The Foxes recommend: Books for Mothering Sunday.

As an introduction to a week of Mother’s Day-themed items starting on Monday, the Den have put their little vulpine heads together and come up with a list of last-minute gift buys for mothers (or alternatively, you can just buy them for yourself …).

Leena says: Rachel Cusk’s Arlington Park and The Lucky Ones will make any thinking mother feel better about her own life… hopefully. If the books have an adverse effect, they at least make a very thought- provoking present.

For a far cheerier, but still thought-provoking read, you could choose worse than Theatre by W. Somerset Maugham. It’s definitely a book my own mother would enjoy.

Guest reviewer Samantha chooses The Chocolate Lovers’ Club by Carole Matthews.

To any real-life lover of chocolate, the title alone of Carole Matthews book is too tempting to ignore. As are the continual references to all manner of cocoa delights which punctuate the story as often as full-stops.

The Club consists of Lucy Lombard and her friends Chantal, Nadia and Autumn. As the fellow chocoholics lurch from one crisis to another, they meet up in their favourite cafe, Chocolate Heaven – to share their problems and the latest Selection Box.

A cheating boyfriend, sexless marriage, a gambling husband and drug-addicted brother… Whatever the dilemma, these four women strive to sort it out.

The Chocolate Lovers’ Club is a hilarious page-turner which is more addictive than chocolate itself. Despite the lack of urgency in Nadia and Autumn’s stories, the pace and chapter size are punchy and we are left wanting to know more about each member of the club whose tale is – hurrah! – continued in the sequel, The Chocolate Lovers’ Diet.

But be warned: eighty chapters of chocolate drinks and biscuits and truffles and cakes may leave you feeling extremely nauseous!”

Eve says: My first choice would be The Mathematics of Love by Emma Darwin, which I gave as a gift to my mother, who adored it. VL has already given a wonderful review HERE so I won’t go into detail. Suffice to say my mum really enjoyed it and I was given “good daughter points” for passing it on.

I also choose “The Book of Lost Things” by John Connolly. David’s mother dies close to the start of the book and is replaced by a step-mother who produces a baby soon after. David retreats into another world, called by his mothers voice and the whispering books on his bookcase. He is drawn into a world of nightmares and strangeness where he must conquer his despair over losing his mother to be set free. “The Book of Lost Things” is a WOW book! There is a lot of wry humour; a book about the history of the coal board snores very loudly and then coughs thunderously releasing small clouds of black dust. It’s just full of wonderful quote-aloud passages where you want to share the wonder of the prose with the person sitting next to you on the bus.

From Mhairi: My mother loves to laugh. She says it’s the only thing that keeps her sane, so my choice is the almost-forgotten Harry Graham and his Ruthless Rhymes for Heartless Homes. You can still buy secondhand copies or, failing that, Methuen published When Grandmama Fell Off the Boat: The Best of Harry Graham in 1986, which has the added bonus of a foreword by the late Miles Kington. Ruthless Rhymes – first published in 1899 – has a higher body count than your average Rambo movie. Each poem features a violent death – usually of a close family member. Few are longer than four or five lines, and all are written with an insouciant callousness that just takes your breath away:

In the drinking-well
Which the plumber built her
Aunt Eliza fell …
We must buy a filter.

Not for everyone maybe, but I know at least one mother who’ll love it.

Rosy has gone for something a little more cerebral: A History of British Art by Andrew Graham Dixon. (Published by BBC books ISBN-13: 978-0563551485.)

OK, let’s get away from all the mother and daughter books for a moment and offer something a bit different. I gave this book to my own (not particularly arty) mother and she devoured it in a weekend.

No longer “new”, these books are can still be found on Amazon and would make great presents for anyone presently enjoying Andrew Graham-Dixon’s recent series on Spanish Art.

According to Graham-Dixon, the agreed doctrine is that, unlike Italy, Britain is a nation of writers rather than painters. This can put down to both The Catholic Church’s huge position as a patron to the arts and to the changes caused by the Reformation, which was pretty much against frivolous stuff as art. However, Dixon is determined to look again at British art since the middle ages and reassess some of the overlooked works and show their deliberate nature: from the return (after Holbien’s intense realism) to the iconic anti-realistic portraits of Elizabeth 1 that are more symbol than human being, to paintings of 18th century racehorses owned by the new artistic patrons. Obviously there are the greats: Holbien (not British at all), through to Constable, Turner, Moore and Bacon – yet it is in some of the quieter moments that this books opens your eyes. The beautiful description of the minimalist aesthetics of a Puritan church, for example, or wooden medieval sculptures warning of plague. This book should be read alone for its startling championing of the great painter of horses, George Stubbs, and particularly its analysis of the cover picture, showing the strangely human portrait of this momumental lone stallion, “Whistlejacket”, with such expression and suffering in his eyes – almost like a Christ figure. (You can see where Peter Shaffer might have got it from.)

That said, whilst the coverage of the earlier periods is rivetting – the modern section of the book is less strong and the argument falls away. In which case just pick up something else that deals better with the 20th century such as “The Shock of the New” by Robert Hughes or “This is Modern Art” by Matthew Collings.

But even when you don’t agree with him, Dixon writes engagingly and dramatically and triggering thoughts on things you had never even considered before. As one Amazon reviewer puts it “a killer cyborg from the planet Zaarg would fall in love with art if he read only one paragraph of Andrew Graham-Dixon’s prose.” Err…exactly.

For another (very beautiful) Andrew Graham-Dixon book I would recommend In the Picture: The Year Through Art, his collection of Sunday Times columns first published in 2003. It doesn’t matter that it is now 2008, they are just striking and thoughtful specific dates or the changing seasons. The reproductions are stunning – a beautiful book to meditations on a very disparate set of paintings from all times and periods that relate to dip into and think about at different times in the year.
Publisher Allen Lane ISBN-13: 978-0713996753

We’ll leave the last word to Trilby who supplied this beautiful but slightly bleak quote from The Stones Diaries by Carol Shields. It’s not a cheery book, she says, but full of raw truths:

“My Lucile lives way out there in California now and has her own family and a beautiful home of her own, and I haven’t seen her for, oh, six or seven years. She hardly ever sits down and writes a letter home, what with all she has to do looking after her family, and I don’t hold her to blame one bit about that. Her mama’s no more than a little bitty story in her life now, something from way, way back when, and that’s the way my mama is for me. You can tell that story in five minutes flat. You can blink and miss it. But you can’t make it go away. Your mama’s inside you. You can feel her moving and breathing and sometimes you can hear her talking to you, saying the same things over and over, like watch out now, be careful, be good, now don’t get yourself hurt.

Well, that’s why I took to Mr. Goodwill’s little girl the way I did. I’d be ironing one of her dresses or brushing her hair and I’d think: I’m all she’s got. I’m not even half a mama, but I’m all the mama she’s ever going to get. How’s she going to find her way? How’s she going to be happy in her life? I’d stare into the future and all I could see was this dark place in front of her that was black as the blackest night.”