Books from the Margin April Book: The Home Child by Liz Berry
Bookclub Dates for your Diary
I’ve long been a fan of Liz Berry’s work. Her Forward Prize winning collection The Black Country has been a collection of poetry that I have returned and returned to. Her use of dialect and celebration of her roots through language is particularly interesting to me, as someone with a strong regional accent, and I have often used her poems in workshops to highlight the beauty of language and the enjoyability of poetry at the pleasure point - the place where the cadence and rhythm, the roll of words in the mouth and in the mind make a poem sing to you, before you’ve begun to intellectualise it.
The Home Child is something new: a novel in verse. From the Penguin’s website:
In 1908, Eliza Showell, twelve years old and newly orphaned, boards a ship that will carry her from the slums of the Black Country to rural Nova Scotia. She will never return to Britain or see her family again. She is a Home Child, one of thousands of British children sent to Canada to work as indentured farm labourers and domestic servants.
In Nova Scotia, Eliza's world becomes a place where ordinary things are transfigured into treasures - a red ribbon, the feel of a foal's mane, the sound of her name on someone else's lips. With nothing to call her own, the wild beauty of Cape Breton is the only solace Eliza has - until another Home Child, a boy, comes to the farm and changes everything.
Inspired by the true story of Liz Berry's great aunt, this spellbinding novel in verse is an exquisite portrait of a girl far from home.
This book is beautiful from the outside in - the cover design is sublime - with thick, tactile paper quality and a flash of crimson on the inside cover. It’s illustrated with photographs and woodcut drawings and, of course, the poetry is superb, the voices are alive on the page, Eliza lives in every word.
The Home Child - Dates for your Diary
I’m pleased to be working with The Poetry Pharmacy to offer a 15% discount on this book (and others) when you sign up for either of the zoom groups below.
Book Chat: ZOOM EVENT - Sunday April 2023 16th 10-11am. Grab a coffee and settle in for an hour of book chat where we’ll explore the themes and the poems in The Home Child, and the joy of books in general. You don’t need to have read the book to join in. Come and be a part of a community of book loving, like-minded people. This is a Pay What You Can event, between £1 and £10.
ZOOM Author Event: Friday 28th April 2023 7-7.45pm. Come and listen to Liz chat about The Home Child with me, Wendy Pratt in this relaxed zoom event. There will be chance to ask Liz some questions. This is a Pay What You Can event, between £1 and £10.
More About Liz Berry
Liz Berry was born in the Black Country and now lives in Birmingham. Her first book of poems, Black Country (Chatto 2014), a ‘sooty, soaring hymn to her native West Midlands’ (Guardian) was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, received a Somerset Maugham Award, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Award and Forward Prize for Best First Collection. Liz's pamphlet The Republic of Motherhood (Chatto, 2018) was a Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choice and the title poem won the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem. In 2021 she collaborated with artist Tom Hicks on The Dereliction (Hercules Editions) a chapbook of poems and photographs of the Black Country. Liz's new book, The Home Child, a novel in verse, will be published by Chatto in March 2023.
Twitter: @MissLizBerry
Resources
Review of Black Country - The Guardian 2014: Guardian Article
Liz Berry Talking about The Republic of Motherhood for the British Library: Podcast
Liz Berry’s Website: Liz Berry
Liz Berry’s poems on The Poetry Foundation
Jen Campbell analyses The Republic of Motherhood:
Liz Berry reads Birmingham Roller:
I look forward to chatting to you about The Home Child, and don’t forget, if you can’t make the zooms there’ll be a chance to submit some questions for Liz to me, through substack, and the answers will appear here around the 27th of April. Happy reading!