My name is Sarah and I’m a bookaholic. There: I’ve said it. I read a lot. Compulsively and widely. Ever since I learned to read over my brothers’ shoulders, books have provided a glorious escape into a parallel universe.

Perhaps escape is the wrong word: that makes it sound as if I’m trying to get away from life. And of course, sometimes we all need a refuge. There’s nothing wrong with a bit of escapism when real life is overwhelming. But I think of books as more like food. I can no more entertain the idea of going for 24 hours without reading (how would that work?) than I can imagine a day without eating. Books are basic nourishment, as well as entertainment. Sometimes they serve as fairly plain fodder; at other times a feast for the soul.

One of the best pieces of advice I was ever given as a would-be novelist was to read a lot. Bliss! Carte blanche to do what I was doing already. A failsafe excuse if challenged by anyone trying to get my attention, helped of course by the fact that part of my job entails running a literary festival. (It’s a work thing…)

Anyway, what have I read and enjoyed in recent months? Honest answer: lots. But I’ve tried to narrow this down to a few highlights.

Anne Lamott is a prolific author of fiction and non-fiction. Her 1995 Bird by Bird: Instructions on Writing and Life is the single best book I’ve ever read on writing. I’ve not read any of her fiction, but I have enjoyed a number of her autobiographical collections of essays on faith.
 
Her latest is Dusk Night Dawn: On revival and courage. Her stock-in-trade is to mine stories from her own life in order to offer reflections on universal human insecurities and fears. She writes with acute observation and ruthless precision.
 
Her trademark is an unflinching honesty leavened with a large helping of compassion, self-deprecation, and warmth; she is eminently relatable.

The new book is all about finding hope in the darkness. How can we cope as the bad news piles up? Where do we find joy when our feet are sore and our hearts are broken? She started writing it two years ago, triggered by the climate crisis and using her recent marriage — her first, at 64 — as a jumping-off point for her ruminations. The mix of the domestic and the global is typical Lamott. You can read an interview I did with Lamott here.
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For a completely different offering from over the pond, you might like to read Rodham by Curtis Sittenfield, another American author I’ve long admired. I particularly loved American Wife, a fictional account of the life of Laura Bush. With Rodham, she’s in political territory again. It is the ultimate ‘What if?’ story, in this case asking what if Hillary Rodham hadn’t married Bill Clinton?

The book is meticulously researched. The author has clearly done her homework. Reviews have been mixed, and it is not without flaws (although I don’t have a huge amount of sympathy for the Amazon reviewer who complained he didn’t like it because ‘it wasn’t true’).

Some of the detail in the second half feels like overload. But I loved the way the author had conjured up what might have motivated Hillary, from her experience growing up when the father of a schoolfriend tells her she is ‘awfully opinionated for a girl’ to her devastation when she realises that Bill will never be faithful to her. I ended up thoroughly gripped – and far more sympathetic to the real Hillary Clinton.

What else? Light Perpetual by Francis Spufford (longlisted for the Booker Prize) asks a different what if? What if the bomb that landed on Woolworths in south London in November 1944, killing 168 people including 15 children under the age of 11 hadn’t done so? Spufford explores the lives of five of those children, ordinary working-class people who lived on and grew up to live their lives through the next seventy years or so. Music holds the whole thing together, casting a spell: the book is an intricate composition of huge ambition, encompassing the history of a small island of London in constant post-war flux.

‘What if?’, people keep wondering in Light Perpetual. ‘Why this life and not the other?’ I can’t put it better than the reviewer in the Guardian who writes: ‘The novel is both a requiem and a giving of new life, fusing death and resurrection as they are fused in the Christian liturgy: Let light perpetual shine upon them.’

Generally, I don’t do a great deal of re-reading, mainly because there are always more books on my list than there is time to read. But for a number of reasons I’ve found myself re-reading Susan Howatch. Remember the Starbridge novels of the 1980s? A series of six, they have rather confusing names: Glittering Images, Ultimate Prizes, Glamorous Powers and so on. Howatch, previously known for her sweeping historical-romantic sagas (Penmarric, Cashelmara) came to faith and turned her impressive storytelling talents to the Church of England.

The six fat Starbridge novels – based in a fictional diocese in the south-west of England, are followed by the three St Benet’s novels set in the city of London. (For a fast reader this is bliss: literally thousands of pages of intelligent diversion.) They are all concerned with the big existential questions, and closely tied to the theological debate of the day. Sometimes the plots are a tad far-fetched but they are complete page-turners.

As well as tight plotting what makes them so gripping is her clever use of multi-viewpoint narratives, so that your sympathy swings one way and another. Her characters are flawed and real. Howatch is extremely skilled at revealing the narratives that people cling on to in a crisis.
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Susan Howatch is rather out of fashion now, for a number of reasons. But I’ve found them well worth a re-read. Her insight into the interaction between the psyche, the emotions and the soul is finely tuned. And ultimately compassionate. She gives us all reason to hope for healing and redemption.

All three of my novels have been about families. I’m endlessly intrigued by human relationships. Especially intergenerational ones.

Joy and Felicity is a novel about sisters born eight years apart who have very different upbringings.

Why so different? A combination of reasons. The age gap means that while Joy is a war baby, Felicity is born into an entirely different world. Peacetime; austerity Britain. The intervening years have changed their parents’ lives.

Then, of course, there is the birth order. Joy is very much the big sister, while Felicity is the baby of the family. And that’s not to mention their personalities. Chalk and cheese.

Maybe it’s because I’m one of four children that I’m fascinated by sibling relationships. We four were born within four years – and yet we each experienced our upbringing through individual lenses. Our order in the hierarchy, our particular characteristics, our parents’ increasing experience as parents… well, it all matters, doesn’t it?

As we mature, we are increasingly influenced by those outside the home. Friends and lovers, teachers and colleagues. We have the chance to make more intentional choices. To make our own mistakes. Our circle widens and our paths sometimes diverge dramatically from those of our siblings. Haven’t we all met families where we think, Aren’t they different?

We tell different stories about our own families. We have different insights and interpretations of our history. Sometimes there are secrets, as there are in the Kelly family in Joy and Felicity. Some of these secrets emerge over the course of the novel, while others stay hidden. By which I mean the reader learns things that the main characters themselves never uncover. Truths have a habit of shape-shifting within families, anyway. As Bridie – the girls’ mother – points out, memory’s a slippery thing. Narratives within a family are rarely straightforward and frequently unreliable.

I suspect all families have their hidden stories. My mother, who died last year, once tearfully shared a secret with me that I’m fairly sure she never told my brothers. Does that matter? I think so; it was something she entrusted to me with great care, for a particular reason. As far as I know, only two other people on earth know that truth. She may no longer be with us, but I see no reason to share it now.

The privilege of the novelist is that we have access to our characters’ history and thoughts and feelings. Their entire life history, should we want it. Unlike in real life, when none of us is ever wholly known and understood even by those closest to us.

And that’s the fun of it, I suppose. While in real life we can be left bewildered by other people’s choices or behaviour – perhaps also by our own actions and reactions – the novelist has privileged access. One reason we write, of course, is to help make sense of other people and understand the world a little better.

That’s why, if I’m ever asked what I want readers to take away from my novels my answer is that I don’t set out to be didactic. I write to entertain. The closest I have to a message is a plea for compassion. We’re all flawed beings, formed by our history and our genes and our character.
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If we can understand other people and the choices they make, we’re half-way there. If we can forgive each other too, well that’s better still.   ​

You can pick your friends, but you can’t pick your family, as the old saying goes. Or as Tolstoy writes in Anna Karenina, ‘All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.’

I’m not sure that that’s true. But I do find myself wondering if there’s any such thing as a ‘normal’ family. Presumably that’s why there are such rich pickings in family life for novelists. 

I’m endlessly fascinated by families and how they work. The spoken and unspoken rules; the traditions and habits. The ways of doing things that seem totally normal when you are growing up – and that you only question when a friend or partner points them out to you.

The Restless Wave crosses three generations of one family. Edward, born in 1908, spends his early life in India. His childhood is shaped by strong values of service and duty. Orphaned very young, his upbringing is pretty lonely. In contrast, he goes on to have a large family, six children. One of those children is Hope, the second narrator in the book. She grows up in another era and another context: war-time and post-war Britain. For a whole number of reasons, she deliberately turns her back on her parents’ values. It’s safe to say that her parenting of her daughter Nell couldn’t be more different. And Nell’s outlook on life is different again.

Other characters bring different perspectives on family life. I don’t want to say too much more than that. Suffice it to say that much of the book is about the tussle between the generations as each character struggles with what life throws at them.

It’s only towards the end of writing a book that I seem to spot the bigger themes that overarch a storyline. In this case, I think that The Restless Wave is partly about the search for home.  What does home mean if you are separated from your family? If you’ve seen your home destroyed as a result of war or disaster? How do you rebuild a life after trauma? How do you make peace with the past? And what is it that different people need to feel themselves ‘at home’?

For some, it’s a matter of being surrounded by precious possessions, perhaps with associated memories. For others, it’s the landscape that makes all the difference. For others, it’s the people, whether that’s family, the wider community, or both.  

I guess the answer will be different for everyone. We probably all know people who are capable of cheerfully making themselves at home wherever they happen to be. For some, that’s much harder, and they experience a long-term sense of dislocation. Perhaps it’s a lifetime’s work to carve out a niche.

A friend married to a Welshman recently introduced me to the Welsh word hiraeth. I’m told there is no direct translation into English, but that it means a sort of homesickness, a bittersweet longing for something that is missing. It sounds to me as if there’s overlap with the ancient Greek word nostos, from which we get the English word ‘nostalgia’, which is a sort of longing for home combined with a quest. Homer’s Odyssey is the apotheosis of nostos: the tale of the Greek hero Odysseus in his ten-year quest to return home to Ithaca after the Trojan War. Along the way he encounters shipwrecks and other trials and tribulations, but nostos propels him on.

For me, the sentiments expressed in nostos and hiraeth – if I’ve understood these untranslatable words correctly – are pretty universal. They are as much about finding our ‘home’ within our families and communities as they are about specific geographical places.

Our experience within our families is a huge part of what shapes our lives. That’s not rocket science. But one of the things that interests me as a writer is the batons that are passed down the generations without discussion or acknowledgement. The unspoken, unnamed narratives that become part of our own stories without us even knowing.

And in a sense, that’s what The Restless Wave is all about: the lifelong quest we each pursue to make peace with our pasts and find our place in the world.

The war memorials and cemeteries in Normandy are profoundly moving. They are beautifully kept and tended. Line after line of white tombstones fill acres of land overlooking the beaches that witnessed D-Day and its aftermath. However many times I visit, I am moved.

This year, we've been reminded all over again of the extraordinary feat that was D day. The images from the 75th anniversary commemorations were extremely powerful. I don't think I'll forget the sight of the nonagenarian parachutists re-enacting their landings.  I imagine that this will be the last time any veterans will make the journey.
 
I was in Normandy for the 70th anniversary, when by chance we travelled out to France accompanied by a number of veterans. They marched onto the boat in formation, and we were accompanied out of Portsmouth by a naval escort, in honour of the men. Also on the boat were any number of jeeps and motorbikes dating back to the 1940s. The mood was a combination of a festival and something rather more solemn.
 
Above is a picture of Omaha Beach. Some years ago, we took my son and some friends there while we were on holiday. They  were nervous of playing on the beach. They were concerned it was disrespectful, somehow.
 
My own view is that not playing on those beaches would be sadder far. Let’s never forget the sacrifices those soldiers made, but let’s also celebrate the freedom we enjoy as a result.