A man and a woman meet in a city in what is probably Syria and fall in love. Civil war is initially just a distant presence in their lives. But then it all starts to fall apart, and strange doors start opening up, leading out of the country.

Nadia and Saeed meet at a class. He is a little intimidated by her wearing a full black robe—which she uses to keep men at bay—but asks her out to coffee. They start to see each other, meeting at Nadia’s apartment, sometimes smoking a joint on her balcony.

The differences between them are clear from the start. Nadia is fiercely independent and lives in her own apartment, having fought with her family who did not approve and wanted her to get married. Saeed lives with his parents, both academics, and is very close to them both.

But the unrest in the city, which is getting closer to the couple every day, affects their lives. People talk in hushed tones about doors opening up in the city that lead to other countries, doors that are carefully guarded by the militia. These are like wormholes in time and space, and are completely unpredictable: any door “could become a special door, and it could happen without warning, to any door at all”.

Things become unbearable, and it is important that the couple leave while they still can. They pay a man to guide them to a door and walk out into Greece and then to London. But uprooted from their city and living in another where they are not accepted strains their relationship. They draw apart: Nadia integrating with the fellow refugees who are from other parts of the world, and Saeed looking to those from his own country.

Mohsin Hamid is good at describing the slow creep of civil unrest and war. At first, it’s just the small things that happen in other parts of the city, then there is curfew, and the banality of living in conflict: the bombed-out tank that becomes part of the landscape and the way people adapt to living in an impossible situation.

This is a timely book about what makes people leave and what it means to be a refugee—not just the physical hardships and compromises they make but also what it does to relationships. Using the doors is clever—it avoids recounting the journey so that Hamid can focus on the conflict and the displacement: the guilt at leaving loved ones behind and trying to make sense of, and fit into, a new culture.

At this time of hostility towards the other, of fortresses and walls, and of opposition in many countries to the UN Global Compact on Migration, this book goes a long way in humanizing refugees—essentially, people like us caught up in circumstances beyond their control. Writing that sentence, I feel that I am stating the obvious, but reading the news from various parts of the world, it is something that we have forgotten.

This is the first of the reviews of some of my favourite books (see Revisiting Old Favourites).

What if time flowed in a different way from the one we know and we are used to? What if it circled in on itself, so we relived our lives endlessly without ever knowing it? What if it moved in fits and starts? What if you could travel back into the past or make three different decisions, each one simultaneously in different worlds?

In this book, Alan Lightman imagines the way a young Einstein would see time. He uses as foundation Einstein’s early years, when he was a patent clerk in Bern, Switzerland, and where he wrote some of his most ground-breaking papers.

But the bulk of this book is about the different permutations that time can take and the worlds they create. It makes you really think about how time works. We know that it is relative: it rushes by when you are late for a train, moves like molasses when you’re waiting to meet your lover; when you were a child, five minutes was long and summers went on forever, but as you get older, the years fly past.

The worlds Lightman creates here are myriad: time travellers to the past lurk in corners, afraid to affect events in case they change the future. A man decides not see a woman again because she is too manipulative; in another world, he goes back to her; and in a third, he goes to see her but nothing comes of it. All of these events take place simultaneously. (Reminds me of an episode of Red Dwarf, where Rimmer meets another version of himself from another dimension.)

There is the world where time moves fitfully and people get occasional glimpses into the future, which guides their actions. A woman sees where her son will live and moves there. In another world, time moves slowly for those who move quickly, everyone rushes from place to place, dodging buildings that are on wheels. No one sits and reads book anymore. In yet another, time flows slower the higher you live so people build houses on the top of mountains on stilts and look down on those living in the valleys. Or the one where people only live for a day, so they never see the change of seasons and are bewildered by the change from day to night or night to day. A lifetime of 24 hours means you never get to know anyone. An old man looks back at his past. “His life is scattered in fragments of conversation, forgotten by fragments of people. His life is divided into hasty episodes, witnessed by few.”

This is a dreamlike book, and Lightman’s writing is lyrical. Take this description of day breaking in the patent office where Einstein is working:

“All that can be seen at this moment are the shadowy shapes of the desks and the hunched form of the young man. … Minute by minute, new objects gain form.Here, a brass wastebasket appears. There, a calendar on the wall. Here, a family photograph, a box of paperclips, an inkwell, a pen. There a typewriter,a jacket folded on a chair. … Outside, the tops of the Alps glow in the sun. It is late June. A boatman on the Aare unties his skiff and pushes off, letting the current take him along Aarstrasse to Gerbenstrasse, where he will deliver his apples and berries.” 

Or this passage, set in a world where time goes backwards. A man scatters dust on his friend’s grave, but he is not sad. He looks forward to his friend becoming stronger. “He waits longingly for a particular day he remembers in the future when he and his friend will have sandwiches on a low flat table, when he will describe his fear of growing old and unloved and his friend will nod gently, and the rain will slide down the glass of the window.”

Margaret Atwood never disappoints, and this reworking of The Tempest (as part of a series commissioned by Hogarth Press) is no exception.

Felix, the artistic director of the Makeshiweg Festival in Canada, has been working on what he believes is his masterpiece, an over-the-top production of The Tempest. The play was meant to be a tribute to Miranda, the three-year-old daughter he lost to meningitis. The day before it opens, Felix loses his post in a coup orchestrated by his assistant, Tony, with the help of Sal O’Nally, the Heritage Minister. Felix is devastated: he has not only lost his career but his social standing.

He retreats to a shack to lick his wounds, accompanied only by the ghost of Miranda, who grows as the years go by. He is aware that she is only a figment of his imagination, but he can’t let her go, and spends his time talking to her and stalking Tony and Sal on the internet.

Nine years go by and worried he is losing his mind, he decides to go back into the world. Calling himself Mr. Duke, he gets a job as a theatre director at a prison, the Fletcher County Correctional Institute, as part of an experimental programme called Literacy through Literature. Felix decides that the men will put on only Shakespeare plays, “wizardry in the slammer”, as he calls it. The job seems to bring out his innate talent as director: he earns the prisoners’ respect and encourages them to engage with the play. He is open to the prisoners’ interpretations and changes, insists that the only swear words allowed in his classes are to be taken from the play, and as a final assignment, asks them to imagine the future lives of their characters. To avoid stage fright and unforeseen situations, the final play is recorded and is played to the entire prison on TV screens. The programme is a big success.

But Felix has not forgotten the two men who deposed him. While he retreated from the world, Tony has been clambering up the greasy pole, and is now Heritage Minister. Sal is campaigning to be elected the leader of the federal party. Between them, they have decided to shut down Literacy through Literature but for form’s sake, will be at the prison to see the prisoners’ new play. So far, they’ve been out of Felix’s reach, but now they are walking into his kingdom, unaware that Mr. Duke is really Felix. It is an irresistible opportunity. “How to grasp them, how to enclose them, how to ambush them? Suddenly revenge is so close he can almost taste it. It tastes like steak, rare. Oh, to watch their two faces! Oh, to twist the wire! He wants to see pain. ‘We’re doing The Tempest,’ he says.”

The result is wickedly funny. Getting hardened criminals interested in The Tempest is a challenge, and Felix rises to it. He even manages to persuade one of them to play Ariel, who is transformed from a fairy with wings to an alien creature in a blue raincoat and shower cap. With a bit of help from a couple of his criminal disciples, Felix puts together a cunning plan to get his back on the two men, and Atwood keeps you guessing until the end whether it will work or go horribly wrong.

The book is brilliantly put together. The entire structure is based on The Tempest, with Felix as Prospero, thrown out of his kingdom by Tony and Sal (Antonio and Alonso). His island kingdom is the prison. There is another Tempest within this larger story: the re-enactment of the play, which is actually two re-enactments: one that the rest of the prison sees and the other entirely for the benefit of Sal and Tony. All these layers come together in the grand finale.

Hag-Seed is an absolute delight and one of the most enjoyable books I’ve read this year. Felix carries the story: he is manipulative, self-centred and obsessive, but utterly engaging. You don’t have to like Shakespeare to enjoy it, but if you’re interested or need to be reminded—and it does add to the enjoyment of the book—there is a helpful summary of the play at the end. I hope that the other books in the series are as good.

While the American Civil War was raging, Abraham Lincoln lost his 11-year-old son, Willie to typhoid. It is said that for a few nights after Willie’s death, Lincoln, grief-stricken, used to go to the crypt to hold his son’s body.

George Saunders takes this sliver of history and builds a multi-faceted, multi-voiced story around it. The entire book is constructed of fragments—some are extracts from existing material but the bulk of it made up of voices of the dead in the cemetery, dead who are still in Bardo, the Tibetan term for a place of transition after death. It reminded me of Edgar Lee Master’s Spoon River Anthology, where the dead rise up to tell their stories.

Our guides for most of the book are two of the ghosts: Hans Vollman, a printer who left behind a young wife; and Roger Bevins III, a gay man who committed suicide when his lover rejected him. They are joined by the Reverend Everly Thomas, who had crossed over into the afterlife but fled to the Bardo when he realized he was being sent to hell. He never got over the horror of what was awaiting him.

Although Willie, being a child, should move on, he stays so he can be with his father. However, the children who stay end up by being attacked by vile beings who bind them down with tentacles, so the three men decide to try to persuade Lincoln to let his son go. Given the obstacles in communicating with the living, this is not an easy task.

This is an incredible work of imagination—not just the premise but the way it is written. The dead in the cemetery cannot wander too far from their bodies and don’t seem to realize they are dead. Coffins are called “sick boxes” and graves “sick mounds”. Their manifestations emphasize the way they lived their lives: a miser with several properties worries constantly about their state and has to float horizontally, pointing like a compass to whichever property he was thinking of; a young black woman brutalized and raped is voiceless; and Everly Thomas has protruding eyes and hair standing on end from the time he glimpsed the horrors of the “diamond tent”.

The style took a while to get used to but once I did, I was hooked. There are, as I mentioned earlier, two kinds of chapters: the historical ones, which are composed of extracts of a couple of lines or so from books or contemporary accounts and often contradict each other. But for me, the richness of the book lies in the other chapters, where the dead come alive, so to speak, and tell us their stories. And it brings home the fact that we all have stories to tell.

When we first meet him, Leon is 8 years old, going on 9. He is in the hospital with his mother Carol, holding his baby brother, Jake, for the first time. This first scene sets up the way things are going to be: Leon holding his new brother with care, Carol going off for a cigarette before feeding Jake, and eventually the nurse leaving Leon to look after his baby brother alone.

And so it goes. Carol is unstable, dependent on prescription drugs and barely able to look after herself, never mind her two sons. Leon steps in and takes care of Jake, feeding him and changing his nappies. Eventually Carol goes into a drug-induced coma, and the neighbour calls in an ambulance and social services.

The boys are taken in by Maureen, an older woman who has fostered more than 20 children over her career. She is obviously good with children and creates a sense of security for Leon. But the boys have different fathers and therefore different fates: Leon is mixed race with a Caribbean father, and Jake is white. Jake is adopted quite quickly but social services cannot find a family to take Leon. Maureen realizes the devastating effect that breaking up the brothers is going to have on Leon but is powerless to stop it.

When Maureen has a stroke and has to go to hospital, Leon has to move again, this time to Maureen’s sister, Sylvia. He has lost so much: his mother, whom he hardly sees now, his brother and then Maureen. He develops behavioural problems: he has no friends in school, he steals and acts out his anger. The one plus he has going for him is that although Sylvia is not the maternal figure that Maureen has been, she genuinely cares about him.

Leon’s world widens when one of the social workers gives him a bike. Riding around Sylvia’s neighbourhood, he discovers an allotment near Sylvia’s house. He becomes friendly with two men there: Tufty, a Caribbean man, who introduces him to racial politics and Mr. Devlin, an Irishman, who seems a little suspect. The two men cannot stand each other but have a lot to teach him (including how to grow beans).

As you can tell from the title, Leon is the centre of the book. It is told from his point of view and he feels so real: a child trying to be an adult, dealing with abandonment and grown-ups who are not always there for him. He feels it is up to him to bring his family back together because no one else seems to want to. It’s heart-wrenching: he is so convinced he can do it, but as the reader you are aware that the world doesn’t work that way.

I spent a lot of the book dreading what was going to happen to Leon, but Kit de Waal never lets things get too fraught. Characters are drawn with a lot of empathy—none of them are saints but nor are they horrible. They’re just people, trying to do the best they can.

De Wall has advised social services on adoption and mother was a foster mother, so she obviously knows her subject. Although social services don’t always come off well, this book is not an exposé of the things can go wrong. It is a warm, empathetic book, and it’s good to be reminded of the humanity of ordinary people, especially in the current climate.

When I was a child, I loved Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories, tales of how animals became what they are: how the leopard got its spots, the camel its hump and the rhinoceros its skin. But it’s a book that doesn’t age well. Kipling, after all, was part of the British Empire and believed that colonization was a force for good that helped to improve the lot of the “natives”.

So if you’re looking for an alternative version, here it is. Although I’m not sure that you could read all of these to your children, it’s a book whose time has come. Nikesh Shukla begins his foreword with a quote from Junot Diaz: “There’s this idea that monsters don’t have reflections in a mirror. And what I’ve always thought isn’t that monsters don’t have reflections in a mirror. It’s that if you want to make a human being into a monster, deny them, at the cultural level, any reflection of themselves.”

To me, this quote not only sums up the thinking behind Not So Stories, but the way it subverts conventional thinking. The collection that David Thomas Anderson has put together is diverse, both in terms of the background of the authors—which include Australian Aborigine, Malaysian, Philippines, Iranian and Indian (disclosure: Achala Upendran, one of the authors, is the daughter of a friend, Usha Raman, who writes for this blog)—but also in terms of genre: folk tales, fantasy, horror and realism.

There is a lot to enjoy here: Cassandra Khaw’s sly tale of how Spider persuaded Man to give her venom, which he did without thinking because she was such a small harmless thing (he was in for a surprise!); Joseph E. Coles’s angry account of panther who is kidnapped and made to fight in the Roman arenas; and Achala Upendran’s upending of the traditional account about First Woman and First Man: not woman as temptress but man as oppressor. There are those who lose their roots and find them again: Wayne Santos’s Yuan Ching, whose job is to keep the ghosts of the dead from entering the city but is distracted by her English boyfriend; and Georgina Kamsike’s Nina, who rediscovers her Indian identity after her grandmother dies. And the colonizer is definitely not a force for the good—quite the opposite.

That’s just a sample. I look forward to more retold tales, to diverse voices. We all need ourselves reflected.