Five in April

I read five books in April.

 

Brave Hearted: The Dramatic Story of Women of the American West by Katie Hickman

Most people have heard of Laura Ingalls Wilder and her pioneering family, from the Little House on the Prairie books and the loosely based TV series in the 70s.

In this fascinating and sometimes heartbreaking book, Katie Hickman tells us about other women in the days when ‘America’ was still expanding its territory – whether they were wives, mothers or daughters in pioneering families, missionaries, poker players, sex workers, madams, bar owners, African Americans in search of freedom from slavery or displaced Native Americans (the last two is where the heartbreak happens and the resonances down the years are inescapable).

‘Brave hearted’ scarcely begins to cover the courage of all these women.

I’ve previously read KH’s book Daughters of Britannia:The Lives and Times of Diplomatic Wives, also recommended.

 

 

Burial of Ghosts by Ann Cleeves

A standalone title, first published in 2003. (How prolific is Ann Cleeves? Incredibly is the answer!)

Lizzie, brought up in care, receives an unexpected legacy of £15,000 from a man she had a holiday fling with – but there are strings attached.

 

 

Overkill by Vanda Symon

The first book featuring Constable Sam Shepherd. I bought it and three subsequent titles in the series in a charity shop because they are set in South Island, New Zealand, which I love to read about, and also because Sam(antha) is described as being feisty. I anticipated a Kinsey Milhone or V. I. Warshawski with gorgeous NZ scenery.

Well, all four books will be returned to the charity shop, three of them unread. For ‘feisty’ read ‘irritating’, ‘needy’ and ‘complete pain in the posterior’. She thinks she’s the only one who can sort anything out (she can’t) and the lip she gives senior officers (while being suspended from duty) would surely see her dismissed in real life. Disappointing (if you haven’t guessed that already).

 

 

The Republic of Love by Carol Shields

The much-missed Carol Shields in fact.

A reread. Not one of my favourites of hers (Happenstance and Larry’s Party taking that slot) but she’s always a pleasure to read. If you like Anne Tyler (and if not why not?) you will like Carol Shields.

Rather incensed to see the strapline on the big online retailer: ‘a charming chick lit novel’ – even when it was published in 2003 that would have been a misleading description; it should certainly be updated now.

Fay is a commitment-phobe (as we say in the 2020s) and in any case thrice-married late-night-radio host, Tom, does not seem like a good bet. She has plenty to keep her busy with her research into mermaids for the Folklore Society and with worrying about her parents’ long and apparently happy marriage.

But there’s the inconvenient fact that for both herself and Tom it was true love at first sight …

 

 

For Thy Great Pain Have Mercy On My Little Pain by Victoria Mackenzie

This appealed to me when it first came out and I wish I’d read it before going to an Edinburgh Book Festival event with the author last year.

I’ve read it now. It’s told in two voices – each one a 15th-century female mystic: Margery Kempe and Julian of Norwich. Although not much is known about their lives (which Victoria Mackenzie has imagined most vividly), it is documented that the two did meet each other and that both had visions – or ‘shewings’.

Margery – mother of fourteen children, cried a great deal in public following her visions of Christ on the cross, leading to support from a few people and condemnation from many, including her husband. She wrote a book (or probably dictated it) – astonishingly, the manuscript was missing for six hundred years and found in a cupboard in an English country house in 1934.

Julian (she took a saint’s name) lost her husband and child to the plague and so decided to be an ‘anchoress’, the term for a female hermit. As it would be dangerous for her to live the life a male hermit could (ie in a cave or other isolated place), she had herself bricked up in a room attached to a church in Norwich. There was a curtained window where the necessities of life were passed to and fro to/from a devoted maid whose face Julian never saw. People came to her for guidance; again she couldn’t see them, only hear them.

She also wrote a book, thought to be the first book in English by a woman that has survived.

Imagine being bricked up … yet, this is the person whose optimistic words have lasted down the centuries: All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.

Six in March

I read six books in March.

 

The Mountains Sing by Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai

Drawn from the experiences of the author’s family, this follows two generations through the Vietnam wars. Here, we follow a grandmother and grand-daughter as they have to confront missing or injured family members, poverty, violence and politics both at international and local levels.

The grandmother’s story of how she got her six children to safety (one just a babe in arms), after their business and home were attacked by people they thought were their friends, is heartbreaking – but also uplifting in showing her resourcefulness and courage.

This may sound like a harrowing read – and of course it is in places – but it’s written in an engaging style, a page-turner. Read for book group. Recommended.

 

Introducing Mrs Collins by Rachel Parris

‘Mrs Collins’ – the name probably needs no introduction, not to Jane Austen aficionados anyway. This is Charlotte’s story – Charlotte who set her cap at the much-sneered-at vicar because, well past the usual age of matrimony, she was that dreadful thing: a spinster.

The author looks quite kindly on Mr Collins (it wasn’t his fault that Longbourn should be entailed to him and she has given him a traumatic childhood to account for his demeanour) but of course he isn’t hero material … No spoilers!

Not as enjoyable as the sparkling, recently televised The Other Bennet Sister but a good read; shortlisted in the Debut Romance section of this year’s Romantic Novelists’ Association Awards.

 

A Lesson in Dying by Ann Cleeves

An early book by the author of the Shetland and Vera series, reprinted because of her subsequent massive success. A much-hated head teacher is found murdered in a grisly fashion – step forward Inspector Ramsay. Will read anything Ann Cleeves writes so I’m happy with this.

 

 

 

Provincial Daughter by R. M. Dashwood

A reread. The author (Rosamund) is actually the daughter of E. M. Delafield who wrote Diary of a Provincial Lady and its sequels. EMD’s books are among my very favourite comfort reads.

Provincial Daughter was Rosamund’s only published novel, first appearing in 1961; this Virago edition came out in 2002. It’s set in the 1950s otherwise it echoes EMD’s '30s novels – woman with little domestic interest and literary aspirations is stuck in rural Devon with, in this case, three small boys (and a handsome husband called Lee).

It is entertaining enough; I would probably have enjoyed it more were I not so enamoured with the Provincial Lady.

Years ago, I did a blog post on clothes in fiction and included a piece from The Provincial Lady Goes Further in which, when on holiday in France, she has to take her son’s white shorts to another town to be dry-cleaned. In Daughter, it was the total palaver of school ‘packed lunches’ that made me glad to have had my children in the late 20th century – not a sandwich or healthy flapjack in sight, but cottage pie in a glass jar to be heated up at school. L

 

The Dearly Departed by Elinor Lipman

Anyone else read Elinor Lipman? She’s American, writes novels, short stories and essays. I love her wacky, edging on black, sense of humour. In The Dearly Departed, Sunny returns to her small hometown following the death of her mother and discovers that she possibly has a half-brother the same age as herself. Also includes local politics and golf …

 

Notes on Your Sudden Disappearance by Alison Espach

The author’s The Wedding People is one of my favourite recent reads, its word-of-mouth success so justified. I will reread it at some point. That book starts with a very dark scenario (do stick with it though). Notes also has a dark theme (not a spoiler) – the death of Sally’s beloved older sister in a car accident and the effect that has on her and their parents (and the driver of car). In navigating the world without Kathy (and referring to her sister as ‘you’ throughout the book), Sally, a clever, bookish child finds her own path away from home eventually – and back again.

Four in February

I read four books in February.

 

Fallen Angel by Chris Brookmyre

Amanda is delighted to be asked, out of the blue, to be a summer nanny in a villa in Portugal for the Temple family – a former actress, a famous professor, their children and grandchildren. She soon realises though that there are dark undercurrents to do with the disappearance of another grandchild in this place sixteen years earlier.

Excellently told (of course) and with a massive twist I didn’t see coming.

 

All Adults Here by Emma Straub

I remember enjoying an ES book a few years ago, although can’t remember which one. This, her latest, though was tiresome – more a series of anecdotes about the mostly unpleasant characters than a novel with a plot. ‘Funny and uplifting’ the strap line says; I found it to be neither.

 

This Could be Everything by Eva Rice

19990s Notting Hill. February Kingdom is still traumatised after a family tragedy when an escaped yellow canary appears to help her. Many musical references (she is Tim Rice’s daughter after all) that didn’t mean anything to me but that didn’t matter; I got the gist, and loved the story and the writing. It was a little reminiscent of one of my favourite books, I Capture the Castle.

 

Back When We Were Grown Ups by Anne Tyler

I’d read this before but never owned it so pounced on it when it came into the charity shop I do some volunteering in (sorting books; buying some of them is an occupational hazard).

Stepmother/grandmother Rebecca is the heart of her late husband’s family, the one who runs the family business, the one who pours oil on many troubled waters. But what, she’s begun to wonder, would her life have been like if she’d married college sweetheart Will, if Joe hadn’t appeared and swept her off her feet. Tentatively, she makes contact with Will … but is he the same person from all those years ago? Is she?

There is no one like Anne Tyler and that’s a fact.

 

Seven in January

I read seven books in January.

 

The Secrets of Wishtide by Kate Saunders

Laetitia Rodd is an Archdeacon’s widow. It’s 1850. She lives in Hampstead with a landlady who once rented rooms to John Keats and she makes her living as private investigator. Her brother, a very successful criminal barrister, sometimes sends cases her way.

In the guise of a governess, she travels to Wishtide to find out more about the mysterious young woman whom the heir to the estate wishes to marry and is soon drawn into a much wider investigation.

Atmospheric, twisty, with great characters, especially Laetitia herself.

Kate Saunders (the late, sadly) was a very successful writer of children’s books (Beswitched is one of my favourite books of any genre) but I hadn’t known about this series of three titles until I spotted one in the library.

 

A Bed of Scorpions by Judith Flanders

Another find in the library’s crime shelves. The author’s name caught my eye because I’ve read her (history/non-fiction) A Circle of Sisters but didn’t know she also wrote contemporary fiction. Her heroine, Sam Clair, works in book publishing in London and, very satisfyingly for a book nerd, the uncovering of the villain was helped by Sam’s knowledge of publishing colophons … Three more in the series.

 

Hickory Dickory Dock by Agatha Christie

I was given this very attractive US edition. I've re/read Christie voraciously in the past and while her ingenuity is undoubtedly to be much admired I cannot see how the crime here, involving rucksack exchanges, could practically work … but then of course I’m not Hercule Poirot.

 

The Dark Wives by Ann Cleeves

January – ’tis the season for crime reading. The latest ‘Vera’ and very good it is too.

 

The Eagle of the Ninth by Rosemary Sutcliff

I’ve read some non-fiction about the Roman occupation of Britain especially as it applied to (what became) the border between Scotland and England and find the history of this barbaric/sophisticated army fascinating. (Why, after they left, did we have to wait another 1600 years to have the under-floor heating they enjoyed?!)

A visit at the end of last year to the brilliant Trimontium museum/virtual reality experience in Melrose, in the Scottish borders, reignited my interest in the fabled lost Ninth Legion.

Rosemary Sutcliff’s book was written for children but please, do not let that put you off. The writing is perfectly pitched to appeal to anyone from 9-90, the descriptions are wonderful and the pace and excitement are nail-biting.

Beginning in what is now Dorchester in the south of England, Marcus Aurelius travels on horseback to the area around the Clyde in search of the lost legion, which had been commanded by his father.

There’s little to see now on the Border hills where the vast forts once stood but, reading the book and having been to the museum, it’s not hard to imagine myself there.

 

The Wake-up Call by Beth O’Leary

I enjoyed the author’s first book The Flatshare. This one not so much for various reasons.

It could have been a third shorter. I began to skim-read Izzy’s interminable and samey conversations with her friend Jem.

‘Enemies to lovers’ – I didn’t buy how Izzy and Lucas became ‘enemies’; a misunderstanding that could have been cleared up on page two. Also, couldn’t see why it was called ‘The Wake-up Call’.

I resented (and resisted) the attempts to manipulate my emotions – did Izzy really have to be a relation-less orphan?

And, a rom-com favourite cliché, the dash to the airport … here, last-minute flights were booked a couple of days before Christmas to/from Brazil, the USA and ‘the Outer Hebrides’ (no particular island given) – come on!

Plus, although not a complaint specific to this title, the first person/present tense is quite tiresome to read, especially in a long book, and sometimes unintentionally comical. ‘I give a slow smile.’ ‘I whimper.’ ‘I pounce.’

 

The Break-up Clause by Niamh Hargan

Another enemies-to-lovers, written in the present tense but not in the first person. Loved it!

Twelve years on from their youthful, drunken wedding in Las Vegas, Irish Fia and American Benjamin (still legally married but not having had any contact since) find themselves as mentor and mentee in a high-powered Manhattan law firm.

I heard Niamh Hargan talk recently at an event in Edinburgh. She has written a pilot episode for a series based on the book – do hope that is successful.

Seven in December

I read seven books in December.

 

Everything I Never Told you by Celeste Ng

This is second Celeste Ng book I’ve read (the first being Little Fires Everywhere which was adapted into a series by Reece Witherspoon). Everything is her debut novel, although the term is meaningless when the writing is so accomplished.

Sixteen-year-old Lydia’s body has been found the town lake. So, this is a crime novel but oh so much more. Her father is Chinese, her mother American. She’s the eldest child, with a brother and a sister. It’s the 1970s in small-town Ohio. As the family try to trace Lydia’s last movements (and discover how little they knew her) the reader finds out her parents’ back-story, their ambitions for their clever daughter and their heartbreaking attempts, as a mixed-race family, to be accepted in their community.

 

 

 

House of Eyes by Patricia Elliot

Written for 9-13-year-olds – I guess I fall somewhere in-between … J

In a dark house in Edwardian South Kensington, Connie Carew investigates what happened to her baby cousin, Ida, who went missing years before. Can the beautiful young woman who claims to be the long-lost child be telling the truth?

I bought the book because I met the author. Loved it – it has everything: a delightful heroine, atmosphere, danger, history (suffragettes, séances eg) and a very satisfying conclusion.

 

 

 

Dorita Fairlie Bruce

I went to an all-day event at the University of Edinburgh, a symposium Investigating Irish & Scottish Writers of Children’s Literature 1750-1940. Part of Scotland’s Early Literature for Children Initiative. So interesting!

One of the speakers, Jane Sandell, gave a presentation on Dorita Fairlie Bruce (1885-1970). A writer mainly known for her school stories, Bruce was hugely popular in her day, especially with her ‘Dimsie’ series which alone sold half a million copies by 1947.

What Jane likes particularly about her work is that she treats Scotland as a place where people just live normally and are not defined by bagpipes, haggis or other clichés but, having said that, the author describes the Scottish west-coast landscape beautifully.

When I got home, I looked out three DRB titles from my shelves and reread them – three ‘Springdale’ titles. Dimsie, you’re next.

 

 

 

They Called Her Patience by Lorna Hill

Lorna Hill is another writer who describes landscape beautifully – in this case the Northumbrian border with Scotland.

As it’s very hard to come by, I was very happy to acquire this from a friend of a friend who was downsizing her collection of children’s books (although sadly my copy does not have the lovely dust jacket shown here). I’ve got the second (of two) Patience books (It Was All Through Patience) already.

Patience (her name is really Fleur and she’s definitely not patient) has a will of iron. Though she is much younger than her adored half-brother David and his friends, plus she has recently been very ill, she is determined to join in everything they do whether that’s riding, camping or getting up to mischief.

 

So after my very happy visit to the blue remembered hills, I picked up

 

 

Act of Oblivion by Robert Harris

and read about the Restoration of Charles II to the throne in 1669 and the ‘Act of Oblivion’ whereby everything that had happened leading up to the execution of Charles I was, in effect, to be forgiven and forgotten – except for the 57 signatories to the King’s death warrant.

The regicides were to be hunted down and dispatched slowly and cruelly. This is mostly the story of two of them who managed to escape to America, to the aptly named ‘New England’ where it was very hard to hide in the small settlements and to travel between them.

A page-turner, and the book ignited an ambition to read some non-fiction about the Civil War and its aftermath. Tune in next month …

Six in November

 

I read six books in November.

 

 

The Postcard by Anne Berest

This translated French best-seller is a harrowing read. It’s the story of the author’s ancestors’ flight from Russia and their moves to Latvia, Palestine and Paris. Each time they thought they were moving to safety. In 1930s France, this Jewish family was the opposite of safe. Anne Berest’s maternal great-grandparents and her teenage grand-aunt and grand-uncle uncle died in Auschwitz. Through chance, her grandmother did not suffer the same fate.

Why ‘The postcard’? In 2003, a postcard arrived for the family. On one side was a picture of the Opera Garnier. The other side bore only the names of their dead relatives. By the end of the book, we know who sent it and why. No spoilers about the who but I’ll tell you the why – so that the names of Ephraïm, Emma, Noémie and Jacques would never be forgotten.

Anne Berest has done an incredible job of researching her family’s traumatic history and recounting it in a way that’s as page-turning as a novel. Harrowing, yes, but highly recommended.

 

And now for something completely different …

 

 

My Favourite Mistake by Marian Keyes

Perhaps the last book about Marian Keyes’ much-loved Walsh family. This one focuses on Anna, returning to live in Ireland with burnout from her high-pressured job in PR for a cosmetic company in New York. The timing turns out to be good as family friends whose new business is in trouble are in dire need of someone with her experience.

This being the Walsh family, they all get involved with much shenanigans along the way. Great escapism. This, by the way, is the first book I’ve read on the Kindle app on my phone and it worked a treat. Now I’ll never be caught without something to read …

 

 

Without Fail by Lee Child

The mixture as before. More escapism.

 

 

Death at the Double by Jo Allen

‘On her return to Cumbria after years in Australia, Connie Sheldon’s first stop is the nursing home where she hopes to mend her relationship with her estranged elderly father, Edwin, but she’s in for a shock. Not only has Edwin been dead for three years but another woman, passing herself off as his daughter, has stolen Connie’s inheritance — and disappeared.’

Intriguing or what? Jude Satterthwaite investigates.

 

 

No Fond Return of Love by Barbara Pym

I reread my Barbaras regularly. This one, about spinster Dulcie and her curiosity (some might call it stalking … ) about charismatic academic Aylwin Forbes is one of my favourites.

 

 

Crusoe’s Daughter by Jane Gardam

Motherless six-year-old Polly Flint is sent to live with two aunts in a yellow house on a marsh; soon she is fatherless too. This excellent, atmospheric book follows her into extreme old age.

The household is not geared towards a small child so Polly’s early reading is from her grandfather’s library of classics. Robinson Crusoe, rather comically, becomes her hero; she sees a similarity between his situation and her own. In modern terms, she frequently asks herself: What would Crusoe do?

 

And if you are looking for another read this Christmas-tide how about this?

 

 

Or this?

 

Wishing you a merry Christmas and a happy and peaceful 2026.