HONOUR

Professor Mervyn Morris named Jamaica’s poet laureate

Jamaica once again has a poet laureate, an honorary title that has not been awarded in over 50 years: the distinguished academic and poet Mervyn Morris, OM. Morris, Professor Emeritus of Creative Writing and West Indian Literature at the University of the West Indies, is the author of Is English We Speaking (1999), Making West Indian Literature (2005) and six books of poetry including I been there, sort of (2006).

Morris was born in Kingston in 1937, and studied at Munro College, the University College of the West Indies and, as a Rhodes Scholar, at St Edmund Hall, Oxford. He received the Order of Merit in 2009.

Jamaica has had two previous poets laureate: Tom Redcam, posthumously awarded the honour in 1933, and JE Clare McFarlane, who held the tile from 1953 to his death in 1962. They were named by the Poetry League of Jamaica.

The current Poet Laureate of Jamaica programme was a joint initiative of the National Library of Jamaica and the Entertainment Advisory Board within the Ministry of Tourism and Entertainment, through nomination forms available on the National Library of Jamaica’s website, starting last November, which listed among its requirements for the nominees that they a) have at least three published works of poetry, not including anthologies; and b) must be Jamaican; defined as a Jamaican citizen, naturalised citizen or of Jamaican parentage.

Morris, in addition to being recognised for his outstanding accomplishments as a Jamaican poet, will also promote reading and Jamaica literature, with an emphasis on poetry, undertake public poetry events to stimulate a greater appreciation for Jamaican poetry, promote poetry as an art and medium for entertainment and for recording and disseminating cultural heritage, and generally celebrate and propel Jamaican poetry to new heights.

When contacted, Morris told Bookends, “It’s an honour, and I’m grateful. My remit is to help promote Jamaican poetry, at home and abroad.”

The Poet Laureate of Jamaica was selected by a nine-member committee, consisting of representatives of the NLJ, the Department of Literatures in English of the University of the West Indies, Mona, the Poetry Society of Jamaica, the Institute Of Jamaica, the Jamaica Cultural Development Commission, the Entertainment Advisory Board, the Book Industry Association of Jamaica, and the Creative Industries Commission. Poet Laureate Morris will be pinned by the governor general with the Badge of Office at a ceremony at King’s House in May. He will serve for three years.

TRANSITION

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Nobel laureate, dead at 87

Nobel laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez crafted intoxicating fiction from the fatalism, fantasy, cruelty and heroics of the world that set his mind churning as a child growing up on Colombia’s Caribbean coast.

One of the most revered and influential writers of his generation, he brought Latin America’s charm and maddening contradictions to life in the minds of millions and became the best-known practitioner of “magical realism”, a blending of fantastic elements into portrayals of daily life that made the extraordinary seem almost routine.

In his works, clouds of yellow butterflies precede a forbidden lover’s arrival. A heroic liberator of nations dies alone, destitute and far from home. A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings,” as one of his short stories is called, is spotted in a muddy courtyard.

Garcia Marquez’s own epic story ended last Thursday, at age 87, with his death at his home in southern Mexico City, according to two people close to the family who spoke on condition of anonymity out of respect for the family’s privacy.

Known to millions simply as “Gabo,” Garcia Marquez was widely seen as the Spanish language’s most popular writer since Miguel de Cervantes in the 17th century. His extraordinary literary celebrity spawned comparisons with Mark Twain and Charles Dickens.

“A thousand years of solitude and sadness because of the death of the greatest Colombian of all time!” Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos said on Twitter. “Such giants never die.”

His flamboyant and melancholy works – among them Chronicle of a Death Foretold, Love in the Time of Cholera and Autumn of the Patriarch – outsold everything published in Spanish except the Bible. The epic 1967 novel One Hundred Years of Solitude sold more than 50 million copies in more than 25 languages.

The first sentence of One Hundred Years of Solitude has become one of the most famous opening lines of all time: “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.”

With writers including Norman Mailer and Tom Wolfe, Garcia Marquez was also an early practitioner of the literary non-fiction that would become known as New Journalism. He became an elder statesman of Latin American journalism, with magisterial works of narrative non-fiction that included the Story of A Shipwrecked Sailor, the tale of a seaman lost on a life raft for 10 days. He was also a scion of the region’s left.

Shorter pieces dealt with subjects including Venezuela’s larger-than-life president, Hugo Chavez, while the book News of a Kidnapping vividly portrayed how cocaine traffickers led by Pablo Escobar had shred the social and moral fabric of his native Colombia, kidnapping members of its elite. In 1994, Garcia Marquez founded the Iberoamerican Foundation for New Journalism, which offers training and competitions to raise the standard of narrative and investigative journalism across Latin America.

But for so many inside and outside the region, it was his novels that became synonymous with Latin America itself.

“The world has lost one of its greatest visionary writers – and one of my favourites from the time I was young,” President Barack Obama said.

When he accepted the Nobel prize in 1982, Garcia Marquez described the region as a “source of insatiable creativity, full of sorrow and beauty, of which this roving and nostalgic Colombian is but one cipher more, singled out by fortune. Poets and beggars, musicians and prophets, warriors and scoundrels, all creatures of that unbridled reality, we have had to ask but little of imagination, for our crucial problem has been a lack of conventional means to render our lives believable”.

Gerald Martin, Garcia Marquez’s semi-official biographer, told The Associated Press that One Hundred Years of Solitude was “the first novel in which Latin Americans recognised themselves, that defined them, celebrated their passion, their intensity, their spirituality and superstition, their grand propensity for failure”.

Garcia Marquez’s affable visage, set off by a white mustache and bushy grey eyebrows, was instantly recognisable. Unable to receive a US. visa for years due to his politics, he was nonetheless courted by presidents and kings. He counted Bill Clinton and François Mitterrand among his presidential friends.

“From the time I read One Hundred Years of Solitude more than 40 years ago, I was always amazed by his unique gifts of imagination, clarity of thought, and emotional honesty,” Clinton said Thursday. “I was honoured to be his friend and to know his great heart and brilliant mind for more than 20 years.”

Garcia Marquez was born in Aracataca, a small Colombian town near the Caribbean coast on March 6, 1927. He was the eldest of the 11 children of Luisa Santiaga Marquez and Gabriel Elijio Garcia, a telegraphist and a wandering homeopathic pharmacist who fathered at least four children outside of his marriage.

Just after their first son was born, his parents left him with his maternal grandparents and moved to Barranquilla, where Garcia Marquez’s father opened the first of a series of homeopathic pharmacies that would invariably fail, leaving them barely able to make ends meet.

Garcia Marquez was raised for 10 years by his grandmother and his grandfather, a retired colonel who fought in the devastating 1,000-Day War that hastened Colombia’s loss of the Panamanian isthmus.

His grandparents’ tales would provide grist for Garcia Marquez’s fiction and Aracataca became the model for Macondo, the village surrounded by banana plantations at the foot of the Sierra Nevada mountains where One Hundred Years of Solitude is set.

“I have often been told by the family that I started recounting things, stories and so on, almost since I was born,” Garcia Marquez once told an interviewer. “Ever since I could speak.”

Garcia Marquez’s parents continued to have children, and barely made ends meet. Their first-born son was sent to a state-run boarding school just outside Bogota where he became a star student and voracious reader, favouring Hemingway, Faulkner, Dostoevsky and Kafka.

Garcia Marquez published his first piece of fiction as a student in 1947, mailing a short story to the newspaper El Espectador after its literary editor wrote that “Colombia’s younger generation has nothing to offer in the way of good literature anymore.”

His father insisted he study law but he dropped out, bored, and dedicated himself to journalism. The pay was atrocious and Garcia Marquez recalled his mother visiting him in Bogota and commenting in horror at his bedraggled appearance that: “I thought you were a beggar.”

Garcia Marquez wrote in 1955 about a sailor, washed off the deck of a Colombian warship during a storm, who reappeared weeks later at the village church where his family was offering a Mass for his soul.

The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor uncovered that the destroyer was carrying cargo, the cargo was contraband, and the vessel was overloaded. The authorities didn’t like it,” Garcia Marquez recalled.

Several months later, while he was in Europe, dictator Gustavo Rojas Pinilla’s government closed El Espectador.

In exile, he toured the Soviet-controlled east, he moved to Rome in 1955 to study cinema, a lifelong love. Then he moved to Paris, where he lived among intellectuals and artists exiled from the many Latin American dictatorships of the day.

Garcia Marquez returned to Colombia in 1958 to marry Mercedes Barcha, a neighbour from childhood days. They had two sons, Rodrigo, a film director, and Gonzalo, a graphic designer.

Garcia Marquez’s writing was constantly informed by his leftist political views, themselves forged in large part by a 1928 military massacre near Aracataca of banana workers striking against the United Fruit Company, which later became Chiquita. He was also greatly influenced by the assassination two decades later of Jorge Eliecer Gaitan, a galvanising leftist presidential candidate.

The killing would set off the “Bogotazo,” a weeklong riot that destroyed the center of Colombia’s capital and which Castro, a visiting student activist, also lived through.

Garcia Marquez would sign on to the young Cuban revolution as a journalist, working in Bogota and Havana for its news agency Prensa Latina, then later as the agency’s correspondent in New York.

Garcia Marquez wrote the epic One Hundred Years of Solitude in 18 months, living first off loans from friends and then by having his wife pawn their things, starting with the car and furniture.

By the time he finished writing in September 1966, their belongings had dwindled to an electric heater, a blender and a hairdryer. His wife then pawned those remaining items so that he could mail the manuscript to a publisher in Argentina.

When Garcia Marquez came home from the post office, his wife looked around and said, “We have no furniture left, we have nothing. We owe $5,000.”

She need not have worried; all 8,000 copies of the first run sold out in a week.

President Clinton himself recalled in an AP interview in 2007 reading One Hundred Years of Solitude while in law school and not being able to put it down, not even during classes.

“I realised this man had imagined something that seemed like a fantasy but was profoundly true and profoundly wise,” he said.

Garcia Marquez remained loyal to Castro even as other intellectuals lost patience with the Cuban leader’s intolerance for dissent. The US writer Susan Sontag accused Garcia Marquez in 2005 of complicity by association in Cuban human rights violations. But others defended him, saying Garcia Marquez had persuaded Castro to help secure freedom for political prisoners.

Garcia Marquez’s politics caused the United States to deny him entry visas for years. After a 1981 run-in with Colombia’s government in which he was accused of sympathising with M-19 rebels and sending money to a Venezuelan guerrilla group, he moved to Mexico City, where he lived most of the time for the rest of this life.

Garcia Marquez famously feuded with Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa, who punched Garcia Marquez in a 1976 fight outside a Mexico City movie theater. Neither man ever publicly discussed the reason for the fight.

“A great man has died, one whose works gave the literature of our language great reach and prestige,” Vargas Llosa said Thursday.

His voice shaking, face hidden behind sunglasses and a baseball cap, Vargas Llosa said Garcia Marquez’s “novels will survive him and keep gaining readers around the world”.

A bon vivant with an impish personality, Garcia Marquez was a gracious host who would animatedly recount long stories to guests, and occasionally unleash a quick temper when he felt slighted or misrepresented by the press.

Martin, the biographer, said the writer’s penchant for embellishment often extended to his recounting of stories from his own life.

From childhood on, wrote Martin, “Garcia Marquez would have trouble with other people’s questioning of his veracity.”

Garcia Marquez turned down offers of diplomatic posts and spurned attempts to draft him to run for Colombia’s presidency, though he did get involved in behind-the-scenes peace mediation efforts between Colombia’s government and leftist rebels.

In 1998, already in his 70s, Garcia Marquez fulfilled a lifelong dream, buying a majority interest in the Colombian newsmagazine Cambio with money from his Nobel award.

“I’m a journalist. I’ve always been a journalist,” he told the AP at the time. “My books couldn’t have been written if I weren’t a journalist because all the material was taken from reality.”

Before falling ill with lymphatic cancer in June 1999, the author contributed prodigiously to the magazine, including one article that denounced what he considered the unfair political persecution of Clinton for sexual adventures.

Garcia Marquez’s memory began to fail as he entered his 80s, friends said. His last book, Memories of My Melancholy Whores, was published in 2004.

He is survived by his wife, his two sons, seven brothers and sisters and one half-sister. His family said late Thursday that his remains will be cremated and a private ceremony held.

BOOK EVENT

Bookends coordinator for PEN America World Voices fest in NYC

Author and Bookends magazine coordinator Sharon Leach will be part of a delegation of 150 writers from 30 nations set to participate in the PEN America World Voices Festival of International Literature, scheduled to take place in New York City April 28, 2014 to May 4, 2014.

The festival, which celebrates its 10th anniversary this year, was built on the PEN American Centre’s tradition of highlighting freedom of expression and the fostering of cross-cultural dialogue among writers, artists and citizens around the globe, offering connective tissue for a new generation to see beyond cultural divisions and misconceptions during a wide range of events, including readings, debates, one-on-one conversations, participatory workshops and performances throughout New York City.

The Pen World Voices Festival is the brainchild of celebrated author Salman Rushdie, then-president of the PEN American Centre, who, in 2004, had the idea of initiating an international literature festival in New York City – something which hadn’t existed before. An event which would bring audiences together with writers from around the world, offering first-hand cultural and political experience from different countries and offering a vantage point from which to develop a deeper understanding of the intellectual landscape around the world.

It is the only international literary festival in the US, and the only festival with a human rights focus and, over the course of the last 10 years, has presented over 1,500 writers and artists from 78 countries, speaking 56 languages.

This year’s 10th anniversary theme is ‘On the Edge’. Writers on the line-up this year include Colm Tóibin, Martin Amis, Dan Chiasson, Noam Chomsky, Lydia Davis, Rosario Dawson, Christopher Farley, AM Homes, Jay McInerney, Francine Prose, among many others.

Leach will be among three Caribbean writers expected to take part in the literary safari event, a perennial festival favourite, on April 29, at the Wesbeth Centre for the Arts, located in the West Village, and which will see 20 writers paired with 20 hosts in their private apartments for simultaneous readings in an intimate setting with a literate audience who will ask questions of the writers after the 15-minute readings and also engage in discussions.

The other Caribbean writers are Barbara Jenkins (Sic Transit Wagon) from Trinidad and Joanne Hillhouse (Fish Outta Water, The Boy from Willow Bend, Dancing Nude in the Moonlight, Oh Gad!) from Antigua. Leach’s first book, published in 2006, is What You Can’t Tell Him. Her new collection of short stories, Love It When You Come: Hate It When You Go, will be released from Peepal Tree Press later this year.

The PEN American Centre was founded in 1922 and based in New York City. It works to advance literature, to defend free expression, and to foster international literary fellowship.

SPOTLIGHT

Kei Miller wins OCM Bocas Prize for non-fiction

From a longlist of 10 titles in poetry, fiction, and non-fiction, the judges of the 2014 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature have chosen a winning book in each genre category. Kei Miller’s Writing Down the Vision was chosen from the non-fiction list. Fellow Jamaican Lorna Goodison’s Oracabessa was selected from the poetry category, while Trinidadian Robert Antoni’s As Flies to Whatless Boys was chosen from the fiction list.

They will vie for the US$10,000 overall award, sponsored by One Caribbean Media, parent company of the Trinidad Express and TV6.

Kei Miller’s Writing Down the Vision (Peepal Tree Press) is a collection of essays that present a range of experiences – personal and public – which the writer uses to articulate his vision and his understanding of the realities of life in Jamaica and the Caribbean. The judges noted, “Miller is an original thinker, a writer who knows his own mind and is wary of orthodoxies. He is uncompromising and honest in his interrogation of issues and his experiences of the worlds he inhabits, cutting through the normalcy to reveal the realities of these worlds.”

About the author

Kei Miller was born in Jamaica in 1978. He read English at the University of the West Indies and completed an MA in Creative Writing at Manchester Metropolitan University. His work has appeared in The Caribbean Writer, Snow Monkey, Caribbean Beat and Obsydian III. His books include Fear of Stones and Other Stories (short stories), Kingdom of Empty Bellies (poems), There is an Anger That Moves (poems), The Same Earth (novel), The Last Warner Woman (novel), and A Light Song of Light.

Miller currently teaches Creative Writing at the University of Glasgow.

The winner of the overall OCM Bocas Prize will be announced on Saturday, April 26, as part of the fourth annual NGC Bocas Lit Fest. The final cross-genre judging panel, headed by the celebrated Jamaican poet Linton Kwesi Johnson, will include poet and academic Mervyn Morris, writer and academic Hazel Simmons-McDonald, literary critic and academic Ken Ramchand, and Marjorie Thorpe as representative of the Prize administrators.

The 2013 prize was won by Monique Roffey for her novel Archipelago. The 2012 prize was won by Trinidadian Earl Lovelace for his novel Is Just a Movie. Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott was winner of the inaugural 2011 prize for his poetry collection White Egrets.

LITERARY EVENT

Poet Christine Craig for Inaugural Writers’ Retreat

The Drawing Room Project (DRP) Association will host a three-day writers’ retreat, specific to poetry, from May 23 to 25, 2014.

Aimed at new to early and mid-career writers and featuring the internationally acclaimed Christine Craig, the retreat will be held at Country Thyme agro cottages in Highgate, in the heart of St Mary.

With writers such as the Honourable Louise Bennett-Coverley, aka Miss Lou, Erna Brodber and Velma Pollard hailing from Highgate, and with English writers like Ian Fleming and Noel Coward, who spent years writing in St Mary, the location has become almost synonymous with literature. The DRP intends to extend this tradition and become part of the location’s unique identity with the staging, there, of this event.

Craig, who was born in Kingston, is a multi-faceted writer who focuses on poetry and fiction (both adult and children). Her first publications, Emanuel and His Parrot, Oxford University Press, 1970 and Emanuel Goes to Market, Oxford University Press, 1971, written for children, were a collaboration with her then husband, Jamaican artist Karl ‘Jerry’ Craig. These were the first full colour children’s books to feature a Jamaican child. She has written and directed a series of Jamaican history vignettes for children’s television, and in 1990, Heinemann Caribbean published Bird Gang, a novella for children. Her poetry, collected in the anthology, Quadrille for Tigers (Mina Press, Berkeley CA) dazzled readers with her flair for language, evocative descriptions of the Jamaican landscape, and dramatic imagery of the poignancy and pain of life for many Jamaican women.

She leads this inaugural residency, in which 12 participants will be guided in their craft.

“Christine was a natural pick,” said Sonja Harris, one of three trustees of the DRP, as “her poetry, collected in the anthology, Quadrille for Tigers, Mina Press, Berkeley CA, is praised for its flair for language, evocative descriptions of the Jamaican landscape, and dramatic imagery of the poignancy and pain of life for many Jamaican women.”

The retreat, the organisers have pointed out, stands to gain from Highgate’s rich culture and history, stimulating the creative process with landscape, architecture, community living and the documenting of indigenous practices that have sustained the area for generations. But there are also benefits to the community as two low-residency fellowships – The DRP Writers Fellowship and the Bookophilia Young Poets Award – are being offered to students in Highgate.

Additionally, on Saturday, May 24 at the venue, from 7:00 pm to 10:00 pm, the public is invited to enjoy readings by the participants, to share their own work and see displays by the Jamaica Hardanga Heritage Trust, Highgate Agricultural Producers Enterprise (HAPE) and local craftsmen.

The Drawing Room Project Association was founded in 2007 by writers Millicent Graham and Joni Jackson, with trustees Sonja Harris, Hyacinth Hall and George Davis. Its goal is to build a better society through introspective art and collaboration in a series of creative conversations through workshops, productions and exhibits.

COMPETITIONS, CONTESTS, etc

Call for submissions

A new Caribbean anthology, to be published by In Our Words Inc, a Canadian publishing company, is looking for submissions featuring subject matter reflecting Caribbean content. Submission guidelines: prose and poetry, prose, 2,500-5,000 words; five poems. No fee to submit and no remuneration. Upon publication, writers will receive a free copy of the anthology. Deadline to submit is August 31, 2014. Please e-mail submissions or queries to peta-gayenash1@gmail.com.

NEW IN BOOKS

New titles now available in e-reader and print

The Last Days of Jesus: His Life and Times, by Bill O’Reilly

Two thousand years ago, Jesus walked across Galilee; everywhere he travelled he gained followers. His contemporaries are familiar historical figures: Julius Caesar, Caesar Augustus, Herod the Great, Pontius Pilate. It was an era of oppression, when every man, woman, and child answered to the brutal rule of Rome. In this world, Jesus lived, and in this volatile political and historical context, Jesus died – and changed the world forever.

In time for the Easter season of reflection and adapted from controversial right-wing talk show host Bill O’Reilly’s bestselling historical thriller Killing Jesus, and richly illustrated, The Last Days of Jesus is a riveting, fact-based account of the life and times of Jesus.

In Paradise, by Peter Matthiessen

In the winter of 1996, more than 100 women and men of diverse nationality, background, and belief gather at the site of a former concentration camp for an unprecedented purpose: a week-long retreat during which they will offer prayer and witness at the crematoria and meditate in all weathers on the selection platform, while eating and sleeping in the quarters of the Nazi officers who, half-a-century before, sent more than a million Jews to their deaths. Clements Olin, an American academic of Polish descent, has come along, ostensibly to complete research on the death of a survivor, even as he questions what a non-Jew can contribute to the understanding of so monstrous a catastrophe. As the days pass, tensions, both political and personal, surface among the participants, stripping away any easy pretence to healing or closure. Finding himself in the grip of emotions and impulses of bewildering intensity, Olin is forced to abandon his observer’s role and to embrace a history his family has long suppressed – and with it the yearnings and contradictions of being fully alive. The last book by the author who died recently.

Thrive, by Arianna Huffington

In Thrive, Arianna Huffington makes an impassioned and compelling case for the need to redefine what it means to be successful in today’s world.

Huffington’s personal wake-up call came in the form of a broken cheekbone and a nasty gash over her eye – the result of a fall brought on by exhaustion and lack of sleep. As the cofounder and editor-in-chief of the Huffington Post Media Group — one of the fastest growing media companies in the world — celebrated as one of the world’s most influential women, and gracing the covers of magazines, she was, by any traditional measure, extraordinarily successful. Yet as she found herself going from brain MRI to CAT scan to echocardiogram, to find out if there was any underlying medical problem beyond exhaustion, she wondered is this really what success feels like?

In this deeply personal book, Huffington talks candidly about her own challenges with managing time and prioritising the demands of a career and raising two daughters – of juggling business deadlines and family crises, a harried dance that led to her collapse and to her “aha moment”.

Hold Me In Contempt: A Romance, by Wendy Williams

Move over 50 Shades, there’s a new romance in town. Talk show host and media personality Wendy Williams brings on the heat in her first ever, no-holds-barred, down and dirty, romance novel.

Kimberly Kind is trying to get beyond her roots. A successful, beautiful, smart lawyer, she’s finally finding direction in her life and getting out of the streets. But a terrible accident threatens to throw her carefully laid plans off course. Now Kim’s hiding a huge secret… one that could threaten everything.

Enter King. A perfect mix of Justin Timberlake and David Beckham, the man oozes sex and has more swagger than anyone Kim’s ever met. Their chemistry is off the charts. But after passion-filled nights, the intensity of their emotions takes both of them by surprise.

Love was not supposed to be an option. Now it’s the only thing holding them together. When their pasts come back with a vengeance, can love possibly be enough?

Living With a Wild God: A Non-believer’s Search for the Truth About Everything, by Barbara Ehrenreich

From the New York Times bestselling author of Nickel and Dimed comes a brave, frank, and exquisitely written memoir that will change the way you see the world.

Educated as a scientist, Barbara Ehrenreich is an author, journalist, activist, and advocate for social justice. Here, she recounts her quest-beginning in childhood-to find “the Truth” about the universe and everything else: What’s really going on? Why are we here? In middle age, she rediscovered the journal she had kept during her tumultuous adolescence, which records an event so strange, so cataclysmic, that she had never, in all the intervening years, written or spoken about it to anyone. It was the kind of event that people call a “mystical experience” and, to a steadfast atheist and rationalist, nothing less than shattering.

In Living With a Wild God, Ehrenreich reconstructs her childhood mission, bringing an older woman’s wry and erudite perspective to a young girl’s impassioned obsession with the questions that, at one point or another, torment us all. The result is: a searing memoir and a profound reflection on science, religion, and the human condition.

Clever Girl, by Tessa Hadley

Clever Girl is an indelible story of one woman’s life, unfolded in a series of beautifully sculpted episodes that illuminate an era, moving from the 1960s to today, from one of Britain’s leading literary lights – Tessa Hadley – the author of the New York Times Notable Books Married Love and The London Train.

Like Alice Munro and Colm Tóibin, Tessa Hadley brilliantly captures the beauty, innocence, and irony of ordinary lives – an ability to transform the mundane into the sublime that elevates domestic fiction to literary art.

Written with the celebrated precision, intensity, and complexity that have marked her previous works, Clever Girl is a powerful exploration of family relationships and class in modern life, witnessed through the experiences of an English woman named Stella. Unfolding in a series of snapshots, Tessa Hadley’s moving novel follows Stella from the shallows of childhood, growing up with a single mother in a Bristol bedsit in the 1960s, into the murky waters of middle age.

Clever Girl is a story vivid in its immediacy and rich in drama – violent deaths, failed affairs, broken dreams, missed chances. Yet it is Hadley’s observations of everyday life, her keen skill at capturing the ways men and women think and feel and relate to one another, which dazzles.

Love wounds

Chapter 14

That Christmas my father planned to celebrate his 70th birthday by flying to Jamaica and hosting a dinner get-together with his kids – from both within and without his marriage. He thought it was time to finally get everything out in the open, make the unofficial ones official, and for us to all to become acquainted. “Water under the bridge, princess,” he’d said breezily when he called to invite me. “Can’t un-ring a bell. Mistakes were made but we can put the past behind, can’t we, Grets?”

I heard the ice cubes clink in the single malt whisky I knew he was drinking as he sat at his desk in his home office in Palm Beach, where he lived now with a tiny Japanese woman named Michiko. In spite of everything I admired how unapologetic he was about the pain he’d caused our family, and it was agreed, even by him, that he’d caused our unravelling because of his wandering eye. He’d been a handsome man with a weakness for women, and although my mother had never been in any imminent danger of him leaving our family, she’d been a true uptown Jamaican wife who’d suffered the humiliation in silence when the stories had begun to seep out.

“Daddy, have you told Roland and Stewart about this?” I wasn’t sure my sisters would come – my father had promised plane ticket for Dixie – but I knew my brothers, who would both quite coincidentally happen to be vacationing in Jamaica at the time, absolutely wouldn’t.

“Baby girl, you worry too much.” My father’s laugh was booming. “Everything’ll be fine.”

My father could not conceive of the possibility of his plan falling flat; his entire life, he’d always relied on his roguish charm to see him through any situation. My mother, long before their marriage had gone sideways, loved to tell anyone who would listen about the time they’d been held up at gunpoint in their car at the gate of a friend’s home where they’d gone to a dinner party. The gunmen had pushed my parents into the house, where the other guests and the host, a recent divorcee, dripping in finery, had already gathered. But somehow my father had managed to smooth-talk the criminals, making them leave without one item of jewellery being stolen or one shot ever fired.

Of course, his proposal had always been fated to be an uphill task since most of his indoor plumbing children hated him as did most of the outdoor plumbing ones. On the evening of the dinner, Boxing Day, only I turned up with Martin in tow at the prescribed time: 3:00 pm.

My father approached us with a drink in his hand. He was tall and tanned, and lean as ever. His hair had greyed some at the temples since the last time I’d seen him, which was perhaps two, years before; but he still looked to be in his early-fifties. He was still in good shape for a man his age, and for the first time I could see his appeal. I hope Martin looks this way when he’s his age, I thought. And right then and there I realised what I hadn’t even allowed myself to think out loud: I wanted a future with Martin. We’d been together, by this, almost three years and though we spoke about it in only vague terms, I was definitely contemplating the next step: marriage.

“Man, those cars,” Martin said almost reverently beside me, letting out a low whistle. He stared appreciatively at the cars — there was a navy Mazda Miata, a Jaguar, a Porsche and two SUVs of indeterminate make and model – parked in the driveway. Even without being sure of exactly how many of the cars belonged to him – my father counted automobiles as toys – I knew there were no invited guests inside. The house was his Jamaican retreat, which he stayed at whenever he was here. Gardeners dressed in khaki, with rakes and hoses, bustled about on the lawns as crystal sunshine, slanting through tall mango trees, fell in warm bands across their faces.

“Greta,” Daddy said, pulling the passenger door open and taking the Tupperware containing potato salad from me. “Nice wheels,” he said, leaning in to brush my cheek with liquor-scented kiss that reminded me of the ones he always gave me when I was a little girl. He smelled of Grey Flannel, also a relic from an earlier time.

“Welcome, son,” he said, pumping Martin’s hand when I introduced them. “I was just telling my daughter here that I love your car.” Martin had driven his white Mercedes convertible, his pride and joy, hoping for this exact reception.

Martin grinned, glancing triumphantly at me through the corner of his eye. Wed had a big argument earlier when he’d told me he was opting not to take the truck. I felt that the Mercedes was too delicate to navigate the rough terrain of the hills but he’d wanted to impress my father.

“I see you’re a car buff like myself, sir,” he said, nodding to the five cars that were parked, one behind the other, on the wide, cobblestone circular driveway, recently washed and polished and gleaming under the dazzling sunlight.

Perhaps it was because his other sons hadn’t shown up, or perhaps it was because he’d followed Martin’s football career, but my father instantly took to him, referring to him as “son” all evening. They chatted and laughed and discussed sports, and local politics, which they weirdly saw eye to eye on. My father was a big supporter of the labour party which had just recently regained power and so, apparently, was Martin. After dinner they retired to the balcony to smoke and drink liquor, leaving me and little Michiko to self-consciously muddle our way through the evening, which seemed never-ending.

But it was all worth it. Daddy loved Martin – God knew he always hated my other boyfriends – so all was right with the world. Once, when I went out there to offer refills, he smacked me playfully on my butt and said, “You picked a good one this time, baby,”

It didn’t occur to me that given his track record, my father was the last person from whom I should have wanted a ringing endorsement on matters of the heart.

TO BE CONTINUED NEXT WEEK