44. Cousins, Salley Vickers
Confusing family saga. Not sure why I had this on my TBR as it's not my usual type of thing. It's the story of three generations of a well-to-do English family, ranging from around WW2 to somewhere near the present day. Various dramatic things happen. There are deliberately close echoes in the events that affect each generation, and this gets confusing as the timeline of the book jumps forward and back, and the characters names and nicknames can get mixed up. If I tell you that there's a fair bit of aching, sexy-emotional feeeeeelings-type-stuff going on and that nearly all the characters are closely related to one another, it may give a hint of why I found this book all rather strange and slightly repellent.
45. In Our Mad and Furious City, Guy Gunaratne
Winner of the Jhalak Prize and Booker longlisted. This book is set in London in the not-quite present. References to real life events are included but deliberately slightly scrambled so it's not clear when it's set. Racial and religious tensions are heightened after the murder of an off duty soldier by a black Muslim man (which is almost, but isn't, the real life murder of Lee Rigby). The main characters are three young men living in North London, on an estate that Gunaratne describes almost although it's a prison camp - the central yard where the boys gather to play football, the towers overlooking it from where people watch from their balconies. This is a claustrophobic and tense depiction of London life, and you read it holding your breath, waiting for something bad to happen.
46. Black, Listed, Jeffrey Boakye
I heard Jeffrey Boakye talking to Michael Rosen on Radio 4 a few weeks ago and it prompted me to seek this out. It's a project that sounds simple and turns out to be anything but - Boakye lists, then analyses, as many terms as he can used to describe black people or blackness. From the official to slang to insults to those strange sly adjectives that only seem to get used in certain contexts about certain people ("powerful" athletes, for example). Boakye is an English teacher (now a Head, I think) and reading this book is like a great lesson with your best English teacher - he knows the context, he knows the history, the allusions to other texts, but in the end he comes back with clear focus to the words themselves. Why do we use phrases like "mixed race", "ethnic minority"? Is "urban" experience synonymous with black experience? What's the significance of there being an accepted female equivalent of "rudeboy"?
If you want an approachable, witty book that will really get you thinking about race and black experience in modern Britain, I can highly recommend this.
47. Into the Water, Paula Hawkins
The last two books were both very readable but quite heavy going so I picked this up as an antidote. It's a psychological thriller/mystery by the author of The Girl on the Train. Julia returns to her childhood home following the death of her sister Nel, whose body has been found in a local body of water known as the Drowning Pool. She's far from the first woman to die there - in fact, before her death Nel had been working on a history of the witch duckings, suicides and suspicious deaths of women that have taken place in and around the Drowning Pool. If you can put up with multiple narrators, all of whom are unreliable as hell, this an absorbing and atmospheric easy read.