Shreya reviews Booker-shortlisted Andrew Miller’s The Land in Winter for broadsheets in India

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Please click here to read the snappy review, but as there are typos, here it is in full:

“It is a truth universally acknowledged that storytelling is essential to humanity, developing society and connecting the world as it does. It’s a mystery, therefore, that storytelling is anathema to the gatekeepers and practitioners of the modern ‘literary’ novel, and plots, pariahs banished from their ivory-towered, exclusionary terrain. With riveting exceptions like Booker-winning Wolf Hall or the Pulitzer-shortlisted The Dutch House, prizewinning or nominated books wallow in the kind of navel gazing that have driven readers away in their gadzillions, even as ‘literature’s’ guardians, blinded by their own self-proclaimed brilliance, rue their shrinking foothold in the real world.

Having picked up Andrew Miller’s Booker-shortlisted The Land in Winter, I was surprised, therefore, by its semblance of a story. It makes an excruciatingly slow start, bogged down for the first hundred pages with details no-one needs to know (we’re informed of every trip his characters make to the bathroom – completely unnecessary even had the story been about a consortium of plumbers), then hits its stride and becomes engrossing for the next two hundred, before letting us down again with a weak, wussy finish.

It does, however, along the way, get you invested in a few of its characters, an art that appears largely forgotten in many of today’s novels. You don’t have to like them but if the author can’t get you interested in their fate then the story has failed, and Miller does succeed in making me care about Bill’s farm, his eccentric bull, and whether he lives or dies in the end (Bill, not the bull, though the latter provides some of the rare moments of humour in this book), and about mistreated Irene and whether she will ever escape her ghastly doctor-husband’s clutches or of the oddly sinister blind children’s home matron she finds herself beholden to after her misadventures in the snow. Gabby, the East European doctor, on the other hand, is an intriguing character left largely undeveloped, and what a waste of a good story that is! The trying-too-hard-to-be-interesting Rita, I couldn’t warm to, and Eric the Doctor, I wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole, or his married lover and cuckolded husband for that matter, but these things are subjective and they might float your boat.

The language is beautiful, the descriptions of the pivotal snow in particular, a character in its own right, but the author indulges himself in stylistics to such a degree, especially his love for layering each line with metaphor upon (sometimes mixed) metaphor, that these stretches not only go on forever, as a snowscape can seem to, but clog up the otherwise impressive literary flow.

In conclusion, dear reader, if you’re holidaying in the sunshine, with time on your hands, give this a go.”  

(c) Shreya Sen-Handley, for The Asian Age and Deccan Chronicle

Shreya writes about truth in memoir, with a “refreshing, current, and beautifully written” take on the subject, for a British literary magazine

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“I’m with Oscar when he posits, “the truth is rarely pure and never simple.” Wilde! Not at all how a lot of folk, including famous philosophers, view truth – as the single unimpeachable edict on which we must build our world. Yet, the witty Irishman was, as always, spot on. The multiplicity of our planet makes undiluted, uncomplicated truth impossible, begging the terribly modern question of “whose truth?” There’s never just one side to a story, you see, though one of the numerous versions taking wing might brush closest to its empirical moorings…”

Please click here to read the essay in full

Shreya, her second child and third book, meet The Queen in London at Her Majesty’s invitation!

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Images with The Queen at Clarence House and in front of a rainswept Buckingham Palace from British media and NLT colleague

“Pussycat, pussycat where have you been? I’ve been to London to see The Queen. Pussycat, pussycat, what did you there?”

Shreya and her schoolgirl daughter were invited, in recognition of their efforts to encourage literacy in Britain, along with select Literacy Champions, to meet The Queen in London, to celebrate the National Literacy Trust’s 30th anniversary.

Shreya’s third book, ‘Handle With Care’ (HarperCollins 2022), was presented to The Queen at the celebration, selected from the many books nominated as ‘reader favourites’ from across Britain.

A wonderful royal adventure, with fab people, dampened only by the incessant rain (hence the waterproofs of the second photo)!

Shreya’s column for newspapers in October is about cold-shouldering the ‘wellness’ gurus as we find our own methods of managing in tough times

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(Photo by Olivia Rose Barns for Nottingham UNESCO City of Literature and Nottingham Trent University)

“…chill out we must. Make the best of a bad job. Get our heads down and plough on. That I can do, and have always done, but this unwinding malarkey — how on this storm-tossed earth does one do that? Should I phone a friend? Ask the audience? Can Pink Floyd help me get comfortably numb?

My bestie said looking forward to his retirement sustained him. But the average age of retirement in most countries has been pushed to seventy, which seems too distant a prize to even contemplate! Gone are the days, even in prosperous western states, when you could retire in your fifties with a pension that kept you in clover for the rest of your life. A subject so triggering for France this year, that a million would-be-pensioners fought over it with the gendarmes, up and down the Champs Elysees!

How about a ‘mini-retirement’ Gary-Neville-style? We cackled when this millionaire footballer waxed lyrical about his ‘new’ idea; a centuries-old concept everyday folk call a holiday! He might be better acquainted with it in practice, however, as we plebs could do with a proper break. The average American, often working two jobs, gets ten paid annual holidays, whilst the rest of us, marginally better off, are too beset with health, financial, parental, and other problems to relax.”

Please click here to read the article in full