Crossword

Suppliers of both new and pre-loved vinyl, official t-shirts, merchandise and memorabilia. Come visit and “Try before you buy”. The Beat & Track, The Old Shambles, South Street, Sherborne, DT9 3LN 07730 356719

thebeatandtrack@icloud.com www.thebeatandtrack.co.uk

JULY SOLUTIONS

ACROSS 1. Imitator (8) 5. Among (4) 9. Card game (5) 10. Requests the presence of (7) 11. Prompts (7) 12. Armature of an electric motor (5) 13. Tangled (of hair) (6) 14. Floor covering (6) 17. Loop with a running knot (5) 19. Design style of the 1920s and 1930s (3,4) 20. Provoked; encouraged (7) 21. Dramatic musical work (5) 22. Clothing (4) 23. Gusty (8) DOWN 1. Carrying out trials (13) 2. Not tidy (7) 3. Agreements; plans (12) 4. Serving no functional purpose (6) 6. Short choral composition (5) 7. Available for use as needed; optional (13) 8. Unnecessarily careful (12) 15. Go before (7) 16. One who wantonly destroys property (6) 18. Academy Award (5)

Jonathan Stones, Sherborne Literary Society

Songbirds by Christy Lefteri (Manilla Press 2021), £14.99 hardcover Sherborne Times Reader Offer Price of £12.99 from Winstone’s Books

The richly decorated front cover of this novel is illustrated, not by the migratory songbirds which form part of its main plot, but by a bee-eater, which may be an ironic reference to the novel ‘The Beekeeper of Aleppo’ which brought the author to worldwide fame, and of which this book is the follow-up.

The backdrop has moved from Syria to Cyprus, where Petra, a young widow, and her daughter live in an apartment in Nicosia. On the floor above them lives Yiannis, divorced and childless, who has been financially ruined by the stock market crash of 2008, and who supplements his meagre income from picking mushrooms by poaching songbirds which migrate in their thousands through Cyprus on their way to and from Africa. The process by which the birds are caught, dispatched and sold to restaurants on the island is described in an elegantly vivid detail which may not be for the fainthearted.

Into this mix has arrived some nine years before, Petra’s live-in maid Nisha, also a young widow, who has left her own mother and daughter in Sri Lanka to find work in the West as the only way she can support them and to provide for her daughter’s education. Nisha communicates with her daughter by the use of Yiannis’ iPad, an activity of which to her subsequent selfreproof, Petra has been oblivious through her previous indifference towards Nisha’s own circumstances. Yiannis has fallen in love with Nisha and has proposed to her, in the course of which he has also confessed to the illegal source of his previously undisclosed income. It is at this point in the story that Nisha disappears overnight, and the rest of the novel centres on Yiannis and Petra’s searches for Nisha, and in so doing, their journeys towards self-discovery and growing sympathy for the army of semivisible female domestic workers in their midst. Petra must also come to terms with her previous failure to relate to her daughter, and to rebuild that relationship in the aftermath of Nisha’s disappearance. The novel therefore is concerned both with the social justice issues arising out of the human trafficking by western societies of women such as Nisha, and with the effects which her disappearance create in the relations between the main characters. The mechanism by which the author pursues her layered intentions lies to a considerable extent in the design of the chapters, which alternate between Yiannis and Petra speaking to the reader in the first person. These are in turn interspersed with short third-person chapters which describe, at first obscurely, but with gradually increasing ominousness, a decomposing hare lying beside a contaminated lake on the island. The author extracts considerable poignancy and pathos from this interesting and unusual technique, leading to a denouement which carries with it a sense of tragic inevitability.

“A beautifully crafted novel that sits at the intersection of race and class, that flags the frank truth of the life of migrant workers for whom a flight to freedom can become the most finely woven trap.” Jodi Picoult

sherborneliterarysociety.com

'Independent Bookseller of the Year 2016’