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Posted in Throwback Thursday

Little Disasters by Sarah Vaughan

Posted on by thelotusreaders

You think you know her…

But look a little closer

She is a stay-at-home mother of three with boundless reserves of patience, energy and love. After being friends for a decade, this is how Liz sees Jess.

Then one moment changes everything.

Dark thoughts and carefully guarded secrets surface – and Liz is left questioning everything she thought she knew about her friend, and about herself.

As regular readers know, between my blog tour and current fiction reads I always like to go back and read an author’s earlier works. I thoroughly enjoyed this novel from Anatomy of a Scandal writer Sarah Vaughan, first published in 2020. It starts with an ordinary evening on duty for Liz, who is a registrar in paediatrics. She’s called down to A&E to see a ten-month-old baby presenting with strange symptoms. She’s been vomiting, and seems drowsy but doesn’t have a temperature which rules out a virus or infection. However, Liz is familiar with this particular baby girl, because she belongs to her best friend Jess and she’s definitely not acting normally. Jess has always seemed an absolute natural when it came to motherhood, certainly more than Liz. Jess made parenting seem easy, spending so much time making sure her children have the right foods, and lots of activities to try and nurture their minds. She’s the stay at home full time parent, but where Liz would struggle without working, Jess seems born for the role. Yet, this is not the same Jess that Liz knows outside of work – she’s edgy and claims her daughter had a fall. All children fall and through no fault of the parent, but the accident Jess describes doesn’t account for the boggy head injury that Liz can feel at the back of her baby’s head. Why would Jess lie?

Told through different perspectives, from Jess to Liz, this is a brilliant domestic thriller with tension so tight it might snap. This tension in the writing echoes Jess’s mind, at any time she might completely unravel but that doesn’t mean she hurt her baby. Vaughan is exceptional at drip feeding us a little at a time. A tiny bit of extra information here. A new viewpoint there. But never more than you need to keep the story flowing. It’s a powerful and emotive story, but Vaughan never descends into sentimentality or melodrama, this is sharp, addictive and never slows down, insisting you read another chapter, then another.

She is painfully honest about parenthood, so much so that it’s painful to read at times. Especially when the perspective shifts to one of the children and we’re suddenly reminded in the midst of all this, just how vulnerable they are. We are never really aware, until it happens to us or a close friend or family member, just how transformative giving birth can be. Some births are difficult, violent even. Yes, it’s a time of incredible joy and celebration, but my friends were exhausted in those first few days. Exhausted to the point of being almost catatonic. They were uncomfortable, dealing with caesarean scars and infection, stitches, painfully swollen breasts so that every bit of them seemed to be either hurting or leaking! It didn’t look like fun to me and there was a small part of me that was a little bit glad I couldn’t have children. We hear comedians and celebrities publicly talking about how difficult parenting can be and it isn’t just the body that’s affected. The birth can leave you feeling traumatised. The lack of sleep wears you down and you can’t remember things. Then your mind can play tricks on you. Are you really up to this? What if you’re not doing this right? Some women don’t bond with their baby straight away then berate themselves for being terrible mothers. We know so much more about post-natal depression and post-partum psychosis these days, but women still get missed because they’re too scared to say how they feel. If you’re having thoughts of harming your baby, how can you tell anyone?

I think this story that will resonate with many women. Jess and her baby really do pluck your heartstrings. At first I was so suspicious, because she’s cagey and closed off. I couldn’t understand why you would wait nearly six hours to get help for an obvious head injury. I was pretty sure where the narrative was going, but then the author surprised me with a new perspective and a huge twist that was really unexpected. This is a far darker path than I’d expected. Domestic thrillers are one of my a favourite genres and this is up there with the best. It really delves under the layers of motherhood and overturns that old expectation that every woman is naturally maternal. That post-natal depression can happen to anyone, even when they’ve not experienced it with their other children. It brings home to the reader that looking after a newborn baby is a giant undertaking and it how vital it is to ask for help. This is such a perceptive novel with an unexpectedly treacherous conclusion. Sarah Vaughan is an incredibly clever writer, balancing both our sympathy for Jess and her baby, but also our thriller reader’s desperation to uncover what has happened.

Published by Simon and Schuster 2020

Meet the Author

Sarah Vaughan is the international bestselling author of the Number one Netflix TV series, Anatomy of a Scandal, and four other novels. A former journalist, she read English at Oxford before training at the Press Association and spending 11 years at the Guardian as a news reporter and political correspondent. After having her second baby, she left to freelance, and eventually to write fiction. Two women’s fiction novels followed before Anatomy of a Scandal, her 3rd novel and her first courtroom drama/psychological thriller, heralded a new direction and became an instant international bestseller. Sold to 24 countries, it was also a Sunday Times top five bestseller, spending 10 weeks in the top 10 charts; a kindle number 1 bestseller; and one of Richard & Judy’s best dozen books of the decade. In April 2022, it dropped as a six-part Netflix mini-series, written by David E Kelley and Melissa James Gibson, and starring Sienna Miller, Michelle Dockery, and Rupert Friend. In its first 3 days, it debuted at number 3 worldwide and was the number 1 most watched Netflix TV show in multiple countries, including the UK and US. In its first 3 days alone, it notched up 40.28 million viewing hours.

Little Disasters, published during the first and third lockdowns, was a Waterstone’s Thriller of the Month and is in the process of being adapted for a UK broadcaster. It was also WH Smith paperback of the month, a Kindle bestseller, and has been published in the US and various other countries. Reputation, published in March 2022, has also been optioned by the team behind Anatomy of a Scandal with a view to being developed for TV. It will be published in the US in July, and in various other countries throughout the year

Posted in Random Things Tours

In Bloom by Eva Verde

Posted on by thelotusreaders

‘This is my family story. From all I’ve sown together, through all I couldn’t ask. I want to be the bud who makes it.’

In Blooms tells of strength, survival, forgiveness, resilience and determination, and the fierce love and unbreakable bonds between mothers and daughters.

Ever since Sol’s untimely death left her pregnant and alone at twenty-two, Delph’s kept herself small as a form of self-protection. Now, over a decade later, she lives with their daughter Roche and her new partner Itsy, a kind and protective cabbie, on the fourteenth floor of Esplanade Point on the Essex coast.

But Delph’s protective bubble bursts when Roche moves in with her estranged nan, Moon. Feeling on the outside of the bond between her fierce-yet-flaky tarot-reading mother and volatile martial-arts-champion daughter, Delph begins questioning her own freedom. And when Roche’s snooping into her grandmother’s past unearths a familial line of downtrodden women; a worrying pattern emerges. Has keeping small and safe truly been Delph’s choice all these years…?

I don’t believe in trigger warnings, despite their intended purpose to flag up material that may ‘trigger’ difficult emotions in the reader, I feel that they might stop someone experiencing a connection with a text. It might well be a trigger, but that doesn’t always have to mean it’s a negative one. It might be a trigger that starts a healing process. If anyone should have avoided this book it was me, because I was Delph. I lost the love of my life in my early thirties and then sleepwalked into a coercive and damaging relationship. Yes, it was a hard read at times, but it wasn’t remotely negative. Moon, Delph and Roche are three generations of a family. Each woman has her own issues, but they all stem from one place. Right back at the beginning. As the book opens Roche can no longer live with her mother and Itsy, the man she’s been living with for most of Roche’s life. So she decamps to her grandmother Moon’s house. Roche can’t stand Itsy, he dislikes her and wishes she wasn’t there. In fact what he wants is Delph all to himself, it’s easier to control someone who’s isolated. Delph has had a glazed over look ever since he arrived in her life and she doesn’t seem like her mum anymore. Delph has done everything she can to keep Itsy happy. She’s changed how she dressed, made herself less beautiful, stayed at home and stopped going out with friends. Every day she makes herself smaller to make more space for him and Roche can’t watch it anymore. However, things are changing slowly. Delph has a job she enjoys at B & Q, new connections with her colleagues and today she has made a choice. Delph is pregnant and she knows deep down in her soul that ‘the thought of more years, more life, tied to him’ is more than she can bear. She goes secretly on her own for an abortion, the quietest but most powerful act of rebellion she can make. Then comes her opportunity, Itsy receives a phone call from Jamaica to tell him his mother is dying. He must jump straight on a flight, so Delph lets him go alone, knowing that now she has several weeks to herself. She doesn’t stop Roche from moving out and accepts this as her time to heal, time to be the parent that so often Roche has to be for her. However, this isn’t the only recovery needed in the three generations of this family thanks to the actions of men.

I felt at first that I was slowly piecing together the story of a client. Being a person- centred therapist means letting the client choose what they want to talk about. I would use my counselling skills to tease out that story and ask questions where it needs to be clarified or where I might only be getting one perspective. Here the story has it’s own pace and each woman narrates her own section. We flit back and forth between the women, also delving into the past here and there. It’s like doing a jigsaw puzzle but only being handed one piece at a time, then another from a different place. It takes some time to perceive the whole and that was definitely the case here. Only we the reader can see where they all are in relation to one another. The reality of being a woman in today’s world is explored fully, there is no doubt that these women’s lives would have been immeasurably better had they not encountered the men they do. It takes Roche to articulate this properly with the words and wisdom of her generation.

“Roche knows, remembers, how her life changed at around the time she started secondary, and her bubble of invisibility popped. How, despite the school uniform screaming otherwise, she very suddenly became the inhabitant of a woman’s body, complete with a depressing self-awareness that this was now Roche’s life until one day men deemed her invisible again. In fairness, it’s not her contemporaries who usually do the perving – no, it’s men, grown–ass men who have always done the bulk of the wolf–whistling, the innuendoes and basic compliments that they expect her to ‘smile, love’ and be grateful for.”

As a middle aged woman I now know the power of that invisibility and how, in many ways, it’s a blessing.

I love how carefully the author drew the threads between generations, those behaviours that create a pattern of intergenerational trauma. There are moments in her journey where Delph needs her daughter by her side, but she recognises that it’s a selfish need. Delph’s lived experience stops her; “is not for a child to fix the parent. Nor is Roche the ointment to Delph’s current troubles”. She’s spent enough time trying to help Moon. Then we go back into Moon’s early years, when her grandmother is in hospital, suffering from mental ill health. Her name was still Joy back then and her job is to dispense sunshine to a women who can’t even remember her name. ‘Come on,’ Ma says, in a giddy-up way. ‘You know how happy your little face always makes her.’ This a learned behaviour, people pleasing and exactly what Delph is trying to avoid for her own daughter, three generations later. By sitting with her own pain, Delph is avoiding instilling that behaviour in Roche, she’s actively breaking the cycle. Yes, there are traumatic moments in these women’s lives, Moon’s story being particularly harrowing, but we can also see the women’s determination to change. It’s that change and what it means for Roche that brings such an uplifting feeling to the book. For me it’s Delph’s struggle that touched me deeply. The loss of Sol, who’d been there her entire life, is devastating. So moving out of Itsy’s orbit and the mental paralysis she’s been living with means opening up her emotions. That’s all of the emotions including her grief, but it’s a process that needs to happen so that Roche can talk about her father openly and in a joyful way. I found myself more engrossed in the later stages of the book as I had to see whether these women could heal together. This is beautifully written and manages to be funny, moving and hopeful.

Meet the Author

Eva Verde is a writer from East London. Identity, class and female rage are recurring themes throughout her work and her debut novel Lives Like Mine, is published by Simon and Schuster.

Eva’s love song to libraries, I Am Not Your Tituba forms part of Kit De Waal’s Common People: An Anthology of Working-Class Writers. Her words have featured in Marie Claire, Grazia, Elle and The Big Issue, also penning the new foreword for the international bestselling author Jackie Collins Goddess of Vengeance.

Eva lives in Essex with her husband, children and dog.

In Bloom will be published in August 2023.

Twitter @Evakinder

Instagram @evakinderwrites

Posted in Monthly Wrap Up

Monthly Wrap-Up August 2023

Posted on by thelotusreaders

August has been a quieter month as far as blog tours and my usual reading schedule goes. It’s been a reading rollercoaster in that I’ve loved a book and blazed through it, then had another that I’ve really struggled to get into. There have been DNFs and a couple of very close calls. I’ve also taken time to catch up on the books I’ve missed in a series, this time it was Matt Wesolowski’s Six Stories novels that I’ve now caught up with. I’ll be mentioning them at the end of the post. I have indulged myself with a book that I knew would make me laugh, a couple of novels from writers I really admire, then a debut that I knew would be close to home. I’ve been to England, the USA and Australia plus two strange other worlds that bear some relation ours accept for some very strange medical conditions or the possibility of some strange paranormal phenomena. Here are my thoughts on my favourite August reads:

I’ve enjoyed Anita Frank’s other novels so I was very keen to get hold of this as early as I could. Thanks to NetGalley, HQ and the lovely Anita herself I was sent this beautiful finished copy as well as the digital version. This mystery had some of my favourite themes and settings; I enjoy the ‘new servant arrives at a family estate’ plot as it’s always reminiscent of Jane Eyre and I enjoy books set after WW1 as it’s a turbulent time when British society was changing rapidly. Sarah is the new employee arriving at Darkacre, the family seat of the Stilwells. WW1 has wreaked havoc on the men in this family. Maurice was not prepared to be the master of the house and with double death duties already crippling the estate, he’s had to learn fast. Unfortunately Maurice has returned from war a changed man, plagued by nightmares, flashbacks and extreme responses to loud noises. With youngest brother Leonard severely disabled by his war injuries and struggling to come to terms with the loss of his limbs, the family are depleted and barely coping. However, as Leonard so cryptically tells us, perhaps it is no more than they deserve? Sarah’s arrival is the catalyst for this story and it isn’t just the relationship between family members that points to there being issues at Darkacre, soon a series of unexplained happenings start to gnaw away at the nerves of even the most stoic inhabitants. Then a mysterious police officer arrives to tell the family that he’s investigating rumours of a body buried in the family’s woodland. This is a great mystery, placed within such a well researched and atmospheric setting.

I read this touching and very entertaining memoir one afternoon on holiday and feel more in love with Lou Sanders than I already was. Having enjoyed her on Taskmasters and Outsiders I was very interested to read the story behind the slightly scatty and incredibly open woman I’d seen on screen. As expected Lou tells her story with no frills or filter, creating a really intimate reading experience. I could hear her voice immediately and that was the best thing about it. She describes a difficult early life – struggles with ADHD and a very late diagnosis, coupled with devastatingly low self-esteem. Totally misunderstood at home, she was drinking and drug-taking from an early age, all to mask feeling different and as if she didn’t belong. Leaving home at 15 and working in pubs, she learned to use drink to create a new persona, one that made people laugh. Drama followed her and some of her stories, especially around the opposite sex, are starkly told and are all the more devastating for their honesty. She’s totally unaware that she has the option to keep to her boundaries, in fact I don’t think she was aware of her ability to set them. Lou is very matter of fact and unshowy about choosing to get sober and change her life. She credits AA with her success and it only stuck when she realised she was ruining her own chances, self-sabotaging her career. She would ask comic friends why new comics were getting TV gigs and she wasn’t. After shows where she was obliterated, threw things into the audience and even bit someone, it took a good honest friend to tell her the truth. TV producers didn’t trust her, she was too unpredictable. That friend probably saved her career, in act they saved her life. A brilliant, well written and emotionally intelligent memoir that’s also laugh out loud funny.

Lowbridge is a small town in Australia; the hometown of Katherine’s husband James. Katherine has been struggling with her mood and self-medicating with drink. James is hoping that the move will help, but it’s clear something momentous has happened. Their lives have imploded, but they are each dealing with it in different ways. James encourages Katherine to leave the house and she accidentally stumbles across the town’s historical society. She is inspired by the exhibition they’re putting together as it’s something she can potentially help with, but when she comes across a thirty year old mystery, problems start to arise. The disappearance of teenager Tess has remained unsolved and Katherine thinks it may be time to highlight the case and jog people’s memories. She knows she must involve Tess’s family in the decision, but she doesn’t expect opposition from anyone else. However, she is faced with opposition and it is from James. He tells her to leave the mystery alone: it will stir up trouble and be unhealthy for her to become wrapped up in another family’s grief. Katherine is determined though and with Tess’s family on board she starts to research what happened in 1987. The setting really does bring small town attitudes to life, but it also highlights the difference between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have nots.’ Uptown teenagers have lives filled with homework, tennis club, music lessons and private schools, a group that includes Katherine’s husband James as well as the missing girl. Downtownis where miner’s families live and poverty, drinking, trouble with the police and lack of aspiration seem to be the norm. The author shows how geographical situation can determine your life in a gritty and painful story that Katherine slowly uncovers, all the time wondering if the answers might lie too close to home.

This incredible debut is seriously in the running for my book of the year. It floored me emotionally and I don’t think I’ll be forgetting it any time soon. When Ella from Hachette Books messaged me to say there was a book she thought would be right up my street I was a little surprised. I didn’t think the publicists would know me well enough to make predictions about what I’d like. I was wrong. She knew exactly who this book was for. ‘It’s about a man turning into a Great White Shark’ she told me, well what’s not to like? I was hooked on the idea before the book even arrived. Lewis and Wren have fallen in love. They’ve no idea that their first year of marriage will also be their last. It’s only weeks after their wedding when Lewis receives a rare and shocking diagnosis. He has an unusual mutation and although he might retain some of his consciousness, his memories and possibly his intellect, his body will become that of a Great White Shark. Lewis is complicated, an artist at heart he has always wanted to write the great American play for his generation. How will his liberal and loving heart beat on within the body of one of the earth’s most ruthless predators? He also has to come to terms with never fulfilling his own dreams. However, worse than that, he has to come to terms with leaving Wren behind for her own safety. Wren wants to fight on. To find a way of living and loving each other as Lewis changes. She is told that there will come a point when this will be too dangerous. Lewis will then have to live in a state run facility or free in the ocean. It’s when she sees a glimpse of his developing carnivorous nature that a memory from her past is triggered. Wren has to make a terrible, heart-wrenching decision. This is a beautifully written, astounding debut, that takes universal human emotions like fear, love and loss but presents them in a highly original way that makes them all the more devastating.

I don’t want to tell you too much about this follow up to Louise Hare’s novel Miss Aldridge Regrets, because my review hasn’t been published yet. However, I can tell you how much I enjoyed it and how the author moves Lena’s story on from the murderous and surprising events of her cruise across the Atlantic to NYC. Lena was travelling to audition for a Broadway role, but her proximity to the rich Abernathy family on board left her caught up in a murder mystery. She also came closer to knowing more about her own background. While on board she had a relationship with Will, the singer in the ship’s band. He offers her a place to stay in NYC, with his best friends Louis and Claude. However, as the book opens with a woman falling from their apartment window we’re left wondering what goes on in the fortnight’s break? Especially since the fallen woman was clutching Lena’s passport. Has our heroine met a sudden and untimely end? I won’t tell you any more as I’m still reviewing this one, but I really enjoyed the pace and the detail in her setting of 1930’s New York. Themes of family, identity and being black in the USA make for fascinating reading and I would highly recommend it.

Here’s a preview of my September Reading

Posted in Netgalley

The Stargazers by Harriet Evans

Posted on by thelotusreaders

The Stargazers does something I’ve been trying to put across in my own WIP. It shows us that our own story, as we have experienced it and tell it to others, is only one strand of an infinite tapestry. Sarah Fox and her husband Daniel are moving in to their new house on The Row. It’s a ‘proper house’, meaning that as you walk through it you can imagine your child taking their first steps in the hallway or using the tree swing in the garden. It reminded me of when we were looking at houses and we viewed an incredible place that felt to me like a grown up house. It had all the children’s heights written on the wall next to the kitchen door and also a little family of llamas, painstakingly cut out and coloured in, then clear varnished onto a beam in the living room. It was a proper family home and I think this is a little bit of what Sarah feels as they cross the threshold of No 7. Does this make them grown-ups? Perhaps amplified by the fact that Sarah has never known a real family home until now. Sarah and her sister Victoria (Vic) spend their early childhood in the family home of Fane Hall, one of the most splendid stately homes in the south of England. When their grandfather, the heir, dies. They are awaiting the return of Great Uncle Clive. He will become the Earl because Sarah’s mother, Iris, cannot inherit the house being a woman. Iris has doubts, but hopes that since the death of both her father and her husband, Uncle Clive will be benevolent and allow them to remain living in the west wing of Fane. Yet the man who returns from war with a new wife, Aunt Dotty, does not see things the same way. Fane is his, and instead he grants them a small flat in Kensington.

Years later, after Iris has repeated endlessly to her daughters that Fane is her house regardless of inheritance law, they fall on hard times. So she tells the girls to pack and brazenly moves into Fane, occupying a different wing to Clive. Time has been hard on Fane and it seems like her Uncle has allowed it to fall down around him. Every room feels ransacked and amazing collections like the taxidermy animals have been thrown on the floor, their glass cases broken and the smell emerging into the house. There’s also a far worse smell. Many of the toilets are blocked, the bathrooms unusable and their smell permeating throughout. This is the legacy of WW2 and Fane being used by the British forces, not very carefully it would seem. Uncle Clive is dirty, shambling and penniless. A game seems to resume between her Uncle and her mother Iris, with the girls caught in-between, often forgotten and at times completely neglected. Then Iris sends the girls to boarding school and settles in at Fane waiting for him to die. This means that for long periods Sarah has to leave her only friend in the world. The only one who understands her home situation and gets to know her one to one. They are the stargazers. Sarah climbs out of her window in the middle of the night to meet him at a large tree, big enough to sit in and watch the night sky. There they don’t have to talk about their home lives, it’s simply understood. This young boy lives with the lady who runs the post office, but she’s a foster mum. He tells her they need to look forward to their futures not their pasts, to their dreams of being a musician and a film maker.

As we work our way through these different layers of family history, it works like a set of Chinese boxes, one story tucked inside another and we learn a little more from each. Sometimes, an event in Sarah’s childhood helps us understand the present. Then we read a snippet from Iris’s past that informs us about why she treats her own children badly. The adult Sarah we meet in her house in London is very different, as her life shrinks a little. She has two small children and spends all day taking care of them. She doesn’t have time for daily music practice and her hands become stiff so she can’t stretch to pluck the cello strings. Where once she played cello professionally, it now sits in the corner of a room upstairs untouched. Husband Daniel is a bit clueless about how Sarah feels. He’s a fellow artiste, but he’s an actor and television producer and he still gets to leave the house each day. He also starts a long Sunday lunch tradition for the neighbours which seems to a euphemism for come into the house, drink all day and neglect to clear up after themselves. Sarah struggles a bit in this chaos, especially when something outside of their daily routine happens – like her sister turning up to stay when Sarah had completely forgotten them. Instead of embracing the chaos and simply saying ‘I’ve forgotten completely, come on into the madhouse’ she tries to cover the fact that she’s not remembered, putting untold pressure on herself.

There’s a saying in counselling that no two children have the same parent, that applies strongly to Vic and Sarah. They are very different people, possibly due to the way they responded to emotional abuse as children: one was compliant and the other, despite being scared, was defiant. Not only was Iris psychologically damaging, she was neglectful. She is constantly forgetting to feed them, doesn’t buy them the right clothes for school and ensures they are seen as different both by the children of the village and even their school friends. At school Vic becomes a huge hit with the popular group and seems worshipped by the younger girls. When asked to show her loyalty to the group she doesn’t hesitate, even when that loyalty means shunning her little sister. There is bullying that’s uncomfortable to read and gave me the shivers. In choosing the popular girls, Vic has ensured her safety but has also signed up for a lifetime of putting on a front. Sarah may be shunned but at least she can be herself. I felt sorry for Vic, after all she is also the product of abuse, but in turning into an abuser herself she started to lose my sympathy. Especially when it comes to their treatment of Sarah’s music teacher and an act that has lifelong repercussions.

I thought this book was fascinating from a psychoanalytic perspective showing how we find ways of surviving abuse childhood that become part of our personality. In a twist I didn’t expect, a Sunday dinner at Sarah and Daniel’s goes south fast when their little girl disappears. The reasons why surprised me, because I was never quite sure where the stories were going to join up or who might be lurking from the past. Sarah’s eventual return to Fane in adulthood doesn’t work out in the way she might have hoped, but it helps her finally face up to what happened there. The final paragraphs show us the irony of Iris clinging to Fane and to life. She is still muttering to herself that Fane is hers and what would have happened had she been a boy? Did she get what she wanted in the end? Is the estate viable or have terrible compromises been made? As we find the answers to these questions we also see Iris’s decline as compared with the little girl she must have been when she first visited the house. This final flashback is brilliantly thought out and placed. That first visit can’t fully vindicate Iris, there is never an excuse for her actions towards her own children, but it could shed some light on what happened to set these wheels in motion. It might even explain her unshakable belief that Fane is hers. This is a great book about family, intergenerational trauma and the adults we grow up to be, because of the children we once were.

Published by Headline Review 14th September 2023

Harriet is the author of thirteen novels, two of them are Richard and Judy book club selections, several have been Top Ten Bestsellers, one won the Good Housekeeping Book of the year prize, but the accolade she’s most proud of is the lady on Twitter who wrote last month that she thought my books were real ‘knicker grippers’. As Harriet says on her Amazon author page ‘I suppose that’s all you can hope for isn’t it?’

Her first novel, Going Home, came out in 2005 and her last was The Beloved Girls, published in paperback in April 2022. She wishes she’d tried another job sometime but she can’t imagine not writing. She has written since she was a child, first on books I stapled together with paper then notebooks, then a laptop that crashed and lost all of the novel she was writing in secret back in 2002. (So now she backs her work up properly) Her first novels were more about relationships and people in London and had more chicklit themes and the later ones are darker and more about families and secrets and houses and the past. Those themes have always been in her books, but as she’s grown older she’s enjoyed exploring them more. She has so many stories in her head all the time and adores knowing that her job means that she can carry on telling them.

If asked how she’d describe her books she’d say she wants them to be gripping, involving, heartwarming stories about families and mysteries in the past with a Gothic tinge. This one definitely fits that description.

Posted in Throwback Thursday

Other People’s Husbands by Elizabeth Noble

Posted on by thelotusreaders

Elizabeth Noble’s domestic drama is focused around a solid group of friends. Six women and their husbands have been a ‘pack’ for several years after chat at the school gates led to lunches, then dinners and now regular get togethers like their annual May Day bank holiday. Traditionally this weekend is always spent together, sometimes abroad but usually at Annie’s picturesque holiday cottage. Annie loves sharing her home with her closest friends and is the best host, often heading down there a couple of days before the others to air the house out and prepare the bedrooms. This is where the ripples begin. In previous years Annie remembers all the kids coming along, playing in the pool and shrieking with laughter. More recently it’s just been the adults and the first day usually involves getting out of travelling clothes and spending the afternoon by the pool, the men in their swimming shorts and the women in sensible Boden one piece swimsuits, an unspoken rule. Kit and Natalie are late for everything and this weekend is no exception, so everyone is already lounging outdoors when Natalie joins them. This is the moment that everything changes, as Natalie strolls out in a high legged red bikini walks the length of the pool and climbs in. The red is as subtle as a matador’s cape, but will anyone take up the challenge? All the women know without speaking that this is a betrayal of the sisterhood, an open sexual invitation, a red flag. Even a couple of the men mention it, later on in bed with their wives they say it was a statement, pure theatre, something that shouldn’t be a surprise considering Natalie is an actress. Yet her husband Kit barely seems to notice.

However, one of the husbands noticed a long time ago that Nat is beautiful. In fact over twenty years there have been several moments – a glance, a brush of the fingers, a hand that lingers on a shoulder, a kiss that strays from the cheek to the edge of the mouth. Will this now become something more? The author lets the tension rise beautifully. She perfectly captures how one action acts like a ripple in a pond within a group like this. It would affect every one of the friends and the next generation who have grown their own friendships over the years. Natalie is feeling restless and expressing that in her clothing and changing her routine. She and husband Kit have a small flat in London that she can pop to on the train and visit galleries or go shopping. Previously she’s been held to the routine of children at home but now she’s free from that and has time for herself. Her husband Kit seems absolutely solid and a great dad, but Natalie misses that frisson of attraction and electricity between two people. So, when she and Dom accidentally bump into each other in London she doesn’t have anywhere to be or to rush back for, so they can enjoy the warmth of a city evening. Joining others who are sat on the embankment, looking at the river and enjoying a bottle of wine or ice cream. The heat between them is obvious, but there’s always been something to stop them before. Dom loves his wife, she’s solid and dependable but their sex life has dwindled of late and they don’t seem to have made the transition back from family to being a couple again. His attraction to Natalie, something he felt at their very first meeting, has never diminished. What if they now have a chance to be together? Whereas Natalie seems to agonise over her husband and children finding out, Dom doesn’t seem to think about the catastrophe this would cause.

Noble has written their characters very carefully so that I really did care about Natalie despite her actions. I enjoyed her relationship with daughter, listening to Temple’s marriage problems and going away with her for the weekend for some quality time. Natalie’s issues were largely her own and they had nothing to do with her relationship with Kit. Dom’s wife Sarah was very organised, something that seemed to fit with her job as a schoolteacher. She often organised group get togethers and was very family orientated. She knew that her sex life with Dom had slipped a bit of late but she wasn’t too worried. She thought that sex did tend to dwindle a little when people reached middle age and had been together so long. That didn’t mean they didn’t love each other. However, she had really been too busy to stop and think about whether they actually did still love each other. The author’s ability to get inside the mind of these characters was incredible and I enjoyed how the story was split between various different members of the group, including the next generation who were facing changes of their own. I loved how the women tried to remain friends with each other, despite everything that was happening around them.

While this intense drama was going on it was balanced by a peek into these couple’s lifestyle. I coveted Annie’s holiday home with it’s old fashioned charm. The events they’re all invited to, such as one of their daughter’s weddings being held in the garden at home, were lavish and beautifully arranged. These were dreamy interludes between the domestic drama that I drifted through, thoroughly enjoying how lovely they were. There was also a gorgeous little romance developing between two of the next generation, who had spent years climbing trees and running through sprinklers in each other gardens, but were now confused because their feelings were changing. In the main it was the women who stood out in this novel, whereas a lot of the husbands simply faded into the background. These were strong women, having to keep afloat careers, family commitments, parents and marriages. These are the ‘middle’ years where children still need you and parents start to rely more on their children. It’s a little like spinning plates, but at least these ladies had gorgeous homes and getaways. Let’s be honest, no one here is struggling on minimum wage. It’s gloriously gossipy though and I felt like a thoroughly spoiled fly on the wall by the end. Perfect for by the pool reading, this really was an enjoyable and addictive domestic drama.

Meet the Author

Elizabeth Noble is the internationally bestselling author of The Reading Group, The Friendship Test, Alphabet Weekends, and Things I Want My Daughters to Know. She lives in New York City with her husband and their two daughters.

Posted in Publisher Proof

Fayne by Ann-Marie MacDonald

Posted on by thelotusreaders

Fayne by Ann-Marie Macdonald

‘I do not wish to be a woman.’

‘My dear. I’m afraid we none of us has the choice.’

I do not wish to be a lady, then.’

‘I cannot blame you.’

The vast estate of Fayne lies to the southern border of Scotland, ruled by the Lord Henry Bell, Seventeenth Baron of the DC de Fayne, Peer of Her Majesty’s Realm of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. The mysterious Lord Bell keeps to his rooms by day, appearing briefly at night to dote over his beloved and peculiarly gifted child. But even with all her gifts – intelligence, wit and strength of character – can Charlotte overcome the violently strict boundaries of contemporary society and establish her own place in the world? Fayne is the page-turning queer story of longing and belonging you’ve been waiting for.

I must admit to being slightly daunted when this novel came to the door. I say ‘to the door’ because it wouldn’t fit through the letterbox or into our postbox. It’s an absolutely brick of a novel, so much so that I had trouble holding it. Feeling a little overwhelmed I spoke to a fellow blogger who suggested that I mark it off into readable sections of about 150 pages. It was great advice and I’m glad I persevered with the novel, because it really was intriguing and original. Set in the late 19th Century and written in a similar style to a Victorian novel, Fayne is the story of Charlotte Bell. Charlotte is a precociously intelligent young woman with an insatiable curiosity that is starting to overcome the bounds of what her father and the estate’s library can teach her. This could be a dream existence, but there are shadows in her childhood. Charlotte’s mother died giving birth to her and her brother, the heir to Fayne House died at the age of two. Her father makes a break with tradition on her twelfth birthday, when a young woman would usually have a governess, he hires her a tutor instead. Lord Bell gives him one command for the education of his daughter, to teach her ‘as you would my son, had I one’. Charlotte’s only restriction up till now has been staying within the bounds of the estate. This is because she has a mysterious condition that may make her prone to catching illnesses from others. However, when she takes her tutor out to the bog, they find an unexpected artefact and take it home. Lord Bell suddenly announces he has arranged for her to be cured of this condition, turning Charlotte’s world completely upside down.

There is a feyness to her character, with her love of the boggy moorland and it’s mysterious mists that envelop walkers. She has learned both the ways of the bog and local folklore from Bryn, an elderly servant who seems to come with the estate. Yet the artefact she finds seems to be a mystery. The other mystery that confused me from the outset was the nature of Charlotte’s condition. Also, despite her curiosity about everything else, Charlotte seem strangely unaware of what it is and how it manifests. Her old nurse tells her there are all manner of miasmas and droughts that might carry off her ‘darling pet’. I kept waiting for her to ‘feel’ ill but that never seemed to happen. Another curiosity was her mode of dress, at a time when women were terribly restricted by their clothing which would have included a corset, possibly a bustle, and long cumbersome skirts and petticoats. Yet Charlotte is leaping around the moor, seemingly wearing a form of trousers, that she describes as a scarlet tunic and leggings. I was totally intrigued, imagining a type of female Robin Hood. In fact Charlotte herself says that if she did miss her footing in the bog and was discovered years later, she might be mistaken for a Roman centurion complete with a cape! She’s such an interesting and completely different Victorian female character I was fascinated with her. While still wondering what the mystery around her was, I became beguiled by her wit, intelligence and her endless wonder. As the answers started to come I was rooting for her to escape the rigid gender boundaries of her time and fulfil her potential. The author’s assertion that Charlotte is normal, it’s the world that’s trying to impose it’s order upon her, chimed very strongly with my disability theory background. The social model of disability asserts that all bodies are normal, but the way society is organised creates the disability. For example, if all exits and entrances to a building were ramped everyone can use it. It doesn’t matter if you’re sitting or standing.

It’s clear that the landscape at Fayne and Charlotte are inextricably linked. Despite eventually travelling away from it’s borders, it stands out as the one place she was allowed to be her true self with no restrictions or arbitrary boundaries. She didn’t have to choose who she was at Fayne, she could just be Charlotte. Fayne is a liminal space, existing somewhere between mythology and reality, between England and Scotland. I loved the way the author positions Fayne and the estate’s old folklore as authentic, as natural as Charlotte is before she moves to Edinburgh, which is a sharp contrast to the wilds of her childhood. I was desperate for Charlotte to retain this authenticity, but everything about a city imposes order – the signs, the roads, the hard surfaces. Then there’s ‘society’ and it’s arbitrary rules about gender. There are so many rigid ideas about how a woman should look and behave. The imprisonment of a Victorian woman’s clothing is so stifling that when we think of Charlotte’s tunic and leggings, it feels like being restrained. Yet there are other ways of being, even here, you just have to know where to look. It was great to be on that journey with Charlotte, as she finds that other people also defy expectations. There is so much more to the novel, different viewpoints and characters as well as some plot twists and turns. However, I was always happy to come back to the ever curious and irrepressible Charlotte. It will take all of Charlotte’s ingenuity and intelligence to unearth her family’s secrets and discover her own identity. In some ways I was reminded of another novel with an intersex character delving into her family history, Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides. I enjoyed both character’s journeys to find themselves, but also each book is so rich and full of history. I have read Middlesex more than once and Fayne will also benefit from a re-read, hopefully at a slower pace, as I’m sure there’s so much I missed or didn’t fully appreciate on first reading. Ann-Marie MacDonald is an extraordinary storyteller and I’m now interested to explore her other novels.

I knew from a very young age that I was wrong in the world. And the idea of looking through the eyes of somebody who’s born with an intersex trait has been quite compelling to me for a very long time. It’s not an exotic quality. That’s why I’ve decided not to treat it as a “spoiler.” That’s just who Charlotte is, that’s her body. That’s normal. It’s the world that has a problem and is going to make it a problem for her’.

Ann-Marie MacDonald Press Release from Tramp Press.

Meet the Author

Ann-Marie MacDonald is a novelist, playwright, actor and broadcast host. She was born in the former West Germany. After graduating from the National Theatre School of Canada in Montreal, she moved to Toronto where she distinguished herself as an actor and playwright. In 1996 her first novel Fall On Your Knees became an international bestseller, was translated into nineteen languages and sold three million copies. It won a Commonwealth Prize, the People’s Choice Award and the Libris Award. In 2002 it was an Oprah’s Book Club choice. In 2023, The Way the Crow Flies appeared and in 2014 Adult Onset, both of which had international success. In 2019 she was made an Officer of the Order of Canadafor her contribution to the arts and her LGBTQ25+ activism. She is married to theatre director Alisa Palmer with whom she has two children.

Posted in Publisher Proof

Shark Heart by Emily Habeck

Posted on by thelotusreaders

When Ella from Hachette Books messaged me to say there was a book she thought would be right up my street I was a little surprised. I didn’t think the publicists would know me and my book choices well enough to make predictions about what I’d like. I was wrong. She knew exactly who this book was for. ‘It’s about a man turning into a Great White Shark’ she told me, well what’s not to like? I was hooked on the idea before the book even arrived. Lewis and Wren have fallen in love. They’ve no idea that their first year of marriage will also be their last. It’s only weeks after their wedding when Lewis receives a rare and shocking diagnosis. He has an unusual mutation. Although he might retain some of his consciousness, his memories and possibly his intellect, his body will become that of a Great White Shark. Lewis is complicated, an artist at heart he has always wanted to write the great American play for his generation. How will his liberal and loving heart beat on within the body of one of the earth’s most ruthless predators? He also has to come to terms with never fulfilling his dreams, but expressing that anger with shark DNA in his system has huge repercussions. He has to come to terms with leaving Wren behind, for her own safety. Wren wants to fight on. To find a way of living and loving each other as Lewis changes. She is told that there will come a point when this will be too dangerous. Lewis will then have to live in a state run facility or free in the ocean. It’s when she sees a glimpse of his developing carnivorous nature that a memory from her past is triggered. Wren has to make a terrible, heart-wrenching decision.

I felt emotionally devastated by this beautiful novel that uses a fantastical premise to unleash experiences of grief, love, loss and potentially, healing. Wren and Lewis reminded me of my relationship with my late husband. We married after six weeks and even then I knew I wouldn’t have him forever. I had almost seven years until I lost him. This book explained how my own grief experience felt. After Jez’s death I felt furious with anyone who said ‘Jez would think..’ or claimed they could sense his presence. I could feel nothing. No voice, no presence, nothing. It was as if he had never existed. For Lewis there becomes a point when his incessant desire to feed will become his overriding thought, strong enough to wipe out all others, will that include his love for Wren? He will not exist as Lewis anymore, the doctors tell Wren, he will not even know who she is, because he will be all shark. Wren has to come to terms with letting Lewis go, but how do you walk away from the most precious thing in your life? I had a point where I had to decide that I couldn’t look after my husband any more. I was exhausted, we had no carers in place and it didn’t feel safe to try and go it alone. Besides, as his brother told me, I had to start building a life without Jez. I cried more the night he went into nursing care, than when he died, because I felt I’d let him down and I knew he would die. He did, only six weeks later. Wren is told the same after a terrible violent incident occurs at the after-party for the play Lewis’s students have worked on. Wren calls the specialist nurse for advice, but she urges Wren that it’s time. Will they be able to say goodbye?

Despite these similarities to my life, it wasn’t Lewis’s story that broke my heart, It was Wren’s story. This is not the first time Wren has had to say goodbye. When she was barely a teenager her mother also had a rare diagnosis, but her mutation was that of a Komodo Dragon, equally deadly and impossible to live with. One scene between Wren and her mother, as she leaves her in the state facility, was so deeply moving I cried. I found it unbearable. This is what’s astonishing about Emily Habeck’s debut. It seems so fantastical, yet is utterly real in it’s experiences and emotions. Using such unusual animals as the mutation/illness creates a distance from the feelings involved. Some readers might even think the premise ridiculous – but the terrible anticipation, the moment of loss, the grief and relentless momentum of life are exactly the same. It doesn’t matter whether it’s the decision to put an elderly parent in a home or a Komodo Dragon into a facility, the guilt and pain as you walk away feels identical. It isn’t all relentless misery though. We meet Wren’s mother as the teenager she once was, experiencing love for the first time. We also go back to Lewis and his new life in the ocean, as his emotions flit between loss and what’s for dinner. His friendship with Margaret is so funny. She was once a human too and she’s been looking for another hybrid to talk to, and boy does she talk?! She’d try the patience of a shark. In a beautifully unusual way and in an almost poetic prose, this beautiful debut is about life. It’s ups and downs, the horrendous losses and the gains: the naivety of first love, becoming a mother, our love and care for an elderly parent, friendships and realising that a special little girl sees you as her dad. Life is constant adaptation, evolving and developing all the time. Every end is a beginning. This is such a special novel, an incredible debut with such a keen grasp of what being human is all about. I can see this becoming an all-time favourite for me. It quite simply took my breath away.

Meet the Author

Emily Habeck has a BFA in theater from SMU’s Meadows School of the Arts as well as master’s degrees from Vanderbilt Divinity School and Vanderbilt’s Peabody College. She grew up in Ardmore, Oklahoma. Shark Heart is her first novel.

Published on 3rd August by Jo Fletcher Books

Posted in Sunday Spotlight

Changeling by Matt Wesolowski

Posted on by thelotusreaders

I spent some of my recent holiday going back to the earlier books in a series I picked up half way through. I often review for Orenda books blog tours and this has meant picking up on some fabulous authors who are on the fourth or fifth book in a series. I then slowly buy the previous novels in the series and take them on holiday so I can wallow in them for a couple of days. So, it was with no idea of the subject matter, except it would be a mystery and was being revisited by a podcast called Six Stories where Scott King interviews six people connected to the case. It’s not that he expects or aims to solve the case, although that’s a possibility, it’s about hearing different voices, perhaps ones that haven’t been heard or have something to add to their original evidence. I had no idea of the geographical location in The Changeling, nor could I have predicted reading it when I did. The case begins on Christmas Eve 1988 when Sorrel Marsden is travelling along the Wentshire Forest Pass, a road between Chester and Wrexham in North Wales. He hears a knocking sound in the car and decides to pull over in a lay-by to investigate. As he gets out he glances back to check on his son Alfie who is fast asleep in his booster seat in the back. Sorrel checks under the bonnet of the car, but not seeing anything obvious he decides to continue his journey. However, as he drops the bonnet he notices the rear passenger door is open and Alfie’s booster seat is empty. He looks for his son on the edges of the forest, but with no clue where Alfie has gone he goes to the phone box and calls the police.

We holidayed on the welsh borders, with the River Wye running through the garden of the cottage. We were travelling back from Chester Zoo when I started to read The Changeling and I’d passed navigation duties to my stepdaughter so I could put my feet up in the back. So I read Sorrel Marsden’s account of his son’s disappearance as we drove from Chester into Wales! Wesolowski is skilled at creating a setting that slowly unnerves the reader and I felt this as I read about the history of the forest and the interview King does with a contractor working on the construction of a holiday park. He was working in the forest at the time of Alfie’s disappearance and tried to help with the search for the boy. Not that searching was easy, as floodlights that worked earlier that day completely malfunctioned when needed. It was also impossible to move vehicles from the area of the search, the very embodiment of a ghost in the machine or gremlins in the works. The builder claimed that strange events started happening when they tried to remove ancient trees from the woodland. With normal tools not working, they were reduced to hacking at the trunks of the trees with little success except for a few blood injuries. They were sleeping onsite in temporary buildings when the knocking started, insistent and gaining in volume despite having no visible source. Most fanciful were his stories of seeing an animal out the corner of his eye, possibly a goat or wild boar. What i found most chilling though were the voices, whispery and urgent little voices that were indecipherable but angry in tone. Sorrel Marsden has made a point of walking the pass every year on the anniversary of Alfie’s disappearance. He never claims to hear or see anything on his treks, but they do serve a purpose. They set him up as the victim, the hero of the piece, especially then compared with Alfie’s mother Sonia who has never taken part in the search or been interviewed about her son. Until now.

The character’s in the novel are open to interpretation and our impression of them might change, depending on whose account we are listening to. Part of Sorrel’s story of that night is as damning for Sonia as her absence at memorials and other events. He claims to have suggested to spend Christmas with his estranged wife and son, but as Sonia’s drinking worsened he decided to remove Alfie from his mother’s care and return with him to his own home in Wrexham. This would have given people a terrible impression of Sonia and as an uncaring and unfit mother. Yet we haven’t heard her or anyone else’s opinion, only Sorrel’s. People tend not to question or accuse the bereaved and with Sorrel being found by police curled up in the phone box in a foetal position, it’s hard to blame those in attendance for treating him with care and compassion. Yet Sonia does consent to meeting King and talks for the first time about that awful Christmas. She doesn’t deny drinking, but has some explanations for her actions. She claims that Sorrel is an unusual man, with an ability to draw people to him that goes beyond his looks or personality. She recalls being belittled and controlled. Yes she struggled as a very young and isolated mum, but no help came. Despite claiming she was a bad mother, Sorrel left her alone with Alfie and rarely visited. I loved the women who contacted Scott King to tell their story of encounters with Sorrel. Like a mini ‘Me Too’ movement these women come together to talk about coercive control, psychological abuse, strange knocking sounds keeping them awake and leaving them unnerved. These women have incredible strength and having experienced a relationship like this I had my suspicions about Sorrel Marsden.

Sorrel is controlled, especially in his work as a chef. Other kitchen workers comment on his admiration for the military way of running a kitchen, a system of rules and regulations he also expects in his kitchen at home. Women refer to an unusual feeling they’d experience, as if he had them in an enchantment. It made me think of the word ‘glamour’ in the way it’s applied to witches – folk tales tell of a witch’s ability to ‘glamour’ people, to only show those sides of themselves they wish to be seen, often appearing as a beautiful young woman when they are in fact a shrivelled old woman. If we look at it realistically, Sorrel is a master manipulator and serial abuser able to charm and convince women to trust him. He then slowly isolates them, breaks down their confidence, gaslights them and convinces them they are worthless. When his story is picked apart there are holes everywhere, including a past link to the forest. When Alfie is a toddler he suggests a family camping holiday to the forest, with a friend of his called Wendy to help with the childcare. On this trip Alfie ‘disappeared’ into the forest for the first time, found by Sorrel who walks back into the clearing with his son in his arms. Both Sonia and Wendy claim that Alfie was never the same after this trip. I could only wonder why Sorrel would have taken them to a wood with no facilities and such a haunted reputation. Did Sorrel know what was in the woods? Was Alfie some sort of sacrifice? From then on Sonia would hear strange voices and knocking when no one was there.

The section that genuinely lifted up the hairs on the back my neck seemed a bit tenuous at first. King interviews a man whose mother has recently died. She was a teacher back in the 1980’s and as part of her training she was gathering research on pupils who had behavioural issues. When she died her son found the research in the attic and was intrigued by her notes on Child A, because Child A was Alfie Marsden. Delyth recorded his behaviour on several occasions and the more she saw, the more scared she was. Alfie would turn his back on other pupils, deliberately not participating in what everyone else is doing. Alone with him, Delyth heard muttering and although he wasn’t moving, she could hear a strange knocking. There were times where she was scared to look him in the face. Yes, other teachers warned her that he might bite or lash out, but with her he was unnaturally still as if he was listening somewhere else or to something else. Did Alfie just have behavioural issues or was there something more sinister at play? Were the knockings and strange voices similar to those mentioned by the building contractors or by the women who knew Sorrel?

By the final stages of the book I was wondering exactly who is The Changeling of the story? Was Alfie’s sudden change after visiting the forest on the camping trip a sign that he was possessed or changed in some way? Or was Sorrel’s affinity with the forest a sign that he’d been there before? A Changeling is a child swapped in it’s infancy by the fairy folk, either because something wrong or because fairies want to strengthen their fairy blood. The behaviour of a Changeling is ‘unresponsiveness, resistance to physical affection, obstreperousness, inability to express emotion, and unexplained crying and physical changes such as rigidity and deformity.’ Some are unable to speak at all. I was also a little unnerved by the psychic who was brought in after Alfie’s disappearance, then stalled proceedings by saying Alfie was ‘in a Royal Court.’ It has never made sense and it never changed. As she corresponds with Scott I was unnerved by her, what does she know and how? There are a couple of utterly brilliant twists towards the end, neither of which I’d expected and one made me rethink everything I’d read up to that point, in a Sixth Sense way. I wanted to go back and reread with that knowledge, to see how I’d missed it. This was a brilliant and disturbing novel, a clever mix of psychological and supernatural elements that’s very addictive and will stay with you long after the book is finished.

Out now from Orenda Books

Meet the Author

Matt Wesolowski is an author from Newcastle-upon-Tyne in the UK. He is an English tutor for young people in care. Matt started his writing career in horror, and his short horror fiction has been published in numerous UK- and US-based anthologies, such as Midnight Movie Creature, Selfies from the End of the World, Cold Iron and many more. His novella, The Black Land, a horror set on the Northumberland coast, was published in 2013. Matt was a winner of the Pitch Perfect competition at the Bloody Scotland Crime Writing Festival in 2015. His debut thriller, Six Stories, was an Amazon bestseller in the USA, Canada, the UK and Australia, and a WHSmith Fresh Talent pick, and film rights were sold to a major Hollywood studio. A prequel, Hydra, was published in 2018 and became an international bestseller. Changeling, the third book in the series, was published in 2019 and was longlisted for the Theakston’s Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year. His fourth book, Beast, won the Amazon Publishing Readers’ Independent Voice Book of the Year award in 2020. Matt lives in Newcastle with his partner and young son, and is currently working on the sixth book in the Six Stories series. Chat to him on Twitter @ConcreteKraken.

Posted in Netgalley

What’s That Lady Doing? By Lou Sanders

Posted on by thelotusreaders

I’ve felt over the last year that every comedian has a book out. This is the result of the pandemic, where comedians could write material but had no way of testing it out on audience. It seems that a lot of them decided to use this time to write a memoir and this is up there with the best of them. One of the most important things about a memoir written by a celebrity is that it feels authentic and this book feels like a rambling conversation with Lou. She has such a strong narrative voice. I must admit to being a bit fascinated with Lou Sanders for a while now. I’d seen snippets of her stand-up, appearances on panel shows and a gloriously deranged turn as Mel Giedroyc’s sidekick on Unforgivable. However, it was her appearance on another Dave comedy show that cemented her in my memory as someone I’d like to know more about. On Outsiders, she was in a team with Ed Gamble, tackling activities out in the woods to earn Scout-style badges devised by David Mitchell. It was her effect on Ed that absolutely floored me. She slowly drove him to distraction by agreeing a plan, then as he struggled with it, she would get bored and wander off to start a Plan B by herself. His exasperation is delightful. Similarly, on Chris and Rosie Ramsay’s BBC2 show, she dissolved the presenters to puddles of uselessness by beautifully relaying a story about a dog’s back end while visibly gagging! I felt like this was a lady with a gloriously quirky and unapologetic way of being herself in the world that I simply loved. I learned while reading this memoir that her ease with herself, her authenticity, has been very hard won. I now admire her all the more and plan on buying this book for all the teenage girls in my life by the bucketload.

Lou tells her story with no frills or filter and that led to a really intimate reading experience. I could hear her voice immediately and that is the best thing about it. She tells the story of a difficult early life – struggles with ADHD and a very late diagnosis, coupled with devastatingly low self-esteem. Totally misunderstood at home, she was drinking and drug-taking from an early age. All to mask feeling different and as if she didn’t belong anywhere. Leaving home at 15 and working in pubs, she learned to use drink to create a new persona, one that made people laugh. She used whatever it was that made her feel different and strange for laughs. Drama followed her and some of her stories, especially around the opposite sex are starkly told and are all the more devastating for their honesty. She only realises in reverse that it’s impossible to give consent when you’re incapacitated. She’d learned that it was sometimes easier to give in and drink numbed the reality of what had happened. Each wound is almost unnoticed and that’s not just because she was obliterated. She’s totally unaware that she has the ability to keep to her boundaries, in fact I don’t think she was aware of her ability to set them. People who are worth nothing can’t ask for things. They’re not even aware they have the right to say no.

Lou is very matter of fact and unshowy about choosing to get sober and change her life. She credits AA with her success and it took a few false starts to get passed the times she kidded herself – ‘I’ve not had a drink for months, surely one or two would be okay?’ She learned that for her, one leads to many so she can’t have any. Ever. It only became clear for her when she realised she was ruining her own chances, self-sabotaging her career. She would ask comic friends why new comics were getting TV gigs and she wasn’t. After shows where she was obliterated, threw things into the audience and even bit someone, it took a good honest friend to tell her the truth. TV producers didn’t trust her, she was too unpredictable. That friend probably saved her career, in act they saved her life. I found her clarity around this part of her life really admirable, but she doesn’t want to see herself as a heroine or an example. This book doesn’t have a self-help vibe. She knows that she is a work-in-progress and only sticking with AA and practicing abstinence will work for her. In fact she also realises that therapy keeps her life ticking over, it gives her a release – like the pressure valve for her life. I loved the raw honesty of Lou’s writing. This is a book that never could have happened if she hadn’t learned to love every bit of herself. Well, most bits anyway. Some celebrity books are a list of achievements or a ‘how I became famous’ journey, but you don’t really meet the person. I’m not very good at surface stuff. Small talk is impossible for me, because it feels totally inauthentic. I put this book down feeling like I’d really met the person between it’s covers and we’d had a long, honest conversation about life.

Meet the Author

Lou Sanders is a British comedian. She is the champion of series eight of Taskmaster, co-hosts Mel Giedroyc: Unforgivable and has made a host of other television appearances from Live at the Apollo to The Late Late Show.

Lou has performed stand up around the world, including venues in New York, LA, Berlin and sell-out runs in Edinburgh and Soho. Lou has written articles for The Guardian, Time Out and GQ magazine.

More from Lou

Cuddle Club – The podcast where each week Lou Sanders (Taskmaster, QI, Would I Lie To You) asks a special guest the hard hitting questions that other non-cuddle based podcasts don’t dare to. Hot stuff like: Which kid did your parents prefer? Why are we all pretending massages are normal? And, can you ever trust anyone to order for you?

https://www.lousanders.com/gigs

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Minor Disturbances at Grand Life Apartments by Hema Sukumar

Posted on by thelotusreaders

The Grand Life Apartments are a series of dwellings with beautiful garden surroundings in the coastal city of Chennai. It’s residents are varied and each one has their own sections to the story. Kamala is a dentist on the edge of retirement who counts down the days to her annual visit from daughter Lakshmi who is studying at Oxford University in the U.K. Her tendency towards religious offerings and a more traditional view on marriage and family, sometimes put her at loggerheads with Lakshmi. Revathi is 32 and a successful engineer who lives alone, something her mother never tires of reminding her is not normal. She is reaching her expiry date in the arranged marriage market. Reva likes her freedom and has entertained thoughts that maybe not everyone is cut out for marriage and a family, but hasn’t dared tell her mother who is setting up her latest ‘introduction’. Then there is Jason, a young British chef who has impulsively decided to work at an exclusive hotel in Chennai. He has been driven from his London home by an awful break-up that he’s struggling to get over. In the meantime he is making friends with his neighbours and helping out Mani, the owner of the apartments. Mani is facing his own struggle though. A developer offered him a sum of money for the apartments, planning to level them and their gardens so they can extend their luxury apartment blocks across the street. Mani refused their offer, setting off a dangerous and dramatic series of events that will bring the residents together.

I thoroughly enjoyed this slice of life in Chennai, narrated by the the various inhabitants of Grand Life Apartments. I feared a sanitised setting, rather like the The Great Exotic Marigold Hotel’s beautifying of India. However, here the author manages a great balance of being honest about the difficulties of India, whilst also showing it’s warm welcome and sense of family and community. She also showed how travelling or working in the city could sustain someone and take them on an uplifting and life changing journey. A setting with this dichotomy of incredible positives versus the difficulties of corruption and poverty, is very difficult to write in a light-hearted novel. It takes serious skill and I was surprised to find it was a debut novel. It was no surprise to learn that Hema had been a travel writer, because when reading I did feel like I was there. This wasn’t the tourist route either, but real people living and working in the heat and smog of the city. The heat comes across strongly (possibly more to do with my menopause when I think about it) and the dust laying over everything. There was a great mix of things that are comforting and welcoming, but other stories and mentions that reinforced the foreignness of India. These momentary snippets of Indian daily life were brilliant, I loved Jason Skyping his mum who was terrified to see a lizard walking up the wall of his living room! ‘Oh that’s just Lizzie the Lizard’. The apartment’s beautiful gardens are a wonderful touch of old and new, as well as the place where residents tend to come together. It’s a unifying force for the residents and allows young and old to come together – such as on Kamala’s birthday where a power cut and Jason’s rice pudding are central to the impromptu celebration.

This is a book where the characters are really important, because the story comes out of their relationships and personality. Kamala’s daughter Lakshmi comes to stay and with incredible bravery shares a secret about her life that she knows will shock and possibly disappoint her traditional and religious mother. I loved the detail of Kamala’s life, the descriptions of her spice filled cooking and the rituals of her worship at her homemade shrine, with the flowers she buys to accompany her prayers. There’s a solidity about Kamala, she knows who she is and what she believes. Now her thoughts on life are being challenged and she’s having to step out of her comfort zone and let go of the things she expected for her life. I loved the scenes with her friend Sundu (a formidable woman and lawyer) when they come to England. Sundu forces Kamala into trainers on their trip to London and is often amused by her rather blinkered view of the world. The scene with the group of young men on a corner and Kamala’s observation that they smelled of a spice she’d never encountered before, made me laugh out loud.

I felt something for Reva, a connection of some sort although I couldn’t pinpoint why. The way Reva wants to be really does rub up against cultural and familial expectations in her personal life, whilst also coming up against the patriarchy at work. She’s an engineer who knows her own talent and ability to manage a team, but she finds her experience and ability overlooked by management. She’s thinking of moving to another company if they choose to promote a man over her this time, but is she too old to start again or choose a start-up company? She’s contemplating the same risk in her personal life. The pressure she feels from her mother, who doubts her prospects on the marriage market as a woman in her thirties, means she meets men that her mother has arranged. We see her on these ‘dates’ and she does meet nice men, but is ‘nice’ enough? Her mother can’t control Reva’s inner voice and it tells her to hold out for a love match. She knows it’s a risk, but what would happen if she didn’t find love? She would live the life she lives now: working, meeting friends, socialising with her neighbours and checking in on the older residents like Mani and Kamala. Would that be so bad? Does her freedom mean that much to her?

Finally there’s Jason and he has the part of an Englishman abroad. He’s an incredibly sensitive man who has come to Chennai on an impulse to avoid heartbreak at home. His relationship with Elizabeth came to an abrupt end and he’s facing that period of ruminating on the state of their relationship. He was imagining marriage, possibly a family and he thought they were on the same page. Clearly she wasn’t, so was she tricking him or was he simply so caught up in his own expectations he never noticed that she was lagging some way behind. He does spend time checking her social media profiles, dreading but knowing that eventually he will see a hand on her shoulder or a grinning face next to hers. However, when the news comes, it’s nothing he expected and he feels sick. It feels like a betrayal. I was desperately holding out hope that Jason would blossom in Chennai and I loved reading tiny steps towards this. His relationship with Kamala is based on food, she wants him to experience real South Indian food and he desperately wants to impress her. She feels like a grandmother figure to him and he’s so respectful of her. His relationship with Mani is great too and I loved how he helped with the garden, understanding how important it is to Mani and his memories, but also making small changes that help it sustain the lives of the people currently living at the flats. I was more than a little bit desperate for him to forget his heartbreak and maybe spend time with someone a little closer to his new home.

The corruption seen in the building company plot line isn’t the only real or gritty bit of the tale. Begging comes up a few times and Reva thinks about women who fall foul of the social rules and can find themselves drowned in the village pond! There’s also a young boy who rushes around delivering from the local store and has a manner like a little old man. It was great to have this edge because it made India feel real, rather than a Disneyfied version. I found the book, especially Jason and Reva’s journeys, really inspiring. They’ve both made big choices in life – to go away to university, to become a chef, to fly to the other side of the world even! I loved the way Jason was learning a new skill, with Kamala’s advice and making steps towards moving forward in life, by getting rid of his social media. Could they perhaps move forward towards each other? I kept hoping. I had visions of their setting as the perfect haveli with a stone courtyard, beautifully scented climbers and water feature at the centre with just the right trickling sound. I was scared for Mani and not just because the developer’s threatening behaviour worsened. With all of his memories tied up in these apartments, it would be an emotional upheaval for him to leave. I was left with some questions unanswered and I hope this means a sequel might be in the pipeline. I wondered: where Jason and Reva’s lives might go; how Lakshmi might build her life, knowing how much her mum is trying to understand; would Sundu be able to save the apartments? I was deeply invested in these characters and their journeys. The author engaged my senses and my emotions in her debut novel, so much so that I’m already waiting for what comes next.

Out now from Coronet Books.

Book blogger problems No 1: Nosy cats 🐈