The Interpretation of Dreams – 8 March 2025

Dream Count is a novel about four women. Dream Count is four connected novels. Dream Count tells and retells the stories of four women so that the reader at first knows them and then realises the ways in which one cannot know someone.

Dream Count is a novel about romance. Or, its opposite. Dream Count is about the brutal realities of and brutalisation of women’s bodies. Dream Count explores lasting friendship and momentary connections across generations and cultures.

Dream Count, clearly,should not be summarised.

Dream Count is a major event in publishing, with reviewers and readers poised to share their views having waited more than a decade since literary rockstar/feminist icon/[insert superlatives here] Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s last novel. This makes me a little nervous. It is hard to shape one’s own thoughts with so much noise. And at first, when reading Chiamaka’s post-mortem of her failed relationships, I was unsure. The writing is excellent. But I had questions about the character which bothered me.

Then something shifted. My reactions were upended. My assumptions proven wrong. It’s a stunner.

The characters feel alive. The story at the novel’s heart, of Kadiatou, a perfect victim labelled a liar, will have you curled in a ball hugging yourself one moment, poised with rage the next. The stories of all the women grow as they are stitched to one another and morph as the narrative circles further back.

In Powsels and Thrums, Alan Garner offers essays and poems entwined to form a rich and changing picture. The title refers to his writing as well as to his ancestors’ work as handloom weavers, a vocation generating assorted bits of leftover fabric known as powsels and thrums, from which the family’s clothes were made.

The result is important, the formation of it captivating. Adichie and Garner both reach for pieces of cloth put aside, for fragments apparently slight or mismatched, drawing them together with surprising threads, taut and subtle.

I lean in close, reading slowly. Which is not to say with sobriety, for both are funny too: Adichie’s characters are full of wry observations and Garner’s writing switches from critique to play with ease.

Inviting a similar close reading as well as offering playfulness are several poetry collections.

John Greening will be reading in the shop next Saturday from his new annotated edition of U.A. Fanthorpe, Not My Best Side, and from his own poetry. I’ve been reading his The Interpretation of Owls, enjoying journeys across the country, hearing church bells ring whilst spotting birds and hidden paths, burrowing through time to meet Nefertiti, Tutankhamun and a revised Ozymandias and taking flight with (so far) two herons. Not to mention the owls. The last line of the title poem, inspired by the picture which forms the book’s cover – five owls smoking clay pipes – is perfect.

Do come along at 5pm on 15^th to hear from John and, through him, from Fanthorpe too.

Next month the avian theme continues seamlessly with Deborah Harvey reading on 12^th April. Her latest collection, Love the Albatross asks how you tell a story when you don’t know how it ends and suggests “maybe these words are spurs or goads.” Powsels and thrums. Spurs and goads. Poems peck their way out of eggs, enter down chimneys and jump from balconies.

Coco Island by Christine Roseeta Walker teems with stories too, inspired by landscape, animals, mythology and family all anchored to this place, both real and not. As in Powsels and Thrums, where Garner takes the reader on looping journeys, here the land is alive and it does not always wish you well.

In another melding of form, The Collected Works of Billy the Kid by Michael Ondaatje, reissued this week with superb cover art, is a collage of prose, poetry and photography telling the story of a murderous young man in the American West. He’s killed a fair number of people. Some birds too. Now a former friend of his has been hired to deal with The Billy Problem. If you found Blood Meridian funny, this is for you…

Play, poetry, creativity and a tapestry of brilliance abound in three delightful picture books. Two of them also feature my favourite foods.  

Chick Pea by Steve Antony is about a chick who loves peas. Chick loves peas on toast, peas on pizza, peas on ice cream… I love peas. And chickpeas. I don’t eat chicks.

I Want to Be a Gherkin! by Karen Frear, illustrated by AnnaLaura Cantone is about a dill who wants to be a gherkin. It’s a story of acceptance. Also pickles.

Bear by Natalia Shaloshvili is about a bear who likes being left alone with a cookie and a balloon and a book. Sometimes one is fascinated by a character with whom one has little in common – such as Billy the Kid – and sometimes…

May your weekend be full of dreams counting books, owls, pickles, powsels and thrums,
Lizzie