Celebration time at The People's Friend!

My acquaintance with The People’s Friend goes back many (many) years as I said here.

My association with the magazine as a writer isn’t so long but it has been wonderful. The fiction team give such encouragement to writers, whether they are brand new or of longstanding, and in a climate when other magazines are abandoning fiction or being positively discouraging, that is a beacon of light that shines in a naughty world, as Shakespeare (almost) said.

To date, I have had 34 stories published by them and three serials, not forgetting one article and one poem. Along with many other contributors, I was delighted to be invited to help celebrate the 150th (the 150th!) anniversary of the magazine.

And what a swell party it was (fizz, cocktails, canapes and cake plus dancing displays and a small dog ... ); it was lovely to meet staff members, and other writers, some of whom were friends already, plus others I had met only virtually or knew only by name.

As was said in one of the speeches last night the magazine was first published in 1869 when women’s lives were completely different to how they are now and it has sustained them through many vicissitudes including two world wars; that it sells 170,000 copies each week now shows that its comfort and joy are still required. You can find out about the history of the magazine in this anniversary volume.

Long may it continue.

My life (maybe) – according to the books I read in 2018

 Describe yourself

How do you feel?

Describe where you currently live

 

If you could go anywhere where would you go?

Your favourite form of transportation is

 Your best friend is

 

You and your friends are

 What’s the weather like?

 

Favourite time of day

If your life was a book

  

What is life to you?

Your fear

What is the best advice you have to give?

Thought for the day

How would you like to die?

Your soul’s present condition

This is a fun idea I saw first on Joanne Baird’s Portobello Book Blog:

https://portobellobookblog.com/2017/01/01/my-life-according-to-books-i-read-in-2016/

Six in December

I read six books in December.

The Blackwater Lightship by Colm Toibin

I’ve been a fan of CM’s since reading Brooklyn (made into a great film starring Saoirse Ronan, albeit with a slightly different ending). This one is set in Ireland in the 1990s. Declan is dying, and that brings together the women of his family – his sister, mother and grandmother, between whom relations have been strained for a long time. He is so good on family dynamics; for me though this book lacked the warmth and touches of humour that made Brooklyn so wonderful.

The Second Stage of Grief by Katherine Heyton

Read on Kindle. A police series set in New Zealand. I read the first in this series last month and the second one was just as good. Gritty and page-turning:

Ngaire Blakes is trying to put her life back together. The ex-cop resigned from the police after a vicious assault left her battling PTSD. Dragged into a murder investigation, she’s shocked to discover that all the evidence points to her.

Noreen and the Barclay Affair by Helen Dawson

Another book set in New Zealand, this time a children’s one with a great cover – I pounced on it in a charity shop. However, the story about Noreen, a girl who works in her aunt’s detective agency, was, I’m sorry to say, dire. Implausible plot to say the least and the aunt is barely mentioned – she is got out of the way in various unlikely scenarios so that Noreen can do the ‘detecting’. Still like the cover though …

The Pen and Pencil Girls by Clare Mallory

Another children’s title and set in New Zealand, although really it could be set anywhere. Six schoolgirls form a club to write and illustrate stories. One of them is set the task of typing the stories up for a competition. I learned to type myself on a manual machine with seven – seven – carbon copies (under the eye of a very strict teacher) so could sympathise with the pains she took. The book was first published in 1948; this edition is a reissue from the wonderful Girls Gone By Publishers.

Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend by Katarina Bivald

I’d read reviews of this and have long wanted to read it – not knowing this, my dear d-in-l surprised me by giving me a copy which I proceeded to read in a couple of sittings. 

Sara is Swedish and has been made redundant from the bookshop she has worked in for ten years. She has been having correspondence with an elderly lady in a sleepy small town in Iowa which culminates in an invitation to visit. Not to give too much away – but Sara’s arrival and her love of books draws the town’s eccentric inhabitants together. I love books set in small-town America and I liked all the booky references. Sara’s slow-burning relationship with Tom was very believable. My favourite character though was ‘Poor George’ and his fatherly longing for the daughter of his faithless wife. Recommended …

The Virago Book of Christmas edited by Michelle Lovric

Curl up with a tantalising volume that fives full rein to the seditious humour, peculiar discomforts and exquisite social tortures of the season.

Some familiar and loved authors of mine here – Elizabeth Goudge, Agatha Christie and Laurie Graham for example – and many new to me. Among my favourite pieces was an extract from Winifred Foley’s memoir A Child in the Forest in which she – eventually – comes to love her home-made rag doll. And one unexpected pleasure was Jane Welsh Carlyle’s letter to a friend telling of ‘the very most agreeable party I was ever at in London’ where the company included Charles Dickens doing conjuring tricks.

The problem with anthologies – and I am working my way through The Virago Book of Food too – is the discovery of new authors. So little time, so much to read …

On that note, a very Happy New Year to you.

Stella's Christmas Wish

Stella’s Christmas Wish is set in Edinburgh and ….

… On her right-hand side a train glided into Waverley Station. Down in Princes Street Gardens water had been flooded in and frozen to make a skating rink and it was busy both with competent skaters and people holding on to each other, laughing if they fell over. That was a comic Christmas-card scene – but the wider picture showed the dull winter green of the gardens; stalls selling food and mulled wine; the wheel – Edinburgh’s equivalent of the London Eye over the Christmas period.

 … the beautiful Scottish Borders

The Eildon Hills were white on the top, like a snow queen’s tablecloth. It was said that fairies lived there and that long ago the Queen of the Fairies enticed a Borders man called Thomas the Rhymer away to fairyland. When he returned years later – thinking he’d been gone only a few days – he had the ability to see into the future. Alice read Stella and Maddie that story one winter when they were little and for years they imagined that their Christmas-tree fairy had come from that fairyland in the hills.

Wherever you are I hope your Christmas wishes come true.

Free book!

A Christmas present for you ...

 

In my previous post I told you about Capital Writers’ new anthology Capital Christmas Stories (you can read the beginning of my story here).

And, just for you, our first anthology, Capital Stories, which came out last year, is FREE for five days only, from 20-24 December.

You’re welcome.

Capital Christmas Stories

With Jane Riddell, Anne Stenhouse and Jennifer Young I am part of Capital Writers – four writers who live in Edinburgh, Scotland’s capital city.

Edinburgh, renowned for many things over the centuries, is now also famous for its Christmas/New Year festivities (anyone tried this year’s silent disco on George Street …?).

So it seemed appropriate that we produce an anthology of festive stories and here it is, available from Amazon at the very cheery price of 99p:

And here is a review by Joanne Baird of Portobello Book Blog

This is how my story begins:

UNDER THE CHRISTMAS TREE

Princes Street. George Street. Moray Place. Castle Street. Hanover Street.

Jessica blinked and looked again at the map she’d just been given in the tourist office.

Edinburgh was over 11,000 miles away, but in front of her were many of the same street names – albeit in a different configuration.

Sophie had only given her vague instructions about how to get to where she lived on Wallace Street, walkable she’d said from the centre of the city. Jessica had left home twenty-four hours ago, the time now a blur of airports and trying to sleep in cramped seats, and her head swam as she scanned the map for the street whose name was yet another reminder that Dunedin, New Zealand, was named after Scotland’s capital.

She took the map over to the assistant behind the desk. He swivelled it round towards him and made a pencil circle.

‘There,’ he said, marking a spot that actually didn’t look too far to walk and then helpfully pointing out the route. ‘Start here, at Stuart Street. About twenty minutes’ walk? Or there’s a taxi rank on the other side of the road.’

Any thought that a walk would clear her head – and postpone the moment of seeing her sister – was dispelled when Jessica saw that Stuart Street was vertical, so vertical she imagined herself having to scale it like a mountaineer while trying to hang on to her wheeled suitcase. Did people really live up there? Edinburgh was hilly but this was in a different league.

So, she wouldn’t walk. But she could still put off arriving at Sophie’s; she’d spotted a café when she got off the shuttle bus from the airport.

Over a long black coffee, which served to wake her brain up a little, she tried to think what she would say to her sister, what platitudes she could come out with this time to comfort her. And she wondered if Sophie would realise that Jessica herself might be in need of comforting.

Would Sophie remember what had happened to Jessica last Christmas? Would she wonder why her hysterical phone call home a month ago, crying that Logan had left her, had resulted in Jessica, uncharacteristically impulsive, saying she’d book a flight and come to New Zealand for Christmas? Just her, not David. No, she wouldn’t wonder; she would take it for granted that her older sister would drop everything – including her husband – so that Sophie wouldn’t be on her own over the festive season.

Now read on …

Five in November

I read five books in November.

As I said in last month’s reading round up I was lucky enough to spend October in New Zealand. And I forgot to mention one book I read while I was there so I’ll catch up on it now; it is set in NZ.

The Three Deaths of Magdalene Lynton by Katherine Hayton

Read on Kindle. This is the first in a trilogy featuring Detective Ngaire Blakes, a half-Maori detective in Christchurch, in the South Island of New Zealand.

Magdalene Lynton died forty years ago, a vivacious teenager who fell victim to a grotesque, accidental drowning. Now someone has confessed to her murder …

I thought this was a terrific police procedural, very dark in places, and can thoroughly recommend it. (I have bought but not yet read the second one.) And you’ve got to love an author whose biography reads: ‘Katherine Hayton is a forty-two year old woman who works in insurance, doesn't have children or pets, can't drive, has lived in Christchurch her entire life, and resides a two-minute walk from where she was born. For some reason, she's developed a rich fantasy life.’

My last week Down Under was spent with lovely cousins in Tasmania.

Forty South Story Anthology 2018

An anthology of stories from the ten finalists in the 2018 Tasmanian Writers’ Prize. And one of those finalists was my talented cousin Allison Mitchell with Keeping Quiet, a story inspired by family tales.

Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng

Read on Kindle. The book opens with the Richardson’s house, in a genteel American suburb, burning down and it’s discovered that a fire was made in each of the bedrooms. The suspect is the youngest of their teenagers, Isabelle; she has run away. We then go back to find out what led up to that moment. Totally engrossing.

Amy and Isabelle by Elizabeth Strout

I’ve come late to Elizabeth Strout’s party but I’ll be staying right to the end. So far her Olive Kitteridge continues to be in first place for me but Amy and Isabelle is a compulsive and unsettling read, with all the characters living on in my mind. Isabelle and her teenage daughter Amy live in a small American town – a quiet, uneventful life until Amy has an affair with one of her teachers.

News from Heaven by Jennifer Haigh

Another small-town America book – this time of short stories, some of which link with each other. Jennifer Haigh has written an award-winning novel which I haven’t read (yet) called Baker Towers, set in the fictional coal-mining town of Bakerton, Pennsylvania. This declining town is also the setting for the short stories. Loved them – she really gets under the skin of her characters, male or female, whatever age they are.

Murder at the Mousetrap by Helena Marchmont

And now for something completely different – the first in a series of short, cosy, countryside mysteries, with Alfie, a protagonist described as ‘Miss Marple meets Oscar Wilde’. And where cosier to have a murder mystery, laced with a good dollop of humour, than the Cotswolds? A fun read (on Kindle). Look forward to the second one.