Olivia Glazebrook

Jack and Mabel move to Alaska to try to separate themselves from a tragedy — the loss of their only baby — that has frozen the core of their relationship. They intend to establish a homestead in the wilderness, but it is 1920 and they are middle-aged, friendless and from ‘back east’ — unprepared and ill-equipped for the backbreaking work and unspeakable loneliness of pioneer life. By the middle of their second winter the climate, isolation and sorrow of their situation seem to have got the better of them; at the opening of The Snow Child we find them at the end of their wits and their resources. During a singular moment’s lightheartedness  after a snowfall the desperate couple builds a snow child beside their house and dresses it in hat and scarf.

One morning in 1979 a six-year-old American boy, Etan Patz, set off on foot to catch the bus to school — the first time he had been allowed to walk to the bus stop by himself. One morning in 1979 a six-year-old American boy, Etan Patz, set off on foot to catch the bus to school — the first time he had been allowed to walk to the bus stop by himself. He did not arrive; he vanished without a trace and was never found. In 2001, still missing, he was declared dead. Etan’s was the case that changed the way America looked for its lost children: his search was given huge — unprecedented — media coverage, and his photograph was the first of many to be used in the ‘milk carton’ campaigns of the 1980s.

This is a curious book: not exactly likeable, but certainly intriguing, and definitely accomplished. It is a debut novel, but doesn’t feel like one at all. It is smart, bold and surprising, with nothing of the crowd-pleaser about it; in fact it might irritate, or disgust, just as easily as it amuses. A disgraced professor of art history, Thomas Lynch, believes that there exists an uncatalogued painting by Giovanni Bellini, of the Madonna, and that it is hidden somewhere in a dilapidated English country house named Mawle, a house owned for generations by the Roper family.

When people write about their experiences as drug addicts they often — wittingly or not — write with a degree of competitiveness. There is a tacit understanding that the reader will feel cheated by anything less than a full-blown addiction to class-A drugs. A handful of Solpadeine and two bottles of vodka every day for 20 years just isn’t going to cut it with a publisher. James Frey was well aware of this when he embellished A Million Little Pieces to make it more ‘appealing’, and how right he was: we lapped it up. Readers want the author of a sin-soaked drug memoir to lie, cheat and steal — preferably from his/her middle-class parents. Any of the following are recommended as extras: prostitution, sleeping on the street, mugging an elderly pedestrian.

Janet seems to have her life neatly organised. She’s hardworking, she has a nice boyfriend, she lives in a comfortable house and she drives a dark-green Golf. Recently, however, she has been receiving messages from her mind. Seizures (which also occurred in her childhood) will strike without warning and leave her humming with nervous tension — a struck tuning fork. Janet disregards this important signal of an imminent decline; in any case, her attention is diverted by a call from a solicitor. She is told that she has inherited, from her mother, a house beside the sea. Janet is puzzled by this news. She had always believed — had been told by her father — that her mother was killed in an accident when Janet was a little girl.

Jane Smiley suffered a period of writer’s block after 9/11. In the middle of writing a novel, Good Faith, she found herself unable to continue. It all suddenly seemed pointless. So, to inspire herself to complete her own, she read a hundred novels — one of which was Boccaccio’s The Decameron. After finishing Good Faith (published in 2003) she wrote a book about the hundred novels she had read (13 Ways of Looking at the Novel), and then she wrote this book, Ten Days in the Hills, which is a ‘reworking’ of The Decameron. Writer’s block can rarely have been put to such good use. Finding herself unable to write was a shock for Smiley since inspiration had always come easily to her.

If you had a friend who was an actress, and she was on the brink of a nervous collapse, what would you do to cheer her up? Or rather, what wouldn’t you do? I bet you wouldn’t take her to New York to visit a mutual friend, another actress, who was starring on Broadway — after all, that would be a bit vindictive, wouldn’t it? I mean, what’s more likely to give an actress a nervous breakdown than the success of a close personal friend? Well, Cissie O’Brien is a comedienne (ghastly, unfunny word), so perhaps she does it as a joke: she whisks her depressed actress friend, Maggie Salt, off to Manhattan to visit their pal Helena Cassidy who is the current toast of the theatre world. Nice work, Cissie.