Book Club
Writer and journalist Gill Hornby recommends a life-affirming novel to transport us away from the daily grind.
There cannot be one woman among us not in need of some serious distraction. This current climate of tedium flecked with fear is doing us no good at all. There’s only so often you can refresh your twitter feed and inflate your blood-pressure. For your own mental health, put down your phone and instead pick up Small Pleasures by Clare Chambers.
Everyone I know loves this novel. Set in 1957, it is the story of Jean Swinney who earns her meagre living as a general reporter on the Kent Northern Echo. For all her trail-blazing as a working woman journalist, her life is grim. She’s a spinster, approaching middle-age, who lives with her vile mother in a drab little house where they eat awful food together in silence. She’s patronised at work, humiliated at home, battling loneliness. And then a letter arrives at the paper and her life is changed.
Mrs Gretchen Tilbury has written to the editor with the claim that her ten-year old daughter is the result of an immaculate conception. ‘Our Lady of Sidcup’, the newsmen all call her and, what with involving women’s bodies and other unmentionables, throw it to Jean to investigate. She goes and meets Gretchen and, though unconvinced – Jean isn’t daft – she doggedly chases the story through the past and the present in her search for the truth. And in the course of all this, she - you guessed it - finds friendship and love.
Small Pleasures is the perfect small novel – a finely cut jewel of a thing. Its delicate and meticulous story-telling will consume you. Though a virgin birth might seem a little far-fetched as a premise, I promise you: Small Pleasures is simply divine.