Book Review: Tell Me Everything by Elizabeth Strout – a welcome return to the world of Bob Burgess

~ Judith ~ 6 Comments

The Burgess Boys was the first novel by Elizabeth Strout I ever read. I was soon a fan of Strout’s particular way of storytelling, never missing a book since and catching up with Olive Kitteridge, Lucy Barton and co, the small towns of Amgash Illinois, or as with this book, Crosby, Maine.

But I never forgot the wonderful character of Bob Burgess, the self-deprecating legal-aid lawyer, working the cases that don’t bring in a fat pay-cheque. He’s got plenty of history with his well-to-do, more confident brother, Jim – another lawyer and winner of a famous case people still talk about.

In Tell Me Everything, we catch up with Bob, who in the previous Lucy Barton book (Lucy by the Sea) has become Lucy’s friend. They take walks most days together, Bob having a furtive cigarette. Our other Elizabeth Strout character of note, Olive Kitteridge also enters the plot, having a story she wants to share with Lucy. Bob brings Lucy to visit the elderly Olive in her care facility, and Olive immediately detects that Bob is in love with Lucy. This is awkward, as Bob is married to Margaret, a church minister, and Lucy has settled in Crosby with her ex-husband William.

Lucy is a famous author, though a quietly unassuming one. Olive finds her a bit mousey but the two soon get along well, sharing stories of ordinary folk. They’re often rather sad stories, but the two feel they are worthy of sharing, as being otherwise undocumented lives. I feel this is Elizabeth Strout’s goal too – to write about ordinary folk, their burdens and their hopes, their failures and secrets, as well as the talents they don’t know they have. Some are more ordinary than others.

When elderly Gloria Beach goes missing from Shirley Falls, suspicion lands on her son Matthew, a strange, shy, reclusive man who has always lived with his mother. Bob finds himself reluctantly agreeing to defend Matthew against what seems to be an imminent charge of murder. Again, what is on the surface hides a grim set of family secrets, “lives of quiet desperation” indeed. So Bob has a lot going on with the legal case and his feelings for Lucy. A terrible illness in his brother’s family throws more light onto his relationship with Jim and events from the past.

Forty-five minutes away on the same morning that Susan was reading about Gloria Beach in the Shirley Falls newspaper, here, in the smaller town of Crosby, Bob was having a cigarette. It was a windy day with muted sunlight that was trying to press through the cloud covering, and Bob was standing beside his car in the back parking lot of that same old inn that had gone bankrupt and had vines growing over its windows. Last night his wife had sniffed his shoulder and said, “Bob? Don’t tell me you’re doing that again. Please don’t tell me you are smoking again.”
And he had lied!
He had lied.
Now Bob thought, Keep moving, so that the smoke wouldn’t stick to him, although the wind seemed to twirl itself around and not go in one direction. As he took a step forward, his phone in his pocket started to ring and he stepped right into the smoke he had just exhaled, and he thought, You idiot. Meaning himself.

Poor old Bob. He’s such a nice guy but gets caught up in everyone else’s troubles. He’s what Lucy calls a “sin-eater” – he seems more ministerial than his wife, Margaret, who he’s beginning to have some doubts about. On top of everything else, Margaret is having a difficult time with a partitioner.

I rattled through Tell Me Everything, particularly interested in the murder case and wanting to find out what had happened. But there’s nothing sensational here, it’s all very much like real life, another tragedy in an already tragic family. How Bob spots what happened and deals with it reveals an astuteness that is easily hidden within his seeming ordinariness.

Tell Me Everything is another terrific addition to the canon of novels about characters I have come to care about. They’re so realistic with their good points and bad, but Olive, Lucy and Bob are all people who take an interest in the lives of others, even people they hardly know. The stories of these people that come to the surface are often somewhat bleak, heartbreaking even, but they’re nonetheless fascinating. Tell Me Everything‘s a four-and-a-half-star read from me.

Book Review: The Twins by L V Matthews – a twisty psychological thriller with dark family secrets

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This novel is the sort of psychological thriller that has you hooked from the beginning. Yes, it’s about twins, and I know there have been so many stories about twins, you often feel you’ve heard them all before. But that didn’t stop me picking this one up and getting immersed in the story of Margot and Cora.

For twins, the two couldn’t be more different. Margot is quiet and responsible, a dedicated nanny to a well-to-do London family. She has a comfortable life and makes sure everything is as it should be for her young charges. It’s a twenty-four seven kind of gig, but you get the feeling Margot is creating a warm and loving environment because that seems to have been absent in her own childhood.

Cora on the other hand lives in a cramped flat across town with a flatmate, and the two are complete hedonists, living on the edge, while Cora will stop at nothing to get that big break as dancer. She’s confident, a bit crass, breezy and somewhat heartless. Glimpses of her at school, a decade before, reveal she’d been in with the in-crowd, while Margot lingered in the background, friendless and the butt of jokes.

The Twins begins with a mishap during a family holiday on a yacht which sees Margot lose the medication that keeps her anxiety at bay, and slowly memories start to creep back. These are events from her late teens, when something terrible happened involving the death of the twins’ younger sister Annie. Desperate to know more, Margot toys with the idea of seeing a therapist, an idea that Cora vehemently opposes. What is the secret that Cora wants to keep from Margot?

…I then look at the sea out of the porthole, exhale, and tell myself that I’m safe here. Looking after people is what I’m good at: routine and order and consideration. There is no need to feel anxious.
‘Margot?’ someone calls from above. ‘Can you bring up the oysters?’
‘Absolutely.’
I busy myself with tending to others. People don’t realise you’re not talking to them about your own life if you’re putting food on their tables, if you’re doing their laundry, if you’re smiling at their stories. I like living their lives because it’s easier than living my own.
My life has ghosts.

The story flips between the two sisters as we watch Margot attempt to reclaim the past, questioning her grandmother, in a care-home, her own memory now patchy. She trawls the internet to find the one person who might help her – Cora’s high-school boyfriend and Margot’s secret crush. Meanwhile Cora trains for a role in a dance performance that echoes parts of their story.

As more and more shadowy secrets rise to the forefront of Margot’s mind, you can’t help but feel for her and worry that when she finds out the truth it will be worse than not-knowing. She’s a much more sympathetic character than Cora, who seems like the dark to Margot’s light. Besides which, Margot’s grip on her life seems more and more rickety. This really racks up the tension.

Altogether, this is a nicely escapist read that keeps you hooked. However there was one point at which I wanted to throw the book across the room – a twist that I wasn’t expecting, not at all. I wasn’t even sure I wanted to finish the book after that. But I’m glad I did. It all comes together quite well and it makes the book seem rather more psychologically interesting than it might have been.

So if you like a good twisty, suspenseful read, this one’s worth persevering with, even if it is about twins. There is a really nasty character who makes a good villain; and the story plays with the fickleness of memory and the effects of trauma to create an interesting psychological situation. The plot really keeps you on your toes as a reader, so The Twins definitely does the job. A four-star read from me.

Book Review: The Mischief Makers by Elisabeth Gifford – an imagining of the life and creativity of Daphne du Maurier

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As a girl, I remember being given a number of Daphne du Maurier’s books and enjoying them immensely – particularly Rebecca and The Scapegoat. There were adaptations of her novels and stories that appeared on TV – I’ve seen several versions of Rebecca, and then there was Hitchcock’s The Birds. I read her darker, spookier short stories too. She always struck me as a master storyteller and remarkably original for her time.

Elisabeth Gifford explores what made du Maurier tick in her new novel The Mischief Makers – how she got her inspiration as well as her family life, before and after marriage. It also describes the encouragement she got from J M Barrie, her Uncle Jim, the author of Peter Pan and guardian to her five cousins, the Llewelyn Davies boys.

I’m not sure how Elisabeth Gifford managed to write such a nicely concise and well put together story because there must have been such a lot left on the cutting room floor. The du Mauriers and J M Barrie are all such fascinating people. As a young girl Daphne was often at the theatre, her father, Gerald du Maurier, one of the outstanding theatre actors of his time. It was during a run of Barrie’s The Admirable Crichton that her parents had met, her mother starring opposite Gerald. Daphne’s grandfather was the author of Trilby and creator of the character Svengali, the evil mesmerist whose name lives on.

But one by one they have grown too old for tales of Peter Pan. Now Uncle Jim can also be found sitting with Daphne and Angela in the nursery, perched like a crumpled bird on the fender, mesmerising them with secret islands, prompting them as they swoop from chair to chair or swim like mermaids across the carpet. All night long Daphne continues to swim and fly through the night in her sleep. And it becomes clear to her that she has a secret only Jim knows: she may look like her sisters but really she is one of the boy cousins whom she has long idolised, longed to be there with them when the stories were first told in Black Lake Woods. She is part of Jim’s little gang, living on the edge of magic and adventure. She is really a wild boy, dancing at the edge of Neverland, thumbing her nose at the rest of the dull old world.

Daphne married Major Frederick (Tommy) Browning, himself an interesting man, a career soldier who set up the first British Airborne Division that was instrumental in the defeat of Germany during WWII. Knighted for his war work, Daphne became known as Lady Browning, although the strain the war put on their marriage was one they struggled to recover from. And of course Daphne’s immersion into her work as a writer, her determination to live quietly in Cornwall, which at times cut herself off from her husband, even, at times, her children.

But it’s the stories of her cousins, the Davies boys, and their recollections of their guardian that is really interesting. Peter as an older man is constantly engrossed in letters and memorabilia, trying to make sense of his childhood, whether or not they were simply used by Barrie, and the tragic death of his brother Michael as a young man. Was Barrie somehow at fault?

Daphne sees similarities between Barrie and herself, as writers stepping into imaginary worlds, discovering their characters in the people they meet, as well as in themselves. She even seems to feel Rebecca watching her, a somewhat disturbing presence. This insight into the mind of Daphne the writer is illuminating and fascinating. You also get a strong sense of what people went through in the last century with two world wars, and the social changes that followed, as seen through Daphne’s eyes.

The Mischief Makers is quite a tour de force, a brilliant read, particularly for a life-long Daphne du Maurier fan like me. The writing is pared back and straight-forward, mostly written from inside Daphne’s head, but with some extra chapters slipped in from earlier family experiences, the results of Peter’s research. It all comes together to create an overall picture of a very complex woman and her world. I wonder if we’ll see the book among those long-listed for the Women’s Prize for Fiction this year. It’s a five-star read from me.

Book Review: The Last Line by Stephen Ronson – a World War Two thriller with a home-front hero who’ll stop at nothing

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I’m not really sure what to make of The Last Line, Stephen Ronson’s first book in a series following wartime hero John Cook. The cover promises that Cook is “the Jack Reacher of 1940s Britain”, and that would certainly seem to be true. But it took me a while to get used to a character like Cook in a WWII Suffolk setting.

After serving in the First World War, Cook had decided he wanted more action, and found it as a Commando in India. Once he got that out of his system, he got busy turning around a struggling family farm and buying up more land. When we meet him, Cook is just quietly minding his farm when a Spitfire crash lands in one of his fields, chased by a Messerschmitt, an interesting scene that reminds us that the war is dangerously close to British soil.

As a farmer, Cook needn’t rejoin his regiment, but you can’t keep a good man down and he plans to get back into the action as soon as possible. But the War Office has other ideas for him, and he’s instead asked to be part of an Auxiliary Unit, a resistance group designed to make things difficult for a German invasion, which after the fall of France now seems imminent. He meets a man named Bunny in a pub who tells him to find some people he can trust to lend helping hand, people who are prepared to give their lives in a ‘last line’ of defence, before the tanks roll their way on up to London.

Bunny shook his head. ‘I want you to form a small team, I’m calling them Auxiliary Units. Someone local will make contact with you. Work with them to pick up a few more men you can trust. Ex-army probably. Men who take the initiative, who can find their way around the country, who know the woods. Men who get things done without being told how to do it. Men like you.’
‘How do I communicate with you?’ I asked.
‘You don’t,’ he said. ‘This isn’t regular army. No chain of command. No safety net. If you get caught with a machine-gun and a pound of TNT under your bed next week, you’ll be shot as a German spy. No crying to Mother.’

And so we get to meet a few other determined sorts, among them young Eric, out poaching every night, Cyril with his hidden radio gear, and Lady Margaret who is struggling to save her estate from ruin, but has a stash of munitions ready to go. There’s some instant chemistry between LM and Cook, but before any romance can take place, our dashing hero has some local battles on his hands. The daughter of his accountant has been murdered – she’d been worried about a young evacuee and had been asking awkward questions.

These lead Cook to The Grange, a stately home also struggling to pay the bills, where he spots odd comings and goings involving trucks, a couple of young spivs who aren’t dressed for the country, and a padlocked barn. He puts his Commando knowledge to good use, how to make himself invisible as well as how to get answers out of people who think a sidearm makes them tough. They’re always in for a surprise as Cook will stop at nothing and knows how to kill with his bare hands.

It’s fair to say, however, that the malefactors are truely vile and get what they deserve. But as the death toll rose, I just couldn’t help wondering how Cook could get away with it all. Perhaps Bunny would pull a few strings. In the end I decided to just go with it and enjoy the story as a kind of boy’s own adventure for grown-ups.

The support characters are interesting and offer scope for development in the novels to come. I liked Lady Margaret, she’s not afraid to get her hands dirty, and the young evacuee, Frankie. He’s struggling to fit in, has obviously come from poverty, but Cook takes him on in an endearing way. I hope we get more from Mrs Cook, John’s mother, who seems a salt of the earth type, and has a lot to put up with.

The Last Line is a diverting read, with plenty of pace and a lively style that suits the period and the main character. The second book is already published (The Berlin Agent), and I’m interested enough in Cook & co. to find out what happens next. This one’s a three-star read from me.

Reading Challenge: Classics Club Spin #40

~ Judith ~ Leave a comment

It’s that time again. Time for a new spin challenge from the team at The Classics Club. A list of twenty titles, numbered, and in a few days, The Classics Club will send me the number of the title I’m to read.

I would be happy with pretty much any of the books listed. I’m keen to continue my reading of Anthony Burgess, or revisit old favourites like the Austen. I read a lot of Iris Murdoch many years ago, so it would be interesting to see how she reads for me today. Though many here are books I’ve never read, so they’ll be interesting and fresh. Anyway, here’s the list:

1. A Buyer’s Market by Anthony Burgess
2. The Death of the Heart by Elizabeth Bowen
3. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
4. The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot
5. The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett
6. The Forsyth Saga by John Galsworthy
7. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith
8. The Sea, The Sea by Iris Murdoch
9. The Razor’s Edge by W Somerset Maugham
10. Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man by Sigfried Sassoon
11. Elizabeth and Her German Garden by Elizabeth Von Arnim
12. The House on the Strand by Daphne du Maurier
13. Jacob’s Room by Virginia Woolf
14. The Happy Foreigner by Enid Bagnold
15. A Game of Hide and Seek by Elizabeth Taylor
16. The Group by Mary McCarthy
17. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
18. Bliss and Other Stories by Katherine Mansfield
19. The Man in the Queue by Josephine Tey
20. Moon Tiger by Penelope Lively

Book Review: Stone Town by Margaret Hickey – atmospheric outback noir and a new case for our troubled cop

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This book is the second of Hickey’s books featuring Detective Senior Sergeant Mark Ariti, whose life was going nowhere in the first book, Cutter’s End, until he was rescued by a case that took him back to where he lived as a boy. Now he’s living in his late mother’s house in Booralama and has taken charge of the local police station with a wider region of small towns to look after. This is rural Australia, north of Adelaide, and Mark soon has a new case, bringing us to the small town of the title.

Mark is called out on a night of torrential rain. Three teenagers have discovered a body on land that was once mined for gold, now popular with bird-watchers. But what was Aidan Sleeth doing, wandering about at night, some distance from home. A property developer, he’d been buying up land to turn what was a haven for wildlife into sections for new homes and making enemies along the way. Which might be why he’s been shot in the head, execution style.

As it often goes in these country towns, no one wants to talk about it. The teenagers are too upset, their families protective. The neighbours are reluctant to get involved. Whether Mark likes it or not, two detectives are sent from Adelaide to help with the case, both in their own ways arrogant, the senior detective taking over his office, the junior detective making brash comments that jar. And they’re more worried about a missing officer than the murder they’re supposed to be investigating.

Stone Town, barely twenty-five kilometres from where he lived in Booralama, may as well have been another universe. Consisting mainly of old farming families and an influx of tree-changers, the area was known for its mines, remnants of settler stone houses scattered about the bush, and significant wheat yield.
Riveting, Mark remembered thinking in Year 10 local history. Take that, Machu Pichu.
But the gold from Stone Town was long gone and it had been years since farmers’ sons returned from boarding schools to make a life on the land.

Detective Sergeant Natalie Whitstead has been doing surveillance work on the wife of an organised crime boss, Tony Scopelliti, currently serving a sentence in prison. When her car is discovered near Stone Town, Mark can only assume she’s dead, her body thrown down a mineshaft. Brief chapters in italic type would suggest otherwise, making the reader feel like a child calling out at a Punch ‘n Judy show, “she’s over here” and hoping the police will find her in time.

Of course the two cases will at some point converge, and Mark, an experienced and sensible officer, will show up the Adelaide cops, who turn out to be more complex characters than first assumed. If that isn’t enough, his old mate Superintendent Conti has warned Mark that there’s a leak to suggest one of his new colleagues is getting information back to Scopelliti. Can Mark keep an ear out?

So Mark has a lot on his plate. To make things more interesting, he’s going through a few personal issues: missing his kids since his divorce, grief for his late mother, as well as that feeling you have when you’re over fifty and back at your childhood home – a sense that life has passed you by. As a reader you can’t but like the guy but also you worry about him.

What I really liked about the story was the way Hickey captures rural life, particularly the old allegiances among people who have grown up in an area and unfortunately for some, know all their secrets. Wherever Mark goes, people fondly remember his mother, a woman who was close friends with fellow members the Country Women’s Association, who to many seem to have a strong say on how things are done. Mark’s interactions with these women and other crusty characters, particularly at the pub, often add to the gentle humour that runs through the story.

I thoroughly enjoyed Stone Town, and will definitely be keen to check in with Senior Sergeant Ariti again. Hickey has written three in the series as well as a couple of stand-alone titles. If you’ve enjoyed other Aussie Rural Noir authors such as Jane Harper, Garry Disher and Sarah Bailey, Margaret Hickey is well worth giving a try. Stone Town is a four-star read from me.

Book Review: The Family Remains by Lisa Jewell – a twisty, psychological thriller sequel that will have you hooked

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Lisa Jewell often explores dark family secrets in her psychological thrillers. This is never more so than in The Family Upstairs, the 2019 novel about the Lambs, a well-to-do family and the interlopers who make their home with them, upending their lives. Mrs Lamb has felt the need to do something useful with the Chelsea family’s wealth, and takes in the Thomsen’s, as well as a couple of homeless musicians. Their London riverside house is luxurious and roomy, but David Thomsen exploits the Lambs, and the children, Henry and Lucy Lamb; Phin and Clemency Thomsen, get caught up in a situation that ends in murder.

The sequel, The Family Remains picks up the story of the younger generation, having been reunited in the first book and who are now trying to each build a future. This includes Libby Jones, the daughter Lucy had as a teenager, brought up by adoptive parents and who inherited the house in Chelsea. But the shadows of what went before still linger and there’s a sense that Henry and Lucy in particular are still looking over their shoulders.

When a bag of bones is found by mudlarkers on the riverbank, DI Samuel Owusu traces them back to the old Lamb residence and all the things that Henry and Lucy hoped would be forgotten about forever may now come to light. But Henry and then Lucy are on a quest to find Phin, Libby’s father, supposedly working in a safari park in Botswana, but who has high-tailed it, for some reason, to Chicago.

So while Henry and Lucy are hunting down Phin, DI Owusu is trying to piece together the life of Birdie Dunlop-Evers, a former member of a pop-group, reported missing in the 1990s. The story also works in the story of Rachel, a jewellery designer, who is told at the start of the book of the death of her estranged husband. We’re well aware of the particularly nasty type of guy Michael was – we met him in the earlier book when he was married to Lucy.

Lucy is a lovely-looking woman. When I saw her last year for the first time since we were teenagers, I was taken aback by the loveliness of her. She has a face that tells stories, she looks all of her forty years, she barely grooms herself, she dresses like a bucket of rags, but somehow she still always looks lovelier than any other woman in the room. It’s something about the juxtaposition of her amber-hazel eyes with the dirty gold streaks in her hair, the weightlessness of her, the rich honey of her voice, the way she moves and holds herself and touches things and looks at you. My father looked like a pork pie on legs and my lucky sister snatched all her looks from our elegant half-Turkish mother.

Golly, there’s a lot going on here, so never before was there a better reason to read the earlier book before the sequel. But somehow it all makes sense, and even if it’s a while since you read The Family Upstairs, you never feel completely bamboozled. Yes, you will have questions, loose ends and half-forgotten pieces of the overall puzzle. But Lisa Jewell will have you hooked, never the less, as I was.

I steamed through this novel in a couple of days, desperate to know if things would work out all right in the end. There’s always the sense that even though Henry and Lucy and even perhaps Phin, have been driven to do desperate and even quite bad things, they were very damaged children. We still feel for them, as well as Rachel, getting caught up in a relationship with a monster. It’s a twisty, original psychological thriller and as such a compelling read, but it’s very empathetic too.

And the characters are just so interesting. DI Owusu is a really nice guy, thoughtful, intelligent and sympathetic, which helps balance out the potential darkness and selfishness of Henry. Rachel’s story takes us into a character who has lived for the moment when it comes to relationships and suddenly in her thirties, feels it’s time to make a commitment. If only she hadn’t settled on Michael. But it’s Lucy I really enjoyed the most – she is so fragile on the one hand and yet has had to be strong and think on her feet for her children.

It is probably the characters and their unique situation that prompted so much demand from readers for the sequel that Lisa Jewell hadn’t planned to write. Which is probably why her books are so good, so moreish. Whenever I feel like a book to unwind with, she’s a top choice. If only I could make them last a day or two longer. This one’s a four-star read from me.

Book Review: Western Lane by Chetna Maroo – a beautiful imagining of a family’s grief through a child’s eyes

~ Judith ~ 1 Comment

In some ways, Western Lane follows a well trodden path – a young person going through a difficult time, finding an outlet for their feelings through a sport, and then the promise of success. I’m sure I’ve seen a few movies like this, from the Karate Kid to Rocky. This time it’s squash, but the sport is really just something to give the plot a bit of structure, because overall this is a story about a family dealing with the loss of their mother.

Our narrator is Gopi, who is only eleven when her mother dies. She has two older sisters, Khush and Mona, who demonstrate their grief in different ways, while their Pa is patently struggling. His work is erratic – he’s an electrician and doesn’t always turn up when he says he will. His sister-in-law, the girls’ Aunt Ranjan is worried about them when the family visit their Pa’s brother in Edinburgh. Aunt Ranjan says he should consider giving one of the girls to her and Uncle Pavan to bring up.

Pavan and Ranjan have not been able to have children, are comfortably off, and are fond of the girls. Gopi, being the youngest, seems the likeliest candidate, but Pa can’t bear the thought of it. And imaging losing your mother at such a young age and then being uprooted from your home and family. So on their return to London, Pa and the girls deal with their problems by avoiding them. They hit the squash courts.

Of all the girls, it’s Gopi who has some talent and squash becomes a regular part of her routine. She meets Ged, who’s always at Western Lane because his mother works there. While Gopi plays squash with Ged, her Pa is becoming friendly with Ged’s mother. In the background the local Indian community are watching the family, eager to step in and offer advice, whether it’s appreciated or not. There’s pressure on the girls to do things right, as their mother would have done.

I don’t know if you have ever stood in the middle of a squash court – on the T – and listened to what is going on next door. What I’m thinking of is the sound from the next court of a ball hit clean and hard. It’s a quick, low pistol-shot of a sound, with a close echo. The echo, which is the ball striking the wall of the court, is louder than the shot itself. This is what I hear when I remember the year our mother died, and our father had us practising at Western Lane two, three, four hours a day.

So there are a number of story threads in play, as well as glimpses of Indian culture, the food, the traditions which at times comfort, at others restricts. The reader very much gets a sense of Gopi, wth all that she is going through, what she’s feeling and the red flags. Can she be herself, be allowed to excel at squash as well as being a good daughter? There’s all the worry about her Pa, and her sisters, but she’s just so young. How can she have a normal childhood?

Western Lane is a lovely book, not very long, but nicely judged and the writing is gorgeous. I learnt a lot about squash, the feel of being on the court, the bounce of the speeding ball. It’s done in a way that makes it interesting for even a non-sports-minded person like me. The audiobook was superbly read by Maya Soroya and she really nails Gopi – a child struggling in a world that’s difficult to understand. The novel was shortlisted for the 2023 Booker Prize so I was curious to see why. It’s definitely worth picking up and I’ll be keen look out for more by this author. A four-and-a-half star read from me.


Book Review: When We Were Orphans by Kazuo Ishiguro – an unsolved mystery and a journey back to pre-war Shanghai

~ Judith ~ 1 Comment

I’d had this book on my bookcase from a decade or two before, and thought I’d revisit it in audiobook form. But the writing was just so engaging, the narrative voice of the main character drawing me in, I got the paperback out after all, the better to absorb it all at my own pace.

When We Were Orphans begins with its main character, Christopher Banks, having recently moved to London after graduating from Cambridge, when he bumps into an old friend from school. Over the course of their conversation it emerges that Christopher was considered a bit of odd character as a boy, while the two think about what they want to do with their lives. And it seems that Christopher has always wanted to be a private investigator. We’re in the early 1930s, the Golden Age of the detective novel, which is what may have inspired him.

This may seem a little ridiculous, but Christopher is deadly earnest, and soon sets about fulfilling his ambition. But the big mystery that has dogged his life so far has always been the disappearance of his parents when Christopher was a young boy. The story flips back to his childhood in Shanghai, where his father had a job with a company that was involved with the trade of opium.

It is slightly surprising to me, looking back today, to think how as young boys we were allowed to come and go unsupervised to the extent we were. But this was, of course, all within the relative safety of the International Settlement. I for one was absolutely forbidden to enter the Chinese areas of the city, and as I know, Akira’s parents were no less strict on the matter. Out there, we were told, lay all manner of ghastly diseases, filth and evil men. The closest I had ever come to going out of the Settlement was once when a carriage carrying my mother and me took an unexpected route along that part of the Soochow creek bordering the Chapei district; I could see the huddled low rooftops across the canal, and had held my breath for as long as I could for fear the pestilence would come airborne across the narrow strip of water. No wonder then that my friend’s claim to have undertaken a number of secret forays into such areas made an impression on me.

Eventually, Christopher makes his way back to find his parents, which he is confident he can do, now that he’s become renown as a top detective. He does this regardless of the fact that China has been invaded by Japanese armed forces and nothing from his childhood is the same. Among the expats he meets there is Sarah Hemmings, a girl he’d found attractive at one time, now married to Sir Cecil, an aging diplomat who she is attempting to inspire into stopping the tide of war. Delusion among the expats seems to be catching.

Christopher ploughs on looking for his parents – surely they can’t really still in the house where they were taken all these years later? But he is convinced he will succeed, as is everyone else – he’s a famous detective after all. Yet he’s also something of an unreliable narrator – Ishiguro contrasts the workings of Christopher’s mind, his blindness to reality, with the chaos all around him. Is he a symbol of British interests in the East, of colonialism and the imagined superiority of the British Empire? There are a lot of ideas at play here.

When We Were Orphans was shortlisted for a Booker Prize although it hasn’t been a favourite with the critics.. I found the plot lagged a little towards the end, while the ending itself seemed a little rushed. But I did enjoy the world the author created and the characters, though obviously flawed, are still interesting and engaging enough to spend time with. Ishiguro sets up wonderful scenes, and creates settings you can really visualise. The writing is as it always is with Ishiguro, fabulous. I am glad I picked this up for a second time – another reason to hang on to those old books bought decades before, just in case. Even so, it’s probably only a three-and-a-half star read from me.

Book Review: Gabriel’s Moon by William Boyd – much more than your average spy novel

~ Judith ~ 1 Comment

I’m always keen to read anything by William Boyd – his prose is crafted, his characters complex and there is always an interesting historical setting. And story-wise, you can never tell what’s going to happen next.

With Gabriel’s Moon we are in London, at least some of the time, in the early 1960s, and our complex protagonist this time is Gabriel Dax. He’s a travel writer at that time when travel writing was really popular, and at thirty, is already very successful.

The book opens with a prologue describing the house fire that killed his mother and when, as a six-year-old, Gabriel was lucky to escape with his life. Ever since, Gabriel has struggled to sleep – with nightmares of the fire plus troubling missing elements of his memory. He has sleeping pills, and not surprisingly he drinks a lot. A doctor recommends he see a therapist and these sessions lead him to investigate just what really happened that night.

Gabriel’s recent jaunt abroad has taken him to Léopoldville, and the newly independent Republic of the Congo. He takes an opportunity to interview the new prime minister, Patrice Lumumba, who wants to set the record straight. It seems his life is in danger, and there are names he wants recorded, should he be assassinated. This is way out of Gabriel’s usual sphere as a writer, but he does what he’s asked, making taped recordings of the interview.

He was cleaning his teeth when the telephone rang again. He wandered back into the sitting room and picked up the receiver.
‘Hello, Lorraine?’
But no. Silence again.
‘Look,’ he said calmly, ‘you’re wasting your time, whoever you are. I’m not fussed. Not remotely bothered. OK? I don’t care if you call every hour. Goodbye.’
He took his pill, slid into bed and plumped his pillow, thinking back to his two hours spent with Patrice Lumumba and the way Lumumbra would reach out and tap the back of his hand to make a point.
‘They want to kill me,’ he remembered Lumumba had said at one stage, softly, in his accented English, as if he might be overheard by someone.

But Gabriel’s work hasn’t always been just about travel. His brother Sefton, being something in the Foreign Office, has on occasion asked Gabriel to make deliveries for him to the Continent. When Faith Green, a secretive woman Gabriel has clocked reading his book on the plane home, contacts him with a commission of her own, his first instinct is to refuse. Faith works for MI6 and is something of a femme fatale. But the money’s good, and the trip to Spain tempting. Before you know it, Gabriel’s involved in more and more dangerous work for Faith and in spite of his niggling doubts, seems unable to refuse.

Gabriel’s an interesting character and not always likeable. You want to give him a good shake, tell him not to drink so much and get a grip on his life. There are sadly not many people he gets close enough to call friends. His girlfriend Lorraine hasn’t a clue about what is going on in his head, while he and his brother are somewhat distant having been brought up by different relatives after the death their mother. So there’s no one there to offer a reality check. How he handles the increasingly tricky situations he gets himself into sees a new Gabriel emerge.

Undercurrents of the political situation with the USSR, the Cuban Missile Crisis, as well as social politics of the time round the story out and the period really comes to life. There are glimpses of the ordinary, such as Gabriel’s ongoing battle with a savvy mouse in his flat; the pest-eradication advice from Tyrone, his streetwise locksmith. The book reminded me a little of A Bird in Winter by Louise Doughty – another really intelligent and nuanced spy novel with a main character on their own and battling for survival. This makes both books really engaging and gripping.

Then there are the settings. As well as Congo, there’s Warsaw and Cádiz, rural England and sixties London. If you’re after a satisfying, pacy but intelligent novel, Gabriel’s Moon might just do the trick. It’s a four-star read from me.