I suddenly realised today that I hadn’t done a monthly wrap-up since August! Since I last spoke to you all, a few things have gone wrong with my health. As you know I have multiple sclerosis, but for many years now I’ve had problems with my spine. I had a spinal injury when I was 11 years old. I’d read books like Pollyanna and What Katy Did where the heroine has an accident either falling from a tree or a swing and becomes paralysed. As soon as I landed the somersault I knew something was wrong and I stayed still, but a classmate ran over to the crash mat, grabbed my right arm and tried to pull me up. I had an excruciating pain near my shoulder blade around the level of my bra strap. It turned out I’d broken two vertebrae and crushed a disc. Years later when caring for my late husband, I tried to move him across the bed to stop him falling and had a searing pain in my lumbar area. I couldn’t move and he had to call my parents and admit ‘I broke my wife’. I had an injection in my spine and stayed in bed for two days. Thanks to these injuries I have chronic pain in my lumbar and thoracic spine where the nerves are impinged by the discs. Lately I’ve really struggled with the pain and I’ve been having a radio frequency denervation alongside strong painkillers to control it. At the end of August I had my latest procedure and it was so painful I struggled to tolerate it. I can’t be sedated for the procedure, because I have to be able to feel things so the consultant can ensure they’re burning the right nerve – not the motor nerves. Sadly this time the procedure hasn’t worked and I’ve had increased pain that’s moved from the right side of my spine into the left leg. I was struggling so much that I had an MS relapse too. So I’m taking a hiatus from blog tours and any other promotions, so that I can read slowly and pick what I want from the TBR pile. I’ve found the thought of being in this level of pain indefinitely very difficult to cope with. I’ve had a really low mood and had found it hard to read books that I either wasn’t enjoying or in the mood for because I’d made a commitment to read it by a deadline. So at least till the end of the year I’m picking what I fancy and reviewing when I can, with no pressure. Here are my favourite reads of the last couple of months.
Married couple Martha and Finn are travelling in South America on what feels like a final attempt to save their marriage. Martha has been wrestling with severe anxiety about the climate emergency and wanted to come to Bolivia, specifically to visit the other-worldly salt flats. A place where the sky is so perfectly reflected in the wet surface that it feels like you’re walking in the clouds. She has found an eco-spa based on salt, promising group therapy work, salt drink rituals and lounging in the warm salt pools. Finn is sceptical, especially about the cost, but agrees to throw himself into the experience. Only 48 hours later, as the group wake from their salt drink ritual and a night of hallucinations, someone is found dead. The guests are at the mercy of their hosts and the inhospitable environment. How will they find their way out of the salt flats and which one of them is a murderer? This is a tense and psychologically brilliant thriller, with a strange and otherworldly backdrop that heightens the sense of isolation and fear.
Set in the not too distant future, Lights Out focuses on a summer where electricity rationing has become a reality. The government shut down of power will begin at 8pm every night and every residential household is affected, only hospitals and hospices are exempt from the switch off. As the days count down Grace feels her anxiety start to build. She has had a phobia of the dark since she was a child when she remembers being locked into a pitch black space, an incident she believes happened at school. Most nights she’ll be on duty in her job at the local hospice but she’s home for the first switch off and begs her partner to be home before 8pm. He seems not to take her fear too seriously, even though he’s spent years since they moved in together sleeping in an eye mask to block out then constant light Grace needs. Then strange things start to happen. One morning Grace notices her goldfish Brad and Jennifer have a companion in their bowl. The next night some candlesticks appear in the kitchen. Who has heard of a break in where they add to your belongings instead of stealing them? No one takes her concerns seriously, but she’s unnerved by the accompanying note from ‘The Night’. This is a seriously tense thriller with an interesting premise that plays into current fears about energy usage and poses two mysteries: who is The Night and what does he want? What happened to make Grace so scared of the dark?
I thoroughly enjoyed this new thriller from Paula Hawkins and it’s isolated setting on the Scottish island of Eris, only reachable from the mainland at low tide across a causeway. This was the home of Vanessa, a celebrated painter and potter, but since her death has been owned by her friend and companion Grace. While the island was left to Grace, Vanessa’s works were unexpectedly left to her first agent who has an art foundation at a stately home where they are in the process of going on display. The story is set in motion when a visitor to the gallery makes them aware that one of Vanessa’s installations seems to contain a human bone. As the piece is pulled for forensic examination, everyone is thinking about Vanessa’s estranged husband who went missing after visiting her on Eris. He was thought to be lost from the causeway, but what if he never left the island? Becker is the curator of the gallery and an expert in Vanessa’s work. Grace will have to be informed and it could be just the opportunity to visit Eris, so that Grace is seen in person and Becker can approach her about artworks and diaries that the foundation believes she is withholding. Grace may seem to be a quiet and unassuming woman, even mousy, but once on Eris it’s twelve hours until the tide turns. The human bone came from someone who visited Vanessa’s studio, but did they ever leave? This is an atmospheric and obsessive thriller detailing the messy lives of those in the bohemian world of art.
This wonderful new novel from Tracey Chevalier captures the spirit of the Venetian islands and a heroine you will take to your heart. Orsola Rosso is the daughter of a glassmaker living on the island of Murano. She has to grow up quickly when her father is killed in the glass workshop when a flying shard from a chandelier hits him in the neck and cuts into his artery. Under her elder brother, the workshop starts to suffer a decline as he tries to pursue more artistic pieces than the consistently good tableware that was the Rosso’s main source of income. Desperately wanting to help she visits their merchant, Klingenhorn, for ideas and he sends her to the only female glassmaker in Venice to learn how to make glass beads with a lamp. Very soon she is able to create beautiful beads that Klingenhorn can sell. Orsola is a heroine that gets under your skin. She’s ambitious, fiercely loyal to her family but able to see how the workshop must diversify if they’re to survive. Chevalier shows us the magical islands of Venice and Murano through her eyes as she weathers grief, the plague, business woes and falling in love. Set, with magical licence, from the time of Casanova all the way up to the COVID pandemic this is an incredible story of a strong and bold woman who knows how to survive.
Another incredible woman heads up Jodi Picoult’s new novel, this time an Elizabethan playwright named Emilia Bassano. In a dual timeline narrative we see modern playwright Melina finding that it’s still difficult for your plays to reach the stage if you are a woman. Egged on by her best friend she starts to research and write about an ancestor, Emilia Bassano who was a published poet and also wrote for the stage. As the official mistress of the man placed in charge of the London theatres, Emilia has access to Elizabethan playwnights and poets like Spenser, Webster and Kit Marlow her best friend. Melina becomes drawn in by the conspiracy of whether Shakespeare was solely responsible for his incredible number of plays? Her research leads her to believe that the ‘real’ writer might have been a woman and the evidence points to Emilia as a possible candidate. She was a Jewish woman living as a Christian, part of a family of court musicians from Italy with an incredible talent for words. She has visited all the places that Shakespeare uses in his plays, understands how to fit in at court and on the street and knows what it is to be a strong woman – could Beatrice and Viola have come from her pen? This is a gorgeous piece of historic fiction with a heroine you’ll enjoy and a mystery that draws you in.
This incredibly emotional novel has to be Julia Owen Moylan’s best one yet. In Berlin 1926 sisters Leni and Annette have lost everything after the death of their parents and are living in a makeshift shelter in an abandoned garden. Leni finds work in a glamorously decadent nightclub as a cigarette girl. Babylon Circus is a glittering cabaret with provocative dancing girls, providing a staggering contrast between Leni’s nights and days. However, it does provide the means to find the sisters lodgings and regular food. When Leni meets Paul, the club’s pianist, a tentative love affair emerges that may challenge the fragile beginnings of a stable life for Annette. Their love plays out over forty years and changes the course of both sister’s lives forever. The author brilliantly captures the two distinct time frames of a country that’s struggling in the aftermath of two world wars and a city that’s physically and ideologically divided. For the sisters she shows how extreme circumstances, trauma and one split second decision can shape a life. The contrasts between the colour and sparkle of the cabaret at night and the shabbiness of the daylight hours are stark, echoing the poverty and grim utility of a city post war and under Communism. The sisters are so real heart-breakingly human, full of flaws and hovering between resignation and hope. This is definitely in contention for my book of the year.
That wraps up the last two months of powerful reading. I don’t have a tbr as I’m reading what I fancy on the day but here are some that are calling to me from my various to read piles, some on NetGalley plus the ones I’m physically tripping over at home.
The Lotus Readers 