The Corona Chronicles – Lockdown Library

A while back, I counted the number of books on my shelves which I haven’t yet read, and came to the astonishing total of 63 – almost evenly divided between Hebrew and English. The problem is, that I cannot resist book shops and I buy books at a much faster rate than I can read them.

I still read faster in English (my native language) than I do in Hebrew, mainly because I can “speed read” in English, whereas in Hebrew, I have to read each word. But the truth is, I enjoy doing so. And I am now doing so in English also, learning to savour every word, as if I am reading aloud to an audience, even when I am only reading to myself.

Of course, there are books that benefit more from this approach than others. A fast-paced action thriller by Dan Brown is not really suited to this method. But a beautiful, sweeping family saga, such as Catherine Banner’s “The House at the Edge of Night” (which had been waiting on my To Be Read shelf for over three years before I finally got round to it, this lockdown summer) was an ideal choice, brimming over, as it is, with beautiful passages such as this one:

…She had been gone two entire years. Sitting on the varnished wooden seat at the prow of Bepe’s boat, she felt worn thin, as though time had travelled twice as fast since she had left the island. Her skin was no longer well armoured; she had forgotten the way it stung you, this sun, the air that came over you in hot waves, the bare white to which all colours turned under its glare.

The ferry swung against the tide, water pooling under its left flank, and before her reared the island. And now she was down on the quay, and now climbing the old hill, and the island assaulted her with the force of memory: the sea’s hydraulic hiss, its familiar hot-dust smell. And yet she saw it through her mother’s eyes, too: saw how the streets she climbed were full of stale air, the pavements crusted with dog turds, the facades of the church and the shops peeling, and every inhabitant in some phase of advanced age. The kind of place one could not love without effort, and yet, she understood now, the only place on the face of the whole earth that she herself loved.

“The House at the Edge of Night” is a the story of four generations of the Esposito family, set on the fictional island of Castellamare, off the coast of Sicily, and their cafe, the eponymous House at the Edge of Night. Covering the years 1914 – 2009, the story begins with the arrival of Amedeo Esposito, practically on the eve of World War I, to take up a position as the island’s doctor. Amedeo is a collector of stories . Each section of the book begins with one of Amedeo’s stories and they form a framework for the book. Indeed, the red leather-bound notebook in which Amedeo transcribes the stories he collects, is itself the subject of a bitter rivalry between his grandsons.

The story begins with Amedeo, but the plot is driven by women – Amedeo’s beautiful, strong-willed wife, Pina, their daughter, Maria-Grazia, her grand-daughter, Lena – and the island’s saint, Sant’ Agata, on whose feast day Amedeo first arrived on the island and on whose festival, 95 years later, the novel ends. In between, we follow the islanders through two world wars, the rise of fascism, the economic boom of the 1970s and 80s, the financial crisis of 2008 – until we are so heavily invested in their destinies, that we, too, are ready to say a little prayer to Sant’ Agata and to work with the islanders shoulder to shoulder when all seems lost, such as in this passage, near the end of the book, when the ferry breaks down, leaving scores of tourists who have heard of the saint’s miracles, stranded on the Sicilian shore, with no way to reach the island (I should add, that the money brought by those tourists is desperately needed to save the heavily-mortgaged House at the Edge of Night).

Now Agata-the-fisherwoman rose to a great height, hauling herself by the bar’s counter. “We’ll take the old boats,” she said. “We’ll launch the ones stored away in the tonnara. The old boats, painted, with the white stones, that we used before the war. There are ten or twelve in there.”

The islanders began to stir themselves. Down the road to the quay they hurried, in cars and vans, on bicycles, on foot, bearing lanterns like little white stars. Maria-Grazia seized Flavio’s Balilla binoculars, and together she and Lena took the three-wheeled van and followed them. In the dark that was all at once less storm-tossed, less rain-washed, the young men of the island launched the boats. On the waters of the harbour they rode again: the Sant’Agata Salvatrice, the Trust in God, the Santa Maria delle Luce. The Provvidenza, the Maria Concetta, and the Siracusa Star.

Lena and Maria-Grazia were left onshore with the rest of the islanders, watching the lights sail away from them. And here on the edge of the ocean, Maria-Grazia seemed to see the island as it looked to those ships leaving it, and must have looked to those Espositos who had left it: her son, her brothers, her granddaughter — a rock in a haze of water vapour, receding on the clouded surface of the water like a ship cast off. “Didn’t you want to go in the ships, too?” she asked Lena.

“I’m going to stay here,” said Lena, “and prepare the bar for when they get back.”

And, finishing the novel, the reader is left with the feeling that the bar is still there, waiting for them, warm and hospitable, and that you can return and it will seem as if you have never been away.

Another book that I have been reading during this seemingly never-ending, on again-off again lockdown, is “Rapid Eye Movement” by Amanda Sheridan.

This one also stays with you long after you have finished reading it, but in a very different way to “The House at the Edge of Night“. This one is a fast-paced action thriller, but with a hint of something more, possibly the supernatural, possibly Sci-Fi. It, too, begins on an island – the island of Cyprus – but it begins with a flight in the dark and a bat out of hell car chase culminating in a devastating crash which lands Jennifer, one of the protagonists, in hospital, in a coma.
At the same time, Lucy, the second protagonist, is involved in an accident near her home in Yorkshire, putting her, too, in a coma.

And now things start to get very, very weird. Because Lucy begins to dream about Jennifer’s life, even as Jennifer dreams about Lucy’s.

Two ordinary women who have never met. And whom the doctors are unable to bring out of their respective comas.

Through their dreams, we learn about their respective (and very different) lives – Lucy’s with her building contractor husband Charlie and their two daughters, in the Yorkshire Dales, and Jennifer’s, by the side of her darkly handsome and somewhat mysterious Israeli lover, the enigmatic Ilan.

What the two women do seem to have in common is an artistic streak – Jennifer is an interior designer and Lucy is a photographer. The homes of both are described in loving detail, including the extensive renovations undertaken by Lucy and Charlie – in a way that makes it clear that the author is writing from personal experience.

But why are these two women dreaming about each other’s lives? And are they, in fact, doing so? Or is one of them real and the other merely a dream?

And most important of all – now that the lives of the two are so inextricably intertwined, what will happen if one of them wakes up? Will the other remain in a coma? Or will she cease to exist?

This book is not one to be read at your leisure, but rather, one where you reach the end of a chapter and tell yourself: “Just one chapter more” – and then again “Just one more” – until you realise it is nearly 2 o’clock in the morning and that, if you want to get any sleep at all, you are going to have to leave Lucy and Jennifer to their dreams for a few hours.
That’s if you dare to go to sleep. For who knows where your dreams may take you…


The book ends on a profoundly disturbing note, with many questions left deliberately unanswered. Yet a possible cause of the connection between the two women is hinted at and the epilogue leaves the way open for a sequel. In fact, I am happy to report that a sequel has just come out – and it goes without saying that I shall be reading it as soon as I finish the two books I am currently reading!

Side by side with the new books on my TBR bookshelf, the recent four-part dramatisation of E.M. Forster’s “Howards End” induced me to reread a modern classic which I first encountered in the Lower Sixth. At the age of 16, I hated it. I haven’t looked at it again till now – but this time round, I found it so much more palatable.

Spoilers now follow.

The story revolves around three families – the wealthy, artistic, intellectual and determinedly liberal Schlegels, the equally wealthy, entirely worldly and unswervingly capitalistic Wilcoxes and the poverty-stricken, nominally lower middle-class (but practically working class) Basts. The latter impact the lives of both Schlegels and Wilcoxes, without even knowing it.

The Schlegel family consists of three siblings – Margaret, the eldest, and most practical of the three (although she constantly denies her own practicality), from whose point of view the story is mostly told, her passionately idealistic sister Helen (who, in many ways, reminded me of Marianne Dashwood in “Sense and Sensibility” and whom, like Marianne, I found rather tiresome) and their brother , Tibby – a very clever teenager, but, I thought, lacking in human warmth. A chance meeting in Germany, where both families were holidaying, has thrown them into a seemingly unlikely friendship with the Wilcoxes, who invite them to visit them at their country home, the eponymous Howards End – an invitation to which only Helen responds.

Disaster seems to follow Helen around wherever she goes. It is her thoughtless “theft” of his umbrella, some weeks later, which draws into their circle the young clerk, Leonard Bast – a boy of twenty with ambitions to “better himself” by means of literature and music, whom Margaret and, more particularly, the idealistic Helen, are anxious to “help”. Leonard is burdened with a wife, Jacky, “of whom it is simplest to say that she was not respectable” (to quote Forster). In fact, when we first meet her, Jacky, who is some thirteen years older than Leonard, is actually his mistress whom, for some inexplicable reason, he feels in honour bound to marry, as soon as he attains the age of twenty-one. I say “inexplicable”, because as the book progresses, it becomes clear that Jacky has been “not respectable” for many years before she and Leonard ever met and that he played no part in her degradation. It is later revealed that ten years previously, she had had a liaison with Mr. Wilcox, but it is by no means clear that he was the first and indeed, one suspects that he was not.

I stated earlier that the story is told, for the most part, from Margaret’s point of view – but it is Helen’s blundering attempts to “help” Leonard which drive much of the narrative and lead her to an act which, in the eyes of society at that time (the first decade of the 20th century), is unforgiveable – and to a tragic outcome.

I will say no more, as I don’t want to give everything away. I will just add that most reviews of the book, and of the media adaptations of it, stress its concern with the social, gender and class divisions in early 20th-century England, but to my mind, the novel is most interesting when it deals with personal relationships, which Helen reminds us time and time again, are the most important of all.

These are just three of the books I have been reading during this seemingly interminable lockdown and, no doubt, I shall be reading many more before it is done.
I see no danger of growing bored – and if I run out of books, there are many delights to be found on YouTube. In fact, I am currently indulging in “The Onedin Line” – all 91 episodes of it…

So, how about you? What have you been reading/watching these past few months?