Decades: Compiling the Ultimate Library with Anna Mazzola

Welcome back to Decades as a new guest curator joins me to add new books to the shelves of my ultimate library. This is a project which began back in January 2021 and if you look back through the past two years of my blog posts you will find dozens and dozens of amazing book recommendations – as suggested by authors, bloggers and publishers.

This is my Decades Library. There were no books on my library shelves when I first started my mission to compile the ultimate reading library. I only wanted the best books to be found on the library shelves, books other people had read and loved – the books they would recommend to other booklovers. Each week a guest joins me and I ask them to nominate new books to be added to the Decades Library. But they can’t just select books at random, I have set two rules which they must follow…

1: You Can Select Any Five Books
2: You Can Only Select One Book Per Decade From Five Consecutive Decades

Easy? Have a go at choosing which five books you would pick. Which fifty year span do you think best reflects your favourite reading?

This week I am delighted to welcome Anna Mazzola to Grab This Book. I finally got to the opporutnity to meet Anna at Bloody Scotland last year – her panel with previous Decades curators, Douglas Skelton and D.V. Bishop, was one of my festival highlights. She was chatting about her latest book (The Clockwork Girl) and there was also lots of distrubing facts about nuns – you really had to be there.

Before I hand over to Anna to share her five Decades selections I shall draw your attention to this handy wee link which lets you browse and buy Anna’s books: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Anna-Mazzola/e/B01D4XL42M/ref=dp_byline_cont_ebooks_1

Anna is a writer of historical thrillers and Gothic fiction. Her third novel, The Clockwork Girl, set in Paris in 1750, is a Sunday Times Historical Fiction pick for 2022 and reached number 11 in the Sunday Times Bestseller list. Her debut novel, The Unseeing, won an Edgar Allan Poe award. Her fourth novel, The House of Whispers, is a ghost story set in Fascist Italy and will be published in April 2023. Anna also writes legal thrillers under the name Anna Sharpe, the first of which will be published in 2024.

When not writing or tutoring for The Novelry, Anna is a human rights and criminal justice solicitor, working with victims of crime. She lives in Camberwell, South London, with her husband, their two children, a snake and a cat.

DECADES

My Cousin Rachel, Daphne Du Maurier, 1951

I’ve never been able to decide which is my favourite: My Cousin Rachel, or Rebecca. They are both dark and exquisite and explore similar themes. My Cousin Rachel is perhaps the most haunting, however. It was written in 1951 when Du Maurier was at the height of her powers, and while it might on its surface be a romantic novel set amid beautiful Cornish estates, it is in fact a novel about female sexuality, poisoning and power.

We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Shirley Jackson, 1961

The Haunting of Hill House is the more famous novel, but We Have Always Lived is, to my mind, Shirley Jackson’s masterpiece. Jackson wrote the book towards the end of her rather troubled life. The novel’s two female lead characters combine what Jackson’s biographer Judy Oppenheimer calls the ‘yin and yang of Shirley’s own inner self’. Constance embodies the domestic, while Merricat is strange, headstrong, murderous. A devastating and often darkly amusing exploration of everyday evil. One of my favourite books of all time.

Surfacing by Margaret Atwood, 1972

Surfacing was one of Margaret Atwood’s early works and remains one of her most unsettling. It tells the story of a young Canadian woman returning to her childhood wilderness home with her boyfriend and two friends to investigate the disappearance of her father. As the story progresses, we see the island exert an increasing pull on Atwood’s heroine, leading her into ever growing wildness.

Beloved by Toni Morrison, 1987

(Also loved Jazz, 1992). A huge, gripping, searing novel. I first read it when I was eighteen and it has stayed with me ever since. Beloved begins: ‘124 was spiteful.’ 124 is a house in Cincinnati in 1873 and it is spiteful because it is haunted by the fury of a baby whose throat was cut to make her safe from slavery. Not an easy read by any means, but an essential one.

A Place of Greater Safety by Hilary Mantel, 1992

Another huge and often bloody masterpiece, but this one is set during the French Revolution. Mantel’s main characters are the leaders of the Revolution – Danton, Robespierre and Camille Desmouslins, but we also see their wives and other lesser known characters. Complex, witty and brilliant. It was the first novel she wrote, though not the first to be published. Thank goodness she didn’t give up.

Huge thanks to Anna for these mighty selections. Some weeks I prepare the Decades list and I recognise for or five of the books as titles I have read and loved. Other weeks (including this week) I am reminded of why I need to invite guests to help me identify the best books to include in the Decades Library – big, powerful stories which I haven’t read but fully appreciate why they are held in such high regard.

I am adding We Have Always Lived in the Castle to my Audible library. Decades grows my TBR once again – the best outcome for me.

DECADES WILL RETURN

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April 10

Decades: Compiling the Ultimate Library with Louise Fairbairn

Back in January I decided I wanted to build up a library of essential reads as chosen by booklovers. I started with empty shelves and I invite each of my guests to nomainate five books they feel should be added to my Ultimate Library. There are two rules:

1 – Choose ANY five books
2 – You can only choose one book per decade over five consecutive decades.

Today I am joined by Louise Fairbairn. Journalist, blogger and frequent chair and contributor to many book events. Recently Louise helped me prepare for my first appearance in an online event (which still remains secretly under wraps) and her wise council was very much appreciated as the butterflies were taking hold. I am frequently in awe of the diverse range of books she is able to discuss in depth and her assistance with my Decades project was always something I had hoped would happen.

I will hand over to Louise and invite her to introduce herself and her five selections.

DECADES

I’m a freelance production journalist and proofreader, and was the crime fiction reviewer for The Scotsman newspaper for several years. I chair the occasional event, am a Bloody Scotland Book Club panellist, and currently am a judge for New Zealand’s 2021 Ngaio Marsh Award for Best First Novel. I blog about crime fiction as The Girl With All The Crime Books (www.crimebookgirl.com / @crimebookgrrl), and ramble on about other stuff as @scarletrix on Twitter.

I could read before I started school (which didn’t impress the teachers) and since then it’s been a rare day I haven’t read a chapter of something at some point. We didn’t have a lot of books at home when I was young, but there were many well-used library tickets, book tokens often appeared for birthdays, and second-hand bookshops remain something that my family is incapable of walking past without entering, “just for a look”.

Picking just five books was HARD! My “Desert Island Books” are very different to this list, too (Neil Gaiman, Terry Pratchett, Peter O’Donnell, Val McDermid and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle). But I’ve chosen books I utterly love, and that I think demand to be read in one sitting while your cup of tea goes cold because you are so enthralled.

1940s

1946 Daphne du Maurier – The King’s General

I had a bit of a Daphne du Maurier binge a couple of years ago, and discovered this gem. She wrote a string of novels (most famously Rebecca) and heaps of short stories (including The Birds and Don’t Look Now), and led a rather peculiar life, if Margaret Forster’s biography is in any way accurate. All her novels are very different, all of them testament to an incredible imagination – and they’re often a bit *odd*. The King’s General is set around the time of the English Civil War, and is a romance with a bit of a mystery, but mostly is an incredible portrait of a woman’s life and the strength she finds when so much is ranged against her. I normally don’t much like historical fiction, and I’m definitely not a fan of romance, but this is just terrific – utterly gripping plot, a fascinating history lesson, and chock-full of emotional intrigues.

1950s

1955 Alistair MacLean – HMS Ulysses

I wanted to drop in an Alistair MacLean because they’re great action thrillers that sold ridiculous amounts of millions of copies in his lifetime, yet he’s all but forgotten these days and I think he shouldn’t be. But just to be awkward, I’m recommending his debut, HMS Ulysses because it’s not like all the others. As with several of his later novels, it draws on his experiences during the Second World War, but while it’s fiction, it has no need to exaggerate for effect because the experience of the Arctic convoys was so extreme. The thriller plot holds the attention fine, but what sticks in the mind is the battle against the elements as much as the enemy, and the way he evokes the deep-seated fear of the men who went through hell every time they left port. It’s a book that tears at you, but you cannot put it down. Unlike several other titles of his, it made such an emotional impact I’m not in a rush to re-read it, but it’s astonishingly powerful.

1960s

1961 Muriel Spark – The Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie

I almost went with The Girls Of Slender Means, which I adore, but there’s a reason The Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie is so well known and so enduring and it’s not just Maggie Smith’s amazing portrayal in the 1969 film. The novel is only 128 pages long, but it’s absolutely rammed full of plot, character work, evocation of place and some of the sharpest, wittiest, most poignant foreshadowing you’ll ever see in fiction. I studied it at university, and it was among the few books that I enjoyed rather than endured, then have re-read it several times since as it’s just so entertaining and rewarding. Spark was a poet, so stuffing lots of ideas and sensations into a tiny number of sentences was in her nature, but it’s still a masterclass in how much richness you can offer in so few words.

1970s

Ted Lewis – Get Carter (aka Jack’s Return Home)

I’ve been banging on about Ted Lewis for a few years, and it’s entirely Nick Triplow’s fault – I picked up his biogrphy of Lewis when it came out, then saw him do a Q&A at a screening of Get Carter, after which we had a pint and a chat. Thanks to him I’ve been hooked by Get Carter, the novel. It’s interesting to compare it with the film – the setting is different, being moved form Humberside to Newcastle, but to me the main change is that Michael Caine makes Jack more human than he is in the book. In Lewis’s novel he’s uncompromising, unwavering and often brutal; in teh film there’s a glimmer of something else behind the cold gaze – in part because of Caine’s film CV rather than anything he does overtly. Lewis specialised in unlikeable protagonists and grimy, unsettling true noir plots, and while he’s an uneven writer, his best are gripping reads. Get Carter is perhaps the most accessible; I’d recommend both book and film for any library. Watch/read with a pint in a thin glass to hand.

1980s

1984 William Gibson – Neuromancer

I spent a lot of my teens and 20s reading sci-fi and fantasy, and comics, and still dip into that world now and then (comics is a medium, not a genre, people!), so Neuromancer in part stands for all that. It’s also just a little slice of genius. As with SF authors since forever ago, William Gibson gives us a brave new world extrapolated from and built on the one we live in – plus here he gives us the terms “cyberspace” and “the matrix”, and is credited with creating the archetypal “cyberpunk” novel. Information is thrown at you with no explanation, just go with it and you’ll find it’s a great ride – and something of a crime novel too, if you care to look at it from a certain angle. It’s perhaps dated now, but try and read it in the spirit of 1984 (I first read it circa 1989, hat tip to my pal Neal for pressing it into my hand) and feel its freshness, and the wonder and glee of that first audience. Gibson’s whole oeuvre is worth exploring, he’s a very thoughtful writer who sees the world from interesting angles.

Some big, big titles in this selection. My thanks to Louise for taking on my Decades challenge – I know she spent quite a lot of time deliberating over her final selection as I got frequent updates which suggested I had caused some frustration!

You can see all the books which have been added to my Ultimate Library here: https://grabthisbook.net/?p=5113

DECADES WILL RETURN

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