LE PORTRAIT

LE PORTRAIT A literary magazine: March to September issue

The best authors of 2016 inside!

Healthy living: spices that heal Cancer Electric literature’s best short story Collection [Type text]

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SHORT STORIES: ELECTRIC LITERATURE’S BEST SHORT STORY COLLECTIONS OF 2015….. Page 3 ESSAYS: Page…..33 BEST AUTHORS 2016: From the Guardian….Page 39 HEALTHY LIVING: Cancer fighting culinary spices and herbs….page 68

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ELECTRIC LITERATURE’S BEST SHORT STORY COLLECTIONS OF 2015

A Manual for Cleaning Women by Lucia Berlin The unfathomable uniqueness of Berlin’s style—her voice, in particular—is evident in the adjectives being thrown around. Recent pieces on Berlin and reviews of A Manual for Cleaning Women have described her work as joyful, careworn, dark, bright, funny, sad, vivid, droll, sincere, bawdy, offbeat, fierce, gritty, unfailingly feminine, wickedly wise, emotionally raw, and (my favorite) spiky. […] This was a brilliant woman. Her work transcends funny and shows us the absurd.

She doesn’t let her characters hide behind artifice or sensationalism or substances, as much as they might like to. Reading these stories, you get the sense that this is what she wanted for herself: to let go of the bullshit.

As a result, the transformation she provides is visceral and startling: We 3|P ag e

get the sense that Berlin, writing these stories, was often as surprised as you at where they wind up.

Get in Trouble by Kelly Link If I had the power to write fiction like one contemporary writer, I think I’d probably say Link. She has this uncanny ability to stretch a short story way past the boundaries of both length and possibility without ever crossing the line into fantasy. And no, I don’t mean that in a 4|P ag e

phantasmagoric, Borgesian kind of way (although you can also see his influence from time to time when reading Link); rather, Link’s work feels fully realized, emerging from her brain as truly and impossibly colored. She’s the sort of writer always able to surprise me, even though I’ve finished all of her other books, even her latest collection, Get in Trouble. Link’s writing has been compared to everything and everybody, from H.P. Lovecraft, to Buffy the Vampire Slayer and hardboiled noir writers, but stands out in its originality and idiosyncratic loveliness.

The Visiting Privilege by Joy Williams Joy Williams has long been one of America’s greatest living writers, and The Visiting Privilege might have been the best book of the year. Her sentences are as sharp and precise as scalpel incisions, and her ability to turn the real beautifully surreal is second to none. Ben Marcus, in the New York Times Book Review, called her work “one of the most 5|P ag e

fearless, abyss-embracing literary projects our literature has seen [with] the sort of helpless laughter that erupts when a profound moral project is conducted with such blinding literary craft.” If you have yet to read Williams’s work, there is no better place to start than this book, which collects stories from across her decades of ground-breaking work alongside several new stories.

The Complete Stories by Clarice Lispector It would be enough to call Lispector an original, whose authority is embedded in her abiding strangeness. It’s a strangeness instantly recognizable for anyone who has thoughts rolling around in their head, that they didn’t prompt, and can’t quite account for. That’s the proof of Lispector’s greatness. She crafted stories out of what people can’t get used to, being born for no reason they know, inside a universe whose 6|P ag e

expansion they have no sensory evidence of, though astronomy and physics attests to it. As long as that feeling of unease lingers, these stories will remain primary, true.

Refund by Karen E. Bender What is your life worth? What is any life worth? These are provocative questions that hover over Refund by Karen E. Bender–a Finalist for the National Book Award—a collection of stories that ultimately explores the emotional and economic devastation in the country since 9/11. In “Anything for Money” we see these questions examined through a most modern vehicle: a television game show. The wealthy producer of a show that watches people put themselves in awkward (and often debasing) situations for money finally learns the limits of what his great 7|P ag e

wealth can buy when his estranged granddaughter, who has recently and unexpectedly come to live with him, becomes in a need of a new heart.

Fortune Smiles by Adam Johnson As poignant as it is tonally diverse, Fortune Smiles—full of pedophiles, refugees, and digital ghosts—captures the contemporary “realistic” moment as well as any of our most earnest novels and stories, drone strikes and absurdity in all. Like his earlier Emporium and his Pulitzerwinning The Orphan Master’s Son, the stories in Fortune Smiles demand to be torn from the spine and passed lovingly and 8|P ag e

desperately to strangers. The National Book Awards didn’t screw this one up.

Making Nice by Matt Sumell “Assholery is similar to masonry, in that both are primarily concerned with putting up walls, shutting others out, hiding things, providing shelter to that which is vulnerable, and protecting that which we can’t bear to see exposed. […] Unlike masons, assholes like to destroy things.

And when Matt Sumell punches holes in Alby’s walls, he reveals the troubled heart of a sensitive man. […] Every editor gets into the game to find powerful, original voices and catapult them into the world, but it 9|P ag e

rarely works out the way you imagine it will. With Sumell it has. Here’s a fierce talent whom the world will soon know.”

Gutshot by Amelia Gray Gray’s writing frequently leaves us mystified, unable to comprehend the scenes laid out before us with near-sociopathic detachment. In “House Heart,” one of the most twisted stories in Gutshot, a couple kidnap and imprison a young prostitute who “smelled like a bowl of sugar that had been sprayed with a disinfectant.” They bribe her to live within the arterial ventilation system of their house like a human hamster, engaging in a game they call “House Heart.” Aroused by her fear and the thought 10 | P a g e

of her captivity, they make love as she crawls above them, pressed onto her stomach, dehumanized.

Young Skins by Colin Barrett My town is nowhere you’ve been, but you know its ilk. A roundabout off a national road, an industrial estate, a five-screen Cineplex, a century of pubs packed inside the square mile of the town’s limits. The Atlantic is near; the gnarled jawbone of the coastline with its gull-infested promontories is near. Summer evenings, and in the manure-scented 11 | P a g e

pastures of the satellite parishes the Zen bovines lift their heads to contemplate the V8 howls of the boy racers tearing through the back lanes.

So begins Colin Barrett’s mesmerizing debut collection of stories, Young Skins, released to near-universal critical acclaim and, in the months between its Irish and US publication, a raft of major literary awards. His brutal, linguistically stylish tales of Sisyphean young men, voluntarily trapped within the confines of the fictional west of Ireland town of Glanbeigh, have elicited high praise from Colum McCann, Anne Enright, Colm Toibin, Sam Lipsyte, and The New York Times.

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Night at the Fiestas by Kirstin Valdez Quade Kirstin Valdez Quade’s Night at the Fiestas is an astounding debut, packed with unforgettable characters, vivid landscapes, heartbreak, and spiritual yearning. Writing for The New York Times, Kyle Minor captured the book’s power: “This is a variety of beauty too rare in contemporary literature, a synthesis of material and practice and time and courage and love that must have cost its writer dearly; it’s not easy to be so vulnerable so consistently. Quade attempts, page by page, to give up carefully held secrets, to hold them up to the light so we can get at the truth beneath, the existential truth. Perhaps this is as close as we can get to what is sacred in an age in which so many have otherwise rejected the idea of the sacred.” The National Book Foundation named Valdez Quade one of its 5 Under 35 for 2014.

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In the Country by Mia Alvar Alvar was born in the Philippines and lived there until she was six, after which her family moved to Bahrain and eventually to New York. As a writer, she has the ability to capture that peculiar blend of excitement and pain that comes with uprooting oneself from a specific place or idea.

Many of the stories in the book deal with literal border-crossings, but what binds the collection together more broadly is a sense of creative displacement. This is a book in which characters are addicted to dreaming, embellishing, or outright lying, and in one story a young woman even goes so far as to become that most heinous of fraudsters: a fiction writer. “I never could get used to the ‘withdrawal,’” the character admits. “The rude comedown from having lived so much inside a story it felt real.”

There’s a similar comedown to be experienced upon closing In The Country, a vivid debut that deserves to catch the interest of prize committees. I sat down with Alvar earlier this month to discuss it.

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Hall of Small Mammals by Thomas Pierce When I first encountered Thomas Pierce’s writing, it set off quiet and powerful earthquakes in my brain. His stories have the power to bring you immediately into their world, and then turn you upside down, sideways, and transformed. Reading his manuscript for the first time, I felt the tension and anticipation (and greediness) that an editor feels when they know… this is one I must publish. This is a voice that needs to be delighted in, needs to be heard.

Everyone who has read Hall of Small Mammals—the collection which includes this story—has confided in me that, of course, this story or that story was the best one, the stand-out of the collection. And it would always be a different story. Every story in this collection is someone’s favorite, including this one, “Videos of People Falling Down.” I hadn’t ever seen this reaction before, and it speaks to the incredible diversity and brilliance of Thomas’ writing. The striking thing to me was this 15 | P a g e

sense of intense ownership and kinship readers felt with Thomas’ work.

They came into his world and felt like it was their own.

Cries for Help, Various by Padgett Powell Padgett Powell is one of the true originals of American fiction, and his weird and humorous writings constantly find new ways to shape fiction.

His most recent novel, You and Me, was composed entirely of dialogue between two characters sitting on a porch, and the novel before that, The Interrogative Mood, was composed entirely of questions. His collection of forty-four short stories–“forty-four failed novels,” Powell has called them–is the prefect introduction to his linguistic dexterity and try-anything style.

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Ball by Tara Ison [Tara is] a cool cat: not show-offy, but patient, warm, funny, and supremely gifted. She was a great pleasure to have in class because she was spot-on, but not aggressive or ungraceful about it. She used her powers for good. […] “Ball,” as you are about to find out, is a truly outrageous story about contemporary relationships, sex, and dog ownership. It is about the way these things are very similar. And it is not breezy and light about sex and dog ownership, it is honest and tragicomic and astringent and provocative.

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The Brink by Austin Bunn The Brink is the impressive debut book by playwright, screenwriter, and fiction writer Austin Bunn. Bunn’s stories traverse worlds from online gaming to end-time cults, sometimes dipping into the fantastical, but they all deal in characters who are on the edge of a precipice of some kind in their lives. In “The Ledge,” a ship has literally sailed to the end of the world, and the crew discovers what might lie beyond. As Bunn has stated, he is drawn to “stories about the resilience and transformations that happen at the moment when one way of life ends and another begins.”

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My Documents by Alejandro Zambra Zambra’s stories are disarmingly casual in their delivery. Similar to Chilean predecessor Roberto Bolaño, Zambra has enormous skill for conveying lush emotional landscapes with stripped and distant language.

Zambra’s characters tend to be sensitive, brooding, and sharp witnesses, and they navigate the interior landscapes of their situations in ways that are fluid and impressionistic. […] My Documents consists of stories that hit the sweet spot between meandering and meticulous. In many stories, Zambra delays and complicates the slow-building tension – past opportunities for traditional endings – to arrive in uncharted territory.

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Half an Inch of Water by Percival Everett Set in the contemporary American west and centered on husbandry, mystery, and racial politics (on, Everett says, “the West that exists”), Half an Inch of Water is a departure from Everett’s more conspicuously experimental work. Dry, sincere, quiet—the collection reminds us that these adjectives aren’t naughty words, and that Everett’s gifts are as limitless as the landscape about which he writes.

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Daydreams of Angels by Heather O’Neill The stories in O’Neill’s first story collection, Daydreams of Angels, are reminiscent of fairy tales and fables that marry the dark and the magical.

The collection is full of rough characters and situations, but also shrouded with a kind of fantasy that can, like a child’s viewpoint, make difficult places easier to enter. The stories are funny and beautiful and the created worlds are endlessly fascinating.

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A WHIRL IN THE POOL by Allison White Based on a true story.

Alana was immersed in a velvet whirling pool. She swirled around as she felt the first waves of relief wash over her slender body. The sweet warmth of the calm clear water washed over her body wrapped in a thin swimming costume. The warmth of relief and joy began to well up in her tight stomach. It was a sublime experience that was like flying in the 22 | P a g e

clouds that hovered tantalizingly over her and so far away. It felt beautiful and serene for a moment. However her mind was jumbled with thoughts she had so far unsuccessfully pushed out of her mind.

Today she had agreed to swim with Steve her one year old boy friend.

She would have soaked in milk given the choice because she needed it.

She could have swum in honey or wine if it could only make her feel fresh again. She did not feel clean enough these days, and thanks to the camp she had attended recently. Life had taught her a lesson to never take anything for granted. A life of luxury given to you on a silver plate was not a torment but a gift. It was a gift to thank the gods and your ancestors for because they brought you up into such fine lines of providence. She wanted Steve to quickly want to have a baby again. She prayed for it. She wanted him to rush her into the hospital when her water was bursting. He would then do what was expected of him. Take the bride price home for their marriage to take place.

She still couldn’t believe her life could have been taken away from her last month in one snap. Steve was her life and she couldn’t deny it any more. If only this water could turn into wine‌she wished for a splinting moment.

She came up in the water and looked around to see if Steve was coming to join her. He was nowhere in sight. She felt frantic though not scared.

She badly needed his company. He had to be somewhere inside the house looking for something. She dived back into the water with arms outstretched in a yoga style.

The chatting sounds of recruits singing their war songs in the sun flashed into her mind. She was there once again in the hot sun burning her bare face till her eyes squint. It made her scrawl her face into a weird expression.

A huge wave of bodies moved along with her. She felt sweaty and exhausted with the bad stench of human odor threatening her nostrils.

Her feet too felt sour and almost bare like she was walking on the stones with bare feet, yet she was wearing new snickers. She moved along like an ocean current clashing with sea stones and stopping abruptly only to be shocked into movement again. This was because her energy was draining out faster than the rush hour. She felt like a rock that could not 23 | P a g e

move any more. A harsh tone from one of the leaders brought her back to the dense reality.

“You, move! Move! Move fast!”

He commanded with a menacing stick that was raised in her direction. It made her clamp her feet together in a run that too seemed to be seeping the life and last breath out of her. Her mouth felt as dry as a desert land.

She was washed out and left brittle like a withering leaf. She was lucky to be a human or she would have withered.

Alana dived back into the water in a flash and tried to float on it. It was impossible to float of course but she could pretend she was lying on the surface with her feet dangling and stretched in front of her. Jesus walked on water, she remembered but she couldn’t.

Alana felt the weight of memories tumbling back into her mind.

“Sit down!”

The commander in charge of her group yelled in a clear eloquent accent.

He amazingly directed that command at Alana. It astonished her out of the anxiety threatening to consume her senses. She was being told to sit on the ground she had instinctively rejected because of its dirt and filth.

She felt sick already. She did not know how she was going to escape from this camp.

“If you don’t do what you are told here, you will regret it forever! It will be like milking a snake! You don’t tamper with the bees because they will sting!” He yelled for every recruit to hear.

“This is the first lesson for all of you!” He said again in a voice that cautioned all her senses.

She felt more like a prisoner than a recruit to a course she had undertaken voluntarily. She already had a plan which she hoped to sell to Commander Ahmed.

He looked at Alana with a deep penetrative gaze while giving further instructions she could barely hear. She stared back at him and smiled almost triumphantly. She knew that he needed a good student for this course.

Alana loved the sweet velvet feel of the water that held her in the pool.

Her mind felt less tormented. She had bathed and scrubbed the dirt from 24 | P a g e

her body every night. It had amazed her how a simple bath had turned her filthy body into a sweet smooth human flesh again. Her body had felt like an animal’s for a long time. It had seemed like a miracle when she bathed on those nights. She swam around in circles feeling the gentle waves of the currents blown by the wind lightly like soft kisses and whispers on her body. Water had become the sweet messenger from god to deliver her from all the dirt of the day. It was the angels’ touch that had soothed and comforted her hurt pride and emotions.

Commander Ahmed had begged for her to stay because he had developed feelings of attraction for her. In the camp he had been like a god no one could resist. However she had run away and felt guilty for the betrayal. His hands had searched for her body, but it had been fleeting and unfulfilled.

She slowed the movements of her hands in the water. She turned her hands around and imagined an eagle in the air. She flapped her arms in the same manner a little more sensually and slowly as she closed her eyes and the cold flash of memories dazed her into another world once again.

Hard black boots trampled the hard beaten tarmac roads in a sweat. They belonged to the recruits who left a trail of dust every time their feet left the ground for a micro second. She was amazed to see the recruits appear suddenly.

“Everyone lie down!” The harsh command that could have split any wood came from the arrogant commander who watched all his trainees with the keenness of a guard dog. The ground they were told to lie on was filthy. She watched as he made one of them stand before him. There was a pool of stagnant water in front of them. She had passed that filthy water before. It was filled with mud, frogs and maggots! She felt a burning sensation in her chest which went down to her stomach.

Tomorrow or later that evening, she could be doing the same. She felt her body convulse into anxious tremors of fear as she watched what the commander did to his recruits.

“We are going to learn how to swim! Yes? He yelled like the captain of tormentors.

“Yes sir!" The whole group answered in a chorus.

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“Okay, you will each jump into the water and swim across. Are we clear?” He said with a menace that tore the air like a lightning bolt.

“Yes sir!”

“If any of you do otherwise, I will surely give you a double punishment.

Are we clear?”

“Yes sir!” They yelled. No one would dare to cross him. Alana feared for her life. She felt she would soon die of nausea. The look of that water could have drowned a pig! She couldn’t believe a human would survive in such water for even a second.

Each recruit splattered and spat through the filthy water while the commander whipped a few slow ones with his magic stick that he never ceased to carry.

The sound of a roaring truck surprised everyone. They all looked on curiously. Alana shuddered to think what was next. The air was tense and every bone cracked in agony. It was the fire brigade, she guessed.

One man stood on top of the truck with a long enormous pipe that gushed out torrents of water. The man who was standing on top hit the recruits with a furious gush of the water as the truck moved closer to get a better hit of the dirty bodies of recruits. It was a bath they all deserved after the swim through mud, frogs and maggots.

The shocked groans of recruits painfully reached her ears as they winced at the cold rush of running water on their bodies. They were deep groans of forbearance only a fellow recruit understood.

Alana had talked to Commander Ahmed. She was going to get her pass after all. She would leave immediately because she couldn’t see herself surviving through this course. She knew she would refuse if asked to do any of those so called exercises.

She calmed her running emotions for a moment as she drifted through the swimming pool. She had ended cold sleepless nights too.

She finally got a glimpse of Steve coming in.

“Where have you been?”

“I was looking for the wine.”

“Won’t you swim with me?

“I will, of course my dear.” He removed his shirt and jumped into the water with a splash. Alana watched the ripples form around his chest and 26 | P a g e

felt awed by his athletic physique. She loved everything about Steve. He swam next to her and put his arms around her in an embrace.

“I didn’t know you loved swimming this much.”

“I do!”

“Heh heh. He laughed.

“Do you want to race to the other side?” He asked.

“Okay!” She swum as fast as she could and was surprised at the energy she still had. She arrived at the end with Steve still at her side.

“I won!” she yelled.

“No, we won!”

“A tie?”

“We reached at the same time.”

“Okay.” She said with a smile.

She had come back to Steve immediately she had got the chance to leave the camp. She had missed him a lot. She now understood how important his friendship was to her. She calmly remembered how unlucky it had felt to be so far away.

The sky that danced so merrily before her now had been in that place the only beautiful thing she ever saw. It was always a silver blanket floating in the air. The air was always washed clean by the puffing wind that never silenced the whistling leaves and branches in the trees. The sky had been like a fume of heavy smoke that had just escaped into the air.

You could feel your hand touching it because it hovered so close to the ground.

The day she had stayed sick in bed, it had rained down on recruits mercilessly. The palms of heaven had parted in torrents of rain that abused and mocked the camp. No one dared to move until told to do so.

No one mentioned it was raining or gave recognition to its effects.

Commander Ahmed found her inside the dormitory on her bed. She was shocked. He had somehow known he would find her there. No one was supposed to be in the dormitory at that time.

“Are you still determined to go away?”

“Sir I am not feeling well.”

“Call me Ahmed.” She shook her head.

“Come on. I know you are a beautiful girl. You need to go back and live 27 | P a g e

a better life!”

“I have got an asthma attack!” she said.

Ahmed shook his head in amazement.

“I wouldn’t let you die on the field, besides I know that you want to run back to your boyfriend.”

“Why would you say that?”

“It’s obvious you don’t care about useless soldiers like us.”

“It’s not true.” She said boldly “It’s true.” He insisted “Please, please, please.” She wanted him not to feel so jealous about her boy friend.

He silently drew closer to her. She could see desire in his eyes. He touched her briefly. She was sitting while he leaned closer into her.

“Then stay.” He pleaded.

“I am sick.”

“Stay, I know you can. I will give you anything you want. I know, the drinking water, the milk tea.”

“It’s impossible. I would not let you go through all that for me.”

“I can let you sleep all you want. I will buy you food from a hotel in town!”

“Thank you very much, but I am scared. I am really scared. I have to see the doctor. I promise to come back.”

“When will that be?”

“After check up, I will immediately come back.”

“Alright.” He touched her face briefly and lightly before turning around to leave.

Alana shrieked out of her thoughts at the shrill sound of her ringing phone. Anxiety shot through her body as she realized Ahmed could be calling her right now.

“Your phone!” Steve said from behind her.

“Let it ring.”

“Why? It could be important.”

“Important?”

Steve swam next to her and said; “You have become like the princess 28 | P a g e

who turned into a river.”

It made Alana begin to laugh.

“I won’ get out then, I want to become a river!”

“You are so funny.” He said.

“You are funnier.

“Why won’t you pick up your call?”

“I fear it could be the commander at the camp.”

“You won’t talk to him? You know they can’t force you into anything you don’t want to do.”

“I am still worried” Steve didn’t know about Ahmed’s secret feelings for her. She knew she had to deal with it but it would be better to simply ignore him. All that mattered was she had left it all behind. Steve promised to protect her. No one could force her into doing something she didn’t want to do.

“Let me go get us a ball while the water princess stays here.”

“Okay, boss!” She watched Steve climb out of the pool with relief while she forced herself to stay calm. She climbed out and grabbed her phone to see who was calling.

It was Ahmed! She had been right. She threw the phone back like it would bite. She immediately went back to the pool before Steve could find her. One day he would stop calling. She wanted him to give it all up. She could not trust men like Ahmed and besides Steve was the love of her life. His insistence on her would definitely drive her crazy. She was now a fly caught in a web which should have been easy to disentangle from because it was such a tiny mesh. She seemed stuck in that tormenting place.

She found Ahmed’s character icy. She did not know how a human being could live the life he lived. These were the men who fought for their country after all. She did not want to blame him for everything because he realized that life in other countries for the military and police ought to be the same.

She swirled around in the water as it seemed to heave and sigh at every stroke of her arms through it. She felt excitement going through her body. She wondered if she had done the right thing not to tell Steve 29 | P a g e

about it. She did not know how he would react. She feared above a platonic confrontation between both men. She couldn’t stand to have such delicate journeys get out of hand.

She heard Steve bounce the ball on the white floor and turned around curiously. He had a ball and the wine. He seemed happy with himself, she observed. That was a good sign because she was ready for him “What do you have in mind Steve?”

“Plenty.”

“Tell me.” She heaved.

“First of all, grab this!” he plunged the ball into Alana’s direction. She almost grabbed it, but missed it narrowly. She held the ball in her hands and realized it was a light ball.

“You bought this for the swimming pool?” she said curiously.

“Yes, it was a great idea. Don’t you think?”

“Of course.” She tossed the ball lightly as Steve rushed back inside the house again. This time he came back quickly with two glasses for the wine.

“You will love this.” He said happily.

“The wine?” she asked “Of course my dear.”

“You know I love wine ,Steve.”

“Do you want a glass now or will you drink later perhaps? He said with a teasing wink.

“Later.” She said.

Steve nodded his head and plunged back into the water. He swam closer to her so that they were a few inches from each other. Alana could smell beer on his breath. She raised her brows in amazement.

“Have you been drinking?”

“I took a sip, think.”

“Wow.” She was not surprised by Steve’s behavior. He got a hold of the ball and tossed it to the far end.

“The first to get it wins!” they both swam hard to get the ball. Alana’s speed wasn’t as fast before because Steve had somehow reached the ball before she could.

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“Oh! You won! She said breathlessly.

“Yes.” He said triumphantly. Alana was still laughing at Steve’s triumph when the sound of her ringing phone cut through their cheers with a shrill she could compare to a rushing waterfall. The sound of her phone rang too many alarm bells in her mind. She feared Ahmed’s insistence that she return to him. So she did not know if she had done the right thing with him anymore.

“Should I answer you phone. Whoever it is will have to listen to me.”

“I will get it.” She almost jumped out of her skin at Steve’s offer. She waved through the water with her arms and legs slowly till she reached the small ladders that got her out of the water oto the white floor. She looked at the caller ID and wished the name would disappear. It was Ahmed.

“Hello?”

“Are you avoiding me?” It was the first thing Ahmed said to her. She felt the muscles in her stomach tighten. She needed Ahmed to get the hard cold truth even if it hurt.

“I am not coming back.” she stated in a blunt tone that shocked Ahmed.

“How could you? You have got no remorse or love for your country.”

“That’s not true. I have got a serious asthma which can’t let me do anything like that.” She lied.

“I am really sorry then. We were all waiting for you to return but you obviously lied to me.”

“I didn’t lie. What should I do?”

“Will you ever come back to me?”

“No my boy friend is taking care of me.”

“Alright then, don’t say too much. I wish I knew who he is because he is a really lucky man.” Alana fell silent at Ahmed’s words.

“Goodbye.”

“Goodbye.” It seemed like an inevitable sad ending for Ahmed. She turned around and saw steve coming towards her.

“Who was that?”

“A military official.”

“A military official? What did he want?” she shook her head in disbelief and said; 31 | P a g e

“They are asking for my return to the camp.”

“You should never go back there.”

“I know!”

“But what does he want from you?”

“I told them I was so sick, I got a doctor’s recommendation to rest.”

Steve held a glass of wine for her, which she immediately took with relief.

“Come on, relax.” He said. She was afraid her anxiety was visible to Steve. She shook her head in agreement as the first sips of wine left electrifying waves of warmth into her whole body. She wanted to simply melt back into the water as she felt hot so quickly under the mid morning sun that bathed both of them. She put her glass down to Steve’s surprise and plunged into the swimming pool with a splash. The cold water welcomed her home merrily because felt an instant wave of relief wash over her entire body. It left her drenched and immersed in utter relief like a fish.

“Hey!” she heard Steve’s voice and came up into the water laughing.

“What?”

“I thought we were still drinking.” She laughed more and swam around in circles till Steve plunged in next to her. She was glad Steve was around when confronted with Ahmed.

END

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Drum Circles, Sexual Temples, and Skinny Dipping in Hawaii – An Essay by Emily Meg Weinstein ESSAY: UNSAFE SPACES, BY EMILY MEG WEINSTEIN To a New Yorker, California is far out, or so I believed when I moved there. But when I arrived, all the real adventurers had set their sights not on the edge of the country, but on the states that weren’t even attached.

My friend and fellow East Coast refugee, Jeff*, had done me one better and moved to Hawai’i. Like me, Jeff was from Long Island and had gone to a fancy college, but he found those experiences lacking. His search for something more had taken him first to the far north coast of California, and then, when he tired of the soap-opera politics of smalltown dope-growing, into the Pacific itself. He picked me up at the airport on the sunny Kona side of the Big Island, drove us to the rainy Puna side and announced, “This is what’s left of the town of Kalapana.“ What was left of the town of Kalapana was a drive-thru salmon-burger joint and a combination outdoor concert venue, picnic area, and bar that doubled as a church on Sundays. Some people, Jeff said, passed out drinking on Saturday night and woke up in attendance at the Sunday morning service.

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We walked on the hardened lava that had destroyed what wasn’t left of Kalapana, drank some kava, and enjoyed the high caliber of reggae only beach towns can attract. Then we went to Jeff’s hobo camp, a small plot of land he had recently purchased in a dense rainforest outside Pahoa, a place described in theBig Island Revealed guidebook as “a town of outlaws and wackjobs.”

Jeff had hacked his way to a space big enough for him to erect his Burning Man shade structure over a sleeping pad, some plastic storage bins, and a bucket he used for a toilet, creating a makeshift shelter he planned to live in until he built his cabana.

Jeff only lived at the hobo camp part-time. He had been attending a series of workshops at what he described as an “intentional communal sustainable holistic living experiment.” The experiment was run by a permaculturist and polyamory advocate named Pono, and the workshops included free camping.

The next morning at the farmer’s market, we visited Pono’s booth. Pono supported his intentional community by climbing untended coconut trees, shaking down coconuts, and selling them at the famer’s market.

While Jeff and Pono discussed DIY sewage options, I perused Pono’s personal collection of poetry, music, and mission statements, which were on display next to the coconuts. These documents were neatly organized in plastic sleeves in three-ring binders, and included such titles as “I Party Naked,” and “Spirit Re-Quest.” I leafed through the mission statements on tantric sexuality, instinctive eating, and mindful co-parenting, but slammed the binder shut when I saw the words “nonviolent communication.”

What was it about the words nonviolent communication that made me feel so…violent? And then, immediately, guilty about this reaction?

Nonviolent communication could probably help me cope with these feelings, but I had only ever had nonviolent communication advocated to me by a certain kind of man, the kind of man just now explaining how 34 | P a g e

humidity affected excrement composting times. This was a man with both a graying ponytail and a receding hairline, whose sexuality was just a little too close to the surface for my comfort.

It wasn’t just the presence of this type of man’s sexuality, it was that his sexuality had been workshopped into its current prominence. His workshopped sexuality was wrapped in layers of acceptance and celebration that had been workshopped there, too. These workshops, which were conducted in “safe spaces,” had created too safe a space, a space safe for something that, paradoxically, made me feel less so.

There was something about the way men like this used words like “nonviolent” that was similar to the way the Bush administration used words like “freedom” or “democracy.” The very deployment of these words instantly implied their opposite. When he labeled his communication as explicitly nonviolent, the ponytailed man with the openly displayed chest hair made me think that without extreme efforts to the contrary, he would, in fact, be violent. His constant insistence that we were in a “safe space” hinted at danger.

At Pono’s polyamory workshop, Jeff told me, a sixty-something woman had invited him to the sacred sexual temple with her. (Like me, Jeff was in his mid-thirties.)

“I didn’t end up going,” said Jeff, “but it would have been a good opportunity to confront my ageism.”

I looked down at my deeply tanned cleavage, wondering whether, if I attended the right workshop, I could one day convince a much younger man that I had created a safe space for him to resolve his Oedipal issues.

When I snapped back to the present, Pono was emphasizing the importance of making sure one’s homemade toilet not only encouraged, but demanded, a squatting position. “Are you familiar with the benefits of squatting?” he murmured gravely.

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Our tour continued to a clothing-optional beach down a short, steep, lava trail, where I became preoccupied with finding the right level of nudity.

Options ranged from fully fig-leaved to totally naked, to totally naked and painted. In the drum circle, women were mostly barebreasted, though heavily accessorized. When I asked if this were some kind of festival, Jeff told me that it was just the weekly Sunday morning drum circle, held following ecstatic dance.

On the beach, people were drumming, gyrating, smoking, nursing beers, nursing babies, and sitting in small circles, doing what Jeff said was “processing.” Given the popularity of polyamory on the Big Island, processing was a Sunday morning activity as common as drumming or ecstatic dancing. Processing, as far as I could tell, meant that everyone talked about every feeling they had about everyone having sex with everyone else. I had the sense that a certain kind of eye contact was involved in “processing,” perhaps a type of listening preceded by an adjective, like “active,” or “patient,” or “radically empathetic.”

Hardly anyone was swimming, but I’ll choose pretty much any activity over processing, active listening, or a drum circle. I decided to take advantage of this safe space to swim like a man, in just my board shorts, while maintaining some kind of shield to indicate that I would be celebrating my own sexuality as a party of one.

We waded into the thundering surf and swam past the breakers. It was only when we were just far enough out to make getting back a project that I realized the ocean was a not a safe space. A strong current pushed toward a jagged promontory. The shoreline sloped steeply, and you had to scale a forty-five degree ramp to get clear of the waves before an insistent undertow sucked you back out.

I watched an older man eating it in the breakers over and over, getting tossed and slammed like a rag doll, trying to crawl ashore. When some other naked beachgoers finally pulled him out, his nose was bloody. I had never seen waves hurt anyone before.

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“I want to go back in now,” I said, in a voice alien to my own ears.

“Then you better pick a better wave,” came an equally otherworldly voice. Jeff was nowhere to be seen, but a bearded, naked sage was floating belly-up nearby, as if we were in a calm lake.

He wasn’t afraid. I had only just started rock climbing then, but the glint in this man’s eye and the sinew on his limbs reminded me of the guys who had gotten me started. I trusted this old sea turtle like I trusted those old desert rats. These were the men of any age I found attractive. Not the ones who preached about nonviolent communication and created safe spaces into which their celebrated sexuality could ooze, but the ones who knew how to stay safe in spaces that really weren’t.

“This is a good one,” nodded the naked old man, blithely stroking further out to sea. I swam into the swell. It lifted me up and hurled me shoreward, forcing me headfirst into a gravel trench. I stabbed a foot in front of me, clawed my way up the sand and outran the Pacific’s frothing jaws.

Once clear of the waves, I hunched over, gasping and choking, then straightened up, wiped my nose, and shucked my shorts. I no longer cared if Jeff, or any of these Hawaiian hippies, saw me wholly naked. I was alive, in that way you can only be when you apprehend, even for a moment, how easily you could not be.

A storm rolled in. Without breaking rhythm, the drum circle migrated into the rain shadow of a cliff. I bought a beer and lit a smoke and let the raindrops fall on me, feeling like I had gotten away with something that I needed to preserve by pickling and smoking it into my cells for deep storage.

The next day we went up the volcano and watched its crater smoke.

There was a visitor center with scientific exhibits and stacks of an emphatic pamphlet: “Lava Viewing: COMMON SENSE IS NOT ENOUGH.” It turned out there was another entity on this island that thought safe spaces were a joke—the molten mother earth herself.

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It was then when a spiritual experience found me on the Big Island, not at ecstatic dance but in the volcano visitor center. Next to the brochures was a painting of Pele, the goddess of this volcano. She lived, the placard said, in its crater.

The painting represented her as if she were the volcano. Her long hair, curly like my own, formed the fire rivulets that ran beneath, and sometimes broke, the earth’s surface. She sat in the lotus position, meditating with a Mona Lisa smile before a subterranean lava lake, holding a flame in her hands. The goddess looked like me to me, but not as worried.

It was the first time I saw an image of a deity and wanted to worship.

The pamphlet was right—common sense was not enough. The waves were so big, the volcano so unpredictable, the islands so isolated, the lava so sharp, that to live here, a person would need more than common sense. They would need more than Pono’s pamphlets. They would need deities.

The volcano did not care whether it communicated violently or nonviolently. After its outbursts, nothing was processed. No workshop could make its space safe. Gods and goddesses couldn’t help us or save us, but they could give us someone to beg, or to blame. *Names have been changed.

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MEET THE NEW FACES OF FICTION FOR 2016: From The Guardian

Six of our eight debut novelists, left to right: Harry Parker, Fiona Barton,Nadim Safdar, Janet Ellis, Lisa Owens and Joanna Cannon.

Composite: Karen Robinson for the Observer Harry Parker: ‘I wanted to be seen as someone who could write, not a legless bloke who wrote a book’

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Ex-soldier Harry Parker, who lost his legs in Afghanistan, has written a war novel with a difference “It’s quite a weird book, isn’t it?” suggests Harry Parker in his publisher’s office on a grey Tuesday morning. “Weird” may be overstating things, but Anatomy of a Soldier feels like a new take on the war novel. Following characters from both sides of an unnamed conflict, it’s told from the point of view of various inanimate objects (a bike, dog tags, a bag of fertiliser). The effect is both disorienting and captivating.

Parker’s novel is grounded in grim personal reality. After serving in Iraq, a tour of Afghanistan came shuddering to a halt when the 32-yearold was wounded in the field, losing both legs. “I stepped on a bomb,” he says simply.

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Harry Parker: explores ideas of conflict through the voices of inanimate objects. Photograph: Karen Robinson for the Observer It’s a fate that Tom Barnes, the central character, meets too, and his journey from troop leader to amputee is the emotional heart of the novel.

In a startling chapter written from the perspective of a bed, Tom returns to his family home after undergoing rehab in hospital. As he starts washing his body, including his “stumps and groin”, with a cold flannel, the full horror of what has occurred hits him and he breaks down in tears. “I feel like I’ve been chosen for a main part I never wanted to play and everyone’s come to watch,” Tom tells his shocked mother. By the end of the chapter, there’s a feeling of catharsis as Tom concludes that, on balance, he wouldn’t change a thing that has happened to him. That was one of the most autobiographical sections of the whole novel, Parker tells me. “That scene happened to me about 10 weeks after I’d got the injuries,” he says. “When I wrote ‘I wouldn’t change a thing’, I definitely felt that. And I feel that more over time, but you have a bad morning when your legs aren’t working properly and you’re instantly jolted back to the time when you got injured.”

You could chuck the chapters into the air and read them in any order – that’s what it’s like to be blown up Although Parker had written when he was in the army (“blackly comic stuff, like slightly amusing ways of dying”), it was some time before he wrote about his life-altering experiences on the battlefield.

“I had a big resistance to writing about my injuries,” he says. “No one with any sort of disability wants to be defined by their injuries.” He wanted to be seen as someone who could write and not “a legless bloke who wrote a book”.

It took an army-funded creative writing course in 2013 to help him make peace with addressing what had happened to him in Afghanistan. During the course, he wrote about conflict from the point of view of various animals and of a tourniquet, then Anatomy of a Soldier began to take 41 | P a g e

shape. “There was something about telling the story from a fictitious point of view that made it easier to do.”

From that starting point, his bigger idea was to write a book whose chapters could run nonsequentially. “I wanted it to be like you could chuck them into the air and read them in any order, because that’s what it’s like to be blown up. I liked the idea of creating a puzzle with each chapter. I wanted the reader to ask, ‘Where am I?’” The challenging form of the book also saves it from falling into traps faced by other war novels. “War can be presented as quite black and white, it can be quite ‘them and us’.” Anatomy of a Soldier, meanwhile, is nuanced and wonderfully complex. PE Anatomy of a Soldier will be published by Faber in the spring, £14.99 Nadim Safdar: ‘The book’s about love, not suicide bombers’

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Nadim Safdar wrote his debut novel in a shed in his garden, and still practises dentistry part-time. Photograph: Karen Robinson for the Observer Dentist Nadim Safdar’s debut is a ‘super-timely’ novel about the radicalisation of a British Muslim In the early hours of 11 November, Akram Khan, a former British soldier, leaves his wife and West Midlands home for the final time. His aim is simple: to attain martyrdom by detonating a bomb at a Remembrance Day parade. But while there is plenty of grit in 44-yearold Nadim Safdar’s layered, involving debut, it is not quite as bleak as that might sound. “It’s about love; it’s not about suicide bombers,” Safdar stresses: love of God, of Britain, and the love between friends.

Safdar grew up in Stourbridge, a stone’s throw from Cradley Heath, the town at the centre of his novel. His Pakistani parents came to the UK in the 1960s; he was one of six children, and was more interested in boxing than books until he discovered poetry in his teens. But literature took a back seat, of necessity, when he had to make a living: “I thought: ‘This is what I should be doing,’” he says, “and I’ve had a stab at writing, but you quickly fall back into profession, mortgage, family…”

After studying dentistry at Newcastle University, Safdar “knocked about a bit” – something that also involved reading medicine at Wolfson College, Cambridge for a year – before moving to London and, eventually, set up his own dental practice in Harley Street. In 2010 he decided to sell up, build a writing shed in his Clapham garden, and enrol on a “very, very helpful” creative writing MA at Birkbeck.

I was incredibly jammy. It was very, very nice Safdar’s publication record at that point ran to a 1993 paper on fractured mandibles. He began two novels but scrapped both halfway, and it was 43 | P a g e

as a series of short stories about his protagonist’s childhood friends that Akram’s War began life. One of these – Adrian, son of a local “Paki basher” – goes on to serve alongside Akram in Afghanistan. But parkawearing playground runt Craig Male also has an important role, opening Akram’s eyes to the wildlife occupying the edgelands of their home town.

There is deep affection in the book for the Black Country’s industrial landscape, although Safdar says he was indifferent to his surroundings as a child – “Growing up there, I didn’t see the beauty of it” – and credits his awakening to the work of the Birmingham-born photographer Richard Billingham, a friend.

As his stories accumulated, Safdar found himself in search of a form that might contain them. The solution – inspired in part by Richard Flanagan’sThe Narrow Road to the Deep North – emerged as a frame narrative, constructed around Akram’s encounter with the significantly named Grace, a troubled prostitute who has been cruelly separated from her beloved daughter. (Safdar, a twice-married father of three, is a former campaigner for Fathers4Justice, although this is a subject – along with his own experience of the military – about which he politely declines to talk.)

Advertisement Despite the “super-timely” nature of his novel, Safdar wasn’t confident of publication. He recalls how he submitted his manuscript to the agent Anna Webber one Friday in 2014 and received the promise that it would be read “in the next three months”. On the Monday morning, his phone rang. “I was incredibly jammy,” he says, eyes lighting up. “It was very, very nice.”

Nevertheless, Safdar’s editor was keen that he give the novel a happier ending – the right call, Safdar now admits. “I think you have to listen to 44 | P a g e

your betters and your peers,” he says seriously. “It’s a craft: one is learning all the time.”

In tracing the radicalisation of a British Muslim, Safdar knows Akram’s War “will inspire commentary”; but he has no interest in adding to any debate, wishing the book to speak for itself. He is already at work on his next novel, The Journeyman – “about a boxer who always loses”, – and still practises dentistry part-time. To be able to write full-time would be nice, he says, but then reconsiders. “That’s a double-edged sword.

Sitting in that shed, which I did for four years, does takes its toll… You need to mix it up a bit.” SC Akram’s War will be published by Atlantic on 5 May, £12.99.

Fiona Barton: ‘The journalist character Kate’s reactions are not necessarily mine’

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Fiona Barton studied body language and speech patterns at many criminal trials during her reporting career. Photograph: Karen Robinson for the Observer News journalist Barton’s spare psychological thriller about child abduction examines the lies we tell ourselves to survive Fiona Barton’s debut novel, The Widow, is being billed as 2016’s The Girl on the Train. Translation rights have been sold in more than 23 languages and the TV rights have been snapped up.

A psychological crime thriller, it tells the story of Jean, whose husband, Glen, was acquitted of abducting a two-year-old girl. Now he’s dead, she’s preparing to tell her story.

Everyone has their own moral compass, but then you've got a news editor shouting down the phone…

Barton, a former news editor at the Daily Telegraph, and award-winning chief reporter at the Mail on Sunday, has worked on many high-profile trials and crime stories, including the Madeleine McCann disappearance.

Over the years, she became a “professional watcher”, studying body language and speech patterns for clues. And, she tells me, she became fascinated by the phenomenon of the wife who stands by a man accused of a terrible crime. What is the psychology of that woman, she wondered. Does she believe he is innocent or is it an abusive relationship?

In court, she’d often think: “Are the family hearing the terrible details for the first time? What are they thinking? What it will be like when they get him home, if he’s found not guilty? That sense of: Oh my God, did I ever know him? Who is he?”

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The Widow is beautifully, sparely written, the narrative switching between the widow, the detective leading the hunt, the journalist covering the case, and the mother of the child, revealing the lies people tell themselves to survive.

Barton is sanguine about people assuming the portrait of Kate, the journalist, is autobiographical, but says it’s “an amalgam of dozens of people… I’ve been everywhere that Kate has been, but her reactions are not my reactions, necessarily.”

The book is shot through with gripping detail, from the tabloids vying for an exclusive to an interviewer buying her case study new clothes and taking her to a posh hotel (something Barton has done herself).

“Everyone has their own moral compass, but then you’ve got a news editor shouting down the phone, asking: ‘Why didn’t you ask this?”

We never find out the details of Glen’s alleged crime but we know he’s addicted to looking at graphic images of abuse on his laptop (what Jean dismisses as “his nonsense”). For Barton it shows how some men compartmentalise their lives. “When I was doing research, one paedophile in prison called it his ‘cupboard under the stairs’.” Jean is no fool, but childless and lonely at 37, she prefers not to tackle the secrets in her marriage. “She’s a youngish woman, but because she married straight from home she hasn’t had that thing of being young and carefree.”

Barton wrote the book when she and her husband took a two-year career break to work on a VSO project in Sri Lanka. “The kids were starting their own lives, my parents were young enough not to need constant care.”

In Colombo she trained Tamil journalists to produce a radio show and a newspaper for displaced persons living in refugee camps. It was lifechanging – and gave her the space to try fiction. “I’d get up at 6am and write for two hours before work.”

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When she was shortlisted for 2014’s Richard and Judy’s Search for a Bestseller competition, there was a hotly contested auction for The Widow, won by Transworld’s Bantam Press (which also published The Girl on the Train). Now based in south-west France, Barton still works as a media trainer with reporters living in exile. Her second novel will look at how the online revolution has changed journalism. For all the phone-hacking scandals and celebrity froth, she still has a touching faith in the profession. “Yes, there are bad apples, but I do feel journalists do a good job, often in very difficult circumstances.” LH The Widow is published on 14 January, Bantam Press, £12.99.

Janet Ellis: ‘Inevitably, because I’ve just turned 60, people are going to say, what took you so long?’

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Janet Ellis submitted the manuscript for her novel anonymously.

Photograph: Karen Robinson for the Observer The actress and presenter’s debut novel is the dark tale of a rebellious girl in 18th-century London The Butcher’s Hook doesn’t read like a first novel – it is a high-finish performance. Its heroine is an 18th-century teenage girl, who starts demurely although her sex drive turns out to be anything but demure.

You need to be braced for violence to rival any Jacobean tragedy: The Butcher’s Hook will hook you. I exclaimed to my husband over one extreme scene, to which he joked: “Isn’t that just what you’d expect from a former Blue Peter presenter?” Between 1983-87, Janet Ellis presented the children’s programme (“the golden years,” she laughs), but submitted her novel anonymously to publishers. She is not the type to rest on her laurels – or, it would seem, to rest at all.

I did that stupid thing of saying I wanted to write a novel… Don't say it… just bloody do it!

We meet at her Chiswick home where she has lived for a quarter of a century (her three children – one is the pop star Sophie Ellis-Bextor – are grown up and there are grandchildren). She and her house are a match for each other: pretty, warm and lively. We talk over coffee. Born into an army family, she has wanted to write novels all her life, and “from when I was little” wanted to act. “I was a Kentish maid, though we spent six years on postings in Germany. I went to seven different schools.” At 17, she got into the Central School of Drama where “I practised being afraid”. Her first television role was on Jackanory Playhouse as Princess Griselda (the BBC fought for her Equity card, which was “extraordinary” because “for seven-eighths of Griselda’s story, she is changed into a pot plant”).

As the decades disappeared, she never gave up the idea of becoming a novelist: “I did that stupid thing of saying I wanted to write a novel to my poor family and friends. Don’t say it unless you’re going to do it.

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Just bloody do it!” A three-month creative writing course run by Curtis Brown, the literary agency, spurred her on (she was selected on the strength of 3,000 words and a synopsis). As a Costa prize judge, she knew how flawed first novels can be. But she now concludes that writers are made as well as born: “I’m the product of everything I’ve read, every conversation, every emotion I’ve felt. Inevitably, because I’ve just turned 60, people will say, what took you so long? My novel needed to be slow-cooked… because of what I didn’t know. The craft frightened me.”

Working with 14 other trainee novelists, two hours a week, she was initially unnerved by criticism. “I had thought if you altered anything, the whole edifice was so fragile it would crumble.” The class workshopped each other’s novels. She saw – still sees – fiction as visceral: “I felt a terrible mixture of vain and terrified, which is the thing that stopped me doing anything at all. This sounds really twee but it was so important, it mattered so much.”

She was drawn to the 18th century because of the “look of it. I walk a lot. I love seeing the layers under London. I wanted to communicate that history is just us, not a special way of thinking.Although, as a girl in that period you were limited in your sphere of influence and your communications. I did some research, read 18th-century letters and diaries…” Her challenge was to create a 19-year-old heroine who did not sound too knowing. When you’re 13, she says, you “feel something is bursting out of you but you don’t know what it is”. The sense of sexuality is a powder keg in the book but she writes so well she’s in no danger of winning the Bad Sex award: “It’s the thing I agonised about most.”

Curtis Brown doesn’t automatically represent its graduates. Yet Gordon Wise, on the strength of 3,000 words, inquired of Ellis last summer: “When could you finish this?” By November, she had delivered 85,000 words. Getting the email from Wise – “Read it. Loved it.” – was the

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greatest thrill, although it came at a difficult time: her father was dying in hospital. Did he know the novel had been accepted? “Just,” she says.

Did she ever terrify herself with what she wrote? “Yes,” she laughs, “and I know some people will go, ‘How long have you had thoughts like this?’” To which, she imagines herself replying: “Doesn’t everybody?” KK The Butcher’s Hook is published 25 February, Hodder & Stoughton, £14.99.

Nicholas Searle: ‘All novelists aspire to tell lies. So in that sense, I do hope I’m a good liar’

Nicholas Searle’s tricky plot is inspired by a conman he encountered in real life. Photograph: Karen Robinson for the Observer 51 | P a g e

The former civil servant’s debut is the story of a conman who hopes to pull off one last job…

Like the protagonist of his first novel,The Good Liar, Nicholas Searle is an international man of mystery. Tantalisingly, his author bio states “he is not allowed to say more about his career than that he was a senior civil servant for many years”.

It was spying, wasn’t it? Searle squirms in his sharp grey suit. “I was working on security matters and that’s the limit of what I can say. You can press me on it if you like, but there are good legal, contractual and ethical reasons for me not talking about my previous work.” The frown softens into a chuckle. “It’s ridiculous, but that’s the position I’m in – as Michael Dobbs might say, ‘I couldn’t possibly comment.’”

This “remarkably rewarding” job took him from Cornwall to London to New Zealand and back, until 2011, when Searle decided to move to Yorkshire with his wife and concentrate on writing. He honed his skills with an online creative writing course run by literary agency Curtis Brown. Propelled by a mix of stubbornness and bravado, he sent his manuscript to the CEO of the company, Jonny Geller, agent of the likes of John le Carré and David Mitchell.

Geller got back to him “immediately”, and within 10 days they had deals with HarperCollins in the US and Penguin in the UK. “It was fantastic and kind of befuddling. I thought it must be a wind-up, because this kind of stuff doesn’t really happen.” A few months on, he is now “at an awkward juncture, because the book could absolutely flop, and I’m quite sanguine about that. But if it is reasonably successful, this could be lifechanging.”

I don’t lie willy-nilly, but there are times in life when it’s morally sound to do so At 58, Searle finds himself at the beginning of a second career never having published so much as a short story. The “all-consuming” day job 52 | P a g e

made it difficult to devote much time to writing, yet it was, he says, “a compulsion, which I sublimated over years and years of writing probably the most erudite internal memos inside the civil service” (the novel’s first line features the words “kismet”, “serendipity” and “happenstance”). The book aims to straddle readability and literary ambitions; tellingly, Kate Atkinson and Will Self are both influences.

The snake on the cover is a good indication of the plot: it twists and turns surreptitiously, making it tricky to discuss details (“spoilers are the one thing that have vexed my publishers”). The story was inspired by a true event: an older female relative of Searle’s was duped into a relationship by an octogenarian conman, “by all accounts a real charmer”. But when the family paid a visit, “within 10 seconds I had him fully figured as not exactly the ticket… it became pretty evident he just told lies by instinct”. Eventually it turned out this was the latest in a string of scams, and after a tense negotiation Searle convinced him to leave.

Based on this encounter Searle invented Roy Courtnay, a charming but self-serving, duplicitous character. He devised a backstory for him and two weeks later the plot was fully formed in his head. Was it difficult to inhabit the mind of such a devious, misogynist character? “Perhaps I should plead the fifth here, because it was horrible, but at the same time it wasn’t too difficult – which sounds terrible, but over the years I’ve met my fair share of people like that, so that made it easier to inhabit his mind.”

Considering his former job, and the layers of lies that make up the novel, is Searle himself a good liar? “I don’t lie willy-nilly, but there are times in life when it’s morally sound to do so, in order not to upset or offend someone. In those situations I can lie convincingly and I’m sure you can as well. Most people do lie, even in the most banal of circumstances.”

After some thought, he adds: “All novelists aspire to tell lies in the form of fiction. So in that sense I do hope I’m a good liar, if in no other.”

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The Good Liar is published on Thursday by Penguin Viking (£12.99).

Kit de Waal: ‘You don’t casually write about vulnerable people for your own entertainment – or anyone else’s’

Kit De Waal drew on experience working in social services, foster care, adoption panels and as a magistrate for her debut novel. Photograph: Karen Robinson for the Observer De Waal’s debut is told from the viewpoint of a boy in care and, with her life and career experience, it didn’t require much research “If I was 25, I might have thought, ‘I’ll see where this goes,’ but at 51, you’re more like: ‘I haven’t got time to be pissing around, I want to get published!’” Kit de Waal grins, remembering how ambitious she felt at 54 | P a g e

51, going to university for the first time to do an MA in creative writing.

“I remember sitting with some other writers who were either saying, ‘Ooh, I just really love words’ or ‘I just really want to write a book,’ and I was going,” – she hammers her hand on the table to make the point – “‘Book. In. Waterstones.’ It’s not for my drawer!” she laughs, her soft Brummie accent peppering her speech.

Born in 1960, De Waal grew up in Moseley, Birmingham, as one of six children. She left school at 15, went off the rails for a bit, and came around to reading in her early 20s. She spent her first post-hedonistic year consuming sombre military novels recommended by a colleague before discovering – and devouring – the Penguin Classics, and forging a career in criminal and family law: working in social services, training foster carers, being on an adoption panel and becoming a magistrate.

This experience, she explains, is why her debut novel, My Name Is Leon, took her less than a year to write. “There was no research to be done at all – to me, it’s all very familiar.”

We had an offer that I was floored by, and I was like, 'Sign it, sign it, sign it – before they change their minds!'

The book is told from the perspective of Leon, nine, who ends up in foster care with his baby brother, Jake, only to discover that social services have arranged for Jake to be adopted by a separate family. Leon becomes vaguely aware that this blond-haired, blue-eyed baby is different from him: Jake’s father is white, Leon’s father is black, and Leon wonders if they’ve been separated because they don’t look like brothers.

With two adopted children of her own, De Waal – who wrote two unpublished “sprawling thrillers” before this – admits she was scared of writing this story. “You don’t casually write about vulnerable people for your own entertainment – or anyone else’s, for that matter. I thought, how am I going to be true to social workers, to foster carers, to birth mothers, to adoptive parents, to black men, to multicultural England?

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And most of all, how am I going to be true to any child who’s been in care?”

But the novel was an instant hit with publishers. “It was incredible,” De Waal says, wide-eyed. Her agent sent it out on a Monday, and “by Wednesday we had an offer that I was floored by. I was like, ‘sign it, sign it, sign it – before they change their minds!’” Wisely, De Waal’s agent suggested she hold back, and soon her book was at the centre of a six-way auction. “I think people responded to it because it’s a story about a part of society a lot of people don’t think about,” De Waal suggests.

Set in early 80s inner-city Britain, My Name Is Leon balances the gritty with the feelgood; De Waal knew early on that, among the grimness of life as a foster child, there had to be an element of positivity for Leon and for readers. Indeed, Leon’s view of the adults who surround him (in their varying disengaged, awkward, angry, drunk, or lonely states) is perceptive, and, on occasion, startlingly funny. De Waal has a knack for being comical: midway through our interview, she gets up from her chair, hitches up her trousers and crouches to show me how she would get down to Leon’s height when writing to better understand his viewpoint. Even her name embodies her youthful playfulness: Kit is a family nickname she acquired in childhood when she would pronounce St Kitts (where her father is from) “St Kiths”.

Recently, De Waal announced that she would fund a scholarship for a person from a marginalised background to do a creative writing MA at Birkbeck. It’s a way of getting more diverse stories – “which are legion, and don’t often get told” – published, she says. “I wanted to call it the Fat Chance scholarship, because so many people who I’ve suggested should do an MA, say: ‘Fat chance – haven’t got the money!’ My father’s black, my mum’s Irish, and growing up poor, in an all-white neighbourhood, in the 60s, there was rabid racism. Doing an MA for me was a dream, and I wanted to give someone like me that opportunity.” CJ 56 | P a g e

My Name Is Leon will be published by Viking in June.

Lisa Owens: ‘I wanted to tackle the idea that there’s a dream job out there and you’ll find happiness by locating it’

Lisa Owens was signed by an agent within six months of completing her creative writing MA. Photograph: Karen Robinson for the Observer Owens left her job to write her novel, Not Working, which looks at how endless career options leave many feeling overwhelmed Lisa Owens had been working in publishing for six years when it began to dawn on her that she wasn’t as ambitious in her chosen field as friends and colleagues appeared to be in theirs.

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“There was a sense that maybe I didn’t feel that same drive, and I found myself questioning, ‘Is there something else I really want to do?’” she says.

The question proved to be both a catalyst and an inspiration. Owens realised what she really wanted to do was write, and so resigned from her job to embark on the creative writing MA at the University of East Anglia. Her resulting novel – Not Working – explores the idea that today’s 20- and thirtysomethings are lost in a sea of career options that many find paralysing.

“We were raised to think we could do whatever we wanted to do,” Owens explains. “And I think that pressure is quite difficult, because people think, ‘How do I choose when I could do anything? How do I make the right decision?’ It sounds like a very first-world problem, of which I’m completely aware – I have to caveat it with that!”

People would ask what I was writing, and I’d tell them, and they’d say it really rang true to them Owens laughs, as she does a lot throughout our interview. She has a natural warmth and wit that leaps off the pages of Not Working, a novel as insightful about the contemporary dilemmas facing young professionals as it is sharp, incisive and laugh-out-loud funny. And it’s Not Working’s humour that gives its protagonist, Claire Flannery, such a fresh voice. In the novel, Claire gives up her job in marketing to try to find her real vocation, only to struggle locating it. Much of the book – told in vignette form – follows Claire’s job-search, and is filled with blisteringly acute observations of the mundane thoughts and obsessions that fill the lives of people with too much time on their hands.

Owens didn’t, however, always intend her debut novel to be comedic.

She’s a fan of “sparse Irish domestic fiction” and had imagined she’d write something in that vein. But for years she’d been noting down 58 | P a g e

snippets of random observations and when she came to read them collectively, realised they were all in the same, compelling voice.

“There was something about this voice and this world that felt immediate, that felt truthful. People would ask what I was writing, and I’d tell them, and they’d say it really rang true to them.”

The book struck such a chord that within six months of completing the MA – and based on only the first 1,500 words of her manuscript – Owens was signed by agent Jane Finigan. Just over a year later, Not Working was the subject of a fierce eight-way auction and has sold in 10 foreign territories.

“It was an amazing experience because I had no idea that anyone would like it,” Owens reflects. “It was overwhelming to have people be so positive about it.”

Owens cites her influences as American writers such as Lydia Davis, Lorrie Moore and AM Homes “who manage to have that wit but also literariness”. One also senses the impact of Lena Dunham; Not Working could be described as Girls with English eccentricity and a particularly British brand of social awkwardness – there are plenty of cringeworthy set pieces.

“I do like that kind of comedy of manners,” Owens says, laughing. “The Office,Seinfeld, Curb Your Enthusiasm. And I do probably take a perverse pleasure in them.”

For now, a different kind of pleasure awaits the state-school-educated Cambridge graduate. I’m meeting her just four days before she and her husband – the actor and comedian Simon Bird – are expecting their first baby. When I ask whether she’s already working on her second novel, Owens laughs again: “It’s at the back of my mind, but I have other, more immediate, demands on my time. I definitely want to write another book.”

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What does she hope readers will take away from Not Working?

“What I really wanted to tackle was this idea that there’s a dream job out there and that you will find happiness through locating that. Work doesn’t have to equal happiness, work doesn’t have to completely define you. There are lots of other ways of being fulfilled.” HB Not Working will be published by Picador on 21 April, £12.99.

Joanna Cannon: ‘We need to be kinder to the people who stand at the edge of the dancefloor’

Joanna Cannon was inspired by Alan Bennett’s use of words in Talking Heads. Photograph: Karen Robinson for the Observer

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Derbyshire psychiatrist Cannon brings outsiders centre stage in her tale about a disappearance during the heatwave of 1976 “People’s narratives have always fascinated me – ordinary people, not kings and queens. People on the edge of society all have a story about how they got there,” says Joanna Cannon. Eloquent and witty over tea in the Observer offices, she shares her own: “I left school at 15 with one Olevel. I worked in various jobs – when you work in bars, and deliver takeaways, and shovel dog poo you meet people from all walks of life. I listened to their stories. It made me interested in the human psyche and in narrative.”

Growing up in a small town in the Peak District she became interested in how people feel threatened by strangers. Outsiders people the pages of her debut novel, The Trouble With Goats and Sheep. Set in the 70s – “a time of huge change” – it explores themes of bigotry and belonging through the disappearance of Mrs Creasy, and the arrival of a new family, the Kapoors. The word “unbelonger” echoes throughout. Does she feel a sense of “unbelonging”? “Oh, God, every day. I think all writers have felt they’re on the outside looking in, that’s how you learn to observe things.

When the box of proofs arrived, my mother picked one up and said: "Imagine, all that came out of your head!"

“I was an only child and so was my mother. I wasn’t good at joining in.

Some of my best friends were in the pages of books. I had Aslan and Mowgli and Meg. My mum and dad were wise and generous enough to take me to the library and that’s where I found the words. We could never have afforded to buy many books – my mum worked at Woolworth’s and my dad was a plumber. I was like Grace in the novel. I was the first person in our family to go to university. My dad read to me and when we ran out of stories he’d make his own up, which had all sorts of great morals, like most fairy stories. He came from a poor background and left school at 13 to earn a living, but he encouraged me 61 | P a g e

to take the path I wanted and not worry about being a ‘goat’ [‘goat’ is the term for the novel’s outsiders].”

Watching Alan Bennett’s Talking Headsalso “opened a door”: “I could see the power of words and how they can switch your perception and you can understand another human being through them. I wished I had the ability to harness that power and use words so beautifully.”

In her 30s, she went back to college, did her A-levels, applied for medical school and is now a psychiatrist (“I had to work while I was at med school, so I delivered pizzas – I still do now if they’re shortstaffed!”). On the wards the first thing she had to do was certify a death: “I thought I was going under – I’d come home and cry. I thought, I’ve either got to lose that sensitivity or find a way of processing it, so I did what I always do – write.” She wrote in car parks in her lunch break, on night shifts on the rare occasion that everyone was asleep, and still gets up at 3am to write. “We need to be kinder to people who stand at the edge of the dance floor. Mental illness doesn’t get the compassion other illnesses do. Social isolation is so damaging. The judgments we make of people aren’t always right. I wanted to convey that in a story.”

Another lucky twist in Cannon’s tale was receiving an unexpected tax rebate: “I thought I could either have ballroom dancing lessons or write a book. I did an online Faber course. That disciplined me.” Mentoring was also vital: “The writer Kerry Hudson set up WoMentoring: it’s so important for people who don’t have the opportunities, to enable people who have got talent to have a chance to use it.” Cannon loves to play guitar and piano, and when writing the novel made a Spotify playlist full of 70s music: “I have to write in silence – even the sound of my own breathing irritates me. But when I’m thinking, I like music to help me visit certain eras.”

She finds it both “strange and incredibly moving” to hear from people who have read the book, not least her mother: “When the box of proofs arrived, my mother picked one up and said: ‘Imagine, all that came out of your head!’” AS 62 | P a g e

TEN TOP READS OF THE YEAR George RR Martin and Yann Martel head the authors releasing new material Critics are looking forward to a bumper year for books in 2016, with new releases from several esteemed authors on the cards. Here are ten titles to look out for...

Swing Time, Zadie Smith Zadie Smith's forthcoming novel, Swing Time, is about "two brown girls", according to the author. It's the tale of two bi-racial dancers who grow up together in a poor London neighbourhood but diverge in adulthood in the 1990s. Where one follows her dream of turning professional, the other becomes a personal assistant to a pop star.

"It's a close but complicated childhood friendship that ends abruptly in their early 20s, never to be revisited, but never quite forgotten, either," says publisher Hamish Hamilton, which describes the novel as "dazzlingly energetic and deeply human".

Performing a reading of two chapters of the book at the US's Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Smith intriguingly said the idea of conspiracy – which she sees as "a symbol of a yearning for knowledge" in the absence of a formal educational structure – is an underlying theme throughout the novel.

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Autumn, Ali Smith The first in a four-part series of books by the How to Be Both author, has been described by its publisher as "a stripped-branches take on popular culture" and a "meditation, in a world growing ever more bordered and exclusive, on richness and worth".

The four novels from Smith, who won the 2015 Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction, are expected to be named Autumn, Winter, Spring and Summer as part of a seasonal motif. Publisher Hamish Hamilton said the books would be separate yet interconnected and cyclical, "exploring what time is, how we experience it and the recurring markers in the shapes our lives take and in our ways with narrative".

Out in August The Winds of Winter, George RR Martin The next instalment of George RR Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series was due out before the sixth season of Game of Thrones hit television screens on 24 April. However, the author has confessed he will not be able to finish it in time. "For months now I have wanted nothing so much as to be able to say, 'I have completed and delivered The Winds of Winter on or before the last day of 2015.' But the book's not done," wrote Martin on his blog in January. It is not clear when the novel will be published, with the author warning he was still "months away" from finishing it.

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Television viewers are well acquainted with key characters such as sharp-tongued dwarf Tyrion Lannister, Cersei Lannister, the king's scheming mother, and the "Mother of Dragons" Daenerys Targaryen, who wants to retake the Iron Throne. The novels also include scores of other characters who never made the cut for Game of Thrones and Martin has hinted that some of these could play a much bigger role in the sixth book.

TBC The Noise of Time, Julian Barnes In his first novel after The Sense of an Ending, which won the Man Booker Prize in 2011, Julian Barnes recounts the life of Dmitri Shostakovich, the famed Soviet composer who struggled all his life with the Communist Party's absolute rule over his music - in a decade, he went from a celebrated cultural icon to being officially denounced for being too "Western". Barnes has written an ambitious book, says The Independent, while Guardian describes it as a "complex meditation on the power, limitations and likely endurance of art".

Out now Here I Am, Jonathan Safran Foer Yet another highly anticipated book, Here I Am is Jonathan Safran Foer's first novel since 2005 and there's already a lot of hype around it.

Set in Washington DC, the novel follows the implosion of an AmericanJewish family over the course of a month, as divorce and tragedy take hold of their lives. Meanwhile, overseas, a massive earthquake rocks the Middle East and Israel's political foundations. Foer's editor Eric Chinski says Here I Am is full of "high-wire inventiveness and intensity of imagination".

Out in September

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The High Mountains of Portugal, Yann Martel This is Yann Martel's fourth novel and it already has everyone buzzing.

It's not hard to understand why - he won the 2002 Man Booker Prize for his breakthrough title Life of Pi, which became a Hollywood film.

Starting in Lisbon in 1904, The High Mountains of Portugal tells the story of a young man called Tomas, who finds an old journal hinting at a deep secret. The book weaves three different stories into a road-trip across four centuries and two continents, exploring themes of love, loss and heartbreak along the way. It could turn out to be a serious awards contender – even those who weren't pleased with Martel's last book, Beatrice and Virgil, are putting this on their must-read lists.

Out now Thus Bad Begins, Javier Marias In 1980s Spain, Juan de Vere, the assistant to famous film-maker Eduardo Muriel, finds himself trapped in an unsettling love triangle. As Muriel's wife flits in and out of the book -and other people's beds - Juan is tasked by the jealous husband to find out all he can about one of her mysterious old friends, who seems to be inexplicably linked to the Franco regime. Javier Marias has a knack for exploring disquieting relationships and this looks to be a similar affair.

Out now What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours, Helen Oyeyemi With five novels under her belt, as well as a Granta nomination for Best Young British Novelist of 2013, Helen Oyeyemi is one of Britain's new powerful voices. What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours is her first short-story collection, inspired by fairy tales and dark secrets, all magically reworked throughout the book.

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The Pier Falls, by Mark Haddon Mark Haddon, of The Curious Incident of a Dog in the Night-time fame, will have his first collection of short stories published this May. The tales touch upon themes such as war, abandonment and natural disasters, all leading to a death of sorts, although his wife apparently asked him to write at least one where no one dies. Haddon says the stories "are bound together by an empathy for sometimes unlovable people in difficult situations". If your interest is piqued, you can read the first of these, The Pier Falls, in the New Statesman.

Barkskins, Annie Proulx Brokeback Mountain author Annie Proulx has spent ten years working on Barkskins and it looks set to become a bestseller even before publication. Set in 17th-century New France and reaching all the way to China and New Zealand, the book tells the story of two settlers and their trials and sorrows. The book has already been picked up by Scott Rudin Productions and a mini-series set to premiere globally in 171 countries and 45 languages is planned. Could it be as successful as Brokeback Mountain?

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CANCER-FIGHTING CULINARY SPICES AND HERBS Spices and herbs have long been used for medicinal purposes, such as fighting indigestion and other digestive problems. Although science is uncertain about the direct benefits of consuming certain spices and herbs with regard to protecting against and fighting cancer and its side effects, their indirect beneficial effects may be more easily recognized.

One such effect is their unique flavor profile, which ranges from strong to mild, with only small amounts needed to create a whole new taste sensation. When cancer-related loss of appetite and taste changes occur, which can lead to undesirable weight loss, adding herbs and spices to your cooking may help stimulate your taste buds and reinvigorate your appetite.

1

2

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Ginger

Rosemary

Turmeric

Ginger has long been used in folk medicine to treat everything from

Rosemary is a hearty, woody Mediterranean herb that has

Turmeric is an herb in the ginger family; it's one of the ingredients

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colds to constipation. Ginger can be used fresh, in powdered form (ginger spice), or candied.

Although the flavor between fresh and ground ginger is significantly different, they can be substituted for one another in many recipes.

In general, you can replace 1/8 teaspoon of ground ginger with 1 tablespoon of fresh grated ginger, and vice versa.

Consuming ginger and ginger products, in addition to taking any anti-nausea medications as prescribed, may provide some comfort for a queasy stomach during cancer treatment.

needlelike leaves and is a good source of antioxidants. Because of its origin, rosemary is commonly used in Mediterranean cooking and you’ll often see it included as a primary ingredient in Italian seasonings. You can use it to add flavor to soups, tomato-based sauces, bread, and high-protein foods like poultry, beef, and lamb.

Rosemary may help with detoxification; taste changes; indigestion, flatulence, and other digestive problems; and loss of appetite. Try drinking up to 3 cups of rosemary leaf tea daily for help with these problems.

4 Chile peppers Chile peppers contain capsaicin, a compound that can relieve pain.

When capsaicin is applied topically to the skin, it causes the release of a chemical called substance P. Upon continued use, the amount of

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5 Garlic Garlic belongs to theAllium class of bulb-shaped plants, which also includes chives, leeks, onions, shallots, and scallions. Garlic has a high sulfur content and is also a good source of arginine,

that make many curries yellow and gives it its distinctive flavor.

Curcumin appears to be the active compound in turmeric. This compound has demonstrated antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties, potentially protecting against cancer development.

Turmeric extract supplements are currently being studied to see if they have a role in preventing and treating some cancers, including colon, prostate, breast, and skin cancers. Although results appear promising, they have largely been observed in laboratory and animal studies, so it’s unclear whether these results will ultimately translate to humans.

6 Peppermint Peppermint is a natural hybrid cross between water mint and spearmint. It has been used for thousands of years as a digestive aid to relieve gas, indigestion, cramps, and diarrhea. It may also help with symptoms of irritable

substance P eventually produced in that area decreases, reducing pain in the area.

oligosaccharides, flavonoids, and selenium, all of which may be beneficial to health. Garlic’s But this doesn’t mean you should active compound, called allicin, gives it its go rubbing chile peppers where characteristic odor and is you have pain. Chile peppers need produced when garlic bulbs are to be handled very carefully, chopped, crushed, or otherwise because they can cause burns if they come in contact with the skin. damaged.

Several studies suggest that Therefore, if you have pain and increased garlic intake reduces the want to harness the power of chile risk of cancers of the stomach, peppers, ask your oncologist or colon, esophagus, pancreas, and physician about prescribing a breast. It appears that garlic may capsaicin cream. It has shown protect against cancer through pretty good results with regard to numerous mechanisms, including treatingneuropathic pain (sharp, by inhibiting bacterial infections shocking pain that follows the and the formation of cancerpath of a nerve) after surgery for causing substances, promoting cancer.

DNA repair, and inducing cell Another benefit of chile peppers is death. Garlic supports that they may help with detoxification and may also indigestion. Seems support the immune system and counterintuitive, right? But some help reduce blood pressure. studies have shown that ingesting small amounts of cayenne may reduce indigestion.

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bowel syndrome and food poisoning. Peppermint appears to calm the muscles of the stomach and improve the flow of bile, enabling food to pass through the stomach more quickly.

If your cancer or treatment is causing an upset stomach, try drinking a cup of peppermint tea.

Many commercial varieties are on the market, or you can make your own by boiling dried peppermint leaves in water or adding fresh leaves to boiled water and letting them steep for a few minutes until the tea reaches the desired strength.

Peppermint can also soothe a sore throat. For this reason, it is also sometimes used to relieve the painful mouth sores that can occur from chemotherapy and radiation, or is a key ingredient in treatments for this condition.

Chamomile is thought to have medicinal benefits and has been used throughout history to treat a variety of conditions. Chamomile may help with sleep issues; if sleep is a problem for you, try drinking a strong chamomile tea shortly before bedtime.

Chamomile mouthwash has also been studied for preventing and treating mouth sores from chemotherapy and radiation therapy. Although the results are mixed, there is no harm in giving it a try, provided your oncologist is not opposed. If given the green light, simply make the tea, let it cool, and rinse and gargle as often as desired.

Chamomile tea may be another way to manage digestive problems, including stomach cramps. Chamomile appears to help relax muscle contractions, particularly the smooth muscles of the intestines. 

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