Paradise by AL Kennedy

"Almost forty and with nothing to show for it, Hannah Luckraft is starting to notice that her lifestyle is not entirely sustainable: her subconscious is turning against her, her soul is a little unwell. Her family is wounded, her friends are odd, her body is not as reliable as it once was and her drinking is frankly out of hand. Robert, a dissolute dentist, appears to offer a love she can understand, but he may only be one more symptom of the problem she must cure. From the north-east of Scotland to Dublin, from London to Montreal, to Budapest and onwards, Hannah travels in search of the ultimate altered state: the one where she can be happy - her paradise"

Think I need to read it again, don't think I understood it but her language is so wonderful. About a girl / woman called Hannah from her first person perspective, she's an alcoholic and Kennedy describes a level of addiction I've never experienced but the reaching for Paradise is something that is so at the heart of me, I always feel hurt when I read Kennedy's writing becuase it accesses a part of me I without meaning to carefully keep supressed because if I didn't I would never stop crying and that is why Hannah drinks, life cuts her as deeply as me and she drinks to black the pain of the wonder out. Utterly brilliant bit about Jimmy Shand which she read out when I saw her a couple of years ago when Indelible Acts came out.

Blitzcat by Robert Westall

AZ: "She made her way down the cliff, and on to the beach. At the edge of the waves, she stopped, shaking her wet paws. She knew that somewhere ahead was her person, but far, far away. She miaowed plaintively; stood staring at the moving blur of uncrossable sea. She led the way to safety, out of the blazing hell of blitzed Coventry. People touched her for luck; feared her as an omen of disaster. Wherever she went, she changed lives...From her beginning to her end she never wavered. She was the Blitzcat"

Realised when reading this have read it before but don't mind because very good, about a cat called Lord Gort psi tracking her (yes her) master during WWII and the people she meets and affects, written in third person but with a real feeling of dwelling in the cat's mind and with powerful descriptions of the bombing destruction of Coventry, life in Britain during WWII and what it was psychologically to be alive at that time, grieving, fearful, damaged, lonely, worn out, living with the very real threat of invasion at the time of Dunkirk/kerque.

Tanglewreck by Jeanette Winterson

AZ: "Time is big business, and whoever gets control of time controls life as we know it! In a house called Tanglewreck lives a girl called Silver and her guardian Mrs Rokabye. Unbeknown to Silver there is a family treasure in the form of a seventeenth-century watch called the Timekeeper, and this treasure holds the key to the mysterious and frightening changes in time. When Silver goes on the run to try and protect herself and the Timekeeper"

Was interested in this because I like Winterson's fiction anyway and my mum brought Cj Winterson's book The King of Capri which is beautifully illustrated and has a lovely mythical quality. Tanglewreck is like Pullman but also has those lovely mythic qualities, deliniating the connections between old and new magic (science) and raises the interesting question of the implications of the increasingly frenetic pace of 21st century life.

137: "In New York City the tops of the buildings tear the sky. When the snow falls the tops of the buildings look like mountain peaks. The most important people in the city live and work as high as they can on their man-made mountains. When they want to travel, a helicopter lands on the roof and carries them away, just as enchanters on glass mountains whistled for eagles."

Skellig by David Almond

AZ: "When a move to a new house coincides with his baby sister's illness, Michael's world seems suddenly lonely and uncertain. Then, one Sunday afternoon, he stumbles into the old, ramshackle garage of his new home, and finds something magical. A strange creature - part owl, part angel, a being who needs Michael's help if he is to survive. With his new friend Mina, Michael nourishes Skellig back to health, while his baby sister languishes in the hospital. But Skellig is far more than he at first appears, and as he helps Michael breathe life into his tiny sister, Michael's world changes for ever . . ."

Skellig is a creature trying not to be an angel. A baby clinging to lfe that you want to live as badly as the young boy narrator does. A reminder that although many times I wish I was 'ordinary' I don't have to be:

"They say that shoulder blades are where your wings were, when you were an angel ... They say
that they're where you wings will grow again one day"

"Sometimes I think she's never quite left Heaven and never quite made it all the way here to Earth."