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.
