Book Review: Precipice by Robert Harris – history unfolds in a fascinating drama involving love and war

~ Judith ~ 1 Comment

I’d not read a Robert Harris novel before, but was curious about the events Precipice describes – the indiscretion of a prime minister writing endless letters to his much younger mistress, revealing state secrets. The potential for said letters to get into the wrong hands as Britain tips into World War One.

In the author’s notes at the beginning and at the end of the book, you learn that all of the above events are quite well documented, historians have devoted entire books to the subject, and that the letters written by the prime minister as they appear in the book are authentic. My interest even more piqued, I happily plunged in.

The story begins describing the life of the Hon. Venetia Stanley, a member of a somewhat fast set known as the Coterie who live in London, enjoying the excess afforded to them by money and privilege, and amusing themselves in various daring ways. It’s the summer of 1914, and Venetia is expected to attend a boat party on the Thames, an invitation the PM, H.H Asquith begs her to cancel in favour of meeting him. He needs help with the Irish question, as he tells her in his letters. The boating trip ends in disaster, just as well Venetia cried off at the last minute, and we meet policeman, Paul Deemer.

Deemer, an invented character, is a nice contrast to the elevated world of the PM and Venetia. He’s just an ordinary sergeant at the Met, has a young brother rescued from various scrapes by a promising career in the army, while Paul having recently broken off an engagement, is not sure about his future. His parents are dead, and he’s a quiet, lonely sort, ideal for a hush-hush project with Special Branch.

Asquith writes to Venetia several times a day (postal deliveries numbered twelve a day in London at the time), the two meet at various social occasions, and go for a Friday “drive” together, where the PM shares with Venetia the burdens of his role, the decisions he is tussling with and often revealing copies of telegrams and other top secret documents. Venetia is intelligent, offers a sounding board and emotional encouragement. He’s like a politician who has made it to the top job, only to discover it’s a lot harder than he’d anticipated.

She liked him for his kindness, his cleverness, his fame and power, which he wore lightly. Her father had been a Liberal MP: she had grown up surrounded by talk of politics. Now she was probably the most well-informed woman in the country. And if she was honest, she also enjoyed the thrill of it – the secrecy, the illicitness, the risk.

In the background, as war is declared we meet lots of the key players, such as Lord Kitchener, Winston Churchill and and Lloyd George. I’ve never read such a clear account of how WWI began, nor how agonising it was for the British government to make the final decision to declare war on Germany. As the months pass, the huge confidence of those like Churchill is put to the test as troop losses start to take their toll on morale.

This is all quite fascinating, while Paul spends his days doing things he’s not comfortable about in his new role. Harris has done an amazing job in weaving in the letters with events they describe as they unfold. But anyone wanting a riveting spy novel might be disappointed. This is much more a story about three characters and their emotional journey as the world turns to chaos. And it’s well done, carrying with it a depth of research that makes everything that happens seem very real. I’ll certainly read another Robert Harris; Precipice is a four-star read from me.

Book Review: The Pull of the Stars by Emma Donoghue – a gripping read set during the Spanish Flu epidemic

~ Judith ~ 2 Comments

Emma Donoghue’s novels are always worth checking out and quickly immerse you into all sorts of situations and topics. I loved Akin and was fascinated by Haven, but The Pull of the Stars is one of the most intense stories I’ve read in a while. Perhaps it is due to the short time-frame of the narrative, and its setting shortly before the Armistice of 1918. We’re in a struggling Dublin hospital where thirty-year-old nurse Julia Power is assigned to a tiny maternity ward for women infected with the Spanish Flu.

Julia is suddenly given the charge of the day shift for the three bed ward, a former storage room, taking over from the stern nun working through the night. The hospital is woefully understaffed and undersupplied, but Julia has good midwifery skills. A helper, Bridie Sweeney, is sent from a kind of convent workhouse and finally a doctor, Kathleen Lynn, who while being extremely caring and experienced, is wanted by the police for her involvement with Sinn Fein.

Over the four chapters, named for the four colours a flu victim’s skin turns, from early fever through to oxygen deprivation and even death, the reader is given a nail-biting ride into complications of childbirth. There are some pretty grisly details, and I confess to being somewhat squeamish when it comes to descriptions of operations, but this kept me reading, the life and death situations surrounding the women’s care quite fascinating.

Could she be hungry for her breakfast? Unlikely, in her state; patients with serious flu cases had no appetite. Haggard at thirty-three years old, pale but for those flame-red cheeks, her belly a hard hill. Eleven previous deliveries, it said on Ita Noonan’s chart, seven children still living, and this twelfth birth not expected for another two and a half months. (Since Mrs. Noonan had been able to tell us nothing about when she might have conceived or when she’d felt the quickening, Sister Finnegan had had to make a stab at the due date based on the height of the uterus.)
My job wasn’t to cure all Ita Noonan’s ills but to bring her safe through his particular calamity, I reminded myself, to push her little boat back into the current of what I imagined to be her barely bearable life.

Poverty is described in all its forms here, made all the worse by the war. We learn of the harsh social cost of carrying a child out of wedlock – we’ve all heard about the convent laundries – but the orphanages seem to be just as bad. Young Bridie is an orphanage girl, not sure of her age – “about 22” – undernourished and unpaid. For all that, she’s eager to help and enjoys the work, is kindly with the women in the ward and strikes up a friendship with Julia.

At home Julia has a brother, who has never spoken since returning from war service, the two making an odd sort of couple, Julia earning a living, Tim keeping the house and making meals. Talk of women’s suffrage and the division of opinion about the Easter Rising hover in the background. The character of Kathleen Lynn is based on a real person, and in the book she inspires Julia to think about political issues differently.

This is a dramatic and intense read about friendship in the face of adversity, changing political and social times, a microcosm that tells so much about the wider picture. I loved the book, though it was tough-going at times with the harsh realities of birth trauma and fever as grim as any battle story. In fact the two are compared more than once in the book. For all that there is a positive ending that gives you a glimpse of hope, so don’t let me put you off – this is such a brilliant story – a five-star read from me.

Book Review: My Sister and Other Lovers by Esther Freud – a return to the characters of Hideous Kinky

~ Judith ~ 1 Comment

Esther Freud is one of those authors I always read, so I was eager to check out her new book My Sister and Other Lovers. It’s a return to the characters of Hideous Kinky, her first novel, also made into a film starring Kate Winslett, which is well worth a viewing too, if you can find it. The earlier story follow’s two young girls, Lucy and Bea, when their mother abruptly leaves their father, taking them to Morocco in search of enlightenment in the 1960s. Their mother is very young, parental supervision is minimal and the children often left to themselves, sometimes frighteningly so.

In the new book, we pick up the story of Lucy, now fourteen, Bea soon disappears off to university, but there’s a little brother, Max, now, and the mother has recently left Max’s father. They eventually arrive at a commune, and again there are adults behaving badly, and no one minds what Lucy gets up to.

We follow Lucy’s story, her awkward relationship with her mother, as she goes on to study drama, and the remoteness of Bea. The past is a dangerous country, but inspires Bea to make a film of their childhood in Morocco, in which she reveals she never felt safe. Lucy seems continually in search of a family, men are predatory when they see a young girl without few parental boundaries. Later it seems impossible to establish a lasting relationship with any boyfriend. Men come and go, are unpredictable, sometimes just as lost as she is. She never seems to get close enough to anyone to really understand what’s going on with them, her sister included.

It was high summer when the police arrived. Someone must have let them in, and shown them up the stairs. They stood, a man and a woman, awkward in shirtsleeves, at the door. ‘What’s this about?’ my mother asked. Max clung to her skirt.
‘We have reason to believe your daughter may be implicated in a crime.’
I blanked my face. I’d seen it: Free Astrid Proll in red letters on the bus shelter. Baader-Meinhof scrawled across the Wartlington Hotel.
‘No.’ I shook my head.
‘We have information relating to a terrorist cell.’
‘Here, in East Sussex?’ My mother laughed.
I laughed too and they turned to look at me, in my school uniform, ink from a pen I’d used to do my homework staining my thumb.
‘We have the name Lucy on a list.’
‘Wrong Lucy.’ My mother crossed her arms.

We move through the decades and Lucy eventually builds a new career, has a chance to start a family, but nothing is easy, however hard she tries. It’s a very bohemian environment described, ephemeral and sometimes insubstantial and the language reflects this. I found myself at times rereading paragraphs to discover the underlining meaning. Esther Freud’s novels often delve into the autobiographical for inspiration and I couldn’t stop wondering where the real ended and the imagined began.

Esther Freud is the daughter of Lucien Freud, the artist, as well as the great-granddaughter of Sigmund Freud. If she was ever to write an autobiography, I’m sure it would be fascinating. In the meantime, her fiction is well worth exploring. My Sister and Other Lovers is a four-and-a-half star read from me.

Book Review: This Story Might Save Your Life by Tiffany Crum – an original and riveting L.A. thriller with all the feels

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I hadn’t a clue what to expect from this debut novel, and even looking back having turned the last page, it still seems an interesting mix of genres – by turns a psychological thriller, a dramedy and a love story.

This Story Might Save Your Life is named after the massively successful podcast hosted by besties Benny and Joy. The idea behind the show is life-threatening situations, and how to survive them. Each episode describes one such event researched by one of the team, who then asks the other, how would you escape – for instance, being caught in the mouth of a humpback whale. So yes, we’re not just talking house fires and boats capsizing.

There’s a lot of comedic banter, and it’s really the personalities of the two that make the show work. Neither Benny or Joy ever thought they’d be still doing the show years later but subscribers write in with their own near-death survival situations and it goes from strength to strength. Joy’s husband Zander has helped grow the brand, running the business side of things and even taking the show on tour.

The situation is complicated by Joy’s medical condition. She has narcolepsy, which means those closest to her are aware that she might just fall asleep at any moment. With care and meds she leads a fairly normal life. The other complication, which happens right at the start of the book, is that during the season that the Santa Ana winds threaten trees and cause general mayhem, Joy and Zander disappear from their home.

We get Benny’s story about the disappearance, the police investigation and the growing concern that the two may be in danger. Benny’s not a big fan of Zander – there’s some jealousy there between them – so his main concern is for Joy whose narcolepsy makes everything tricky anyway. Interwoven with the all the CSI, the search teams and suspicious looks from a probing Detective Keller is Joy’s story. She and Benny have a publishing deal to write a two-person memoir, so this is her story, going back to her learning to deal with her illness, make a life for herself, her meeting Benny and then Zander.

The switching between the two stories makes you beaver through the chapters desperate to see what happens next. Joy’s backstory is just as interesting as Benny’s search for clues, slowly bringing us up-to-date with potential reasons for the disappearance. The plotting is excellent, but the characters are engaging too. Joy and Benny are charming and funny – Joy captures our empathy because she’s just so positive in spite of her medical condition, while Benny’s a bit of a goof, but also intense. He’s also been through some difficulties and has a temper.

Zander is a bit of a dark card, and there are other characters who have emotional connections to the two MCs – among them Zander’s sister Mallory, and Benny’s ex, Luna, which adds further complications. It’s quite likely someone’s lying, but who? And even Benny and Joy seem to be hiding something. So there are plenty of twists that keep you eagerly reading to the end. I also loved the L.A. setting which Tiffany Crum helps you visualise – a place I’d be happy to revisit.

I read this novel courtesy of Netgalley and Hachette, Australia for an honest review. It’s a great story, and I’d certainly be keen to read more by Tiffany Crum. This Story Might Save Your Life is due for publication on 10 March and is a four-and-a-half star read from me.

Book Review: The Cursed Road by Laura McCluskey – another dark and twisty mystery set in the Scottish Highlands

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When I spotted on Netgalley a second book in Laura McCluskey’s DI Georgina Lennox series, I quickly expressed my interest. I’d been well entertained by George’s first appearance in The Wolf Tree, a crime novel set on a remote Scottish Island, full of secrecy, superstition and twists. George is a stroppy character, young for a DI but has a good nose for detective work. So she’s partnered with DI Richard Stewart, an experienced avuncular sort, the good cop to George’s bad, doing his best to keep George out of trouble.

But in The Cursed Road, the tables have been turned. The traumatic events of the first book left both cops reeling, George undergoing some months of recovery and therapy, which have made her stronger, steadier. Richie on the other hand has not done the therapy, won’t look George in the eye, and has a short fuse that has their Superintendent worried. When a case comes up – the discovery of the body of a young woman in a remote corner of the Highlands – the two are sent to the town of Kirkcree to investigate, George also tasked with keeping an eye on Richie, reporting back anything that causes concern.

Emotions are running high for Richie. He’s the lead because ten years ago, a young woman disappeared from the same area. Cara Reid had a difficult start to life, lacked family support, but she always kept in touch with her younger brother, until suddenly she didn’t. Richie has never forgotten the case, blaming himself for not finding her. The new victim was found with Cara’s name scratched on her arm. The two cases must be linked, surely.

It takes less than six hours for the press to start calling her Bambi.
The moniker is as cruel as it is inaccurate; in the story, Bambi survives. What they really should have called this woman, her body found in a remote area of the Scottish Highlands just before dawn this morning, is ‘Bambi’s Mother’ – especially after the pathologist dug out the bullet, a .270 Winchester, from between her third and fourth ribs.
‘A perfect shot,’ one local police constable was quoted admitting, ‘if you thought you were bringing down a deer.’
But just as effective in bringing down a person, George thinks as she thumbs through the article on her phone.

George and Richie settle in somewhat testily at their small-town inn, supposedly there for just one night to see what they can find out from interviewing the pathologist and investigating the crime scene. It would be easy to see this as a shooting accident gone wrong. Further along the road where the body was found is an exclusive resort catering to international tourists wanting to hunt deer. Investigations unearth disputes the owners have with an old Scottish family that has lived in the area for centuries in their crumbling castle. Suddenly the story is peppered with interesting characters and potential suspects.

Other people on George’s radar include the creepy guy who eyeballs George at the village pub, and the journalist Hendry Shaw who made a big story out of George and Richie’s discoveries on the island. He particularly highlighted George’s part in the case, which hasn’t helped her relationship with Richie. George doesn’t hesitate to give Hendry a piece of her mind, especially when he follows them to Kirkcree. But is he beginning to wear George down?

A curse, a hundreds-year-old feud and a ghostly apparition all add to the atmosphere in this curious case. Clues and suspicious behaviour stretch the stay of the two detectives and with that the danger level rises. The detective’s partnership is put under pressure and George has to be the mature one, adding a bit of depth to the characterisation. The story builds nicely in pace with a nail-biting finish and George shows her mettle. It all adds to a clever, original and entertaining murder-thriller and a four-and-a-half-star read from me.

The Cursed Road was published this week on 24 February. I received a review copy courtesy of Netgalley and Harper Collins Publishers Australia.

Book Review: Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell – a story about Shakespeare, his family and the tragedy that haunted them

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Maggie O’Farrell’s one of my favourite authors, but for some reason I forgot to read Hamnet. Then the movie came out and reminded me. To be fair, I wasn’t sure I would enjoy a story which involves the death of a child. And yes, there’s suffering as well as grief here. But O’Farrell also fills the book with so much life and sensation, vividly bringing you into the English countryside, the period, and the small town where Agnes/Anne and William Shakespeare live.

The first and biggest chunk of the book is a dual timeframe story which tells you how William Shakespeare meets Agnes Hathaway, when he is sent to tutor her young half-brothers. They are both extraordinary people and can see that in each other as soon as they meet. Agnes, because who wouldn’t notice a tall, striking woman carrying a falcon; and William, because Agnes can see into people with a kind of extra-intuition, and observes in the bored eighteen year old, the huge imagination and talent that will make his name.

The story flips between their love story and over a decade later when young Hamnet and his twin sister Judith are in the yard together. Judith starts to feel ill and goes inside to lie down. The twins live with their older sister and mother in a narrow house sharing a yard with Agnes’s in-laws. They are in and out of each other’s houses. But when Judith falls ill, her mother is at her brother’s farm, tending her bees. The other women, his grandmother and aunt are out, and his grandfather ill-tempered and volatile, leaving Hamnet running desperately into the street to find help.

She grows up feeling wrong, out of place, too dark, too tall, too unruly, too opinionated, too silent, too strange. She grows up with the awareness that she is merely tolerated, an irritant, useless, that she does not deserve love, that she will need to change herself substantially, crush herself down if she is to be married. She grows up, too, with the memory of what it meant to be properly loved, for what you are, not what you ought to be.
There is just enough of this recollection alive, she hopes, to enable her to recognise it if she meets it again. And if she does, she won’t hesitate. She will seize it with both hands, as a means of escape, a means of survival. She won’t listen to the protestations of others, their objections, their reasoning. This will be her chance, her way through the narrow hole at the heart of the stone, and nothing will stand in her way.

In a few scenes, Maggie O’Farrell shows us how their family works, the town they live in, the period, and the surrounding countryside. It’s all so vivid and full of the young boy’s energy, his desperation. By the time the women return, Judith is gravely ill, and there are the tell-tale signs of the plague. Time passes slowly and fast at the same time. Hamnet’s waiting for help, then slipping into sleep next to his twin, but everyone else around them is too busy to notice where the children are, only cross they haven’t done their chores.

We all know what happens, it’s on the back cover even if you’ve forgotten the history. But it’s still nerve-wracking reading. ‘Go upstairs,’ you want to tell the grown-ups. ‘Check on your children.’ In the meantime we have the alternate chapters describing Agnes and William’s marriage, William’s ongoing restlessness, his father’s endless displeasure with him, the plans to go to London. There are peripheral characters too. Agnes’s sensible brother and bitter step-mother, the story of Agnes’s own mother, long dead, but who had an affinity with nature, and the healing skills that Agnes herself has inherited.

It’s in the last section of the book that things really come together. We are not waiting for help this time, but for William to return home, urgently sent for to see for the last time his dying child. The passing years, William’s continued absences. How it all comes together is brilliantly done and the ending is stunning. Again you have the immediacy in how O’Farrell brings you into the lives of her characters. We feel what they feel, the sensations coupled with their own internal monologue are so well crafted.

Hamnet is such a beautifully put together story, and the ending so brilliantly done that you finish the book well satisfied. This alone is worth the five stars I’m giving this book. I’m also pleased to report that Maggie O’Farrell has a new book, Land, due out in June.

Book Review: Hastings: a boy’s own adventure by Dick Frizzell – an entertaining memoir of growing up in 1950s provincial New Zealand

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Gosh life in the 1950s could be dangerous. Kids jumping on bikes and disappearing for the day, nobody really knowing where they were, mowing the lawns with bare feet, impromptu caving adventures under a mountain known as The Peak. Somehow the author managed to survive childhood to write this entertaining memoir about growing up in his home town of Hastings – that’s Hastings, Hawke’s Bay, New Zealand – not the one in England or any of the other Hastings around the world.

Dick Frizzell is one of New Zealand’s most instantly recognisable artists – his paintings, that is. When you read this book, you’ll discover that not only did he win an art prize at his high school, but an English prize as well. As a writer, he has a chatty style, the kind that you can imagine him using to tell a funny anecdote over a beer. It’s also very descriptive, with many original and quirky turns of phrase that help you imagine what things look like. The visual artist coming out in his prose.

Although I missed the 1950s entirely, my quite a bit older siblings would tell similar tales from their childhood and a similar picture of New Zealand would emerge. This book begins with Dick’s early years, and the arrival of a whole bunch of sisters, his parents’ concern that he needed a brother and the sudden arrival (and departure) of Ray. The book is full of characters, beginning with his parents – his engineering father’s ability to build and fix, and to get through large amounts of beer during a rabbit hunting excursion. Or his mother’s love of entertaining, her cottage art and determinedly sunny nature.

These characters – neighbours and kids from school, elderly aunts and teachers – emerge in the stories, which are often wild and whacky tales, capturing the young Richard as an innocent at large. The decision of Dick and his mates to test the saying ‘like shooting fish in a barrel’, which of course meant ‘borrowing’ a gun and fish; the unusual ‘mates’ he makes in hospital on a men’s ward following a burst appendix; joining a theatre troupe performing South Pacific as a call boy and painting on tattoos.

A couple of days later we got the fish into the barrel. Well, we got one fish into the barrel; the other one was dead when I retrieved the bucket from its hiding place. Maybe the crushed-up Snax biscuits didn’t suffice. Could’ve been the salt.
So now we had a fish in a barrel and were beginning to feel a bit half-hearted about the whole enterprise. The actual logistics were starting to look a bit daunting too. Just how do you shoot a rifle into a barrel? We were going to have to stand on boxes. Maybe it was meant to be ‘shooting fish in a half-barrel’.

Such a busy time, and all through it a nostalgic look at how we lived. New products at the corner shop, like the arrival of the first popsicles (marketed as TT2s), driving his mother’s 1936 Austin Sherborne, saving up to buy Beano, Phantom and Uncle Scrooge comics, teenagers with motorcycles at the milk bar. Through it all lots of drawing and art, the future painter starting to develop. It all seems so innocent now.

Did the outside world impinge at all on any of it? As a kid, I remember being very aware that my older brother could get drafted into the Vietnam War, that there was a nuclear arms race, pollution and not enough food for countries in Africa, George Harrison singing about Bangladesh. I remember getting really worried before I even got to high school. It was a different time, I guess.

Hastings: a boy’s own adventure is a fun read though. I chuckled my was through the thirty stories, some of them quite hair-raising. A trip down memory lane, or your parents’ memory lane. It’s the kind of book you can pick up and put down as each story is a separate vignette, which makes a nice bedside read, or gift, I should think. The first in a series of planned memoirs, Hastings: a boy’s own adventure is a four-star read from me,

Book Review: Here One Moment by Liane Moriarty – a gripping novel about superstition, mortality and fate

~ Judith ~ 1 Comment

It takes a smart novelist to write an engaging story with multiple characters and viewpoint switches. Liane Moriarty pulls this off really well in her novel, Here One Moment, about a passenger on a short intercity flight who predicts the ages at which her fellow passengers will die and the cause of death. We follow a selection of these passengers in the days, weeks and months following the “Death Lady”‘s predictions as they assimilate what they’ve been told.

Honestly, this is such an original and clever story and Moriarty really pulls you in wth short chapters that flit between Cherry’s story – she’s the Death Lady – and one of a small group of passengers who have been given the short straw – a death predicted for the near future. Understandably their responses vary from being a bit worried, angry, or shrugging the predictions off as nonsense. That is until some of the predictions begin to come true.

Cherry is a pleasant looking, reserved woman of around seventy who arrives on the plane tired and a bit dehydrated. Her mother was a well-known fortune-teller in the Sydney suburb where Cherry grew up. You might think that Cherry has inherited this profession and continued to practise. But Cherry’s a maths geek from a young age. How her life develops takes the reader through the sixties and seventies and on, so that we eventually form a clear picture of why she had her ‘funny turn’ on the plane.

The lady sighs. She turns to appraise Leo.
Leo says, ‘You’re telling us how and when we’re going to die?’
Later he will berate himself. He will think he should have followed Sue’s lead and shut her down, but his feelings are mixed up with memories of his beloved grandmother’s confused face and how he – Leo! – could make it smooth and peaceful when he went along with her delusions. He was better at it than his sisters. Those were the last gifts he gave her. He will do the same for this lady. It doesn’t matter what nonsense she is talking.
‘Cause of death. Age of death,’ says the lady. ‘It’s really very simple.’
‘Sounds very simple,’ agrees Leo. ‘Give it to me straight.’

Meanwhile we get to know the half-dozen or so “doomed” passengers and how they deal with what they’ve been told. There’s Allegra, the cabin manager, stunningly beautiful, loves her job and yet has a family history which includes depression. Is she really likely to taker her own life in the next year? There’s engineer Leo, a loving family man, late for his daughter’s performance in a school production, supposedly going to die in a workplace accident. He chums up with Ethan, 30 years old and returning from the funeral of a friend, who has died suddenly, leaving Ethan to wonder about seizing the day.

There’s also the ER nurse in her sixties, still fit and active, as well as the bride, with her new husband, still in their wedding regalia, both women given terrible predictions. But possibly the most difficult to hear is the young mother, Paula, who has had to deal with an unsettled baby through the whole flight, which included a two-hour delay, only to learn at the end of it that her boy will die by drowning, aged seven.

We follow each of these characters, their stories woven in with Cherry’s, as their ‘death-day’ looms. It’s nail-biting stuff, as they’re all likeable people with busy lives, loves and families. You get to the middle of the book as the first predictions seem to come true, wondering if you’re going to like what happens next. Is this some kind of ‘And Then There Were None’ (Agatha Christie) scenario?

Well, you’ll have to read it to find out. I will say that it was interesting to read a book that deals with our mortality, an issue we tend to put to the back of our minds. But in the cases of Leo, Ethan, Allegra and co, death is suddenly there in their minds all the time. And the idea of what you might do differently if you knew what was in your cards, or tea leaves. The question of how much of our destiny do we hold in our hands.

I enjoyed all these character’s stories, even Cherry’s, who seems unlikeable at first, cruel even. I galloped through Here One Moment, desperate to find out the what happened – so it’s a four-star read from me. If you’re doing the 52 Book Club Challenge, Liane Moriarty has a sister Nicole Moriarty who also writes fiction.

Book Review: No Friend to This House by Natalie Haynes – an evocative reimagining of the story of Jason and Medea

~ Judith ~ 4 Comments

Natalie Haynes really knows her classics. Inspired by a performance of Euripides’ Medea with Diana Rigg in the lead role, it’s the novel, she says, she had wanted to write her whole life. She’s studied the original in Greek and her knowledge comes through in the way the story is layered with history and mythology going back in time.

Many stories about Jason focus on his adventures on his ship, the Argo, with his famous Argonauts who even include Heracles, and their quest to obtain the Golden Fleece. He has to fight a dragon, slay a field of warriors and sail his ship through the crashing rocks of the Symplegades, plus a whole lot more. But in this book, Natalie Haynes switches the focus onto Medea, the princess who defies her father to help him.. And it’s not a happy tale.

Before all that, Haynes weaves in a ton of backstory so that we learn about the fleece itself, the ram it came from and why it was so special. The actual taking of the fleece doesn’t happen until the middle of the book. There are tyrannous kings, including Jason’s uncle who steals the kingdom of Iolcus from Jason’s father. Perhaps it’s this trouble at home that urges Jason to want to seek adventure.

We’ve also got Aietes, king of Colchis, and owner of the fleece, who doesn’t hesitate to dispose of family members. We discover the backstory to why Medea chooses to help Jason and how she becomes besotted with the hero. There’s some meddling from the gods here as Medea is no pushover. She’s an interesting character, a powerful witch who worships Hecate.

It was hardly the fault of the Argo.
This was the kind of thing people said in those days: if you couldn’t blame anyone, you’d say it was the ship. But Jason didn’t set his Argonauts to row across the oceans because he was captain of the Argo; the men built the Argo because Jason wanted to find the fleece. So if you were trying to find the beginning of this story, then that’s where you would go: to the glimmering softness of the golden ram. Would you choose the day it was born? Or the day it appeared in Hellas to rescue two children, about to lose their lives?

Jason is a great leader, handsome, charismatic and skilled enough to win through – although he gets a lot of help, from the gods as well as Medea. But it’s really the story of Medea that anchors the novel. She’s interesting in that she has to deal with being wary of Jason as well as besotted with him – thank you, Cupid. She’s in survival mode a lot of the time, figuring things out, calling upon her magic. She’s clever and strong, but she’ll need to be as going off with Jason is no plain sailing.

If you know anything about the origins of this story, you will know that Medea has been given a lot of bad press. She does some truly terrible things, so she’s not your most likeable heroine. And in this world of legend, not many characters are as heroic or even as kind as you might expect. There’s a ton of characters too. Haynes piles in short episodes from the past to fill you in on why this happened, and why fate decrees that something else has to be the way it is. It’s complex and you will find yourself riffling back to the helpful List of Characters and the map at the start of the book time and time again.

No Friend to This House is a very readable and different sort of novel, abundantly well researched and this gives it that ring of authority. You come away feeling you know the real Jason and Medea, the way the ancient Greeks would have known them. It also shows how women can be marginalised in our histories, and what they may suffer because of the grand schemes of men. It’s a stunning read and stacks up well among other novels based on ancient legends – a four-and-a-half star read from me.

Book Review: Traitor’s Legacy by S J Parris – a fab new series of historical thrillers set in Elizabethan England

~ Judith ~ Leave a comment

I’ve been a big fan of S J Parris’s Giordano Bruno series of historical thrillers, which follow a heretic priest on the run from Rome, recruited by Queen Elizabeth’s spymaster Francis Walsingham. In this new series S J Parris has shifted the narrative along a decade or so and reintroduced a peripheral figure from the Bruno books as her main character, sleuth and spy. This would be Sophia de Wolfe, now thirty-five and a woman of means, living quietly in London. Queen Elizabeth is in her final years, but the threats to her sovereignty have not gone away, particularly since there is the big question of who will succeed the throne when the queen dies.

Traitor’s Legacy begins with the burial of a body – just a young girl – at a site where a band of players, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, has just removed its theatre, ready to rebuild on the other side of the Thames. It’s winter, and the dismantling of the theatre happens quietly, undercover of darkness, with a young boy called Badger paid to keep a look out. What Badger also sees, is the two men who hide the girl, as well as the jewelled clasp one of them leaves behind. There are documents with the body, too, written in code.

We flip to Sophia’s home where she is being tutored in the skill of swordsmanship. She wears her specially made duelling breeches, not an outfit any right-minded woman of the age would be seen in, but the canny reader knows they’re going to come in handy later on, along with her skills with the sword. Her session is interrupted by a visit from Thomas Phelippes, an envoy from Robert Cecil, Walsingham’s replacement. He has news of the body, an Agnes Lovell, and Cecil wants to see Sophia immediately. The coded documents are in Sophia’s cypher, from her days as one of Walsingham’s spies.

Thinking her days of espionage long over, Sophia is now tasked with discovering who might have written a warning in her code and left it with the girl’s body. Sophia will have to dig into who might have killed the girl and why, and whether the warning has links to the Queen’s determination to bring the Irish into line. Or something else entirely. Young Agnes was a ward under the guardianship of the powerful North family, and Sir Thomas North and his son had both served in the Irish War. But Agnes’s uncle was a known Catholic sympathiser – so there’s that. And then there’s the theatre company whose site was so convenient to the murderer – so many threads to unravel.

Sophia’s own history will come into play, particularly when the son she gave up for adoption at birth, now a teenage boy and member of the Chamberlain’s Men, becomes accused of the murder. There are threats against Sophia herself, some daring rooftop escapes and more bodies turning up to keep the story humming along. In the background you have Parris’s depth of research which brings Tudor England to life, not just the powerful players at court, such as Cecil and the Duke of Essex, but the ordinary folk – the street kids, like Badger, living off their wits, the servants that know more than they’d like to let on, the women working in brothels. There’s lots of insight into the precarious place of women in all levels of society too, something Sophia understands only too well.

This is such a rich and layered novel, keeping the reader on their toes, with a cast of interesting characters. I loved the scenes in the theatres – the Lord Chamberlain’s Men were Shakespeare’s troupe. But there’s also a rival group, the Admiral’s Men, and their playwright, Anthony Munday – a former spying colleague of Sophia’s who gets involved in the case. There’s some unfinished business for Sophia to sort out with both her son and with Munday – so plenty of interesting threads as the series continues.

I was delighted to listen to this as an audiobook read by Kristin Atherton, who does all the voices so well, it’s hard to believe they’re all the same narrator. And I’m also delighted that the next book in the series, Rebel’s Gambit, is out in May. Traitor’s Legacy is a five-star read from me.