Tag: family secrets

Book Review: Margaret, Are You Leaving? by Dianne Yarwood – an empathetic, insightful story about finding your roots

~ Judith ~ Leave a comment

Yet another book about a character coming to terms with her family’s past, but no less enjoyable for all that. I’d chosen the book for its interesting and attractive cover – yes, covers do matter – and was soon engrossed in Maggie’s story. She’s an engaging character, a real live-wire, now in her forties. We’re in Sydney a couple of decades ago and Maggie’s at work where she fields calls from viewers for a television channel. She’s interrupted by a phone call from her brother Lucas with the news that her adoptive mother is dead.

The news is a shock, but not because of grief, but rather because it reminds Maggie of her terrible childhood. Lucas also reveals that he has found some documents about Maggie’s birthmother, but she’s reluctant to go down that path, aware that the woman gave her up when she was two, and that makes two mothers that were unable to love her. The book follows Maggie’s eventual decision to find out more about her origins and the journey that takes her.

When Maggie’s not at work at the station, she also has a job as a part-time teacher aide, which she loves and has a talent for. She’s particularly good with troubled children, seeing in them the need for connection that she had missed out on. You can’t help thinking what a terrific mother she’d have been herself.

I loved the character of Maggie, who really carries the novel. She’s madly enthusiastic for cooking – there’s lots of delicious food described – and when she’s unhappy, goes fishing, whatever the hour. I particularly loved her dog, a pointer called Brian, who strikes me as one of the best literary dogs I’ve met.

She drove to Rodd Point and parked by the water, then set herself up on the stone sea wall with Brian locked by her side. The water was inky and changing in the moonlight. She wore a small head torch and it lit up her hands, the fishing line, the ledge where she sat with her legs dangling over its edge.
It occurred to her that she’d come here to scream. To scream and scream and not be heard. But there was someone else. A little further along a man stood on one of the small rocky ledges in front of the wall. Fishing as she was. Alone and quiet as she was.
So instead she held one finger on the line waiting for movement and worked to fend off despair. Her chest rose and fell, water lapped. Brian lay beside her with his head resting on her leg.

Maggie also bonds with her TV channel co-worker Anna, who has her own mother-related subplot. As an Englishwoman having settled in Australia, Anna desperately misses her family back home – particularly her mother. This mother is the opposite of Maggie’s mother, the two phoning each other most days, while Anna’s own home life revolves around children and family.

The story reveals some sad truths about Australia’s immigration history – particularly the difficulties European migrants found adjusting to life in Australia, often carrying the burden of their wartime experiences. Maggie’s experiences in institutional care as a troublesome child also make for sobering reading. In the Author’s Note at the back of the story, more of this is explained plus that this book is inspired by the life of the author’s friend.

But the overall feel of the book is uplifting, a feel-good read due to the empathy Dianne Yarwood creates for her characters, even the not very nice ones. There’s wisdom and humour as well, and maybe it was a little too feel-good for me, but you can’t help wanting a happy ending for someone who has had so much sorrow. Margaret, Are You Leaving? is a three-and-half star read from me.

Book Review: More Than Enough by Anna Quindlen – a warm and witty novel about family, friendship and DNA

~ Judith ~ 4 Comments

Anna Quindlen’s new book has some similar themes as Ann Patchett’s Whistler. And while Patchett’s obviously the heavyweight here, both authors have a wisdom and warmth about them with a real empathy for their characters. More Than Enough follows forty-two-year-old English teacher Polly Goodman who belongs to a book group where no one is allowed to read the book. They buy the book, each taking turns to choose the book, but no one is to read or talk about the book, because their monthly get together is a chance to talk about themselves and share what’s important.

It’s her three friends from her book group that have bought Polly a DNA kit as a kind of joke. Perhaps if she’d had a happier relationship with her mother, if her father wasn’t in a care home for early onset dementia, she would have hesitated longer before sending away her sample for analysis.

When Polly discovers she has a match with someone outside her family, the sceptre of a family secret emerges and she agrees to meet Talia, a troubled young girl she instantly warms to. Garrison, Polly’s brother is gay and insists there isn’t a chance of his fathering a child – I love Garrison, who’s both worldly wise and hilarious. She can’t talk to her father about it, and her mother’s a formidable, high-flying judge who doesn’t inspire confidences.

Meanwhile, Polly and her lovely husband Mark, a large-animal vet at the zoo, are trying desperately to have a child, have had several disappointing rounds of IVF, to the point that it begins to seem impossible. There are more book group meetings, and Talia introduces Polly to her grandmother, a wise and empathetic breeder of alpacas, which she uses for her absurdly expensive range of knitwear.

Polly and Mark are lovely characters, you want the best for them and you get the backstory of their relationship. There’s Polly’s school teaching and her growing up with that tough-cookie of a mother – something Polly has always resented. This reminded me of the mother-daughter relationship in Whistler, along with the sense of a mother keeping secrets. Again, we have characters that are well-meaning – there’s nobody whose nasty or manipulative , nobody driven to do something terrible – maybe because there can be enough things going on in ordinary lives to create the tension a story needs to keep you reading.

Each term I put a poster on the old cork board with a quote from a writer. This year it’s from Louisa May Alcott: “I am not afraid of storms, for I am learning how to sail my ship.” At least a few of my first-years will copy it down, worried that it will make its way onto the exam. Every time I look at it, I will think to myself, Lies, lies and damn lies. But that’s just me, still afraid of storms, and of capsizing.
“Who is George Eliot?” I’ll ask them right out of the gate so that I can get a snapshot: the ones who had researched the writer, the ones woh hadn’t, the ones who didn’t know who I was talking about, even occasionally the ones, usually transfers from other schools, who thought George Eliot was male. I loved my job, and I loved Windsor, but I had to start playing intellectual chess day one.

Over all, this is a warm, gentle read, laced with sad moments as well as humour. Although it may seem a little slow going, it’s well worth it as you become invested in the characters. I had to put it aside for a few days when I was away for a weekend – I don’t like taking library books on holiday – and couldn’t wait to get back to Polly’s story on my return. I’ve enjoyed other novels by this author and More Than Enough did not disappoint – a four-star read from me.

Book Review: Whistler by Ann Patchett – a surprise reconciliation and the story of a family

~ Judith ~ 4 Comments

A new Ann Patchett novel is always such a joy, and this one did not disappoint. Whistler is written from the point of view of Daphne, a teacher at a private girls’ school in her fifties. She admits to being popular with older men, so it’s not surprising that Jonathan, her husband, is a seventy-year-old retiree. They’re at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York when Jonathan notices an elderly man following them. It turns out to be Eddie, the stepfather Daphne hasn’t seen since she was nine.

The two reconnect – Eddie was always the nicest stepfather you could imagine and the pair had been close in the two years they’d known each other. But it all came to an end when Daphne’s younger sister, Leda (their mother had gone through a Greek mythology phase), developed appendicitis and Eddie was left to collect Daphne from school while their mother stayed at the hospital. A car accident on a snowy night ended with Eddie being sent packing and ever since Daphne felt it was her fault.

The story dips back into the past to recreate that night and also tells the story that Eddie was hoping to develop into a book – he’s an editor at a major New York publishing house. The story has a similarity to this one, and involves a horse named Whistler – in case you were wondering where the title came from. We learn about the girls’ father Buddy, who left his family when the girls were small, beckoned back to a life at sea; the resilience and mental toughness of their mother; and of her third marriage to the author of books about positivity, who has become an oddly bitter old man.

A lot of the book is Eddie’s story too. He’s a wonderful character, a genuinely nice guy who makes a strange pact with Daphne’s mother, which hampers his emotional life enormously. But out of it Daphne gets a fabulous dad and friend. Books are his life too, and this he passes on to Daphne. So this is a great novel for book lovers and writers too.

Eddie Triplett had been cut from an entirely different piece of cloth, and it was the same piece of cloth that Daphne came from, or that’s what she told herself. He read constantly, and not just finished books. He read books that were loose piles of paper and marked them up to make them better. “A work in progress,” he liked to say, as if the novel needed some help getting on its feet. At her insistent begging, he once marked up a theme paper she had written for English class, correcting it the way a teacher would so that she could write it out a second time, fixing her mistakes before handing it in. “I don’t think I’m supposed to be doing this,” Eddie said, circling her misspellings, her word repetitions.
“Other parents to it,” she said. And they did. Not her mother but other people’s mothers. Never the fathers as far as she knew.

Segments of the accident as it is recounted are placed strategically through the book and the story builds to a satisfying ending. There’s a thread of grief that runs through it for the years of wasted time, and guilt too over how it all happened. I found this an enjoyable read with good company, but less compelling, less gritty than some of Patchett’s earlier books, in particular The Dutch House, Commonwealth or State of Wonder. The characters so well-heeled and comfortable, even if the past does shake them up a bit – but not for long.

It’s interesting to delve back into a family and see the difference between what a child sees compared to what really happened. I’m sure that the book echoes real life in this way for many of us. So while this is a quieter story than earlier Patchetts, there’s more than meets the eye. With that in mind, Whistler is a four-star read from me.

Book Review: Hemlock and Silver by T. Kingfisher – a riveting retelling of the Snow White fairytale

~ Judith ~ 4 Comments

Book challenges are a great way to step out of your reading comfort zone and discover fabulous new books you’d never normally think of reading. And this was how I discovered Hemlock and Silver, a book recommended by a couple of colleagues and which I might never have got around to except that it happened to fit not just one reading challenge but two: our local library’s Turn Up the Heat winter reading challenge (discover a new genre), and the 52 Book Club 2026 reading challenge (read a standalone fantasy novel).

I think it was the strong narrative voice which appealed to me from page one. We meet Anja, a healer specialising in poisons, scruffily attired and with a chime adder for company, when the King arrives at her workshop asking for her help. He wants her to cure his daughter Snow, whose health has been in decline, with some kind of poison suspected. While Anja is thought of as a healer, she is at heart a scientist, observing, noting and experimenting, often with roosters, but also on herself.

Anja is the daughter of a well-to-do merchant, she’s a big woman, abrupt and sometimes tactless as her more marriageable sisters often remind her. But she has the respect of those who need her help. Her new task will take her away from her home of Four Saints, to a desert enclave where the Princess is sequestered, accompanied by two of the King’s guard, chatty and cheery Aaron and the strong but taciturn Javier.

I had just taken poison when the king arrived to inform me that he had murdered his wife.
The poison was a distillate of chime-adder venom, which burned my sinuses when I took it off my wrist the way some people take snuff. The king was a tired man of medium height, with sandy hair and deep grooves worn into the sides of his face. I hadn’t recognized him at first when he stepped through the door of the stillroom. Well, why would I? The king was someone that I had seen far off, at the head of a long table or perched on a throne. Without context, he was simply a well-dressed man who had come in without even knocking.

As everything she knows about poisons throws up no obvious solution, Anja is forced to watch and wait and hope for a solution. Spying the Princess eat an apple that has not been brought from the palace kitchen’s, Anja is mysteriously drawn into a strange world involving mirrors, a talking cat and a sense of evil. There is indeed dark magic afoot, but T Kingfisher maintains a light touch with her storytelling, with humour and a touch of romance never far away.

She also does a brilliant job of creating a believable magical world that relates well to the original story. As such it was the perfect fantasy read for me, as we have that ‘stranger in a strange land’ feel, with Anja’s observant and scientifically aware character. She’s aided not only by a snarky cat who is only sometimes helpful, but by the practical and determined Javier. It’s a clever reinvention of a fairytale favourite, complete with poisoned apples, but missing the dwarfs.

I particularly enjoyed the audiobook narration of Hemlock and Silver, which was read by Jennifer Pickens who does the voices so well, I would seek out other books she reads on that basis alone. Hemlock and Silver is a four-star read from me.

Book Review: Bone Lands by Pip Fioretti – first in an Outback Noir series and a cracking good story

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Pip Fioretti writes a kind of genre blending crime novel with Bone Lands, which combines everything that we love about Outback Noir – the big skies and harsh, dry landscapes, the Aussie battlers who live there – with a hardboiled policeman and puts it all in the historical setting of 1911. And as a character, mounted trooper Senior Constable Gus Hawkins has a lot going for him. He’s complex in that he’s well-educated and sounds it, with several tours in the Boer War behind him which have left him with both mental and physical scars. He’s smart and resourceful, but that old PTSD means he drinks too much and gets into fights.

But then, everyone here seems to get into fights, well, just about. It’s a hardscrabble existence out in the back-blocks of New South Wales. Hawkins’ little town of Calpa is a ‘blink and you miss it’ kind of place, with a pub, a post-office, the police station and not a lot else. It’s a one-man station, with tasks often concerned with managing unrest – there’s not a lot to do in Calpa but drink your wages away – local admin like gun permits and the like. But riding home from monitoring behaviour at a dance honouring the King’s coronation, Hawkins comes across a serious crime – three young members of the same family brutally murdered.

The Kirkbride family are well-off landowners, running a huge sheep station, and not well liked in this haves and have-nots kind of place. With the endless work required to make money from wool, they have a huge labour force of hardened men of the land. Life is cheap and violence comes easy. But when the violence is against their own, the grim landowner and patriarch Robert Kirkbride is oddly reluctant to have Hawkins nosing around too much, preferring to believe in the ‘robbery gone wrong’ theory. It doesn’t help that Gus has had a romantic connection with the remaining daughter, Flora.

It was a six-hour ride upriver to Bourke. In summer it was a bastard of a ride, one I preferred to do at night if I had a choice. The thing to do was carry a tin of Josephson’s Australian Ointment. Buckskin breeches were made so you didn’t chafe, but six or more hours in the saddle on a hot day and everything chafed, from balls to brain. The glare was blinding but our official hat was a jaunty pillbox affair, which would be just the thing for a Parisian gendarme but was ridiculous out here. I shoved it in a saddlebag and wore a cabbage-tree hat like every other man in the bush.
The sun was on its way across a vast blue sky, a westerly wind blowing. I noticed a shape ahead in the distance, moving slowly. Dancer stopped at the sight of it. He didn’t like things that moved, nor did he like things that didn’t move. So there we were, his ears pricked forward, completely still, every muscle tensed and ready to flee.
‘How’d you get into the police force, mate?’ I said, stroking his neck. ‘Bribed someone, eh?’

But Gus is determined to find out what happened. These were his friends and he wants to bring some closure for Flora, too, who has become unhinged by the deaths of her siblings. It doesn’t help when two detectives arrive from Sydney with their own way of doing things, but none of the nous for dealing with the locality or shifty farm labourers. If conflict is the linch pin of a good story, then this one has it in spades. You can’t help but feel for Gus, even if he is, quite often, his own worst enemy.

Other characters are interesting too, particularly in relation to Gus. His initial dislike of Trooper Lonergan, a somewhat wet behind the ears type, sent from Bourke to manage the station while Gus looks after the detectives, mellows into friendship. Other characters are lightly drawn but the author captures their essentials in a way that makes them immediate. The few female characters – this really is a man’s world – have to manage as best they can, and we can’t help but sympathise over how they’re treated. The plot steams along towards some surprising revelations to make for a very satisfying mystery.

Bone Lands is atmospheric and absorbing, with sentences that are nicely honed and laced with wit, making Gus Hawkins good company. It’s a great start to a series – there’s already a second book (Skull River) with another due out next year, which is good news. Bone Lands is a five-star read from me.

Book Review: Buckeye by Patrick Ryan – a sweeping and emotional historical read

~ Judith ~ 1 Comment

Patrick Ryan’s novel, Buckeye, haunted me for days after I finished it. The story takes us to the small town of Bonhomie, Ohio, starting off during World War II. We follow the lives of two couples, Becky and Cal Jenkins, and Margaret and Felix Salt, through the events of the war, and on to the lives of their children. Events of the twentieth century, wars certainly, but social changes too disturb their lives, but nothing compares to how they deal with events themselves.

All four of them have something that makes them different. Cal has one leg shorter than the other. This exempts him from military service, so he drifts into marriage with Becky, who has a gift. She can communicate with the dead. Astonishingly beautiful Margaret hides the secret of being abandoned as a baby at an orphanage, while Felix, who is gay, tries to lead a conventional life with her. The war shakes them all up, well and truely.

The story begins on the day victory is declared in Europe (VE Day), 1945, with a young Cal working in his father-in-law’s hardware store. He’s interrupted by the arrival of Margaret who has to know what all the commotion is all about and asks if Cal has a radio. They listen to the news together and exchange an unexpected kiss. From there we dip back into the past to discover Cal’s story and Margaret’s, each of which is tragic in its own way.

When he read, heard, and watched the news, he wondered how many people were out there doing the same thing he was—scratching their heads as they tried to figure out how to prioritize their worries and confront their prejudices; drawing their own maps with their fingers crossed.

Cal’s father Everett lives out of town, traumatised by a previous war as well as the loss of two children and his wife to illness, becoming irascible and a hoarder. I really enjoyed the character of Everett, particularly the way he writes angry letters to whichever president is in office at the time. His war service has made him fiercely against war and this theme recurs during the book as more wars upend people’s lives.

Margaret is an interesting character in that she never reveals anything about her upbringing, determined to appear ordinary – if only she knew what that looked like. And it’s hard to quietly figure that out when everyone, particularly men, see nothing but her stunning good looks. So she has secrets from Felix, who likewise hopes for a normal family life. If only the war hadn’t got in the way, he might have kept up the pretence.

Cal keeps on trying to make the best of things, dealing with a demanding father-in-law, as well as his own difficult father, who never shows him any affection. He struggles to understand his wife’s talent which puts her in demand for readings with people who have lost loved ones, some from WWI, and more when the next war rolls along. The complications of children put the characters through even more, with more secrets, but also possibilities.

Therein, she thought, lies the unbearable solitude of a lie: you’re alone when you tell it, alone when you live it, alone when you try to dismantle it.

Like many who lived through the twentieth century, the characters of Buckeye have had their lives overturned by world events. There’s trauma and the tragic losses incurred by war. The prosperous post-war period that imagined a bright future for people but with that a restrictive social order. The changing times with the Civil Rights movement, while gay rights and feminism also get a look in.

It all adds up to a gripping read and an emotional one, certainly enhanced by characters you sympathise with. And then there’s the fine writing. I shall certainly be looking out for more by this author. Buckeye is a five-star read from me.

Book Review: Tata by Valérie Perrin – an evocative story with a complex web of family secrets

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Valérie Perrin is well-known for her bestseller, Fresh Water for Flowers, a book that’s been on my to-read list for a little while. So when Tata popped up on Netgalley, I grabbed the chance to read it. And I’m so glad I did. Tata (which means Auntie) is such an engrossing story, bringing us into the world of Agnès Dugain, a film director who has been unable to work since her actor husband left her. A phone call out of the blue from a small town in Burgundy informs her that her beloved Aunt Colette has died. Which would be sad news, indeed, except Agnès believes her aunt was buried in the Gueugnon cemetery three years ago.

It soon transpires that Colette lived quietly in a secluded house for the last three years, carrying a secret. Agnès leaves Paris to view the body and to discover anything she can about her aunt’s final years to solve the mystery of who is buried in her aunt’s place. The story flips back to the 1950s and the farm where Colette grew up with her little brother, Jean. There’s not much parental love, and the children are expected to work, rather than further their education. But, in spite of this, Jean is discovered to be a musical prodigy.

Colette will do anything to protect Jean, but fortunately there’s help from Blaise, both her friend and the landowner’s son from the chateau, where there’s a magnificent piano. We learn of her apprenticeship to a cobbler in the town, and where Colette finds a niche and some happiness. Meanwhile, Agnès receives from Colette’s good friend and co-conspirator a suitcase full of cassette tapes and so listens to her aunt’s story in her own words.

There are numerous plot threads, and more secrets are slowly revealed. We’re taken to Gueugnon in the 1960s, and its football team, back further to events of the war and its legacy. You read about Agnès’s own career and how she met her famous actor husband. As she looks into the past, Agnès is forced out of the slump that has taken over her since her divorce and reconnects with old friends and makes new ones. She starts to think about a new story.

Throughout are numerous cultural references, including the movies that have inspired Agnès, the music of her father, the popular fashions and songs that evolved over time. I loved coming across film titles of movies I’d also loved, such as La Double Vie de Véronique, The Piano, and Un Coeur en Hiver, which I remember from a film festival. There are scenes in cafés, although Agnès doesn’t often have any appetite, but others eat and we’re treated to that as well. But at heart it’s a story about what we will do to protect the people we love, about friendship and the ties that make us a family. It’s heartbreaking – there are cruel characters as well as terrible historical events – but it’s also hopeful, charmingy written and full of wit.

Tata seemed to me a quintessentially French novel, and while I knew nothing of this particular small town, it was easy to imagine the stone houses, the narrow streets, the little shops and cafés. And the style of storytelling seems very French as well. I loved it. I could happily have started back at page one and read it all again. Tata is due for publication on 23 June, and I read it thanks to Netgalley and Europa Editions. It’s a five-star read from me.

Book Review: The Sea Sisters by Louise Douglas – mystery, tragedy and suspense in a stunning setting

~ Judith ~ 3 Comments

Now here’s the perfect book if you’re feeling nostalgic for summer seaside holidays. The Sea Sisters, takes you to coastal Brittany, and the charming seaside town of Morranez. Here Mila Shepherd is one third of the Toussaints Detective Agency, for the most part helping to find missing persons. But Mila has her own private tragedy. She failed to answer a call from her step-sister Sophie the day Sophie died, drowned in a storm with husband Charlie in a boating accident.

Mila has given up her life in England to be a parent to Ani their teenage daughter and to atone for the guilt she feels. Discovering a note left in Sophie’s kitchen brings back questions about what Sophie and Charlie were doing taking their their boat out in a storm. But before she can dwell on that, she’s soon busy with a new case: the arrival of an English woman, Nicole Stevenson, who believes she is not who her family think she is.

Convinced that she is really Evie Albert, who went missing as a two year old during the annual Morvarc’h music festival, Nicole wants help to prove it. She and her sisters have discovered in their late father’s safe a folder of newspaper clippings about Evie’s disappearance and a photo of Evie’s mother Adeline who looks astonishingly like Nicole.

As the festival approaches for another year, and Ani makes plans with her friends, Mila is reminded of her summers spent with Sophie and the people she used to hang out with during her teens. Among them is her colleague Carter Jackson, who brings to the agency his expertise in dealing with police, and who zooms around the countryside on his Harley.

Soon the mystery of what happened to Evie is all-consuming. Nicole is frail, suffering from an auto-immune disease, so discovering the truth is time critical. We learn of Adeline’s transient lifestyle as a tarot card reader and her connection to the Holywell Commune, a cult-like group living in an old convent on the edge of town and who are distrustful of strangers. It’s going to take some ingenuity to discover if anyone there still remembers little Evie, as the commune is run by the domineering figure of Augustin Golliard.

The story takes some twists and turns as questions surface involving smuggling and petty crime. The two mysteries at times overlap and both Carter and Mila take risks which nicely builds suspense, with enough surprises to keep you interested right to the end. As I turned the last page, however, I was almost sad to be leaving Morranez as Douglas makes it feel like you are on holiday in a French seaside town in the height of summer.

I devoured this light, easy read which blended mystery, atmosphere and nostalgia and even a touch of romance in a well-plotted story. I’ll be keen to read the earlier books in Douglas’s Brittany series. The Sea Sisters, due to be published on 1 June, it’s a four-star read from me. My thanks to Netgalley and Boldwood Books for a reading copy in return for my review.

Book Review: Love Lane by Patrick Gale – part two in the Harry Cane story

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Patrick Gale has long been a favourite author of mine, so of course I’d read A Place Called Winter when it came out in 2015. I’m pretty sure it was one of my top reads for that year. Its story was inspired by the life of the author’s own great-grandfather, a man who had left his wife and young daughter to become a farmer in the Canadian prairies. The novel, set in the early part of the 20th century, describes a secret love, the effects of the Great War and following flu epidemic on its characters, as well as the difficulties of building a life out of nothing. It’s both fascinating and moving and like all Patrick Gale’s novels, beautifully written

In Love Lane, Gale picks up Harry Cane’s story when he sells his farm and makes a visit to his long lost family in England. A kind of mythology has grown up around Harry, known as Cowboy Grandpa, his grandchildren imagining an ageing Gary Cooper. And it isn’t surprising as no one has seen him for most of half a century. His daughter Betty has been brought up by a grandmother and a bunch of formidable aunts – her mother having died when she was twelve. As a young woman engaged to Terry, she feels the urge to write to Harry out of the blue. Terry has asked about Harry and getting married seems the right time to get in touch.

So begins a correspondence that doesn’t result in a visit from either side until Harry sells his farm and, wheat prices being down, has to accept a low offer. He turns up at the Liverpool docks, a shabby elderly man with few teeth and wearing a string tie. At first Betty doesn’t know what to do with him, Terry has a stressful job as a prison governor, but she determines to look after her father. Her flighty daughter Whistle takes a shine to him and so does the dog. There’s also something about Harry which makes women want to talk to him about their problems.

Harry had never gone so long without fresh air, walking the turbulent corridors, from the acid stink of his little, wood-veneered cabin to the bottomless, empty talk of the dining room to the echoing whoops of the bar and – now that he knew the way – down the service staircase to the cosy snug on the deck below. He was having, or listening in on, conversations that left him as dizzy as an inexperienced climber on a mountainside. It gave him the curious sense that – in transit from a young world to an older one – he had stumbled onto yet another, that was altogether older and wiser than either. By the time they had passed Ireland and were nosing into the mouth of the Mersey on a dazzling April morning, he was left with the slightly panicky feeling of someone worrying they’d bought a ticket to quite the wrong place.

The story flips between the points of view of Harry and Betty, as well as Terry, whose prison is one where executions are still performed, something which is hugely stressful. Harry goes on to stay with Pip, their elder daughter, so we get her narration as well. She’s married to Mike, also in the prison service and a man with secrets. Harry is, as ever, perceptive and inspires confidences.

The author does a terrific job of capturing post-war England, still with rationing, and even though both Mike and Terry have important jobs, there’s not a lot to spare. Women of their class didn’t work after marriage, and we get a lot of societal expectations in the 1950s on wives and young mothers in a patriarchal system. It was also a difficult time to be gay, with men outed for homosexual acts given stints in Terry’s prison, among them the tailor he brings Harry to for a new suit and shirts.

But best of all are the characters. Gale has done plenty of research on the one hand, but has had a wealth of letters and diaries, as well, no doubt, as his own memories of old family stories to sift through to inspire the novel. You get to know the characters and really empathise with them, which is something I always like about any of Gale’s books, he’s such a perceptive writer, perhaps having something of his own great-grandfather’s gift.

You can read Love Lane as a stand-alone novel, but I would really also recommend starting with A Place Called Winter, which I recall as a beautifully intense and emotional read. Love Lane is a welcome return to Harry’s story, and a four-and-a-half 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.