Man Up by Rebecca Asher (Vintage, £9.99)
As mother to a boy and a girl, Rebecca Asher has noticed how she herself has sometimes treated them differently for displaying the same behaviour. Her personal experience helps to inform this examination of the influences that mould boys into men. Chief among them seems to be the assumption that the male of the species is emotionally uncomplicated and superficial, and numerous studies have confirmed that, at home and at school, girls are allowed to display a far wider emotional range (barring anger) than boys. The statistics for violence, exclusion from school, criminality, alcoholism and suicide show the toxic consequences. Asher also points to methodological flaws in research purporting to prove hardwired differences between the sexes, and tackles such issues as increasingly gendered toys and the pressures exerted by the vogue for chiselled physiques. But it’s likely that the principal value of Asher’s book will be to create awareness among parents about the unconscious ways they’re conditioning their children.
The Lost Musicians by William Heinesen (Dedalus, £9.99)
It’s said that Heinesen, who died in 1991, could have been a Nobel Laureate but declined to be considered because he wrote in Danish (his mother’s tongue) rather than the language of his home, the Faroe Islands. He was, nevertheless, a great chronicler of the Faroes, and this delightful novel from 1950 will definitely resonate with Scots readers who enjoy stories set in Shetland, Orkney and the Hebrides. Set in what is now the Faroes’ capital, Torshavn, at the dawn of the 20th century, it’s basically a series of interconnected vignettes revolving around a group of amateur musicians, the Boma Quartet, who strive to make life bearable for their fellow islanders despite attempts to thwart them by the more puritanical members of the community. With walk-on parts for local characters like Pontus the Rose, Ura the Brink and the Crab King, it embraces fights, gossip, unrequited love, death and all the usual business of small communities with charm and humour.
Mistress And Commancer by Amelia Dalton (Sandstone, £8.99)
On the day of her father-in-law’s funeral in 1989, Amelia Dalton got a call to say that the boat she and her husband had owned for all of two days was sinking and it was up to her to deal with it. Mistress And Commander is the story of how “a middle-class Yorkshire girl with a background in antiques and cooking” scaled the steep learning curve necessary to convert an 85-foot Arctic trawler into a vessel fit to take passengers on trips to St Kilda. A visit to that island six years earlier had planted the seed, but it was only when their friend, the impressively capable skipper Cubby, was rendered boatless that she and her husband took the plunge and bought a vessel themselves. This account details the immense commitment and heroic amount of work involved, summoning the experience up so vividly that you’ll tip your hat to Dalton’s tenacity while vowing never to embark on anything similar yourself.
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