Tag: relationships

Book Review: Three Days in June by Anne Tyler – a charming novella about marriage, laced with humour and insight

~ Judith ~ Leave a comment

If I had to choose a favourite author, (heavens, what a decision!), Anne Tyler would definitely be on my shortlist. I’ve been reading and rereading her for decades. So picking up her latest book, Three Days in June, I was instantly in my happy place, absorbed in a seemingly ordinary story about ordinary people, and which was unsurprisingly fascinating.

This time we’ve got Gail, who is sixty-one, an assistant school principal who’s about to lose her job. So she’s not happy about that. She leaves work in a huff and then finds her ex-husband, Max, on the doorstep with a cat from the shelter he helps out at. Max is visiting for their daughter’s wedding the following day, but can’t stay with Debbie because her fiancé Kenneth is allergic to cats. Gail isn’t happy about this sudden imposition either, and no way is she about to adopt a cat. No, thank you!

The cat soon settles in, and so does Max, and the former couple get caught up in the wedding arrangements – the wedding rehearsal, shopping for clothes and so on. But the hint of an indiscretion on Kenneth’s part has Gail worried that Debbie is making a huge mistake. She should know. The story flips back in time to the events that eventually led to Gail’s and Max’s divorce.

The clock gathered itself together with a whirring of gears and struck a series of blurry notes. Nine o’clock, I was thinking; but no, it turned out to be ten. I’d been sitting there in a sort of stupor, evidently. I stood up and hung my purse in the closet, but then outside the window I saw some movement on the other side of the curtain, some dark and ponderous shape laboring up my front walk. I tweaked the curtain aside half an inch. Max, for God’s sake. Max with a duffel bag slung over one shoulder, and a bulky square suitcase dangling from his left hand.

Anne Tyler packs a lot into this little book. We get a good deal of character development and insight into the family. There’s the usual gentle humour, which is always a plus, and the characters are wonderful. I instantly warmed to Max, also a teacher, working in a school where he doesn’t earn a lot and rents the same flat he’s lived in for years. He’s a scruffy, gentle bear of a man who doesn’t get in a flap. Early on you feel he’s a good fit for Gail, who’s a bit uptight and pernickety and not so good with people.

There’s also Debbie, a lively, determined kind of girl who doesn’t shirk from speaking her mind. There’s also Gail’s mother, who’s rather amusing in her little digs at her daughter, plus the well-to-do and at times hoity-toity in-laws. The way the different family members bounce off each other is very realistic but also delightfully entertaining.

Three Days in June is classic Anne Tyler – a lovely, warm-hearted read that charms from the first page to the last. I couldn’t help thinking it would make a nice little film, a cut above many wedding movies, that’s for sure. If you’re feeling in the mood for an uplifting read it’s well worth picking up. And check out Tyler’s backlist – she’s had a host of book award nominations, winning a Pulitzer for Breathing Lessons. Three Days in June is a four star read from me.

Book Review: The Bee Sting by Paul Murray – a riveting novel about a family in strife

~ Judith ~ 2 Comments

This is a superbly clever book that seemed to me particularly clever in that its cleverness isn’t at first all that obvious. One thing obvious about The Bee Sting is that it is very long. I don’t often go for long books. They have to have instant readability for me to want to persevere, because of the reading time involved. But once I embarked on this story of a family going through a tough time in small-town Ireland, I just couldn’t stop, because the writing is just so lively, character-driven and, at times, funny.

The story moves between the four points of view of Cass and PJ, teenage children of Dickie and Imelda. Dickie has taken on the family business built up by his father, a car dealership that has, until the recent economic downturn, been a reliable money maker. So much so that the family are among the most well-to-do around town. But now times are tough and Dickie doesn’t know how to fix it. Instead he’s spending his days in the woods with his weird mate Victor, building a bunker in case of an apocalypse.

Dickie was always the smarter son, but less successful with people than his famous footy-playing brother Frank. Everyone remembers Frank, not just for his flair on the sports field, but because of his charm and good-looks. His sudden death a couple of decades before in a car accident only made him seem more of a hero. At the time he was all set to marry Imelda. Dickie with his lack of social finesse and looks that were nothing to write home about seemed like a consolation prize.

Over the course of the book, we discover how Imelda came to marry Dickie instead, as well as both their back stories, Imelda’s coming from a family of ne’er do wells, a violent father with criminal tendencies. Imelda is astonishingly beautiful, which is how she caught Frank’s eye. Marrying Dickie so young and having children soon after, she’s never had a job, but is a brilliant shopper. As money troubles start to bite, she’s in a permanent fury, cross with Dickie and selling off anything she can online to keep at least some money coming in.

Meanwhile Cass has reached that age when everything – her family and life in a town where everyone knows everyone’s business – has become utterly impossible. With her best friend Elaine, she’s plotting to leave as soon as she can. Trinity College in Dublin beckons, but can she keep her studies up enough to pass her A levels when Elaine hauls her off to all kinds of pubs and clubs while they should be studying?

Most days they went to Elaine’s after school, but sometimes, for a change of scene, Elaine would want to come to Cass’s instead. She liked to hang out in the kitchen talking to Imelda – that’s what she called Cass’s mother, ‘Imelda’, so casually and naturally that after a while Cass started doing it too. You are so working those jeggings, Imelda, she’d say. Oh, you think so? Cass’s mam/‘Imelda’ would say, and she’d lean over with impossible willow-like grace to examine the back of her own thighs. I wasn’t sure about the stripes. The stripes are what make it, Elaine would say conclusively, and Imelda would look happy.

Cass’s mother was a famous beauty. She too had blonde hair and green eyes. It’s so weird that she’s your mam, Elaine said. Doesn’t it make more sense that I should be her daughter?

PJ is also having a tough time. His parents aren’t there for him, Cass is eternally cross with him and he’s not socially adept either, parroting facts he’s discovered supplied by his active and curious brain. With the failing of his father’s business, all the town knows about it so school can be hard. He loses himself in violent computer games, leading him to an online friendship. But is that new friend as genuine as he pretends to be?

I hadn’t expected to care for these four characters as much as I did. But Paul Murray takes you right inside their heads, revealing their secrets. In the background we’ve got a support cast of interesting support characters, among them dodgy opportunist Big Mike, Imelda’s great aunt Rose who can see the future, and Ryszard, the handsome charmer and baddie of the story.

While the novel carries you along entertainingly enough, there is a clever plotting that takes the book to the next level. There are very long chapters that build things up, and then very short ones that ramp up the tension. There’s clever stuff with the prose too, the personalities of the main characters reflected in the style. Imelda’s point of view, for instance, is written without punctuation, perhaps an echo of her fierce and furious way of thinking and speaking. There are no quotation marks for speech either, but somehow you soon get used to it and wonder, why do we ever have them in the first place?

Then there’s the ending. I wasn’t going to mention that as I’m still thinking about it, but WOW. Enough said. I’m certainly glad to have read The Bee Sting, even if it was very long, and yes, I’ll look out for more books by Paul Murray, for the writing alone. The Bee Sting is five star read from me.

Book Review: Clear by Carys Davies – a spare, impeccably written novel set during the Highland Clearances

~ Judith ~ 2 Comments

The Walter Scott Prize for historical fiction is always on my calendar, with its longlist of brilliant new titles. Among this year’s list was this little book by Carys Davies, and being set for the most part on a remote Scottish island, it immediately caught my eye.

Clear takes us back to 1843, the tail-end of the Highland Clearances, when small holdings made way for sheep, their tenants forced onto unproductive land, emigrating to the colonies or finding other ways to make a living where they could. It’s also the time when Presbyterian ministers signed the Deed of Demission to separate from the Church of Scotland so that congregations could have more say in who they accepted as ministers. These rebel ministers were an evangelical bunch, forming the Free Church of Scotland, which left many of them without a living, at least in the short term.

Among them is one John Ferguson, a main character from this story. He’s a somewhat dour man who aims to set up his own church, but desperately needs funds to get going. So he accepts help from his brother in law, who finds him short-term employment for a land-owner. This Mr Lowrie has recently converted his land to sheep-farming but has one offshore island still requiring the eviction of its single inhabitant. John makes the arduous boat trip beyond Sheltand to a small island where he’s to persuade the man to leave with him in a month’s time, but immediately things do not go well.

In the meantime, we meet John’s wife Mary, a sensible sort of woman who has come late in life to marriage. Now in her forties, she has learnt to manage and think for herself. So in spite of a decent payout, she can see the pitfalls of this project. The islander may not be happy about being thrown off his holding; John may not be able to express the landlord’s decision in a way the islander, a speaker of a rare dialect, can understand. And John is in the meantime cut off from any transport out for a whole month.

The third main character in all this is Ivar, the island’s solitary inhabitant, a man attuned to the harsh nature of living so far north, with no one but his animals to talk to, but who suits his situation so well. He’s been on his own for twenty years, the visits from his landlord’s factor becoming fewer and further-between. How is he going to react to an interloper on his island?

The big bearded man, Ivar, was watching him turn over the pages.
‘Who does he think I am?’ thought John Ferguson.
He really was very large, as Strachan had told them he would be, and as John Ferguson turned over the last of the sea-washed pages with his raw and damaged fingers, he began to regret that he had come.
Having been alarmed by the factor’s insisting he brought the pistol, he wished now he had it with him. It was a terrible thing to admit to himself, and to God, but it was true. He would have been less afraid with the gun in his possession, and in his weakened state without it, and without Flett’s speech, and without the document of Removing to wave about and prove his authority, he shied away from trying to explain his errand.

Carys Davies creates a terrific story from these characters, their miscommunications and their solutions to unexpected problems. How the two men come to reach an understanding is a large part of the story, building to an intense and somewhat surprising ending. Like the best in this kind of fiction, it brings history to life through the experiences of well-rounded characters. At only 150 pages it’s a short book, but you feel you have lost yourself in this world, the island setting, as well as the backstories of our main characters – all in carefully honed prose.

I can see why this book has made the Walter Scott Prize longlist. It captures perfectly a time and place, as well as creating a nail-biting read. It’s also well-researched. Carys Davies has incorporated some of Ivar’s vanishing language, evocative and interesting words for the environment she describes. Such a lot for such a small book. While it’s nice to have a long immersive read when you pick up a historical novel, sometimes a short book is a breath of fresh air. I loved Clear – easily a five-star read from me.

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

~ Judith ~ Leave a comment

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: 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: This Strange Eventful History by Claire Messud – a novel about displacement, diaspora and a family through three generations

~ Judith ~ Leave a comment

If you’ve ever had a scroll through the Booker Prize website, you’ll discover it’s full of all kinds of interesting information for readers. Here I discovered a quiz that helped you decide which book to start with from this year’s long-list, based on your reading preferences. I could’t resist having a go, and was prompted to try This Strange Eventful History.

The book is described as being of ‘breathtaking historical sweep and vivid psychological intimacy’, which certainly whetted my appetite. It begins in Greece 1940, as the Nazis have captured Paris, leaving French naval officer, Gaston Cassar afraid for his family. So he packs them all up for the arduous journey across Europe in wartime to the old family home of Algiers. That’s his very dear wife, Lucienne, her frail older sister, and his two children, François and Denise, with Gaston returning to the navy.

The family have been moved around before, but home is always Algiers. Until it’s not. With the Algerian Revolution in the 1950s and the country’s eventual independence, the Cassars try to resettle in France, but they are not easily accepted as French, and they miss the beauty of Algeria. Francois moves to Amherst to study and meets Canadian Barbara. The two make a life together, but nowhere seems quite like home. Throwing in the promise of an academic future Francois decides on a business career to better support his family – long hours and work that takes him around the world. His family moves to Australia at one point, try Canada and Switzerland.

But just when her heart was tempted to harden against him, she recalled the letter of the previous fall, the one she felt made her heart literally ache. He’d been replying to one of hers, in which she’d tried to make light of that whisper of truth and had told him he couldn’t know what it felt like for her to be at home for a while – simply to love to be at home! – because he didn’t have a home. Which was true – his parents and sister were living in Buenos Aires, and had been for years, and he’d never even set foot there, neither of them had. The Cassars came to live with them in Paris instead, and because there wasn’t room enough for all of them in the flat on the Avenue Franco-Russe (even though they owned it; but François and Barbara had been living there), they stayed at the Madison Hotel, in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, where Monsieur Cassar had apparently lived for several months near the end of the war, and maybe that was for them the closest thing at that point to home?

Francois seems a perpetually unhappy man. He longs for the intense devotion in his marriage that his own parents experience. But it’s not just his story. We also have Denise’s time in Argentina as a young woman, where she settles with her parents following a breakdown. We get to know the next generation through young Chloe, who also settles somewhere different from where she was born. We see Barbara’s own misery, the issues of having a family and a career, and being responsible for the home. It’s the 1970s and women “can have it all”, but it’s not easy..

As the characters take you around the world, you are not so much shown what happens, but let into their minds at moments of reflection – waiting for a guest to arrive, getting ready for a family event. It is very much an introspective sort of story. As the chapters jump through time, it’s a way of catching up with what has brought them to this point. But it means the story is often less immediate than it might be. More “told” than “shown”. If you’re used to a more plot-driven story, you might find this frustrating. Then, at the end, there is a startling revelation – so don’t whatever you do think, I might just skip the epilogue, or flip to the back to see where you’re headed.

I am certainly glad I read This Strange Eventful History as it evocatively describes the effects of losing your homeland, of dislocation and the importance of somewhere you call home. It’s cleverly written, threads going back to the past that have you thinking, “so that’s what happened”, rather like real life. And the characters are certainly interesting and well rounded, if at times not all that likeable. But overall I found the book a bit of a slog. I’ll certainly go back to the Booker Prize website for more reading advice, and I don’t mind the occasional slog of a read. This one’s a three-and-a-half star read from me.


Book Review: Confessions by Catherine Airey – a compelling story of three generations of Irish women, their secrets and their choices

~ Judith ~ 4 Comments

I couldn’t stop reading this accomplished debut novel. Confessions gets off to a dramatic beginning – New York, September 2001, the day the Twin Towers of the World Trade Centre were attacked. And that’s where teenage Cora’s father works. There’s her slow realisation that he won’t be coming home. Help comes from an unexpected quarter – an Aunt Roísín she didn’t know she had, and it’s away to Ireland and a new life.

Rather than following Cora’s fresh start in Ireland, the story switches back to describe two sisters growing up and struggling with the sudden loss of their father. Their mother takes to her bed and the sisters, Maire and Roísín, do their best. Maire is a brilliant artist but has mental health issues. Fortunately there’s Michael who adores her and is like a brother to Roísín. We’re also with Maire when she earns a scholarship to New York and her struggles to fit in with a narrative shift told interestingly in the second person.

Almost like a character in itself is the big old mansion outside the village, once a stately home, that has become a refuge for women seeking an alternative lifestyle. Known as The Screamers, it offers a new chance first to Maire, and later the home for Roísín and the returning young Cora. It is where Cora’s daughter, Lyca, digs into the past and finds some long buried secrets.

On the walk home from midnight mass you go inside a phone box. Shutting yourself in reminds you of being inside the confessional booth back home. Your first confession, when you wanted to tell Father Peter about Jesus winking at you from the cross over the altar. Your mother had told you that this was a false image, that you were imaging things. But it didn’t feel fair to count this as a sin when you weren’t the one doing the winking. Instead, said you sometimes wished your sister was dead. This seemed to satisfy the priest, who sent you off to pray the rosary.

In Confessions we have the repeated themes of girls growing up without a father, teen pregnancies, too much freedom or too much restraint. These young women are all smart enough to do well in a world that accepts them for who they are, but it’s going to take more recent generations – Cora, and then Lyca – for that to happen, and a more modern Ireland. But it’s the long buried secrets that keep the reader on their toes to the end. How will they disturb the fragile memories Cora in particular has of her parents?

And the writing is wonderful, finely tuned to each character and allowing them to tell their story, vivid and at times very intense. The setting of New York in particular is an interesting highlight – it comes through as a walker’s city, shown from the ground up, as well as a place of surprising vistas when seen from a high-rise building. The contrast with a small Irish town couldn’t be more stark – the closed-in feel of the early interiors, then Screamers with its warren of rooms.

This is a well put-together story, the threads of the different characters carefully woven in and, at the same time, written from the heart. I was glad to receive this advance reader copy thanks to Netgalley, in return for an honest review. Confessions is due for release late January and a four-and-a-half star read from me.

Book Review: The Long Water by Stef Penney – an enthralling Nordic mystery with dark echoes from the past

~ Judith ~ Leave a comment

I’m always excited to see a new novel by Stef Penney. Her new novel, The Long Water, takes its name from a river in a rugged part of Norway within the Arctic Circle, where there’s a string of lakes and rivers, guarded by “mountains that rise out of the water like teeth”. It’s a remote area that once fostered mining, but with most mines now closed, the economy is now more reliant on tourism.

In the town of Fauske, senior high school students are enjoying “russ”, a kind of spring break, taking part in dares, general mayhem and partying all night before the hard work of exams begins. In the middle of this, a popular boy goes missing. Daniel was one of a group of friends who called themselves the Hellraisers and who are admired by everyone for their general coolness. A police search that goes on for days and then weeks yields not the missing boy, but a body in a mine that dates back to 1968, when the mine was closed.

The story draws you in through the eyes of several characters beginning with Svea, an elderly woman living on the outskirts of town with her dog who likes to keep to herself. Her one good friend is Odd Emil, a widower who is also Daniel’s grandfather. Svea has fallen out with her daughter, but is in contact with a granddaughter, Elin, who lives with her father, a rather conservative vicar. Now sixteen, Elin has just come out as gender fluid which at first perplexes her father, but fortunately Svea lends a sympathetic ear.

As well as being a mystery, this is also the story of Svea’s family and ongoing damage from their horrific upbringing. Svea has become strong in spite of this – the father she never knew was a German soldier stationed in Norway during the war, and her mother’s one true love. Her violent drunk of a stepfather taunted her with her doubtful parentage, but at least she had the love of her two sisters.

Elin worries that her being neurodiverse is what drove her mother away, but Svea thinks it’s more likely that her daughter has been troubled by her family’s mental health problems, in particular, an alcoholic grandmother and a fey aunt who disappeared some years ago.

My name is Svea. That’s an unusual name, you might think, for a Norwegian of my vintage. Basically, it means ‘Swedish’, although I could argue that it is a version of the masculine Sverre, from the Old Norse sverrir, meaning ‘wild, swinging’. That’s rather more exciting, but take your pick: swinging, or Swedish; I don’t care. Svea Hustoft. In town, I get called both Miss Hustoft and Mrs Hustoft. Both are equally meaningless. At one point in my life, I was called Svea Ovegaard, but I didn’t like that. Not that Hustoft is any great shakes, but at least it doesn’t have such unpleasant associations. Anyway – what is my vintage? I’m seventy-nine, if you must know, although I think it’s rather rude of you to ask. No, I don’t look it, do I? Don’t think you can get around me with flattery. It’s too late for that. Really, people these days – no manners at all.

The story also follows Benny, Elin’s friend who gets inadvertently caught up as a witness to events on the night of Daniel’s disappearance, while doing something he probably shouldn’t. And then there’s Daniel’s teacher, Marylen, who has a troubled home life and a secret attraction to Elin’s father. They are all interesting characters, well-drawn, who throw different lights onto the central mystery.

So there’s plenty of story threads. How the town deals with the disappearance of Daniel, as well as the discovery of a body pushes the plot along nicely. Elin and Svea can’t help but ask questions while hints of what happened decades ago make you whip through the pages. On top of which, Fauske is such an interesting place for a reader to visit – Stef Penney is brilliant at creating evocative settings – and you have the feeling that there are darker undercurrents that need to be brought to light, particularly around misogyny and prejudice.

While all the characters are easy to sympathise with, Svea is a particularly brilliant creation. She’s crusty and plain-spoken, loves her dog but has secrets too. Her story is slowly revealed, while we wonder if it isn’t too late for her to find peace with the past, reconnection with her family, even love. Stef Penney, who wrote the Costa Award winning: The Tenderness of Wolves, is always worth waiting for and her new book didn’t disappoint. The Long Water is a four and a half star read from me.

Book Review: The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox by Maggie O’Farrell – a disturbing story about family secrets and the spectre of madness

~ Judith ~ Leave a comment

I’ve had this book on my bedside table for what seems like forever – a ‘just in case’ sort of book for when I’d run out of anything else that begged me to pick it up. I knew it would be good – Maggie O’Farrell is always good, but the subject matter sounded sobering.

The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox follows an Edinburgh family. Iris receives a letter from a solicitor about a relative she didn’t know she had, the sister of her grandmother, about to be released from care. Esme Lennox has been in a mental hospital for sixty odd years and now needs to be rehoused. Her name has been put down for a rest home, but there’s not a bed available for some weeks. Can Iris look after her in the meantime?

Iris assumes Esme must be unsafe, or unable to care for herself, or both, and with a shop to run and a busy life, is not confident she can take her aunt on. Her initial impulse is to agree to a temporary solution in a hostel. She collects Esme, a woman in her seventies, but the hostel is unwelcoming, peopled with drug addicts and volatile personalities. What can she do but put Esme up in her spare room and explore other options.

In the meantime we get Iris’s story – her close bond with step-brother Alex; the father who died young; her mother in Brisbane; her affair with a married man. Her little shop selling gorgeous pre-loved clothes and accessories. But the bulk of story is about Esme – her childhood in India with an older sister and baby brother. Her quirky personality, her stuffy, unloving parents and the terrible tragedy before the family’s return to Edinburgh. Esme is bright and rebellious, not sensible and manageable like her sister, Kitty. We follow her growing up and the events that tip her over the edge.

Iris waits for Esme to open the door but nothing happens. She puts her hand on the doorknob and turns it slowly. ‘Good morning,’ she says, as she does so, hoping she sounds more upbeat than she feels. She has no idea what she will see behind the door.
Esme is standing in the middle of the room. She is fully dressed, her hair brushed and neatly clipped to one side. She is wearing her coat, for some reason, buttoned up to the neck. There is an armchair next to her and Iris realises that she must have been pushing it across the floor. The expression on her face, Iris is astonished to see, is one of absolute, abject terror. She is looking at her, Iris thinks, as if she is expecting Iris to strike her.

It’s not a happy story, not at all, but it casts a light on the way women with mental health problems, or even if they were just a bit unruly, could be sent away to asylums. All was needed was a determined, usually male relative, and the signing off a doctor. Maggie O’Farrell imagines how a young woman like Iris would feel on discovering that her grandmother had a sister she’d never mentioned, and that that sister had been never been out of her mental facility for sixty years. Just how do you deal with that?

The two discover more about each other as secrets emerge, and in facing up to the truth, Iris also faces up to the truth of her own life, in particular her own relationships. It’s a compelling read and I was not in the least disappointed, in spite of the tragedy of Esme’s situation, as the story surges on to an attention-grabbing finale. I was hooked – I am always hooked with Maggie O’Farrell. I’m not sure if it’s her crisp writing style, or her immensely interesting and empathetically drawn characters, but her books are just so satisfying. As is this one. The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox is a five star read from me.