Trespass

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I think the book could have been half the current length, but we were barraged again and again with bloody rats, foul stenches, feces loving fungi and puss filled cuts. I do not want to speculate here why people like to engage in masochism, suffice to say that it is not something that I enjoy. When Tess closed her eyes, the ants went on rising in the darkness, only now the swirls were silver. The second thing Clark accomplishes is another engrossing tale about people growing into their humanity and becoming better for it.

Trespass by Clare Clark - review by Tom Williams Trespass by Clare Clark - review by Tom Williams

Its appetite was voracious, indiscriminate; its tentacles stretching even into the city’s bowels to lick at their squalid deposits.Mia’s life, in particular, is dominated by her phone, and the buzz of her texts becomes part of her father’s violence against her. Eliza assumes she's been sent to London to get an abortion but Black has plans of his own regarding the unborn child. It's at one of these bouts that Tom runs into Lady - a mangy, disagreeable looking mutt who rests her head on his foot before being dragged off by her abusive master. London herself is never quite redeemed in the same way (indeed, the only solution to its ills seems to be to escape them), but the dark setting nevertheless has a purpose: to act as background and foil for a very real character.

The Great Stink by Clare Clark - AbeBooks The Great Stink by Clare Clark - AbeBooks

Theirs is a mother-daughter bond put under intense pressure by the ghosts of the past, and by the fact that, as an attempt to protect her daughter from the shame of abandonment, Tess has told Mia her father died. She arrives as an apothecary’s maid, a position hastily arranged to shield the father of her unborn child from scandal. There must have been cicadas that day, birdsong, the dis- tant shush of the sea, but Tess remembered only the silence and Sylvie standing at the gate, her face like the face of the wooden saint who proffered his bread in Quimper cathedral, sombre and unshakeable. this story revolves around the woefully inadequate sewage system and an engineer who was chosen to assist in the design to modernize it. The novel follows two men - William May and Long Arm Tom - whose destinies don't cross until the very end of the book, and, even then, they never actually meet.In short, there is enough meaning in Eliza's character growth to make the book worthwhile if the reader has the patience (and stomach) for the dark and dirty content which proceeds it. Clare Clark is the author of six highly acclaimed historical novels, including The Great Stink, Savage Lands (both longlisted for the Orange Prize) and The Nature of Monsters. Mostly because that book was better and more obscure and I want to point more people in its direction. There are also lots of flashbacks and memories and shifting around between characters, all of which made the distance between me and the story yawn widely.