Extraordinary Books are a newish UK indie publisher (part of the Indie Press Network). They describe themselves as “a not-for-profit company bringing a radical new approach to publishing. We were founded with a sense of outrage at the ever-growing monopoly exerted by the big publishers, a desire to subvert the current state of the industry.” Do visit their website’s ‘About‘ page to find out more about how they work. I am extremely grateful to their publicist, Claire, for sending me proof copies of the first two novels on their list, which couldn’t be more different to each other….
The Westward Hours by Dennison Smith
This was sold to me as a kind of dystopian western – and given my penchant for both, made me eager to read it. It’s set in a nearish future US, where climate change has wreaked havoc worldwide, and millions died, changing the geopolitics of the world too. After civil war, the Reunited States is now ruled by corporations, and is divided into two classes, the uber-rich oligarchs of the ‘First and Last One Hundred’ corporations, who live under climate-protected domes, and the dispossessed who struggle to survive. Additionally, half the country is now effectively declared as badlands, with enforced borders.
Dorothy, a ‘Recent History’ lecturer, is married to Joel Saunders, who works for Yácorp (‘number one Govcorp’). He’s their ideas man. Dorothy has persuaded him to take her on a business trip to ‘-101’, formerly Kansas, and the frontier city of Ulysses which Joel had worked on. She tells us:
On the last night of our marriage, the silence between Joel and me didn’t feel like peace. But peace is so often a word devoid of feeling. […]
The silence was nothing but a lull in the night’s hostilities.
We learn that Dorothy’s maiden name was MacAllister, a toxic name to many. We don’t discover its true significance until further on in the novel, but we gather that her family’s’ ranch is beyond the boundary into the lands of the American Southwest that were part of the Sacrifice War. As she engages in subterfuge to leave her husband at the end of the novel’s first part, she tells us:
I am the last of my ancestors, and this story is mine to tell.
Smith then takes us back in time to before the War and into the MacAllister family history, how they hailed from Scotland originally travelling west as the land was submerged and settled there. The narrative tells of Dorothy’s grandmother, and how her twins Tom and Tam were begotten by an act of violence. The twins would grow up to become charismatic leaders of the Ghost Army, fighting against the government. When a child is born to Tam, she is taken back to the ranch to grow up – the precious MacAllister heir. That’s the condensed version of the majority of the novel!
Yellowstone it ain’t; once the twins are on the rampage, the book has more of a Mad Max feel, given a literary treatment. Smith doesn’t over-explain things, leaving the reader to fathom out relationships and what’s happening, which isn’t always clear, but I went with the flow, this wasn’t always an easy read, but was always interesting. We do, however, get the feel of the insurgency and its aims. Smith lived on the Navajo Reservation in Arizona as a young adult, and has an affinity with how indigenous Americans were treated historically, which she applies to her story of the MacAllister clan.
The choice of the name ‘Dorothy’ for her initial protagonist is surely deliberate, for as she says in The Wizard of Oz, ‘There’s no place like home.’ and that’s perhaps the key at the heart of her story. Tellingly, the author has left the US to make her home in Portugal.
Source: Review copy – thank you. Hardback, 272 pages. BUY at Amazon UK or Waterstones via my affiliate links.
The End of the Vodka by Oscar de Muriel
Mexican author Oscar de Muriel is already known for his ‘Frey & McGray’ series of Victorian occult mysteries, (which I was vaguely aware of but have since ordered the first volume). They sound great fun. However, he’s taken a rather different turn with his new novel, The End of the Vodka.
The main events chronicled in this novel all happened, but de Muriel has cleverly joined the dots, with a little artistic licence to imagine conversations and possible consequences to create a kind of mystery thriller from them – and it involves Frida Kahlo. I was sold on the spot!
Fact: Dorothy Hale was a beauty, a showgirl and an aspiring, but unsuccessful actress and later socialite after marrying a millionaire. On 21st October 1938, she threw herself from a high window of the apartment block where she lived in New York. In 1939, Dorothy’s friend, Clare Boothe Luce, a writer and diplomat, who was married to Henry Luce, (who owned Time magazine amongst other titles), commissioned Frida Kahlo to paint a retablo (devotional picture) of Dorothy as a memorial to her. However, Frida being Frida, and a surrealist, didn’t produce what Clare expected, instead chronicling Dorothy’s life as she fell. Luce nearly destroyed the painting, but her friend Isamu Noguchi persuaded her otherwise. It was donated to the Phoenix Art Museum in Arizona.
De Muriel then creates two timelines. The first follows Frida Kahlo in 1939, as she tries to get inside the head of the late Dorothy, told as letter/diary entries written to her husband, the muralist, Diego Rivera, with whom she thinks Dorothy had an affair the last time he was in the city. Rivera was a notorious womaniser, but Kahlo loved him yet, even though they are virtually separated at this time, by distance at least. These parts are written from Frida’s diaries, which de Muriel was able to consult.
The second strand follows Clare Boothe Luce in 1940, as she is blackmailed by an important businessman to find out information about the war in Europe from various sources, including Wallis Simpson, the Duchess of Windsor. There is documented evidence that they stayed at the Ritz at the same time, but their meeting, where Clare tries to persuade her to divulge information on von Ribbentrop, is imagined.
Having had access to Frida’s documents, and being able to quote them in the book, de Muriel does a great job of getting inside Frida’s head. She was always in pain, yet struggled through as we know, and was frustrated that at this stage of her career, she wasn’t getting the attention that male artists like the other surrealists and her husband of course were receiving. de Muriel’s depiction of her as she tries to winkle out the facts to enable her to create the painting, she plays a detective role. As Clare does similarly with Wallis Simpson, showing that de Muriel has done his research well again.A political edge to the story is added via Frida and her husband’s associations with the Communist party and Leon Trotsky – who would be murdered (with an ice-pick) in Mexico City in 1940. This contrasts with Clare’s mission to get Fascist info. It was all fascinating.
This was a very different kind of art mystery/thriller that I enjoyed hugely. De Muriel sounds an interesting man, now based in the UK, he’s a chemist and violinist as well as an author! It was also book No 6 of my #20BOS26.
Source: Review copy – thank you! Hardback, 336 pages. BUY at Amazon UK or Waterstones via my affiliate link
The de Muriel book sounds really fascinating, thank you!