Tag: Époque Press

Époque Press: The Nacullians

Craig Jordan-Baker’s debut novel, published by Époque Press, was the November selection for the Republic of Consciousness Prize Book of the Month – and it’s an absolute gem. The Nacullians is a family saga about a kind of family that’s not normally the subject of such a book: a working-class family in Southampton, whose founders emigrated from Ireland in the 1950s: “Patrice Nacullian concentrated on pregnancy, smoking, and crosswords, while Nandad spent his days laying bricks and being racially abused on building sites.”

The structure is non-chronological, with chapters ranging from Nandad’s son Bernard learning the unwritten codes of acceptance on the building site in 1988, to a hospital volunteer singing songs on a ward in 2011 where one of the Nacullians is a patient. This raggedness of structure mirrors a general sense that the Nacullian family don’t quite fit into this kind of story – so the story is reshaped to fit them.

I really appreciated Jordan-Baker’s prose style. It reminds me of Dan Rhodes’s writing, and has the same capacity to start out whimsical and end up serious and poignant. There’s a real feeling in this book that it will not be bound by any preconceived ideas of what a novel should sound like, and the result is exhilarating to read. It builds up to a scene of someone eating cheese and bread: something that sounds mundane, but in this novel has the whole weight of a family’s history behind it.

El Hacho – Luis Carrasco

Today’s book is a debut in two senses: the first novel by Gloucestershire-based writer Luis Carrasco, and the first title from publisher Époque Press. For both of them, it’s a fine start.

El Hacho – “the beacon” – is the Andalusian mountain on whose slopes Curro has spent his life farming olives. But times are tough: a prolonged drought threatens to ruin the current crop. Curro’s brother Jose-Marie is in favour of selling off El Hacho for its stone to be quarried – but he’s never been involved in the family farm, doesn’t understand the soul of the place. As Curro says to his brother:

You might say I lack ambition but that land is an extension of my own body. I could no more leave it than tear the tongue from my mouth. When I work it I stir the memory of our people into the fragile dust and every drop of sweat, every callous on my hand and groan in my joints is theirs as well as mine. To abandon it would be to abandon myself and that I cannot do.

El Hacho, then, is in part a tale of tradition versus modernity, but it does not come across as sentimental. Carrasco is clear on what the personal costs to Curro of selling the mountain would be, but also on the price he pays for staying. The story of El Hacho’s drought also becomes the personal story of Curro’s wish for life to go on as it has.

There is a certain timeless quality to El Hacho: it’s not completely out of time, but there’s not much to place it in a specific period. The story reads pretty much as though it could take place at any point over (say) the last sixty years. So, as well as being the tale of one particular farmer, El Hacho feels emblematic of a story that could play out over and over again, in many different times or places.

Book details

El Hacho (2018) by Luis Carrasco, Époque Press, 116 pages, paperback (source: review copy).

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