The third and final in a series of articles on the novels shortlisted for the 2015 Desmond Elliott Prize discusses A Song For Issy Bradley, written by my now-Twitter-pal Carys Bray. Spoilers as always.
I picked up Bray’s novel in a library. My first library book since university, I stared at the cover and decided to read a few chapters before I checked it out and made any real commitment.
Instantly I knew this was a very different book to the other two shortlisters I’d reviewed. The content was drastically different. It was less female-centric, for starters, and it was going to teach me about something I really had very little grounding in before. The Mormon faith.
The religion and its practices almost take on a character of itself in the novel. You see how it behaves and what its features are, how it affects people – whether it’s a hero or an anti-hero is open to interpretation. Does it save or capture? Who can tell?
The thing that shone through in this novel is the first-hand experience of it all. The fears, experiences and thought-process all seem to come from a very real place. So when the worst happens, my grief to what was a fictional event, felt very, very real. And when expressing that fact on twitter, I got a very real response from the woman responsible.
Great community spirit Carys.
What I liked so much about this was how I really wanted these characters to be OK. I didn’t feel particularly strongly that I liked or didn’t like any of them, I just felt the human will of community driving my wish that they’d be OK, they’d make it through their grief and their heartbreak and they’d be a family again. And, more than that, how I was fascinated by how they dealt with it in terms of their faith.
I finished Bray’s the quickest out of all the Desmond Elliot shortlisters, and that stands as a testament to how much I enjoyed it. Touchingly sensitive and emotionally compelling, A Song For Issy Bradly was my favourite of all three.
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