Seven in October

 I read seven books in September.

The Wedding People by Alison Espach

I didn’t know this author but kept hearing good things about The Wedding People – which were well justified. I loved it. An excellent premise: Phoebe arrives at a grand beachside hotel in Newport, Rhode Island wearing her best dress. As she discovers, she’s the only guest at the Cornwall Inn who isn't here for Lyla and Gary’s week-long wedding extravaganza.

This is both serious and humorous with an ending I won’t reveal but which leaves you well able to imagine what happened next. And the icing on the (wedding) cake for me is that that I have visited beautiful Newport so could picture the setting.

 

The Running Grave by Robert Galbraith

The seventh in the Cormoran Strike series. Over eleven hundred pages! I hardly spoke to my other half for a whole weekend. Strike’s professional partner Robin (with whom he is in love although he’s never hinted at that) goes undercover for several months to investigate a cult. Seriously unpleasant people and some very scary moments for the resourceful Robin.

 

The Love Hypothesis by Ali Hazelwood

I picked this ‘TikTok sensation’ in a lucky dip. I’d heard of ‘STEM’ romances – romances set within the world of science but hadn’t read one before. I enjoyed it a lot, the characters, the setting and the resolution. Sadly, it also showed that the misogynist 1960s world that Bonnie Garmus conjured up in Lessons in Chemistry is still evident in the new millennium.

 

Murder on the Marshes by Clare Chase

A cosy crime – well, cosyish. My heart was in my mouth as Tara, the main character, walked home each night to her rather isolated cottage on a Cambridge common, especially when we learn that she’s had a stalker in the past. A journalist, Tara becomes involved in the investigation of the murder of a charismatic university professor, Samantha Seabrook. Suspects abound. The resolution was satisfactory although I thought the way the investigating police officer was able to put two and two together just in time strained credulity. But I’d like to read more by Clare Chase.

 

How to Solve Murders Like a Lady by Hannah Dolby

The fun follow up to No Life for a Lady set in the late 1800s. I love Lady Detective Violet and her professional and personal partner Benjamin. The body of a local woman (bit of a busybody) has been found on the beach. Violet’s attempts to investigate the death see her thwarted (be a Lady Detective? how dare she!) and ultimately in danger herself. The book has a lovely ending with the next mystery being set up.

 

A Duke of One’s Own by Emma Orchard

A spicy Regency romance. I liked that, for a change, this wasn’t set in Bath or London but in a castle in wintry Yorkshire. The Duke of Northriding is hosting a weekend during which he will choose a bride, for he needs to have an heir. Lady Georgiana Pendlebury is one of the guests. Both she and the Duke are horrified to see each other as they have met before – at a very clandestine party.

 

The Maiden by Kate Foster

Long-listed for the Women’s Fiction Prize 2024; read for book group. ‘The Maiden’ – no, not a delicate young lady but a guillotine (now in the National Museum of Scotland), was used between the 16th and 18th centuries to execute nobility.

Based on a real-life murder trial in 1679, the book imagines the circumstances which led newly married Lady Christian Nimmo of Corstorphine, Edinburgh to be found guilty of stabbing her lover – who was her uncle by marriage. Kate Foster doesn’t suggest that Christian was innocent but rather that she was more sinned against than sinning. Seventeenth-century Edinburgh is wonderfully evoked and the author has invented some very colourful character.

 

Six in June

I read six books in June.

No Life for a Lady by Hannah Dolby

I adored this book – it was the runner-up in the Comedy Women in Print Award in 2021, for an unpublished novel.

It’s 1895. Violet, aged 28, lives with her father in Hastings who worries that she will never find a husband. She is certain she doesn’t want to get married but what she does want is to find out what happened to her mother who disappeared ten years earlier.

Very soon she regrets employing a private detective as he seems to have his own agenda and she takes matters into her own hands. One thing leads to another, and another – the comedy comes when the reader catches on to situations of which Violet is unaware, and to her innocence (as befits a respectable Victorian unmarried woman) about the facts of life (and her curiosity on the subject).

Violet is delightful, someone it would be great fun to be friends with. The era and the setting are immersive and the resolution to the mystery unexpected.

Read this on Kindle but will be purchasing a paperback too. I hope very much that we will hear more of Miss Violet Hamilton. 

 

Reader, I Married Him edited by Tracy Chevalier

A book of twenty-one commissioned short stories inspired by Jane Eyre and what fabulous collection it is. The authors took the prompt and ran with it in all directions; they include Tessa Hadley, Helen Dunmore, Jane Gardam, Elif Shafak, Evie Wyld, Audrey Niffenberger and Lionel Shriver.

Two of my favourites were: one where you gradually realise that the narrator is Wallis Simpson; and a heart-breaking tale featuring Jane’s childhood friend Helen.

 

The Book Lovers by Emily Henry

I’m not on TikTok but am aware that Emily Henry is extremely successful as a result of being recommended on it. I see from looking at her other titles that her thing is romance with booky themes. This one, for example, has a relationship between an editor and a literary agent, both of them hustling New Yorkers, who find themselves in Sunshine Falls, North Carolina, very far from their comfort zone.

Well, what’s not to like? There was great banter and some lovely writing. I will be reading more Emily Henry.

(Bookshops/books and romance are definitely ‘a thing’ at the moment; I read a book with the same title in April.)

 

Three Junes by Julia Glass

An appropriate title to read in June … a Christian Aid Book Sale purchase. The ‘three Junes’ span a decade and purport to depict ‘the life and loves’ of a Scottish family, the McLeods.

I didn’t think they came across as particularly Scottish (whatever that means) and not much of the story actually takes place in the family home in Dumfries & Galloway. The characters are not given equal weight – most of it belongs to Fenno, gay, in Manhattan during the Aids epidemic.

I’d like to have, for example, seen Dennis, bad-boy turned award-winning chef and family man, up close rather than through the eyes of others.

Strangely, the last ‘June’ focused on a hitherto unmet character, not a member of the family …. I wanted to like this but it all seemed rather oblique.

 

 Lost and Wanted by Nell Freudenberger

I read and really enjoyed The Newlyweds by this author and so recommended her new novel (which I hadn’t read at the time) to my book group. Don’t know what they thought of it yet because I ended up not being able to attend the meeting.

And I don’t know what I think of it … it was – unexpected. One reviewer said it was 'Middlemarch meets Bridget Jones’ Diary'. Were we reading the same book?

Last month for the book group we read Lessons in Chemistry – this one could have been called Lessons in Physics. I don’t have the kind of mind to understand black holes and the decaying universe but fortunately I know someone who does and I shall be passing this on and asking for a explanation in words of one syllable.

 

My Life in Houses by Margaret Forster

Margaret Forster and her husband Hunter Davies had the same beginnings, brought up in council houses in Carlisle, and they met at school. Both were very clever and began, in their early twenties, to make their livings as writers.

By the time they were thirty they were earning so much (Margaret principally from her novel Georgy Girl which was made into a film) that they had to go and live in Portugal for fourteen months to avoid the Labour government’s punitive income tax.

Margaret (now sadly gone to the big house in the sky) remembers her life through the houses she has lived in, including the family home in Hampstead (bought for £5000 in 1962, with a sitting tenant) and holiday homes (at different times) in Portugal and the Lake District.

All financed from their writing and good on them… not that I’m jealous or anything …