Author: thelotusreaders

Hello, I am Hayley and I run Lotus Writing Therapy and The Lotus Readers blog. I am a counsellor, workshop facilitator and avid reader.
Posted in Fiction Preview 2024

Books To Look Forward To In 2024- Part 2

Posted on by thelotusreaders

It seems I’ve barely said goodbye to 2023 and I’m already six books in with my 2024 books. This looks like a bumper year of brilliant books and is likely to cause me some problems when summing up next New Year. It blows my mind to think there will be others that pop along and surprise me too. Here’s my first part and the second will be posted tomorrow. Here’s to a bookish New Year 🥂🍾📚

At The Stroke of Midnight by Jenni Keer.

It’s 1923 and in a decade that promises excitement and liberation, Pearl Glenham and her father are invited to a mysterious country house party on the Dorset coast, by a total stranger. Her father claims not to have any prior association with Highcliffe House, but it’s apparent that he has a shared history with several of the guests, although he won’t admit it. Belatedly discovering that her father was blackmailed into attending, Pearl’s worries are compounded when their host fails to arrive. Intimidated by everyone, Pearl escapes to the nearby cove and finds a mysterious mercury clock hidden in a cave. This strange encounter sets in motion a series of events that will culminate in an horrific house fire, claiming the lives of all the guests, including Pearl herself. But then Pearl wakes up back in the cave, seemingly destined never to live past midnight. She can repeat the day. But can she change its outcome?

Out on 10th March from Boldwood Books

Night Watching by Tracy Sierra

I don’t know very much about this novel, except for the blurb below and the many brilliant reviews from other thriller writers using so many superlatives to describe it.

There was someone in the house.

Home alone with her young children during a blizzard, a mother tucks her son back into bed in the middle of the night. Then she hears a noise – old houses are always making some kind of noise. But this sound is disturbingly familiar: it’s the tread of footsteps, unusually heavy and slow, coming up the stairs…

In that split second, she has three choices. Should she hide? Should she run? Or should she fight?

Out on 8th February from Viking.

A Sign of Her Own by Sarah Marsh

Ellen Lark is on the verge of marriage when she and her fiancé receive an unexpected visit from Alexander Graham Bell. Ellen knows immediately what Bell really wants from her. Ellen is deaf, and for a time was Bell’s student in a technique called Visible Speech. As he instructed her in speaking, Bell also confided in her about his dream of producing a device which would transmit the human voice along a wire: the telephone. Now, on the cusp of wealth and renown, Bell wants Ellen to speak up in support of his claim to the patent to the telephone, which is being challenged by rivals.

But Ellen has a different story to tell: that of how Bell betrayed her, and other deaf pupils, in pursuit of ambition and personal gain, and cut Ellen off from a community in which she had come to feel truly at home. It is a story no one around Ellen seems to want to hear – but there may never be a more important time for her to tell it.

Out on 1st Feb from Tinder Press.

Expiration Dates by Rebecca Serle

Daphne believes the universe has a plan for her. Every time she meets a new man, she receives a slip of paper with his name and a number on it – the exact amount of time they will be together. The papers told her she’d spend three days with Martin in Paris; 5 weeks with Noah in San Francisco; and three months with Hugo her ex-boyfriend turned best friend. Daphne has been receiving the numbered papers for over twenty years, always wondering when there might be one without an expiration. Finally the night of a blind date at her favourite LA restaurant, there’s only a name: Jake. But as Jake and Daphne’s story unfolds, Daphne finds herself doubting the paper’s prediction, and wrestling with what it means to be both committed and truthful. Because Daphne knows things Jake doesn’t, information – that if he found out – would break his heart. Rebecca always manages to do something a little bit different with her romances and I’ve loved all of her books so far.

Out on 19th March from Quercus

Christ on a Bike by Orla Owen.

Cerys receives an unexpected inheritance but there are rules attached, twisted rules that have to be followed if she is to receive it in full . As she settles into her new life, she begins to feel trapped and senses that the villagers, her sister and a man she keeps seeing on a bicycle are constantly watching her. Cerys, desperate to control her own future, decides to try break free but the past is ever present and dictates her fate. I found the blurb of this intriguing and I have a recommendation from fellow blogger Ellie and she’s usually great for unusual reads.

Out on 25th Jan from Bluemoose Books.

One of the Good Guys by Araminta Hall.

I’ve been lucky enough to have a proof of this one so I can honestly say WOW! This one will blow your socks off. Cole is the perfect husband: a romantic, supportive of his wife, Mel’s career, keen to be a hands-on dad, not a big drinker. A good guy. So when Mel leaves him, he’s floored. She was lucky to be with a man like him. Craving solitude, he accepts a job on the coast and quickly settles into his new life where he meets reclusive artist Lennie.

Lennie has made the same move for similar reasons. She is living in a crumbling cottage on the edge of a nearby cliff. It’s an undeniably scary location, but sometimes you have to face your fears to get past them.
As their relationship develops, two young women go missing while on a walk protesting gendered violence, right by where Cole and Lennie live. Finding themselves at the heart of a police investigation and media frenzy, it soon becomes clear that they don’t know each other very well at all. This is an up to the minute look at relationships and the gender war. If so many men are feminists, why are so many women scared to walk home at night?

Out on 4th Jan from Macmillan

Anna O by Matthew Blake

ANNA O HASN’T OPENED HER EYES FOR FOUR YEARS

Not since the night she was found in a deep sleep by the bodies of her best friends, suspected of a chilling double murder. For Doctor Benedict Prince, a forensic psychologist on London’s Harley Street, waking Anna O could be career-defining. As an expert in sleep, he knows all about the darkest chambers of the mind; the secrets that lie buried in the subconscious. As he begins Anna O’s treatment – studying his patient’s dreams, combing her memories, visiting the site where the horrors played out – he pulls on the thread of a much deeper, darker mystery.

Awakening Anna O isn’t the end of the story, it’s just the beginning.

Out on 1st Feb by HarperCollins

Goodbye Birdy Greenwing by Ericka Waller

Great friends are hard to find, difficult to leave and impossible to forget…

Birdie, Ada and Jane are all lost. Life has not turned out as they planned, and all three of them are scared to ask for help, to say yes – or to say no. To take a chance on someone else. Birdie Greenwing has been at a loose end ever since her beloved twin sister and husband passed away eight years previously. Too proud and stubborn to admit she is lonely, Birdie’s world has shrunk. Jane Brown hoped moving to Brighton would be a new start, away from her overbearing mother. While she finds it hard to stand up for herself, her daughter Frankie has no problem telling people what she does and doesn’t want. Ada Kowalski thought training to become an Oncologist in England would be a dream come true. In reality she is isolated, exhausted, the professional detachment she has had to develop now threatens to take over her life.

When a series of incidents brings their lives crashing together, these three unlikely allies find that there’s always more to a person than meets the eye.

Out on 18th April by Doubleday.

The King’s Witches by Kate Foster

Women whisper secrets to each other; it is how we survive.

1589. Princess Anne of Denmark is betrothed to King James VI of Scotland – a royal union designed to forever unite the two countries. But first, she must pass the trial period: one year of marriage in which she must prove herself worthy of being Scotland’s new Queen. If the King and the Scottish royal court in Edinburgh find her wanting, she faces permanent exile to a convent. Determined to fulfil her duties to King and country, Anne resolves to be the perfect royal bride. Until she meets Lord Henry. By her side is Kirsten Sorenson, her loyal and pious lady’s maid. But whilst tending to Anne’s every need, she has her own secret motives for the royal marriage to be a success . . .

Meanwhile, in North Berwick, a young housemaid by the name of Jura is dreaming of a new life. She practises the healing charms taught to her by her mother, and when she realises she is no longer safe under her master’s roof, she escapes to Edinburgh. But it isn’t long before she finds herself caught up in the witchcraft mania that has gripped not just the capital but the new queen . . This is the follow up to Kate’s brilliant book The Maiden.

Out on 6th June from Mantle.

The Knowing by Emma Hinds.

Powerful, intoxicating and full of suspense. The Knowing is a darkly spellbinding novel about a girl fighting for her survival in the decaying criminal underworlds. It is a hard-hitting story of love, obsession and betrayal.

Whilst working as a living canvas for an abusive tattoo artist in the slums of 19th-century New York, Flora meets Minnie, an enigmatic circus performer who offers her love and refuge in an opulent townhouse that is home to the menacing and predatory Mr Chester Merton. Flora earns her keep reading tarot cards for his guests whilst struggling to harness her gift, the Knowing – an ability to summon the dead. Caught in a dark love triangle between Minnie and Chester, Flora begins to unravel the secrets inside their house. Then at her first public séance in the infamous cathouse Hotel du Woods, Flora hears the spirit of a murdered boy prostitute and exposes his killer, setting off a train of events that leaves her fighting for her life. The Knowing is a stunning debut inspired by real historical characters including Maud Wagner, one of the first known female tattoo artists, New York gang the Dead Rabbits, and characters from PT Barnum’s circus in the 1800s. It is so up my street it’s ridiculous and I can’t wait to tell you all about it.

Out on 18th January from Bedford Square Publishers.

The Collapsing Wave by Doug Johnstone

This is my current read and I’m really enjoying being back with Ava, Heather, Lennox and of course Sandy. This follows on from the first in the series, picking up from that moment in Ullapool where the trio reunited Sandy the Enceladon with his fellow aliens and they made the Great Descent into the sea loch. Now Lennox and Heather are detained nearby, in a purpose built centre called New Broom that’s part prison and part research facility. Run by the American military, the base is dedicated to researching any individual enceladons they can catch. This is a form of torture as they are separated from the whole and forced to communicate telepathically with Lennox and Heather. Meanwhile, Ava is on trial for the murder of her husband after years of domestic violence, but what next for her and her daughter Chloe if she’s acquitted? As Sandy tries to help his detained friends, they all learn just how far the Americans will go to reach their objectives. However, the protest camp near New Broom is filled with people who didn’t believe the government’s explanation for the Great Descent. They know that the the Americans are experimenting on something more than marine life, something extraterrestrial. Could their help ensure freedom for the Enceladons as well as Lennox, Heather and Ava? A brilliant read, full of Doug Johnstone’s usual mix of politics, philosophy and buckets of empathy alongside the aliens.

Out on 14th March from Orenda Books.

The Unfinished Business of Eadie Brown by Freya North

Eadie Browne is an odd child with unusual parents, living in a strange house neighbouring the local cemetery. Bullied at school – but protected by her two best friends Celeste and Josh, and her many imaginary friends lying six feet under next door – Eadie muddles her way through. Arriving in Manchester as a student in the late 1980s, Eadie experiences a novel freedom she never imagined and it’s seductive. She can be who she wants to be, do as she pleases, and no one back home needs to know. As Manchester embraces the dizzying, colourful euphoria of Rave counterculture, Eadie is swept along, blithely ignoring danger and reality. Until, one night, her past comes hurtling at her with ramifications which will continue into her adult life.

Now, as the new Millennium beckons, Eadie is turning 30 with a marriage in tatters. She must travel back to where she once lived for a funeral she can’t quite comprehend. As she journeys from the North to the South, from the present to the past, Eadie contemplates all that was then – and all that is now – in this moving love letter to youth.

Out on Feb 1st from Welbeck Publishing

The London Bookshop Affair by Louise Fein

London, 1962: The world is teetering on the brink of nuclear war but life must go on. Celia Duchesne longs for a career, but with no means or qualifications, passes her time working at a dusty bookshop. The day a handsome American enters the shop, she thinks she might have found her way out of the monotony. Just as the excitement of a budding relationship engulfs her, a devastating secret draws her into the murky world of espionage.

France, 1942: Nineteen-year-old Anya Moreau was dropped behind enemy lines to aid the resistance, sending messages back home to London via wireless transmitter. When she was cruelly betrayed, evidence of her legacy and the truth of her actions were buried by wartime injustices. As Celia learns more about Anya—and her unexpected connection to the undercover agent—she becomes increasingly aware of furious efforts, both past and present, to protect state secrets. With her newly formed romance taking a surprising turn and the world on the verge of nuclear annihilation, Celia must risk everything she holds dear, in the name of justice.

Out on 29th February from William Morrow.

Loot by Tania James

Meet Abbas. Woodcarver, toy maker, dreamer. Abbas is seventeen when he is whisked away to Tipu Sultan’s glorious palace in Mysore. Apprenticed to the clockmaker Monsieur Du Leze, he is ordered to create an ingenious musical tiger to delight Tipu’s sons. In the eccentric Du Leze, Abbas finds an unexpected friend who encourages his skill and hunger for learning, and through whom he also meets the unforgettable Jehanne, who has questions and ambitions of her own.

But when British soldiers attack and loot Mysore, Abbas’s world is turned upside down and his prized tiger is shipped off to a country estate in England. In order to carve out his place in the world, he must follow. A hero’s quest, a love story, an exuberant heist novel that traces the bloody legacy of colonialism across the world, Loot is a dazzling, wildly inventive and irresistible feat of storytelling from a writer at the height of her powers.

Out on 25th Jan by Harvill Secker.

This Tale is Forbidden by Polly Crosby

Nesta believes in the fairy tales – the true stories of powerful magical women who shaped and ruled the world decades ago. But the world has changed since then, and now, she is forbidden from wandering too far from the isolated woodland cottage where she lives with her grandmother. Nesta longs more than anything to see the city that lies beyond the forest, and when her grandmother is abducted, she gets her chance, journeying there in the hope of rescuing her.


But once there, she is horrified to see her grandmother’s warnings were true: girls are forced to wear certain clothes and punished if they don’t behave in certain ways. The city’s Authorities have rewritten history, replacing the fairytale heroines with weak girls who must rely on men. Worse still – everyone believes this is how the world has always been. Only Nesta knows the truth. But truth is a dangerous thing, and suddenly she finds herself a target. Can she evade the Authorities long enough to rescue her grandmother and liberate everyone else, bringing magic back into the world? This is a YA debut from Polly, whose writing I absolutely love.

Out on 4th Jan by Scholastic

Emily Wilde’s Map of the Otherlands by Heather Fawcett

This is the second book in the Emily Wilde series and another beautiful cover to add to my collection. Emily Wilde is a genius scholar of faerie folklore, and has catalogued many secrets of the Hidden Folk in her encyclopaedia with her infuriatingly charming fellow scholar, Wendell Bambleby, by her side. But Bambleby is more than just a brilliant and unbearably handsome scholar. He’s an exiled faerie king on the run from his murderous mother, in search of a door back to his realm. By lucky happenstance, Emily’s new project, a map of the realms of faerie, will take them on an adventure to the picturesque Austrian Alps, where Emily believes they may find the door to Bambleby’s realm, and the key to freeing him from his family’s dark plans. But with new friendships for the prickly Emily to navigate and dangerous Folk lurking in every forest and hollow, Emily must unravel the mysterious workings of faerie doors, and of her own heart.

Out on 16th February by Orbit Books

Spitting Gold by Camilla Lowkis

Paris, 1866. When Baroness Sylvie Devereux receives a house-call from Charlotte Mothe, the sister she disowned, she fears her shady past as a spirit medium has caught up with her. But with their father ill and Charlotte unable to pay his bills, Sylvie is persuaded into one last con.
Their marks are the de Jacquinots: dysfunctional aristocrats who believe they are haunted by their great aunt, brutally murdered during the French Revolution. Sylvie and Charlotte will need to deploy every trick to terrify the family out of their gold – until they experience inexplicable horrors themselves. The sisters start to question if they really are at the mercy of a vengeful spirit. And what other deep, dark secrets threaten to come to light…?

Spitting Gold is a darkly atmospheric and propulsive historical debut that twists and turns, blending gothic mystery with a captivating sapphic romance.

Out on April 18th from Doubleday

Crow Moon by Suzy Aspley

When the crow moon rises, the darkness is unleashed…

Martha Strangeways is struggling to find purpose in her life, after giving up her career as an investigative reporter when her young twins died in a house fire. Overwhelmed by guilt and grief, her life changes when she stumbles across the body of a missing teenager – a tragedy that turns even more sinister when a poem about crows is discovered inked onto his back. When another teenager goes missing in the remote landscape, Martha is drawn into the investigation, teaming up with DI Derek Summers, as malevolent rumours begin to spread and paranoia grows. As darkness descends on the village of Strathbran, it soon becomes clear that no one is safe, including Martha…
Both a nerve-shattering, enthralling and atmospheric thriller and a moving tale of grief and psychological damage, Crow Moon is a staggeringly accomplished debut and the start of an addictive, unforgettable series.

Out on 14th March from Orenda Books

The Gathering by C.J.Tudor


A small Alaskan town.
A missing boy.
A brutal murder.
A detective brought in from out of state to assist the former sherriff who investigated a similar murder twenty-five years ago.
But are they hunting a twisted psychopath – or something even more terrifying? I am determined to read C.J. Tudor’s back catalogue this year as she’s an author I’m very aware of but haven’t had time to read. This one sounds amazing.

Out on 11th April from Michael Joseph.

I have made an error in the above book covers graphic and added Halfway House by Helen Fitzgerald, if you want to know about her brilliant new novel take a look at part one.

Posted in Netgalley

Yellowface by R.F. Kuang

Posted on by thelotusreaders

White lies. Dark humor. Deadly consequences… Bestselling sensation Juniper Song is not who she says she is, she didn’t write the book she claims she wrote, and she is most certainly not Asian American–in this chilling and hilariously cutting novel from R.F. Kuang

June Hayward and Athena Liu were in the same year at Yale and both debuted in the same year in publishing. Yet that’s where the similarities end. Athena is picked up immediately in the world that’s always looking for the next big thing. Stories about basic white girls just aren’t cutting it any more, so Athena is a cross genre literary darling. Her death is a freak accident that allows June an opportunity, she acts impulsively and steals Athena’s work in progress. Her work is an interesting novel about Chinese labourers and their part in WW1 helping the British and the French. Could she perhaps edit the manuscript and submit it to her own agent? Would it be wrong to start a new pseudonym? Enter the ethnically ambiguous new novelist June Song.

This was a brilliant inside look at issues and timely arguments within the publishing industry. In the past couple of years I’ve seen the question of authentic voices rage back and forth, especially interesting to me when it comes to writers with disabilities and the way disabled characters are written. Is it more important that a marginalised story is told or is who tells it the vital issue? This can be especially urgent when it’s a previously untold story or a hidden part of history. June has so much success with the book, but struggles to protect her secrets. One wrong word could expose her, so how far will she go to protect her new identity?

I’m always fascinated with books where I don’t like any of the characters because it usually means I’m learning something. I think some readers are uncomfortable with this. Athena is the wronged party and should therefore be ‘likeable’. In fact racist or more accurately model minority thinking means that a Western audience might expect the Athena to be sweet, pretty, docile and diligent just because she’s Asian. The qualities are positive, but allow no room for difference unlike the endlessly unique white characters created every day by Western writers. Huang broaches the idea that the industry’s criteria for deciding which Asian writers to publish is based within this flawed expectation. There’s also an issue around the type of subject matter chosen by publishers. In the wake of George Floyd’s death a lot changed in the publishing industry and we all talked a lot about diversity, but when I think of the subject matter of books I’ve read from ethnically diverse writers, particularly African American or Black British writers, they have all contained sexual abuse, violence or intergenerational trauma. Can we say this is a true reflection of the experience of people from those communities? Or do publishers expect this type of story from black writers and favour publishing them over other narratives? Do we only accept marginalised voices when they’re saying things we expect, things that make us comfortable because they echo our ideas about that particular community?

June truly believes that she’s becoming the minority in the writing world. That unless you’re a BIPOC writer you can’t get a look in from agents and publishers. The focus is on ‘own voice’ fiction and no one wants to hear from yet another white girl. I thought about the controversy around the book American Dirt when reading this. Writing is all about imagination and an author can imagine anything. An author can also research anything, but is research enough when you’re attempting to write from the perspective of someone with a disability, or someone LGBTQ+. I have to mention the proliferation of books from a neuro-divergent perspective by writers who have experience in this area, but who aren’t neuro-divergent themselves. I can understand the concern about it, but I’ve also really learned from some of these books and been led to other reading so I could educate myself. Where does ‘own voice’ writing end? Are we saying that a male writer can’t write in the voice of a female character? Writing is all about creativity so if we can only ever write from our own viewpoint wouldn’t it get a little boring? Should publishers accept a manuscript from a white writer who’s writing outside their own experience, if they are inundated with own voice manuscripts of equal merit?

“She’s using the pen name Juniper Song to pretend to be Chinese American. She’s taken new author photos to look more tan and ethnic, but she’s as white as they come. June Hayward you are a thief and a liar. You’ve stolen my legacy and now you spit on my grave’.

I loved that this book addressed those big issues, but it was also entertaining, delicious and disturbing in equal measure. I really enjoyed the ins and outs of the publishing world and the gossipy social media ‘blow-up’ feel of the book. Then there were moments that were more uncomfortable and challenging. It addressed what a lonely job it is to be a writer and how that isolation magnifies other aspects of being an author such as the negativity of social media and the perils of comparison. I wasn’t sure about June but that meant her character stayed with me. On one hand I felt she deserved to be exposed, but when I saw the reality of that I felt really bad for her. This was such a clever novel, so complex, full of amazing contemporary issues and always entertaining.

Meet the Author

Rebecca F. Kuang is the #1 New York Times bestselling and Hugo, Nebula, Locus, and World Fantasy Award nominated author of Babel, the Poppy War trilogy, and the forthcoming Yellowface. She is a Marshall Scholar, translator, and has an MPhil in Chinese Studies from Cambridge and an MSc in Contemporary Chinese Studies from Oxford. She is now pursuing a PhD in East Asian Languages and Literatures at Yale.

Posted in Publisher Proof

Strong Female Character by Fern Brady

Posted on by thelotusreaders

When I received an email asking if I’d be interested in a finished copy of Fern Brady’s memoir I was typing ‘Yes please’ before I’d even finished reading the email. Something about Fern made me sit up and take notice when I was half-watching a late night showing of Live at the Apollo. She was such an interesting mix of intelligence, wit, forthrightness and that little bit of indefinable magic that captures an audience and takes them with you. By the time she appeared in Taskmaster I was a big fan. If you listen to my partner, this was because of her approach to tasks, which is very like my own. She dissected tasks in a very analytical way that was completely obvious to her, then when her team mates didn’t catch on (quite often in one case) she would speak to them as if they were insufferably stupid. Apparently the look in Fern’s eyes and her tone of voice reminded him of me watching a quiz show or reality series. Every Monday I become inexplicably wound up by Mastermind, especially when contestants pass questions instead of just throwing an answer out there. It’s obvious to me that if passes count against you in the tie-break situation, it would be better to simply shout ‘banana’ if you don’t know the answer. They might look stupid but they’d have no passes. So I guess I felt something of a kinship with her and the way our brains work, although in other respects we couldn’t be more different.

I had heard that Fern was recently diagnosed as on the autistic spectrum, a very hard won diagnosis for women and something I’ve had some experience of in my mental health work. Any mental health team has it’s share of people who are neuro-divergent, especially older people whose schools were simply unaware of the condition, whatever gender the individual might be. I’ve seen first hand the devastation that can be caused by undiagnosed autism. The inability to fit in at school, the crippling ‘shyness’ that leads to bullying, subsequent depression and anxiety, institutionalisation from long periods on psychiatric wards, coping strategies such as self-imposed isolation, drinking or drug taking. Then all the social issues that come along with these difficulties, like struggling to find or keep employment, poverty, neglect or even being preyed upon by those in society who look out for people to cuckoo or subject to modern slavery. This may sound extreme to some, but I’ve personally seen all of the above happen to people who were not diagnosed early. Not that diagnosis is the cure for all of these terrible life circumstances, but labelling does help because it enables the individual to access benefits, housing, support and some degree of protection in society. Fern was one of these people, born in an era when diagnosis was more common, but usually reserved for boys. The problem is that autism looks very different in women – women don’t fall into the Sheldon Cooper, no girlfriend, obsessive, Star Trek loving, nerd stereotype.

Fern was diagnosed exactly twenty years after she first told a doctor she had autism. Prior to that doctors told her she couldn’t possibly be autistic because she made eye contact and she’d had boyfriends (as if the ability to maintain a heterosexual relationship inoculated you from being neuro-divergent). One night after performing, Fern told her boyfriend that an audience member thought she might have Asperger’s and she should read a book called Aspergirls. She wasn’t sure she wanted to, but as her boyfriend started to read up on it he said to her ‘this is an exact description of you’. Often the signs of autism are simply missed in women because we have become too good at disguising or masking how we truly feel in a situation. Women are able, particularly in a work environment, to put on a mask. For example, all through school and university I was terrified of public speaking. I didn’t want everyone’s eyes on me, I would start to feel hot, sweaty and go completely purple in the face. Eventually I became so embarrassed about being purple in the face I became anxious about that too. These symptoms were exacerbated by a terrifying exercise at the beginning of teacher training where we had to pick a song that told a story and then sing it, unaccompanied in our seminar group. I felt like my mum’s pressure cooker, shuddering with heat and pressure until it gave a high pitched whistle and she would let the steam out. It felt like that but with nobody on hand to release the pressure. When things like this happened and even now when I’m involved in confrontation I’m right back there sweating, with a face like a giant blueberry. I didn’t last a term. However, if I am teaching a whole class of people, like one of my therapeutic writing workshops, I barely break a sweat. I have put on the mask of an expert, someone who knows what they’re talking about and how much it can help. So, as an expert, I can do the task.

Fern struggles to fit in wherever she goes in life, whether it’s school, college or work. She can’t fathom the unspoken social codes that govern our existence, especially in groups of women. Her obsessions are not the archetypal trains, sci-fi or comics. As a child she was obsessed with learning languages, culminating in a successful application to Edinburgh University to study Arabic and Persian. She had no desire to visit the countries where these languages were spoken, she just loved doing verb drills and was running out of languages. She played the piano incredibly well at a young age too, but because these were seen as ‘positive’ pastimes it never occurred to anyone to label them as autistic tendencies. She funded her studies at university by stripping, somewhere she felt that she fitted in. Although that was probably due to the fact that most stripper’s dressing rooms have their fair share of misfits. She didn’t have to be herself in the club, she put on a persona and got on with it. The early years of her comedy career were harder, mainly because there were more social codes to navigate, such as having to pretend she would like to have coffee and ‘get to know’ someone instead of just asking if she could be considered for a panel show slot. Sometimes it felt as if people wasted years playing games just to work with someone, when a simple ‘do you want to work together?’ Would have sufficed. She noticed that people didn’t like her to be so direct, particularly standing up in meetings and asking what the point was? This was something I used to do regularly in my last job as an advocate for people with disabilities. I had a huge case load on part-time hours so if someone called a meeting with no obvious point I would ask if they could quickly get to the point so I could assess if it was worth me sitting there. I remember saying that I’d like to get back to my desk and ‘do some real work’. I was there for the clients who needed me, not my colleagues. In hindsight I can see why our receptionist was terrified of me.

I loved the honesty of this book. Fern is brutally honest, even about those things that perhaps don’t show her in the best light. Her frankness about the autism, but also the mental health problems and addictions she experienced as a result of remaining undiagnosed, is admirable because it will help people who are in that destructive cycle. Her teenage years are particularly fraught and painful to read, mainly because she’s totally misunderstood by those who are supposed to love her. I found Fern’s retrospective take on those years and her post-diagnosis discussion with her mother was particularly moving. Fern is staunchly feminist and I loved that her inability to read social cues meant she didn’t internalise some of the bullshit that still exists in society about how women should behave. When in a shared flat at university, her flat mates basically slut-shamed her for having too many men at the flat. Hilariously, Fern replies that there seven days in a week and she’s shown restraint by only bringing a man back four times. There are other laugh out loud moments like this, where Fern is more than happy to create humour from her situation. There were some similarities in religious upbringing that resonated with me and made me smile.

This is not the typical redemptive narrative arc memoir where someone transcends their illness/situation in order to tie up any loose ends and become the ‘superhuman’ that we should all emulate. I have a disability and this is a narrative trope I can’t stand to see in disability memoirs. People don’t overcome a permanent disability, whether it’s visible or invisible; physical or mental. We learn to accommodate it and live alongside it if we’re lucky. Fern shows that beautifully by describing her difficulties working within her industry with her diagnosis. She describes the Taskmaster experience brilliantly and it’s refreshing to read a celebrity admitting to ongoing issues with their health. It’s more of that brutal honesty she’s famous for and it helps to know that what we see on TV doesn’t come without it’s difficulties, particularly the meltdowns which are a result of the stresses and strains of filming. As you can probably tell I identified strongly with this book and I have wondered if it might be worth mentioning to my GP that I have struggled with social codes; have been told that people are scared of my rather forthright opinions and ideas; have physical crashes after periods of stress; avoid parties; have repetitive mind games or movements that calm me and help me go to sleep; prefer to deal with people in writing; watch repetitive programs that are calming to me; prefer to see friends one to one rather than socialise in groups of women. These may just be personality quirks, but I have wondered and could see how a label might help me understand some of my behaviours. I really welcomed Fern’s story in terms of understanding myself better, whether diagnosed or not, but I also admired her ability to bare her soul and find the funny in her difficulties.

Meet the Author

Fern Marie Brady (born 26 May 1986) is a Scottish comedian, podcaster, and writer. Before becoming a stand-up comedian Brady worked as a journalist. She achieved fame as a stand-up comedian by entering stand-up competitions such as at the Edinburgh Film Theatre. As a result of her success as a stand-up she was invited on to comedy panel shows such as 8 Out Of Ten Cats. In 2020 she became a podcaster when she co-created a podcast entitled Wheel of Misfortune.

Brady was diagnosed as being on the autistic spectrum in 2021, as an adult. She has been active within the field of autism education since learning of her diagnosis. She has written how she has been dealing with the diagnosis in her 2023 memoir Strong Female Character.

Posted in Squad Pod

Past Lying by Val McDermid. Karen Pirie Series.

Posted on by thelotusreaders

I was so blown away by my first Val McDermid novel last month that I couldn’t settle to any other reading when I knew that this sequel was waiting for me on the book trolley! So in the end I gave in. We left DCI Karen Pirie at the beginning of lockdown, which she’d decided to spend in her lover Hamish’s huge Edinburgh flat with her new constable Daisy. It was a hurried and unexpected choice, with Hamish retreating to his Croft in the Highlands where he was now making hand sanitiser and profiting nicely. The team are officially stood down from working, but Karen had ordered some cold case files to be taken to the flat so they could at least read and review them. She isn’t known for being good at following rules so lockdown is a challenge, with her midnight walks and checks on the old flat she bends things a little to suit her. It would be impossible to imagine her not working though and luckily her DS Jason gets an unexpected call that triggers something. A librarian is using lockdown to file away items donated to the archive and she has been working on the papers of the late author Jake Stein. In them she found an unfinished manuscript that bothered her. The narrator is a crime writer and he abducts an aspiring writer from one of his workshops, a young girl called Laurel Oliver. He describes taking her to a shack in the woods and strangling her, then planting her body in the garage of another crime writer, Rob McEwan. Rob and Jake met at a festival and became friends, with Jake being the big name and Rob just starting out. They discovered a mutual love of chess and would play each other each week at Jake’s house, where he has the classic car, the high end kitchen decor and a beautiful wife. A beautiful wife who seems to get along with Rob very well. Stars in any creative field can fall as well as rise and as the tables start to turn for these two could Jake have carried out this murderous blueprint? All the way down to the detail of concreting her body into the inspection pit of Ron’s swanky new house? Since once of their cold cases is a young girl called Lara Hardie who did disappear in Edinburgh at the time of this manuscript, Karen can’t afford to take any chances.

It must have been very hard to write tension and excitement into a situation where people can’t go far and are largely researching online and in archives. It’s not fast paced activity and I always remember laughing out loud at a moment in one of Dan Brown’s thrillers where his hero tries to make running to the library sound macho and full of action. It could have gone horribly wrong, but somehow Val McDermid brings real tension to the case. That’s without the anxieties of every day life at this very surreal time, which are captured perfectly by the author. She relates to us the strange emptiness of a busy capital city and the difficulty of having to apply the intricacies of COVID legislation to your every movement, even if it’s just looking at papers in a library. Karen is possibly even more impatient in her working life, so there are times to bend the rules a little, but it means she never slips into the slapdash lazy ways of other people who seem to think it’s an excuse to shut down. Her boss ‘the Dog Biscuit’ thinks she could easily stay at home because HCU cases can wait; the case has no urgency, since the main suspect, Jake Stein, will never come to trial. However, maybe because she lost the love of her life to murder, Karen understands that the sooner a victim’s family finds out the truth, the better. This applies whether the suspected killer is alive or not. Besides, despite what the manuscript suggests, she’s not going to pigeon hole the case just yet. Things aren’t always what they seem.

Her relationship with Hamish is proving difficult and not because he’s in the Highlands on his croft. They actually have more problems when they see each other, probably because they shouldn’t be. There’s something about Hamish’s cheerful ability to make money out of other people’s misery that rankles with Karen. He’s angry to find Karen isn’t home in the night, but she’s out walking. Unbeknownst to Hamish, there’s an asylum seeker staying in Karen’s flat after threats were made against his life. It’s a favour for a good friend and Karen is so moved by his situation that she buys him new clothes and stocks the cupboards. We see a side to Hamish we’ve never seen before when he has a confrontation with Daisy after turning up at the flat with no warning and against regulations. This time he threatens Daisy, but on a second illegal visit he becomes violently angry to find this strange man staying in Karen’s flat. When he tries to break the door down Karen is furious: it’s her flat and it’s not Hamish’s place to tell her who can be in it; he has no empathy for the man’s plight and zero understanding of his own privilege. Plus, he shouldn’t be here in the first place. Could this be the end for their relationship? Despite this, the COVID journey that Daisy and Karen have is a lot better than most. They have plenty of room in the flat they’ve borrowed from Hamish and their frustrations are small ones, mainly confined to how difficult it is to investigate a case when every establishment seems to be working to their own idea of the rules. Jason has a truly terrible experience when his mum is hospitalised with the virus, because they can’t see her or reassure her unless the staff organise a FaceTime session. Jason’s brother takes his frustration to the extreme while Jason is just terribly sad and scared for her. The snippets of her small team’s personal lives are more apparent now that their living and working spaces are in one place. Jason is in lockdown with girlfriend Eilidh, but has proximity made their relationship stronger? Daisy has been hiding a secret about her personal life and finds lockdown a difficulty when embarking on a new romance.

Karen’s grief for Phil ebbs and flows, not helped by the extra time she has to overthink. She has to think about whether her relationship with Hamish gives her what she needs. They miss a shared outlook on the world, something she had and lost with Phil. The case didn’t go the way I expected at all, making the last sections really gripping. Karen’s ability to get results in a global pandemic doesn’t surprise me. Where some potential witnesses try to fob her off, using COVID as an excuse, Karen always tries to find a way to stay within the law while still getting the job done. I love seeing her come across petty bureaucracy, it makes me laugh because they have no idea what they’re dealing with if they take on Karen. This is crime fiction at it’s best and I’m now starting back at the beginning with the first novel featuring this interesting and incredibly insightful detective.

Out on 12th October 2023 from Sphere

Meet the Author

Val McDermid is a number one bestseller whose novels have been translated into more than forty languages, and have sold over eighteen million copies. She has won many awards internationally, including the CWA Gold Dagger for best crime novel of the year and the LA Times Book of the Year Award. She was inducted into the ITV3 Crime Thriller Awards Hall of Fame in 2009, was the recipient of the CWA Cartier Diamond Dagger in 2010 and received the Lambda Literary Foundation Pioneer Award in 2011. In 2016, Val received the Outstanding Contribution to Crime Fiction Award at the Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival and in 2017 received the DIVA Literary Prize for Crime, and was elected a Fellow of both the Royal Society of Literature and the Royal Society of Edinburgh. Val has served as a judge for the Women’s Prize for Fiction and the Man Booker Prize, and was Chair of the Wellcome Book Prize in 2017. She is the recipient of six honorary doctorates and is an Honorary Fellow of St Hilda’s College, Oxford. She writes full-time and divides her time between Edinburgh and East Neuk of Fife.

Posted in Random Things Tours

Upstairs at The Beresford by Will Carver

Posted on by thelotusreaders

“The entrance to Hotel Beresford is art deco. Strict lines, geometry and arches showing cubist influence. The monochrome carpet screams elegance as it leads towards the desk that stretches the length of one wall, marble with chrome embellishments. Or, at least, it once looked that way. Back when writers and poets and dignitaries roamed the hallways and foyer. It still feels lavish. Glamorous, even. But faded. And a little old-fashioned.”

Ever since I read The Beresford I’ve been wondering what was going on through the other entrance. The entrance merely hinted at in one of it’s scenes. If what was going on up there was more weird or dangerous than the apartments at the front, I dreaded to think! In my review for the first book I wrote about the Dakota Building in New York City, because my mind kept drifting towards it while reading. It has just the atmosphere for this particular den of iniquity, it has a brooding sense of menace or presence of evil. Yet inside it reminds me of the Chelsea Hotel, a NYC landmark where in the mid Twentieth Century writers, musicals and artists lived. Arthur Miller, Bob Dylan, Arthur C. Clarke, Andy Warhol and Edie Sedgwick all inhabited the hotel in the 1960’s.

“Each floor looks the same yet somehow has its own unique landscape; it’s known for something particular. A celebrity affair. A mysterious death. A legendary party. Rumours that a serial killer crashed there between sprees. Rock stars smashing up rooms. Writers creating their masterpieces. Some is legend, much is true. All is talked about. With fondness, fascination and morbid curiosity.”

The author tells his story through a series of fascinating characters who live or work in the building. A young boy called Otis who lives on the seventh floor with his parents, who are constantly at war. Sam is an angry man who lets everyone feel his displeasure, often taking out his anger on wife Diane and son, Otis. Diane is turning tricks while Sam is at work in order to have an escape fund, often leaving Otis hanging round the building trying to avoid what’s going on. His favourite place to hang out is at their neighbours, but knows his mum would go crazy if she found out. Neighbour Danielle is a jazz singer with a voice so smokey it immediately conjures up exactly the kind of bar that would employ her. She likes to sit on her couch, under the window with one leg dangling out into the street. Along the corridor are the Zhaos, a sweet Chinese couple who also like to dangle out of their window, smoking something a little stronger than Danielle. Then, living in the penthouse on the top floor, is Mr Balliol. He owns the building and has the disconcerting ability to know everything that’s going on in the rooms he rents out and often sidles up to guests and his staff with no warning or sound. His unique staff are working on a business conference which will keep the hotel busy for a couple of days, but today is going to be an unusual day. Many different rumours swirl around the Beresford Hotel, some more fantastical and darker than others. It’s had more than it’s fair share of deaths, some accidental and some less so. Today is going to test the people who dismissed those darker rumours as impossible. Anything is possible at The Beresford Hotel.

“Peeling paint and faded hopes. Much like Carol. Carol seems to age with the building. For every strip of wallpaper that gets ripped or falls away, Carol gets another wrinkle. When the front facade gets uplifted with a new paint job or some detail on the masonry, Carol turns up with a Botoxed forehead or facelift. But not from a reputable surgeon. From somebody she saw advertising in the back of a magazine.”

Of all the characters I was absolutely transfixed by hotel manager Carol who seems like part of the building. She is that wonderful mix of unobtrusive, but yet ever present when needed, that all the best hotel employees have. No one notices the person who quietly sits in her office or on reception, but Carol has an uncanny way of knowing most things that go on in the hotel. She can probably guess at the rest, but doesn’t share Mr Balliol’s seemingly supernatural abilities. She has the world weariness of having seen it all before; most guest’s behaviour is not as unique as they would like to think. So she’s adept at covering up minor indiscretions all the way up to the accidentally dead: the husband who’s beaten his wife for years and finally gets his comeuppance, a solo sex game gone wrong or prostitutes- who end up accidentally dead more than most. Nothing much surprises Carol, even if a business conference does turn into a wild party or bacchanalian orgy. Yet behind the secret door to her inner office we see a softer Carol, perhaps the real woman beneath he hard nosed employee. It’s clear she’s suffered a loss. One guest who has spied Carol’s profile on a website has noticed this crack under the surface:

“He remembers Carol’s profile among the twenty that he settled on. He could see her former beauty, but this isn’t about going deeper than the surface, it isn’t some outreach programme. It isn’t benevolence or sensing someone’s spirit. Danny can see that Carol is broken. And he likes that. She had loved somebody so completely and then they died, and she has never recovered.”

Her soulmate and husband Jake is almost fatally injured in an accident and hasn’t come out of a coma since and as the weeks go on she begins to realise that the Jake she knew and loved was gone. His body was here, but not his mind, and the more time that passes the more it dawns on her that he is going to need help with his most basic human functions – he will have to be fed and piss into a bag for the rest of his life, if it can be called that. In desperation she calls on God, she will do anything if it will save the man she loves. God doesn’t answer. Yet bargaining is her only hope and if God won’t answer ……

Will Carver is one of the most unique writers I’ve ever read and this latest novel is no exception. He understands human nature. Not that all of us are checking into hotels and choking the life out of prostitutes, but he gets the smallest most innocuous and innocent thoughts as well as the darker side of our nature. His narrative voice is conspiratorial, it lets us into every corner of the hotel and also gives us curious little asides about the world we live in. Many of the speeches are recognisable as things we’ve thought and said about the absurdities and horrors of our world.

I loved his insight into writing through the character of I.P. Wyatt who also lives on the seventh floor and is struggling with that difficult second novel after a very successful first. His words are probably self-reflexive – where an author writes their own experience of writing the novel into their novel – although I do hope Carver isn’t applying Wyatt’s method.

“Some days he writes without breathing for hours, others he spits four perfectly formed words onto the page. And each evening, he deletes everything. He can’t stay in love with his words. He had it so perfect. Anything less than that and he will be chewed up by the press and readers and strangers online who just want to vomit vitriol with no personal consequence. Even if he can replicate the quality of that last book, it won’t be that book, that surprise success. And too much time has passed now. It will never live up to the hype. He should have just churned something out quickly. Something that could be torn apart that he wouldn’t care about.”

Carver has taken the age old tale of the Faustian pact and brought it up to date, into the 21st Century where despite all the advances in science and technology there are still terrible events we can’t control. As we all know, especially if we’ve watched Peter Cook and Dudley Moore’s film Bedazzled, making that sort of bargain or deal rarely benefits the desperate petitioner. The brilliance of Carver is that when we think we’ve worked out what’s going on, just like the twelve elite businessmen at their conference find out, a whole new level opens up before us. This is a daring novel, with a deep vein of human emotion at the centre. Yet it’s also playful, thrilling and dangerously dark indeed. If you’re not convinced by me then I’ll let Carver persuade you in his own words.

“When you watch a television soap opera, things are hyperreal. It’s unfathomable to have that many murderers and fraudsters and adulterers living on one street as part of one of three largely incestuous families. Life isn’t like that. Things don’t happen in that way. Hotel Beresford makes television soap operas look like a four-hour Scandinavian documentary about certified tax accountancy.”

Published 9th November 2023 by Orenda Books

Meet the Author

Will Carver is the international bestselling author of the January David series and the critically acclaimed, mind-blowingly original Detective Pace series, which includes Good Samaritans (2018), Nothing Important Happened Today (2019) and Hinton Hollow Death Trip (2020), all of which were ebook bestsellers and selected as books of the year in the mainstream international press. Nothing Important Happened Today was longlisted for both the Goldsboro Books Glass Bell Award 2020 and the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year Award. Hinton Hollow Death Trip was longlisted for Guardian’s Not the Booker Prize, and was followed by four standalone literary thrillers, The Beresford, Psychopaths Anonymous, The Daves Next Door and Suicide Thursday. Will spent his early years in Germany, but returned to the UK at age eleven, when his sporting career took off. He currently runs his own fitness and nutrition company, and lives in Reading with his children.

THE BERESFORD is currently in development for TV.

If you would like to get in contact, I can usually be found on TWITTER/X @will_carver but who knows how long that will last..?

You could always check out my website where you can join the MAILING LIST to stay updated with deals and competitions and which EVENTS I will be attending throughout the year. (There are also many hidden easter eggs within the site, just as there are in my books. Feel free to click around and see what you find.)

Recently, I have also become a podcaster and present the LET’S GET LIT podcast with fellow writer SJ Watson, where we discuss books and writing each week while sharing a drink. (Find us wherever you get your podcasts from.)

Oh, and just in case TWITTER implodes, I can also be found here…

FACEBOOK – @WillCarverAuthor

INSTAGRAM/THREADS – @will_carver

BLUE SKY – @willcarver

Posted in Throwback Thursday

The Signature of All Things by Elizabeth Gilbert

Posted on by thelotusreaders

‘Holding her robust infant, Beatrix murmured a prayer in her native Dutch. She prayed that her daughter would grow up to be healthy and sensible and intelligent, and would never form associations with overly powdered girls, or laugh at vulgar stories, or sit at gaming tables with careless men, or read French novels, or behave in a manner suited only to a savage Indian, or in any way whatsoever become the worst sort of discredit to a good family; namely, that she not grow up to be een onnozelaar, a simpleton. Thus concluded her blessing — or what constitutes a blessing, from so austere a woman as Beatrix Whittaker.’

Some people didn’t know Liz Gilbert until the film ‘Eat, Pray, Love’ came out, in fact I was surprised to learn how many people hadn’t known about or read the book. I’d really enjoyed the book and found the film ok, but thought it didn’t dwell enough on the psychological and spiritual aspects of her journey. It had a mixed reception at my book club where some really identified with her character, but others were screaming how lucky she was to have a publisher willing to fund her trip of a lifetime during her divorce as many have to continue getting the kids to school, going to work and only having the millisecond before sleep hit them to have anything resembling a spiritual or self-aware thought. I’d not expected the anger and jealousy that it evoked in some readers. So it was with trepidation that I approached her novel The Signature of all Things. If I’m honest I probably wouldn’t have sought it out, but I was in one of my favourite bookshops while on holiday in Wales and I saw it in the second hand section. It was such a beautiful book that I had to buy it and I flicked through it back at the holiday cottage, then was sucked in very quickly and all my planned reading went out of the window. I was stunned to be sailed around the globe from London to Amsterdam, Peru and Tahiti. Even more exciting was the heroine, Alma Whittaker, daughter of a famous explorer, plant hunter and botanist. I was drawn to her intelligence, her busy mind, her assertion that she is the equal of any man and the depths of her feelings.

The book begins be setting up Alma’s early life and family situation, so we meet her father and his beginnings in botany as a boy apprentice to a plant hunter- actually a punishment for some very sneaky thefts from Kew Gardens. His incredibly enterprising ideas mean that by the time Alma is born he is a very rich man, with a mansion in Philadelphia. His fortune has been made in the quinine trade, a medicine extracted from the Cinchona tree found in Peru then traded and grown around the world to produce a drug for malaria. At his home, White Acre, he and his wife have two daughters: Prudence their adopted daughter who follows an extraordinary path into abolitionism and Alma. Alma is a tall, large-boned girl who is described as ‘homely’, but is intelligent, determined and secretly contains well pools of sexual curiosity, all qualities that seem unusual for her gender in this time period. Her father’s belief that all people should be given the opportunities that enable them to manage others and excel in their own chosen field governs the household. ‘All’ really does mean all in William’s case and his daughters are given a thorough education at home, rivalling any man. Both he and his Dutch born wife are clearly progressives and Alma flourishes with the opportunities they give her to become a very accomplished botanist in her own right and perfectly able to develop her own projects and command the voyages necessary to hunt for the plant she has set her heart on. Unexpectedly, at an age when scholarly spinsterhood is expected to be her path, a painter visits White Acre and Alma falls deeply in love. This painter believes Joseph Boehme’s philosophy that all of nature contains a divine code, every flower and every creature – such as the Fibonacci sequence. Their two interests combine and while Ambrose is a utopian artist, often found to be painting orchids rather than studying them in a lab, they do have the same passion for nature. Where he saw life as divine and a guardian angel watching over him, Alma saw a life as a struggle where only the fittest survived, something she found out for herself when exploring:

“Then — in the seconds that remained before it would have been too late to reverse course at all — Alma suddenly knew something. She knew it with every scrap of her being, and it was not a negotiable bit of information: she knew that she, the daughter of Henry and Beatrix Whittaker, had not been put on this earth to drown in five feet of water. She also knew this: if she had to kill somebody in order to save her own life, she would do so unhesitatingly. Lastly, she knew one other thing, and this was the most important realization of all: she knew that the world was plainly divided into those who fought an unrelenting battle to live, and those who surrendered and died.“

Of course, this love is not the end of Alma’s story. Liz Gilbert isn’t going to let a man eclipse Alma or create a sappy rom-com ending to such a strong, feminist story. Alma and Ambrose represent two great schools of thought in the 19th Century, that of the spiritual and the scientific. These two schools of thought had equal status and often intermingled to this point, but as the century progressed a complete separation occurred where spirituality became a belief without reason and science became fact without a divine sense of wonder. Could the common ground that Ambrose and Alma thrive upon at first, survive the divide between their two disciplines? Make no mistake though, Alma is the protagonist here and she’s one of my favourite characters ever. I loved her drive (sadly lacking in this writer) and her preservation of it, no matter what. She can speak five languages at five years old! Oh and two dead ones. Her educational achievements aside, it was her confidence and self-belief that stood out to me. Yet here we are two centuries later in a crisis of confidence, with an epidemic of imposter syndrome and doubts about how to be women. Alma is wholly herself, even when at times that might seem steely, reserved and abrupt. She believes that everyone is the master of their own self, including women. It is sad that the introduction of Prudence to their family is the catalyst for Alma experiencing negative self- thoughts. She wishes to keep Prudence, who has been staying with the Whittakers since a family tragedy, but her presence is an opportunity for comparison – the ultimate thief of joy. Alma realises for the first time that she is not beautiful. She retreats into her work at moments of doubt or unhappiness, even extreme heartbreak and loss. It is her refuge and the one area of life that she can control and that she continues to be confident in. I truly admire her ability to continue. To live.

The research that Liz Gilbert must have undertaken for the verisimilitude of this novel is colossal. She writes with a 19th Century sensibility, keeping Alma completely grounded in her place and time. The first rule of creative writing – show, don’t tell – is so strongly in place that I felt like I was with Alma, only seeing or hearing things at the same moment she does. This brings such an immediacy to the novel that it gallops on at quite a right, especially considering this is the story of a 19th Century dowdy and academic spinster. It’s a book that a lot of people might not consider reading from the blurb, which is why it needs to be highlighted in this way. It ranges across biology, exploring, business, philosophy, science, the mystical and yes, the sexual. There are secrets kept all the way to the end that I really didn’t expect at all. I have to say that my favourite review of this book is a negative one. Mainly because it made me laugh out loud, but also because it unwittingly makes you want to read it.

“I was actually enjoying this and then at 49% a spinster has a spontaneous orgasm from holding hands with a dude in a closet.”

left by Goodreads Member, Sylvia, October 2nd 2015

I don’t know about you, but I’d want to read that book!

Meet the Author

Elizabeth Gilbert is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Eat, Pray, Love, as well as the short story collection, Pilgrims—a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award, and winner of the 1999 John C. Zacharis First Book Award from Ploughshares. A Pushcart Prize winner and National Magazine Award-nominated journalist, she works as writer-at-large for GQ. Her journalism has been published in Harper’s Bazaar, Spin, and The New York Times Magazine, and her stories have appeared in Esquire, Story, and the Paris Review.

Posted in Netgalley

The Island of Longing by Anne Griffin

Posted on by thelotusreaders

One unremarkable afternoon, Rosie watched her daughter Saoirse cycle into town, expecting to hear the slam of the door when she returned a few hours later.

But the slam never came.

Eight years on, Rosie is the only person who believes that her child might one day return home. Will this belief come at the cost of everything she has left?

My previous work in mental health and my counselling training always lead me towards books that either portray dramatic life events or feature characters that are deep and three dimensional, with a flourishing inner life. Anne Griffin delivers this and more, so I was interested to read her latest novel because it goes into the character’s reactions to a highly dramatic and distressing event. The worst thing that can happen to a parent is to lose their child and this happens to Rosie. Her daughter, Saoirse Dunne, disappeared eight years ago and since then she has been unable to think straight or get on with life. Her heart and spirit are broken, So she heads back home, an island off the coast of Cork. There she’s hoping to find solace and some sort of healing from the natural world around her and the community she knows on the island. She and her husband Hugh have grieved differently over the last eight years, the loss has slowly separated them emotionally and now they continue to need different things. When we see a comparison of their relationship, before and after their daughter’s disappearance, the difference is stark.

Rosie still holds on to the belief that Saoirse might return and she isn’t ready to let go of this. She’s also taking her son Cullie with her and they share so those questions many people ask in grief – ‘what if I’d just…’ and ‘if only I had …’. There’s a sense of survivor’s guilt in these thoughts and I was hoping that they would both find some peace too. Rosie’s decision to return home to where she grew up and even her old work operating the ferry to the mainland, could be seen as a way of cutting out the most painful part of my life and returning to a time when life was more simple. When she’s operating the ferry she feels closer to her daughter than she has in a long while. Of course this gives her solace, but it’s also a barrier to her accepting reality.

I really enjoyed the sense of place created by the author and it’s meaning in the novel. I could visualise Roaring Bay Island completely and the surrounding sea even feels soothing. It’s a refuge, but only for the summer. I worried that after this idyllic interlude in her grief, going back to reality would be a terrible shock. The author acknowledges this, writing that it’s merely a chance to ‘step out of the world for a while’. I loved the freedom she feels while piloting the ferry, with the rocking motion of the waves like a cradle. It was wonderful to witness the kindness and thoughtfulness of the people on the island too. Is this something she isn’t getting in her current home. The place where Saoirse is still missing.

The author keeps Saoirse’s disappearance at the heart of the novel and the family’s experience of loss and pain is devastating but beautifully done. I have experienced loss and this was so raw and real, with incredibly authentic dialogue. I did feel tears coming here and there because Rosie’s feelings were so close to my own. It gives the reader a window into an experience they hope never to share. Please don’t be put off though, there are moments of lightness in the community, they really are an example of humanity at it’s best. There’s also such resilience in the characters, in the face of a loss that is unthinkable. When she returns from the island, she’s moved forward emotionally and Dublin feels like a dark place. It feels like the past. I loved the author’s addition of a sentence from Saoirse, on it’s own page and in a larger font. This lets us get to know Saoirse a little. It also seems to amplify that feeling that she’s gone, yet always there for those who love her. I won’t say this is an easy read. In fact some people may be uncomfortable witnessing the family’s grief. If people do push through that, they’ll gain an understanding of a universal human experience. We all experience loss. For people like me who have had their lives, like Rosie’s, divided into a before and after, this type of emotionally literate writing is a God send. A comfort and a reminder that we’re not alone.

Meet the Author

I’m the international bestselling author of three books: ‘The Island of Longing’, 2023, ‘When All Is Said’, 2019, and ‘Listening Still’, 2021.

I’ve been published all over the world, from the UK to the US and from Taiwan to Lithuania. It has been published in twenty-five territories. In 2019, I was honoured to be awarded Newcomer of the Year at the Irish Book Awards.

To me, writing is all about great storytelling and I hope you find that within the pages of my books, from Maurice Hannigan in ‘When All Is Said’ who sits to the bar of his local hotel to raise five toasts to the five most important people in his life, to Jeanie Masterson in ‘Listening Still’ who is struggling under the weight of obligation to the family funeral directors, and to Rosie Driscoll trying to find her daughter Saoirse who has been missing for eight years.

Thanks so much for all of the great support.

From Anne Griffin’s Amazon Author Page 1/11/23

Posted in Monthly Wrap Up

Best Reads October 2023

Posted on by thelotusreaders

October has continued to be a quieter reading month as I’m still recovering from a relapse that started last month. I’ve not taken part in blog tours and mainly have picked and choose what I’ve read from my TBR book trolley and my pile that lives next to me in the bedroom. It’s been an eclectic mix and I’m even starting to pick up the odd non-fiction book too. I’ve enjoyed most things I’ve read but these six really are the cream of the crop.

This latest novel from C.J. Cooke was originally a NetGalley choice but I bought it as well, because I like a finished copy when I’ve enjoyed a book and I’ve bought her last three models without worrying about trying it first. They’re always good. This one was exceptional and all based on board the Arctic whaling boat the Ormen. In the present day it’s a shipwreck just off an isolated part of Iceland and about to be moved out to deeper water and sunk. We follow Dom, who is try to document the ship before it is disappears forever, but I had so many questions about why she’d chosen to do this alone. Not long after a group of three explorers also turn up to document the boat and they join Dom, living on the Ormen and measuring sounds, distances and filming their attempts at Parkour. Then we’re sent over 100 years into the past and a different voyage for the Ormen, a whaling expedition with an unusual addition on the ship. Nicky wakes as the ship is moving and soon realises she has a severely broken ankle with an open wound. She has no recollection of coming aboard, but does remember being in the park and bundled into a sack. For some reason she has been taken from her home and family by one of these rough and ready crewmen. She hopes the captain will free her, but when he refers to her as the crew’s Selkie wife she knows what she’s here for. If Nicky wants to live and return to her family, she will spend the voyage ‘entertaining’ the men in her cabin. Nicky resigns herself to her fate, but not to the strange thing that’s happening to her injured leg. Where the leg is healing, instead of soft warm skin covering the wound Nicky can see a sleek silver grey skin, almost like that of a seal. This is a brilliant bit of historical fiction and a great ghost story too. The setting is eerie and unsettling, Nicky’s voyage is horrifying and the explorers become very on edge with their situation and each other. Unputdownable!

The Hidden Years is another dual timeline narrative, set in a large mansion in Cornwall both in the 1960’s and the war years. We start with Belle who is at university in the 1960’s when she meets Gray and falls head over heels in love. Gray invites her to Silverwood, a community where self sufficiency and creativity are a way of life. Gray wants to work on his music and he wants to take Belle down to Helford, Cornwall with him. Once there, Belle experiences a different way of living but also befriends a lady in a nearby cottage who inexplicably seems to recognise her. We then go back to the 1940’s a girl called Imogen taking two boys down to their school in Cornwall, where she’s offered a temporary job as matron in the dormitory. She has a friendship with one of the teachers Ned, but there’s a spark of attraction with another school master too. When Imogen starts to volunteer as a nurse for the war effort, her relationships with these two men will cause heartache and shape her life. I loved the way she writes about how war shapes the future of these young people and how far reaching it’s influence is. This is a great read, full of period detail and local history with a central mystery you’ll want to uncover.

Alice Hoffman’s new novel The Invisible Hour is a mixture of historical fact and magic realism, including one of America’s most famous writers, Nathaniel Hawthorne. Hoffman’s book uses Hawthorne’s book The Scarlet Letter as a basis for her story which starts with a young girl called Ivy who becomes pregnant while still a teenager. Her rich, Boston, family are horrified and reject her pleas for help, so Ivy leaves home. With the help of a friend she makes her way to a community in Massachusetts that has a very charismatic leader. Joel has been left land by his first wife and has built a religious community that makes its money from the apple orchards they harvest. By the time Ivy’s father has sent out a private investigator to find her, she is married to Joel and has a small daughter, Mia. In a separate timeline we meet a teenage Mia who is finding the restrictions of their community too hard to cope with. She has already found a way to sneak into the library and enjoy the books banned by Joel. When tragedy strikes at the farm, Mia takes a chance and runs with the help of the librarian. However, Joel isn’t very good at letting things go and Mia has left with a painting, with a very important inscription on the back. There’s jeopardy and tension all the way, but of course Alice Hoffman brings in some romance and a sprinkle of magic as Mia steps outside her time and meets Nathaniel Hawthorne. This was a feminist take on the themes of The Scarlet Letter, with a strong defence of women across history and an even stronger defence of the written word.

This was a real return to form for the Strike novels after the complex and internet based case at the centre of the last book. Here Strike is running several cases, but the main investigation is of a religious organisation not unlike Scientology in it’s methods. A peer of the realm asks Robin and Strike to find his son, who has been part of the church for a number of years. They have been trying to let him know that his mother was terminally ill and would like to see him, unfortunately she has now died and he believes that the church haven’t given him their letters. We’re taken to the church’s farm and retreat in Norfolk, known as the Chapman Farm. With most of their operatives already on cases it’s Robin who volunteers to be a new recruit, offering to visit services at their London temple. Strike worries, but from Robin’s point of view as an equal partner she has the right to make these choices. However, knowing Robin’s previous trauma I was worried that the church would target and manipulate her. They agree she will identify a place on the farm’s perimeter to leave them a note each week under a rock. That way if she wants to come out, they will know. The farm sections are tense, disturbing and kept me turning the pages – no mean feat in a book of this size. As always the feelings these two have for each other will threaten to break the surface and as Robin finds herself in danger will this be the time they are honest with each other? This was a great investigation and a definite step up from the last novel in the series.

This is the third novel from Alix E. Harrow and she became a ‘must-buy’ author for me after her last. Consequently, I ended up with three copies of this after forgetting I’d ordered it and getting a copy from the publisher. We’re in the town of Eden, Kentucky, a place where industry dominates the job market and the Graveley’s power plant is the destination of most young men who stay put. Opal doesn’t want that for her brother Jasper, who she’s been looking after since she was twelve and their mother drowned in an accident. The brother and sister live in a motel room, exist on food that doesn’t need cooking and live hand to mouth. Opal has two cleaning jobs, but isn’t spending their money on their day to day expenses, or on herself. She has seen potential in Jasper and she wants him to get a proper education. Her savings are all for him to attend a private academy where he’ll flourish and be able to leave Eden. However, Opal is attracted to Starling House. She passes on her way between jobs each day and although it’s barely visible from the road, there is one light that glows in an attic room and there’s the gates, sinuous ironwork that almost looks alive. One night she stands at the gate and places her hands on the curls of the ironwork. Immediately, she feels wetness and realises her hand is cut, but on what? When she looks up, a tall, dark wild looking man has appeared in front of her with a sword. He’s magnetic and as they stare into each other’s eyes he says one word – ‘Run’. Opal doesn’t need telling twice, but will she be able to stay away? Especially when the house wants her. … A love story of swords and thorns rather than hearts and flowers, this is a perfect dark fantasy for autumn.

Val McDermid is one of my reading oversights, so I was thrilled when her latest Karen Pirie novel was chosen for one of our Squad Pod reads. We were also sent Still Life, to catch up with the story and I can now see why Val is the Queen of Crime. Karen Pirie is in charge of a cold case unit, but this case begins with a new body being pulled from the Firth of Forth. The dead man has been living in France under an alias, but strangely his artist brother went missing a few years before and is in Karen’s cold case files. Surely the two disappearances are related? I loved Karen because she’s so determined, meticulous in gathering every detail and not above getting her hands dirty. They follow the dead man’s movements during his Scottish visit and think he had a lead on his brother’s disappearance. Meanwhile, her sergeant Jason is following leads on a skeleton found in a camper van, within the garage of a rented house. Two women lived there, but the team can’t be sure at first who they body is and which woman is on the run. They have a lead to the north west of England where one of the women has lived in an art collective. So, on her own travels to France, then Ireland Karen has the help of a young recruit called Daisy. The story took us into interesting places, including Westminster and the Scottish office and how they choose their art from the National collections. I was also touched by the sensitivity Val brought to Karen’s personal life and her new relationship with Hamish, while still grieving for Phil – a fellow police officer and the man she loved. The cases are fascinating, but so is Karen and there are so many reasons to keep turning the pages. I was so sucked in by this that I read the next one straight away and then went back to the first in the series! I’m so excited to have all of Val’s back catalogue to read.

So that’s been October. Here’s what I’m hoping to read in November.

Posted in Sunday Spotlight

Book Scenes That Gave Me Nightmares

Posted on by thelotusreaders
A Halloween surprise

It by Stephen King. There are a lot of problems with this book, mostly the fact that his villain, Pennywise the Clown, is way more terrifying than the ‘It’ eventually encountered by the gang underground. I don’t think reading It started my clown phobia, but reading it as an impressionable teen certainly didn’t help. Now I’m terrified of anything that doesn’t show it’s real face, so masks, hoods, and make up always send a shiver up my spine. The scariest scene has to be when little Georgie Denborough, in his yellow Macintosh and hat, goes outside in the rain to play with his paper boat. The boat slips into the gutter and is washed into the storm drain. As Georgie approaches the drain he can see red tufted hair and floating balloons. They float, says Pennywise the clown. This clown has teeth and as Georgie reaches into the drain for a balloon he loses his arm. They all float down here.

The Turn of the Screw by Henry James. This is a distinctly odd book, with no real answers or clarity about what is happening at Bly. Are there real ghosts at the house with malicious intent? Is it the children, Flora and Miles, who are possessed by demons or just evil and manipulative towards their governess? Is the governess mad, hallucinating the ghosts of Bly’s former employees and terrifying the children? I definitely err on the side of the children being the problem, they are far too knowing and precocious for their years. It may be that the children have been affected by their time with previous employees Peter Quint and the last governess. Whichever it is the two children make me shiver and the final scene where Peter Quint appears at the window to the governess is doubly scary because we don’t know if they can both see him, or just the governess. As Miles falls down dead I wondered whether their aim to send the governess mad has worked and backfired spectacularly. Henry James plays with the Victorian ideal of childhood innocence and that’s what makes it so creepy, the thought that we might be in danger from those we consider vulnerable and incapable of evil is incredibly subversive.

Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë. Wuthering Heights is a story narrated by the family servant Nelly Dean, as told to a visitor to the farm, one of Heathcliff’s new tenants called Mr Lockwood. The weather worsens dramatically during his visit and as night falls it is clear that it’s unsafe to travel on horseback and he must stay. Heathcliff begrudgingly gives Lockwood a bed for the night, an old oak bed set under a window that overlooks the Moors. He wakes in the night, disoriented and disturbed by a tapping at the window. It is merely a branch and he concludes that he has been dreaming, influenced by Nelly’s tragic story of Catherine Earnshaw. He cannot unfasten the window, then resorts to breaking the glass to grasp the branch. The moment he reaches out to grab the branch but instead grabs an ‘ice-cold hand’ never fails to lift the hairs on the back of your neck. As he sees her white little face through the window he tries to pull his hand away but she won’t let go, begging him to let her in as she has lost her way on the moor. His solution is to grind the child’s wrist across the broken glass of the window until blood runs onto the bedclothes. This scene ensured that for my whole childhood I closed the curtains of any room I was in as soon as it was dark.

The Watchers by A.M. Shine. There’s so much to love in A.M.Shine’s debut novel, but one scene stands out for me, leaving me unsettled and unable to sleep. Set in rural Ireland, our heroine Mina is stranded in the middle of nowhere after her car breaks down as she does a strange favour for a friend. As sets off on a walk towards civilisation, she takes a wrong turn and ends up in the woods. The trees seem never ending and as afternoon starts to move towards dusk she has a strange sense of being watched. An unusual screeching noise unnerves her as she reaches a clearing and sees a woman shouting, urging Mina to run to a concrete bunker. As the door slams behind her, the building is besieged by screams. Mina finds herself in a room with a wall of glass, and an electric light that activates at nightfall, when the Watchers come above ground. These creatures emerge to observe their captive humans and terrible things will happen to anyone who doesn’t reach the bunker in time. This opening scene is so tense that when she reaches safety there’s a moment of relief, but only a moment. As the light comes on we realise that the glass window is full of creatures, staring in at their prey. I think the fact we never fully see a watcher makes it scarier as our imagination fills in the blanks. There is a twist to the ending that I can’t reveal, but I assure you it’s just as terrifying.

Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia. I loved this brilliant horror novel that explores colonialism, feminism and eugenics as well as being downright scary. Noemi is a guest at High Place, wanting to spend time with her friend Catalina who has married into the wealthy Doyle family. Yet all is not well in the Doyle household. Noemi finds her time with her friend is very tightly controlled because Catalina has succumbed to a mystery illness. The family patriarch spouts his vile views on race and eugenics at the dinner table and what is going on with the mushroom wallpaper? It was Noemi’s strange dreams that I found most terrifying: she wanders the house covered with spores, has deeply sexual encounters with her friend’s husband and is haunted by a woman with a golden glow for a face who tries to communicate despite not having a mouth. However, nothing is more terrifying than coming face to face with the reality of the patriarch’s existence. Just as Noemi dreamed of the house becoming a mass of sores, his body is rotting to the touch. We are faced with blood, pus, bile and many other grotesque images, but even worse for Noemi there’s a threat of sexual violence culminating in the sort of kiss she really didn’t want. This made me physically retch! Oh, and you’ll be put off mushrooms for a little while.

Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier. I would argue that Daphne Du Maurier’s classic thriller is a ghost story, in fact in some ways both the women married to Maxim De Winter are haunting his home Manderley. Rebecca is dead, killed in a sailing accident, but her presence is still very much alive in the mansion: the west wing upstairs is off limits, still set up as her bedroom complete with her nightclothes laid out on the bed; her correspondence and address book is still out on her desk in the morning room with a huge ‘R’ on the cover; she even inhabits the cottage on the beach that her dog Jasper escapes whenever he can. The new Mrs De Winter is lost in this grand stately home and simply wanders to whichever room the servants direct her, servants who are still following the Rebecca’s routine. She doesn’t even have a name. However, the scariest part of Manderley is Rebecca’s servant Mrs Danvers installed as housekeeper after the to move to Maxim’s Cornish home. Described as wearing a long black dress, with gaunt features and deep set eyes that made her look like a skull she seems to slip between room silently, always seeing precisely the moments that the young Mrs De Winter would rather she didn’t. She encourages her new mistress to hold a costume ball like the old days and as an extra favour she suggests that she copies a costume from an ancestral painting on the stairs, not mentioning that Rebecca wore the same costume at the last ball. When Maxim first glimpses his wife on the stairs he thinks for a dreadful moment it is his dead wife and he is unnecessarily harsh. As she flees to the banned West Wing, Mrs Danvers torments her with Rebecca’s flimsy nightwear and the details of their routine. Her voice is hypnotic as she urges her new mistress to open the window to lean out for some air. The suspense as she tells her to jump, that she’s no use, she’s not loved and Maxim will always love Rebecca. A well timed shout and flare from a ship in distress are the only things that save her. This is the moment we know what this terrifyingly obsessed woman is capable of. Is Rebecca working through her, was she in love with her mistress, or was she simple unable to accept her death? Either way she is deadly dangerous and very creepy indeed.

Shining by Stephen King. We’re back to King now, the ultimate horror writer and one of my favourite novels in his back catalogue. Everything about this book is creepy, from the wasp’s nest to the twins in the corridor, but there’s one scene that puts the fear into me and that’s the woman in room 217. Jack Torrance has been slowly sinking into his alcoholism ever since his family arrived at The Overlook Hotel and his son Danny has been exploring the place, often unchecked since they’re so isolated they know there’s no one else around. The problem is that Danny has the ability to see things his parents can’t and while they’re sure no people are around, they can’t say the same about dead people. In a scene that’s written so well I can feel Danny’s terror, he makes his way into room 217 and notices the curtain drawn around the bathtub. As he pulls the curtain back, hoping his parents have left a surprise for him, he is horrified to see the grey, lifeless flesh of a woman. Except she’s not so lifeless. As Danny desperately tries to exit the room he hears the sound of her body slipping and sucking over the side of the bath. Her squelching footsteps as she chases him. Obviously King writes so much better than me, so when I first read this scene my heart was hammering in my chest so hard! I felt sick. Ever since, if I enter a bathroom and the shower curtain is pulled across my mind immediately goes back to this scene and I do feel a little unnerved.

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley ‘It was already one in the morning; the rain pattered dismally against the panes, and my candle was nearly burnt out, when, by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs.’ The various film adaptations of Frankenstein rarely do justice to the true horror of Mary Shelley’s words. I must admit that the 1990’s Kenneth Branagh version made me vomit, quite literally, into my popcorn bucket! Not a great look for a date, but there we are. That was about the way the creature slipped out of the bath of fluid he’d been kept it. It’s hard to describe but I have a horrible revulsion towards snotty egg whites and this was like a bath full of them and a naked Robert de Niro was sliding about in them like Bambi on a frozen pond. The sound was enough to induce retching and I’ve never been able to watch it without that reaction. The original words though strike fear into me, the sheer horror of what he’s created and the realisation that he’s concentrated all his efforts into achieving life, without once thinking what would happen next. The dull yellow eye feels reptilian to me and that fear of what exactly this creature is swirls around the mind.

Changeling by Matt Wesolowski. This book really did get under my skin, possibly not helped by reading it in an unfamiliar and remote house where we were on holiday, not a million miles away from the forest in question. This starts as a missing child case, when Sorrel Marsden stops his car in a lay-by on the Wentshire Forest Pass on the Welsh Borders. As he investigates under the bonnet, hoping to find the cause of a strange knocking noise he has heard in the engine, he leaves son Alfie in his car seat. Minutes later, when he closes the bonnet, he glances up to see Alfie and finds him gone. He is never found. Scott King fronts a true crime podcast, a new one explored in each book of Wesolowski’s Six Stories series. Usually, the cases that Scott explores have a supernatural element and that’s definitely he case here, with the forest seemingly a hot spot for unusual unexplained noises, glitches in machinery and possible fairy sightings. However, room is also left for a more human explanation and it was the human aspects that really chilled here. A trainee teacher and her journals and reports form part of his investigation and her research into Child A takes on a sinister significance. She records a time when she was supervising the child alone and his lack of communication is a little unnerving. Then she starts to hear noises, strange knockings that she assumes are Child A banging under the desk. However, he isn’t moving. Then she hears muttering, as if he is talking under his breath to someone or taking instructions. Yet he is utterly still, eyes completely blank as if he has tuned out or is tuned in to something else. This scene did make me shiver. I didn’t know what scared me more: a child possessed or used as a conduit for something supernatural or a child that’s rather too knowing, deliberately setting out to unnerve their teacher.

The Ghost Woods by C.J. Cooke. We’re back in the gothic territory of monstrous births in this novel from C.J. Cooke and I loved the strange mix of the horrors of nature with the supernatural. In a room where he keeps his favourite specimens, Mr Whitlock has a wasp that’s been taken over by a fungus. The life cycle starts when the creature breathes in the spores, but then they slowly grow inside the insect until it bursts out of their body. It feels like there may be parallels here, especially for resident Mabel who is expecting a ghost baby. When our heroine Pearl arrives, this mini example of a parasitic fungus is overshadowed by the incredible fungal takeover in the west wing. Despite being closed off, she finds spores growing and multiplying on the outer stairs. Will it eventually take over the whole of Lichen Hall? There is a creeping sense of dread about the girl’s pregnancies because they do seem monstrous in their movements as seeing a tiny feet stretch out the skin of their abdomens. Mabel’s boy is beautiful, but its not long before she notices the strange lights appearing from under his skin. What do they signify? Is this the legacy of the ghosts? The atmosphere feels isolated and wild, but weirdly suffocating and claustrophobic at the same time. Everything builds slowly, keeping you on edge, but for sheer heart stopping terror it’s when walking outside in the woods that a shadowy figure awaits. I realised I was holding my breath when one of the girls fell trying to escape this creature and it grabbed her leg. In the seconds before she kicked it away she felt it’s purpose very clearly, a terrible intention to get ‘inside’ her skin.

New Spooky Recommendations

New releases to check out are Alix E. Harrow’s new novel Starling House from Tor Books out on November 1st and The Haunting in the Arctic by C.J.Cooke which is out now from Harper Collins.

Posted in Netgalley

Lady McBethad by Isabelle Schumer

Posted on by thelotusreaders

I was first introduced to Macbeth thanks to my crush on Sean Bean. I was living in Milton Keynes at the time and studying for my English Lit degree. We knew that Macbeth was coming in our final year and when we found out that Sean Bean would be playing the title role at our local theatre we had to see it. It was a production that had some unusual choices, but an incredibly clever banquet scene that has stayed with me. However, it was the more recent Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard film that I found absolutely spellbinding and moving in it’s depiction of Macbeth and his wife as two grieving parents. It gave some context to their actions in the play, particularly Lady Macbeth who is often depicted as a power hungry harpy who coerces her husband into a violent act that he’s unable to live with. I’ve always thought Lady Macbeth was done a disservice, depicted rather like Eve in the garden of Eden as a woman dissatisfied with her lot who convinces her husband to eat apples from the only tree God expressly told them not to touch. According to most dramatists she’s greedy, dissatisfied and power hungry. She was ripe for a rewrite and here it is in Lady Macbethad.

Gruoch has druid heritage and her grandmother prophesied that she would be Queen of Alba. She believes in this prophecy and will try her best to fulfil it. She was born the daughter of a King, even though her father has now been ousted. Her heart and desires are with Macbeth but she is the betrothed of Duncan, the heir elect and marriage to him should enable her to fulfil her destiny. Yet life at court comes with it’s difficulties, it’s lonely and uneasy to know every woman at court would do anything to be in her position. He coronation approaches, with the women keeping her at a distance and giving her the cold shoulder. An unexpected turn of events tears her plans apart and she’s forced to run for her life and leave her ambitions for the crown behind. Now she must fight just to survive, never mind the crown.

This was a really interesting take on the tale of Macbeth and a woman whose motivations are always unclear. There’s a feel of Eve about her, it is Macbeth who wields the knife yet in many depictions I’ve seen, the emphasis is on Lady Macbeth as the instigator of the killings. The evil temptress whispering in the blameless man’s ear. I was intrigued by a retelling of the story, based on a real woman who did marry a man called Macbethad who became the king of Scotland. The book starts as a fiction about Gruoch, but becomes an origin story for the character of Lady Macbeth. I thought these two women were brought together well, creating one character. She does have aspects of character that Shakespeare establishes in the play, becoming a scheming, power hungry woman. She’s also rather paranoid and even violent in her own right. However, whereas in the play we don’t know why she is this way, here we get her back story and have an opportunity to understand her a little better. Even if we don’t necessarily like her.

Macbethad seemed to be more balanced and measured in character. He stands out for this, which seems an irony when I expected to respond to Gruoch more sympathetically. There are other characters in the book based on real people from history, covering their family allegiances and their conflicts. I think it’s so difficult to marry historical facts with a fictional story in this way and I was impressed with the author’s attention to detail. She sets the book firmly in it’s Scottish setting by using Scottish Gaelic, as well as the stories and folklore of the area. She brought to life the conflict between the established pagan traditions and the growing practice of Christianity, something I found really interesting. Her descriptions of the place felt vibrant and alive, I could actually see it. She is equally vivid when it comes to the more brutal aspects of the story. There were parts of this book that I enjoyed immensely and I would definitely recommend it to those interesting in historical fiction and Shakespeare.

Meet the Author

Isabelle Schuler is a Swiss Hawaiian-American actress, writer and former Waterstones bookseller. She has a BA in Journalism and her screenplayQueen Hereafter was longlisted by the Thousand Films Screenwriting Competition in 2019. In 2020, Schuler adapted Queen Hereafter into her debut novel, Lady MacBethad. She lives in Hertfordshire.