A Still Life
Josie George Bloomsbury £16.99
If you’ve been suffering from lockdown cabin fever, spare a thought for Josie George. Since early childhood, the first-time author has lived with chronic illness that leaves her unable to walk more than a dozen steps without courting exhaustion and a barrage of excruciating symptoms.
She’s now in her late 30s and her condition continues to baffle doctors, who over the years have offered diagnoses from lupus to mental health disorders.
Her dynamic memoir is about far more than sickness, however. Written largely from her bed in Staffordshire, it splices her intent to document a year of her life, beginning on January 1, 2018, with flashbacks charting her self-discovery, moving through an abusive teenage relationship and early failed marriage to single motherhood and her determination to scrape a living from her passions.
If you’ve been suffering from lockdown cabin fever, spare a thought for Josie George (above). Since early childhood, the first-time author has lived with chronic illness
As winter gives way to spring, unexpected romance renews her sense of what’s possible.
There are, inevitably, bouts of crushing fatigue and continuing pain. ‘Chronic illness is a terrible narrator,’ she notes drolly. But desire, birdsong and lessons on learning to love the body you’re in crowd these pages, as do knitting, hope and friendship.
Crucially, there is nothing woolly about George’s insistence on finding joy in the everyday. As she explains: ‘I don’t think the purpose of mindfulness is to feel reassured or relaxed or to distract you conveniently from fear. I think its purpose is to wake you up, to make you brave and powerful, to make you a revolutionary who wants to live differently, act differently.’
This book would always have found a loyal readership – its vivid prose and meticulous, kindly candour ensure it. But coming now, at a time when record numbers have been struggling with their own ill-health and when many more have been forced to slow down, it feels like a manifesto for recalibrating.
Notes From Deep Time: A Journey Through Our Past And Future Worlds
Helen Gordon Profile £20
Rating: 
In a world where we are all essentially housebound for what feels like an interminable age, it’s a real treat to travel through space and time. To be reminded of the world’s immensity, of its infinite capacity for change and possibility puts humanity’s current situation into context as the tiniest pinprick of a moment – which will pass.
This is a beautiful and deftly written book, essentially on geology. Not the sexiest subject; even though I’m one of those people who stop to admire rock strata on holiday, I know rocks aren’t for everyone.
However, with considerable skill, sound research and lovely sprinklings of literary and human insight, Helen Gordon has elevated what might be a dry subject for some to the appropriate level of awe-inspiring reverence that deep time deserves.
What exactly is deep time? We aren’t talking about 10,000 years, or even 100,000 years – these are mere nanoseconds on a geological timescale. We are talking about millions and billions of years.
It might sound beyond the reach of the human imagination, but the echoes of deep time are never far away. In fact, you can see back two million years in the sandy gravel of a building site on Cambridge Heath Road in East London, 55 million in the London clay beneath that, up to 100 million in the chalk of the North Downs.
Gordon takes us scrambling down cliffs to reach Siccar Point, a headland in Berwickshire that gave 18th Century geologist James Hutton evidence to argue for ‘deep time’ – that the Earth was much older than then thought.
We also join a ‘fault-finder’ on a tour of Hollywood looking for everyday evidence of the San Andreas fault; and we walk with Gordon through sunny Naples, examining the stonework of beautiful, historic buildings.
As well as providing for buildings, and being the literal bedrock of our existence, geology has many other contributions to human life. For example, the first comprehensive geological map of Britain by William Smith in 1815 helped spur the Industrial Revolution by revealing seams of coal.
On a more individual level, it can even have forensic uses. In 2002, the type of microfossils found in a fragment of chalk helped to convict Soham murderer Ian Huntley – geologists were able to link the chalk found under Huntley’s wheel arch to a farm track where he said he had never been.
Fascinating stuff, but it’s Gordon’s background as a literary writer that takes Notes From Deep Time to the next level. She has imbued geological tales with a beauty and humanity.
In the far reaches of north-west Scotland, ancient boulders (a mind-boggling three billion years old) break ‘through the grass and bracken like the backs of grey whales in a green sea’.
As a pregnant Gordon sits on these rocks, thoughts of the beating heart of her unborn child segue to one of the earliest hearts found in a 520 million-year-old arthropod from the same geological time as the quartzite hilltops that surround her.
Life resonates through the ages.
Shaoni Bhattacharya-Woodward