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Posted in Netgalley

Sleeping Dogs by Russ Thomas

Posted on by thelotusreaders

It’s a very brave author who spends three novels establishing a fascinating and complex character, then chooses to leave him out of the fourth novel in the series. We’re back in Sheffield where Adam Tyler is searching an old cinema when he’s hit from behind and falls from a high gantry. He reaches the Northern General in a coma and the strange thing is that his team have no idea what he was investigating. None of their current cold cases even mention the place, but it’s not unusual for Tyler to investigate an avenue of enquiry alone. As Tyler clings onto life, with his old boss Diane by his side, we follow DC Mina Rabbani as she tries to cover the CCRU’s open cases, while surreptitiously looking into Tyler’s movements and locking horns with DC Doggett who is the official investigator of Tyler’s attempted murder. Meanwhile, at an artist’s event, Mina meets an awkward young woman called Ruth. She also stands out in this group of yummy mummies who’ve been taking a pottery class. She suggests they meet for coffee and Mina agrees half-heartedly, knowing it’s likely her job will prevent it from going ahead. As Mina and Doggett find a barely literate note, written in Sheffield dialect on Tyler’s desk they’re sure that this is what he’s been chasing. The note is a strange confession to a potential murder, but holds none of the details that might give them something to work with. More to the point, what is it about this note that made Tyler keep it to himself, especially from Mina who felt they’d developed trust. Our case splits into two timelines; the present investigations told through Mina’s eyes and a flashback to six months ago where we follow in Tyler’s footsteps. Each timeline inches forward slowly, drip feeding clues to the reader and ensuring we keep turning the pages. 

There’s also a third narrative voice following Ruth, the young woman from Mina’s arty party. Both had felt out of place at the event and this could be the innocent reason she sought Mina out for conversation. However, when she bumps into the same woman in the street a short while later I started to wonder if this was the coincidence it seemed. Mina is still unsure but does agree to coffee, feeling sorry for the young woman who seems a little awkward and unsure of herself. As Ruth’s circumstances begin to unfold I felt sorry for her. She lives in the home where her father recently died, but he still feels very present, both in the fixtures and fittings but also in Ruth’s mind. His chair still seems to embody him, marked forever by his hair oil and a halo of yellow nicotine. It’s clear that he was a huge presence, a domineering father who bullied his daughter. His need for care and to control her have kept her indoors and alone for so long that she’s scared to meet people. The scene where a group of girls befriend her in a bar and mooch drinks from her is particularly sad because she’s clearly vulnerable. Her desperation is written all over her face, so when a much younger man takes an interest in her I was immediately suspicious. I had a strange sensation of feeling protective of Ruth, but very wary at the same time. Mina really does develop into an excellent investigator in this novel. She’s always had great instincts, but here she steps out of Tyler’s shadow and really shines. She is shocked when the ACC puts her in temporary charge of the cold case unit in his absence, but determined to prove herself. Doggett warns her that her loyalty to Tyler is admirable, but could also hold her back. He wonders if the ACC is testing her and that a possible promotion could be on the cards. She has some interesting chemistry with the new uniformed liaison officer Danny that made me smile. We also see a lot more of her family and community in Sheffield, giving us insight into how determined and independent she has been to get where she is. This case will have her questioning every part of her world, even those closest to her. 

As for Tyler, even though his insular and secretive ways have carried on there have been some changes since the revelations of the last novel including his difficult childhood. The crime ring known as The Circle were shown to have influence even inside South Yorkshire police. We see again how protective he is of those he’s come to trust – such as bringing ex-ACC into the CCRU. As usual he doesn’t mind rattling even the most gilded of cages; he comes into conflict with previous local MP Lord Beech, who warns him off digging into the kidnap of his first wife. As soon as he reaches hospital Diane is by his side, but so is Scott. Tyler met Scott in the last novel, but we see in the flashbacks the ups and downs of their tentative relationship. It’s good to see Adam being more vulnerable with someone and Scott’s training as a counsellor might help him understand this complex man. I read late into the night to finish because I was desperate to see all those puzzle pieces slot into place. As the complex truth is finally revealed it’s life changing for one of the team and has implications for every character we meet in the course of the investigation. The Lord, a schoolteacher, a lawyer and a carer can all be traced back to a crime that isn’t what it seems. I wanted to know how far Tyler had come with his enquiries and most of all who met him at the disused cinema of the opening pages. This was a tense, intelligent and complex thriller that had so much emotional depth too. 

Published by Simon and Schuster 24th October 2024

Meet the Author

Russ Thomas was born in Essex, raised in Berkshire and now lives in Sheffield. After a few ‘proper’ jobs (among them: pot-washer, optician’s receptionist, supermarket warehouse operative, call-centre telephonist and storage salesman) he discovered the joys of bookselling, where he could talk to people about books all day. His highly acclaimed debut novel, Firewatching, is the first in the DS Adam Tyler series and published in February 2020. Nighthawking and Cold Reckoning, the second and third books in the series, followed in 2021 and 2022.  To find out more, visit his website or follow him on Twitter:  https://russthomasauthor.com T: @thevoiceofruss

Posted in Netgalley

Ice Town by Will Dean

Posted on by thelotusreaders

I’m convinced that I’m fated to never meet Will Dean. Despite booking to meet him twice this year both COVID and MS relapses have had ridiculously accurate timing and I didn’t manage either event. It’s so frustrating because I really am such a Tuva fangirl. I really enjoyed this trip back into her world, even if at times it was tense, threatening and claustrophobic. Will’s intrepid reporter is enticed to a town further north than Gavrik because her instinct is telling her there’s a story. Dubbed ‘Ice Town’ it’s a minor ski resort with only one upscale and very empty hotel. Stuck in its mid-century heyday it is now losing out to the bigger resorts and the hotel must be on its knees. Tuva can only access the town via a tunnel through a mountain. Traffic queues at the tunnel mouth as drivers are alternately let through. It then closes at night leaving residents cut off from the outside world. Tuva has been drawn by a missing person’s report, a teenager called Peter has disappeared. Nothing unusual in that, but Peter is deaf and Tuva is imagining how isolated he must feel. She worries that his hearing aid batteries have run out of battery life. She imagines him stuck somewhere in the dark, in freezing temperatures and not even able to hear the search teams shouting his name. Tuva packs up her Hilux and heads north hoping to find out more about Peter and maybe help the search. She’s heading for the only B & B in town, but when she gets there it’s clear they should have dropped the second B – something Tuva points out with her usual tact! It’s actuality two bedrooms in the back of the a sunbed shop with very thin walls, but Tuva does not need luxury and expenses are scrutinised carefully by her boss Lena. As she starts to acclimatise she starts to realise that, if possible, this is a quirkier town than Gavrik. She’s also without the long-standing relationship she usually has with the police. Can she find Peter without their help? Without her usual support system to call on, might she find herself in danger? 

She rounds out that Peter lived with his grandmother and seems quite isolated in then community. Kids at school thought he was weird and girls mention that he made them uneasy, always staring at their mouths. Tuva is quick to point out that this isn’t sexual, he’s just trying to lip read. The church seems to be the gathering point for the community, with the Deacon organising the search parties. Instead of the police, once the tunnel is closed at night, the residents are protected by the Wolverines, a local biker gang. Tuva meets one of them at the only watering hole in town and finds out he’s actually a poet, an unexpected hobby for a huge mountain of a man dressed in leather. Tuva has managed to shack up next to the only other outside journalist, a girl called Astrid who has the other room beyond the sun beds. Tuva feels an urge to find Peter quickly and when a body is found near the tunnel she fears the worst. When news comes through that the body isn’t Peter, the search is based on two possibilities: either Peter and another resident have gone missing at around the same time and died from exposure, or Peter is in hiding, because he is the killer. This change from victim to possible perpetrator worries Tuva, she knows how disorientating it is to have no hearing out in the wilderness. She also worries that if the police do catch sight of him he won’t be able to hear their commands and they’ll shoot him. She asks the police chief to remind her officers that Peter can’t hear them. 

It’s not long before Tuva is plunged into disorientating situations herself, in one scene when she’s staying at the resort hotel her isolated lobby falls into darkness and she can’t find the right bedroom door. For a moment she’s terrified and knocks a picture off the wall in her panic. It made me very jumpy because it seemed targeted because she’d been placed in such a remote part of the building. When waking up one night after a dream she feels around the bedside table and can’t find her hearing aids or her phone. As she feels her way around the unfamiliar room, I had the uncanny sense that she might be being watched. Anyone could be lurking in the dark. Who has moved her stuff and is someone in the dark watching her panic? That definitely had my heart racing. Then she finds them on the desk, remembering she’d had one too many at the pub and must have left them in the wrong place. Another scene that kept me glued to the book was when she took the ski lift down to the town and for some reason the power goes out. She hears what she thinks is a shot and the overhead light goes out. Now she’s just swinging silently in the dark and in the cold. She knows it doesn’t take long for frostbite to set in and she tries to protect her face. She is so vulnerable at this moment and I was scared for her. I felt like someone was playing with her, like a cat does with a mouse. I had to finish this scene before I could get up and do anything else. 

Will writes the quirkiest characters and here there are a few. There’s Ingvar who comes across like a college professor and lives halfway down the slope with his dogs. Could he have tampered with the ski lift, after all he might seem respectable now but he has served a sentence for murder. The poet bouncer is another surprise, especially when Tuva unexpectedly wakes up in his house. There’s a pod-caster who is becoming quite well known, but his listeners don’t know that he keeps the slopes smooth by day and keeps large numbers rabbits in his basement for food. Once it becomes clear that they have a spree killer on their hands, the odds are a lot more serious. Could Tuva end up being a target due to her snooping around the town and asking too many questions? Maybe Peter’s position as an outsider has created resentment and a desire for revenge? For some reason Tuva doesn’t think he’s the killer, although he still hasn’t been found and bodies are starting to pile up. The claustrophobic feeling of the town isn’t helped when the killer’s methods become known. They disarm people with bear spray, several times more powerful than ordinary pepper spray which is banned in Sweden. Other items they use are military grade so could this be someone who served in the army? The victims are asphyxiated with a tourniquet used on the battle field that has a clever gadget attached. It can be turned to create the necessary pressure, even if you can only use one hand? It’s an unusual piece of kit and Tuva wonders whether the killer is a medic or has used one on the battlefield. Or is it the ability to adjust the pressure that’s key? To allow a few breaths then cut the victim off again, playing God. 

I enjoyed the realisations Tuva has about her own life. She recognises that Lena and Tammy have kept her on track since her partner Noora died. To the extent of making sure she’s eating and getting some sleep. Despite losing her mum she certainly has some substitutes. I loved how Will lets thoughts of Noora just wander across her mind from time to time, sometimes happy memories and sometimes deeply sad ones. I’m glad that she gets to hear Nora’s heart beat from time to time. There is a strange coincidence that may have a huge impact on her personal life going forward. The tense few chapters that bring us to the finale are so confusing! My suspicion was running back and forth constantly and the clues come thick and fast here. I really didn’t know who to believe. We’re on tenterhooks and I remember thinking why does Tuva put herself and us through this? The ending coming in time for the Santa Lucia festival was beautifully done and those of us who’ve been reading since the beginning and love the weirder members of the Gavrik community will love a little cameo towards the end. When will someone pick this up for TV or a film series? It’s a fabulous franchise and it just gets stronger all the time. 

Out on 7th November from Point Blank.

Meet the Author

Will Dean grew up in the East Midlands, living in nine different villages before the age of eighteen. After studying law at the LSE, and working many varied jobs in London, he settled in rural Sweden with his wife. He built a wooden house in a boggy forest clearing and it’s from this base that he compulsively reads and writes.

Posted in Netgalley

The Mischief Makers by Elizabeth Gifford

Posted on by thelotusreaders

 

The Mischief Makers tells the story of author J.M Barrie’s relationship with the du Maurier family, including their daughter Daphne. I had a vague idea there was a connection between he two but hadn’t realised what the connection actually was. The film Finding Neverland always makes me cry, especially where the boy’s mother dies and makes her way into heaven/ Neverland. I knew that all the brothers were adopted by J.M.Barrie but I’d not realised that the boys were Daphne Du Maurier’s cousins. Their mother Sylvia was Gerald du Maurier’s sister, so my first thought was why weren’t the boys adopted by their own family? The author tells the story from Daphne’s perspective from her childhood all the way to middle-age. It’s a psychological study in a lot of ways, because Gifford really takes us into Daphne’s inner world as her life unfolds. Daphne herself filters the world through her psychological readings of Jung and Adler. We move back and forth in time as she examines incidents from her childhood with the benefit of experience and new discoveries she makes. We gain insight into her character and her process as an author, which was wonderful for me because I’m a huge fan of her work. 

Daphne grows up in a very complicated situation where she has a very attentive father and a cold, distant mother. This is something she examines closely later o with her adult knowledge of what’s appropriate and her father’s philandering ways with young actresses he starred with in theatre productions. The boys and J.M. Barrie are constant presence too, particularly in the nursery where Daphne would be waiting for the writer to weave stories. She is an imaginative child and Barrie teaches her to use her imagination, conjuring her ‘shadow self’ very like his most famous creation, Peter Pan. Tomboy Daphne is his real life principle boy and their play gives her space to sword fight, climb and take to the high seas in a way that’s frowned upon for girls in her class. There’s a fluidity to Daphne, in terms of both her gender and sexuality. In adulthood her pirate side becomes the bold, beautiful and sexually adventurous Rebecca de Winter. This was a character I’d always associated with Jane Eyre’s Bertha Mason – the original madwoman in the attic. Similarly, the second Mrs de Winter also represents Daphne but the quiet side that’s rarely seen in London. This is the side that craves time alone in Cornwall where she dresses in men’s tweeds and romps through the countryside or goes out sailing from their home in Fowey. As I was reading about this side of her character I was reminded of the young Mrs de Winter’s tweed skirts and her new sister-in-law’s observation that she couldn’t give a fig what she looks like. Fowey is where she goes to be herself, o hunker down with her children and husband Tommy. It’s where she writes and is most at home. 

I was very interested in the methods Barrie used to visualise the scenes from his books and plays. It also unlocks the imagination of his young charges, as the boys act out certain scenes such as hanging certain characters in the woods. With Daphne he has an almost hypnotic way of getting her to imagine an island rising from the lake. Could his techniques, which could be seen as hypnotism, have caused Daphne constant sense of being split. What effect did Uncle Jim’s imagination and techniques have on the boys in his care? Daphne remembers Michael being plagued by night terrors about drowning and a stubborn aversion to learning to swim. Are they all too imaginative? It’s clear that mental illness has run in the family, but is this an innate problem or unintentionally learned behaviour? 

I loved how Daphne comes across as a very new type of woman, especially in her own society and class. She epitomises the ‘flapper spirit’ but her progression goes much further than the drinking and dancing of the Bright Young Things. She’s different from previous generations of women in her very own way. She wants to write, to live alone in Cornwall and earn her own money. She has never fancied the idea of a husband and children, and has chafed against all the rules of being a young lady set by a mother she refers to as ‘Edwardian’. We get what she means in one sentence – the generation gap is huge. There’s also her fluid sexuality , something that I’ve always suspected as an undercurrent in her most famous novel Rebecca. Mrs Danver’s obsession with her mistress, telling her new mistress about Rebecca’s lustrous hair and showing her the sheer lace of her nightdress. When Daphne visits New York for a plagiarism case about the novel she meets Ellen, the wife of her publisher. She is immediately struck by her hostess’s resemblance to the character both in looks and her ability to look after a guest and put them at their ease. Daphne is overwhelmed by feeling and interprets it as desire, but I could see the second Mrs de Winter gazing out at Rebecca wishing she could be like her. Wouldn’t life be easier if she was this smart, perfect hostess and Tommy’s trophy wife? Although, Tommy largely accepts his rather less organised and talented wife.

Elizabeth Gifford brought Daphne to life for me and having visited the du Maurier home at Ferryside and Menabilly, I could easily imagine her there.  It was fascinating to take a trawl through her upbringing and how she ended up down in Cornwall writing. There is also this brilliant sinister edge to the story, with odd psychosexual tension and the questions around J.M. Barrie’s motives in adopting the du Maurier boys. Despite her mother’s wishes, her parents are generous enough to let her live down in Fowey as a young woman. Through her own journals we can see that she is troubled, constantly torn between the self she wants to be and the self she feels she should be. This is the gap between Rebecca and the second Mrs de Winter who is young, inexperienced and not equipped to run a great household in the same way as her predecessor. She questions herself constantly when the truth is that much like Maxim de Winter, her husband loves her for all the qualities she sees as faults. I thoroughly enjoyed this novel, that filled in the gaps in my knowledge about a brilliant writer and the psychological place her work came from. 

Meet The Author

Elisabeth Gifford studied French literature and world religions at Leeds University. She has an MA in Creative Writing from Royal Holloway College. She is married with three adult children and lives in Kingston upon Thames.

Posted in Personal Purchase

Mrs Death Misses Death by Salena Godden

Posted on by thelotusreaders

Wow! I loved this book! It’s been sitting on my shelf for a while. I’d bought it instinctively but hadn’t got round to reading it yet and our new local book club gave me the chance. The club is a brilliant combo of meeting other bookish people, talking about books and eating pudding. It’s like my fantasy night out. I found the book incredibly lyrical and philosophical and totally blew my mind. It also made me take a long hard look at myself. It’s hard to explain the story, except to say that it’s a journey. I am a total sucker for books that address the reader directly and here we’re addressed by Death herself. Yes, I did say ‘her’. She explains herself like this: 

‘The greatest trick man played was making you believe I was a man […] Surely only she who bears it, she who gave you life, can be she who has the power to take it. The one is she. And only she who is invisible can do the work of Death. And there is no human more invisible, more readily talked over, ignored and easy to walk past than a woman, a poor, old black woman.”

She weaves another narrative through Death’s monologues and that’s the story of Wolf. He is charmed by an old antique desk he sees through a shop window, not realising when he buys it that it belonged to Death. He is drawn to writing and feels this desk might unlock his discipline and creativity. As he writes, Death perches on the edge of the desk and talks to him. They met when he was very small, during the fire that killed his mother. Between this story, Death delivers monologues on modern life: our ridiculous preoccupations, the way our lives are moulded by society and those terrible events that are an indictment on us and our world. The description of the fire that kills Wolf’s mother is surely based on Grenfell. There are multiple deaths and the residents have been campaigning to be heard for some time, claiming that the tower block was a death trap. I read this as the enquiry was in the news and the injustice resonated so strongly. The lives lost were cheap. The issues in the block were never addressed because those in power don’t listen to the poor, the downtrodden, or the immigrants. They were unwanted in an area that was becoming gentrified and no one seems accountable. There were no alarms and no sprinklers and the fact that Wolf survived us a miracle. This brush with Death connects them both, a deep sense of injustice and grief. I found Death’s monologues wise and started to think of her voice as that of the author coming into the fictional world. Her description of grief felt right: 

“It’s like having a stone in your centre;  time smooths the edges like a pebble in a river, but it’s always there – a stone is a stone”. 

We’re given a glimpse of Wolf’s ancestry through the prism of death. Wolf’s mother is the latest in a long line of violent and terrible deaths: hanging, gunshot, fire, drowning. Does this ancestral history mark Wolf out as Death’s obvious companion? 

Mrs Death’s monologues on society are brilliant, whether it’s child abusing celebrities using their money, fame and even religion to disguise their misdeeds or social media moguls allowing spurious and fake news stories to mislead us about what is real. I loved her take on sexism and misogyny, starting off with our perceived surprise that she’s a woman. The misogyny begins at the beginning of time, with Eve and the garden of Eden. Women in creation myths and legends are always the trickster. They’re the person who draws men towards their deaths, like the Sirens. There’s Eve, Medusa, Kalima – all are the architect of man’s misfortune. She lists the crones, witches, hags and wicked stepmothers of fairy tales. We sound incredibly powerful in those terms, but women only lead people to their deaths and don’t have the power to end life, despite having the power to give birth to it. Perhaps it’s that power to create life that scares men so much. If you listen to right wing politicians, we’ve excused and accepted way too much in the name of tolerance. Yet, women are still openly viewed in these terms, think about Trump’s running mate J.B. Vance and his dig at childless, cat ladies. Being a slave to her womb is the only thing that makes a woman natural or fulfilled. 

‘It is exhausting how much space men want and how much credit and control man wants for mankind”. 

There were parts of Death’s monologues that made me take a look at myself and particularly how I consume. Even publishing comes under her scrutiny as she talks about the stories chosen for publication. It’s not necessarily the stories that are most creative, but those that sell. She posits a story about the struggles of poor people, the literary equivalent of a Ken Loach film. She wonders about whether it would sell without a hook? Vampires are popular these days aren’t they? Let’s set it in Sheffield. It’s like I, Daniel Blake but with vampires. That will sell. The Christmas monologue really hit home, because I’d spent three days moaning that my usual place for Christmas wrapping paper had changed their website and it wasn’t working properly. It was designed for America and had stopped recognising some UK post codes and I was fuming. They were going to sell out before I got mine. Talk about first world problems. 

“It’s not a proper Christmas without the deep fried pork-whip nutmeg balls. Quick! Shop! Consume!” 

We all have our favourite Christmas foods, but Christmas will still happen without them. We will still have those we love round us. Yet every year I drag myself to Sainsbury’s because I just have to get my supply of Ecclefechan tarts. While it’s good to have our own traditions and things that make our Christmas, wouldn’t it be okay if the wrapping paper didn’t match the tree? It made me thoroughly ashamed of myself.

What I found most profound was Death’s ideas around ageing and changing. Humans are not meant to stand still. We change constantly. At those times when I’m worrying about how I look and my weight, which has increased considerably over the last few years while I’ve been unwell. I tell myself that this is the best I’m ever going to look. When I look back to pictures from twenty years ago I realise how pretty I looked,  but I have to remember that in twenty years I’ll be seventy years old and I’ll probably do the same. I need to stop feeling inadequate. Stop the self- criticism. As Mrs Death says, it’s the love that matters. Even though our outsides change, inside you’re still you. Even when I’m old and wrinkled in my nursing home, with others doing the washing and caring, deep inside I’m still me. I can visit a lifetime of memories and imaginary palaces in my mind that have always been there. That never leaves. It reminded of some work I did in a nursing home. I planned it for two reasons. I wanted to talk residents through their memories and help them make a memory box. I also wanted to created a collage for each resident to put outside their rooms so that carers could see it and hopefully realise that the residents are people. They’re not just empty bodies to be serviced, because once they had busy, full lives just like their carers do. It makes a massive change to the standard of care because they can now relate to residents and talk to them, instead of over them. I loved doing it because it changed how carers related to the residents.

I loved how the book changed as I came towards the end. The prose starts to break up and poetry starts to take hold, firstly in- between longer prose sections but then longer verses. The prose becomes shorter, more statements than sentences. It’s like the descent into madness or dementia. Meaning becomes more difficult to decipher with only brief moments of lucidity. Wolf stays at a writing retreat and he seems to lose time. There are periods of unconsciousness. He wanders and rambles. It’s still beautifully lyrical but more instinctive. It comes from the soul. 

Ultimately this book won’t be for everyone but those that do like it, will love it. I came away feeling uplifted. I didn’t expect a book about death to be so life-affirming. Wolf realises that time is a man made form of control. It’s something man created to place structure on life. Without time how could we create ‘work’, regulated to certain hours of the day and measured in units for which we are paid. Time is control. He examines the words we use, such as ‘time of death’. Death seems overwhelmingly final, so much so that we might avoid thinking (or reading) about it. There’s only one time of death, but we do have the time of life every single day. It’s down to the way we look As Mrs Death says ‘it’s all in the phrasing’. 

Meet the Author

 

Salena Godden FRSL is an award-winning author, poet and broadcaster of Jamaican-mixed heritage based in London. In 2021 Canongate published her highly acclaimed debut novel ‘Mrs Death Misses Death’. It won The Indie Book Award for fiction and The Peoples Book Prize and was also shortlisted for The British Book Awards and The Gordon Burn Prize. 

Salena Godden’s work has been widely anthologised and broadcast on BBC radio and TV and film. Her essay ‘Shade’ was published in award-wining anthology ‘The Good Immigrant’ (Unbound, 2016). She has had several volumes of poetry published including ‘Under The Pier’ (Nasty Little Press, 2011) ‘Fishing in the Aftermath: Poems 1994-2014’ (Burning Eye Books, 2014) ‘Pessimism is for Lightweights – 13 Pieces of Courage and Resistance’ (Rough Trade Books, 2018) and also the childhood memoir ‘Springfield Road’ (Unbound, 2014). Her self-produced poetry album ‘LIVEwire’ (Nymphs and Thugs, 2016) was shortlisted for The Ted Hughes Prize. The Royal Society of Literature inducted Godden as a fellow FRSL in 2022. She is also a patron of Hastings Book Festival and an Honorary Fellow of West Dean, Sussex.

A new hardback edition of ‘Pessimism is for Lightweights – 30 Pieces of Courage and Resistance’ was published in February 2023 by Rough Trade Books, featuring revised and new material, an introduction by John Higgs and an Old English translation of the title poem by Emily Cotman. The poem ‘Pessimism is for Lightweights’ is on permanent display at The Peoples History Museum, Manchester. 

Salena Godden is currently working on three new books for Canongate: Literary childhood memoir ‘Springfield Road – A Poets Childhood Revisited’ and full poetry collection ‘With Love, Grief and Fury’ will be published together in May 2024. Plus an eagerly anticipated 2nd novel set in the ‘Mrs Death Misses Death’ universe will be published by Canongate in spring 2025.

Posted in Publisher Proof

My Hummingbird Father by Pascale Petit

Posted on by thelotusreaders

This extraordinary novel weaves a mystical and hypnotic spell around the reader, using the flora and fauna of our heroine’s home in Venezuela and slowly unravelling the truth about her childhood. Dominique is an artist who receives a vision of her father in her dream, so powerful she is able to recreate it on canvas. She hasn’t seen him since her early childhood, so it’s a surprise when he gets in touch and asks her to come to Paris. He is dying and wishes to reconcile with his daughter. Longing for paternal love Dominique travels to Paris, on a physical and spiritual journey to recover that part of her early childhood she spent in Paris with both her parents. There she uncovers repressed memories that reveal the truth of her parent’s marriage and her own birth. She also visits the Venezuelan Amazon where she meets Juan, a mystic and shaman who guides her journey. A gentle and tender love story emerges between them as Dominique tries to heal from what she has uncovered. 

I would have known this writer was a poet and an artist from the very beginning because she writes lyrically and creates such striking visual imagery. At first it’s an assault on the senses, a maelstrom of imagery from the Amazonian jungle filled with colour and fantastical animals. A beautiful example of magic realism, the author’s vivid imagery tells of jaguars, birds of paradise and in one case a very disturbing anteater I expected to see in my nightmares. It’s almost hypnotic and I was so overwhelmed and beguiled by the beauty of her words that I didn’t realise the pain and devastation underneath. It’s through her artwork, which is almost shamanistic at times, that she processes her trauma. Her childhood was tainted by her father leaving, seemingly without explanation when she was six years old. She then experienced abuse and resentment from her mother. The process of recovery from trauma is a major theme in the book and we can see how Dominique’s reintroduction to her father triggers the emotions that she hasn’t resolved. In fact his presence triggers nightmares and the re-emergence of events she’s kept locked away in her subconscious. She wants answers to the mystery of her father’s disappearance, but I feared she would be re-traumatised by the truth.These are dark, harrowing memories in parts but it’s clear that the beauty of nature really does have a healing effect on her. 

Her descriptions of Venezuela and the incredible Angel Falls made me want to see it for myself! Here things become more mystical as we see Dominique’s beautiful connection to this place and a man she meets from the Pemon community, indigenous to Venezuela. Juan helps her to go deeper inside herself and face whatever unresolved feelings lurk there. He is a shaman to the community and can ward off malevolent spirits, including the type of dark and disturbing emotions that can haunt people who’ve experienced abuse. This is an incredibly personal journey and her time in Venezuela, the rediscovery of her childhood home in Paris as well as reading her father’s correspondence all contribute to her recovery. I found her story deeply moving and challenging to read at times. However, I recognised the catharsis in Dominique’s artistic expression and the importance of documenting traumatic experiences. She needs others to bear witness to the truth of her childhood, because only then can she achieve acceptance and healing. This is a beautifully written novel, that’s lyrical and treads a line between poetry, visual art and prose. I was touched by it and by the deep connection Dominique has with the natural world. There she can be her true self, an imperfect human woven back together by animals who always accept us as we are.

Meet the Author


Pascale Petit’s eighth poetry collection, Tiger Girl (Bloodaxe, 2020), was shortlisted for the Forward Prize and for Wales Book of the Year. A poem from the book, ‘Indian Paradise Flycatcher’, won the 2020 Keats-Shelley Poetry Prize. Her seventh collection, Mama Amazonica (Bloodaxe, 2017) won the inaugural Laurel Prize in 2020, the 2018 Royal Society of Literature’s Ondaatje prize, was shortlisted for the Roehampton Poetry Prize and was a Poetry Book Society Choice. Her sixth collection, Fauverie, was her fourth to be shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize and a portfolio of poems from it won the 2013 Manchester Poetry Prize. T. S. Eliot shortlisted What the Water Gave Me: Poems after Frida Kahlo (Seren, 2010), was also shortlisted for Wales Book of the Year. Salt published her debut novel, ‘My Hummingbird Father’, in 2024 and her ninth poetry collection, Beast, is forthcoming from Bloodaxe in 2025, and is awarded the Arthur Welton Prize.

Posted in Publisher Proof

The Black Loch by Peter May

Posted on by thelotusreaders

Readers probably won’t believe this but this is my first Peter May novel. I’ve had his books on my ‘authors to explore’ list for when I’m second hand book shopping, but something always gets in the way of me reading them. So, when I was offered this blog tour I jumped at the chance to finally read one. I love books set in Scotland and I am a particular fan of Tartan Noir – crime novels and mystery novels from authors like Doug Johnstone and Val McDermid. I was immediately drawn into the incredible scenery and atmosphere of the Isle of Lewis. This is the fourth in a trilogy, so I’ve definitely got some catching up to do where Fin McLeod is concerned. Once a detective and now retired, Fin is drawn back to Lewis when Caitlin Black’s body is discovered on a remote beach. Only eighteen years old, Caitlin was a student at the Nicholson Institute. It emerges that she was having an illicit affair with Fionnlagh McLeod, her teacher and a married man twenty years her senior. Fionnlagh soon becomes the prime suspect and is arrested on suspicion of her rape and murder. He is also Finn’s son. Finn knows he must return to Lewis to support his daughter-in-law and granddaughter. He also knows, despite the evidence against him, that he must try to clear his son’s name. As Fin travels around the island, he is drawn into past memories and soon realises this crime has echoes back into his own teenage past on the island. A terrible accident at a salmon farm caused two deaths, just as the industry started to expand on the island and become a multi-million pound concern. This is a journey of family ties, secret relationships and a bleak and unforgiving landscape, where violence, revenge and revelations converge. 

Fin and his wife Marsaili both grew up on the island, so it holds echoes of their relationship over the years. It’s strange for them to be back on Lewis after a ten year absence and awkward to turn up on Fionnlagh’s doorstep where his wife Donna is devastated by the possibility that her husband has killed his teenage lover. Their daughter Eilidh is happy to see her grandparents and currently oblivious about her father’s fate, but it’s clear to see the damage Fionnlagh’s exploits have had on Donna. These early chapters felt like being sucked down into a whirlpool of memories. There’s such an incredible sense of place and the use of Gaelic words and names feels foreign, strange and somehow magical at the same time. There are tourists enjoying the white sandy beaches, but we’re taken down below the surface to the realities of living somewhere so remote and bleak. Then further down to the horrors underneath where salmon are eaten alive by lice in their cages, where beached whales gasp their last agonising breath on the sand and a beautiful girl with her whole life ahead of her can be thrown over a cliff like rubbish.

“He finally reached the Black Loch just before seven-thirty. He parked above the beach as sunlight fanned out towards him across cut-crystal water, revealing the secret colours that concealed themselves on the shore, among rocks and boulders and the seaweed washed up to dry along the high-tide mark. To his right, cliffs of Lewisian gneiss rose steeply out of the water and he could just see the gables and chimneys of the house that stood above them overlooking the bay. He cast his eyes down again to the water’s edge and left footprints in the wet sand as he followed the curve of the day towards the looming black of the cliffs. Somewhere here Caitlin’s body had been washed ashore.”

Peter May has portrayed the environment, whilst also showing the extent to which climate change and the eco- industry have impacted the surroundings he’s known for his whole life. The old cottages are damp and battered, some being refurbed by incomers with money either as family homes or holiday cottages. New houses are squat, one-storey dwellings built to blend with the sand and the heather with large  windows giving uninterrupted views of the landscape. Younger islanders are focused on eco-activism with Caitlin Black and her friend Isobel starring in a programme about the island’s ecology. They care about fish farming practices driven by the market across the globe for salmon. Practices that prevent wild salmon from swimming up river to spawn as well as terrible conditions for the farmed salmon too. Huge cages that once held a few hundred salmon now hold a hundred thousand, with such a high mortality rate they’re having to take them from the cages and dump them into rock crevices formed from by the tide. They lay there rotting until the sea washes them away.

“The activist’s aerial shots exposing the illegal dumping of dead fish, and the zombie salmon, half eaten by sea lice, swimming listlessly around in cages where anything up to twenty-five percent of fish were already dead. She listened in horror as he conjured up an image of the stinking, maggot-ridden morts […] and the 1000-litre containers of formaldehyde that a desperate Bradan Mor was using to try to kill the sea lice.”

Fin’s narrative takes us on his investigations around the island, trying to find evidence to disprove the police’s theory that his son is a killer. A task made much more difficult when his DNA matches samples taken from Caitlin’s body. Why would he rape someone he’s been sleeping with for months? This is according to locals who’d noticed their clandestine comings and goings from a derelict cottage by the sea. Despite the urgency of the present moment, Fin is also pulled inexorably into the past, because this island has a huge hold and power. I felt centuries of history in the land it’s people and their relationships. This is sometimes positive, as Fin remembers beach parties where he first met Masaili as a teenager and they make love on the beach in the present, grasping a tiny moment of happiness and connection in the hurt and devastation. The most terrible memories involve a scheme to steal fish from the fish farm and pass them off as wild salmon, for a ghillie from the estate to sell on. Fin goes along with it despite his misgivings, but the scheme is originally suggested by Niall. A group of teenagers meet and drive to the fish farm several times, but one night there’s an awful storm and a sense of foreboding. This enterprise leads to two deaths and creates a suspicion in Fin about his friend Niall. If he is willing to steal from his own family and brush aside the death of a friend, is he capable of murder? Niall’s surname is Black and Caitlin is his daughter.

It feels as if the island has a consciousness. It sees your past and your future as clearly as the present, almost as if they’re happening simultaneously. I felt it when Finn walked across the very place he stood with Masaili when they were first meeting at six years old and she had two pigtails. She also called him Finn for the first time, christening him with a nickname he still uses. This is a thin place, unchanged for centuries. It also said something about how we experience the world. We are rarely solidly who we are in the present, with past and future forgotten. We are simultaneously all the selves we’ve ever been. In this way Fionnlagh can be a good father, a talented teacher and a suspect in a murder. There are also darker moments from Fin and Marsaili’s past that come alive here. Her narration is a rare moment in the novel but she relives a night in Glasgow from their university years, when she found Finn in bed with another girl in their student flat? It makes us realise that Finn isn’t wholly the upstanding man we think he is, he was also the cause of so much hurt, rather like his son. 

There’s a sense in which this trauma is generational, not just in individual families but in the island itself. The environment has always been harsh and people have found it to survive. It’s a hunting and fishing community and other nearby islands, like St.Kilda, became uninhabitable in the early Twentieth Century due to the difficulty of growing and catching enough food for the islanders. Fin takes us back to a conversation he had with his grandfather about the whaling industry, brutal tales of harpooning these majestic creatures and turning the sea red. It links to the beached whales in the bay, possibly drawn off course by one of them being unwell and in distress. As the vet assesses these giant creatures and people desperately try to save them he talks about a tradition in the Faroe Islands where they draw whales to the shore then hack them to pieces. Fin has violent memories of being forced to join a seasonal slaughter. In his last summer before university, Fin felt like a black cloud had descended because he and his friend Artair had been chosen to join the guga hunters. This was a four hundred year old tradition where twelve men would travel to An Sgeir, an island no more than a rock in the middle of the ocean. A guga was a young gannet, once hunted in a desperate need for food, their slaughter was now a rite of passage. Hunters killed two thousand birds in a fortnight, then they would be plucked and salted. Fin felt disgusted by the idea, but it seemed unavoidable and it would be dishonourable to give up your place.

“Neither Artair nor I wanted to spend two weeks on that bleak and inhospitable rock, scrambling among the blood and shit that covered the cliffs, slaughtering defenceless birds.”

This was a tense and complex case with so many possible suspects, and Peter May also keeps us guessing about Fionnlagh. Perhaps he could be the killer, after all he does confess. In a way this created a crime novel that didn’t revolve completely on whodunnit, but on the tensions between different characters and also their environment. He also creates a compelling picture of the beautiful and intelligent victim, Caitlin Black. A girl as embedded in the island as Fin, with a deep passion for the island’s environment and it’s flora and fauna. She epitomises the gap between generations, but also between those who want to protect the island and those who are making a generous living by exploiting and polluting it. I loved how deep the island and it’s history ran in these people, something I can understand having lived right next to the River Trent for most of my life. In fact the first thing I did when moving into my last village twelve years ago was go to the river bank and take off my sandals to feel the river bank under my feet. The river and it’s daily tidal bore, the smell of fresh cut hay, the cool of the forest, the crunch of dry pine needles underfoot as well as the smell of straw bales in the sun and freshly turned earth are all in my soul. They make up part of who I am and although I moved away for study, I have returned and unknowingly into the same village where my great-great grandmother is buried. Our ancestors call to us and this is definitely what Fin and Marsaili are feeling, as well as need to be close to Fionnlagh, Donna and Eilidh. This is something he couldn’t have imagined ten years ago, but now he wonders if it’s where they belong. Perhaps this means future additions to the series and on the basis of 5is novel, I’ll be the first in the queue if it does.

“He leaned over to kiss her and remembered that little girl with the pigtails who had walked him up the road from the school to Crobost Stores giving him the nickname that had stuck for the rest of his life.”

Out on 12th September from RiverRun Books, an imprint of Quercus.

Meet the Author

Peter May was born and raised in Scotland. He won Journalist of the Year at twenty-one and was a published novelist at twenty-six. When his first book was adapted as a major drama series for the BBC, he quit journalism and became one of Scotland’s most successful television dramatists. He created three prime-time drama series, led two of the highest-rated series in Scotland as a script editor and producer and worked on more than 1,000 episodes of ratings-topping drama before deciding to leave television and return to his first love, writing novels.

Posted in Squad Pod

Circus of Mirrors by Julie Owen Moylan

Posted on by thelotusreaders

I really have been blown away by this story set just after WW1 and progressing to the mid-twentieth century. Our characters are two German sisters Leni and Annette who live in Berlin and are the last living members of their family. When we first meet them they’re in dire straits, living in a makeshift shelter in an abandoned garden. Thanks to war and the influenza epidemic they’ve lost their family, so are totally reliant on each other. Leni, the older sister, gets a chance to earn some money at a notorious and rather seedy cabaret club called Babylon Circus. There the naive and rather shy Leni becomes a cigarette girl in a second hand and pinned costume that just covers her modesty, but she is at first shocked by what she sees. With shades of the musical Cabaret the author creates a club that is a mirage of clever lighting, fairground mirrors and risqué musical numbers. It’s enchanting by dark and unwelcoming by day, but it doesn’t matter because this is the type of fun that can only be had at night. The girls are shameless on stage and nudity is everyday in the dressing room, but Leni sees something attractive in their boldness, bawdy gossip and loud raucous laughter. They have a freedom she’s never seen before in women, they’re not afraid of taking up space. The illusion extends to the girl’s costumes, covered at first glance but offering a cheeky glimpse here and there. This is what the crowd turn up for, but one girl manages to shock the audience by crouching on the table of a misbehaving customer and pissing in his face. Everything is overseen by owner Dieter, a man with his own disguise. He rarely enters the cabaret room, but sits in his office with it’s resident cat. Having left half his face on a battlefield he wears a tin mask which chafes at his wounds and leaves his expressions slightly lopsided. This gives a certain sense to the fairground mirrors, if everyone is distorted then no one stands out. 

It’s Paul the pianist’s good looks that capture Leni; his talent, his smile and the lock of hair that escapes onto his forehead. When he starts to walk her home she’s evasive, how can she tell him he doesn’t have one? She invents a family, but then has to keep Annette out of her business. Paul’s also in trouble, as his brother has run up debts he can’t repay and the lenders are leaning on him to pay instead. After a warning in the form of a beating he knows he must leave, but what will he do about Leni? Leni and Annette now have rooms, with a landlady who doesn’t mind watching Annette in the evenings while Leni works. I had so many questions. Would Paul ask Leni to go with him? Does he even feel that strongly about her? Where would Annette fit into this? Even after all these questions are answered, jealousy and fate intervene changing everything. 

In our second timeline we’re in the midst of the Cold War and a middle-aged Leni is living in Berlin with her teenage daughter, following the death of her husband. She’s surprised by a sudden visit from her sister Annette who now lives in the USA. She seems agitated and anxious, spending all her time in flat brooding and smoking. Leni’s daughter is in the throes of first love, using the guise of drama rehearsals to meet her boyfriend. With nowhere to go they find solace in a strange old cabaret club where there’s a fairground mirror amongst the ruins. This is the perfect place for secret assignations. Leni is concerned that with her sister here the past seems closer than it’s been for years. So many secrets are being kept between these women and when Leni sees a face from the past, it could all come tumbling down like a pack of cards. 

Julie writes mid-century women like no one else. I feel like I know them. This is my grandmother’s generation and my grandad actually went to Germany after WWII to help rebuild the country. I remember being shocked by the utter devastation of German cities when they were depicted in the film The Aftermath. I was haunted by a woman getting her daughter ready for school, brushing her hair in their normal routine, but with the outer wall blown away. It was like looking into a doll’s house. The author made me feel the contrast of that wild decadence in the 1920’s with the Cold War period where everything feels grey and routine with nothing to look forward to. The bleakness of Leni’s flat really comes across as it seems to echo the desolation of Annette. Even the once rowdy and colourful club is now derelict and abandoned. I love the way the author plays with place and identity in this way, as well as how the characters see themselves. Their internalised sense of how they look forming part of their identity, but is often at odds with how we see them. Dieter and the girls at the club are almost gaudy grotesques, using appearance and performance to mask true feelings. As for Dieter, I kept thinking about his inability to express emotion in his face and how that affected his ability to connect with others. If we can’t express what we feel what effect does that have on our identity? Dieter can’t look at his new face because it doesn’t reflect the image he has of himself in his mind. It’s only once everyone else becomes distorted that he fits in, only the cat accepts him utterly as he is. 

The secrets between the sisters are beautifully constructed. Annette’s adult behaviour is a faint echo of her childhood feelings. Her jealousy and fury when she discovers Leni with Paul is the fear of a child who has almost lost everything and everyone she knows. She only has Leni and what if she leaves her too? As an adult, pulling secrets or feelings from her is almost impossible. She has been holding the past inside herself so tightly and for so many years I was unsure if she would bring it’s truths to the surface without breaking. Towards the end, as another terrible event outside their control looms over Berlin, my heart was in my mouth! Not knowing whether the ending would be what I wanted had my heart racing. I couldn’t bear either sister to suffer any more heartache and this is the beauty of Julie’s writing. She makes you believe in this world and these characters so much, that you’re able to shed real tears for them. This novel is easily one of the best I’ve read this year and I’m in no doubt it will feature in my end of year list too. I’ve loved Julie’s first two novels, but this is certainly Julie’s best novel so far. 

Published by Penguin on 12th September. Thanks to Julie and the Squad POD Collective for including me in this month’s book club.

Meet the Author

Her debut novel That Green Eyed Girl was a Waterstones’ Welsh Book of the Month and the official runner up for the prestigious Paul Torday Memorial Prize. It was also shortlisted for Best Debut at the Fingerprint Awards and featured at the Hay Festival as one of its TEN AT TEN debuts.

73 Dove Street was recently named as a Waterstones’ Book of the Year and Daily Mail Historical Fiction Book of the Year with the paperback still to come in April 2024.

As a filmmaker Julie won the Celtic Media Award for her graduation film “BabyCakes” before going on to win Best Short Film at the Swansea Film Festival.

Her writing and short stories have appeared in a variety of publications including Sunday Express, The Independent, New Welsh Review and Good Housekeeping.

She has a Masters in Filmmaking and an additional qualification in Creative Writing & English Literature. Julie is an alumna of the Faber Academy. Circus of Mirrors is the third novel.

Posted in Publisher Proof

The Secret Orchard by Sharon Gosling 

Posted on by thelotusreaders

I’ve really enjoyed Sharon’s last couple of novels, because I love their mix of strong female protagonists who are facing challenges and growing into themselves. This novel focuses on sisters Nina and Bette, set on their family’s farm in Scotland. When their father dies they have no choice but to be under the same roof for the funeral. The sisters are very different, Bette is ten years older than Nina so the age gap meant they weren’t very close anyway, but when Bette left for university she never came back to the farm. Living in London, Bette is a sought after divorce lawyer and her work is her life. She flies back to Scotland the day before the funeral and aims to leave the next day. Nina is hostile towards her sister, she has the opinion that Bette left the farm and never looked back. As their mother tries to smooth things over, Nina is shocked to discover that Bette and her father kept in regular contact by email and that Bette paid for the new roof on the barn. Both sisters are shocked at the will reading when they find out that their father left them both the farm in two equal shares. However, there are massive debts to manage and Nina has always left the finances to their father, preferring to do the farm work than sit in the office. This is the only safe place Nina and her son Barnaby have ever lived. Could they be about to lose it? When getting the farm valued, Bette and the agent walk the perimeter on the land and stumble across a secret orchard, tucked away with it’s entrance concealed off the coastal path. Could this hidden fruit be the answer to their money woes and possibly a mystery to bring both of them together? 

We’re drawn in by an intriguing prologue that suggests an historic love story between two local but rival families. I was dying for Bette and Nina to do some digging on this story and unravel their orchard’s complex back story. The author leaves the crumbs of this story to tantalise us while we move through the present day and the emotional aftermath of Nina and Bette’s father’s death. It’s clear from the outset that these two sisters could be an incredible team. Nina is good at the day to day farming work, rushing between baling and milking while also being there for her son Barnaby. I was on board with Barnaby straight away because he wears his Spider-Man costume everywhere, possibly even to his grandfather’s funeral. This titbit of character and humour reminded me of a little boy who always attended our church for Saturday evening mass and would go up the aisle during communion dressed in costume. Watching his long tail wend it’s way up the aisle so the priest could give a blessing to a mini dragon absolutely made my week. His mum made him take the head off for the blessing, but it was straight back on as he skipped back to his seat. Barnaby is a delight and I enjoyed watching him build a relationship with his Aunt Bette. Bette is brilliant with the financial and legal details, something nether Nina or their father has been able to do. She sets herself the task of working methodically through their chaotic office and showing the bigger picture; they might have been working themselves to the bone, but was all this work actually generating profit? 

Bette understands legal procedures and processes too. When she explains they’ll have to get the farm valued Nina immediately flares up, she doesn’t want to sell the farm. She assumes Bette is looking to cash in, but when Bette explains it’s just the first stage in any plan they make whether that’s to sell or to finance the farm better for the future. She’s calmer and more patient with the process and because Bette’s less attached to the land she can make sensible, dispassionate choices which is just as vital for the farm’s survival. Added to the main plot of saving the farm there are a couple of sub-plots. Nina is often helped out around the farm by neighbouring farmer Cam, who is very capable and good with Barney, not to mention easy on the eye. What would I take for friendship to turn into love. There’s also the mystery of why Bette left the farm so definitively all those years ago and when Ryan enters the picture her reaction left me wondering if he was involved. Cam suggests a visit from an expert he knows, to see if the orchard is viable and what would be the best way to bring some income from it. Nina has never known why her sister left, so her reaction to Ryan is puzzling for her. He has great ideas for the apple trees, some of which appear to be very old species that are rarely grown. He sets them on a programme of managing the trees, pruning and grafting them to enhance their health and yield. There isn’t an off putting amount of detail on how to turn the orchard into a cider business, but there’s enough to pique the reader’s interest and I was rooting for the sister’s success. 

The sisters have such depth to their characters and their lack of communication with each other has led to so much misunderstanding between them. Nina comes across as quite bitter towards Bette and to some extent she sees her sister as someone who has everything: the job, the money and the fancy London lifestyle. Actually it’s Nina whose had everything – a wonderful relationship with her father and precious time working together. She has Barnaby and although her relationship with his father broke down, she loves her son more than anything. With her mother living abroad with her new husband, Nina has taken on the lion’s share of the work around the farm and keeping an eye of their father but Bette has never expected any financial gain from the business, assuming that it belongs to Nina. I could see how the new plans might bring about a better personal relationship between them and I was kept reading by the promise of a warmer relationship between them, the makings of a new generation of the family. There’s a lot of forgiving to do here, but once they’d discussed why Bette left in the first place I could see another life opening up, one in which she might stay. As always with this author, this was such an uplifting and heartwarming story. The potential for both sisters to have their own love stories was also joyous to read, especially if you’re a sucker for an ‘enemies to lovers’ scenario. There are setbacks of course, some of them natural disasters and others caused by deep-seated rivalry. Sharon Gosling writes this type of story beautifully, as she weaves the threads of the sister’s story and the mystery surrounding the orchard’s origin, not to mention why it had been hidden all these years. The setting is wonderful, particularly the orchard with the salt air and the sounds of waves crashing against the cliffs. It’s so romantic and I loved the detail of how the salt permeates and changes the taste of the fruit making it so unique. This was a wonderfully escapist novel, driven by the character’s of Bette, Nina and of course, Barnaby. I thoroughly enjoyed being in their world for a while and I’m sure you will too.

Out 12th September from Simon and Schuster

Meet the Author

I’ve been writing since I was a teenager, which is now a distressingly long time ago! I started out as an entertainment journalist – actually, my earliest published work was as a reviewer of science fiction and fantasy books. I went on to become a staff writer and then an editor for print magazines, before beginning to write non-fiction making-of books tied in to film and television, such as The Art and Making of Penny Dreadful and Wonder Woman: The Art and Making of the Film.

I now write both children’s and adult fiction – my first novel was called The Diamond Thief, a Victorian-set steampunk adventure book for the middle grade age group. That won the Redbridge Children’s prize in 2014, and I went on to write two more books in the series before moving on to other adventure books including The Golden Butterfly, which was nominated for the Carnegie Award in 2017, The House of Hidden Wonders, and a YA horror called FIR, which was shortlisted for the Lancashire Book of the Year Award in 2018. My last children’s book (to date) is called The Extraordinary Voyage of Katy Willacott, and was published by Little Tiger in 2023.

My debut adult novel, The House Beneath the Cliffs, was published by Simon & Schuster in August 2021. Since then I’ve written three more: The Lighthouse Bookshop, The Forgotten Garden, and The Secret Orchard, which is out in September 2024. My adult fiction tends to centre on small communities – feel-good tales about how we find where we belong in life and what it means when we do. Although I have also published full-on adult horror stories, which are less about community and more about terror and mayhem…

I was born in Kent but now live in a very small house in an equally small village in northern Cumbria with my husband, who owns a bookshop in the nearby market town of Penrith.

Taken from Sharon’s Amazon Author Page.

Posted in Netgalley

The Dark Wives by Anne Cleeves

Posted on by thelotusreaders

Vera is another of my favourite female detectives. She’s like a little, inquisitive bird. She’s generally a bit grumpy and sharp when the occasion demands it. She’s stubborn and lives for her job, knowing instinctively which of her team is best for which task and often expecting long days and nights. That’s definitely the case when a missing person report comes in for a young girl called Chloe living in care. Even more disturbing is the discovery of a body in the nearby park. This young man with a head injury turns out to be a new recruit to the children’s home called Josh Woodburn. Josh was a student but had recently taken a part-time post as a support worker and had worked closely with Chloe. She had come to the home after her mother was hospitalised with mental health problems. Despite the offer to stay with her paternal grandparents Chloe chose the home. She was learning to express herself, trying things on and seeing what fitted. Josh had encouraged her to write about her feelings, so she was journaling daily and dabbling with poetry. The social workers at the home had noticed she maybe had a slight crush on the new worker, so they can’t imagine her harming Josh. On the night Chloe disappeared Josh had come into work and then popped out again, everyone else was enjoying film night and pizza. Their only clue is that a dark, high end Volvo had been seen parked outside the home a few times recently. At the moment, Vera and the team don’t know if they’re looking for a vulnerable witness who is missing or the fleeing perpetrator. Either way they need to find her as soon as possible, before anyone else is harmed. 

The team are getting used to new girl Rosie, as they lost one of their own on the last case. Rosie is what Vera considers a proper Geordie with the obligatory fake eyelashes, fake tan and never going out with a coat. Vera is determined she will have to get used to the breadth of their patch which takes in both cities and vast countryside. Joe is suspicious and is watching her closely, but actually she has good instincts and her empathic manner with the victim’s families yields results and they seem to trust her. Chloe’s grandparents live in Whitley Bay, after selling up their farmhouse in the country. Her granddad tells them how sorry he is that they haven’t made more effort with her. Sadly her parent’s difficult split lead to bitterness and Chloe’s father felt she blamed him for her mother’s mental health. Her grandad would message her and take her out to the hills where they used to live and an old bothy that he still owned with an incredible view. They would take a picnic and simply enjoy being in the open air together. He admits that her relationship with her grandma was more difficult. His wife owns a boutique and was always trying to get Chloe to make more of herself, disliking the Goth look that Chloe had adopted. Vera can see that Chloe doesn’t fit the stereotype of a child in care; she still has connections with family and hasn’t been drawn into drink, drugs or violence. Vera keeps asking herself – what is Chloe running away from? 

Josh’s parents are obviously shocked and grief stricken, but also confused. They had no idea he’d taken a job and financially he didn’t need to work. He could have lived at home and gone into university, but he wanted the full student experience and they could afford it so why not? Josh’s big love was film so the work isn’t even linked to his course at all. His father wonders if he was still trying to impress a girl he’d been involved with called Stella. Stella’s family ran an organic farm where people with mental health issues or who were homeless could help out and gain work experience. Stella seemed almost embarrassed by Josh’s comfortable, middle-class background and put him on the spot. What was he doing to make a difference in the world? Maybe taking this job was a way of showing her he did have a social conscience. Coincidentally the farm is near the village of Gilstead, where Chloe’s granddad’s bothy is. Could Chloe be hiding out there until she can get away. When they arrived at the bothy the next day, Vera is horrified by what they find. There’s another body and the suggestion that someone has been living here. This body must have something that links it to Josh and Chloe, not just that they’re from the same care home but something they seem to be missing at the moment. Gilstead is a pretty village that tourists like to take a look at and this week is no exception. This week sees the annual witch hunt in the village, where children search for the ‘witch’ on the hills and in the dark. Outside the village are three monolithic stones, the so-called ‘Dark Wives’ of the title. Eerie posters of an all seeing eye appear in cottage windows to repel witches and let them know the villagers have their eye on them. It seems a little odd and creepy but essentially harmless. 

The relationships in the team are interesting and Joe’s relationship with Vera is problematic, not least because he feels stuck between his boss and his wife. Sometimes he feels like he’s always trying to please women, whether he’s at work or home. Vera lives alone and doesn’t always understand that responsibility to another person. She seems to assume everyone is as free as she is when she suggests a pie and ping after work. Other times she’s almost motherly and affectionate towards him. It was really interesting how this case seemed to get under Vera’s skin and bring back memories of her father. She still lives in his old cottage with all his things surrounding her and never seems to make it her own. Is she just camping there? Or setting down roots? She thinks about her relationship with her father and how difficult he could be when drunk. Maybe she understands Chloe’s need for a stable and loving parent who’s there for her, instead of the other way round. Sometimes police work is a thrilling chase and other times it’s doing the boring background checks and looking at the detail. This case is a bit of both, but the finale of the Gilstead Witch Hunt is genuinely spooky. With the monolithic Dark Wives in the background and the sun setting, the village comes alive with people taking to the hills to look for the witch. It’s dark and menacing, so as Vera, Joe and Rosie set out with them there’s real tension in the air. Chloe could be out here in the dark, but so could a killer. As they stumble around in the cold, with Rosie finally wearing a coat, it was hard to know whether screams were just excited kids or something more sinister. I love Anne Cleeves’s plots because they’re like a labyrinth, looping round and back on themselves. There are always secrets to unravel within families and these ones are no exception, they’re also emotional because these families are struggling or have broken apart. Most of all I love Vera. She’s like a little terrier and leaves no stone unturned in her determination to find a killer. 

Out now from Pan McMillan

Meet the Author

Ann is the author of the books behind ITV’s VERA, now in it’s third series, and the BBC’s SHETLAND, which will be aired in December 2012. Ann’s DI Vera Stanhope series of books is set in Northumberland and features the well loved detective along with her partner Joe Ashworth. Ann’s Shetland series bring us DI Jimmy Perez, investigating in the mysterious, dark, and beautiful Shetland Islands…

Ann grew up in the country, first in Herefordshire, then in North Devon. Her father was a village school teacher. After dropping out of university she took a number of temporary jobs – child care officer, women’s refuge leader, bird observatory cook, auxiliary coastguard – before going back to college and training to be a probation officer. In 1987 Ann moved to Northumberland and the north east provides the inspiration for many of her subsequent titles.

For the National Year of Reading, Ann was made reader-in-residence for three library authorities. It came as a revelation that it was possible to get paid for talking to readers about books! She went on to set up reading groups in prisons as part of the Inside Books project, became Cheltenham Literature Festival’s first reader-in-residence and still enjoys working with libraries.

In 2006 Ann Cleeves was the first winner of the prestigious Duncan Lawrie Dagger Award of the Crime Writers’ Association for Raven Black, the first volume of her Shetland Quartet. The Duncan Lawrie Dagger replaces the CWA’s Gold Dagger award, and the winner receives £20,000, making it the world’s largest award for crime fiction.

Ann’s books have been translated into sixteen languages. She’s a bestseller in Scandinavia and Germany. Her novels sell widely and to critical acclaim in the United States. Raven Black was shortlisted for the Martin Beck award for best translated crime novel in Sweden in 200.

 

Posted in Orenda

The Murmurs by Michael J. Malone

Posted on by thelotusreaders

I quickly became fascinated with this mix of historical fiction, psychological suspense and the paranormal. We meet Annie Jackson as she tentatively starts her new job in a nursing home in the West End of Glasgow, hoping to get her life back on track. Annie suffers with terrible nightmares where she’s stuck in a car underwater. She also has the sensation that someone is holding her head under water until her lungs feel ready to burst. She also has debilitating headaches and she can feel one threatening as her new manager introduces her to resident Steve. Then something very odd happens, as a blinding pain in Annie’s head is followed by Steve’s face starting to shake, then reform. A whispering sound begins in her head and she sees Steve as a skull, followed by a vision of him falling in his room and suffering a debilitating stroke. She desperately wants to tell him but how can she without seeming like a lunatic? He becomes agitated and upset, as Annie starts to describe the layout of Steve’s bathroom and he asks her to stop. As she’s sent home from another job she starts to think back to her childhood and the first manifestations of her debilitating problem. Annie survived the terrible car accident that wiped her childhood memories and killed her mother. This strange supernatural phenomenon is why Annie is alone and struggles to make friends. These are ‘the murmurs’. 

I felt so much compassion for Annie, as the story splits into two different timelines: we are part of Annie’s inner world as a child, but also in the present as fragments of memory slowly start to emerge. We also go back even further to the childhood of Annie’s mother Eleanor and her two sisters Bridget and Sheila. We experience their lives through other people’s stories and written correspondence, especially that of a nun who also works in a residential home. I enjoyed how this gave me lots of different perspectives and how the drip feed of information slowly made sense of what was happening in the present day. Different revelations have a huge effect on the adult Annie and because her memories have been buried for so long she experiences the shock and surprise at exactly the same time as we do. This brings an immediacy to the narrative and I felt like I was really there alongside her, in the moment. With my counselling brain I could see a psyche shattered by trauma, desperately looking for answers, she is piecing herself back together as she goes. 

Teenage Annie had a similar vision about a girl called Jenny Burn, who went missing never to return. The murmurs awakened when her mum’s sister Aunt Sheila came to visit them. She tried to openly discuss an Aunt Bridget who also had a ‘gift’ but has ended up in a home. Eleanor, Annie’s mother, asks Sheila to leave, but it’s too late because Annie has already seen that her aunt is dying of cancer. Annie evades her mum and makes her way to the hotel, the only place Sheila can be staying. Unfortunately, Jenny is working on reception. Annie can see her climbing into a red car and she desperately wants to warn her, but she knows she’ll come across as a crazy person. Eleanor is desperately looking for a way to deal with her daughter, she’s a person of importance in the church and she can’t be seen to have a daughter who has visions. Pastor Mosley has Eleanor exactly where he wants her. There’s a control and fanaticism in him that scared me much more than Annie’s murmurs. When Eleanor takes Annie to the pastor, he demonstrates his control by holding her head firmly under his head as he prays for her. When she almost faints, he’s convinced there’s a demon in her. Annie is scared of him, she gets a terrible feeling about him but doesn’t know why. Religion is portrayed as sinister and controlling, with fervent followers who never question, but live in the way they’ve been instructed is Christian? story takes an interesting turn when Annie’s brother Lewis, a financial advisor, becomes involved with the church once more and it’s new pastor Christopher Jenkins, the son of their childhood neighbour. He’s revolutionised the church and through the internet he’s turning it into a global concern. He’s not just interested in saving souls though, he’s also amassing money from his internet appeals. He also seems very interested in meeting Annie. 

As the book draws to a close the revelations come thick and fast as both past and future collide. The search for Aunts Bridget and Sheila seems to unearth more questions than answers. Annie finds out that Jenny wasn’t the only woman who went missing in Mossgaw all those years ago. As she starts to have suspicions about her childhood home, Chris seems very keen to draw her back there. Might he be planning a huge surprise? I was a bit confused at first with all these disparate elements, but as all the pieces started to slot together I was stunned by the truths that are unearthed. Then as Annie’s childhood memories were finally triggered I felt strangely terrified but also relieved for her all at once. I hoped that once she’d regained that past part of herself she would feel more confident and free, despite the strange gift she seemed to have inherited. Maybe by facing the past and leaning in to her relationship with her brother, she might feel more grounded and strong enough to cope with her ‘gift’. I thought the author brought that compassion he’s shown in previous novels but combined it with a spooky edge and some intriguing secrets. I really loved the way he showed mistakes of the past still bleeding into the present, as well as the elements of spiritual abuse that were most disturbing. This book lures you in and never lets go, so be prepared to be hooked.

Meet the Author

Michael J. Malone was born and brought up in the heart of Burns’ country, just a stone’s throw from the great man’s cottage in Ayr. Well, a stone thrown by a catapult, maybe.

He has published over 200 poems in literary magazines throughout the UK, including New Writing Scotland, Poetry Scotland and Markings.

BLOOD TEARS, his debut novel won the Pitlochry Prize (judge:Alex Gray) from the Scottish Association of Writers and when it was published he added a “J” to his name to differentiate it from the work of his talented U.S. namesake.

He can be found on twitter – @michaelJmalone1

Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/themichaeljmalonepage

And here’s my newsletter – subscribe for lots of cool stuff! – https://michaeljmalone.substack.com