This week, there’s horror, mental health, baking, and an autistic love story
This week there’s horror, mental health, a spot of baking, an autistic love story and a historical novel set in Birmingham, or the ‘Second City’ as it’s known in the UK.
Everything I Wish I’d Known about Anxiety, Caroline Foran, Gill €18.99
This book is aimed at people who are suffering from anxiety and who are not sure what the next step to take should be. Caroline Foran is an author, journalist and podcaster known for her practical approach to dealing with anxiety and mental health issues. The book contains 10 powerful ‘stops’ on the road out of anxiety. There’s no place here she tells the reader to merely ‘just breathe’ nor is the reader encouraged to ‘snap out of it’. Foran knows of what she speaks. At the age of 25 she quit her new job, fled the flat she’d recently moved into with her boyfriend, went home to Mammy and Daddy and her life just collapsed. She writes: ‘My road to recovery, if we can call it that, was messy, long and full of dead ends. This book exists to help you avoid as many of those as possible.{…} Now, with the benefit of hindsight, I can see a much clearer, more compassionate path – one that would have saved me a lot of unnecessary anguish.’ In this book Foran shares that path in a clear, practical and sensitive format. This book, as the blurb says, is both reassuring and inspiring.
Unapologetic Love Story, Elle McNicoll, Macmillan, €17.99
McNicoll sets the tone for her novel in her author’s note at the beginning, remembering that ‘one of the most powerful men in the world said that autistic people would never write a poem or go on a date’. Her response to this quote was a two-line poem that goes like this: ‘Roses are red, with thorns that can prick/ You are enough and that man is a dick.’ So there!
This is the story of Raina Lewis, successful podcaster and London’s hottest ‘It’ girl, who highlights the trials and successes of autistic and disabled women. She meets Tom, journalist and ‘King of Cancel Culture’ and Tom believes there’s more to Raina than meets the eye, that her public persona is possibly a fake one. So, he asks if he could profile her for his next book and Raina reluctantly agrees. What starts out as a professional engagement turns into a relationship but soon sparks begin to fly. It’s a romance for fans of the genre, but told with an edge, and from a fresh perspective.
Loaf Tin Bakes, Shane Smith, Gill, €22.99
While lots of us can handle decent dinner recipes, succeed in not poisoning our loved ones and maybe even sometimes impress them, there’s a whole heap of us who avoid baking. Dessert for a special occasion dinner is usually purchased from a decent source, because baking is just too easy to get wrong. Very wrong! Award-winning pastry chef Shane Smith is determined to dispel our fears in this practical, helpful book. He says in his intro: ‘If you’ve ever stared at a recipe with a long list of ingredients and seventeen steps, this book is for you. Baking should feel the way it does on the best days: simple, joyful, a bit messy and totally doable. So I chose the most dependable piece of kit in my kitchen, the humble 2lb loaf tin, and built an entire baking world around it. Why a loaf tin? Because it doesn’t mind if you’ve been baking for twenty years or twenty minutes.’ That’s my kind of cookbook. And from there he offers oodles of baking recipes, sweet and savoury, all produced from the humble loaf tin. Like all of Gill’s cookbooks, it’s a highly polished production and it comes heartily endorsed by Rachel Allen.
Dora’s Dream, Annie Murray, Pan, €9.99
Set in 1850s Birmingham, at the height of the Industrial Revolution, this is the story of orphan Dora, sent from the workhouse out to work as a housemaid for a wealthy Birmingham family. Their house has a library and Dora is entranced by the books, which this kindly family allow her to read in her time off. Dora has dreams of finding herself in print one day, despite her ‘lowly’ position in life. A crisis forces Dora to leave her job, and she later reinvents herself as a washerwoman. It’s dogged hard work, but she now has another mouth to feed besides her own. It’s looking like her dream of writing will never come to fruition. A thoroughly researched historical novel that immerses the reader in the gruelling poverty, the child labour, the packed orphanages and workhouses of those years, it’s as much a social commentary as it is the story of one determined woman refusing to give up on herself.
Honeysuckle, Bar Fridman-Tell, Nightfire, €22
Sister and brother Wynne and Rory live in the countryside with a housekeeper and a tutor; their parents are absent most of the time. Wynne is tiring of her little brother seeking her constant companionship and so, with flowers from the garden, she creates another sister and calls her Daye. Daye can now be Rory’s playmate. But Rory is devastated when Daye begins to disintegrate. Wynne reminds him that Daye was made from flowers, is just a ‘flower-girl’ and that all flowers eventually wither and die. He’s not so resigned to the situation and somehow must make a resurrected Daye, one that will last longer. A mix of horror, folklore and fantasy, if this is your genre of choice then you’re in for a treat.
Footnotes
A delicious weekend of classical music takes place in Birr this coming weekend, April 30 to May 4 and includes an outdoor production of Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas and a concert by renowned soprano Celine Byrne, along with lots of other events. See birrfestivalofmusic.com for details.
The Bealtaine Festival runs nationwide for the month of May, a collection of events, talks, get-togethers and whatever you’re having yourself. Events are being added to the website on an ongoing basis where the emphasis is on celebrating the arts and ageing. See bealtaine.ie for details of what’s on and where.