In brief: Splinters: A Memoir; Fervour; Elderflora: A Modern History of Ancient Trees – review
Splinters: A Memoir
Leslie Jamison
Granta, £16.99, pp272
This first memoir finds lauded essayist Jamison navigating bumpy new motherhood, a bitter divorce and the pandemic, yet its pages are lit by flinty humour and grownup joy as thought and feeling are joined in prose that’s intimate and exacting. It’s never less than gripping either, as she takes stock of how she’s been remade – and reinvigorated – by the dismantling of a marriage and the insistent needs of an infant. New romance flares and fades for her, but from the sharp fragments of her title she fashions a mother-daughter love story that reads like a classic.
Fervour
Toby Lloyd
Sceptre, £16.99, pp320
Lloyd’s suspenseful debut novel propels the reader deep into the heart of an idiosyncratic – and decidedly dysfunctional – family. Religious Jews and intellectual sticklers Hannah and Eric Rosenthal have tended to favour their brilliant daughter Elsie over her siblings. When she begins behaving oddly after the death of her grandfather Yosef, a Holocaust survivor and the subject of Hannah’s forthcoming, somewhat sensationalist book, they blame her obsession with Kabbalah, but younger brother Tovyah has other ideas. Infused with motifs from Jewish folklore and classic horror films, Fervour animates themes of betrayal, belief and the past’s long tail.
Elderflora: A Modern History of Ancient Trees
Jared Farmer
Picador, £10.99, pp448 (paperback)
Having spent years resisting being labelled a “tree guy”, environmental historian Farmer indulges his passion in this fascinating and wide-ranging exploration of ancient trees. Although traditionally associated with gods and gurus, they have been vandalised by people, who plundered them for land, resources and knowledge. Determined to be hopeful – “or least anti-hopeless” – Farmer looks forwards as well as back, reminding us that today’s trees are the “elderflora” of tomorrow, however things pan out for our own species.
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