Looking for Laurie

 

 

This 7500-word short story (or Long Read in People’s Friend terms) has just been published in a bookazine Feel Good Fiction (see details below).

I’m thrilled the story found a home (and a great illustration) but almost more thrilled that I eventually managed to finish it …

 

Some stories go quite quickly from inspiration to thinking where to go with it; others take a little longer and one or two much looonger.

 

I had the initial idea, the ‘What if?’ thought, for Looking for Laurie twenty years ago.

 

We’d booked a short family holiday in Canada during the October school holidays but unfortunately had to cancel a couple of days before we travelled when one of the children took appendicitis.

 

After we’d all recovered from that I thought What if? … What if the appendix chose to get nasty after a family arrived in Toronto? And what if the child couldn’t fly home on the return date and the mother had to stay on? How would she spend those few days on her own in a strange city?

 

I could have stuck with Toronto for the setting but as I’ve never been (see above … ) I decided to turn the story around and have a young Canadian woman – the name Joanne popped into my head – arriving with her teenage son in London. She’d just got married and this was a business trip for her new husband combined with a honeymoon.

 

What if Laurie, the London-born father of her son, had left her in Toronto promising to return but he never did? Never knew he had a son, in fact?

 

Thoughts percolated and bubbled inconclusively for a while. I wrote other stories, magazine serials.

 

Wait! Could this be a serial rather than a story? I tried to make that work, cliff-hangers and all. It didn’t.

 

But now I knew what Joanne would do in London on her own while her husband David travelled north on business and Ben was still in hospital. She’d been thinking how little she actually knew about Laurie and became determined to find out more – and find out why he’d left her when they’d been so happy.

 

I realised I had to set the story back in the day so that her sleuthing would be more tricky than making internet searches. As I’d lived in London, moving there in the fiendishly hot summer of 1976, I placed Joanne there (with a flashback to 1962).

 

What took the longest to work out was what would happen when/if she found him? Would she still love him? How would her son and husband react?

 

I pecked away at it, thinking and rejecting various solutions. When I had success in placing two 7500-word stories with The People's Friend that suddenly seemed the best length to tell the story. I never wanted to give up on it – I wanted to find out myself what happened when Joanne went looking for Laurie.

 

And if you want to know, the story is in this bookazine – available from larger supermarkets, T. G. Jones (where I got mine), online from DC Thomson, Amazon and elsewhere. Yes, it’s £8.99 but that’s only around 20p a story including (see above!) a Long Read.

 

 

 

 

Five in June

 I read five books in June.

 

 The Correspondent by Virginia Evans

I bought this lovely hardback copy with a birthday book token a few weeks ago. The book has since won the Women’s Prize for Fiction, which I was delighted to see as it shows that the demise of the epistolary novel was announced too soon …

Several of my very favourite novels are written in letter form: I’ve reread The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society twice, 84 Charing Cross Road (many times) and Daddy Long-Legs (many times).

Will I reread The Correspondent? At the moment I’m thinking that I will not.

The life story of the irascible 73-year-old Sybil Van Antwerp is told through the letters she writes to family members, famous authors and neighbours etc etc and I really liked that structure.

But there was almost too much – the death of her small son for which she has carried guilt, her law career and a decision that comes back to haunt her, the fact that she was adopted and discovers her origins through DNA, a rift with her daughter, her two current suitors, and more.

Maybe I was irked by the fact that seventy-three is presented as being truly ancient (!) instead of just over our allotted span …

I liked it but I thought I would love it.

 

The Impossible Fortune by Richard Osmond

Number five in the Thursday Murder Club. In which lovely Joyce acquires a son-in-law … and helps Elizabeth, Ibrahim and Ron solve a billion pound mystery.

 

 

The Hallmarked Man by Robert Galbraith

Have been saving this almost-1000-pager (hardback bought in charity shop) for a free weekend so I could binge – and binge I did. Couldn’t tell you the ins and outs of the complicated plot but it was an enjoyable forty-eight hours following Strike and Robin find out who was the dead man in the silver vault – and how their own relationship is (or is not) progressing.

 

 

A Journey of a Kind by Aimée Chalmers

This is a beautifully written and produced, self-published novel given to me by a friend – Aimée Chalmers is a friend of hers.

The protagonist, Thea, recalls the year she spent as a young woman, fleeing from her life in Scotland, to teach English in Greece.

Sadly, although it’s listed on Amazon and on various bookshop online sites, its status is currently given as ‘unavailable’; I don’t know why. Worth asking for in your local bookshop – ISBN 9781036954130.

 

 

The News From Dublin by Colm Toibin

Short stories, or in some cases, long short stories, set in Ireland, Spain, Argentina and Catalonia.

Look forward to hearing him speak about the collection next month at the Edinburgh International Book Festival (now sold out).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Eight in May

I read eight books in May.

 

West with Giraffes by Lynda Rutledge

This was recommended to me and I loved the premise, which is based on a true story. In 1938, two giraffes are on their way to San Diego Zoo in California. There’s a hurricane, the ship is tossed about, but miraculously the giraffes survive. (A hippo wasn’t so lucky.)

The giraffes’ story is a morale boost to Americans so soon after the Depression and with the threat of another war in Europe. So the twelve-day cross-country road trip to deliver the giraffes to the zoo is one eagerly followed by a myriad cast of characters, some with the best of intentions, some not.

I loved it and so did my book group – it’s a great yarn combined with brilliant writing, not something you often get. Apparently, a film is in the pipeline.

 

 

We All Live Here by Jojo Moyes

Lila has her hands full. Her husband has left her; she has two daughters; her mother has died and her stepfather, Bill, gradually moves in with her. To crown it all, her unreliable biological father, an actor past his famous heyday, makes a re-appearance. Oh, and she’s trying to have a love life.

Jojo Moyes’ books are always page-turners but this wasn’t one of my favourites. While I liked some of the characters, especially her two dads, I didn’t take to Lila herself. I wouldn’t take to anybody who has written a book detailing the breakdown of their marriage, since she is identifiable and there are children involved. It was a best-seller though (so what do I know?) so now her agent has encouraged her to embark on a follow-up, about the aforementioned love life. That doesn’t go so well.

 

 

Before I Met You by Lisa Jewell

Dual timeline, set in the 1920s and the 1990s (it's not one of LJ's psychological thrillers). In the later age, Betty moves from Guernsey to London to find the mysterious woman mentioned in her grandmother’s will. Her search will uncover Arlette’s glamorous life in Soho, a whirl of cocktail parties and smoky night-clubs. In researching Arlette’s tragic love story, Betty finds her own place in the city.

(And, no, the mysterious woman is not who you might immediately think she will be.)

Fabulous, loved it.

 

 

The Crow Trap by Ann Cleeves

The first Vera. Excellent. So I’ve read them all now, perversely finishing with the first.

 

 

The Locked Room by Elly Griffiths

I haven’t read any of Elly Griffiths’ (forensic archaeologist) Ruth Galloway books before. Quite enjoyed it, especially the Norfolk setting. It’s probably not typical as it’s set in 2020. It does bring that strange time to life, with its restrictions on movement (not that they prevent the characters from doing whatever they want) and uncertainty.

 

The recent Christian Aid book sale presented the opportunity to buy these three vintage books for children. How could I refuse?

Enjoyed them all.

 

The Lark in the Morn Elfrida Vipont.

 

 

The Lark on the Wing by Elfrida Vipont

 

 

Lillipilly Hill by Eleanor Spence

 

 

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.