Tag: Politics

Take What You Need by Idra Novey

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Take What You Need by Idra Novey

Published by Daunt Books Originals

on 3rd August 2023

Available from All Good Bookshops

What They Say

Take What You Need traces the parallel lives of Jean and her beloved but estranged stepdaughter, Leah, who’s sought a clean break from her rural childhood. In Leah’s urban life with her young family, she’s revealed little about Jean, how much she misses her stepmother’s hard-won insights and joyful lack of inhibition.

But with Jean’s death, Leah must return to sort through what’s been left behind. What Leah discovers is staggering: Jean has filled her ramshackle house with giant sculptures she’s welded from scraps of the area’s industrial history.

Set in the Allegheny Mountains of Appalachia, Take What You Need explores the continuing mystery of the people we love most, zeroing in on the joys and difficulties of family with great verve and humour, and illuminating what can be built from what others have discarded.

What I Say

There are novels that when published, seem to be everywhere, with so many people shouting about them, that often there are quiet novels of pure brilliance that don’t get the attention they truly deserve. I hope that Take What You Need really does find its way onto your bookish radar, because I think it should be front and centre on your reading lists.

In Take What You Need Idra Novey perfectly articulates the complexities and realities of living in modern America while the world beyond your four walls, and the people you love change beyond your control.

Jean and Leah are stepmother and daughter, who are now living in different parts of the country after Jean had to live the familial home when Leah was only ten. Although Leah’s father tried to discourage their relationship, they stayed in touch via sporadic emails and phone calls. Leah is now living in New York with her husband and young son, while Jean lives in Appalachia, a place ravaged by poverty and addiction. When Leah receives a phone call from a stranger, telling her that Jean has died and left her artwork to her, Leah and her husband undertake the journey to the Allegheny Mountains with their young son.

After a life of working, Jean had devoted herself to her art, and used steel and lots of different ephemera that she collected from flea markets and wherever she could to create her works she called her ‘manglements’ – a body of work that ranges from small boxes to huge totem pole sizes that she has inside her house.

When Jean’s neighbour asks to use her stand pipe so she can get water for her family after theirs is cut off, it is then she meets their son Elliott. Realising how little money the family has, she starts to offer him food and the use of her shower. After Elliott helps Jean when she has an accident making her art, they start a tentative friendship, and Elliott starts to help Jean construct her artwork. Jean sees a young man constrained by his environment, who has the potential to change his life – if only he can see it – and this is part of the backdrop of this novel, the very different lives that play out when you do or don’t have the financial means to survive.

All the time Jean is also thinking of Leah, and when a visit from her goes spectacularly wrong – with both women describing very different perceptions of what happened, the relationship breaks down again. Jean is alone, with only her art for company, and Elliott is becoming more and more distant as he becomes an addict, starts to turn to theft and is thrown out of his family home. Leah finds it difficult to understand how Jean can possibly want to speak to Elliott after everything he has put her through, but Jean instinctively understands that this is a young man who never stood a chance as the world around him collapses and pulls him under with it.

The narrative moves effortlessly between Jean and Leah, both women aware of the closeness they have lost, and realising that if only they can find the words, they could once again have the relationship they both miss so much. I felt it was also a way for Idra to show the reader two very different experiences of living in America, at a time when the MAGA movement and Donald Trump’s presidency is a reality, and we are constantly aware of the socioeconomic backdrop to the plot. Elliott’s trajectory is one that is all too familiar and harrowing, yet there is also a humanity and need for connection that means he cannot let Jean go, as he recognises that she saw him as a person with potential, and although he doesn’t always know how to deal with it, he eventually understands the emotional debt he owes her.

Take What You Need is a beautiful and thoughtful novel about how art intersects with so many parts of our lives, and how powerful and life changing it can be. This is also a novel about how sometimes family is not necessarily those people you are related to, but instead can be found in those people who understand and love you for what you are and the potential they can see in you. Jean understands both Leah and Elliott completely, and although they are seemingly disparate characters, it is Jean’s love and desire for both of them to fulfill their potential that unites them after she is no longer in their lives.

I absolutely loved it.

Thank you so much to Jimena Gorraez and Daunt Publishing for my proof copy

Age of Vice by Deepti Kapoor

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Age of Vice

Deepti Kapoor

Published by Fleet Reads

Published January 3rd 2023

What They Say

This is the age of vice, where pleasure and power are everything, and the family ties that bind can also kill

New Delhi, 3 a.m. A speeding Mercedes jumps the kerb, and in the blink of an eye five people are dead. It’s a rich man’s car, but when the dust settles there is no rich man at all, just a shell-shocked servant who cannot explain the strange series of events that led to this crime. Nor can he foresee the dark drama that is about to unfold.
Deftly shifting through time and perspective in contemporary India, Age of Vice is an epic, action-packed story propelled by the seductive wealth, startling corruption, and bloodthirsty violence of the Wadia family-loved by some, loathed by others, feared by all.

In the shadow of lavish estates, extravagant parties, predatory business deals, and calculated political influence, three lives become dangerously intertwined: Ajay is the watchful servant, born into poverty, who rises through the family’s ranks. Sunny is the playboy heir who dreams of outshining his father, whatever the cost. And Neda is the curious journalist caught between morality and desire. Against a sweeping plot fueled by loss, pleasure, greed, yearning, violence, and revenge, will these characters’ connections become a path to escape, or a trigger of further destruction?

Equal parts crime thriller and family saga, transporting readers from the dusty villages of Uttar Pradesh to the urban energy of New Delhi, Age of Vice is an intoxicating novel of gangsters and lovers, false friendships, forbidden romance, and the consequences of corruption. It is binge-worthy entertainment at its literary best.

What I Say

Age of Vice by Deepti Kapoor was published on January 3rd, and hand on heart when I read the synopsis, I didn’t think that it was my kind of novel at all. A high octane thriller set in India which is about the Wadia family and the vice and corruption that permeates it? Absolutely not my sort of thing thank you.

Yet one thing I have learned since I started blogging is to never dismiss a book until you have tried it, and as soon as I started reading it, I knew that this was an incredibly special novel. It may be 560 pages long, but I promise you, that is the last thing you are thinking about when you read it.

This is a story of a family – The Wadias, who seemingly are everywhere in India. From the very top of the social and political worlds, right down to the people who may otherwise be disregarded. Their power and influence permeates every single part of society – and they refuse to be stopped by anyone.

The novel starts with a fatal car crash, and a young man called Ajay who survives it. Alongside Sunny Wadia, and a journalist called Neda, Ajay provides the third main narrative of this novel, from which an incredible and far reaching epic novel spins out. Age of Vice may cover politics, corruption, power and addiction, but it is also a story of a family who are so used to being in control, that they cannot imagine a world where their very presence does not imbue those around them with an instant mix of fear and respect.

The novel starts with Ajay’s story. A young man who lives with his mother and sister in Uttar Pradesh after his father is murdered, he is sold by his mother to child traffickers, who in turn sell him to a man and his wife who ‘employ’ him (they tell him his wages are being sent to his mother). When he meets the irrespresible Sunny Wadia, Ajay recognises that his best hope for the future is to become Sunny’s servant, the silent and accommodating person who effortlessly runs Sunny’s life and caters to his every whim whilst never drawing any attention to himself.

Sunny comes to absolutely rely on Ajay for every aspect of his life, and in turn, as well as finding stability and a regular wage, Ajay is now subsumed into and inextricably linked to the Wadia family for as long as he is alive. Sunny Wadia is regarded as a hedonistic playboy, whose life is one long party and in spite of him seemingly projecting a confident and assured persona, what we discover is all that he wants is the approval and love from his father Bunty, and acceptance from his uncle Vicky, who takes the family business to such a level that he seems unreachable. Yet Sunny also realises that being Bunty Wadia’s son means that his own identity and life has to take second place – unless he is brave enough to stand up for what he wants.

As Sunny spins increasingly out of control, and Ajay is left to ensure no traces of his wrongdoings are left in plain sight, Neda, a journalist, finds herself drawn to him, as she wants to understand the man behind the myths, but she too falls prey to the world that the Wadias have created. Her life changes in ways she could never have imagined, but in spite of it all, even when they are separated by thousands of miles, she feels inextricably drawn back to him.

Age of Vice is a bold, no holds barred novel about the realities of what it means when one family has such power over the world it is in. It is a totally immersive and epic novel that pulls no punches in its graphic depiction of the violence and horror that is part of the fabric of their every day lives.

Kapoor is not afraid to show how deeply and absolutely this world is controlled by those that have, and feared by those who have not. It looks at so many issues such as poverty, wealth, corruption, drug addiction, family and duty, but for me something else sits at the heart of this incredible novel. It is the fact that Sunny simply wants to be loved by his father, and by Neda unquestioningly. His erratic and self destructive behaviour hides the fact that he simply wants to be seen by his father and that when it becomes obvious that is not happening, he makes a series of decisions that change his life forever,

Age of Vice is a novel that makes you care about all the characters in it, as we start to understand how much of their selves and their identities are wrapped up in the all consuming reign of the Wadias. It is a world where you never know who you can trust, and that tension and sense of foreboding seeps through every single page, making it impossible to look away.

This is a novel that if I had simply read the synopsis, honestly, I wouldn’t have picked it up. Age Of Vice is that very rare thing, it is a novel that may seem epic and all encompassing in its scope, but you connect to it on an individual level because of the masterful way in which Deepti Kapoor writes with such understanding about the different worlds so many people inhabit, understanding that all human experience is important, and that the most vital connection of all relies not on money or wealth, but simply to find their place in the world and to love and be loved without conditions or fear.

I absolutely loved it.

Thank you so much to Celeste Ward-Best and Fleet Reads for my gifted proof copy in exchange for an honest review.

Age of Vice is available from West End Lane Books and all good bookshops now.