Gavin Young first met the Ma’dan, the Marsh Arabs of southern Iraq, in the 1950s. Following his return in 1973, he wrote this account to celebrate a people whose culture and way of life was not going to last forever, and his friendship with them.
 
It’s a simple, personal tale, prefaced by some history. For me, it was an insight into the lives of a people who I’d never heard of, whose home and existence existed off the land grid: in the vast maze of waterways between the Tigris and the Euphrates that are the marshlands.
 
The only way in or out was to leave car or bus behind and take a thin, silent, paddled launch, so that to enter was to cross a threshold. There, the Ma’dan had lived for centuries in a constellation of tiny one-family islands, in houses made of reeds, where they fished, kept buffalo, and moved between each other in canoes short and long.
 
The cover photograph by Nik Wheeler suggests an otherworldliness of the living marshlands that was clearly mesmerizing.
 
Since the book was published, the Ma’dan’s story has been one of decline. For being proud, disobedient and independent people, who would typically harbour political fugitives, Sadam Hussein had their marshes drained and the wetlands have never recovered. Back then, in the 1990s, there were a quarter of a million of these descendants of the Sumerians. Now there are just a few thousand, the rest dispersed to their fate in the cities.
 
Young’s affectionate memoir relates happier times. His encounters describe what can seem like a rare species that evolves and flourishes, only to suffer setbacks, languish and fade away. Individuals and civilizations, butterflies and stars, all have their day, a chance to shine, and are gone.

My favourite book last year.
 
Udall writes serious humour with the kind of natural flair that is a joy to read.
 
A lost Arizona kid does what he can to survive institutions and the good intentions and wayward behaviour of adults, who are lost in their own way, odd and incompetent.
 
Edgar relates his story with a refreshing absence of grievance, learning how to make his own way in a discouraging and prosaic mid-west. His mere existence, it seems, is enough to generate the most engaging misadventures.
 
He is a clear-sighted survivor equipped with a rare strength of focus, and yet still a young boy, touchingly clouded by hope.
 
To it all, Udall brings to bear strong American poetry with understated elegance.

These days, side by side in Kyiv’s Holodomor Museum are exhibits from 1932-33 and 2022-23.
 
For each time period, the rescued manuscript of a book is on display.
 
In the early 1930s, Stalin’s imposition of collectivization in Ukraine decreed that all agricultural grain had to be handed over to the state.
 
It caused the deaths of nearly four million Ukrainian people by starvation. In June 1933, 28,000 people died of hunger every day.
 
While the USSR exported grain to pay for industrialization, hungry farmers were punished for collecting the crop leftovers from fields with ten years imprisonment and confiscation of property or execution.
 
In July 2023, a mass Russian missile strike destroyed 60,000 tons of Ukrainian grain. Now, as then, a Russian tyrant wants to suppress the people of the Ukraine, their culture, and their right to exist as an independent nation.
 
In the 1960s, Lavr Nechyporenko made an eyewitness account of the holodomor in a novel called “1933”. He handed over the MS to dissident Ivan Kovalenko who was arrested, losing the book. Kovalenko was finally—remarkably—reunited with it in 1994. That is the first book.
 
On 1st July 2023, 37-year-old Ukrainian novelist and war crimes researcher, Victoria Amelina, was killed by a Russian missile attack. Shortly before her death, Amelina had found the manuscript of a war diary, “Vivat”, kept by Volodymyr Vakulenko, buried in the backyard of his house in Kharkiv, where the Russians had invaded. Vakulenko was killed on 20th March 2023. That is the second book.

I spied this one on the avenue outside Kyiv’s University Metro. I might find fantasy writing seductive myself but it’s urban, as they say, and I steer a wide berth around most sorcery-and-princesses guff, which only makes me want to fall on my sword. On this occasion, the only book I had with me was The Kite Runner which I was getting sick of, so I cheerfully coughed up 50 hryvnia for Enchantment: and am I glad I did!
 
Appropriately enough, the main setting for the story turned out to be the ancient Carpathian forest of western Ukraine.
 
To have a princess who is so plain-spoken with her rescuer as to appear downright rude was a delightful surprise. The tension between these two, in a love story divided by centuries of difference, keeps the narrative going until… well, I won’t give it away.
 
The bad witch is very, VERY bad and the magic is consistent, except for a rather crucial moment when a message is delivered in a far-fetched twist that disappoints after all the hard work put in to maintain credibility. Not a big deal. As the plot develops, Card is generally a dab hand at anticipating objections and heading them off. Where a lesser writer might have you exclaiming “Yes, but…!”, Card will have a character bring up the selfsame objection in your mind and nip it in the bud. This happens all the time. And you never feel that you’re being steered towards the anticlimax of an obvious reveal.
 
Card is also highly talented in presenting the complexity of a person’s reasoning without it being a drag. It brings clarity to motivation and drives the story along so that you’re not left wondering.
 
I found loads to enjoy in his novel, loads to learn from.

Picked up these two for the ride home. Mr Sanderson’s name keeps cropping up so I thought I’d give him a try—and maybe interesting short story writing by Ms Ivory?

In a country under constant and long-term attack by Russia, for the population to conduct life as normal is itself an act of resistance and defiance.
 
As Kyiv prepares for another winter of bombardment, power outages and freezing cold, it decides to… hold a book fair.
 
Pavilions and stalls of titles by Ukrainian writers, with a generous provision for children. What is must be like to be a parent in wartime.
 
Reading is a declaration of belief in a future. Every book bought here means something.
 
Each fairgoer is a story of perseverance.