The Charlotte Bauer Book Club: A lost daughter, meandering rivers and bad moms

News24

5 hours ago

Thanks for all the love for my new Book Club – your excitement is contagious! To answer your FAQs:
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Love Forms by Claire Adam (Faber & Faber)
After a brief tussle on a Trinidad beach with a tourist called Nick or Mick, 16-year-old Dawn – 'a rich, white Trinidadian' – finds herself pregnant.
Her influential father has her spirited away to neighbouring Venezuela, where, under the care of kindly nuns, she gives birth to a daughter, who is spirited away for adoption.
Dawn's parents swear her to secrecy – among Trinidad's tight-knit island community, getting 'ketch' (caught) in that way only leads to more trouble. They urge her to get on with her life as if nothing happened.
Dawn finishes school, moves to London, becomes a doctor, marries an Englishman, and raises two sons. But the shame and regret she feels about the daughter she 'so easily gave up' is lodged in her heart like a stone, and Dawn – now middle-aged and divorced – can no longer pretend that nothing happened.
Love Forms is about so much more than will-she-won't-she find her birth daughter. This captivating novel, longlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize, explores love in many forms – love of country, love of parents, love of self – love that can be mislaid like a bunch of house keys, but will eventually turn up somewhere you hadn't thought of.
In this, just her second novel, Adam shows that she is already a virtuoso at observing small, everyday things to reveal more than the sum of their parts – Dawn's mother's awe at her daughter's eight-ring gas cooker on a visit to London, the arrangement of furniture in an empty office. Adam can put a world of meaning into a shopping list, and I was interested to see in her acknowledgements that she thanks the brilliant miniaturist Claire Keegan (Foster; Small Things Like These) for being one of her mentors.
Love Forms is a literary jewel of my favourite kind – easy to read, hard to forget.
Saraswati by Gurnaik Johal (Serpent's Tail)
Masterpiece, meandering flop or both?
Short-story writer Johal's ambitious first novel flows from the banks of the Saraswati, a mythological Indian river that suddenly bubbles to the surface in a farmer's parched well in near-future Punjab.
Heaven-sent miracle? Climate catastrophe? Propaganda opportunity?
As the river swells and spreads, it will engulf a nation at the crossroads of change and forge bonds between six strangers ranged across the globe (including an eco-saboteur, a minor rock star and a Bollywood stunt double) who will discover a shared bloodline stretching back to a 19th century inter-caste couple whose forbidden love resulted in seven children they named after rivers.
Johal floats so many themes and ideas in this novel, it's sometimes hard to remember where we are, who's talking and even what they're talking about.
The critics adored this genre-bending, time-warping flood of folklore and fact, political satire and stories within stories within stories. Perhaps I missed the boat, but at times I felt I was drowning. And then a dazzling scene or an irrepressible character would emerge from the depths (Harsimran, the Bollywood stunt double, is a treat) and save me from going down a third time.
In the end, I decided to go with the flow of this madly overcooked book and not get too hung up on pesky details such as 'now what's happening?' At 27, Johal may well be a literary genius in the making. I'll hold my breath.
Summer Island by Kristin Hannah (Macmillan)
Astonishing to think that Summer Island first came out in the US almost 25 years ago. Now published by Pan Macmillan for the first time in the UK and currently dominating the front tables of SA bookstores, this golden oldie looks set to continue Hannah's unstoppable string of hits.
When Nora Bridge walked out of her marriage, she left her children behind. She goes on to become a celebrity radio show agony aunt who espouses family values. When her adoring listeners find out that Nora has been hiding the truth about her own bad mom past, her world comes crashing down.
In the fallout, a drunk driving incident leaves Nora with a broken leg and a desperate need to hide from the talk show tabloids and the hill of hate mail from her furious fans.
Nora's youngest, Ruby – a stand-up comedian who has turned her mother into the bread-and-butt of her jokes – hasn't spoken to her in years. But when Nora comes out of hospital, Ruby is persuaded to look after her. And so bad mom and wounded daughter find themselves flung together on Summer Island, the site of their once-happy family holiday home.
The rest is a pretty predictable relationship repair job with lots of crying and laughing and breezy wisdom round the kitchen table, with a B-story featuring a dying friend and an old flame thrown in.
I'd be surprised if readers who enjoyed The Women, Hannah's far more accomplished 2024 historical blockbuster about the nurses on the frontlines of the Vietnam War, find Summer Island as satisfying.
Still, an emergency read if you're stuck in a queue at Home Affairs and perfect for leaving behind, unlike your children.
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To Be Read recommends
A growing skyscraper of adventures, also known as my TBR Tower:
Hunger by Choi Jin-Young (Brazen)
When Dam finds her husband dead in the street, she decides the best way to keep his spirit alive is to eat him. This slender novel – just over 100 pages – about class, corruption and all-conquering love, is a cult classic in Korea. Plenty of food for thought.
Moderation by Elaine Castillo (Atlantic)
Girlie's job is to remove the very worst content that makes it onto the internet, from child pornography to beheadings. And she's good at it, being one of the few moderators who manages not to throw up. A promotion and a new project take her to an even darker place. Apparently, also very funny. I'm in.
When The Cranes Fly South by Lisa Ridzén (Doubleday)
Yay, a book about a man for a change! An elderly Swedish man whose son wants to take away the only thing that makes his life worth living – his dog. All about finding agency among the aches, pains and losses of old age. It won Swedish Book of the Year.