it’s many moons since I did a Top Ten Tuesday post. It proved too difficult to come up with ten titles to match a prompt that didn’t interest me. But hanks to Margaret at BooksPlease I’ve discovered a meme that seems a lot easier.
Top 5 Tuesday was created by Shanah at Bionic Book Worm, and it is now being hosted by Meeghan at Meeghan Reads. She’s published a list of weekly prompts right up to the end of the year, making it easy to spot topics that will interest me and to plan accordingly.
There’s my first attempt. This week’s prompt is Books with a Direction in the Title. I’ve chosen books that include one (or more) of the four cardinal directions in their titles.
North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell
North and South lays bare the social problems caused by industrialisation in mid 19th century Britain; problems that Gaskell saw at first hand when she lived in Manchester where her husband was a Unitarian minister. This is my favourite Gaskell novel.
South Riding by Winifred Holtby
The new headmistress of Kiplington High School for Girls clashes with the local squire in her determination to improve conditions at the school and the lives of her pupils. She’s a passionate idealist; he’s a conservative. Can they find common ground? South Riding is a social commentary novel, depicting the harsh realities of life in the 1930s.
The North Water by Ian McGuire
Ian McGuire gained a Booker Prize longlisting with this raw and bleak novel evoking the brutal and bloody business of whaling in the 1840s. Though the judges didn’t think it was a winner, The North Water scored highly for me because of McGuire’s vivid description of the Arctic landscape and the ruthlessness of the whalers.
The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan
Another Booker contender, but this one actually won the title in 2014. Flanagan’s novel focuses on an Australian doctor who is haunted by a love affair with his uncle’s wife. but there is a lot more to the book than purely romance. It’s a reflection about the brutality of war and the nature of love, death and humanity.
West by Carys Davies
My final title gives me a chance to plug a Welsh author!. Not a word is wasted in this short tale of a widowed settler and his expedition to find animals whose gigantic bones had been discovered in a swamp. He can’t explain why he must take this journey; just that he must even it it means leaving his daughter behind at their Pennsylvania farm. As I wrote in my review: “West captures the wildness of the American landscape and its endless possibilities in equal measure. We never lose sight of the foolhardy nature of Cy’s expedition but the novel seems to be making a bigger point about the impulse some humans possess to seek something larger than their own lives.”
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