On the day after Boxing Day last year, my dad and I went to buy some cabbage. My aunt and cousins were joining us for dinner that evening and we had a meal to prepare. The local supermarket was closed and the cabbage, sourced from an Italian deli around the corner, was obscenely overpriced. In a bind, we bought some anyway and headed back home to begin cooking. Standing around the kitchen island chopping and peeling vegetables, preparing a rib of beef and assembling a side dish of dauphinoise potatoes, we listened to music and chatted. The meal was a success and the cabbage – lightly browned and decorated with caraway seeds – tasty. But most important was that, for the time we had spent cooking, I felt closer to my dad.
Associating rebirth with cycles in nature isn't just a Christian or even religious thing. In temperate climates, especially, every year life that seems to die in autumn is resurrected in spring. Even where trees don't drop their leaves and the earth doesn't sleep under a blanket of snow, subtle changes may indicate a slowing, a retreat, a sense of suspended animation. And now, in the spring, as sap begins to flow, buds begins to form and shoots begin to sprout, life is resurrected. Animals emerge from hibernation, like Sleeping Beauty woken from her death-like 100-year sleep.
But some animals, and a few other organisms, take the analogy one step further: apparently dead, they then, it seems, come back to life.
In Elvira Navarro’s stunning, bewildering novel, our loved ones are simultaneously gone without a trace and present in every moment. “Just how far do the dead travel with us?” Adriana asks. The Voices of Adriana is an audacious metatextual attempt at finding out.
The Homemade God moves between being a page-turning mystery and an astute study of family dynamics, and readers who like a book to pick a lane and stay in it may find this frustrating. But Joyce is a thoughtful writer, and the narrative gear-changes echo the novel’s concerns: the gap between image and reality, the difference between who we are believed to be – by ourselves and others – and who we really are.
The character-driven novel strikes the perfect balance between sharp-witted banter and a deeply relatable portrayal of womanhood that readers will carry with them, much like the series’ legacy.
Most people know the North Road of this book’s title as the London-to-Edinburgh A1. But, as Rob Cowen writes, A1 is a cipher for a 400-mile multiplicity of roads – a historically diverse bundle that includes ancient trackways, a Roman road, the “Old North Road” and the “Great North Road” (the name generally applied to what became the A1 in the road-numbering scheme of the 1920s). This collective forms, as Cowen has it, our primary road – the “backbone” of Britain.