The adventure leads to flight, emigration and a new land, a new language and the pursuit of idealism or happiness – in Liverpool. But what of the stories from the old country; how do they shape and form the next generations who have heard the well-worn tales? You may also opt to downgrade to Standard Digital, a robust journalistic offering that fulfils many user’s needs. Compare Standard and Premium Digital here.

Hexham Book Festival is a Not For Profit CIC and delivers an annual festival that takes place in and around Hexham each year. Linda Grant’s latest novel The Story of the Forest is, at it’s heart, a family saga. Following several generations of the same Jewish family over the course of a century, the novel follows their moves from Riga to Liverpool and, later, to London.This was I felt a stronger book – and interestingly one which has the idea of storytelling at its heart: in this case one which tells, with a lightness of touch and brevity of style, the story of much of the 20th Century from the viewpoint of a family of Jewish emigres to Liverpool. I had previously read her 2017 Women’s Prize shortlisted “The Dark Circle” which I felt was the weakest on the shortlist (and the weakest of the 9 longlist books I read that year) – a book with an interesting societal/historical theme (around pre-antibiotic TB and Britain on the cusp of change from the 1940s to the 1950s) but where for me the storytelling of plot and characters failed to bring it to life as a novel. Linda Grant began her writing career as a journalist and didn’t publish her first novel until she was in her 40s. Since then, her novels have won major literary prizes and her latest, The Story of the Forest, was shortlisted for this year’s Orwell Prize for Political Fiction. The novel is a powerful reminder of the many reasons people move, the difficulties of integrating in a new environment, and how generational memories shape our identities. Golden Age by Wang Xiaobo regarded as one of China’s modern masterpieces. The novel is a smart sature of the Cultural Revolution which was published in 1992 but only now available in its first full English translation . Xialou Guo, the award winning author of A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers, talks to Alex about the Wang Xiaobo's radical and unique style of writing. The novel’s language evolves with the period it covers, from the simple language of a folk tale to the coolly wry prose of a mid-century novelist, such as Elizabeth Taylor, and then to a looser, more dialogue-heavy style as social conventions ease, marriages break down, and Valium is ratcheted to a frightening roar. Throughout the novel, the characters concern themselves with the ordinary preoccupations of ordinary people: they marry, acquire homes and businesses, have children, and let those children go. They anglicize their names and slowly, over generations, become more integrated into English society.

And the story telling of immigrants is another key and more overt theme – the ability for example in English society to invent yourself outside of pre-determined class restrictions, but while also knowing you never really belong. The novel shifts tone when Paula is willingly seduced by two unscrupulous men and begins to hang out in cool Soho. One is a presenter on radio; the other, a film producer, is her new boss. But it is not to be. She is “rescued” by her brothers and reluctantly returned to the bosom of her family in Liverpool. But the question the book asks – as per the opening quote to my review – is why there are no heroine equivalents of these folkloric legends.A grain merchant’s family uproot themselves from their life in Riga and are scattered. Like seeds on the wind, some will make it to fertile ground and others will find themselves in inhospitable terrain, or buffeted here and there by unpredictable currents, some destructive, some surprisingly helpful. Linda Grant’s ninth novel continues her exploration of how chance, contingency and unintended consequences intersect with history’s larger movements; how personal narratives are shaped not merely by what we think of as inescapable forces and events, but by moments of randomness and whimsy. Her characters are, as ever, mobile not only in a geographical sense, but in the way that their desires and motivations shift and adapt, influenced by memories of the past and intimations of the future. The insights into the history and culture of Jewish people is fascinating and poignant in places, but again it feels glossed over which lessens the impact these elements could have had. The missing family members' fates are tossed out in a mere sentence, which seems surprising, given the time spent on minor details elsewhere. It sounds like a serious and heavy multi-generational sage? It is an ambitious book, but it was not a heavy read at all. It’s actually fast-paced and humorous. The dry sense of humour reminder me of Lessons In Chemistry a little bit. It was very easy to read for a historical fiction!

Mina and Jossel never make it to New York because of the First World War, and instead stay put in Liverpool. What follows is a highly absorbing depiction of life in Liverpool's small Jewish community across the changing social mores of 20th century, including marriage and divorce, business and religious observance. We also follow Mina's daughter Paula to London in the late 1940s, where she works first as a secretary and then a continuity girl for a small film company. The threads of the rest of the novel begin to splinter, but are most clearly focused on the lives of Mina and her family in suburban Liverpool. The century skips past briskly, with the hardship and horrors most likely endured by the Latvian Mendels largely left to our imagination. The Liverpool strand of the family endures incidences of pernicious racism, but their concerns on a day to day basis are largely more mundane ones, of family and community. And those characters do, indeed, develop and change as the novel progresses. I found myself rapidly warming to Mina and her family, and becoming genuinely invested in their story. As Jewish immigrants, we follow them as they gradually assimilate into British life and culture whilst also remaining at the periphery of it, forever connected with their past and the homeland they left behind. The novel also takes in the pogroms and wars in Latvia, and the devastating effect that this had upon the Jewish community. The family’s story also touches upon several other major geo-political events, with younger brother Itzik (very much the villian of this fairy story) cropping up in an unusual – and controversial – position later on in the book. One of the most impressive elements of the novel is the way in which, in an understated non-showy way, the narrative style of the book changes over time – reflecting both the ages of the characters and the norms of the society and time in which they are based – starting as fairy-tale, later a rather restrained English style post-war novel, and then a first party meta-fictional finish (with more gradual variations in between).He remembered Vladimir Propp and the lecture in London to which he had enticed his beautiful niece. The lecturer had spoken at great length about the structure of stories. But I also have a story, he thought. He had told it several times to his handlers. Why here, they had asked him, and why now? To which there was no answer besides, 'Once I lived with my brothers and sisters in a good merchant's house in Riga not far from the port, and one day my little sister went out to the forest and our family was undone?

We follow the characters through critical points of their lives and many historical milestones as well. It is a story of family and roots, but I liked that it raised questions on narratives of history. We see what we want to see and how we want to tell a story. Not always the truths. But does it matter in the end? We always have the beginning and that led us here where we are. I'm just suggesting what Mummy always said, that you tell the authorities what they want to hear, Paula says. 'It's only common sense, self-preservation. They were immigrants, no one knew them, they could say what they liked. When you're uprooted like they were, you can be anything you want. Who's going to say otherwise?The end of the novel does little to tie up the many threads created, instead emphasising the complexity of family history, even before the grand narrative of the twentieth century is taken into account. A younger descendant in the modern day begins to explore the Mendel family history, and even some of the foundational stories that have been threaded through the book are called into question. History is presented as a shifting thing, a collection of stories we tell each other that help us get through difficult and complex times but never point to a definitive truth. Fairy tales are another key theme – one done a little more overtly. A pivotal scene takes place at a lecture to which Itzik invites Paula and at which a famous researcher says: Howard Jacobson delivering a lecture on Why We Need The Novel and talking to Philip Dodd about his dystopian novel J