The Story of the Forest: Shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction 2023

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I thought I would be dnf-ing this as I trudged through the first few chapters. I didn’t find young Mina and Jossel compelling or likeable and thought the writing style, further faulted by some abounding typos, was stilted and arching for a resonance and depth of meaning it failed to achieve. However I found that some of the fault laid in my own expectations, as I went into the book thinking it would be mystical, poetic and bucolic and it delivered a very small amount of that. 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. 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.

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! A Baltic forest in 1913, Soho and the suburbs of Liverpool and the Jewish community that grows up there are the settings for Linda Grant's new novel The Story of the Forest. She joins presenter John Gallagher, Rachel Lichtenstein and Julia Pascal for a conversation about writing and Jewish identity in the North West as we also hear about Julia Pascal's play Manchester Girlhood and look at the re-opening of the Manchester Jewish Museum with curator Alex Cropper . 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. I wished I felt a stronger emotional reaction to the ending, but all in all I enjoyed this book and there was no dull moment in the book. Highly recommend this not just to historical fiction fans but anyone looking for an engaging read that is not too big.In her latest novel, “The Story of the Forest,” Linda Grant takes readers on a journey through 20th-century Liverpool, exploring the lives of Jewish immigrants and their descendants. Grant’s writing is a testament to her skill as a chronicler of social history, and her ability to capture the texture of a particular time and place is on full display here. Dr Rachel Lichtenstein is a writer, curator who teaches at Manchester Metropolitan University and is an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Manchester’s Centre for Jewish Studies

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. The Story of the Forest is, however, also a novel about stories and story-telling and, specifically, the way in which family stories are passed down through generations, and the mutations that they undergo along the way. Specifically, the story being told is the titular story of the forest in which 14-year-old Mina Mendel, wandering through the forest as if a child in a fairy tale, encounters a group of young Bolsheviks and, eventually, secures a kiss from one of them. 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. Most pressingly, it acts as an impetus for her older and seemingly wiser brother Jossel to propose the family emigrate to the US. As it turns out, only Jossel and Mina set out on the journey, leaving their siblings and parents to uncertain fates. They find themselves stranded, initially temporarily, in Liverpool by the outbreak of war, but as a Jewish community of similarly placed immigrants begins to form in the suburbs, they ultimately decide to remain in the UK. So begins a journey that sees Mina and her older brother Jossel leaving their family for the New World. They make it as far as Liverpool before an unexpected marriage, the outbreak of World War I, and a second marriage proposal get in the way of their American Dream, and the book then follows them and their descendants as they navigate life in twentieth-century Britain.The travel via England but their onwards passage to America is stalled (and then postponed indefinitely) by pecuniary and global circumstances (Jossel has no money and war breaks out) – note that the ideas of thwarted ambitions, of uncompleted or failed journeys and of the passage of time turning interim half-hearted states at odds with an ultimate goal into permanent ones, are all ones that recur across the novel.

One of the things I enjoyed most about The Story of the Forest was the way in which the narrative-style changes as the family itself develops. Beginning as a fairy story, complete with a sense of child-like wonder and dream-like unreality, the narrative style gradually shifts to reflect the changes in the family and their circumstances. By the end of the book, I was no longer reading a traditional fairy story but a contemporary novel with metafictional elements. That might sound like a slightly pretentious literary device but Linda Grant handles these shifts in tone and style so deftly that they never interfere in the central narrative. You notice that the book has changed but, as if by magic, feel that it’s just because the characters have changed. 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?

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In 1913, 14-year-old Mina Mendel, naive and inquisitive, goes foraging for mushrooms in a forest on the edge of the Baltic Sea. She’s the daughter of a prosperous Jewish family living in Riga, Latvia. In the forest, she meets a gang of boisterous young men who claim to be Bolsheviks: “agents of the coming revolution”. She finds it exhilarating to dance with them. 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). 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. Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads' database with this name. See this thread for more information. She returned to England in 1985, beginning her career as a journalist writing for the Guardian. Her first published book was a non-fiction work, Sexing the Millennium: A Political History of the Sexual Revolution (1993).