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.
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.
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.
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.
Sam is a teacher in the UK, and Dennis is on death row in the U.S., convicted of the murder of a young girl 20 years previously. His case has always been in the media, as there are many who believe he is innocent. After the end of a relationship, Sam fills her time trawling through all the sites and messages about Dennis and his case, and starts to write to him. Months later she's on a plane to visit him in prison, and before long her life takes a very different turn.
I enjoyed reading this book, though I found Sam's character rather unnerving. She's obviously an educated young lady, but she's also naive, paranoid and jealous - not exactly ideal attributes in life, especially when you start a relationship with a convict. Perhaps it's those that need help themselves, who offer help to others? I wasn't sure whether we should feel sorry for her, or be frightened of her. I think the surroundings she found herself in were such that they changed her completely.
A great book for those who love easy-to-read thrillers. You're never quite sure which way it will go until you actually reach the end.
Seventy-year-old Fredrik Welin lives on one of the islands making up an archipelago off the coast of Sweden. He lives alone in a big old house built by his grandfather. His wife has died. He has a daughter, Louise, but she's a traveller and rarely divulges her whereabouts, or indeed any facts about her life, to her father.
Fredrik is woken late one night by a searing light - his house is on fire. He only has time to save himself and nothing else. By the next day the house is burnt right down to the ground.
Over the next few months we learn more about Fredrik - his life on the island, his daughter and her secrets, his relationship with a journalist, and also about Jansson the postman, who not only delivers all the mail by boat to the islanders, but reads all of it too. We also follow the investigation into the fire, as suspicions arise as to who or what caused it to start.
In 2015 Henning Mankell died from cancer. This was his final piece of work. He was a very popular author of Swedish crime fiction, most notably his character Kurt Wallander, played brilliantly by Kenneth Branagh in the English-language tv drama series. 'After the Fire' dwells on loneliness, loss and death. When I was reading the book, I was picturing everything in black and white, just like the cover, as nothing in the book seemed to evoke colour or happiness. I don't know whether this is because of Mankell's state of mind while writing the book, or whether all his crime books have a similar feeling. He also draws on incidents from his own life to include in the book, one of them being when Fredrik travels to Paris and memories rush back to him of when he was there as a young man and arrested during the student uprising in 1968. Mankell himself lived in Paris starting out as a writer, and himself took part in the student uprising.
Even though the book is quite long, and many chapters are about the minutiae of Fredrik's life - his shopping, his daily ablutions, his trips and falls, his musings on life and death - it's never dull or boring, it subtly pulls you into the story of a lonely man living in a lonely environment.
Victor Forde lives on his own in a sparse apartment in Ireland. He used to be married to Rachel - businesswoman turned popular TV presenter - but that is now over, and the main focus of his life is his time spent in his local pub, Donnelly's. It is there that he meets a man who appears to know him well, even though Victor can't place him at all. The man, Fitzpatrick, tells him they used to go to school together and seems to know a lot about their time there, especially the teachers - one in particular, Murphy, who used to tell the schoolboy Victor that he liked his smile. For Victor used to attend St Martin's CBS, a Christian Brothers school in Ireland, where they were taught by monks. It is the memory of what the monks did to the young boys - Victor in particular - that would forever haunt him. Who is this man Fitzpatrick, and why is he so uncouth and imposing, dredging up horrible memories for Victor?
There are few laughs in this book, some of it uncomfortable reading, partly because of the feeling of dread in the chapters about school, and partly because you know this sort of thing was actually happening in real life. Fitzpatrick is not a nice character, and every time he makes an appearance in the pub, you just wish Victor would walk away and ignore him, but it's like a magnet, drawing them together. The ending of the book is quite a shock, in fact it had me slightly confused, and I felt I should read the book again to make sense of it.
Even though she plays a
small part in the book, I loved Victor's mother, she was such a caring,
adorable woman. This could be because the only other female character
in the book was Rachel, the ex-wife. She came across as a domineering,
controlling woman, and I felt that Victor was made out to be a victim in his marriage as well as in his school and in the pub.
Roddy Doyle often writes about uncomfortable subject matters - marriage breakdowns, domestic abuse - and most of his fiction is set in Ireland (being Irish born and bred himself), so the overall feeling of the book is true Roddy.
Helen Dunmore was a prolific writer of both children's and adult fiction. She sadly passed away recently after a battle with cancer. Birdcage Walk was her last work of fiction. She states at the end of the book that even though she knew she was ill during the writing of the book, she didn't realise how ill. I think that once I knew this, I myself became aware of the many mentions of mortality, and how you are remembered after you die, and this may have affected my enjoyment of it. It was very dark and sombre - I can't say morbid, because that would infer I took no enjoyment out of it. I found the first half of the book slightly laborious; I was willing for something to happen. It wasn't until about the second half that I began to race through it a bit quicker.
The story is set in Bristol, while in France the French Revolution is under way. Lizzie's husband, Diner, is a builder and he is working on a terrace of upmarket houses overlooking the Avon Gorge. However, is business is bleak, and is set to become bleaker as the Revolution in France spreads its terror across Europe. Meanwhile, Lizzie's mother and stepfather take a keen interest in the actions of the revolutionaries, being careful not to speak out loud where their loyalties lie. With Diner spiralling into bankruptcy, depression and jealousy, how can Lizzie escape the inevitability of the crisis that is looming?
Please make sure you also read Helen Dunmore's 'Exposure'. It is a brilliant story of blackmail, lies and deception.
I hadn't read any Salman Rushdie books before I came to this one. I know it sounds absurd, but since The Satanic Verses and the threats on his life, I've had a slight fear over his novels. Would they be too political for me, too intelligent?
Well, in The Golden House, he certainly is the latter two things, but it didn't stop me enjoying the book immensely. He throws literary, historical, cinematic and mythological references into nearly every sentence, many of which I hadn't heard! He is certainly a well-educated man, and the book a huge literary feast. The utmost care has been taken over every sentence - no noun or adjective has been misused. Sure, I might've glazed over on some paragraphs because the descriptions were just too much for my brain to cope with on one go, but overall it is a beauty of a book.
Nero Golden arrives in America with his three sons during the period of the inauguration of Obama. They all refuse to say where they have come from and the reason they left. But they bring with them power, money and danger. The story of their downfall is told by one of their neighbours, Rene Unterlinden, who is trying to find an idea for a film - and he finds it in the Goldens. This is an epic tale of Indian and American history and politics - the appearance of presidential wannabes the Joker and Bat Girl will have you grinning and wincing at the same time.
It may be over 400 pages long, but this book will drag you in and under, and you won't come up for air until the last page.
A couple of light hearted facts for you - did you know that in his early career Salman Rushdie was a copywriter for an advertising agency, and he was the one who came up with 'irresistibubble' for Aero, 'naughty but nice' for cream cakes, and 'that'll do nicely' for American Express?
I like a good ghost story, and this definitely had the beginnings of one, but there was too much unnecessary stuff in there to wade through for it to become a good book for me.
Eleanor and Richard have moved into an old Victorian house in London, perfect for doing up and making their own. The previous owners wanted a quick sale, and Richard and Eleanor's offer was immediately accepted. They take on a lodger, Zoe, for their basement flat to help with the mortgage. But then Eleanor soon becomes aware that something is not right in the house, especially upstairs in one of the bedrooms. All the walls have the name 'Emily' scrawled all over them, the room feels airless, and a terrible smell of rot is permeating through the house. Soon Eleanor becomes sick with headaches, which only disappear when she leaves the house, and one their two small children starts acting strangely. Eleanor tries to find ways to convince Richard that something is not right, but will he listen before it's too late?
Now, if that had been the whole story, I would've enjoyed it more, but instead I had to wade through Zoe's personal background, her work, her relationships, all of which had absolutely nothing to do with the story apart from adding a bad vibe to the house. Richard is incredibly annoying, not only because he steadfastly refuses to accept Eleanor's complaints about the house, but he has a weird fetish for going into Zoe's room when she's not there, which I never understood. And would anyone actually buy a house which gives them the creeps, and had a room with a child's name scrawled over the walls, and scratches on the door? There was too much in this book that annoyed me for me to enjoy it.
