A local bookshop is running a competition for recommendations for a book of the year. I guess they mean a modern, new book published since January, so I looked through what I’ve read which falls into that time span. I’ve read dozens and dozens of books, but most of them are published years ago, sometimes many years ago! It didn’t, however, take me very long to decide – there was one outstanding book which I’ve written about here a couple of times. This is what I wrote about my nominee:
My book of the year is without a doubt “Undercurrent” by Natasha Carthew.
It’s a fascinating autobiography of a girl growing up feeling like an outsider in her family and in her Cornish community. It makes social comment on poverty in Cornwall and the difficulties and deprivation suffered by an ordinary if rather chaotic family. Young Natasha is somewhat of a loner, an outsider, struggling with her identity. From a very early age she begins to express her thoughts and ideas in writing and particularly poetry. Poetry is an escape and a comfort to her and a way of managing the situation she’s living in.
However, it’s not her life story alone which made such an impact on me; Natasha is a wonderful and vivid writer, and her descriptions of place – the land, the littoral and the sea, are stunning and evocative. She loves the natural world and seeks refuge from her hard and unhappy life in her observations and experiences of it. Her use of language is brilliant and vivid, her perceptive and accurate observations are recorded in her notes, poems and writings through her life from being a small child. Her story, though troubling, and in some places hard to read, is gripping and engaging, but it’s her writing – I am in awe of her writing.
Lois Elsden 