loves spending time in Italy. In her spare time she likes to quilt, paint and travel as often and as widely as possible. She is an active member of the Historical Novel Society, the Romantic Novelists Association, The Society of Authors, NINC and the Alliance of Independent Authors.
Get a free copy of Clare’s exclusive short story collection, A Fine Pair of Shoes, at www.clareflynn.co.uk.
Everything Is Better With Dragons 