"51 and a half" by Vanessa Gebbie (Ad Hoc, 2023)

Not only a book for people who run workshops, but also for those who haven't the time to attend them. The 51 exercises are ideal warm-ups to get you into the mood for writing, and you can read some of the flash, stories, poems and extracts from plays and novels that were the outcome of the exercises.

The exercises' variety ensures that you'll find ones that work for you, and each one that does will result in a work that you wouldn't otherwise have written. Dip in and see.

Google is suggested as a lucky-dip tool and well as a source of information. I can't help thinking that the phrase "other search engines are available" should appear somewhere.

I liked the white on white idea mentioned in Game 40. I liked "The Ridge" by Maria Sanger (a short story). My "A promising writer" is a sample response to game 16. I'd find game 50 hardest - Alice Wakefield's sample response would be completely beyond me - I couldn't keep my inner critic quiet that long.

Typo in "cricket 6" - in "you're going to pay Word Cricket", I think "pay" should be "play".

"Ordinary People" by Diana Evans

Obama has just got in. His happy family is everywhere.

Bruce (photographer) and brother Gabrielle hold a party.

Melissa - article writer - and Michael have been there. The kids (3 months and toddler?!) are elsewhere. Michael's hoping for sex, but she's tired. And there's a mouse in the kitchen. She recalls the 2nd birth, how she'd wanted it at home but the hospital kept her in. Michael thinks the magic has gone out of their relationship. She's bored by childcare.

Damian (his father - not close - died a month before) and Stephanie have 3 kids. She's angry/upset that he's become distant. Damian's father - a single parent - was a black-activist. His book is still a set text. She's middle class. He's humiliated at the monthly Sunday roasts with Stephanie's parents. They moved out to Dorking. He misses inner London. He has an unfinished novel.

Michael and Damian (who fancies Melissa) have been friends since university. Michael talks to Damian about separation. He's becoming friendly with Rachel at work. Melissa tells her friend Hazel that she's considering separation. Michael and Melissa try a night out, making an effort. It partly works.

Mrs Jackson is going senile. She lives 5 doors from Michael and Melissa.

Michael sleeps with Rachel, confessing to Melissa about it. He lives in a hotel for a while. Damian stays a night when the trains are cancelled. Nothing happens, but it could have.

Gangland violence near Melissa's house scares her into having Michael back. There's a sudden holiday where the 2 families plus Hazel and partner stay in a Spanish villa. Hazel wants a baby. Melissa has consenting sex with Damian in the pool.

Many songs feature. People see in them analogies for their lives.

Weeks later, Melissa lets slip to Michael about Damian. His best friend! Melissa's worried about their daughter - she has imaginary friends. One of them is Lilly, who Melissa knows was a poorly child of the previous owner. Michael dumps his old novel and moves out. Hazel is dumped. Melissa downsizes, thinking her house is haunted. She loses her job.

Other reviews

• Arifa Akbar (She is particularly good at the gendered distinctions of midlife crises ... But while the inauguration is a clever way in, just as the death of Michael Jackson seems to mark the end of this short-lived era of hope in the final chapter, both Obama and Jackson are so freighted with American history and politics that their symbolism feels cosmetic and irrelevant in relation to these couples. It is a forgivable flaw, given the accomplishment of this novel, which has universal appeal in its reflections on love and yet carries a glorious local specificity ... In some grandiose passages Evans seems to be deliberately giving us Dickensian pastiche, zooming out to narrative vistas of the city before returning to the lives and homes of her couples.)
• Hannah Beckerman (Race is essential to these characters’ lives, but Evans’s delicate prose weaves issues of racial identity and politics into the narrative so that they never feel heavy-handed. ... Evans writes with great humour and insight about the monotony of caring for small children, and provides a sharp psychological portrayal of the disenchantment and estrangement of long-term relationships. Although the first half of the novel suffers from an excess of backstory, which interrupts the sense of quiet urgency she has introduced in her characters, Ordinary People is nonetheless a deftly observed, elegiac portrayal of modern marriage, and the private – often painful – quest for identity and fulfilment in all its various guises.)

"The Cutting Room" by Louise Welsh

An audio book.

The ever-present first-person narrator, Rilke, 43, works for an auction house in Glasgow. At the start he's agreeing to clear a big house in a week for an old sister whose brother has died. He finds an extensive, valuable porn book collection. He also finds old photos, some of them snuff photos. Are they rigged? He has various contacts who he asks. He's gay, cruises, and knows cross-dressers, porn traders, drug-traders etc. He also knows about the legitimate art market. He's friends with a leading policeman who's secretly gay. We learn about the tricks of the auctioneer's trade. There is a plot and a final surprise, but it's Rilke's voice which carries the novel. I liked it.

Other reviews

• Paul Magrs (We get a lovingly detailed and grimy catalogue of impedimenta. The book is full of stuff: erotic ivory netsukes hidden in jacket pockets; worn stone steps in tenement buildings; shirts with armpit stains like weak tea. It is this kind of concreteness and eye for detail that makes The Cutting Room a literary novel - pulling us closer to life than most generic efforts. It's less successful when it gets self-consciously literary and chimes off Girodias or Foucault, or presents its tombstone chapter epigraphs to lend some clout.)
• Linda Wilson

"In Ascension" by Martin MacInnes

An audio book.

Leigh, from Rotterham, had an aggressive, unpredictable father who controlled water levels until his early death. Her mother's a maths academic. Her sister Helena is in finance. Leigh's Ph.D subject is algae. She's on a research ship when a deep vent appears in the ocean. It seems to repel ships. She dives into it and has a fever, a feeling she wants to dive again.

A new form of rocket propulsion is discovered simultaneously in 3 continents. One of the discovers had a fever. Leigh gets to work for a company planning a space launch. Her job is to design sustainable algae supplies. An asteroid that had been behaving strangely disappears. Voyager 1 sends out signals from long ago. Chapter 14 (part 2, I think) has a dazzling list of images of Earth-based life.

She's in a reserve crew but ends up in a ship. Her mother is ill. The algae they fly with has some DNA from the vent (not Leigh's idea. She doesn't know whose). Leigh guesses it might encourage symbiosis (archaea into eukaryotic). They all black out. When they wake they all have radiation sickness. There's no power and the ship tech doesn't work. They're 2 billion years in the past. The algae are thriving.

It's 2040. Helena has been trying to find out more about her sister's death - lost rather than dead, like missing sailors. The mission's been discredited, the company gone bust. Helena is told that there might be answers on Ascension island (near where they were going to splashdown). She spends 2 weeks there. She finds a building that looks as if it's been prepared for Leigh and the crew. She recalls episodes of her life with her sister.

At the end Leigh is on the ship returning to Earth. It's entirely blue.

Other reviews

• John Self
• Stuart Kelly

"Safe With Me" by K.L. Slater

Anna, a postlady in Nottingham, witnesses an accident between a car and a motorcycle. She recognises the driver from an incident 13 years before. She helps Liam, the motorcyclist. Updates from the 2 time lines alternate.

Anna thinks that the driver (now calling herself Amanda though Anna knew her as Carla), was the cause of her brother's and mother's death. Anna's mother neglected Anna, who often used to go to neighbour Joan. When she thought her mother was harming her brother Dan, she contacted Carla who went through the official channels. Carla even (against the rules) visited the house. Dan and the mother were found hung. Carla was (surprisingly to me) sacked.

Anna becomes increasingly confused. She wants Liam to take Amanda to court. Amanda has visited Liam. They've almost become friends. Anna wants to be his friend, suggesting that she moves in with Liam and his old mother while he recovers. Anna hasn't been delivering all the mail. It's been piling up in her house. She starts burning it. She's investigated, suspended. She goes to Liam for emotional support. He suggests that she put her house and money under someone else's name, otherwise when people sue her, she'll lose all her assets. The only person she can think of is Liam.

We learn that Joan found Dan dead and his mother dying, but let the mother die. We learn Carla killed herself and that Amanda is her identical twin. Liam is in debt. He was a juvenile arsonist, killing his father and sister. The accident had unlocked a dangerous aspect of himself.

At the end it's visiting time in a clinic. Liam and Anna, but it's Liam who's the patient.

Too often for my liking, Anna does daft things that her mental issues don't explain.

Other reviews

• goodreads

"A whistling of birds" by Isobel Dixon (Nine Arches Press, 2023)

Poems from Anthropocene, Bad Lillies, New Statesman, Poetry Ireland Review, Poetry London, The Dark Horse, etc. Illustrations by Douglas Robertson. D.H. Lawrence, birds and snakes feature.

I have things to learn from the lightness of touch in poems like "Larch Fog", the first poem. It begins with "How the twigs make a fog between the trunks". Stanza 2 says "Sometimes it seems you write,/ Bert, about the lives of people/ just to shape the landscape/ that you move them in" (the poem is "For D.H.Lawrence" who was known as Bert). In stanza 4 and 5 it says "your generous hoard of living names -// is not just so much backdrop,/ but the kernel and juice of it". The poem ends with a list mostly of plant names.

There are quotes from DH Lawrence poems interlaced in the poems.

"Fantasis for Small Octopus Orchestra" has freewheeling layout and ideas. "the bats" has phrases scattered around the page. Like bats I suppose.

She's skilled at stretching an idea to fill a page - see "Man", "Threshold, etc - though the 3 lines of "the seahorse always breaks my heart" isn't enough for a poem. And sometimes the poetry sounds more like flowery prose.

• In "Dung Beetle", " You might pooh-pooh or patronise/ this humble enterprise,/ but he's guided by a higher light than ours/ (his Egyptian cousin was a god/ who rolled the dung-sun through the skies).". There's an aabca rhyme scheme in these lines, which seems accidental. And does "pooh-pooh" work?
• "Utterance" is poetic - "The voices speak to us/ down the avenues of years/ with the tender tongues of trees ... rain drenching the stubbled fields/ a drumbeat rising in a metal pot/ paper water lilies floating/ in a bowl of Chinese porcelain"
• "The Secret Peach" ends with - "An old woman fading in a foreign land/ will thirst for that particular juice,/ will call out for it, searching/ for the peach's proper name,/ forgetting that she ate, we ate,/ the peaches from those trees each year/ and never knew it written down,/ in any of our languages"
• In "My Sweet Fiorenza" "The woman on the step holds out her paper cup,/ rattling her coins - aiuta, aiuta! - rattling her damnable coins through my veins/ and the church, swollen with its own mythology,/ is too tight for my thoughts. For once/ I let the candles be, head for the blessed air."
• "The Spiders of Ragusa" has "wrapped in wintry webs/ a postponed Halloween// veiled in close-spun white/ the sunbold citrus orbs/ are muted lamps/ and you daren't touch/ the resolute archnid tapestry".

I like "Rosa x damascena" (2 pages) and ç (34 long lines)

There are over 3 pages of useful notes.

"Scratching the sands" (National Flash Fiction Day, 2023)

An anthology of Flash with the shortlist of Microfiction at the end. The theme was Time.

Favourites include "1969" and especially "You Die First". Interesting that "Wood Wide Web" and "Take Root" use the same science idea.