I didn’t realise I had this fear until around twenty years ago. I was 36 and my husband had died from complications with his multiple sclerosis. It had become so severe he couldn’t swallow or breathe properly. I had this realisation that I’d never been alone. From being around 16, I’d always had a boyfriend or partner. It was a fleeting thought I wrote in my journal and then forgot about. We’d had a busy house, what with carers and nurses and family popping in all the time. I struggled with the time that stretched out in front of me, used to a demanding caring role that included clearing lungs, tube feeding and constant turning to avoid pressure sores, there were now no demands taking up my day. I was at a friend’s house and she asked me if I’d stay for tea and I automatically said no, forgetting that I had nothing to come home for. No matter who I was with or where I went, the crushing silence when I reached home was unbearable. It was as if the air in the room was heavy and empty at the same time. His wheelchair, parked in the corner of the garage was unbearable to go past. I was relieved to be able to sleep all night but then started having nightmares. Waking suddenly, covered with sweat thinking I’d forgotten to get up and suction his lungs. Thinking he’d stopped breathing, then remembering that he had. I had dreams where I couldn’t find him and I was wandering in this dystopian nightmare of bombed out houses and twisted metal. I was turning over wreckage thinking I’d find him underneath but he simply wasn’t there. I could still hear him trying to clear his throat. I kept falling asleep in the day, then waking up unable to move but hearing noises that made me think someone was in the house. My brain bringing up intruders just so I felt less alone. A year later I met someone. It was someone I’d known a long time and trusted. I was magical thinking. That the universe had given me this person so I had something to be happy about. I was owed a happy ending, right? I thought it was the least the universe could do. So I made it perfect. I fashioned my own happy ending. Only to be left four years later feeling like I’d been in love with a ghost. The man I imagined myself in love with didn’t exist. Instead this controlling, insecure and abusive monster was living in my house and I couldn’t work out what had happened. Why had he changed? Like all abusers he started off charming, but if I was honest with myself I should have walked away at the six month mark, when the first red flag appeared, but I didn’t because I wanted us to be happy. Now I would have to learn how to be alone again. This time though I leaned into it. I relaxed into the sadness and anger, allowed myself to feel it. Now I know I can survive anything.
I listen to music all the time at home. I’m old enough to have a vinyl collection, cd collection and Spotify premium. Every so often we say that we must get rid of our cds and dvds (never the vinyl, especially since my other half has reconditioned his father’s old Bang and Olufson stereo from the 1980s). Then we look doubtful and say ‘what if the internet fails’, because I’m sure that at the end of civilisation the first thing we’ll reach for are his Duran Duran LPs and my 1990s collection. We all know how much music taps into our emotions and I know I’ve spent hours constructing playlists for specific celebrations or to document a particular year. So when a book comes with or inspires a playlist it does add to my emotional connection with the book. One of the most effective things about the adaptation of Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander book series is the atmospheric music and often that’s where we end up with these lists, others come from fans of the book who have looked for every piece of music mentioned in their favourite novel – something that particularly connects to romance novels it seems. Some authors actually make their soundtrack first, or make a playlist for each character as a way of familiarising themselves and feeling that character. Other books are set in the world of music so have official playlists or actual tracks written for featured band or artist in the narrative. Here I’ve added a mix of different playlist types and hopefully there’s one or two you’ll enjoy.
Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng
In Shaker Heights, a placid, progressive suburb of Cleveland, everything is meticulously planned – from the layout of the winding roads, to the colours of the houses, to the successful lives its residents will go on to lead. And no one embodies this spirit more than Elena Richardson, whose guiding principle is playing by the rules.
Enter Mia Warren – an enigmatic artist and single mother- who arrives in this idyllic bubble with her teenage daughter Pearl, and rents a house from the Richardsons. Soon Mia and Pearl become more than just tenants: all four Richardson children are drawn to the mother-daughter pair. But Mia carries with her a mysterious past, and a disregard for the rules that threatens to upend this carefully ordered community.
When old family friends attempt to adopt a Chinese-American baby, a custody battle erupts that dramatically divides the town – and puts Mia and Elena on opposing sides. Suspicious of Mia and her motives, Elena is determined to uncover the secrets in Mia’s past. But her obsession will come at an unexpected and devastating cost…
This playlist is made by the author so should evoke some feelings and memories around the characters and mood of the novel.
Eleanor and Park by Rainbow Rowell
Eleanor is the new girl in town, and she’s never felt more alone. All mismatched clothes, mad red hair and chaotic home life, she couldn’t stick out more if she tried.
Then she takes the seat on the bus next to Park. Quiet, careful and – in Eleanor’s eyes – impossibly cool, Park’s worked out that flying under the radar is the best way to get by.
Slowly, steadily, through late-night conversations and an ever-growing stack of mix tapes, Eleanor and Park fall in love. They fall in love the way you do the first time, when you’re 16, and you have nothing and everything to lose.
Set over the course of one school year in 1986, Eleanor & Park is funny, sad, shocking and true – an exquisite nostalgia trip for anyone who has never forgotten their first love.
Again this is the author’s own playlist so should fit with these teenage loves.
Astrid Sees All by Natalie Standiford
New York, 1984: Twenty-two-year-old Phoebe Hayes is a young woman in search of excitement and adventure. But the recent death of her father has so devastated her that her mother wants her to remain home in Baltimore to recover. Phoebe wants to return to New York, not only to chase the glamorous life she so desperately craves but also to confront Ivan, the older man who wronged her. With her best friend Carmen, she escapes to the East Village, disappearing into an underworld haunted by artists, It Girls, and lost souls trying to party their pain away. Carmen juggles her junkie-poet boyfriend and a sexy painter while, as Astrid the Star Girl, Phoebe tells fortunes in a nightclub and plots her revenge on Ivan. When the intoxicating brew of sex, drugs, and self-destruction leads Phoebe to betray her friend, Carmen disappears, and Phoebe begins an unstoppable descent into darkness. “A new wave coming-of-age story, Astrid Sees All is a blast from the past” (Stewart O’Nan, author of The Speed Queen) about female friendship, sex, romance, and what it’s like to be a young woman searching for an identity.
This is a great 1980s soundtrack that has been curated by the author.
High Fidelity by Nick Hornsby
This one is a classic in the books about music category.
Do you know your desert-island, all-time, top five most memorable break-ups? Rob does.
But Laura isn’t on it – even though she’s just become his latest ex.
Finding he can’t get over Laura, record-store owner Rob decides to revisit his relationship top hits to figure out what went wrong. But soon, he’s asking himself some big questions: about relationships, about life and about his own self-destructive tendencies. This is such a quick and engrossing read, funny and incredibly moving with a great film adaptation too.
This is a playlist made up from Rob’s playlist so you can get into his character while listening.
Daisy Jones and the Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid
Everybody knows Daisy Jones and the Six.
Their sound defined an era. Their albums were on every turntable. They sold out arenas from coast to coast.
Then, on 12 July 1979, Daisy Jones walked barefoot onto the stage at Chicago Stadium. And it all came crashing down. Everyone was there.
Everyone remembers it differently.
Nobody knew why they split. Until now . . .
This was such a smash hit, both the book and the tv series. This is original music created for the band and other tracks from that era gathered together by a clever fan. I listen to this one a lot.
The Flat Share by Beth O’ Leary
Tiffy and Leon share a flat Tiffy and Leon share a bed Tiffy and Leon have never met…
Tiffy Moore needs a cheap flat, and fast. Leon Twomey works nights and needs cash. Their friends think they’re crazy, but it’s the perfect solution: Leon occupies the one-bed flat while Tiffy’s at work in the day, and she has the run of the place the rest of the time.
But with obsessive ex-boyfriends, demanding clients at work, wrongly imprisoned brothers and, of course, the fact that they still haven’t met yet, they’re about to discover that if you want the perfect home you need to throw the rulebook out the window…
This playlist is a collection of music used in the tv series based on the book, it gives a great backdrop to these characters and really fits with the book.
The Final Revival of Opal and Nev by Dawnie Walton
A queen of punk before her time. A duo on the brink of stardom. A night that will define their story for ever.
Opal is a fiercely independent young woman pushing against the grain in her style and attitude, a Black punk artist before her time. Despite her unconventional looks, Opal believes she can be a star. So when the aspiring British singer/songwriter Neville Charles discovers her one night, she takes him up on his offer to make rock music together.
In early seventies New York City, just as she’s finding her niche as part of a flamboyant and funky creative scene, a rival band signed to her label brandishes a Confederate flag at a promotional concert. Opal’s bold protest and the violence that ensues set off a chain of events that will not only change the lives of those she loves, but also be a deadly reminder that repercussions are always harsher for women, especially Black women, who dare to speak their truth.
Decades later, as Opal considers a 2016 reunion with Nev,music journalist S. Sunny Shelton seizes the chance to curate an oral history about her idols. Sunny thought she knew most of the stories leading up to the cult duo’s most politicized chapter, but as her interviews dig deeper, a nasty new allegation from an unexpected source threatens everything.
This is a great read. This is a soundtrack gathered from the era and the artists who would have been contemporaries of the characters, it really does take you back.
The Future Saints by Ashley Winstead
A band on the brink. A love worth playing for.
When record executive Theo meets the Future Saints, they’re bombing at a dive bar in their hometown. Since the tragic death of their manager, the band has been in a downward spiral and Theo has been dispatched to coax a new – and successful – album out of them, or else let them go.
Theo is struck right away by Hannah, the group’s impetuous lead singer, who has gone off script in debuting a new song-and, in fact, a whole new sound. Theo’s supposed to get the band back on track, but when their new music garners an even wider fan base than before, the plans begin to change-new tour, new record, new start.
But Hannah’s descent into grief has larger consequences for the group, and she’s not willing to let go yet… not for fame or love.
This is a book I wasn’t sure I would like but I loved it. This is a playlist curated by the author and really puts you in the mood.
Mix Tape by Jane Sanderson
You never forget the one that got away….
Daniel was the first boy to make Alison a mix tape.
But that was years ago and Ali hasn’t thought about him in a very long time. Even if she had, she might not have called him ‘the one that got away’; after all, she’d been the one to run.
Then Dan’s name pops up on her phone, with a link to a song from their shared past.
For two blissful minutes, Alison is no longer an adult in Adelaide with temperamental daughters; she is sixteen in Sheffield, dancing in her skin-tight jeans. She cannot help but respond in kind.
And so begins a new mix tape. Ali and Dan exchange songs – some new, some old – across oceans and time zones, across a lifetime of different experiences.
Until one of them breaks the rules and sends a message that will change everything…
I love this book, it takes me back to my teens and my very own Daniel who was a musician and used to spend hours snuggled up with me just listening to vinyl all night. The music is specific to the book and the BBC series wasn’t a bad adaptation either.
Normal People by Sally Rooney
Connell and Marianne grow up in the same small town in the west of Ireland, but the similarities end there. In school, Connell is popular and well-liked, while Marianne is a loner. But when the two strike up a conversation – awkward but electrifying – something life-changing begins.
Normal People is a story of mutual fascination, friendship and love. It takes us from that first conversation to the years beyond, in the company of two people who try to stay apart but find they can’t.
I adore these characters. This playlist is made up of music that soundtracked the BBC series and fits the book beautifully.
Describe one simple thing you do that brings joy to your life.
I have a moment every morning, especially on these sunny days when I’m sleeping with the windows open, where I hear our cat Dolly greeting the neighbours. In the rescue centre when they let her out to meet us she walked up and down the corridor, peeping in at all the other cats and saying hello. Now she does it with the neighbours. We live in an 18th Century ‘yard’ a short pedestrian lane with just four houses – the old bakers, the cobblers, the workers cottage and the farmhouse. She stalks up and down, with her tail like a question mark, trilling her hellos to everyone she sees. Usually getting a tummy tickle here and there. I know it’s time to get up and those first moments of walking into the kitchen to my cats is the best start to the day. First Maximus, the stoic tuxedo and only boy, who sits proudly on the kitchen table looking as if he’s above such things, but always drops his head to have a forehead bump. Then Minka, our newest and smallest addition who’s barely a year old but had three kittens twice her size. She winds her tail round my legs and all the furniture waiting for kisses and if they don’t come soon enough, she throws herself at your feet with her tummy in the air. Then finally Dolly barrels through the cat flap, not even slowing down, and fills the house with her chatter. She likes to touch noses but also wants to let you know she’s starving and hasn’t been fed for at least a month. We call her the Moomin. Sitting with my tea on a warm morning, they all follow me out eventually after stuffing their faces and lounge in the sun.
We know what we’re getting with Eve Chase, usually an ancestral home or a family with big secrets and here we get both. We’re introduced to Mimi Mott, interior designer and fashion icon who is in London preparing for an exhibition and auction of some of her oldest belongings. Jo is a journalist, desperate for a break and responds to an advert for an assistant to help Mimi with her exhibition artefacts. Once Mimi has chosen an object, Jo will talk to her about it and then write some copy for the exhibit. She and Jo click immediately and she’s set to work straight away. However, Jo had her reasons for wanting this job and if Mimi finds out what they are and who Jo is she could be in a lot of trouble. She would also be in trouble with her grandmother who has no idea what her new job entails or who it’s with. As she treads this tightrope we’re taken back into the 1960s and Mimi Mott’s past.
When Mimi picks an object for the auction, and she and Jo talk about it, it’s easy to see how much it affects Mimi and conjures up memories of the past. She has always known how much power there is in objects from the moment she picks up a piece of crystal from a chandelier at Rushwood and the interior designer, Whipple, encourages her to hold it up to the light and take it in. It holds all the colours of Rushwood within it. Each of Mimi’s fabric or wallpaper patterns has its genesis there, from the plants tended by her family to the objects inside Rushwood and even her trip to the seaside with Lawrence Caswell, heir to the estate. Mimi knows why we keep objects and I understood this so deeply because my house has the chesterfield leather chairs I used to sit in at my friend Nigel’s house, the first antique ginger jar my late husband and I bought to start a collection, a snow globe of New York from my 40th birthday trip and a little stone bird by my bed, part of a matching pair I shared with my friend Kathryn before she died. Mimi gets this human connection with the items we use to decorate our homes. Her auction will show the thread linking each piece to its place in her memory, though everyone thinks Mimi has forgotten her family, she didn’t forget what happened that summer, she has immortalised it through her life’s work. This is a great summer read, full of secrets, family rifts and a bit of romance too.
a mountain village in the Abruzzo region of Italy, Gino, a troubled young man, realises that his childhood sweetheart Franca can give his life the happiness and stability he needs. They seem made for each other, and move to a remote house in the countryside – but there is something in Franca’s past that haunts Gino. Descending into pathological jealousy and resentment towards a married man who had been Franca’s lover, Gino is unable to stop himself imagining the worst, and embarks on a violent path that has catastrophic consequences. This was compelling due to the complexity of Gino’s character. It couldn’t have been a better read for a counsellor and if I had a trainee who wanted to understand the Cognitive Behavioural Therapy concept of negative automatic thoughts I’d get them to read this book. Everything Gino experiences is filtered through a faulty lens. Whether this is innate or a result of constantly feeling like a disappointment is hard to tell. At the moment he has it all, but in his mind it’s already unravelling. The house needs a lot of work, but could be a secluded haven for a family. Gino hears that something strange happened to Franca’s aunt during the war and starts to wonder about it, could an event like that leave something in the house like a mood or a feeling? Is the house unlucky in some way? To be transparent about her past Franca tells him about an affair she had with one of her father’s friends. Although outwardly he seems to accept this confession, inwardly it becomes a nagging concern he can’t shake off. Everything about Gino screams of a paranoid personality disorder, his mistrust of others and ability to twist innocent encounters into personal slights and grudges are classic symptoms. It could stem from his experience growing up with a much loved local hero for a father, but he has stopped listening to others and his behaviours become more extreme, including hallucinating that his baby son is talking to him. This book has emotional depth and complexity, tension and action alongside some incredibly surreal moments too. I would definitely read this author again.
Smallie adj. |smal·lie| Definition: Caribbean (informal). Describing or relating a person from a small island; a small islander.
In 1961, nineteen-year-old Lucinda Brown travels to England in search of her son’s father, Clarence Braithwaite, who left Barbados to join the British army. But aboard the ship to Southampton she meets a man named Raldo who offers her a glimpse of a new life, a freer life. Bound by the memory of her son waiting at home, she chooses Clarence – realizing too late that war has made a stranger out of him.
Nearly fifty years later, Lucinda receives a letter from the Home Office that threatens to tear her world apart. Her children rally together to prove her legal arrival, and to do so they must track down an elusive man from her past, a man she wanted to love but instead lost, a man who now holds the key to her family’s future. Raldo . . . An exhilarating and expansive tale of a family thrown into collision with the Windrush scandal, Smallie shows just how easily the past can spill into our lives, even when – especially when – we think we’ve closed the door on it.
I’m not going to write too much about this because I haven’t written my full review yet, but I loved it. I couldn’t stop reading and I found the writing incredibly inspiring and unique. The dual timelines worked well and I loved the generation gap shown in Lucinda’s timeline and her children’s fifty years later, they haven’t known racism the way Lucinda has and the Home Office letter is their first sense of real powerlessness against the state. This is a must- buy novel.
“You give a girl a taste of fresh air and then you take it away—she’ll grow fierce and wild to get it back.”
Oxford, Mississippi, 1933.
Eleven-year-old Meg Lefleur has learned the hard way to rely on no one. Ever since her beloved mother failed to come home last Christmas Eve, she’s been one of the ‘unadoptable’ girls at the town’s orphanage, where she fights each day to keep her wits sharp and her spirit unbowed.
When she meets Birdie, a young woman who has come to Oxford determined to remind her socialite sister of the impoverished family she left behind, for the first time in a long while it seems someone else might care about Meg’s future. But as the Depression tightens its grip, Birdie begins to suspect her sister’s charmed life may be founded on a tapestry of lies. Then, Birdie encounters Charlie, a woman haunted by loss who has been pushed to the brink with nothing left to lose. Drawn together by circumstance, they find unexpected kinship among a disreputable, determined band of women.
But in a town steeped in hypocrisy, even the smallest act of defiance can have dangerous consequences …
Again, I haven’t written my full review for this book, mainly because there’s so much I want to say! Kathryn Stockett has done it again. I can see this on the big screen and it will be brilliant. I fell in love with Meg and Birdie, but also the women who form a team to get Birdie’s in-laws out of the mess they’re in. This book has so much to say about female strength, friendship and adaptability in terrible circumstances. Every character is so well drawn I could see them. I know a lot about eugenics and its history in the US and this is an important book right now, going against where Christian Nationalist policy is taking the country. It shows the damage that can be done when someone lives the rigid rules of religion rather than the actual message of love given in the Bible. Often those who want the appearance of goodness, will do anything to keep it. Birdie finds that friendship and loyalty can be found in the most unusual circumstances and with people you never expected. There’s tragedy and brutality but also lightness, humour and so much love. Brilliant.
So those are my favourites this month and here are some hopefuls for June’s reading list. Happy Reading ❤️📚
“When Mark died I thought I’d start seeing him around more..”
From that fascinating opener this book becomes so many things: a meditation on grief; a witness to the AIDS crisis in 1984 New York City; a community’s anger at the gentrification of the East Village; a ghost hunt led by a company called Manhattan Remediation. Renata is a young dyke-about-town who has the ability to see ghosts, which has been happening more and more frequently as her friends have started dying of what has recently been named AIDS. So, when her best friend Mark dies, she assumes she’ll see him again. There’s no way Mark wouldn’t give her a chance to say goodbye, would he? But to her disappointment – and increasingly, her concern – Mark doesn’t appear. Renata has other problems, too. A mysterious, police-like force has begun ridding their East Village neighbourhood of anything abnormal or inexplicable. At first, she’s sure they’re scam artists, but it becomes clear they’re actually trapping ghosts. With her band of lovably eccentric pals and lovers, Renata is determined to fight back against the erasure of her friends’ memories and the sanitizing of her beloved New York.
Renata is our narrator throughout and I felt a kindred spirit in seconds. Her expectation of seeing her friend Mark seems odd at first reading, but when I realised he had died without her and she hadn’t known for a few days I was so sad for her. Mark is clearly the most important person in her life, they shared a living space when either one of them wasn’t sleeping at a lover’s place and it seems unthinkable that she wouldn’t have known. That she wouldn’t have felt it. That the sky didn’t cave in. When people say life goes on this is exactly what they mean – everything carries on as normal while you feel like a shrieking banshee. However, for Renata there’s an added element to this disbelief. She can see dead people. In fact she’s being plagued by the ghost of their friend Francois, who she definitely doesn’t want in her flat. So why hasn’t Mark appeared? It’s hard to accept that the powerful and deep emotions you share with someone have suddenly become one sided. I remember thinking when my husband died, we were so close, how can that line of communication be cut? Years later, a chance encounter with a medium left me questioning again, she definitely had Jerzy’s turn of phrase, his humour and tendency to flirt with the furniture, but why was he talking to her and not me? Renata and Mark had a complicated relationship, they each had lovers, but they did have times when they slept together. There was no possessiveness in life, but in death I could understand Renata’s desire to have him to herself.
I was reminded of Jill in the TV series It’s A Sin and the deep connections the residents of the pink palace had with each other. When her best friend Ritchie starts to deteriorate badly, his family take him back home and cut him off from the people who have lived with him. It’s devastating when Jill travels to his childhood home, only to be told by his mother that Ritchie is already dead. The author picks up on this in the novel, the families unable to live with their child’s sexuality rushing in near the end to claim them. This could be out of love, but is also a way of cutting them off from their community, not wanting the stigma of AIDS to touch their family. Some families quickly and quietly arranged funerals for their children without the people who loved them for who they truly were, often citing the cause of death as cancer so the neighbours didn’t know. I was a teenager at the start of the AIDS epidemic here in the UK and I remember feeling genuine fear. The government leaflet had a gravestone on the front with ‘don’t die of ignorance’ carved on it. I even remember a bizarre telethon type event called First AIDS, presented by comedians and DJs telling us which sexual acts were most risky, how to prevent contracting the virus and how to put a condom on. I was thirteen and I honestly believe that it informed by sexual behaviour from the offset – I was known by my friends in later years for two methods of contraception at all times and I’m sure that was down to how frightening it felt back then. There was enormous stigma and prejudice, but because I lived in a quiet village in a rural county it felt somewhat removed from me. Even though I had an Uncle who was obviously gay in hindsight, we never really talked about it. Reading this and knowing that, a few years earlier than First AIDS, death was a daily reality in the gay community of the East Village really made me realise how far behind and out of touch we were.
The author skilfully switches tones from crushing reality, to horror and even humour at times which I really enjoyed. She doesn’t spare the realities of a death from full blown AIDS, in particular she tells us the story of Francois who is haunting her apartment. He is an angry ghost, throwing and pushing things, always making a noise and creating a horrible atmosphere, even before he appears. When he does he is known to vomit, pee on the rug and often lets out a terrible scream. Francois was a teacher, but when he started losing weight and sores were appearing on his face he was asked to leave because ‘his face was scaring the children.’ She details the secondary illnesses that would kill someone with the HIV, the lymphoma or other types of cancer or infection like pneumonia. Then there’s the encephalopathy and dementia. It’s no surprise, when we hear François’s story, that his ghost is angry. She talks about the guilt she feels for wanting him to die quicker, to stop his suffering. Renata’s mother, who never let on that she had the same gift as her daughter, said that spreading salt in the corners of problematic rooms helped soak up the negative energy, so she’s been trying baths with mineral salts but it hasn’t helped. There is some comedy in Francois as well as fear and it’s Renata’s irritation with him that made me smile. She knows she can’t live with him, but what to do? Another theme within the book is the gentrification of the neighbourhood, with talk of landlords trying to remove tenants in rent controlled apartments so they can renovate and earn more from a new one. A company called Manhattan Remediation are mentioned, claiming to be able to remove ghosts or entities from apartments. It’s discussed as a possible link to gentrification, a way to ‘clean up’ the neighbourhood. This is a proud community that wants to keep its history and its ghosts. When Francois finally pushes Renata to the edge she calls them and like the fourth emergency service Dr Silverman arrives with a faraday cage. Could this be the answer?
I was really interested in the community Renata lives in and her job at the vintage shop. She also has other friends who help her sit Shiva for Mark – a Jewish week of mourning where the bereaved stop their daily activities and focus on grieving. Renata’s friends cover the mirrors and prepare food and they talk about their memories. This is a stark contrast to her visit with Mark’s lover Patrick where there is tension and anger on both sides and I was glad she had a loving community around her. The author has captured the resistance and pride of the gay community when they’re coping with stigma and suspicion. The warmth and empathy they show each other is moving. This is such a powerful subject and really succeeds as a piece of queer history in New York City, especially since most US deaths from AIDS occurred in NYC and San Francisco. It really embodies the fear and paranoia of that time perfectly, but also depicts a community of people for whom sex may be fluid but love is plentiful and loyalty is strong. For individuals already stigmatised by their sexuality and estranged from families, this community is their found family and those ties are unbreakable. As Renata observes, if the strength of her grief alone could compel Mark to appear then he would. The addition of Renata’s psychic abilities is a genre-bending idea that mostly works really well and accentuates how lost and confused she feels. I felt her need to keep living too, even though the pull of the dead is so strong. The way she relates her personal grief to the reader, in a time of unprecedented loss, is the strongest part of the book.
This week’s ten are the fictional deaths that really affected me emotionally and why, so if you haven’t read the above books be aware that I will be revealing who dies and the twists that led there if there are any. I’ve been reading about death a lot this month and it’s probably not been the easiest month for that sort of read. 19 years ago on the 25th May I became a widow at the age 34. My husband and I married just six weeks after meeting and I uprooted my whole life to be with him. He had progressive multiple sclerosis and unfortunately died from aspiration pneumonia only seven years later. I’m so grateful for the years I had with him though. They were not easy, two people in a house with a disability is tough and made tougher by a stupid system that deemed me too sick to work but well enough to provide two thirds of the 24 hour care he needed in the last couple of years. Having exhausted myself, I was relieved that he wasn’t suffering and that I had time to look after myself. I was glad to lose the illness (although I still have it) but it took a few months for the loss of the person to hit me, so hard that I felt hollow. So, deaths in fiction do tend to hit me hard and I’m going to start with a YA novel with a character who was so like my husband Jerzy it made me smile as it ripped my heart out.
This story of two terminally ill teenagers is such a quick read, but it lasts a long time in your heart. Augustus Waters was so like Jerzy, just younger. He’s charismatic, positive and almost glows with that special something that makes others look up to him and listen to what he says. When he meets Hazel at a support group she finds him handsome, intelligent and brimming with positivity about his own outlook, having had a brush with osteosarcoma that led to the amputation of his leg. Their love is almost instant and the poignancy is that their first love could be their last. Augustus wants to do something heroic and it’s a quality Jerzy had in spades. Even from his wheelchair he went tall ship sailing, scuba diving and before the MS had played rugby for his county and London Irish. He had that sparkle I could feel in Gus and that undefinable something that made others want to be near him. Gus is a romantic, both in this beautiful love he has for Hazel and in his attitude to his illness. His outlook attracts other patients and keeps them going, so his death, when it comes, feels impossible and like a betrayal. How can someone as bright and beautiful as this do something as ordinary as die. It heightens the relentless nature of the disease and the human condition – no matter how great, how loved or how heroic we are, we all die in the end.
We all experience a book in different ways because we read it through the filter of our own experiences and emotions. I haven’t met anyone who finds Jay Gatsby’s death as sad as I do. Gatsby is another romantic and he truly believes that to win Daisy all he needs is wealth and status, he never doubts her love. He’s been clinging to his feelings for Daisy, thinking she has been doing the same. Finding out she’s married to Tom Buchanan and lives out on Long Island, he moves in across the water and waits. His next door neighbour Nick, who is also Daisy’s cousin, gets her to visit his house for tea and finally they are in the same room. Gatsby shows her his home and his wealth, thinking that now she must see there are no obstacles in their way. However, the Buchanans are ‘old money’ and despite Tom’s drinking, aggression and cheating with Myrtle from the gas station, he’s still the ‘right sort’, whereas Gatsby’s wealth is from dubious sources and even though hundreds of people attend his grand parties he’s probably one of the loneliest characters in fiction. The terrible accident that occurs as the group race back from the Plaza Hotel has been building slowly in the background. When Gatsby takes the blame for hitting Myrtle with his car, even though Daisy was driving, it’s the beginning of the end. Myrtle’s husband, who has been driven mad with jealousy over her affair, will seek revenge. It comes as Gatsby waits for Daisy’s call, hoping she’ll leave Tom and be with him. She never calls, but the waiting Gatsby doesn’t know this as he’s floating face down in the pool, dead from gunshot wounds. What’s devastating is the yearning, the hope and our knowledge that Daisy and Tom have already left, having got away with murder and seemingly untouched by the deaths of their lovers.
David Nicholls writes relationships and emotions like no one else and when I first read this back in the early 2000s I spontaneously burst into tears. For me this line is up there with the most devastating in fiction:
“Then Emma Mayhew dies, and everything that she thought or felt vanishes and is gone forever.”
It’s so utterly final. All the things we’ve read about her on previous St Swithin’s Days that made both us and Dexter fall in love with her are gone. It makes us realise that it’s not just her presence that’s gone, but her love for Dex and all their little relationship jokes and rituals. No one else will understand Dex like Emma did. The author builds up our expectations for this couple for so long and they spend long periods apart, mainly for Dex to get his shit together and realise that what they have is love. So their time together was so brief and we grieve that, the loss of all they were going to do, such as start a family as they were discussing at breakfast. Before she gets on her bike and rides off into the path of a lorry. I’ve seen so many people on forums complaining about her death and how it doesn’t serve the plot or purpose of the novel. Her death is the purpose of the novel, it’s sudden and brutal, leaving everything unresolved and that’s how people die sometimes. Nicholls is showing us what happens what happens when we don’t take risks and waste time, life is fragile and can be snuffed out at any moment. It brings a gut punch of reality to the romance and it’s a line I’ll never forget.
Sometimes, death occurs out of sight or when the author has distracted us with other things. Kate Atkinson’s book Life After Life is a masterpiece and probably one of my favourite books of all time, but this sequel following her younger brother Teddy absolutely floored me. As with Ursula in Life After Life, we see the events of the 20th Century through the eyes of Teddy and his family. Too young for WW1, we know Teddy survives the ‘Spanish Flu’ and goes on to meet his wife Nancy, then has life interrupted by WW2 where he serves in the RAF as a crew member on Halifax Bombers. He then goes on to have a steady life, the suburbs and a steady marriage that’s more everyday companionship than a grand passion. They have one daughter, Viola, who struggles when Nancy does of a brain tumour. Ted gives her his time and keeps a steady job as a schoolteacher, but their relationship is never easy. It is only the close relationship with his granddaughter that proves to be an easier and more loving relationship. As he grows older Viola chooses a nursing home for Teddy, where he spends his time reminiscing. However, in a meta fictional twist, Teddy remembers his final bombing mission in 1944 where his plane was shot down and he hands the final parachute to his fellow crew member, sacrificing his own life. Teddy died and all that we’ve seen of his life since then, is fiction. This ending brings home the waste of war and the endless possibilities in life that he missed out on are utterly heartbreaking.
Atonement is one of those novels that shows a death doesn’t need to be witnessed to be devastating. We have no doubt that our young narrator Briony Tallis will be a writer, in fact we have the evidence of her play that she’s written, made costumes for, cast the children of visiting friends and become a formidable director. It’s a warning to the reader that Briony is very much in charge of this story as we go back to the Tallis country house where her older sister Cecilia has returned from university. So has Robbie their young gardener. We realise as adult readers what transpires that weekend when Robbie sees Cecilia soaking wet after diving into the fountain for a piece of broken vase. Viewing through Briony’s eyes, casts a different light on it because she’s too young to understand desire and love. Confused by the pair’s secret meeting in the library that evening she comes to the conclusion that Robbie is hurting her sister, so when a terrible crime is committed she suggests it might have been Robbie. He is subsequently taken to prison then sent on to fight in France at the outbreak of WW2. We then see the fractured moments the unexpected couple snatch together over the years and their estrangement from Briony who tore them apart with a lie. Then at the very end, the rug is pulled from underneath us. An elderly Briony is interviewed about her career as a writer and she shares why she wrote a book featuring her sister and Robbie, to give them the happy ending she took away from them in real life. In truth Robbie died alone in a bombed out house at Dunkirk and Cecilia was killed when a V2 hit Balham underground station. I remember being shell shocked and heartbroken for some time.
In typical Hardy fashion, Tessa’s whole life is dependent on fate from the time her drunken father suggests they might be related to a wealthy family: the d’Urbervilles of the title being a more upmarket version of their own Durbyfield. Assured of their wealth, Tess is dressed up and sent out on an errand, to claim kinship with these distant relations and hopefully secure some money to replace their recently deceased horse. He has gifted his daughter on a plate and her life feels cursed from that point on. Her cousin Alec d’Urberville is charming, he doesn’t claim her as kin but he does promise her a living on his estate. Once there the other workers, jealous of Tess’s beauty, don’t warn her about Alec. Subsequently, Tess is raped, setting motion a terrible chain of events that follows her to the inevitable end. Tess is hung as a murderess, but as if that isn’t bad enough her husband Angel Clare – who is an absolute let down – watches from a hill above the town in the early hours with her sister. They are watching for the black flag to be raised above the prison to show her sentence has been carried out, They then walk away hand in hand, as if he has simply replaced one sister with another. Not only did I finish this book angry about the injustices of Tess’s life, but I was devastated by Angel’s faithlessness. Not only does he abandon her on their honeymoon for something that was never her fault, but the minute she is dead replaces her with a younger and more biddable model. I was left equally sad and furious,
We are in a British dystopia in Never Let Me Go. Kathy is in her early thirties and her growing up years in the school of Hailsham are an idyllic memory. The pupils were secluded and brought up to believe they were of great importance for the country’s future. However, when fellow pupils Tommy and Ruth come back into her life, other memories start to resurface. Hints of discord come to the surface as she wonders whether there was more to Hailsham than met the eye, a mysterious or even dark purpose behind their isolation. As her feelings for Tommy begin to deepen into love she imagines their future. When the truth emerges in a clinical brutality they desperately try to find a way out of their fate. I found this book devastating. The silences that characterise the friend’s lives, the horror of the thing that’s unsaid but known. We want there to be a heroic arc, a triumph over the system of sanitised violence, but the acceptance of who they are and the value placed by that system on their autonomy and their lives has been drilled into them. There’s an absence where rage and injustice should be burning. I felt that rage and injustice for these characters and as Kathy moves towards her assigned fate I felt utter despair.
There’s a moment in the film Silver Linings Playbook where Bradley Cooper’s character is so disgusted by A Farewell to Arms that he wakes up his parents for a rant and then throws it out of the window. That’s how I felt about My Sister’s Keeper. I’d read and loved Plain Truth, so much so that when I finally met Jodi Picout on her book tour for Sing Me Home, I got her to sign it as well. Then came the book that seemed to go stratospheric and became a (terrible) film of the same name. Anna was born thanks to genetic pre-diagnosis implantation and although she isn’t ill, she has undergone endless medical procedures and operations her whole life. The whole purpose of Anna being born was for her to be a living donor for her sister Kate who has had a lifelong struggle with leukaemia. She was created as a bone marrow donor and up until now has never questioned it, but teenagers tend to rebel in some way and Anna is intelligent and has done her research. She no longer wants to donate but at the moment her medical choices are controlled by her parents. However, if she can get a court to emancipate her from that parental control, she can make her own medical choices. This is a typical Jodi Picoult ethical and legal dilemma and it’s such a compelling story. I was furious particularly with Anna and Kate’s mother who seems not to understand Anna’s need to make independent choices and sees it as selfish, so wrapped up in losing her eldest daughter she hasn’t noticed she’s already lost Anna. The death that happens at the end of this book was devastating, unexpected and totally unfair and not only made me sob but left me deeply angry with the author’s choices. Then I figured that if an author could make me feel that deeply about a character she was probably very talented.
In this incredible novel, Boyd takes introduces us to Logan Mountstuart and we follow the rollercoaster of his life as he traverses the 20th Century. Usually inserted into key moments of history in a rather Forrest Gump way, but more successful. Born in 1906 and written as a disjointed autobiography, it traces his interesting heritage and his education at a Norfolk private school followed by Oxford. Logan plans to be a writer, but life events intervene sending him off course and takes in the Bloomsbury set, the 1930s in Paris, World War II, the New York art scene and the Baader Meinhoff gang. All the time Logan drifts through postings, jobs, relationships and even some very murky goings on with the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. Logan is far from perfect, he makes mistakes and questionable choices but he’s also witty, intelligent and human. He’s something of a womaniser until he meets Freya, the love of his life and finally he feels something more than lust and the thrill of illicit sex. When he looks back over his long life, a lonely man in his eighties, in a grotty flat and eating the cheapest food he can find, it is but a fleeting moment of true happiness. Her loss is something he can’t recover from. Similarly the death of his aging dog is quietly devastating, leaving him utterly alone. As the book closes I felt grateful to have spend a lifetime with this rather unusual, imperfect and lonely man and to think of his death alone in that flat was only bearable if we hope that Freya is waiting there to meet him.
I’m a lifelong Stephen King fan and this has to be up there as one of his best books, released in one large volume in 1996. I read it the same year and was deeply affected by the years our narrator Paul Edgecombe spent working at Cold Mountain Petitionary on Death Row. He tells his story from his present day residence in a local care home as an old man. The story is about a series of strange, unexplained events surrounding a black prisoner called John Coffey – a giant, mountain of a man jailed for the rape and murder of two young white girls. In a row of serial killers, John is a gentle giant of a man who proclaims his innocence telling Paul he was only found near the girls because he was trying to help them. This claim gains more credibility when Paul suffers a terrible urinary tract infection and John touches him with a healing hand, removing the pain and taking it into himself. It’s a feat he repeats spectacularly when the twisted and sadistic guard Percy stamps on a pet mouse John has lured into his cell and called Mr Jingles. Paul witnesses John breathe life back into Mr Jingles, although the feat exhausts him. Paul and the other guards become convinced of John’s innocence, even busting him out of jail for the night to heal the prison warden’s wife who’s dying from cancer. As the execution date comes closer, the guards weigh the responsibility of killing an innocent man. I love the mix of reality, horror, the evil inside human beings and those moments of magic realism and wonder. By the time it was John’s turn to become the dead man walking I was in tears.
I don’t usually like romance novels, but I do love Rosie Walsh’s novels. That might seem strange when often her novels are categorised as romance, but for me there’s much more to them than the more formulaic romances I see. Rosie Walsh creates such complex characters, facing heart-wrenching situations. This is definitely the case for our narrator Carrie Cole who’s a surgeon by profession, but since the premature birth of her twins has been more focused on home life. She and her husband Robin live in a draughty cottage on the moors, with a small ‘Roof’ (AirB&B) holiday let next door in the old piggery. Robin works in the world of medical philanthropy, matching investors to areas they can support medical causes and this is how the couple met. Nearby, her Dad lives with his wife Nicola, but he’s recently been struggling with dementia and may need to move into a home. Both Carrie and her sister Maya have a complex relationship with their mum, who is an international activist and charity worker. Carrie has been feeling the urge to return to work and has put out feelers with her old mentor Yanika about what steps she would have to take in order to level up to the required standard. There’s an event coming up for Roof hosts in Sweden, where Yanika works and they discuss meeting up for a conversation. She could do both in one trip. Carrie has never left the children overnight, although she knows they’re perfectly safe with Robin, in fact he gives her his blessing in the form of a generous booking of a lovely hotel near to the venue. Carrie had been looking at cheaper Roof accommodation, when a familiar name and face appeared on the screen. All of a sudden Carrie’s mind sweeps back to her twenties, where she’s dancing barefoot on a Thai beach with her new husband, Johan, mere moments before Thai police swarmed the beach with guns and arrested him. Carrie knows that Johan was sentenced to twenty years in a Bangkok prison, so how can he be in Sweden hosting a beautiful lakeside retreat?
There were so many questions I wanted to ask during this novel, as Carrie’s narrative follows her present and a deeply traumatic past that she thought was buried, This is a love story but it’s also a mystery, as we see how the couple met when he came into the hospital with a trauma patient he’d helped. He travelled with them into the hospital. Carrie’s connection to him is immediate, but it’s incredibly deep and even though she knows she can’t pursue anything with him, she can’t stop thinking about him. Slowly, through flashbacks we piece together their story and I was devastated for both of them. Carrie pieced herself together after Johan’s court case with the help of her family, particularly her mother who had flown out to Thailand to use her influence and local contacts. Over time Carrie has hardened her heart towards Johan, feeling both betrayed and abandoned by him. Abandonment is a big deal for Carrie and her sister, after they were removed from their mother’s care as children when her advocacy and activism were so absorbing she’d overlooked their safety. Since then Carrie and Maya lived with their father who had a more stable home life. Both girls show signs of abandonment issues and a tendency to self-medicate their feelings. Carrie doesn’t eat when stressed and Maya has issues with alcohol, both of them display displacement activity like cleaning madly when they’re in distress. Robin has proved himself to be a safe harbour for Carrie and she calls him her rock. However, she can’t deny that she wants to know what happened to Johan and the urge to see him is stronger than she expected. I could understand why she needed this, to have someone ripped from your life in this way is devastating, but even worse would be the questions: was Johan really trafficking drugs? If not why did he plead guilty? How did he end up back in Sweden and when? Lost love is painful enough but when you’re left unsure of what was real there’s no sense of closure, Can Carrie meet with Johan and get her answers without her carefully balanced life back in the UK imploding?
I really understood Carrie and I believed in her love story with Johan. Their connection leaps off the page like a flame and never goes out. I also had so much time for Robin, who is an incredibly supportive husband and dad. I was willing Carrie to be honest with him and explain why she still needed the answers. Carrie’s inner voice is so powerful that I believed in her utterly. She has the problems of every working mum who has gone through a traumatic pregnancy with incredibly premature twins and all the ailments that come alongside that. Her little boy still struggles with asthma and her instinct to be with them is a definite response to her mother’s inability to put her and Maya first. Carrie doesn’t want her children to ever doubt her love and commitment to them, but that has come at a high price for her own goals. Perhaps she’s even denied a strong part of who she is – that drive and ambition to the best doesn’t just disappear. She berates herself for thinking about Johan, telling herself she’s very lucky and has everything she needs, but does she? I loved how the author gave Carrie room to ask questions of herself and her closest relationships. Is there a part of her that chose to hide away after the birth of the children? Although she loves the feeling of being cared for and supported, where does caring end and control begin? In some ways her pursuit of Johan and the answers isn’t about her feelings for him, but her feelings for herself and the person she was when they met, I loved how Johan called her Carrie Cole, as if only her full name could encompass all the things she is. Part of me wanted their love to still be there, but the more rational part of me knows that long term relationships and parenthood are tough. Often what we long for in past relationships is a fantasy, one that doesn’t include vomit on the rug, temper tantrums and a Dad that’s slowly losing his sense of reality. Can Johan really be all that Carrie sees through her younger, love filled eyes?
Once the questions start there’s no stopping this complex tale from unravelling and the tension builds as we realise there’s so much that Carrie doesn’t know. As Johan realises that Carrie truly knew nothing from their final moments in front of the courthouse in Bangkok he’s he’s confused. Has she really only just found out a week ago when she looked for accommodation in Sweden? He asks why nobody told her. But who should have told her? Who in her protective and much loved inner circle has been keeping secrets? Can she cope with another betrayal? The answers, when they came, were totally unexpected.. Nothing here is exactly as it seems, for both us and Carrie. What happened on her wedding day in Thailand created a huge scar across her timeline, with her life divided into before and after as if severed from each other, Now she knows there were tiny unseen strands of connection and the cut was never as clean as she thought. Despite telling herself, ever since that day, to make decisions with her head could her heart and her gut have been right along? This really was a heart-breaking love story, with so much depth and emotion for the reader to relate too. I was rooting for Carrie, both with her ambitions to return to work and her personal life. I felt an affinity with her discovery that she had allowed herself to become small and knew that only time alone, recovering and accepting the truth would help her make the right choices. Yet there was still an impulsive and romantic part of me hoping that love would find a way.
Out in June 2026 from MacMillan
Meet the Author
Rosie Walsh is the internationally bestselling author of two novels, the global smash hit THE MAN WHO DIDN’T CALL, and – new for 2022 – THE LOVE OF MY LIFE, a heart-wrenching, keep-you-up-all-night emotional thriller, which was an instant New York Times bestseller and stayed in the German top ten for several weeks.
Rosie Walsh lives on a medieval farm in Devon, UK, with her partner and two young children, after years living and travelling all over the world as a documentary producer and writer.
The Man Who Didn’t Call (UK) / Ghosted (US) was her first book under her own name, and was published around the world in 2018, going on to be a multimillion bestseller.
Prior to writing under her own name she wrote four romantic comedies under the pseudonym Lucy Robinson. When she isn’t parenting or writing, Rosie can be found walking on Dartmoor, growing vegetables and throwing raves for adults and children in leaking barns.
After sixteen-year-old Emily’s father tragically dies, she is forced to live with the only family she has left, an aunt and grandmother in the heart of Savannah, Georgia in a house as beautiful as it is mysterious.
But all is not what it seems with the Bell family; they’re hiding a magical secret.
When Emily meets the alluring Wyn, she forms a connection that feels like it was always meant to be. As the spark between them grows more powerful, her life takes an exhilarating and terrifying turn; but every step closer to him, takes her a step further away from her family.
Emily will find out that blood is always thicker than water…
THERE’S NO BOND GREATER THAN MAGIC
YA fiction isn’t usually on my radar, but I love both Alice Hoffman’s and Sarah Addison Allen’s mix of small town America and witches so I gave it a try. I was sold on the cover comment that this was ‘Buffy meets the Gilmore Girls’. It certainly isn’t short on atmosphere, with a charming setting in Savannah and Bell House in particular. For Emily who is used to the Welsh climate, it’s hard to acclimatise to the soupy heat that leaves everyone dripping in minutes – their laundry basket must be full every day. The Spanish moss that hangs from the trees like a natural brand of tinsel is actually parasitic, showing us that not everything is as beautiful as it first appears. Bell House is breathtaking and Emily’s first glimpse is overwhelming, calling it ‘Sleeping Beauty’s castle through an Instagram filter’. Everything has that southern charm, including her aunt Ashley’s breakfasts that have so much variety it feels like going out to brunch every morning. What Emily hasn’t yet realised is that she has the power to change the weather just by changing mood and Bell House is equally responsive to the people who live there, but its sentience isn’t just benign. Emily’s grandmother Catherine is in tune with the house and drips with Southern charm, her sayings are pure Deep South hokum; “you look like you were rode hard and put away wet” made me giggle out loud. As she starts to educate Emily in her heritage as a witch I wondered whether her sweetness was just as synthetic as saccharin.
I felt like the plot was paced awkwardly, feeling both too slow and too fast at once. This was a slow burn at first, setting up both the atmosphere and back story of the Bell family. While this is understandable as the first book in a series, it did feel like the plot took a back seat to description. Conversely, the central romance seemed to proceed at the speed of light with an intensity that felt unnecessary at this early stage. It felt as if their connection was simply announced rather than slowly building up through their emotions. I wanted more from her new friends Lydia and Jackson, both of whom promise fun and mischief and are incredibly loyal to Emily despite only knowing her a few weeks. I liked Lydia’s role as the naughty twin and I hope their friendship develops in the next book. Jackson is taken with Emily and I was expecting some rivalry between him and Emily’s love interest Wyn. I also loved her aunt Ashley who cares for Bell House and its inhabitants so beautifully, but has a dry wit and plenty of sarcasm. She doesn’t take to Emily right away and she’s a great antidote to Catherine’s syrupy sweetness. She never leaves the house and doesn’t pretend to be happy about her role, there’s far more going on here than meets the eye.
Catherine is the strongest character, stunningly beautiful and clearly very powerful. She takes her role as Emily’s mentor and caretaker very seriously, but there’s very little emotional connection. Catherine isn’t a cuddly grandma at all and imposes quite a few rules on Emily including a ban on dating until her ‘becoming’ when she comes into her full power as a Bell witch. It is Catherine who relates the story of the family of witches who have lived in this house and her history with Emily’s father Paul, who didn’t want Emily to grow up knowing about her potential powers. I loved that the author addressed issues from within that history that resonate today, especially the witch’s role as wise woman to others in her area.
“She helped women who wanted to control the size of their families […] there have always been women who help others in that regard.”
This is important to Emily who soon discovers she’s a natural apothecary, somehow able to identify most of the plants in Bell House’s garden along with their specific uses. I liked the idea that witches tend to have a speciality, with Catherine being an elemental witch. She suspects Emily of having many different powers, shown clearly when they encounter an unexpected attacker in the cemetery one night. This is a terrifying incident for Emily, even though she doesn’t know the full implications of her actions yet. Catherine tells her that their powers don’t signify them as good or bad, but the opposing forces they work with must be treated with respect. It felt like the book really picked up the pace towards the final third, with Emily’s becoming on the horizon and Lydia planning her a birthday party. This contrast shows us how extreme Catherine’s regime is and reminds us that Emily is a teenager who should be getting to know other young people and looking forward to dancing the night away on her birthday. Instead she’s heading out to a cemetery in the dark, for a potentially dangerous initiation into the Bell tradition under a guidance of a grandmother who doesn’t always seem to have her granddaughter’s best interests at heart. This is where Ashley comes into her own and I hoped to see Emily’s relationship with her aunt develop in future books. The becoming is going to be a reckoning for Emily, Catherine and Wyn in an action packed finale that is gripping and unexpected. There were elements of this novel that I really enjoyed and others I felt were underdeveloped or rushed. I wanted more depth to Wyn and Emily, with perhaps a few twists to their relationship considering their age and Jackson’s interest in Emily. The atmosphere and setting really stood out most, the action sequences were dramatic and fast paced and there were characters with a lot of potential. I am very interested to see how werewolves are going to integrate with the story and how Bell House will respond to Emily after her becoming. I really hope we also see more of that conflict between normal teenager and all powerful witch, as well as more about Savannah and its history. The sequel is out now so look out for my review coming in the next few weeks.
Sequel The Witch and the Wolf is out now from Magpie Publishing
Meet the Author
Lindsey is a Sunday Times and USA Today bestselling author, podcaster and vociferous defender of The Cheesecake Factory. Her books include the I Heart series, Christmas Fling, The Christmas Wish, Love Story and YA fantasy series, The Bell Witches.
When she isn’t writing, Lindsey moonlights as a co-host on Tights and Fights, a pro-wrestling podcast on the Maximum Fun network. Yes, really, pro-wrestling. And when she isn’t writing, podcasting or ruining her life with social media, Lindsey is most likely to be found reading, watching literally anything on television, texting the group chat or planning a karaoke night (please note she cannot sing).
Born and raised in South Yorkshire, Lindsey lived in London and New York before settling in Los Angeles, where she lives with her husband and their two cats.
In a mountain village in the Abruzzo region of Italy, Gino, a troubled young man, realises that his childhood sweetheart Franca can give his life the happiness and stability he needs. They seem made for each other, and move to a remote house in the countryside – but there is something in Franca’s past that haunts Gino.
Descending into pathological jealousy and resentment towards a married man who had been Franca’s lover, Gino is unable to stop himself imagining the worst, and embarks on a violent path that has catastrophic consequences.
There couldn’t be a better book for a counsellor to read than this one, following the life of Gino who lives in a small Italian town on the Adriatic Sea. The setting isn’t a bucolic, sun drenched and charming little town, despite Gino’s upbringing on his father’s smallholding where he mainly grows tomatoes. This is a grittier Italy, perfectly suited to the story and Gino himself. Although there is a sense that there’s a different existence within reach, perhaps the life his father has living off the land or whatever brings his father’s friend Harry back every few months. Whatever contentment is, Gino doesn’t know how to find it or accept it once he has it. Gino was born here and makes the comment that he’ll die here if he isn’t careful. He doesn’t want to live the life his parents have, he has bigger and better things to do. However, it could also be the foreshadowing of what’s to come when he meets Franca again. Franca was at school with Gino and in some senses he feels they’re both outsiders: ‘She was a strange little stringy thing, with a thin face and brown hair’. Franca was nicknamed The Rat by other girls, but then Gino was called Dopey after the dwarf in Snow White. She’s very bold, walking up to Gino and telling him that she’s going to marry him one day something both of them were teased about for years. Now, when his father mentions her, he seems irritated but they do have something in common, an inability to live up to their heroic parents. Gino confided in her when they were thirteen, saying all he seems to do is disappoint his father. Franca seems to get this, after all Gino’s father is known for something heroic he did in WW2 and her father is the local ambulance man. Maybe, she suggests, they could be something different to each other? She’s a realist, saying her father could have wanted a beautiful daughter and she’s aware she isn’t. How can they compare to heroes? They are only human. Gino gets into trouble in his teens and spent time in a psychiatric unit and he admits he’d forgotten his old friend, but the conversation with his father lights up his memory and he questions his choices. With a new view on life he searches Franca out and asks to take her to dinner and they are married in a whirlwind and given the chance to make a home in her aunt’s house in the countryside. Is it possible that Gino has learned from his mistakes and now sees what is important in life?
If I had a trainee who wanted to understand the Cognitive Behavioural Therapy concept of negative automatic thoughts I’d get them to read this book. Everything Gino experiences is filtered through a faulty lens. Whether this is innate or a result of constantly feeling like a disappointment is hard to tell. At the moment he has it all, but in his mind it’s already unravelling. The house needs a lot of work, but could be a secluded haven for a family. Gino hears that something strange happened to Franca’s aunt here during the war and starts to wonder about it, could an event like that leave something in the house like a mood or a feeling? Is the house unlucky in some way? To be transparent about her past Franca tells him about an affair she had with one of her father’s friends. Although outwardly he seems to accept this confession, inwardly it becomes a nagging concern he can’t shake off. He asks others about man who has a concrete business, telling them he has a friend who’s putting in a pool. He tells himself he just wants to look at him, but can he resist speaking to him or perhaps even warning him off? At the end of her working day Franca goes to a cafe in town to wait for Gino to pick her up after work. He notices that she’s chatting to a man, laughing and passing the time of day and he knows he’s been trying to pick her up. His strangest obsession comes when his son Elio is born, a beautiful baby with amazing violet eyes. Everyone who sees him comments on what a beautiful boy he is and he genuinely seems hypnotic for some people, almost holy. All Gino can see is a boy who looks nothing like him. Neither he nor Franca are beauties so how can Elio be his and inspire such reverence in complete strangers? Being in his mind is exhausting and worrying, the author leaves us unsure what he might do next. Pressure mounts with every page and Harry is the only person who seems to get through to Gino, telling him that perhaps the boy embodies the beauty inside them both.
Everything about Gino screams of a paranoid personality disorder, his mistrust of others and ability to twist innocent encounters into personal slights and grudges are classic symptoms. He has stopped listening to others and his behaviours become more extreme, including hallucinations that his baby son is talking to him. Franca is disturbed to come home and find Elio screaming in the house alone, while Gino is zoned out in the garden. As readers we’re inside his mind and see his motivations, the wrong patterns of thinking and the way he broods and cultivates grudges that are simply not there. Instead of facing these painful thoughts he directs his anger and obsession outward. If Elio is nothing like him, then someone else must be the father. I genuinely believe that Pierozzi would have carried on his life rarely thinking of Franca and her new husband, but Gino’s places himself in harm’s way. Pierozzi is a dangerous man. He’s described as someone things happened to and that resonated with my idea of Gino. Is this something people would eventually say about him? The way the author builds this difficult inner world is so clever and I was anxious, mainly for Franca and Elio. They are living in the middle of nowhere, with a husband and father who is no longer rational. I was mentally screaming at her to make sure she had somewhere safe to go.
Franca is very sure of her own emotions and choices. When Gino asks her if she’d still marry him she tells him calmly that her feelings have never changed. However she does have “something of the fox about her. That sudden, absolute stillness, that pricking of the ears, that readiness to flee.” Will Franca be just as resolute if she does sense danger? I felt so sad for her, because Gino’s obsession with her past harms her, even though it has nothing to do with him. Why can’t he see that she has only ever loved him? Despite him leaving and never making her any promises when they’re younger, her love never dies. That shows loyalty, but it’s never appreciated or rewarded. Even the beautiful son they have isn’t enough and I wondered if it was partly about his fears of her infidelity but mainly about his relationship with his own father. They were so different in character and distant emotionally, did he ever wonder about his own paternity? The author bookends this story with Harry as the narrator and honestly I had an emotional reaction to being back in Harry’s steady hands at the end. Being in his world felt safer and the way he frames Gino’s story gives it some closure and structure too. I found myself wondering how I’d work with a client like Gino and whether he could ever be satisfied with his life. This book has emotional depth and complexity, tension and action alongside some incredibly surreal moments too. I would definitely read this author again.
Out now from Head of Zeus
Meet the Author
Rupert Thomson is the author of fifteen critically acclaimed novels, including ‘The Insult’, which was shortlisted for the Guardian Fiction Prize, and chosen by David Bowie as one of the 100 Must-Read Books of All Time, ‘The Book of Revelation’, which was made into a feature film by the Australian writer/director, Ana Kokkinos, and ‘Death of a Murderer’, which was shortlisted for the Costa Prize.
His latest novel, ‘Dark is the Morning’, was published on May 7th 2026. Praised in advance by the likes of Chloe Aridjis, Claire-Louise Bennet, Sarah Waters, Julie Myerson, and Philip Pullman, LoveReading subsequently made it one of their Star Books of the Year, saying “Thomson’s writing casts an almost other-worldly spell…Teeming with tension, ‘Dark is the Morning’ represents literary fiction at its most page-turningly thrilling and poignant.” According to the Financial Times, which admired Thomson’s “stunned, post-traumatic prose”, it’s “the ideal holiday read: frictionless at the level of the sentence; stealthy, romantic, and utterly unpredictable in every other way.”
Rupert Thomson is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and has contributed to the Financial Times, Granta, the Guardian, the Independent, and the London Review of Books. He has lived in many cities around the world, including Athens, Berlin, Amsterdam, New York, Sydney, Rome, and most recently Barcelona. He currently lives in London.
Edenscar, a town in the Peak District, has more than most. 17 years ago, its inhabitants were hit by tragedy when a school bus veered off the road and everyone on board drowned. Everyone, that is, except Joseph Ashe. His miraculous survival has haunted him and the town ever since.
Now a Detective Sergeant in the local police, Joe is called to the scene of a brutal and apparently inexplicable crime. The whole town is spooked, but Joe’s new boss, DI Laurie Bower, more used to inner-city police work, has no time for superstition. She just wants to find the very real killer who has left no trace and apparently had no motive.
Joining forces, Joe and Laurie work to uncover the secrets of Edenscar, both past and present.
But when you dig up the dead, expect to get your hands dirty…
Detective Laurie Bower has a new job on a very different patch from inner city Manchester. They have returned to her husband Adam’s family home at Edenscar in the Peak District, to live with his father who has been diagnosed with advanced dementia. This is a wild place and a community where every family has been hit in some way by a tragic accident from 17 years ago. Everyone including Laurie’s new DS Joseph Ashe. Joseph was the only survivor of a terrible minibus crash that plunged his primary school class, their teacher and the driver to the bottom of Lady Bower reservoir. The village is haunted by the loss of those children and so is Joseph Ashe, whose best friend Sammi is still always by his side, even though only Joe can see him. This is going to be a hard district for Laurie to get used to, not only will she be living in the family home, which means getting used to less privacy and the presence of different family members all the time, but she’s not used to the tiny roads, rough terrain and awful weather. She has to hit the ground running when they receive a call about a couple who haven’t been seen over the weekend. Joe has a terrible feeling, because he’d heard gunshots late on Friday night but put it down to poachers in the woods. He also saw car lights heading in the direction of Manchester. Joe and Laurie drive out to Chris and Odette Miles’s cottage on the edge of the woods, a place they’ve been renovating and now share with baby Eric who is almost a year old. As they enter it’s immediately obvious the couple have been dead all weekend, shot in their own kitchen. Laurie chooses to search upstairs to spare Joe from what she fears has happened, a fear that sadly comes true when she finds Eric drowned in only a few centimetres of bath water. Now they must work together, with Sammi alongside, to discover who Chris and Odette were behind the image of a happy family, and then to find their killer.
The atmosphere of this novel is amazing with an opening section that takes us into the minibus to experience that crash as the children did, bringing home just how terrifying it must have been.
“It hit the water hard. Went under, fast. Waves of broken glass from the front to the back […] water like thunder was filling the bus, roll after roll of it, black.”
It’s astounding that Joe survived, but he has been seen with suspicion ever since with whispers that he and Sammi were messing around on the back seat, distracting the driver. Sammi has never left his side since and appears as if he’s the same age as Joe. However, once the bereaved villagers thought Joe could see their lost children he has been something of an oddity. For some the ability to see their child with Joe can be a comfort, but for others it must be distressing and confronting. The moments when this happens lift the hairs on the back of the neck, one child’s ’little icy fingers’ were reminiscent of Cathy trying to get into the window at Wuthering Heights. They’re always visible as if conjured from under the water, dripping wet and wreathed in shattered glass, their eyes black as night. Laurie’s husband Adam is a therapist and he dismisses it as ‘emotional contagion’, a shared trauma that causes mass hallucination. However, they are usually for a set time period and then fade, but Joe’s powers never go away. The weather is also full of foreboding, with several seasons in one day and the woods near the Miles house not recommended after dark. Laurie’s home set up is also unsettling. She is bereaved, but doesn’t share with Joe that she has lost her sister to addiction. She’s also uneasy at her father-in-law’s house, because Pete’s dementia means he behaves differently, becoming agitated towards sunset in a behaviour known as sundowning. He sometimes doesn’t know Laurie, but then when he does recognise her he becomes threatening. This is a place that has secrets and Joe and Laurie need to uncover them if they are going to solve the murders.
Neither detective is in the best place for an investigation and Laurie realises one of the main differences in policing an area where you live. In Manchester she had anonymity from who she was investigating, but here everyone is connected and has an opinion. To hear Chris’s parents talk about the murdered couple they sound like an idyllic family, with his father very proud of his son’s skill as an electrician. In fact he’s been doing so well recently that he’s been able to send his parents on holiday abroad. Odette’s mother has a slightly different perspective, wondering whether the pressure of the renovations and a new baby were taking their toll on her daughter who seemed to be providing most of the child care. Neighbour Bobby, who is an incredible bit of comic relief with habits that could earn him an ASBO and his arse constantly hanging out of his trousers, is more forthcoming. He thinks Chris was up to something to bring in the sort of money he was making. He often heard the couple arguing even though their house is some distance away. Bobby himself has has trouble with developers wanting to buy his ramshackle house, that is currently devaluing the holiday let next door. The team go through several theories – could Chris have been distributing drugs, keeping stolen goods or weapons? This is going to take a deep dive into his business records and asking more searching questions of his resentful family.
I loved how the author has woven in the real-life concerns of a village in an area like Derbyshire within the Peak District. There’s the difficulty for young people who grow up there not being able to afford a decent home as second home owners and investors buy up the local cottages for their portfolio, some with unscrupulous business practices. Laurie feels herself an outsider in this space, the weapons are different for a start as the pair encounter a crossbow booby trap, animal traps and then shotguns in her first few days. Even the motives and suspects are different to those she encountered back in Manchester. She can also see the pressure Joe is under as a receptacle for the village’s resentment and grief. The horrors here are both manmade and supernatural. The pair peel back the layers of secrets and find a neglected kid practically living wild, a plan for hunting in the woods that could have come from the Epstein files and someone who likes to watch their fellow villagers. These twists and turns of the case are fascinating and kept me reading all day. The ghosts are both horrifying and desperately sad, with parents who long to see their child again but not in the way they appear with deep black pools for eyes and dripping with water. It culminates in a terrifying showdown from a totally unexpected direction. The survivor’s guilt is unbearable and I kept hoping that Laurie’s presence and this awful case might be a catalyst for change. Both her and Joe are outsiders in different ways and I could see that distance from the community being useful in terms of their policing but painfully lonely in private. This was a deeply atmospheric and devastating start to a series I can’t wait to dive back into.
Out now from Harvill Publishing
Meet the Author
Sarah Hilary is the critically-acclaimed author of nine novels. Her debut, Someone Else’s Skin, won the Theakston Crime Novel of the Year 2015 and was a World Book Night selection, a Richard & Judy Book Club pick and a finalist for both the Silver Falchion and Macavity Awards in the US. No Other Darkness, the second in her DI Marnie Rome series, was shortlisted for a Barry Award.
In April 2026, The Drowning Place will introduce readers to DS Joseph Ashe at the start of a brand new series set in the Peak District.
Sarah is Programme Director for St Hilda’s Crime Fiction Weekend, and co-founder of Ledburied, a crime fiction festival in her home town. Her short stories have won the Fish Criminally Short Histories Prize, the Cheshire Prize for Literature, and the SENSE Prize.
The Lotus Readers 