I'm a huge fan of Diane Setterfield - I've read her previous books 'The Thirteenth Tale' and 'Bellman & Black' and thoroughly enjoyed them both. This new novel is no exception. I highly recommend it.
The story is set in the 1800s, and centers around 2 things - the Thames and all its tributaries, especially those running through Oxford where it's set - and the mystery of a young girl drowned in the river and then come back to life. Much of the action is set in The Swan Inn, where the regulars and landlord are known for their wonderful storytelling - hence the title Once Upon a River.
Who is this young girl who has been carried into the Swan in the arms of a local photographer? What was she doing in the river, and how did he find her? And how is it she suddenly comes back to life? We follow 3 families who say she belongs to them, but who are we to believe? And why does the child no longer speak?
I loved everything about this book - the feel of magic, witchcraft, and folklore that permeates through the storytelling; the wonderful characters who spring to life from the pages; the flow of the tale that pulls you along like the undercurrent of a fast-flowing river. It's such a wonderful read, and I was so sad to have finished it.
I always find it dangerous when publishers say things like "If you liked that, then you'll love this", because invariably it's not actually true and they're obviously just trying to push their new title. I've mentioned this in other blogs, where a thriller has been dubbed 'the new Gone Girl' or 'if you loved Girl on a train', etc. With this book, it was 'for fans of Eleanor Oliphant'. Now, I absolutely loved Eleanor Oliphant, I mean, the whole world loved her. She was the first of her kind and that was why we loved it. Just because another book is about a single woman with a few problems, does not make her Eleanor. The publisher may even try to copy the title style by using the character's name in the title, but come on. Give your author the individuality they deserve.
This is one reason I didn't like this book. I felt let down and slightly cross by the comparison. The main reason though is that I just didn't like Grace. She's having an affair with a married man, and she thinks he's going to give it all up to be with her. Her whole life seems to revolve around him (aside from her other passion - her cello, and her job as crafting and mending broken string instruments). By the way, why is there not a cello on the cover? That is a bigger passion for her than her life in Paris with her lover. I didn't like David the lover, I didn't like Nadia her assistant - how can such a classicist have such an awful temperament and rowdy social life? I got bored with the details of the cello making. The only person I liked was Mr Williams, the elderly customer who had become a friend. He seemed to be the only normal person in the story. I understand the comparison of her cello with her love life, how she cared for it and took love and attention over crafting a beautiful thing - it's how she dreamt of her life with David. Then when things went wrong with the relationship, so it was duplicated with the incident with the instruments.
The outcome is obvious, the story rather dull. Gosh, I've been rather awful here, but I just didn't like it.
A group of friends decide to to spend their New Year in a lodge miles away from anywhere in the wilds of Scotland. It will just be them, the lodge manager, and hunting instructor. They are planning on having fun, drinking, eating rich foods, and going hunting. They each bring with them their own emotional baggage and their secrets, but they are all good friends and there shouldn't be any problems, right? Wrong. By New Year's Day, one of them will be dead. And one of them is the murderer.
I just loved the premise of this story, and I liked the way that each chapter is told from the perspective of each of the friends (though a tad confusing at times). They relate how they know each other, and what they truly think of each other. The lodge owner and the instructor also get to tell their own stories of how they ended up working in such a remote location. As we learn more about their characters, we are led to be suspicious of most of them, and try to work out who could be the murderer. The only downside of this toing and froing of characters, is that you lose the tension of mystery and thriller. However, I loved the descriptions of how the friends are cocooned in this lodge, with lights on, gathered around a big table having fun, but through the large glass floor to ceiling windows all they can see is the blackness of the outside, and the snow starting to cover the ground, and the fact that they can't see much out, but anyone outside can see straight in.
I can't say that it kept me on the edge of my seat, but I did enjoy reading it. It was overlong though, I did skim read a few pages. I also didn't really like any of the characters, but that's possibly the point - any of them could be a murderer. A good, but not brilliant, murder mystery.
Being a resident of Cornwall, I was drawn to this book because it's partly set in this beautiful county, as well as Plymouth and France. I haven't read any of Hilary McKay's other books (I'm ashamed to say), not even 'Saffy's Angel', for which she won the 2002 Whitbread Children's Book of the Year. But I've heard wonderful things about her stories, so was itching to read this one.
The story follows brother and sister Clarry and Peter, growing up in Plymouth in the early 1900s with their father (their mother died after giving birth to Clarry), and holidaying in Cornwall during the summer holidays with their grandparents and their cousin Rupert. Their father doesn't have a good bond with them, always preferring to sit on his own in his study rather than talking to his children, so Clarry and Peter always desperately look forward to their summer jaunts by the sea. When not in Cornwall during the holidays, Rupert goes to boarding school, and Peter is told he must go too. He is adamantly against this, and takes drastic measures to make sure he doesn't have to go. However, in the long run his plan doesn't have much effect and off he goes. He does make a very close friend while there, Simon, who is also very much in awe of Rupert. While the boys are at boarding school, Clarry battles against the sexism of the time whereby young ladies weren't meant to have ambitions, or want to learn anything other than needlecraft and cookery. She's a strong-willed and independent girl, and stands up to her father to make sure she gets her way. However the First World War is soon upon them, and the rosy dreams of endless summer holidays and laughter is brought to an abrupt end. How will the war affect the children's friendship? And will they all survive it?
McKay is very clever at how she explains the horror and pain of the war in a realistic but not over-dramatic way. After all, her audience is young children aged 9-12, so they need to be told the facts, but not in a way to give them nightmares. It was educational concerning how females were treated at the time, and also about how people rallied around doing their bit for the war effort. I was slightly disappointed that there weren't more descriptive scenes about their surroundings in either Cornwall or Plymouth, the text was more conversational. However, saying that, I enjoyed the book, I loved all the characters (Simon's sister Vanessa was slightly over-enthusiastic for me!), and it was a moving and fast-paced story.
I've never read any self-help books, and to be honest I thought anyone who did was wasting their time. But how would I know that if I'd never read one? When I heard about this book, I thought this was my moment to find out all about the self-help phenomenon. Journalist Marianne Power decided to read a different self-help book every month for a yearto see if any of the would change her life for the better. Even if you've never read one, you'll have heard of some of the titles - for example, 'Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway' by Susan Jeffers, 'The Secret' by Rhonda Byrne, 'The Power of Now' by Eckhart Tolle, and many others.
Well, it's a journey - for the reader but especially for Marianne. Each book she reads sees her unravelling a bit of herself, not always with the outcome she desires. There are tears, there are breakdowns, copious amounts of wine, many rounds of cheese on toast, friends lost and gained, weight lost and gained. She comes out the other side - just - but you'll have to read it yourself to find out whether it was all worth it.
I cried with her, I laughed with her, I cringed when she thought she was acting normally - but then, who am I to say what's normal?! This book is just brilliant, and the final chapter/epilogue had me welling up, especially the last 2 short sentences.
What a wonderful, touching story. It's full of warmth, love, and gentle humour. It focuses on two people in their later years - Tina, a farmer's wife who lives in Bury St Edmunds, and Anders, a curator at the Silkeborg Museum in Denmark. Tina writes a letter to the museum enquiring about the Tollund Man, the name given to remains discovered of a man from the Iron Age, whose body has been recreated and exhibited at the museum. The letter is addressed to someone else who has died, and it is Anders who replies in his place. These missives are the start of an epistolary romance, though neither person truly knows it is happening. They enjoy looking forward to the other's letters, with each one becoming more personal, so Tina and Anders feel they know each other completely without having ever met. Their letters are so tender, their words so meaningful, you just want to pick up pen and paper and start writing to someone (although they do end up sending each other emails, so they don't have to wait so long to hear from each other). Then one day Tina's letters change in emotion and she tells Anders she can no longer write to him. He is distraught - what has happened in Tina's life to make her act this way?
This book was such a refreshing change to anything I've read recently, and it puts your faith back into true old-fashioned romance.
The publisher Orion had really been bigging this title up, so as someone with a new love of swimming I was keen to read this debut novel. It's nothing of huge literary merit, and some of Libby's descriptions made me raise my eyebrow, slightly baffled (for example 'She shook like a child as they kissed like grown ups. No-one tells a tiger to hunt, but still it growls. Her body growled as they kissed'). There are plenty more like that, which made it sound very amateurish.
Rosemary is 86, has lived in Brixton all her life, and has been taking daily morning swims at her local outdoor lido since she was little. Her strongest memories are going there with her husband George, who has now passed away. The lido is now under threat of closure due to financial struggles, and is due to be owned by a private company wanting to change it into a private member's gym. Kate is a 26 year old reporter, who works on the local paper. She suffers from anxiety, and often finds herself overcome by 'The Panic'. Kate picks up on the story about the lido closure, and works with Rosemary to try to prevent it.
I thought it
over-long, and was bored with some of the descriptive text, and didn't
really engage with any of the characters apart from Rosemary. I was
irritated by Kate, but liked the way the author creates a real community feel by bringing in local shop and stall workers. But if you like a light hearted easy read about friendship then you can't go wrong with this novel.
This is a must-read for all you life-long bookworms out there, you know who you are. Since the age of 6, sat on your bed or the sofa with your nose in a book, with your mum hoovering around your feet. I have holiday pics of me aged about 8 or 9 on a Greek island, my dad waterskiing, my sister frollicking in the sea, and me sitting on a rock with my hair in a scarf, sunglasses on, a book propped open on my knees, oblivious to everything going on around me. I think if I didn't give books away every now and then (yes it's true, well there are some books I read believe it or not that I'm not keen on and thus don't want to keep), my house would look how Lucy Mangan's sounds.
On the whole, I related well to most of the books Lucy talks about reading while growing up. She's about 8 years younger than me, and surpisingly that's made a difference in her teen choice of books. She talks about Sweet Valley High, but when I was a teen I was reading a whole range of adult books from Daphne du Maurier's 'Rebecca' to Jilly Cooper's 'Riders', Nevil Shute's 'A Town Like Alice', George Eliot's 'Silas Marner'. I don't remember there being a craze for reading amongst my school contemporaries - I always felt that I was the only one reading.
Also, Lucy talks about books she loved when she was less than 5, picture books and such. I don't remember anything like that. The earliest books I remember being my absolute favourites were Milly Molly Mandy (which Lucy also talks about, which I love her for) and Mrs Pepperpot. But picture books like The Very hungry Caterpillar, or Dr Seuss - nope. But that may be because my sister and I weren't read to by our parents? I don't know, I don't like to ask them in case that was the case and I make them feel guilty.
However, Lucy's whole section from Milly Molly Mandy upto about age 12 I could totally relate to, and I just adored her descriptions of them, and why she was totally in love with them. Lucy also had a great sense of humour, and had me laughing out loud in a few places. The one downside to her writing was her extremely over-long sentences. Oh my goodness, they were so long I would lose the thread and have to start it again. Hyphens, brackets, commas - gosh, as soon as I saw one coming, I'd gloss over it and start the next sentence. Not ideal.
Apart from that, this is a lovely book to read to evoke those wonderful moments when it was just you and a book. Let the world carry on around you.
13 year old Sal and her 10 year old sister Peppa are on the run. They've had to escape a brutal past and an even more brutal end to the past. But Sal is prepared - she has all the kit for survival in the Scottish wilderness. Her backpack is filled with maps, waterproof clothing, food, penknife, fishing gear and the SAS Survival Handbook. She's watched enough YouTube survival videos to become the next Bear Grylls. But life in the woods in October is tough - it's cold and snowing. How long can they hide out before someone finds them?
When I started to read this, I wasn't sure I was going to like it, even though I loved the premise of the story. The detail of their first few days in the forest was slight overkill for me. Many of the descriptions seemed almost like word-for-word transcript out of a manual, and I skipped most of those parts. For me, it started to get interesting when Ingrid's character was introduced (even though it was a rather unbelievable coincidence that someone else was hiding out in the same forest). I loved their relationship, and the story just seemed to quickly build from there. I loved the banter between the sisters, and how Sal kept trying so hard to keep Peppa's spirits up, while trying at the same time to keep them both alive. Through her abusive past, Sal has had to quickly grow up, and she is a believable strong mother figure to her sister.
A marvelous debut novel.
Randolph is an architect, and he lives in an apartment block with his wife Rebecca, and their two children. They live a happy, normal life, until the basement tenant, Dieter Tiberius, accuses them of sexual abuse towards their children, and starts to hound the wife with poems and accusatory letters. Their life starts to fall apart. They seek legal advice, but no-one can help them - not the police, nor the landlord, nor social services. Things become so fraught and desperate, that Randolph decides to take matters into his own hands.
All his life, Randolph has grown up surrounded by guns. His father always had them in the house, and Randolph was continually afraid that his dad would use them on him or his brother in a fit of rage. But it is now that Randolph turns to his dad for help.
The story sounds frightening enough as fiction, but the book is actually semi-autobiographical. The author has based the story on something that actually happened to him in real life. The book is also about class war, the justice system, and politics in Berlin during the 70s and 80s. In fact, I'd say that more than just background information, it takes over the whole story. There is more in the book about family relationships and class wars than there is about the actual incident. It's also a shame about the cover - it looks like just another crime thriller novel, and it doesn't mention on the cover that it's based on a true story.
I quite enjoyed the story, but I got a bit bored with the political argument sections, and I also got so frustrated with the lack of help that Randolph and his family were getting in the face of such harrassment.
I blow hot and cold with novels by Julian Barnes. I just loved 'Arthur & George', but was left dulled by 'The Sense of an Ending' and 'The Noise of Time'. But I wanted to give him another chance (aren't I kind!), so tried this one. I loved it - well, most of it. The book is split into 3 parts, and I think Part 3 could have been edited much more thoroughly. There was much repetition, and I was a little bored, but not enough to put me off the book.
The story is set in the 1960s in Surrey. Paul Casey is a 19 year-old student who is told by his parents to join the local tennis club. There he meets Susan Macleod, 48, married, mother of 2 children the same age as Paul. They fall madly in love and start an affair. Part one of the book is narrated by Paul as an older man, looking back at the start of the affair, and describing their feelings, and the reactions of those around them. Part two recounts their running away and starting a new life together, but the slow breakdown of their relationship as Susan becomes depressed, turns to alcohol, and starts to lose her mind. Part three is set in the present day with Paul describing his feelings now, and whether he feels guilt about what happened to Susan.
It's such an emotional read. It shows that love can jump out at anyone at anytime, and how strongly it can affect us. But also when it goes wrong, it affects us just as strongly - we can be scarred for life. There is so much of life that Paul/Julian is commenting on, you start to question whether he is right. What is the meaning of love? There is one thing for sure though - your first love stays with you for the rest of your life.
Any new psychological thriller that comes out nowadays always seems to get labelled 'the next The Girl on the Train'. Now I haven't read that book, nor seen the film, so luckily I can't make such sweeping comments. Surely an author wants to be plauded for their work for the right reasons, not to comment on whether they live up to a different author's bestseller?
Anyway, that aside, The Woman in the Window is brilliant. I read it in a day and a half - the usual case of 'I couldn't put it down'. The plot twists and turns, there are surprises around every corner, it's dark, and to churn out another overused phrase, it kept me on the edge of my seat. Anna is a child psychologist. She lives alone in a large house, apart from a tenant who rents out her basement. She has a husband, Ed, and an 8 year-old daughter Olivia, but they live away from her, although she speaks to them everyday. Anna is suffering from PTSD (post traumatic stress disorder) which has led to acute agoraphobia. She has not left her house for ten months. To pass the time indoors she keeps herself busy: she plays online chess; is taking an online French course; she gives out advice on an online site she has set up for other sufferers of agoraphobia; she watches many film noir and Hitchock thrillers; and she drinks many bottles of red wine, often until she is in a stupor. She also likes to people watch from her windows, especially her new neighbours across the road - the Russels. But one day she witnesses a terrible act that will change her life forever.
The best psychological thriller I have read in some time.
I think at the moment I'm definitely liking stories involving characters with quirky personalities - slightly oddball, perhaps on the spectrum. I recently read 'Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine' by Gail Honeyman, which I absolutely loved, and then more recently 'Three Things About Elsie' by Joanna Cannon, which was also delightful. 'The Cactus' is along a similar vein, and it did not disappoint.
Susan Green likes order and logic; she does not like time-wasters, mess or emotions. She lives alone, but has a very pleasant, no-nonsense agreement with Richard, who she sees once a week for theatre, dining and ...other activities. But soon Susan's order and routine are thrown into disarray as she finds out a)she is pregnant; b)her mother has died and left the family home to her awful layabout brother Edward. Sensing something sinister is afoot, she decides to try to contest the will while at the same time going through the stages of pregnancy. All she needs to realise is that help is closer to hand than she thinks.
I loved it.
Joanna Cannon's previous (and debut) novel was 'The Trouble with Goats and Sheep' which I absolutely loved, so I was looking forward to reading this next book.
Florence (Flo only to her friends) resides in the Cherry Tree retirement complex. She lives alone in a ground floor flat, but she's never lonely as she has her best friend Elsie to keep her company. Elsie also helps Flo through her moments of forgetfulness and confusion. They team up with fellow resident Jack when Flo realises that a new resident is someone from the past she'd thought she'd never see again. With the manager of Cherry Tree threatening to move Flo to 'Greenbanks' - a more suitable home for her needs - Flo and her two friends have a race against time to solve the mystery of the new resident before Flo may be forced to leave.
This quirky second book does not disappoint. It has Joanna's same style of humour mixed with pathos with an underlying serious storyline. All the characters are realistic and rather adorable. But it's also very moving, knowing that most of us will end up being a Florence, frustrated at realising that we're slowly losing our faculties, and there is only one ending for us all.
A delight to read.
Maud Drennen is a plucky, no-nonsense Irish care worker, whose latest client is Cathal Flood, a cantankerous elderly man, widowed and living alone in Bridlemere, a Victorian Grade II listed mansion in West London. Cathal is also a top-notch hoarder, a dealer in curiosities, and a keeper of secrets. Despite Cathal's efforts to frighten away Maud and her attempts to clear up his mess, he begins to soften and open little doorways into his life. But he holds too many secrets and Maud wants to know too much - what happened to his wife Mary and their daughter Maggie? Why is part of the house blocked off? Why won't he let his son Gabriel into the house? As Cathal starts to close up again, Maud finds herself taking on an investigative role, with the help of her transgender landlord, Renata, and Cathal's previous care worker, Sam Hebden. However, is Maud following red herrings, and is everyone telling the truth?
I did enjoy this book, although I found the author seemed to be trying too hard to get some laughs in. Maud is followed around by ghostly Irish saints who keep trying to point her in the right direction, and I'm not sure I like this detail - they got in the way of the story. I've previously come across the use of Irish saints as characters in a children's book (A Boy Called Hope by Lara Williamson), so this was nothing original to me. I found it took me a while to get into the story, the detail getting in the way too much, but once I'd got used to all the characters, I found it readable and enjoyable.
I kept hearing about this book, so just had to read it myself to see if it lived up to all the hype. Always dangerous of course. It's a good thriller, but loses its way towards the end. The story follows James, an MP and junior minister, his wife Sophie, and barrister Kate. James is a high flying political figure and close friend of the Prime Minister - they went to Oxford together, having already been friends since childhood. However, a scandal is soon to upset James' and Sophie's world when he is accused of a heinous crime. Kate is the barrister who is trying to prove him guilty, but James is adamant he is innocent. With flashbacks to their Oxford days (Sophie was James' girlfriend back then), we are built a picture of characters and relationships, and realise that everyone has secrets to hide and skeletons they'd much rather were left in the cupboard.
The story runs at a good pace, and you don't get confused with the alternating of time periods and character's viewpoints. There is a twist in the story which is obvious from early on, and I got a little bored with Sophie's character as the 'dutiful wife'. It was interesting that Kate's story is told in the first person, but everyone else is in the third. Is that showing importance of the character?
A good courtroom political drama.
These stories were my first introduction to Chekhov. They are a selection of 13 short stories - the cover describes them as 'Essential stories', so I don't know whether that means that someone has selected these as superior or more important than others of his? I always love to read the blurb in books about the author and his background, but there was nothing at all in this, just a photograph of him, and then straight into the stories. So I've googled him and, in short, he was born in 1860 in Russia, the son of a grocer. He started writing short pieces for a magazine under a pen name, and then went on to write major works such as 'The Seagull', as well as continuing his short-story writing. He died from tuberculosis at the age of 44.
I'm not usually a fan of short stories, I like to get my teeth stuck into a plot and see characters grow, but there was something calming and untroubling about these short stories. Sometimes I thought characters from one short story were appearing in another because of the similarity of some of the Russian names, and I quite liked that idea, even though I think I was mistaken about it. All the stories are, I believe, set in Russia and cross all classes. There are stories of peasants, stories of aristocrats and of soldiers, but in all cases it is made obvious that of course everyone is human and has the same feelings. The stories are romantic, moving, real. Chekhov has a definite art of describing emotion, whether the person in question is male or female. Even though you obviously assume the stories are set in the time of writing, ie the late 1800s, because they are stories of human emotion and feeling, they could actually be describing modern day characters.
A wonderful collection.
This has been adapted into a film and is currently out at the cinema. It's a Harry Hole story, who is Jo Nesbo's most famous police inspector (the first Harry Hole novel was published in 1997). Jo Nesbo is a very popular Norwegian author, who writes both adult crime novels and children's books.
This is the first Harry Hole story I've read, and the first thing I must say is that it's quite violent and gory, but I've since heard it said that that is the main feel of the Hole books, along with featuring women in peril (which this one definitely does). The Snowman is about a serial killer who targets married women with children, and disposes of them in rather gruesome ways. It was hard to put this down. I thought I'd guessed who the killer was, but I was wrong. Nesbo takes you through twists and turns in the storyline, throwing in red herrings and extra characters to keep you thinking. I got a bit confused with the Norwegian police department names and some of the officer's names, but on the whole it was a gripping read. I'm sure fans of Harry Hole will not be disappointed.
I really loved Andrew's previous book The Loney, so I was very much looking forward to reading this new one. I'm not really sure how I feel about it. Slightly disappointed, in that it doesn't have the same impact of being unnerved as with the first one. That's not to say that the writing is badly written - he writes impeccably well. It's just that for the first half of the book, I skimmed many pages and really, when I got to the end, the pages I'd skimmed could really have been cut out altogether. I wasn't drawn into the story as much as with The Loney, and only really enjoyed about the last half or even quarter. That's probably because that's where most of the action was - the rest was a large amount of descriptive text of surrounding landscapes, nature and historical characters, which I wasn't really interested in. There was also a lot of jumping around timewise, and sometimes I found myself reading a paragraph and not knowing if we were still in the past or back in the present.
John and his new wife Kat travel from Suffolk to John's dad's farm near Lancashire, where every year they go through a ritual of rounding up the sheep from the moors and bringing them down to the farm out of the harshness of the winter weather. They then put on a sumptuous feast and call the Devil in to fill his stomach with food and wine so that he'll go away, sleep and forget to take sheep or cattle. This is called Devil's Day. However, this particular year, things have happened within the village which have caused fear and tension amongst the neighbours, and John and Kat's first Devil's Day together will be one they will never forget.
I always look forward to a new Nina Stibbe novel. I know it's a perfect treat waiting to be read. She always makes me laugh, enough to make me want to be her best friend! Creepy!
In this little gem of a book, Nina lets us into her own world of Christmas, and sets out dos and donts of this festive period. Need advice on a tree? A turkey? The perfect present? Whether to throw a party? Well all this and more can be found within the pages of this hilarious autobiography/short story/advice book!
The only downside - it's too short!! I want more! Thank you Nina for yet again bringing a smile to my face.
