BBC Sounds: best books of 2021

Since returning to Aberdeenshire in early 2020 I’ve walked almost every day. I am so lucky to have beautiful, usually quiet, countryside on my doorstep, and although I am always glad if I can meet up with a friend, I’m equally happy pottering along by myself. Beside the Dee, through the fields, up the hills and along the lanes; I lived here for many years when my children were small, but never have I appreciated this peaceful, gentle area as much as I do now. 

I’d also never really appreciated BBC Sounds before. I used to catch up with The Archers, but that was about it; now it is my daily companion, and I’ve enjoyed its plentiful (and free) content more and more as the months have passed. Audiobooks, adaptations, dramas old and new - the variety is amazing (even if the ‘menu’ isn’t - someone has now passed on to me the sensible idea of looking at the Radio 4/Radio 4 Extra schedules then searching for any interesting-looking programme on Sounds. It turns out there is masses of stuff that doesn’t show on the index pages.)

So here are ten of the best things I heard on Sounds last year. I was going to rank them but I really couldn’t, they were all wonderful.

Nora Webster by Colm Toibin

In 1960s provincial Ireland, Nora’s husband Maurice has died suddenly, leaving Nora and their two children bereft. Nora is an intelligent and thoughtful woman, but there is a suggestion that Maurice had always managed the practicalities of family life. Now Nora has to work things out herself, while at the same time working out who she really is and how she wants the rest of her life to be. 

Colm Tolbin is such a good writer. There is much we never learn about Nora, or Maurice - we hear Nora’s thoughts, but that’s exactly what they are - vague ideas that pass through her mind, not detailed explanations of the past, or indeed the present, because that is how we do think. 

Nora tries to move on; she goes back to work at Gibneys, she rejoins a choir, she decides to sell the family’s holiday home. But for most of the book she cannot move on from Maurice. Why did he leave them alone (there is no suggestion that his death was deliberate)? What is she to do? Why isn’t he there to tell her? 

Although not everyone is sympathetic to her lot, her true friends do eventually come through for her, but again we realise this through the smallest of details, the fewest of words. I felt as if I, the listener, was often in a kind of underworld, or a dream, with Nora.  It was not only the listener who doesn’t always know the answers - Nora is grappling for them herself.

Although this is a serious book, it still has (like life) some very funny moments. It’s is not depressing, neither does it have an unconvincing romantic conclusion. We travel with Nora, and at the end of the book she has arrived at a new beginning of sorts - on her own.

Siobhan McSweeney brought so much depth and empathy to the title role. From playing the acidly funny Sister Michael in Derry Girls to being the best host the Great Pottery Throwdown has ever had, and now to an outstanding interpretation of a complex, traumatised woman, McSweeney is surely one of the best actors working today.

Meet Me at the Museum by Anne Youngson

Tina, a middle-aged farmer’s wife in England, writes a letter to the director of  the Silkeborge museum in Denmark. Years ago the director had visited Tina’s school, where he had talked about the Iron Age Tollund Man. Tina and her best friend Bella had always planned that they would one day go to Denmark and see the exhibit.  Now, after the loss of her friend, Tina wants to know more about that mummified corpse.

The museum director has also died, but a curator called Anders replies. Both Tina and Anders have regrets; Tina was forced into early marriage by an unplanned pregnancy and has little in common with her husband; Anders' troubled wife has recently died, and he finds it impossible to communicate with his adult children, and especially his daughter, now a new mother.

The entire story is told through the increasingly personal letters Tina and Anders write to one another - but these are not romantic letters (at least not in the obvious sense); they talk of their daily lives, their homes, their families, their regrets. They discuss books, music and poetry. He encourages her to believe that change is still possible; she helps him to understand his daughter. 

Dear Anders

Whenever I pick raspberries, I go as carefully as possible down the row, looking for every ripe fruit. But however careful I am, when I turn round to go back the other way, I find fruit I had not seen… Another life, I thought, might be like a second pass down the row of raspberry canes; there would be good things I had not come across in my first life, but I suspect I would find much of the fruit was already in my basket.

This is such a beautifully written, gently touching story that it is hard to believe that this is the first novel by an author in her seventies. For Sounds, the letters were read by Tamsin Greig and the late and much missed Paul Ritter, who was too ill to go into the studio, but insisted on continuing with the recording from home. They do a fabulous job with this outstanding book. 

Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

I had tried so many times to read this book, but I’d always been deterred by the dialogue, written as it is in such strong dialect. I decided to try it one more time, hoping that the audiobook format might help, but even then I struggled with the first few episodes. 

A great twitter friend, Alice Stainer, encouraged me to keep going; I began to feel I’d be letting her down if I didn’t. And suddenly everything started to fall into place, and I was under the spell of this at times overwhelming tale of love, passion, cruelty and obsession, in which the wild Yorkshire moors, and the sometimes equally wild Yorkshire weather, almost become characters in their own right. 

Some readers apparently find Heathcliff and Cathy such repugnant characters that they can’t stand the book. I didn’t think of them in this way - certainly their behaviour is more often than not appalling, but they are both damaged individuals. For me, some of the supporting characters were much more evil - Heathcliff and Cathy seemed to be victims as much as villains. And at the end of the book (all 34 chapters of it…) there is redemption of a sort in the lives of the next generation. 

Emily Brontë was just 29 years old when Wuthering Heights was published. A year later she was dead. That a woman who led such a limited life could write such a searing, unforgettable story, and one that is still widely read and discussed today, is quite amazing. Thank you, Alice, for your encouragement.

For Sounds Wuthering Heights was read by the excellent Susan Jameson. 

In the Mountains by Elizabeth Von Armin

I’ve read The Enchanted April and Elizabeth and her German Garden. I have a copy of Father waiting for me on my shelves. But I had never heard of In the Mountains till I saw it listed on Sounds; I’m so glad I decided to give it a listen. 

At the end of the First World War a deeply bereaved Englishwoman flees to her summer home in the Swiss Alps. We never know her name, or the precise details of what has happened to her. She is torn apart by grief, and at first can do nothing but record her feelings in her journal, and lie in the fields watching the clouds pass.  Her loyal caretaker Antoine and his new wife look after her with great kindness, and gradually she begins to return to ‘normal’ life and starts to wish she had more people to talk to.

Enter two widowed sisters, Kitty and Dolly, who turn up at her front door one day. They have been lodging in a hotel lower down in the valley for some time, but are finding it far too hot. The narrator invites them to stay with her. An air of mystery is introduced to the house; Kitty, the elder sister, is kind and good, but permanently worried about a secret of Dolly’s; Dolly is much more sociable and lively, and Kitty is terrified that the secret will be revealed. The narrator pretty soon works out what that secret is, but keeps her knowledge to herself so as not to upset Kitty. 

When the narrator’s lonely widowed uncle arrives at the house to encourage her to go home, he is enchanted with Dolly, and the reader is left hoping that the two of them will marry, and thus solve everyone’s problems. 

This is another quiet, gentle story, and one that I very much enjoyed. It was beautifully read for Sounds by Ruth Gemmell. 

The Dry by Jane Harper

I have had a copy of this on my shelf for some time, but I hadn't opened it - partly, I think, because I imagined it was about people lost in the outback, dying of thirst. Needless to say, I was entirely wrong, and this excellent reading by Robert Goulding made me wish I'd opened the book long ago.

Kiewarra is a small, remote farming community. It has had no rain for years; both the land and the people are powder kegs; tempers are strained, ready to snap as quickly as the branches in the bone dry bush.

Aaron Falk, a policeman now based in Melbourne, returns to his birthplace for the funeral of his old schoolfriend. Luke has been found dead, a gun in his mouth; his wife and son's bodies, also shot dead, are at the family home. Only the baby has been left unharmed. But Falk can't believe this was a murder-suicide, and with the local policeman, Raco, (who also has his doubts) he begins to unravel the secrets of various local residents. But Falk and Luke had secrets of their own; twenty years earlier Falk and his father were forced out of town when people blamed him for the death of Ellie Deacon. Luke provided Falk with a false alibi for the day of Ellie's death. Now Falk needs to address what really happened.

This is a brilliant depiction of a community on the edge. The plot is gripping, the setting equally so. Jane Harper gives a real insight into life in a small, isolated town under pressure, where the lack of rain creates situations that we can't even imagine. A triple killing would be a shocking event anywhere, but when it happens somewhere like Kiewarra, where everyone knows everyone else, and most people know more than they want to say, the tension is palpable.

All of the characters in The Dry are convincing and three-dimensional, but I especially appreciated the way in which Raco is treated as Falk's equal, a sensible, thoughtful, clever man, and not the cliched 'uselss local bobby'. 

This was Jane Harper's debut novel - what a talent she has. I'm looking forward to reading the book - and there is now also an acclaimed film, released in 2020. 

Brighton Rock by Graham Greene

When I was a child we had occasional days out from south London to Brighton. It was then nowhere near as smart and fashionable as it is now, but it was still far less seedy than it had been in the 1930s, the decade in which Greene's terrifying underworld thriller is set. 

Gangland grudges, the endless settling of scores, and the twisted brutality of its teenage sociopath anti-hero Pinkie, frame the plot of Brighton Rock, but - this being Greene - Roman Catholicism, and the doctrines of sin, damnation and mercy, are never far from the surface. Here though, they are contrasted with the moral compass and behaviour of the non-religious, in the form of Ida, a bystander with good sense and a good heart, who works out what is going on and decides to act, simply because that is the right thing to do.

Jacob Lloyd-Fortune read Brighton Rock perfectly, conveying all the tension and barely (and sometimes not) controlled violence that underpin this iconic novel.

The Snow and the Works on the Northern Line by Ruth Thomas

The title of this wonderful novel is so evocative that it would have drawn me in whatever it was about. It reminds me of winter days in London, days that are so unlike winter days in the country.  Slushy streets, long, disrupted journeys home. Shop windows full of Christmas displays that promise much and deliver little. 

Ruth Thomas's heroine Sybil works at the Institute of Prehistorical Studies and lives with her boyfriend Simon. She is happy with her ordered life. Enter glamorous Helen, whom Sybil knows and loathes from her undergraduate days, when Helen - then studying for her doctorate - did all she could to prevent Sybil from getting more than a third in her degree. Helen has done well in academia. She is confident, self-promoting and superior - and now she is the new Head of Trustees at the museum. 

Soon Helen and the appalling Simon have become an item. Sybil is not only devastated but also sure that Helen is an academic fraud; she is determined to expose her. Wandering around London, taking poetry evening classes at Brixton Library, going home alone, Sybil gradually recovers from her grief...and makes progress with her plan to bring Helen down.

As in all my favourite novels, the things that make this book stand head and shoulders above many others are the details, the little glimpses into Sybil's new, solitary life. The haikus she writes, her slightly irrational take on life (possibly caused by the head injury she suffers at the beginning of the book), her conversations with the institute's receptionist Jane. Minor characters are well drawn and three-dimensional; Sybil's sad and slightly mysterious boss Raglan, Fleur, the poetry group's teacher, the other particpants, most of them harbouring sadnesses of their own. But this novel is certainly not all bleak and depressing; there are some very funny scenes too.

Ell Potter read The Snow and the Works on the Northern Line for Radio 4, and I thought she did an excellent job, encapsulating all of Sybil's misery, confusion, apathy and finally her determination to have the last laugh. 

A Far Cry From Kensington by Muriel Spark

I first read this slightly strange and often amusing tale many years ago.  It is narrated by Mrs Nancy Hawkins, who is looking back at past events from her new life in another country. This is a device also used in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, when little nuggets are occasionally fed to us regarding the later lives of those creme de la creme girls.

It is 1954 in post-war London. Meat is still rationed; bomb sites abound (as they did even when I was a child) and Nancy is young war widow working at the Ullswater Press, a publishing house on the brink of financial collapse (its owner is about to be imprisoned for fraud.)  The descriptions of 1950s London reminded me of  Excellent Women, in which Barbara Pym has Mildred wandering through the ruins of a city church at lunchtime, where she comes across someone making tea on a Primus stove in the middle of all the rubble.

Nancy lives in Milly's boarding house in South Kensington (not so smart in those days), where her fellow residents include the highly strung Polish dressmaker,Wanda. Wanda receives a poison pen letter, followed by a frightening phone call; she is terrified and believes she is being persecuted by the secret police. Nancy tries to comfort and reassure her.

At a literary event, Nancy calls Hector Bartlett, a particularly obnoxious aspiring author, a pisseur de copie (hack journalist); she refuses to retract this. Unfortunately he is in a relationship with Emma Loy, a very successful author, and as a result Nancy loses not only this but also a subsequent job, as Emma and Hector makes sure no-one will keep her on. Eventually things do work out for Nancy, though sadly not for everyone. 

I found this novel quite bizarre when I first read it as a teenager, but this time - although in some ways just as eccentric as most of Spark's work - it seemed much more believable. I also enjoyed the reference to the pseudo-science of radionics and its light boxes - I think in the past I saw this as ridiculous, whereas now, when we are surrounded by people who apparently think Covid vaccines put microchips into one's brain, nothing seems implausible.

Nancy's slightly inexplicable determination to have her revenge on Bartlett seems to have been fuelled by events in Spark's own life, but because this is Spark I found I hardly questioned this near-obsession; all of her books that I've read have similar 'unusual' aspects.

Maggie Service read A Far Cry From Kensington for Radio 4, and conveyed something I had perhaps missed before - the essential sanity and (mostly) calm good sense of Nancy Hawkins. 

Still Life by Sarah Winman

This book was definitely one of my highlights of 2021. It's a beautiful story of love, loss and redemption, told over several decades, but most of all it's about found family, the different ways in which lives can be lived and love can be shown, and the immeasurable value of friendship, loyalty, constancy and perseverance. And of course it's also about art.

Towards the end of the war, soldier Ulysses Temper is in Italy, attached to a unit deployed to Florence to find Italian art treasures looted by the Nazis. Ulysses' captain knows about art, but Ulysses himself, a child of the East End, knows nothing. 

By chance he meets Evelyn Skinner, a middle-aged academic art historian and Florencophile. Evelyn is an educated gay woman, Ulysses is a straight man from London's East End. Evelyn, who spent much time in Italy before the war, has returned to offer help in the unit's work. These two entirely different characters form a bond that becomes the backbone of the story. 

Ulysses returns to London and his spiritual home, the Stoat & Parrot pub on Kingsland Road, Dalston. His wife Peg has had a child by an American serviceman, and wants a divorce. Ulysses has nowhere to go, but a good deed he performed in Italy leads to an unexpected legacy, and he decides to return to Florence, taking with him Alys, Peg's child, whom she cannot care for. Various similarly rootless characters from the pub (including Claude the parrot) join him, and together they create a home, and make many Italian friends. 

The years pass, mainly happily though not without some serious sadness. Alys grows up, Ulysses starts to craft the globes that his father once made, and in 1966 Florence is flooded. Evelyn and Ulysses almost - but not quite - meet several times. And eventually they are reunited. 

Still Life is such an engaging, touching and unusual novel, quietly and perfectly told. Ulysses is a wonderful hero, gentle, kind, sensible and totally unselfish - but if that makes him sound boring, he certainly isn't; Winman is skilled in writing such human, real, characters, and Ulysses is not the only unforgettable member of this fascinating cast in a story that celebrates beauty in the everyday, and the simple goodness to be found in so many people;

The real magic of Still Life is the elevation of the ordinary, the unabashed consecration of human experiences (Lauren Fox, New York Times Book Review)

I loved every minute of this ultimately life-affirming book.

Small Pleasures by Clare Chambers

This wonderful novel is set in south east London, where I grew up and where the author still lives. Although it opens in 1957, before I was born, the locations and the general feel of suburbia were instantly recognisable. 

Jean is a journalist writing for the local paper (in Petts Wood- the very place in which I spent my formative years!), and routinely fobbed off with the 'domestic' stories that the men don't want to cover. She lives at home with her difficult and demanding mother (her younger sister having cleverly emigrated to Kenya with her coffee farming husband - again this is an echo of my own family history), and sees no way out of this frustrating, restricted life - for she is almost 40, which in 1957 probably felt more like 100 (viz again Barbara Pym - Mildred sees herself as a spinster on the shelf at the age of thirty-two.)

When Gretchen Tilbury contacts the paper to tell them that her daughter was the result of a virgin birth, the job is automatically dumped on Jean, who sets out to meet the Tilbury family and to find out if Margaret Tilbury was indeed the product of an immaculate conception, or if Gretchen is in fact mad, or at least perpetrating a fraud to gain attention and some sort of fame.

Sidcup, 1954 (c) Ideal-Homes.org.uk: A History of South East London Suburbs

Small Pleasures is a story that does not always go where you might expect it to. When she arrives at No 7 Burdett Road, Sidcup, Jean does not find a madwoman in residence; Gretchen is perfectly sane, very nice, and yet totally convinced of the truth of her story. Margaret is a friendly, if slightly odd, child. Soon all three of them are great friends, and Jean is often at their house. Gretchen's husband Howard, a jeweller with a shop just off The Strand, is equally pleasant. He knows he is not Margaret's father; Gretchen was pregnant when they met, and he accepted this. They are a happy little family.

As Jean delves deeper into the Gretchen's past and the foundations of her story, she begins to work out  just what might have happened all those years ago. But at the same time she starts to fall in love with Howard, and he with her. This may be her last chance for freedom and happiness, but at what cost? 

I loved this book for so many things; it is another gently told story, but with far more bleakness at its core than Still Life. All four of the main protagonists are well drawn characters whom the reader will have no trouble in liking; they all have a straightforward, sensible approach to life and are full of good intentions. The supporting cast is not ignored; every character is believable. The settings, both in place and time, are totally convincing (and as with the floods in Still Life, at least one event actually happened.)

Small Pleasures was longlisted for the 2021 Women's Prize for Fiction, and deservedly so. For BBC Sounds it was read by Monica Dolan, and I felt she captured the sense of time, of place, and of an extraordinary event taking place in such ordinary surroundings, perfectly.

So these were some of my favourites from BBC Sounds huge library last year.  I've already enjoyed two wonderful audiobooks in 2022 (Taste: My Life Through Food by Stanley Tucci, and Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan) and am working my way through a third (EM Forster's A Room with a View). Sounds has become such an important part of my life since I moved back to Aberdeenshire; it's the perfect companion to country walks, and I value it immensely.