Book Review: Stone Blind by Natalie Haynes – an imaginative recreation of the Greek myth of Medusa

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Since Madeline Miller’s Song of Achilles, it seems there’s been a growing number of authors turning to classical mythology for inspiration. And it’s no wonder, because the stories of the Ancient Greeks and others are just so engaging.

A cluster have concentrated on the battle of Troy and Odysseus’s subsequent wanderings, while here we have Natalie Haynes’s narrative around the famously hated Gorgon, Medusa. She deserved to have her head cut off, right, turning all those mortals to stone with a single glance? In slaying her, Perseus was a great hero, wasn’t he?

Maybe not. Stone Blind takes us back to Medusa’s birth and her arrival on a rocky shore to be cared for by her Gorgon sisters, Sthenno and Euryale. These two are tusked creatures with snakes for hair, powerful claws and wings that make them swift in the air after their prey. But Medusa is a mortal baby they need to learn how to care for. She has a human form apart from tiny wings and can’t chew carcasses and crunch bones. The sisters keep sheep to feed the baby milk, and learn to make bread.

The three make a loving family, and Medusa grows into a beautiful girl, who attracts the interest of Poseidon, god of the sea. Meanwhile, in another kingdom, a beautiful princess is kept in a dungeon by her father. It is told that Danae will bear a son who will kill King Acrisius, so the king isn’t taking any chances. But what can he do against Zeus, king of the Olympian gods, who breaks into Danae’s cell as a shower of gold. The offspring of this encounter will be Perseus, and how he survives to fulfil his destiny is an interesting strand to this story.

And in the kingdom of Ethiopia there’s the story of Andromeda, another beautiful princess, but without a brother to take over her father’s kingdom is doomed to marry her uncle to secure the royal line. These poor women are pawns in the hands of powerful men; while around humankind and their struggles are the constant machinations of the gods. They’re either like Poseidon and Zeus, raping pretty girls, or they’re bored youngsters like Athene, causing trouble, or perpetually angry like Zeus’s wife Hera, exacting revenge for every slight.

The snakes were patient at first, because they knew no other life. But they longed for heat and light. The cave bored them and they wouldn’t pretend otherwise. They belonged to Medusa and she belonged to them, and they sighed and seethed until she accepted that she could not hide away from the light they craved.

The likelihood of a happy ending for anyone with beauty or an enviable talent seems slim in this world. The ancient Greeks must have suffered many a natural disaster to have come up with such a collection of angry and self-serving gods seeking retribution in so many convoluted ways. And yet they are devoted to them, building elegant temples and beautiful statues, making sacrifices to ward off disaster.

And is a monster always evil? Is there ever such a thing as a good monster? Because what happens when a good person becomes a monster?

Natalie Haynes brings this interplay between gods and mortals beautifully to life, weaving in all the different strands that interconnect the stories. She makes use of the classical Greek chorus which creates some interesting narrative voices: Panopeia the sea nymphs; Elaia, the olive trees; even Herpeta, Medusa’s snakes. There are a lot of plot strands to keep track of and quick switches between them, so the reader has to keep their wits about them. Fortunately, there’s a list of characters at the beginning which I referred to many a time.

The story is an old one, but in Stone Blind it’s very fresh with some deeper meditations on what makes a hero and what makes a monster. I embarked on the novel wondering how I would feel about the character of Medusa, thinking it would be difficult to follow an anti-hero’s journey to her messy end. But Haynes handles it well, creating empathy, and the story never flags. I’m glad I picked this one up and am keen to read more mythological retellings, and more by Haynes. Stone Blind was long-listed for this year’s Women’s Prize for Fiction and gets four stars from me.

Book Review: Good Riddance by Elinor Lipman – a witty New York comedy full of the unexpected

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I’m often drawn to these sorts of New York comedies. I like the smart and snappy dialogue, the invigorating big city atmosphere – the apartments and the quirky characters who are always eating out or talking about eating out. I really enjoyed Elinor Lipman’s On Turpentine Lane, so was keen to snap this one up too. Both novels showcase this author as a writer of very original storylines.

In Good Riddance, the story follows Daphne Maritch, studying to be a chocolatier after a failed marriage and a recent move to a new apartment. It’s not long since her mother died, bequeathing Daphne, among other things, a 1968 Pickering High School yearbook. June Maritch was just a few years older than her students that year and had attended all the class of ’68 reunions, as well as annotating her yearbook with snarky comments about her former pupils.

Daphne doesn’t see any reason to keep the yearbook, and consigns it to the dumpster, where it is discovered by her neighbour, a budding documentary film maker. Geneva Wisenkorn sees all kinds of potential from interviewing the old classmates, showing them the yearbook and speculating about their teacher.

Suddenly Daphne rethinks her hasty ditching of the evidence. She doesn’t want her mother seen in a poor light and doesn’t trust her neighbour not to make her family look ridiculous. Her father was for many years principal at Pickering after all. Throw in a politician with a scandalous secret that also affects Daphne and suddenly she’s feels desperate to shut down the doco and reclaim the yearbook.

There’s a romantic twist to the story in the form of Jeremy, the young actor across the hall, who becomes Daphne’s co-conspirator. And things are complicated by Daphne’s father moving to New York. He plans to see a bit of life in the city he’s always dreamt of. When her dad takes on a dog-walking job, he has a chance to meet all kinds of women.

Lipman throws in loads of fun situations, including Daphne’s tagging along with Geneva to a reunion, a wedding, a funeral and a dramatic situation requiring Daphne to administer first aid. There’s a load of humorous dialogue and the characters butt heads and wind each other up spectacularly. It’s a fun read all round, but I have to say Daphne isn’t for me a particularly appealing character. She can be rather shouty and shrill. Maybe she needs more chocolate.

But on the whole, Good Riddance is an amusing read and Lipman’s writing crackles on the page. I whizzed through the book and will certainly read more by this author. Good Riddance is a three star read from me.

Time to Go for Another Spin with the Classics Club – and for me two reading challenges in one

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I always look forward to each spin of the wheel at the Classics Club. As you may recall, with each Classics Club Spin, you write a list of twenty numbered classic titles, post it on your blog, and read the one that corresponds with the number that pops into your inbox the following week.

This time the challenge coincides with my library winter reading challenge (Turn Up the Heat) – a bingo card of varied tasks and the opportunity to win prizes. One task is to read a book that is older than you. This has had a few people scratching their heads, but not me! So every book on my list this time around is older than me – to be honest, most of them were to begin with. And here they are:

1 Diary of a Provincial Lady (1930)
2 Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh (1945)
3 Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day by Winifred Watson (1938)
4 The Midwich Cuckoos by John Wyndham (1957)
5 The Grass is Singing by Doris Lessing (1950)
6 A Town Like Alice by Neville Shute (1950)
7 The Warden by Anthony Trollope (1855)
8 A Question of Upbringing by Anthony Powell (1951)
9 The Death of the Heart by Elizabeth Buchan (1938)
10 Vittoria Cottage by D E Stevenson (1949)
11 Memoirs of a Fox Hunting Man by Siegfried Sassoon (1928)
12 Sons and Lovers by D H Lawrence (1913)
13 South Riding by Winifred Hotly (1936)
14 Someone at a Distance by Dorothy Whipple (1953)
15 To the lighthouse by Virginia Woolf (1927)
16  A Game of Hide and Seek by Elizabeth Taylor (1951)
17 Lotte in Weimar by Thomas Mann (1939)
18 The River by Rumer Golden (1946)
19 The End of the Affair by Graham Green (1951)
20 Goodbye to All That by Robert Graves (1929)

Book Review: The Whalebone Theatre by Joanna Quinn – an English country house, a quirky heroine and a looming war

~ Judith ~ 2 Comments

There’s something about novels set in English manor houses – the setting is almost a character in itself. In Joanna Quinn’s debut novel we have Chilcombe, the home of the Seagraves, a house that has seen better days, but still mired in the old traditions of class. Jasper Seagrave is so desperate to pass on his estate to a son, that he marries young Rosalind, who in the period following World War I has little choice in suitors. Jasper is in his forties, short and stout, with a wild young daughter, Cristabel.

We meet Cristabel, age four, scruffy and dirty, and brandishing a stick as the carriage pulls up with her new step-mother. She’s a fierce little girl who grows into a fierce young woman, as her family shifts and changes around her, bringing a new sister – Flossie, known, at first, as the Veg; and eventually a longed-for male heir, the much adored Digby. By now Chilcombe is home to an Uncle Willoughby and the scene of endless parties.

War hero Willoughby brings a string of hangers on, some of them surprisingly useful and all of them interesting characters. But it’s the three children, particularly Cristabel who are the stars of the story. Left to their own devices, the children run wild, with little parental input. Digby is the only one who goes to school, the girls partially educated by a series of French governesses. The family get introduced to a bohemian set who appear on the beach one summer – the loud and charismatic Russian painter, Taras, with his wife and two lithe models, plus a family of wild, dark-haired children.

Taras and his family have a lasting effect on the younger Seagraves. While this is largely Cristabel’s story – her desperate attempts to be her own person in a world full of constraints, I enjoyed Digby’s story and particularly Flossie’s. While the other two sign up to do their bit against Hitler, Flossie is more passive, but eventually finds out what she’s good at and what she wants from life. You really have to feel sorry for young girls with no chance at a decent education.

‘Has it occurred to you that Cristabel might be less of a galumpher if she visited London more often?’ said Perry. ‘Has she ever been there? Has she ever been anywhere? Astonishingly, it won’t be that long before she’ll be a debutante. She needs to learn how to behave. Nobody minds a spirited girl from the shires. A practical sort. But they will mind if she won’t use a fork.’

‘Surely she uses a fork.’

Willoughby laughed. ‘I’m afraid not, my dear. She’s taken to eating off her hunting knife. Like a pirate. I rather enjoy it.’

This is a kind of coming of age novel, with its three characters discovering what it is to be themselves in a world set to change. Life after the war will bare little resemblance for how it was before – particularly in the grand country houses.

Joanna Quinn describes a changing society, an England devastated by the first war, the fast set drowning its sorrows in champagne, while a younger generation is ready to break the rules and find their own paths in life. The war welcomes the skills of the three siblings, but how will any of them find fulfilment when the war is over?

I adored The Whalebone Theatre. The writing is fresh, the characters are wonderful and the plot has plenty of surprises and turns. And Quinn does her settings really well – the house on the Dorset coast; Paris under German occupation. There’s a lot to enjoy and I look forward to what Quinn comes up with next. This book gets four stars out of five from me.

Book Review: The It Girl by Ruth Ware – another suspenseful read from “the queen of just one more chapter”

~ Judith ~ 1 Comment

Ruth Ware does it again with one of those books that ticks all the boxes for building suspense in the kind of thriller sometimes known as domestic noir. We’ve got a potential miscarriage of justice; a beautiful, dead girl and the people who loved and hated her; and the kind of plot that seesaws between ‘before’ and ‘after’, making you gallop through the pages. She caps this off with a vulnerable main character who can’t rest until she gets at the truth.

Nobody could be more vulnerable than Hannah. Ten years ago her best friend and college roommate, April, was strangled to death. Now working in a bookshop, April’s death had been so traumatic, Hannah dropped out of university. But it was Hannah’s testimony that helped convict the creepy college porter, John Neville.

Now Neville has died in prison, adamant to the end that he had nothing to do with April’s death and there’s a bunch of journalists eager to revisit the story. One in particular, Geraint Williams, has been dropping emails into Hannah’s in-box, with the endorsement of another college friend, Ryan.

There were other friends there at the time, all rocked by April’s death but all with reasons to resent her. April, a rich party girl, pulled terrible practical jokes on her friends. During their first week at their Oxford college April introduced Hannah to her old school mates, bringing her into their circle. Among them was Will, newly appointed as April’s boyfriend. Flip forward ten years and Will and Hannah are married, living in Edinburgh and expecting their first child. They have always agreed to ignore requests from the press for more interviews.

A complex cocktail of guilty feelings has Hannah rethinking her testimony and digging into what happened. Being pregnant and Will’s long days at work, plus her reluctance to upset her husband with her doubts see Hannah as a vulnerable woman on her own. This ramps up the tension nicely as Hannah explores several alternative scenarios, and memories of that first year at Oxford come crowding back to haunt her.

Ruth Ware has been described as the “queen of one more chapter” and she’s certainly a smart cookie when it comes to plotting. And while April’s the kind of girl with the world at her feet, several motives for her killing emerge through the book, and with that a bunch of suspects. But there are plenty of alibis too. How the facts eventually emerge will keep you guessing, while Hannah and her unborn child become closer to danger as at the real killer closes in.

The It Girl has been long-listed for the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year – a lovely long list of mystery and suspense fiction that’s well worth checking out, especially if you like British crime fiction. I will be keen to see if The It Girl makes the shortlist, which is announced on 15 June. It’s a four-star read from me.

Book Review: Bloomsbury Girls by Natalie Jenner – a post-war story and bookish delight

~ Judith ~ 3 Comments

When I picked up Bloomsbury Girls, I hadn’t realised that it follows an earlier novel, The Jane Austen Society. The newer book continues the story of bright, young thing, Evie Stone, who is now fresh out of Cambridge and a bit miffed.

Evie has been passed over for a research position, and for a male graduate who isn’t half as clever. This is 1949 and women have only recently been allowed to be conferred degrees, so she shouldn’t be surprised. Turning up in London for a job interview, she administers first aid to the manager when he collapses. While he’s recovering, they’re a man down, so Evie finds herself hired.

Soon settled in on the third floor, Evie has to catalogue the mass of rare books bought at auctions by Frank Allen, one of the owners. She has an ulterior motive, but the lack of order makes finding any particular book quite challenging. Fortunately Evie has a quick and methodical mind.

The other ‘girls’ of the title are aspiring author Vivian Lowry and unhappily married Grace Perkins. Grace loves her work at the bookshop – it’s a place she can escape a husband who has had a breakdown and who makes her life a misery. If it weren’t for her two young boys, she would leave him. At the shop she has a good friend in Vivian, who since losing her fiancé during the war, has become an angry young female, pouring all her feelings into the notebooks she carries with her.

Also on the staff is Alec McDonough, who is head of fiction and who has a fascination for Vivian. He too is an aspiring author, but any chance he and Vivian might share their work are hampered by the sparks that fly between them, occasionally romantic, but mostly they’re darts of fury from Vivian. Ashwin Ramaswamy is down in the basement, studying tiny organisms among the shelves of science and nature books.

Ash is also disappointed, having come from India to make something of himself, but struggles with the racism he experiences in London. It isn’t surprising that he and Evie become friends. They’re both up against it. Meanwhile, Lord Baskin, with his financial interest in the shop, finds more and more excuses to pop in since Grace arrived on the scene.

While there are several romantic threads to the story, the main thrust of the plot concerns Evie’s secret mission and to achieve her aims, help comes from a few surprising quarters. Will Evie find what she is looking for? Can Grace begin again and find happiness for herself and her boys? Will Vivian overcome her anger and succeed as a writer? Is there any hope for women to achieve their dreams in post-war Britain?

The novel includes some real-life characters, including Daphne du Maurier, Samuel Beckett and Peggy Guggenheim. They’re nicely brought to life as they interact with Evie and her colleagues. It all comes together in a light, feel-good read packed with warmth and humour. And there’s a smart literary quality too, giving you the impression that the author really knows her twentieth century literature.

It doesn’t really matter if you haven’t read The Jane Austen Society – although I for one will be hunting down this debut novel. Bloomsbury Girls is a fun, satisfying story – a four star read from me. There’s another book, Every Time We Say Goodbye in the pipeline, but not out until next year. Clearly, Jenner’s an author to watch.

Book Review: Exiles by Jane Harper – Aaron Falk is back in an atmospheric new mystery

~ Judith ~ 1 Comment

I’ve read all of Jane Harper’s novels. It was possibly her first book, The Dry, that triggered a popular interest in Aussie Noir, giving Scandi Noir a run for its money. For me, it was Jane Harper that got me reading Australian mysteries and I imagine it was the same for many readers. There’s just something special about novels set in the outback.

Since The Dry we’ve had a second Aaron Falk novel – Force of Nature is soon to hit the big screen – and now, a long-awaited third. Exiles sees the Melbourne detective visiting friends in rural wine country for a christening. It’s a bitter-sweet time for Greg Raco’s family. While Aaron is going to be godfather to Raco’s baby boy, nobody can forget what happened at the same time a year ago. The Marralee Valley Annual Food and Wine Festival was on and it was here that Kim Gillespie disappeared, leaving her baby Zoe asleep in her pram.

Kim’s older daughter from her long-term relationship with Charlie Raco, Greg Raco’s winemaker brother, is desperate for answers. Now seventeen, she’s running a campaign, aided by Charlie and her good friend Joel, handing out flyers and canvassing potential eyewitnesses. Aaron, with all his detective smarts, somehow gets roped in.

And there’s another cold case – the hit-and-run death of Joel’s father at the Reservoir, a spot adjacent to the festival grounds, and it’s the Reservoir where Kim’s shoe was found. Is this a coincidence or are the two cases linked? Aaron has the added complication of meeting up with Gemma again, Joel’s mother – someone he’d met through Raco, and who he can’t quite forget.

Even in the gloom Falk could see it stretching out, vast and open in its centre, then twisting and curving to fill the turns and gullies that formed the banks. It was big. Bigger than he remembered. The opposite bank was just visible across the swathe of water, but he couldn’t see the westernmost edge, or the dam that lay somewhere to the east. The festival grounds felt far behind them, but Falk could hear a distant low thrum of music and crowd noise undercutting the stillness.

Emotions are high in this story with two teenagers having lost parents and not having any answers. Aaron’s a bit of a softy and is sympathetic. The story also hearkens back to the events from the school days of Kim and the Racos. Like the current batch of kids from the local high school, the opening night of the wine and food festival was when there was a big party in the woods near the Reservoir, something local cop, Sergeant Dwyer would love to shut down.

There’s a lot going on in each of the characters’ lives, and we slowly get a picture of a community, of complicated loyalties among old friends, old grudges and a fair bit more besides. We haven’t got a dry, scarily hot landscape. But the stunning countryside surrounding the grim spectre of the Reservoir and all its secrets makes for another atmospheric setting.

Add some superb writing, and a twist in the story I didn’t see coming and I’m happy to say that Jane Harper has done it again. Exiles is another cracking read and is satisfying on several levels. I’ve also got a feeling we might see Aaron Falk again – I hope so; he’s a complex and interesting detective. Exiles gets four and a half out of five from me.

Book Review: The Last Party by Clare Mackintosh – a new promising new detective series in a moody North Wales setting

~ Judith ~ 2 Comments

I saw Clare Mackintosh’s name connected with fellow suspense/mystery author Lisa Jewell, and being a fan of Jewell, decided she should be worth a shot. Like Jewell, Mackintosh has written a bunch of twisty mysteries, but The Last Party is the first in a series featuring Welsh detective Ffion Morgan. I like being in at the start of a promising crime series, and was soon glad I’d picked this up.

The mystery starts with the discovery of a dead body by swimmers braving a New Year’s dip. We’re in the remote village of Cwm Coed on the shore of a lake which borders England. Across the water is a luxury resort called The Shore, built by a couple of investors as holiday homes for the wealthy. These incomers don’t support the village shops, they zip around the lake on jet skies and are just generally obnoxious. So it isn’t surprising that the corpse turns out to be one of the investors, a Rhys Lloyd.

With a name like that you’d assume the victim’s Welsh. And he is – a local made good in the sense he’s become a successful star of stage and screen, and knows how to turn on the charm. His mother still owns the hardware store in the village, and it was his father’s land that he and his partner Jonny Charlton have turned into The Shore. Their New Year’s Eve party was supposed to bring everybody together and appease the villagers, but it all ends in murder. The story soon throws up a fair few suspects – it turns out Rhys is struggling to pay off creditors and his charm hides a darker persona.

DC Ffion Morgan is on the spot – she’s local, still living with her mother and sister in Cwm Coed, but for all that she’s something of a lone ranger. She drives an old Triumph at tearaway speeds over the winding rural roads and has a burning secret. She’s also shocked to discover that her one-night stand from the night before is the English cop assigned to assist on the case.

DC Leo Bradey is an intelligent and promising police officer from Cheshire, with a whole lot of baggage. His ex-wife is going out of her way to exclude Leo from being a parent to their young son, whom he adores, and his boss makes him the butt of all his tasteless jokes. Working with Ffion doesn’t get off to a great start either, but they slowly form a team. They soon discover that hardly anybody doesn’t have a motive for killing Rhys Lloyd.

The Last Party is a much better than average murder mystery. Clare Mackintosh is a former police officer herself so the story has a ring of authenticity. However, there’s a lot more than police work here. Family dynamics, old scores and the effects of burying damaging secrets all add to a character-driven, atmospheric read, the evocative setting adding a ton of interest.

As well as the dangers of the lake, there’s snow to contend with and the story builds to a life-and-death climax that has you on the edge of your seat. This is helped by a plot that switches back and forwards in time and between characters, mostly Leo and Ffion but also the key players and suspects. I was fair racing through the chapters to see what happened next. And then there are the twists.

For a diverting crime read, The Last Party doesn’t put a foot wrong and introduces a fabulous pair of detectives I’ll be happy to meet again. I’ll happily give it four stars. A Game of Lies, the next Ffion Morgan mystery, is due to be released later this year.

Book Review: Impossible by Sarah Lotz – an original and quirky fantasy-romance

~ Judith ~ 2 Comments

I have to confess I nearly didn’t finish Sarah Lotz’s recent novel, Impossible (also marketed as The Impossible Us). The novel is largely email correspondence between two characters who meet accidentally when Nick sends a grumpy message to a customer who owes him money, and it somehow ends up in Bee’s (Rebecca’s) inbox. Bee’s dinner with a Tinder date isn’t going well and she distracts herself with flippant email banter with Nick.

The story of their romance is told largely in emails because, for mysterious reasons, the two seem doomed never to meet in person. At first they are separated by a train ride – Nick’s in Leeds; Bee in London. When they do decide to meet they discover they belong in alternate realities – how many versions of the world there are, they have no idea. But in Nick’s dimension the world has made huge inroads to solve climate change as well as some obvious political differences; Bee’s dimension is the world as we know it.

Being stranded in different versions of the world makes no sense to either of them, but Nick comes across an organisation called the Berenstains who have had dealings with this anomaly. Berenstains member Geoffrey provides some light relief, tasked with keeping an eye on Nick, and staking him out like someone from a comedy-spy movie. There are rules about the situation, in particular, no meddling with the versions of people you know from a reality that’s different from your own.

Nick and Bee are all set to break this rule, Bee hunting out the Nick in her reality, who happens to be a famous author. This is galling for the original Nick, who is a literary hack, ghost writing for authors with limited talent. Meanwhile Nick seeks out the version of Bee in his reality, a Becca with a child, the wife of a powerful businessman, which is equally perplexing. She has given up her fashion design career for a family, quite unlike Bee, who has a wedding dress make-over business. Bee worries that Becca is unfulfilled and could be in a controlling relationship.

The story lurches from one complication to another as Nick and Bee set out to overcome their cross-dimensional problem to find happiness. There are plenty of humorous scenes and weird and wonderful characters – Tweedy, the elderly County type, showing Nick how to use a gun; Magda and Jonas, Bee’s elderly neighbours who epitomise lifelong devotion as a couple; Erika, Nick’s no-nonsense Nordic landlady – among others.

And even if it did at first remind me of the movies You’ve Got Mail crossed with The Lake House, the story is still original and cleverly put together. And yet in the middle it seemed to drag for me. I think it was all those emails. I’ve read epistolary novels before and enjoyed them. But here there’s a lot of bad language, which I find tiresome, and the banter which Bee and Nick find so amusing wasn’t particularly amusing for me. I began not to care particularly whether Bee and Nick found happiness as I didn’t like them very much – it’s probably a generational thing. Two thirds through I was so desperate for some elegantly crafted writing I took a breather with some Jane Austen before going back in.

But I did go back in, because it is impossible not to want to know what happens in the end. And Sarah Lotz ties it all up well. She’s a seasoned screenwriter who obviously knows about plotting and this is her seventh novel. I can imagine Impossible would adapt well to the screen. Would I recommend it? Yes, probably, but with some reservations. It gets a fairly generous 3 stars from me.

Book Review: Return to Valetto by Dominic Smith – back to Italy with a gorgeous evocation of place and atmosphere

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Well, yes I know this book is about a lot more than its setting. There’s a man’s lingering grief for his late wife. A family of elderly women and a secret they never got to grips with from World War II. There’s some parent-child dynamics and a potential love affair. And all of it comes together in a captivating story that maybe takes a little while to get going, but once you get in, has you nicely hooked.

But when I look back on this book in months and maybe even years to come, I know it will be the setting that I’ll think about first. Valetto is Dominic Smith’s invented town in Umbria, which sits on a pedestal of volcanic rock. Much of the old town has fallen down into surrounding valleys, a 1971 earthquake urging many of its inhabitants to relocate. It has become a kind turreted and terracotta island, connected to the surrounding landscape by a footbridge.

Hugh is an American historian who specialises in the study of abandoned towns – there’s hundreds of them dotted around Italy and what better place to begin than Valetto, the childhood home of his mother and where even today his grandmother and three aunts still live. The Serafino women, all widows, are a big chunk of the population which has dwindled to just 10. In a few weeks it is to be his grandmother’s 100th birthday and a party has been planned.

A spanner in the works is the woman who has taken possession of Hugh’s cottage on the Serafino property, supposedly given to her mother for services rendered when Hugh’s grandfather, Aldo, was a resistance fighter during the war. Elissa Tomassi is adamant that the cottage is legally hers, just as Hugh’s aunts are convinced she’s a squatter with no legal tenure. Hugh is sure there can be a way to keep everyone happy and is caught in the middle. But he has to get to the bottom of what happened during the war and discovers not one but two family mysteries to solve.

The past will take Hugh back to Elissa’s home town in the north of Italy to find out what Aldo did in the closing years of the war. He’ll also discover a link between his mother and the Elissa’s that is a trickier memory to unlock and will reveal a crime that has been swept under the carpet. The story builds to a powerful and moving conclusion that has you glued to the final chapters as past deeds are dealt with.

What could be done with the wreckage of the past? As a historian I’d always believed that studying the past could reveal hidden meanings and patterns, that motifs lurked in the underbrush, but now I saw the neap tide of history washing up flotsam on an empty beach.

I enjoyed Return to Valetto enormously, not only for the setting which seems to be a big part of every scene. The late autumn mist across the valley that comes and goes and adds even more mystery. The large old villa that is the Serafino home with its cavernous rooms and crumbling frescoes. There’s the old family restaurant established by his grandmother, where you can see abandoned place settings and dusty menus from a night in 1971. (Oh, did I forget to mention this books is also a hymn to Italian regional cuisine?)

And the characters are a joy. The three aunts, each with their own peculiar ways and at times difficult interactions with each other. I have a particular fondness for books about aunts, going back to P G Wodehouse’s Bertie Wooster stories, and here Iris, Rose and Violet are brilliant. The grandmother with her iron determination to host an unforgettable birthday celebration with an ever-growing guest list and a despairing cook. Both Hugh and Elissa have daughters that make an appearance, so it’s an inter-generational tale as well.

I can’t help feeling Dominic Smith had a wonderful time researching and writing this book as his love for history, particularly social history, as well as all things Italian shines through. This is the second novel by this author I have read and recall that Bright and Distant Shores was one of my top reads for the year it came out. I’ve heard lots of good things about The Last Painting of Sarah de Vos as well. Return to Valetto gets the full five stars from me.

By the way, the fictional town of Valetto is inspired by Civita di Bagnoregio in Lazio – in case you want to visit, either in person or via the Internet.