THE SAGA OF ASLAK SLAVE-BORN by Susan Price. Reviewed by Ann Turnbull

   In this short book, Susan Price has created an engrossing story of loss and adventure. Sixteen-year-old Aslak - born a slave but freed by his father - sets off on a quest to find his sister Astrid. Until their father's death, Astrid and Aslak had lived at home with their father's legitimate children - but when teenage Aslak returns home from his first trading voyage he finds that his father has died and his brothers have sold Astrid into slavery.

  Aslak's journey takes him to Norway and later to Jorvik (Danish York) in England. Aslak is hasty and quick-tempered and often antagonises people, but he has a friend - a shipmate, Thorgeir - who is more diplomatic and who joins him in his search. Later, Aslak is taken under the wing of an elderly woman, whose story reveals much about the lives and beliefs of the people - especially when his bond with her leads to her offering him an unwanted honour.

  The narrative is rich in detail. We learn how people lived, how their houses were constructed, what their clothes and weapons were like. Most importantly, we briefly inhabit the world as they knew it.

  Those who have read any of the Norse sagas will know that they are full of violence and danger but also strict codes of honour and kinship. What Susan Price has done in this short, accessible book is to write Aslak's story in the style of the sagas without any concessions to modern sensibilities. It all rings true.

Detailed historical notes are included at the end of the book.

First published by A&C Black in 1995.

This edition, available as both paperback and e-book, 2015.

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A STERKARM TRYST by Susan Price, reviewed by Penny Dolan

Susan Price’s long-awaited YA novel A STERKARM TRYST has now been published. 

So, because I loved the world of the 16^th Century Border Reivers that was brilliantly evoked in the two earlier titles - THE STERKARM HANDSHAKE and A STERKARM KISS - I bought a copy of this third novel, and was not disappointed. 

Earlier events and confrontations are woven lightly into the plot, allowing new readers and re-readers slip easily into this particular storyline. This is science fiction with excellent time-travelling!

The trilogy has an interesting premise: James Windsor, a late 21^st Century entrepreneur, intended to use his company’s Time Tube to colonise and exploit the unspoilt lands of the past. 

Windsor thought his men would easily secure such a backward territory - and then they met the Sterkarms. Of all the feuding families in the Debatable Lands, the Sterkarms are the most treacherous: everyone knows that a Sterkarm handshake might promise friendship with the right hand while the left hand carries a blade to slide between your ribs. 

At first, the Sterkarms treat the 21^st century intruders with wary respect, deciding these strangers must be Elves. After all, they can appear and disappear, dress in unknown materials, and carry magic pills that take away pain. And from these "Elvenkind" springs the relationship that stands at the heart of the novels.

Andrea Mitchell, a 21st Century anthropologist, finds the love of her life in Per Sterkarm, the family heir, and at the start of THE STERKARM TRYST, she has come through time to her lover again, though uncertain of any welcome.

Known as his "Entraya", his Elf-May, she has a hard task. She has to warn Per and the Sterkarm family that a deadly new enemy has entered their lands. Windsor has time-travelled a group of Sterkarms from an almost parallel time dimension into this one. These are warriors who know this wild landscape as they do, and who fight with matching ferocity and who look just as they do. They will know all the Sterkarm tricks, and Windsor is behind them.

How can Andrea even explain this phenomenon? 

How can a Sterkarm attack another to whom - it seems - they owe loyalty? 

And how, I wondered, can a writer manage two almost-identical casts?

Susan Price does. Carefully, scene by scene, she moves the action forward, resolving what the reader wants resolved, and ending with treachery getting what it deserves. The headings keep the story straight and satisfying in its conclusions.

However, I must say that the plot was not the only thing that made A STERKARM TRYST a compelling experience for me. Within the storytelling, I heard rich echoes of the traditions, superstitions and legends of the Border Ballads, as well as the languages and voices of the region and its past. Humour is there too, within the pages, as well as moments when the differences between the present and the past are suddenly very evident.

Moreover, the dramatic landscape of the book is recognisably that of the Borders, an area of wild uplands and uncertain weather, a place where cattle-raids were then part of the culture, and where hunger was a constant threat.

I enjoyed being within that way of life, following the descriptions of an active community and culture, along with glimpses of cooking methods, housekeeping and textiles, herbal lore, fear and superstition. Captured in the writing too, was the importance of respectful behaviour and right words and acting according to your status: the sense of a time and place where any perceived insult might mean death.

A STERKARM TRYST feels a very physical story. It moves through camps and hovels and crowded stone towers, past the stink of unwashed clothes and the gutting of meat and the hard lives and gory deaths of men and women: this is not a benign or moral fairy-tale. Besides, survival depends on a reputation for cunning and treachery, especially when there are two lots of Sterkarms riding out, as well as Windsor’s thugs and their 21st Century weapons.

Yet, reading the book from the comfort of home - and despite all the violence - it is hard not to admire the warmth and energy and the bonds of family loyalty and protection within the Sterkarm clan. Like Andrea/Entraya, I found the Sterkarms beguiling, and welcomed the many characters that Susan Price has created – Toorkild, Lady Isobel, Sweet Milk, Gobby, Mistress Crosar, Joan Grannam, Davy, Cho and more - each one entirely convincing, for all their faults.

Especially that blue-eyed, fair-haired hero, Per May Sterkarm. And Cuddy. I have to mention them. Read the book and you’ll discover why.

Penny Dolan.

All three titles, including THE STERKARM TRYST, are published by OpenPress in a handsomely-matching set of covers or as e-books. 

 

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Christopher Uptake by Susan Price

Reviewed by Cecilia Busby

Available on Kindle

"Christopher Uptake" is a curious book. I have an original copy of it, illustrated with a picture of a rather serious young Elizabethan man, bending over some writing in a dark room, illuminated only by a candle. The newly issued Kindle cover has an immediately recognisable portrait of an altogether more confident character, gazing at the viewer with a hint of challenge in his eyes.

The motto on the original portrait (below) is "Quod me nutrit me destruit" - that which nourishes me also destroys me. In Elizabethan times the motto was associated with a torch or candle held upside down - the falling wax causing the candle to burn more brilliantly but also eventually extinguishing the flame. The image reminds me of Edna St. Vincent Millay's "My candle burns at both ends, it will not last the night; But ah my friends and oh my foes - it gives a lovely light!" The lovely light, was, of course, the short but brilliant career of Christopher Marlowe, poet, dramatist, atheist and spy, whose wild living and controversial opinions may have led to his murder at the age of 29.

Christopher Uptake is clearly based on Marlowe - yet strangely that link is not made in the blurb for either the original or the re-issued book, despite the portrait on the front. Nor do any of the Amazon reviews mention it. It seems odd. Uptake, like Marlowe, is the son of a tradesman, a grammar-school boy who wins a scholarship to Cambridge, an atheist who takes to writing plays, and who gets mixed up in the Elizabethan secret service, spying on the equivalent of Second World War fifth columnists: the English Catholics. Yet Uptake is not Marlowe; his trajectory is, finally, very different. Rather than taking to the business of spying with gusto, Uptake is riven with doubts. He suffers from stabs of conscience and from guilt at the thought of what his spying may lead to for the Catholics taken and tortured by the Elizabethan secret police. Uptake is a reluctant spy, caught in a net where his cooperation is ensured by threats to himself and his family. He is represented as a miserable collaborator with a harshly repressive state regime.

It's a long way from the swashbuckling image of Marlowe the dramatist, with the "high astounding terms" of his bravura verse, his reputed love of "tobacco and boys", and the boast that "he had as good a right to coin as the Queen of England and ... meant through help of a cunning stamp-maker to coin French crowns, pistolets and English shillings". I have to confess to having fallen half in love with this version of Marlowe when I was sixteen and first discovered Tamberlaine the Great. In the preface to my secondhand copy of his Collected Works was a reproduction of the infamous Baines Note, detailing Marlowe's supposed blasphemies. That, for example, "all Protestants are hypocritical asses", and "if he were put to write a new religion he would undertake both a more excellent and admirable method" as "all the New Testament if filthily written". Like the later Marx, he argued that "the beginnings of religion was only to keep men in awe", and that "Moses was a juggler". Doubts have been cast on how much of this was really Marlowe's opinions and how much was malicious slander - but I was hooked: by the poetry, the drama, and the blasphemies.

Reading "Christopher Uptake", I wondered whether Susan Price had set out to write about Marlowe and then found that she couldn't make it work. Simply couldn't find a way "in" to a character who was so obviously intelligent and free-thinking and yet came to work as a spy for the government, betrayed those he had feigned friendship with, professed a Catholic faith only to entrap and incriminate others. Perhaps she just couldn't prevent the guilt and the doubt overwhelming her Christopher, unlike the historical one, to the point where he had to become Uptake rather than Marlowe.  It seems curious, otherwise, to stick so closely to the original and yet give her character's story such a different resolution. Certainly the book made me think much more deeply than I have before about what it would have been like to live in the time of Elizabeth I, what it really meant to be surrounded by such a strong network of spies and agents provocateurs, to live in the middle of rumour, plots, counterplots, agents and double-agents. It would have been, I think, a little like living in Berlin at the height of the Cold War. Uptake is a young man who wants to be left alone, doesn't want to do anyone any harm; yet in such times it's hard to stay neutral, and Christopher struggles in the sticky webs laid by the Queen's spymasters.

I was really gripped by Christopher's predicament, by his moral dilemmas and justifications, as well as his attempts to limit the damage he has done. Price does an excellent job of making his world believable, making us care about Christopher, making us desperate for him to escape the clutches of the sinister spy, Bagthorpe. It's a book that lives on in the imagination after it's read, and it certainly made me think again about the real Christopher Marlowe and what he may or may not have done in the service of the unscrupulous Sir Francis Walsingham (pictured).

I think there are ways to understand Marlowe's role as a spy, particularly when you remember that England at the time was a small and insecure island, surrounded by great Catholic powers simply waiting for a chance to invade. It was a crueller time, life was more fragile and more contingent. But Susan Price's Christopher is a fine creation that certainly serves as a challenge to anyone who admires the playwright: what made Marlowe choose differently from Uptake?


Cecilia Busby writes as C.J. Busby
She is the author of Frogspell, Cauldron Spells, Ice Spell and Swordspell
www.frogspell.co.uk

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THE GHOST DRUM by Susan Price. Reviewed by Ann Turnbull

"In that country the snow falls deep and lies long, lies and freezes until bears can walk on its thick crust of ice.  The ice glitters on the snow like white stars in a white sky!  In the north of that country all the winter is one long night, and all that long night long, the sky-stars glisten in their darkness, and the snow-stars glitter in their whiteness, and between the two there hangs a shivering curtain of cold twilight."

In 1987 Susan Price won the Carnegie Award for The Ghost Drum.  It seems inexplicable that this powerful, original fantasy was ever allowed to go out of print.  Fortunately it is now available once again as a Kindle e-book, with a stylish new cover designed by Andrew Price.

The origins of this story lie in northern legends and folk tales, especially the folklore of Russia.  There are witches and shamans, an evil Czar who rules over a population of peasant slaves, a prince locked in a tower and a young witch who sets out to rescue him.

In the peasants' house where Chingis, the witch-to-be, is born, it is so cold at night that the whole family must sleep huddled together, lying on blankets, on top of the big tiled stove.  Far away is the padded, silent, jewelled world of the Czar's palace - a place of cruelty and fear, where Safa the Czarevich can never set foot beyond the round wall of the tower room where he was born.  Years pass.  Safa's spirit cries out for escape, and Chingis hears it:

"Stepping from her body, her spirit grasped the thread of the cry and flew on it, like a kite on a line, to the Imperial Palace, to the highest tower, to the enamelled dome."

In a passage of extreme tension Susan Price describes the progress of the witch as she makes her way, invisible, through the palace and up the stairs to the locked room where Safa is imprisoned.

There is no sentimentality here.  Good characters are killed, evil ones triumph.  But alongside the real world is the ghost world where powerful spirits await their chance to return to the world of the living.

The writing is beautiful and the pace perfect.  This is a very visual book that leaves the reader with a wealth of images: the snowy landscape, the forests, the witch with her shaman's drum - and her house on chicken's legs that becomes restless when it senses danger, raking up the snow with its claws and banging its door.  The story is compelling, and it's the detail that brings it to life.

The Ghost Drum would be enjoyed by children of about nine and over - and by adults.  Books 2 and 3 in the series, Ghost Song and Ghost Dance, are also available as Kindle e-books.




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Wolf Hall and Bring Out The Bodies by Hilary Mantel, reviewed by Susan Price

'Wolf Hall' by Hilary Mantel

          ‘Wolf Hall’ and 'Bring Up The Bodies', by Hilary Mantel hardly need my tin whistle to pipe their praise; but I’m going to toot anyway - and at greater than usual length - because there are no other books I want to praise so much.

          I downloaded Wolf Hall to my kindle at the end of May, and there it sat, until the end of July.  I’d heard rumours that it was good, but, well – it was about Tudor politics and Anne Boleyn.  I’d been there before.  Besides, wasn’t it written in the present tense?  I’d read other things in that tense and been dismayed by their clumsiness.

          But from the moment I started Wolf Hall, I was away with Thomas Cromwell.

          Now, I’m a hardened reader.  This makes me difficult to please.  I realise that most of the time I read with a commentary going on at the back of my mind: ‘I’d change that word; I’d cut that; I’d rewrite that sentence; I don’t think that character would do that…’

          I realise this because, while I engulfed Wolf Hall, this commentary was silent.  Mantel’s writing is effortless, beautiful, expert.  I questioned nothing.

          I experienced that pleasure which is quite rare for me these days – the hankering for a book and its world.  I was always eager to get back to it.  I often clicked back a few pages to read a passage again, simply because it was so beautiful. When I saw from the bar at the bottom of the kindle page that the end was close, I rationed my reading, to make it last.

          The moment I finished Wolf Hall, I clicked through to the kindle store and downloaded Bring Up The Bodies.  It was every bit as good.

          We are promised a third book – at the end of which Cromwell, presumably, will get it in the neck.  I bite my nails.  Why didn’t I wait until the third was published, and then I could have read all of them, one after another?

Thomas Cromwell

          When I think of Mantel’s achievement with these books, I am awed.  First, the research.  I faint in coils at the thought of the reading necessary to amass such detail of social manners, clothing, furnishing, politics, religious schisms, climate, and the hullaballoo of daily life in the early 1500s.

          But then, to pluck from all that only the few details she needs: and nothing more.

          A biography would have taken no more research – and Mantel goes beyond that.  She fictionalises it all: which means she dresses in the facts, goes inside them and recreates Cromwell from the inside – and every scene he takes part in.  Henry VIII, Anne Boleyn, Thomas Moore, Cramner – we see, hear and understand all of them as Thomas Cromwell sees, hears and understands them.  We see the countryside, feel its cold and damp, its warm summer days.  We smell the stinks of the streets, the perfume of spices, we witness executions… It is all completely convincing and absorbing, and the amount of thought, concentration, imagining, rewriting and sheer hard work this represents is heroic.

          But more still.  The prose is beautiful.  Its cadences slide through your mind like silk, until some sharp point purposely sticks you like a hidden needle.  Words are worked.  Why is the book called Wolf Hall? Because the family seat of Jane Seymour is called ‘Wolf Hall.’   Not a single scene is set there, but we are directed, ironically, to Anne Boleyn’s downfall even at the time of her greatest triumph.

          Also, ‘men are wolves to men’, and these aristocrats, within whose orbit Cromwell finds himself, are those very wolves: murdering for their own political advantage and selling their daughters.

          Bring Up The Bodies famously opens with Cromwell hunting, with birds named after his own, dead, daughters.  ‘His children are falling from the sky… each with a blood-filled gaze… Her breast is gore-streaked and flesh clings to her claws…These dead women, their bones long sunk in London clay, are now transmigrated.  Weightless, they glide on the upper currents of the air.  They pity no one… When they look down they see nothing but their prey… they see a flittering, flinching universe, a universe filled with their dinner.’

          This reminds us of the family Cromwell mourns: but is also the world-view of the people for whom he works.  It is possibly the view of Cromwell himself.  It’s even, possibly, the view of the dead, and of God, who has gathered them to Himself.  (And although I have severely trimmed the above quote, the beauty of the prose, its lovely rhythms, survives.)

          The book is far from what I half-feared: another trot through Tudor history, as made familiar by many romantic novels and television series. This Anne Boleyn is no romantic heroine, no damsel in distress: she is sharp as a knife, intelligent, relentlessly calculating and self-interested.  After all, look at the family she came from and her upbringing. 

'Bring Up The Bodies' by Hilary Mantel

          Her brother, George, is a spoiled, self-regarding, nasty little ****.  Mantel even suggests that the incest charge may not have been the trumpery most accounts assume it was.  Anne and George Boleyn were reared apart, hardly meeting before adulthood, and siblings today who meet only as adults often feel a powerful erotic attraction.  And Anne was desperate for a son, the only thing that would maintain her position, while George was desperate to maintain his position as the king's brother-in-law.

          Mantel’s Thomas Moore is not saintly, but a vain, self-centred man who makes a pet of one daughter, while routinely insulting the others and his wife.  His urbane manner masks a furious hatred of anyone who dares to understand God other than as Moore does.  The only good Protestant is a dead, burned one.

          It's Cromwell who is usually portrayed as ruthless and brutal, even if intelligent and talented.  Mantel makes him a humorous, compassionate man, whose wide-ranging life and enquiring intelligence have given him vast experience and knowledge, together with a sharp insight into the nature and motives of others.  This enables him to outplay them in the Tudor court’s lethal political chess games.

          His violent, neglectful childhood has made him sympathetic to the poor and abandoned.  Large numbers of the poor are fed from his kitchens every day while his house is full of orphans and apprentices, who flourish in his care.  Mantel gives him a dry, dead-pan wit, and makes him loveable.

          He is also ruthless, when required, and vengeful.  He sees himself as a man who has a job to do, with the tools available.  Politics as the art of the possible.

          But if he can spare somebody’s life, he will; and he considers that, despite his deep dislike of the man, he gave Moore every chance to evade the death sentence.  It was Moore’s own obstinate insistence on being right that saw him executed.

           If it’s not possible to do the job without a death, then Cromwell will ensure that the scaffold is erected in time and the straw spread to soak up the blood, before returning to his loving household and dogs.

          Is this a truthful representation of Cromwell, or of the other historical personages?  Who knows?  Mantel herself says that she offers her books as one possible interpretation of the facts.  The books read almost as an illustration of the truth that we can never fully understand other people.  We can observe what they do, and what they say, but when we try to deduce, from these observations, their thoughts and emotions, all we can do is make an interpretation, filtered through our own emotions, thoughts and experience.  It may be accurate, or wildly inaccurate, but we will never know which.

          And people change.  It may be that the books offer Cromwell’s own interpretation of himself – a good guy really, despite all he’s done.  We all put the best possible spin on ourselves.  I think there are hints, towards the end of Bring Up The Bodies that Cromwell’s good-guy self-image is faltering – another reason why I look forward keenly to the third book.

          I read one review of Wolf Hall which began, ‘I hesitate to use the word ‘masterpiece’…’
          Well, I refuse to use the word, ‘masterpiece.’  These books are by a Mistress: in short, works ‘in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language."
____________________________________________________

Susan Price

Susan Price is the award winning author of 'The Ghost Drum' and 'The Sterkarm Handshake.'

Her website is here
Her blog can be found here
She is also a member of the Authors Electric blog.

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Emotional Health for Emotional Wealth by Susan Jane Smith BSc

          

Category: Adult, self-help.

Susan Jane Smith

Reviewer: Susan Price.

          Susan Jane Smith’s photo shows someone very like the ideal grandmother: smiling, kind, wise, good humoured, ready to listen, and understand.

          Her book, Emotional Health for Emotional Wealth shows this to be an accurate assessment.  Life experience has taught her wisdom.  Twenty years of counselling means that nothing surprises or shocks her.  Her advice may not be what you want to hear, but it’s probably what you need to hear.

         Susan Jane Smith herself says that this is ‘another self-help book.’ What makes it different is the fine anger underlying the compassion and advice, and the passion for helping people to overcome the emotional pain she suffered herself.

          Emotional pain means you cannot be healthy: you cannot live at ease with yourself.  Nor can you be emotionally wealthy. You may have material wealth –you may be driven to tirelessly acquire more and more ‘success’ – but  emotional pain prevents you from relaxing, or simply, wholeheartedly enjoying anything.  The pain forever chafes and nags.

Emotional Health for Emotional Wealth

          It can be so established that it seems normal, yet it still hinders people, adversely influencing their choices in careers, in partners, life.

          Susan Jane Smith knows all too well that attaining the peace of ‘emotional health’ isn’t easy.  Habits are hard to change, and trying often rouses old terrors: but many live with such distress they are willing to work hard to be rid of it: to endure the nightmares, the withdrawal, the loss of family and friends… Whatever it takes.

          Susan Smith went through this struggle herself, and relates how, after years of counselling, she woke one day to a puzzling sensation: an absence of the emotional pain that had chafed her for so long.  The experience set her on a crusade: to qualify as a counsellor so she could relieve others’ pain.

          Her message is simple: If you don’t like your life, change it.  If you can’t understand what is causing your pain, don’t know what to change, or how to begin – then find a therapist to help you puzzle it out, and encourage you when it gets tough.

          Her advice is excellent, but she doesn’t expect you to simply accept it, recommending many other titles and organisations for consultation. The book is a veritable self-therapy source-book.

          She discusses the pain caused by the abuse of children, domestic violence and rape – and also the addictions and compulsive habits so often employed in a desperate attempt to control the resulting emotional pain: alcoholism and other drug abuse, compulsive eating and starving, over-work, self-harm and violence towards others.

          The advice is always based on what Susan Smith has found to be practical and effective.  It is admirably down-to-earth and realistic.

          She has counselled abusers and rapists, and although she has compassion for them, her attitude is refreshingly steely: ‘My understanding from the people I have worked with who had perpetrated abuse is that they simply “wanted to” and could.  They have a callous disregard for the victim… One man said… it would be a crime [only] if the victim told the police.  Distorted thinking!’

          The book’s empowering anger is inspired by injustice, cruelty and apathy.  A Telegraph headline – ‘Child Abuse Won’t Be Overcome Until We Define What It Is’ – makes her demand: Do governments and social services still not know what it is?  She provides, from her experience, a full definition for their assistance.

          She has listened to the damaged adult victims of every kind of child abuse: children hit with pokers, constantly ridiculed, left hungry and cold for days, raped.  Her fervent wish, I think, is for us all to sort ourselves out and stop treating each other so badly!

As the old Russian tale says, There would be no suffering on earth…if only we were kind to each other.

          Sadly, that time will never come, but Susan Jane Smith will battle on – an odd shining knight, but a brave one.

          Almost everyone would gain some insight, some help from reading this book – and if you are one of the many bruised and reeling from a cruel childhood, or rape, or assault by a partner – to name only a few possible traumas – I think this book would be a strong, supportive, wise friend.

           Emotional Health for Emotional Wealth can be found here (UK)

           And here (USA)

          Susan Price is the Carnegie winning author of 'The Ghost Drum' and 'The Sterkarm Handshake'.

          She blogs at Nennius  and with the Authors Electric.

          Her website is at www.susanpriceauthor.com

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Bird of Passage by Catherine Czerkawska

Bird of Passage by Catherine Czerkawska

Reviewer: Susan Price

Category: Adult fiction

          I was three-quarters of the way through this book – or even more – before it dawned on me that it was Wuthering Heights in modern dress.  I was tipped off by a couple of sly and amusing references to twigs tapping on windows and ghosts, and by the hero disappearing for twenty years and then returning a rich man.

          It’s not a re-telling, though – it’s a re-imagining.  A dialogue with the older book, if you like.  It asks, would the same story, the same deathless love, be possible in the modern age, and if so, how?

Catherine Czerkawska

          Even so, if I’d known before I began it, I probably would never have read it, and that would have been a shame.  It would have been my loss – but I’ve read enough self-conscious and unconvincing rewrites of classics to ensure that they’re never something I’m eager to pick up.  However, I’m glad I did download this to my e-reader and click it open, because it’s excellent – as are the other books I’ve read by Catherine Czerkawska:  A Quiet Afternoon in the Museum of Torture and The Curiosity Cabinet.

          Bird of Passage begins on an isolated farm on the Isle of Skye, in the 1960s.  Every year, bands of Irish ‘tattie-howkers’ arrive for the potato harvest, and one year Finn O’Malley comes with them.  He is too young for the back-breaking work, and an elderly farmer is concerned for him, and takes him under his wing, inviting him back to his house to feed him up, and taking him fishing to give him a rest.

          The farmer has a granddaughter, Kirsty, on whom he dotes.  She’s an only child, lonely at the farm, and strikes up a friendship with Finn which persists through the years, as he returns again and again to the harvest.  By the time sex enters the scene, they have forged a close emotional bond that even years of separation cannot loosen; and, as an adult, Kirsty retains an understanding of Finn which others, kept at a distance by his silence, never reach.

          I’ll confess here that I’ve never actually finished Wuthering Heights.  While admiring the down-to-earth reality of its earlier chapters, I’ve always lost interest once it moved on to the next generation.  As far as I’m concerned, it’s one of the classics we love and avoid today.  But I finished Bird of Passage.

Tattie-howkers

          Couldn't have put it down.
          For one, I found both Finn and Kirsty far more engaging characters than Heathcliffe and Cathy.  Kirsty is a bright and loveable child when we first meet her: the sheltered, adored darling of her mother and grandfather.  She can’t understand Finn’s withdrawn and touchy nature and merrily, touchingly, tries to draw him out.  She’s read the ‘Chalet School’ books and, hearing that Finn attends ‘a boarding school’ in Ireland, questions him about dorm feasts.  In reality Finn is a near-prisoner in an ‘industrial school’ for the children of ‘unfit mothers’, staffed by monks.  Things go on in dormitories at night, but not midnight feasts.

The Curiosity Cabinet

          Because we know more of Finn’s background than we do of Heathcliffe’s, we understand him more.  We can see why he is withdrawn, wary and silent.  Nor does he simply vanish before returning a rich man – we know exactly where he’s been, what he’s been doing and how he got that money.  We also understand why he hasn’t changed.  Though I know many Heathcliffe fans won’t agree with me, I’ve often felt that Heathcliffe should be clipped round the ear with a rolled newspaper and told to lose the Byronic pose – whereas with Finn, I knew exactly what he was struggling with and how hard it was.

          I was convinced, moved and impressed by Bird of Passage. It says that, yes, undying love for another, unrelenting absorption in another, is possible in these days of computers and motorbikes.  (Guess who rides the motorbike in leathers: go on, guess.)  But, although it’s possible, you may not want to pay the price.

          Whether you love Wuthering Heights or not, if you enjoy an involving, beautifully written book, you’ll enjoy Bird of Passage.

 Bird of Passage by Catherine Czerkawska can be found here.

Susan Price is an award winning author, and has recently published several ebooks.
She blogs here: http://susanpricesblog.blogspot.co.uk/

Susan Price also contributes to Do Authors Dream of Electric Books? 

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'Overheard in a Graveyard' by Susan Price - reviewed by Rosalie Warren

I love scary stories - not full-blooded horror and nothing too vampirical (is that a word?) - but ghost stories that reach down into the psyche: ones that unearth deep, unspoken, unacknowledged fears.

So how have I managed to live for more than fifty years without encountering the work of Susan Price? I don't know, but that state of affairs is now being remedied. Since reading Overheard in a Graveyard  I've downloaded - is it three or four of her other books? I'm an addict, anyway...

Overheard in a Graveyard is a collection of short stories, beginning with one of that name. The opening tale is a conversation between a night-time visitor to the graveyard and an inhabitant of one of the graves. It's creepy, to the extent that the words crawl like cold fingers down your back. I missed its power the first time I read it, as I hadn't got used to the form. When I'd read the other stories I went back and read it again. This time, it made me shudder. Shades of Heathcliff and and Cathy in Wuthering Heights (still gives me nightmares, that book), but with a compelling voice and atmosphere that is all Price's own.

The second story, 'Bus Aid', is a very different kind of beastie. There's social comment - social satire - here. There's claustrophobia; people trapped and desperately needing help. It's funny, too. And it leaves you wondering... who was doing the haunting in this tale?

Another favourite of mine is 'The Footsteps on the Stairs'. Young children left alone, and a father interrupting his evening at the pub to come home and check that they're OK. Or does he?

I'm trying to work out why these stories have such power. I think it's because of the realism - the poverty in which many of the characters live. The cosy, grimy, small-town life that surrounds them. And the shock of the supernatural, in among all that.

In Price's stories it feels sometimes as though the ghosts inhabit the true world - the one that makes more sense. Some of their transparency is coloured in by the reality of mid-twentieth century Black Country life. Almost as though it's our messy world that's doing the haunting and disturbing the cool, elegant realm we call the supernatural.

There's ambiguity, too - many more questions than answers. Was that really a ghost, or just a dream, or a frightened child's imagination run amok? And there's the delightful recognition that ghosts and spirits may sometimes be benign.

'Mow Top' is heartbreakingly sad. The picture of the toy car rusting away on its little stone on the empty moors will stay with me. This is how it works in real life. Children see ghosts and tell us. We reassure them, and ourselves, that there are no such things...

'The Familiar' is all about the cost of power, and cuts deep.

The final story, 'Overheard in a Museum', is a thing of beauty, like the ship itself. You can feel the swell of the sea beneath you as you read. It speaks of a distant era and reminds us that objects so often outlast people by a long, long time. Except that the ship is not a object - it's the spirit of an age.

You don't need to believe in ghosts to enjoy these wonderful stories, but be warned. You may dive in as a sceptic and find yourself an agnostic, or even a believer, by the end... perhaps not so much in ghosts as in another world, very close to and overlapping with our own.


Details:
Title: Overheard in a Graveyard and Other Stories
Author: Susan Price
Kindle Edition Publication Date: September 2011
Kindle Edition price £1.54
ASIN: B005NHG5XG
Click to view on Amazon.co.uk
Click to view on Amazon.com

Happy Reading,
Rosalie

Rosalie Warren
Author of Coping with Chloe and Charity's Child
See more of my reviews on my blog, Rosalie Reviews



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