Five must-read novels

Jacob Ross: Tell No-One About This: Collected Short Stories 1975-2017 (Peepal Tree)

At first, with all the changes of routine involved in lockdown, I found it hard to concentrate on reading. There was so much disorientation – and in the first couple of weeks especially, I also had the compulsion to keep checking the news. In the past when I’ve experienced quite drastic changes in life and need to put my imagination to reading rather than worrying, I’ve often turned to short stories.

One of the first books I purchased during lockdown was Jacob Ross’s Tell No-One About This: Collected Short Stories 1975-2017, published by Peepal Tree, a Leeds-based press.

The settings of Ross’s stories range from Grenada to the UK. In each, there’s a tremendously evocative sense of landscape, and the writing really moves the senses. The stories are rich in suspense and surprise, but it’s the lives and interactions of the characters that move me most of all. Plus, a recurring theme in several of the stories is some form of curfew, so of course, this gives them all the more resonance with lockdown.

Matthew Welton: Squid Squad: A Novel (Carcanet)

In the writing of Matthew Welton, there’s a tense yet perfect balance between formal experiment and sensory delight. Squid Squad: A Novel shifts the boundaries between fiction and poetry, creating something provocative and new.

In one sense, the ‘novel’ declared in the title seems a gesture of fiction: ‘Squid Squad’, the 64-page first part of the book, is supplemented by what the blurb calls ‘shorter stand-alone poems’ in the remaining 46 pages. The latter poems show Welton in fine form, but it’s the compellingly ‘novel’ first part that most thrilled me as a reader. Working a series of joyful variations on sound, space and image, Welton creates a quietly ethereal set of situations, in which ‘Angus Mingus catapults pebbles at the lemonade cans on the wall. Natalie Chatterly appears in the photograph twice. The salty spaghetti gives Hank Strunk rumbly guts.’

Overwhelmed as we often are by information and instruction under lockdown, I find the world created in this book a stimulating delight.

Lydia X. Z. Brown, E. Ashkenazy and Morénike Giwa Onaiwu (editors): All the Weight of Our Dreams: On Living Racialized Autism (Dragonbee Press)

Autism is part of how I sense and experience the world; it’s also central to much of my creative and critical writing. All the Weight of Our Dreams is one of the most inspiring and transformative interventions I have read on the subject of autism. Key aspects of the condition are discussed at length across the book, including sensory experiences and the need for routine. Most important of all, though, are the contributors’ different reflections on autism as social identity. Crucially, All the Weight of Our Dreams foregrounds the experiences of autistic people of colour, and how race intersects with disability.

Morénike Giwa Onaiwu’s preface to the book states: ‘We - the autistics of colour - are seldom acknowledged. Our faces, bodies and voices are conspicuously absent from not only literature and media, but also from much of the discourse surrounding race and that of autism’. All the Weight of Our Dreams thus offers a vital expansion to discussions of disability and race, while also addressing aspects of gender and sexuality in relation to autism.  Edited and written entirely by autistic adults, this weighty but affordable 500-page paperback includes life writings, poetry, academic research and visual art.

Dave Haslam: Sonic Youth Slept on my Floor: Music, Manchester, and More: A Memoir (Constable)

After greatly enjoying his recent book Searching for Love: Courtney Love in Liverpool, 1982 (Configo), I wanted to read more by this author. There’s something decidedly uplifting about Dave Haslam’s writing. His intellectual enthusiasm is boundless, and his work always inspires me to read and listen to new things. They may not even be from the artists or musicians he’s writing about: it’s more a mindset, an openness, that Haslam’s work has a way of promoting.

Sonic Youth Slept on my Floor is as much a series of literary, musical and cultural meditations as it is a memoir. I loved reading about his years running the eclectic fanzine Debris, in which figures such as Neneh Cherry and Jeanette Winterson would be interviewed in the same edition.

June Burnett: Limbo Girl (Frederick Muller Books)

June Burnett  was a remarkable author and artist, whose work and influence have yet to receive due attention. The first of four novels by the author, Limbo Girl (published in 1980) evokes the Liverpool of Burnett’s youth. Confronting both racial and gender inequality head-on, this novel stands as both a literary and historical reflection of working-class life in post-war England.

After working in factories and on fairgrounds (including a stint as a stunt motorcyclist), Burnett became a mature student at Liverpool College of Art (where her friends included John Lennon and Adrian Henri) before moving to Dresden, Stoke-on-Trent. Burnett’s paintings were successfully exhibited from the 1970s until her death in 2010. As her recognition as a novelist grew during the 1980s, Burnett founded a local writers’ group for working-class women, and was a key supporter of numerous arts-based initiatives in the Midlands.

About Dr James McGrath

Dr James McGrath’s book Naming Adult Autism: Culture, Science, Identity was published in paperback and on kindle by Rowman & Littlefield International in 2019. He is a Lecturer in English and Creative Writing at Leeds Beckett University, and his poems have appeared in various literary magazines.