What we're reading: Allan Stratton, Laura van den Berg and Catherine Chanter

Each week we bring you a sample of the books we’re reading, the films we’re watching, the television shows we’re hooked on or the music we’re loving.


Nina Kenwood is reading The Well by Catherine Chanter

I was handed a copy of The Well last Friday and I read it in one big gulp over the weekend. It’s a book chock-full of ideas, and interesting ones at that. The story is set in a world where it hasn’t rained in Britain for years, except for one place: a rural farm owned by a couple, Ruth and Mark, who left the city for their tree-change dream when the water crisis was just beginning. The heart of the novel is actually a murder-mystery, with the water crisis and the strange happenings at Ruth and Mark’s farm setting the stage for this tragedy. It’s a big, thoughtful novel, with a lot to say about the internet and the media, and faith and survival. A good one for book clubs, I think.

I also recently read So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed by Jon Ronson, and it was so much fun (as well as being rather horrifying). It’s the kind of book you race through very quickly, only stopping to tell whoever’s around about the outrageous, irritating or amusing chapter you just read. I highly recommend.


Emily Gale is reading The Dogs by Allan Stratton

I read the YA novel The Dogs, by Allan Stratton, in just a few hours: a combination of the fuss-free style and tensely unfolding dual mystery that makes this an ideal page-turner for teenage readers who would really prefer it if authors could just get to the point.

Stratton wrong-foots us from the start with his portrait of an unsettled teenage boy frustrated by his anxious mother who is convinced that her violent ex-husband has caught up with them again. Not for the first time she makes them pack up all their things and relocate. But then while the mother’s anxiety seems to subside, it’s the boy’s mental health that comes into question – we’re not sure which of his memories of his father to trust because he’s not sure either.

In the new place he becomes obsessed with an unsolved murder that he’s sure must have happened in the remote house they now live in, so much so that he’s distracted when his own past catches up with him. I found the last few chapters incredibly tense and confronting. This is a powerful depiction of domestic violence, and very accessible for young teenagers.


Bronte Coates is reading Find Me by Laura van den Berg

There are a few short-story collections that I return to again and again. One of them is Laura van den Berg’s What the World Will Look Like When All The Water Leaves Us which is straight-up fantastic. Now her debut novel is here and, much like her short stories, it’s all kinds of weird and wonderful. Set in a America ravaged by a strange new sickness that causes rapid memory loss, Find Me, opens in a hospital. Along with the other ‘inmates’ (the hospital has the eerie feel of a prison), the narrator Joy is immune to the sickness and being studied for a cure. The second half of the novel follows Joy’s trip across a desolate landscape to track down her birth mother.

Van den Berg’s debut has been warmly received overseas. Salon described her as ‘the best young writer in America’, while the Guardian compared her writing to Margaret Atwood and Kazuo Ishiguro. It’s easy to see why. The themes van den Berg tackles are wide-ranging and universal while the details that evoke her dystopian vision of the world are elegant constructions in miniature, precise and haunting. I don’t think Find Me is a perfect novel – the structure is unwieldy – but I get so much joy out of her perspective on the world and writing style.

Cover image for The Dogs,

The Dogs,

Allan Stratton

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