black rock

Amanda Smyth is taking part in our Readers Day on Saturday 24th October. I’ve had her book on my ‘to read’ pile for some time, after it was recommended to me by Amanda’s editor at Serpents Tail (after a while, they get to know what kind of books you like, and send them to you without you even having to ask – reason #4305834634608945 why this just might be the best job in the world).

When the book arrived, I had my nose buried in something else, and while I was reading that, as sometimes happens, a few events appeared on the horizon which demanded me to read other books that were not Black Rock. In the run up to the Festival (absolute worst time to try and do this, I know) I am trying to catch up on my reading list, and so picked up Black Rock - and am I glad that I did.

Black Rock is a pleasure, a surprising and sorrowful novel full of great language and with a genuinely thorough plot. I’m not going to tell you what it’s about, because I don’t want to give it away – and because perhaps, like me, you quite relish the slight recklessness of jumping into the world of a book knowing nothing more about it than that your colleague/dad/best friend/a random man on the train really loved it. I will tell you, however, that it is a beautiful story of survival, of changing times and of loss. Smyth writes of the deepest betrayals and long kept secrets as though they happen everyday – which, of course, they do, we just don’t always know about it. The book is warm, and mature in its telling, so much so that you find yourself struggling to accept the realities faced by the main characters. They, however, do a much better job, or rather Smyth does in her creation of them.

The book skirts some very old and tender issues rather succinctly – managing to both remind us that bad things have always happened and yet not give itself over to those causes entirely – a clever balance that, for me at least, helped create a book I could enjoy, mindfully, but without feeling like I was being clubbed over the head with the ‘moral of the story’ .

If you’ve read this book, I’d like to know what you thought. If you haven’t, I urge you to read it.

You can see more about Amanda here .

Sara