April 12, 2026
A Week Away
We were in the north of England last week for a trip to visit family, and between the hours on a plane, lazy mornings, and bookshop visits, I read so many books!
The first read was The People of Privilege Hill, by Jane Gardam, which I’d stuck in my bag to read in case nothing at the airport struck my fancy, and when nothing at the airport struck my fancy, I was awfully glad to have it there. A short story collection is an awfully good idea for an overnight flight and fragmented attention, and while Gardam reads so strangely to me sometimes—the first book of hers I read was Old Filth, which was getting all the hype at the time, and I was disappointed to find it quite unfathomable—a commitment to appreciating and understanding her approach has proven most rewarding. It also helps to be able to read a short story twice or even three times to finally comprehend it. I finished the collection as our plane was touching down, which left me in a moment of panic—I needed to get to a bookshop pronto, and the W.H. Smith at airport arrivals only sells snacks and newspapers now.
Luckily we made it to Waterstones in Lancaster before the end of the day, and I was thrilled to find on the shelf two books I was coveting. The first of which was Tessa Hadley’s The Party. “What had happened… seemed to have two opposite faces, and she couldn’t choose between them. It was a humiliating drunken mistake full of risk, the very thing nice girls were warned against, which would shame her and ruin her forever. But it was also a revelation of lust, savage, and real, into which she must pass in order to become an adult, and sophisticated.” Hadley does not disappoint with this gorgeous novella, which has nothing slight about it. Rich and textured, with the most wonderful twist, a story of two sisters coming of age in postwar Bristol and the moment from which their futures begin to properly unfold. I loved it.
And then I got to read The Parallel Path, by Jen Ashworth. “I don’t know if there was some greater wisdom in my body that led me out onto the fells and over the rough ground the summer before, telling me I needed to learn how to walk, how to fall, how to manage when I lost my bearings, how to pick my body way slowly along uneven ground. I don’t know if my body – already knowing about the passenger in my skull – was seeking not a cure but a way to care for itself. But I’d like to think such things are possible.” While I’ve been visiting Lancashire on a regular basis for 23 years now, it is actually reading Ashworth’s books that has deepened my understanding of this place and of Northerness in general, her writing articulating so much I’ve always wondered about in connection with this culture I’ve married into (and in which the act of wondering at all is sometimes regarded as mildly suspect).
The Parallel Path is her memoir of her experience walking coast to coast across the north of England during the sweltering summer of 2023, a journey she was compelled to make in the wake of pandemic trauma and ongoing grief after the death of her former partner, her daughter’s father. Caregiving through all of this proves to be all-consuming and her coast to coast walk is meant to be a reclaiming of self, a rediscovery of untetheredness, and an exercise is self-sufficiency.
But Ashworth is never alone, not least because an ailing artist friend has resolved to send letters to each of her stops along the way, his thought provoking messages about death and dying tapped into the thoughts she is having along the way. And because those thoughts are rich and plentiful, delving into the past, the history of the places she encounters, into her own past, and also into her thoughts of her partner and children at home not so very far away.
Is she walking toward home or away from it? And similar paradoxes come into play as she considers life and death, sickness and health, solitude and connection , care and carelessness, and how between all of these is a kind of edgeplace that requires us to make friends with it if we want to live fully (if often uncomfortably) in the human experience.
Next up was The Portable Virgin, by Anne Enright, her fiction debut published in 1992, and which I purchased at the Oxfam Bookshop in Lancaster. My trips to the Oxfam Bookshop have become so unrewarding since I’ve apparently already acquired all the books I’ll ever want, and everything on the shelf is by Anita Shreve, but I was glad to find this one. Inscription reads: “14 September 1993/ Magic, I hope this marks the beginning for you. Congratulations – Women Studies here we come! With love, Annabel XXX.” Which in some ways is as inscrutable as these weird and disorienting stories that I mostly didn’t understand but still enjoyed. “Cathy was often wrong, she found it more interesting. She was wrong about the taste of bananas. She was wrong about the future of the Bob. She was wrong about where her life ended up. She loved corners, surprises, changes of light.”
I loved The Wildwater Women, recommended by the amazing Fred’s Bookshop (since 1956!) in Ambleside in the Lake District and even set in Ambleside among a group of women whose lives are transformed by wild swimming. Such a perfect vacation read and proper northern too—complete with mention of ginnels. ”Abby felt pride blaze across her chest. It was always easier to give advice than to take it, she knew that. But sometimes when your friends did amazing things – showed positivity and perseverance – some of that reflected back at you. Friendship was about knowing who was there for you when you got out of your depth – and she knew these women were. And as she swam in the water, melding with the landscape, she felt truly at peace with life in that moment.”
And oooh, I had a perfect read for my flight home from England. I LOVED The Shame Game, by LD Smithson, who I met by chance while browsing in The Grove Bookshop in Ilkley as her children conspicuously celebrated finding her bestselling book on the display table. So naturally I had to buy it, and I’m so glad I did. It’s the story of four old high school friends who each receive a message threatening to reveal their most shameful secret UNLESS they publicly reveal a shameful secret belonging to another member of their crew. Who among them will be willing to destroy a friend’s life to save their own? I cared about the characters so much, the story kept me guessing all the way through, and at a certain point became unputdownable, which is just what you want on an eight hour flight. I especially love that it was set it Ilkley. Such a wonderful souvenir.
My final vacation read was Sarah Hall’s Haweswater, which I also bought in Ilkley, but mostly read back in Canada, though it didn’t feel like it because her depiction of the Lake District was so evocative, and having been not too far from there, I could see it all so vividly in my mind. This is the debut by Hall, whose books have previously piqued by interest but seemed not quite for me. I started to read her latest, Helm, a novel that takes place over millennia and whose central character is a wind, but it wasn’t quite the right moment for me to get it. Now that I’ve read Haweswater, however, and enjoyed it so thoroughly, it gives me a better sense of her overall literary project and makes me think there’s a chance I can still find my way into it.
I picked up Haweswater because the true story and place it’s based on is mentioned in Jenn Ashworth’s memoir when she walks past the vividly blue Haweswater water reserve, and contemplates the villages that had once existed at the bottom of the lake when it was still a valley, before it was flooded during the 1930s in a massive project to bring drinking water to the people of Manchester. Hall is quite clear that her novel is a fiction, but the geography that inspires her story is so real—the water trickling through the fells, the blue slate of the so solid buildings of Mardale—cottages, the school, the church, and the pub. The narrative is unfathomably bleak—nothing ends well for anyone in this love story between the man from the Waterworks who arrives to tell the villagers about the project and the fierce young farmer’s daughter who is determined to oppose it. But oh, the prose is so vivid and alive, densely woven with meaning, and the bleakness takes a backseat, and it’s a pleasure to be enveloped in the story with all its various perspectives and unfathomable beauty and brutality at once. I am now firmly a Sarah Hall convert, and can’t wait to read more.
