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.
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.
