Category: Random Things Tours

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The Space Between Us by Doug Johnstone.

Posted on by thelotusreaders

“Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” Alice Through the Looking Glass.

Normally, I’d say this is the most unusual book I’ve read in quite a while, but in fact it’s been a brilliant month for Orenda Books as both their March releases have been quirky, original and quietly brilliant. It’s no secret that I love Doug Johnstone’s Skelf series and it’s mix of philosophy, astronomy, family and crime. This stand alone novel has some of the same attributes and a whole lot more besides. One night a strange occurrence in the Scottish night sky brings together strangers Ava, Lennox and Heather. Several people see the strange light and sparks in the air and all have severe cerebral haemorrhagic strokes. These are the most rare type of strokes and usually they’re fatal. Ava, Lennox and Heather are the only people to wake up the next day completely unscathed. Each one has their problems: Heather had been wading into the water with stones in her pockets after receiving a terminal cancer diagnosis but is saved by something in the water. Lennox is a lonely teenager, bouncing round children’s homes and is being set upon by bullies when he sees the lights in the sky and the stroke hits. Ava is pregnant and desperate to get away from husband Mike, a vile abuser obsessed with power and control. Meanwhile, on the beach lies a strange octopus or giant squid, sprawled on the sand and guarded by police. This cephalopod appeared as these unusual strokes happened and no one knows what to do with it. It’s not the usual octopus as it only has five tentacles and it has strange rippling colours under it’s surface. Police officer Nina is on the case and reporter Ewan is determined to find out the link between the creature and the three disparate people who band together to rescue the creature and have now gone on the run.

None of the three fugitives can understand why the extraterrestrial life form has chosen them. At first their link with Lennox seems most powerful. Despite his background of being let down by others, Lennox is very open to the creature and is the one to name them Sandy. He has even allowed them to form a telepathic connection by leaving a sort of organic hearing aid in his ear, turning them into ‘Lennox-Sandy-Partial’. It’s hard for Lennox to explain Sandy, he immediately uses ‘they’ as Sandy’s pronoun, not because of a dual gender but because they’re a dual person. Lennox thinks Sandy may be part of a larger whole or has a hive mind, one that can link with humans should they wish. For Lennox, being part of a larger whole must sound wonderful and grounding in a way he’s never experienced before.

‘It was weird, having spent his life in the care system, he didn’t have a fucking clue who he really was. The policy preventing you finding out about your birth parents out about your birth parents until you were eighteen was strict, and even then, the chaotic system of records meant you might never find out. Shit just got lost. So he’d drifted rudderless through his early life, with no sense of community or belonging anywhere.’

Ava is the next to connect with Sandy, mainly because she trusts him to tell her whether her unborn baby is okay. Ava is also alone in the sense that she alone knows the truth about her life with husband Michael. Ava was already running when she encountered Sandy, running from Michael and his attempts to destroy her. Michael is the archetypal abuser, who started out by separating her from friends and family then used techniques like gaslighting so she would question herself, even her own sanity. Then the physical and the sexual violence began. Even Ava’s mother has abandoned her, thinking Michael is a lovely man who simply has his wife’s best interests at heart. Ava wants to leave before her baby is born and her decision to flee with Sandy up to the north of Scotland is partly because she hopes Michael won’t find her there. These are the first people to meet Ava and accept her for who she is and they immediately believe her account about her marriage.

The last to connect with Sandy is Heather and that’s because she’s deliberately closed herself off to others. Heather has a terminal brain tumour, something she’s been keeping from everyone including her new friends. She has immediately taken on the role of Mum, looking after all of them and even preparing to deliver Ava’s baby. When they approach Heather’s ex-husband for help, the others are surprised, but Heather assures them he is one of life’s good guys. She is clearly genuinely pleased to see him. However, seeing him with a new wife and starting a family is particularly painful. A terrible tragedy forced this couple apart and seeing him brings it flooding back. Can Sandy approach her now, when she’s at her most vulnerable and what help can he offer? All three are fascinating characters and as a group they seem unbeatable. It’s their very connection that gives them strength. However, they are being pursued; by the police, the journalist called Ewan and a shadowy group of men in black who seem capable of anything if it gets them closer to Sandy.

As always Doug Johnstone is capable of taking several unusual, even improbable scenarios but writing about them in such a clever way you don’t question it. I never once stopped to think it seemed incredible. Similarly, our three main characters never pause or worry they’re doing the wrong thing. There’s one incidence where Lennox stops to question what’s happening:

‘There weren’t many Google hits for ‘telepathic octopus’. Shocker. Lennox looked up from his phone and stared at Sandy. He felt like a different person to the one who walked through the park two days ago. Now he was wanted for murder and kidnapping, sitting in a cheesy brown van with an old woman and a pregnant teacher, and getting psychic messages from a telepathic octopus.’

Usually a story like this would be set in a fantasy or dystopian future, but we’re definitely in the here and now. The settings are so ordinary. I could imagine pulling into a viewing point near Loch Ness and meeting Ava, Lennox and Heather when they’ve broken down and are waiting for a lift. Yet, within moments Lennox has been absorbed by Sandy and is diving through the water like a seal, breathing easily and feeling completely at home. These sequences are fantastical, stunningly beautiful and transcendent. He makes us want to be there experiencing it all. I think the key is that despite the strangeness of a tentacled cephalopod shivering with excitement at the thought of swimming in a loch we’re learning from Sandy. He’s showing us how to love life more, to find the wonder of things, to connect more, grow together and to experience everything:

“Suddenly his host shot upward towards one of the bigger cracks in the ice. A jet stream flowed from a volcano on the seabed, like a fountain through the sea to the opening in the ice. They joined it and shot through the ice shelf into space, surrounded by millions of particles of water and ice. He turned and looked at Saturn, huge and orange in the sky. He realised they were in one of the rings, they were the ring […] floating in space, swaying and drifting.”

As always with Doug’s writing there are literary and philosophical references throughout and I was delighted to find one of my favourite thoughts from Susan Sontag who wrote about illness and disability and their surrounding metaphors. Within the medical model of illness, particularly with cancer and other auto-immune illnesses, the metaphors of battle are commonly used as Heather points out:

“She hated the military terminology that people used around cancer: ‘She lost her brave battle with cancer.’ The cancer was part of you, you created it from nothing, so that language meant you were fighting yourself. Turning everything into a battlefield was a masculine, wrong-headed way of looking at things.”

She hates the assumption that if the cancer has spread or become terminal it’s because she is weak and hasn’t battled hard enough. Sometimes the words we choose are very important.

There are allusions to Alice Through the Looking Glass, to Virginia Woolf in Heather’s method of suicide – wading into water with stones in her pockets. There’s also a hint of Howard’s End in Sandy’s ability to connect with his fellow cephalopods and other species. It should make us rethink how we connect with one another. Howard’s End presents people of different classes who normally wouldn’t associate with each other, but people are really all the same. We should connect with all sorts of people in different age groups, abilities, religions and races. Here Lennox truly understands this:

‘It didn’t make sense to think of himself as Lennox anymore, he was a compound of a million things – bacteria in his gut, microscopic bugs in his hair, Xander’s body passing through his own, Sandy inside his neurons. It finally made physical sense, the idea that Sandy was plural. We all are. And the human idea of being singular, apart, alone, was a ridiculous and lonely way of looking at life.”

In fact what our different characters show us is how strong we can be, if we work together, especially characters with very different skills and personalities. Being part of a whole makes us stronger. Despite the danger and tension of their quest to reach Ullapool where everyone converges on the harbour, I found the ending so positive. Sandy asks us to rethink our lives, let others in and perhaps look at the world in a different way. Why do we think of our planet as ‘Earth’ when the largest proportion of our globe is ocean? We look at everything through the filter of our own class, education, experience and privilege. So, we should take time to view things through someone else’s filter. This was a fascinating, funny and uplifting literary journey that challenges us to move closer and reduce the space between us. In other words ‘only connect’.

Published 2nd March 2023 by Orenda Books

Doug Johnstone is the author of twelve novels, most recently The Great Silence, the third in the Skelfs series, which has been optioned for TV. In 2021,The Big Chill, the second in the series, was longlisted for the Theakston’s Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year. In 2020, A Dark Matter, the first in the series, was shortlisted for the McIlvanney Prize for Scottish Crime Novel of the Year and the Capital Crime Amazon Publishing Independent Voice Book of the Year award. Black Hearts (Book four), will be published in 2022. Several of his books have been best sellers and award winners, and his work has been praised by the likes of Val McDermid, Irvine Welsh and Ian Rankin. He’s taught creative writing and been writer in residence at various institutions, and has been an arts journalist for twenty years. Doug is a songwriter and musician with five albums and three EPs released, and he plays drums for the Fun Lovin’ Crime Writers, a band of crime writers. He’s also player-manager of the Scotland Writers Football Club. He lives in Edinburgh.

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The Venice Secret by Anita Chapman.

Posted on by thelotusreaders

I’m sure amongst those who travel a lot, saying that Venice is your favourite travel destination is a bit of a cliché. I’d first wanted to go aged around ten years old, when I first read the children’s book What Katy Did Next. This third book in the Katy series followed the eponymous heroine as she travelled Europe as companion to a woman and her little girl and is lucky enough to be in Venice for Carnival. I first travelled there with my mum as a fortieth birthday celebration and we both fell completely in love. A couple of years later I visited again, this time with my best friend and enjoyed exploring more of the city, beyond the usual tourist sites. Mainly I enjoyed wandering the labyrinthine streets, taking photographs and soaking up the atmosphere. It has a magic that’s part romance and part mystical, with an edgy gothic darkness that can easily unnerve you – especially when the fog comes down, you’ve lost your way and keep finding lonely dead ends. There’s a little maze behind Teatro La Fenice where you can spend untold hours, wondering if you’re stuck in a time loop. It is one of those places where I wouldn’t have been surprised to turn a corner and find myself back in the 18th Century. So it seemed fitting to me that Venice is a backdrop to Anita Chapman’s debut, a dual timeline story with two narrators; firstly in 2019 with Rachel, then back to the late 18th Century with Phillipa. Both women are going through a period of upheaval and change, another uncanny similarity to fit a city that seems to be a ‘thin place’: a city without the normal barriers of space and time.

In the present we meet Rachel who is helping to sort through her grandmother’s belongings while temporarily living in her cottage. She will soon have to make a decision, to share a home with her mother and her horrible new partner, or become homeless. Rachel is feeling a bit lost and displaced, so needs a project to get her teeth into. She certainly gets more than she bargained for! She discovers what appears to be a Canaletto painting in her grandmother’s loft along with a note addressed to Philippa in 1782. With help from Jake at the local art gallery, Rachel endeavours to find out if the painting is an original and uncovers a secret from the past. The painting depicts a view of St Mark’s Square towards the Basilica from one of the south corners of the piazza. It seems to have some provenance and Rachel sets out to discover who painted it and whether it’s really as old as it’s style suggests. It purports to be a Canaletto, but can it really be genuine and if so, what is it doing in her grandmother’s attic? If it is the real deal, it could be the link between Rachel and our 18th Century narrator, Philippa. Phillipa has gone through a huge change in circumstances, following the death of her father who was a preacher. He has left behind a family struggling to make ends meet and Phillipa feels weighed down by responsibility for them. So she takes the decision to become a governess, leaving her family behind in order to earn enough money to keep them. She manages to get a position at the prestigious Chipford Hall, the family seat of the Duke of Oxon, who has two little girls. Yet, it isn’t long before Phillipa is forced on the move again but this time she’s asked to accompany a family friend, Lady Cordelia, on a trip to Venice, researching her latest novel. It was Phillipa’s part of the story that really engaged me as I felt a real kinship with her. She is quite a level-headed and sensible young woman, prepared to take on her father’s responsibilities. There was common sense, but also a deep kindness in her – she’s willing to give up any dreams of her own to keep the family going.

While I enjoyed aspects of Rachel’s story, I didn’t feel she was as strong and her character didn’t quite grab me in the same way Phillipa did. Rachel’s difficulties often seemed to come from her own choices, but I did feel sorry for her. Nevertheless, her sections do hold the story together well and the history of the painting she finds is fascinating and very well researched too. The author has the skill of bringing the historical aspects of the story to life, full of vivid details and characters. For someone who loves Venice, those sections of the story were particularly enjoyable, taking me back to those tiny streets and romantic canals, triggering some incredible memories along the way. I was also interested in the way the author used the figure of the governess, which ever since Jane Eyre has provided rich material for the writer of historical fiction. Governesses are in a position within the house as neither servant nor master, she is rather unique and potentially dangerous. She has access to the centre of the home, working upstairs with the children and often living with the family, rather than in the servant’s quarters. This position allowed the author to really open up the 18th Century for us, particularly in terms of society and it’s hierarchies. The pace is slower at first, but soon speeds up as the clues start to be revealed and we each time we get a bit closer to the truth and the link with Phillipa. We also come closer to the resolution of each woman’s inner journey. Would Phillipa’s be able to construct better boundaries and gain some wisdom in discerning someone’s character before trusting them? Would Rachel learn to stand on her own feet more, despite the difficulties in her background? I loved how we could see the changes in women’s lives since the 18th Century and how we were less at the mercy of the men in our lives, some of whom seemed perfectly happy to sacrifice a woman if it brought them closer to the power they sought. Each part of the story was woven together beautifully towards a satisfying conclusion, ensuring that I’ll be be looking forward to whatever Anita Chapman writes next.

Meet The Author

Anita Chapman enjoyed writing stories from a young age, and won a local writing competition when she was nine years old. Encouraged by this, she typed up a series of stories about a mouse on her mum’s typewriter and sent them to Ladybird. She received a polite rejection letter, her first.

Many of Anita’s summers growing up were spent with her family driving to Italy, and she went on to study French and Italian at university. As part of her degree, Anita lived in Siena for several months where she studied and au paired, and she spent a lot of time travelling around Italy in her twenties.

Anita likes to read journals and diaries from the past, and one of her favourite pastimes is visiting art galleries and country houses. Her first published novel, The Venice Secret is inspired by her mother taking her to see the Canalettos at The National Gallery in London as a child.

Since 2015, Anita has worked as a social media manager, training authors on social media, and helping to promote their books. She’s run several courses in London and York, and has worked as a tutor at Richmond and Hillcroft Adult Community College.

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All The Little Bird Hearts by Viktoria Lloyd-Barlow

Posted on by thelotusreaders

What an intricately beautiful and nuanced novel this is! I had expected a story along the same lines as Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine or Meredith Alone at first. The beautiful aesthetics of the setting and glamorous lifestyle dazzle us and everything on the surface seems benign as Sunday and her daughter Dolly start a relationship with their new neighbours. Vita is aristocratic in her manner and comes across as a likeable eccentric, perhaps a little pretentious but as my friend Nigel used to say, ‘a little bit of pretension doesn’t hurt anyone’. They love- bomb Sunday and her daughter with gifts and elaborate Friday night dinners. Vita and her husband Rollo are staying in the house next door while ‘Rols’ completes a plan to buy and convert a large institution for children in care nearby. Until this glamorous pair enter their lives, Sunday and Dolly lead a very quiet life. Divorced from Dolly’s father, they still live in a house on his family estate where Sunday works in the gardens. Sunday isn’t great with noise (especially several at once) only eats white food and struggles to read between the lines with others. She gets on best with David who works in the greenhouses with her and uses sign language to communicate. Extremes of anything, cause panic in Sunday, so the slow rhythms of nature and it’s subtle colouring are perfect for her. Sunday didn’t even know anything was missing in her life until Vita wants to become her friend. However, is Vita a genuine friend or does she have an ulterior motive? This is where the slightness of the story and the details of glamorous clothes, extravagant dinners and endless champagne started to remind me of Virginia Woolf and her clever way of hiding so much beneath a beautiful surface. Instead of being an uplifting tale about someone who struggles to make connections finding a friend and embracing their peculiarities, this promised to be something darker.

I felt a kinship with Sunday immediately and the tone is light at first as she meets new neighbour Vita and her comical little dog Beast. Vita is one of those people who never question themselves or worry about their interactions with others. She simply inserts herself into Sunday’s life, without any of the social angst over whether she’s wanted there. Vita and her husband Rollo are dazzling and disarming, from the clothes they wear to the hyperbole in their speech and the very best delicacies on the dinner table, including the most exquisitely wrapped and coloured petit fours. They are disarming in the way they present themselves, classy but bohemian and often a touch of carelessness like sitting on the front step in a silk kimono and old work boots. Is this nonchalance studied or natural? Conversely, Sunday can’t be what she isn’t and her ‘quirks’ are not affectations. She has learned to be less, to mask and try to make herself acceptable from a young age thanks to a mother who never showed her love. She constantly proclaimed Sunday was an ‘it’, a ‘what’, an unsavoury puzzle to be solved. We learn that this animosity towards her daughter worsened when a terrible family tragedy occurred. I loved how the author layered the voices in Sunday’s head: her daughter explaining that her dad and stepmum love each other so much, it’s just that Sunday is incapable of seeing it; her mother saying ‘you’re not wired right you’; her sister saying ‘I don’t know what you are Sunday’. At first, the friendship of Vita and Rollo soothes Sunday’s soul, because she feels accepted. They always make sure white rolls are available at the dinner table, in case the main course is too colourful or complex for her. They also make sure there is champagne or soda water, because Sunday will only drink cold, fizzy liquids. These attentions are simply there, neither one of the couple mention them, but they mean the world to Sunday:

‘their attention to my preferences touched me. I had not been known in this way before and found acceptable. There I was seen and approved of, even indulged’.

At first, Dolly and Sunday would often stay late next door after dinner, but subtle changes start to occur. Dolly wants to stay over with Vita on Friday nights. One night, after leaving for home, Sunday returns with her daughter’s favourite pyjamas and hears music as well as laughter next door. Yet when Rollo answers the door, he holds it closed behind him as he takes the pyjamas. He is perfectly polite, but does not step back as he once might have done to let Sunday inside. These subtleties make the reader nervous and I felt worse because I wasn’t sure whether Sunday could see what I was seeing.

‘painted subjects are easier to read than their physical counterparts […] in real life the details I am drawn to are often secondary, and these often mislead. That evening when I looked at Vita, I saw her pretty hair, her little wrists wrapped in gold chains, and her welcoming smile. I did not notice the grip of her hand on my daughter’s arm’.

I wanted to put myself between Sunday and these charming people. She recalls jealousy, but was it because she envied Dolly’s easy relationship with Vita or was she jealous of Vita’s relationship with her daughter? The subtle foreshadowing becomes more direct as Dolly relates the story of Vita simply taking a friend’s baby for a walk without telling the mother. Vita seemingly could not understand why the woman was so scared or why the police were called. Slowly, Sunday understands that her new friend is possibly not what she seems, by using a system of observation and noting patterns of behaviour. Yet I was still worried that she might underestimate the extent of Vita’s ability to create chaos. Sunday describes her way of analysing people, to look beyond their ‘fleeting expressions’ to see the repeated pattern on their heart. She looks beyond what they say and instead values and interprets them based on their repeated behaviour. Yet with Vita she declares herself too scared to look, because she isn’t sure whether the tick tock of her heart signifies a clock or a bomb.

Dolly’s changes are also subtle at first, but Sunday notices a new confidence and self-possession that she is acquiring from time spent with their neighbours. Whereas once Dolly might have been reserved with new people, Vita unlocks the young girl who is soon easily pushed to near hysteria over a shared joke. This quantity of feeling makes Sunday uneasy. Yet surely this new ease in her daughter’s manner can only make life easier for Dolly? She won’t share Sunday’s fears and awkwardness. The coming summer heralds a rollercoaster of change and emotions, first Dolly’s accent becomes more cut glass and she starts to dress differently, more like Vita. As exams loom and the renovation of the children’s home comes closer, the couple offer Dolly a job helping out with admin and interior design. She announces she’d like to do it for the holidays, but Sunday reminds her she does not need to work. Her father and grandparents get her everything her heart desires. Yet Sunday feels churlish refusing the opportunity, torn between what is best for her daughter’s future. I felt that Dolly used her mum’s inexperience against her at times, claiming that there were simply so many uses for her on site, but Sunday could never imagine them, because she’s only ever known the farm. If she refuses Dolly’s request to spend time in London with them, will it make Vita and Rollo’s offer even more attractive? 

Vita isn’t above manipulation herself : ‘I’m so sorry Dolly, you know we love taking you out. And we had such fun planned in London. But…’

Sunday doesn’t know whether she can or should deny her daughter these experiences. It might help her get on in life. Should she be supporting her daughter to reach for something different? Should she be holding her back? However, some base instinct urges her to say no, to ban the trip and keep Dolly home for the summer, knowing this could backfire completely if their offer is benign, nothing more than a favour for the daughter of their friend. Sunday hasn’t had close friends before so can’t compare the situation. When Dolly receives her exam results, the dam breaks and out comes a voice Sunday has never heard before from her daughter, one filled with scorn, shame and no appreciation for her mother’s years of caring attention. Dolly sees her mother’s life as a failure and she will do anything not to be like her. The author cleverly contrasts this awful evening with the story of a fox that arrived in Sunday’s garden, a little too thin and straggly. It made it’s home under their shed for the winter and every day without fail Sunday would set milk and dog food down. In the spring the fox was sleek and flourishing because of Sunday’s steady and dutiful nature.

One of the most heartbreaking revelations for me is Sunday’s slow realisation that others have quirks and oddities, but it is still possible for people to be fond of them. To love them even. She had always thought it simply a fact of life that anyone with quirks like hers would be impossible to love, but that’s not the truth:

‘My mother could still have loved me had she chosen to’.

To befriend someone who has experienced this trauma, to make them feel loved and accepted, but then manipulate them for your own ends is evil. Yet the author keeps the reader unsure whether that’s what Vita is doing an I was constantly waiting for this ticking time bomb of a woman to explode. Yet whatever the outcome, I wasn’t sure that Vita was consciously acting this way. Her behaviour felt like a repeated pattern, possibly an enactment of her own traumas. Rollo knows though and when the truth starts to emerge he is openly affectionate to Sunday. Instead of serving up the usual air kisses, this is a hug that’s more substantial and perhaps honest. Showing a remarkable insight into his wife’s nature he tells Sunday:

‘It’s not you, darling. It’s Vee I’m afraid. She doesn’t think these things through. It might all change again by tomorrow’.

Yet he is willing to let her continue, to collude in destroying others casually and without consequence. At the very least she will offer friendship and take it away on a whim. They will simply slip into another life, with all the security their money and status gives them. Like Nick and Daisy in The Great Gatsby, Vita and Rollo are careless with other people, content to use others and leave them behind. Yet there are threads of hope in the conclusion, not least in Sunday’s ability to reflect on her own actions and feelings with more awareness. This novel is stunning, beautifully written and has such psychological complexity and insight. I loved it.

Meet the Author

Viktoria Lloyd-Barlow has a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Kent. Like her protagonist, Sunday, in ALL THE LITTLE BIRD-HEARTS, Viktoria is autistic. She has presented her doctoral research internationally, most recently speaking at Harvard University on autism and literary narrative. Viktoria lives with her husband and children on the Kent coast.

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Bedtime Story by Chloe Hooper

Posted on by thelotusreaders

Whenever I’ve been faced with difficulties in life, my instinct is to reach for a book that helps. It might be a self-help or nonfiction manual, it might be a novel that closely echoes my own experience, or it could be a memoir that tells a similar story from a totally different perspective. I’ve been helped by so many books over the years: Havi Carel’s Illness helped me cope with my invisible disability, several books about coercive control and psychological abuse helped me through a terrible break-up and books like Small Dogs Can Save Your Life and The Year of Magical Thinking helped me negotiate my first year of being a widow. Books have helped me understand the world in so many different ways, so I was fascinated with the concept of Chloe Hooper’s beautiful book Bedtime Story. In the same way I’d always reached for literature, Chloe Hooper had turned to children’s stories to hopefully find a way through a terrible situation.

Let me tell you a story…

When Chloe Hooper’s partner was diagnosed with a rare and aggressive illness, she had to find a way to tell their two young sons. By instinct, she turned to their bookshelves. Could the news be broken as a bedtime tale? Is there a perfect book to prepare children for loss? Hooper embarks on a quest to find what practical lessons children’s literature—with its innocent orphans and evil adults, magic, monsters and anthropomorphic animals—can teach about grief and resilience in real life.

From the Brothers Grimm to Frances Hodgson Burnett and Tolkien and Dahl—all of whom suffered childhood bereavements—she follows the breadcrumbs of the world’s favourite authors, searching for the deep wisdom in their books and lives. Both memoir and manual, Bedtime Story is stunningly illustrated by the New York Times award-winning Anna Walker. In an age of worldwide uncertainty, here is a profound and moving exploration of the dark and light of storytelling.

I was first drawn by the look of this book and felt really lucky to receive such a beautiful proof copy. However, it wasn’t long before it was the beauty of the words that seduced me. Hooper manages to convey so much in her choice of words. She talks about childhood bedtimes and how ‘you lie in the fresh anarchy of the dark’ once reading is over and it’s time for the lights to go out. I loved the use of the word ‘anarchy’ because that’s exactly how it feels when the light goes off and the ordinary shapes of furniture and well worn toys become something completely different. The darkness allows them to metamorphose into whatever horror they like. It reminded me of childhood trips to the toilet in the middle of the night, when flushing the toilet and turning off the bathroom light would leave me momentarily without sight or hearing. I would run down the hallway on my tiptoes and leap from the threshold of my bedroom onto the bed, just in case whatever lurked under there grabbed hold of my ankle.

I completely understood the author’s need to move into researching children’s stories at a time of such great loss. When I lost my husband I was writing about my experience, but found myself veering off towards the Victorian form of mourning with all it’s rules and regulations. Reading about Queen Victoria’s loss of Prince Albert in a non-fiction format felt safer than reading a novel. It was all facts and couldn’t suddenly ambush me with emotion. The author was obviously looking for answers, but I wondered if she too was looking for reassurance in the dark. Trying to find a correct or right way to do something that is unimaginable. There is something strangely comforting about reading that someone else has faced this. In fact if you think about it this wre ads a mot ptyuuere are a lot of orphans and lost children in literature. Anne of Green Gables, Pip in Great Expectations, Jane Eyre, Mary Lennox in The Secret Garden, Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights – it was a more common experience to loo your parents in the 19th Century. In fact many of the authors themselves suffered childhood bereavements so perhaps their storytelling was a way of writing out that experience from the safety of adulthood, trying out what might have happened to them in that situation, or perhaps exploring their greatest fears at the time. So maybe from these stories there are clues to the better ways of helping a child through the experience, a way in which ‘the right words are an incantation, a spell of hope for the future’.

When working as a writing therapist with people who’ve had life-changing diagnoses, one of the first exercises I do with people is to imagine their illness is a monster. They must of course think about how it looks, but also how it smells and the texture of it’s skin or fur. How does it move across the room and if it came in now what would it do? Would it sit, talk to the group or slink off to a corner and stay aloof or separate? How does it behave with them? What is it’s personality and it’s drive? This is a fascinating exercise and brings so many different responses to the surface to talk about within the group. Of course this is only how we perceive it to be. Our illness and our symptoms, don’t care about us. We are irrelevant to them. It’s what their presence does to us that’s important, how we respond to it – anxiety, fear, dread, anger. Hooper writes about monsters within narratives in interesting ways. On one hand they are amoral, unstoppable and all powerful. As Hooper writes, her husband’s cancer cells are completely indifferent to him and what kind of person he is. Similarly, the Basilisk doesn’t care that it’s Harry Potter he’s trying to eat, because in the monster’s world Harry isn’t the poor, orphaned, centre of the universe, he’s just a meal. On the other hand, the monster can be fashioned from what lurks within ourselves such as the tree monster in Patrick Ness’s A Monster Calls. This monster is seemingly fashioned from Conor’s mother’s illness, but actually he isn’t there for her. He’s there for Conor. While adults feed him platitudes and half-truths, the monster is straight with him and confronts him with a terrible truth, so awful that Conor can’t bear to face it. He’s finally able to tell the monster of his terrible feelings, that he’s so tired of his mother’s illness that he wants her ordeal to end. He is ashamed of feeling this, but in saying it he becomes free. It shows the desperate need for an outlet, away from the parents, where the child can express everything they feel, even the negative and shameful narratives they tell themselves.

If all this sounds powerful, thit is. What I love about this book and the reason I want to use it with clients, is that it doesn’t sugar coat anything. It’s not syrupy sweet, but tells iiīiiooooôoothe truth about trying to live while potentially dying. Anticipating the death of someone you love is like a slow torture and Hooper doesn’t compromise. This is about that daily struggle to be a family and continue to make sense of a world that has suddenly become scary, hostile and uncertain. The love she has for her children won’t let her lie to them, but somehow they find solace in the stories and imaginary worlds she studies. There’s a way in which it teaches them how to accept that our time here and our time together is finite. Or, to quote from The Fault in our Stars, some infinities are bigger then others. I found Hooper’s narrative utterly unique and incredibly beautiful, full of strength, a resilience within the grief. She tells us that as soon as we describe something that’s happened to us in words, we’ve placed it a step or two further away, in order to examine it and understand it better. That’s what’s happening throughout the book and we go along that personal journey with her and her family. It’s such a privilege. However, it’s also a book that treasures literature and shows us how important stories are to our culture. When we bring our children up with stories, we’re sharing something imaginative and magical but we’re also equipping them for everything life can throw at them, because without stories we have no way to make meaning of our existence and experiences.

Out now from Scribner.

Meet the Author.

Chloe Hooper’s most recent book is the bestselling The Arsonist: A Mind on Fire. The Tall Man: Death and Life on Palm Island won the Victorian, New South Wales, West Australian and Queensland Premiers’ Literary Awards, as well as the John Button Prize for Political Writing, and a Ned Kelly Award for crime writing. She is also the author of two acclaimed novels, A Child’s Book of True Crime and The Engagement. She lives in Melbourne with her partner and her two sons.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/may/13/bedtime-story-by-chloe-hooper-review-an-extraordinary-treasure-of-hope-and-grief

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Clara and Olivia by Lucy Ashe.

Posted on by thelotusreaders

“Surely you would like to be immortalised in art, fixed forever in perfection?”

I would kill to dance like her.

Disciplined and dedicated, Olivia is the perfect ballerina. But no matter how hard she works, she can never match identical twin Clara’s charm.

I would kill to be with her.

As rehearsals intensify for the ballet Coppélia, the girls feel increasingly like they are being watched. And, as infatuation turns to obsession, everything begins to unravel.

We’re in Black Swan territory here with the company at Sadler’s Wells as they rehearse Coppélia, which couldn’t be more apt for the story of Clara and Olivia. Clara and Olivia are identical twins, shaped by their ballet mad mother to become the perfect ballerinas. The girls are so identical that in order to assert her own identity Olivia wears her hair in a higher bun than her sister, with a rose attached. There are ballerinas who must be the epitome of perfection and blend in with the chorus so the audience sees perfectly synchronised ballet; the company as one rather than individuals. Olivia has taken her mother’s lessons to heart and is that perfect ballerina, she blends perfectly into the company, but she’ll never be the prima ballerina. Clara has that something extra.

Coppelia is about a man who creates a dancing doll, the image of a perfect ballerina. It’s so beautiful that Franz, a young man from the village, falls in love with it and sets aside his real sweetheart Swanhilda. To teach him a lesson Swanhilda dresses as the doll and pretends it has come to life. While the ballet is a comic one there is a more disturbing similarity, between the doll and the ballerina when each dancer stands at the barre every morning, identical in uniform and in movement. These are the parts the audience doesn’t see, that daily dedication to the same movements over and over until they are second nature. We are also blind to the years before this, where each dancer has persevered through pain and injury or given up sleep overs with friends, teenage boyfriends and even school work to become as light as air on the stage. To move like butterflies, while their worn out and broken shoes are the equivalent of Dorian Gray’s picture in the attic. When watching a ballet it’s not hard to imagine a giant puppet master behind the scenery controlling this whole row of ballerinas so they move as one. With the echoes of Black Swan in my head I was feeling a creeping sense of unease and psychological drama, both around the sisters and whoever it is who watches them.

There are two men in the book, employed or contracted by the ballet company and they too are caught up in this theme of appearances being deceptive. Samuel is a giant. A large, ungainly man whose looks mark him out as different. People would struggle to imagine that it is he who makes their pointe shoes; something that looks so delicate should not be made by people who look like him. When he finds out that the shoes he’s making are for Olivia Marionetta he knows he must find some way to mark them out as different from all the others, just as he noticed her among the other dancers in the company. He always writes the dancer’s name across the sole in pen, but her shoes should have something more. He takes his inspiration from the white rose he has seen pinned just about her bun and engraves it into the sole then, as he leaves the shoes in her pigeon hole, he places a white rose on top. Samuel is lucky that despite his size he can travel around the theatres and dance studios largely unnoticed. His contribution is unseen and therefore, he is invisible. So he has no doubt that Olivia won’t guess who has paid her this tribute, even if he has been hanging around the rehearsal room. He noticed that despite looking identical, the girls are not the same. Olivia is obedient and keeps her eyes cast down during rehearsals, not daring to challenge the dance mistress. Whereas Clara scares him, she knows she is an excellent dancer and there’s a challenge in her moves and the way she looks directly at the dance mistress. When given direction, she turns away and rolls her eyes at the other dancers. Clara knows she outshines the others, but he hopes his shoes will make Olivia feel adored too.

Nathan is even closer to the dancers during rehearsal because he is their practice pianist. He and Clara go out with the company at night while Olivia stays home, soaks her feet and mends her shoes for the following day. Her legs will be refreshed and her bag carefully packed, whereas Clara knows her feet will ache from practice, followed by dancing through the clubs till the early hours. She also knows that when she opens her bag, her tights will be full of hair grips. Usually the girls share clothes, but Clara has been wearing a dazzling green coat that Nathan bought her. Of late she has started to find the coat a little claustrophobic, the belt too restrictive and the shoulders too heavy. Nathan too seems to get a little closer each time, his hand always at her waist and his knee pressed tightly against hers under the table. She was also a little unnerved at the line of verse he scribbled when they were playing a game – ‘A lovely apparition, sent to be a moment’s ornament’ – while she isn’t sure what it means, something about it bothers her and I thought back to the puppet ballerina Coppelia. Nathan appears to be the perfect companion for a beautiful young dancer, but the closer he gets the more she wants to pull away. She imagines his houseboat, the ideal home for a young bohemian musician, but despite it being a few moments away from her flat he never takes her there. Is the look and idea of her more alluring than the reality? In their own private rehearsal he pushes her, far beyond tiredness and hunger. In the dressing room after he apologises, she notices how he looks at the dancer’s jumble of make up, jewellery and bits of costume that haven’t been returned to wardrobe. The one thing he becomes fixed on is a tiny figurine of a ballerina, like the ones you might find in a girl’s jewellery box, permanently on point and turning endlessly without exhaustion or hunger to mar her beauty. No real woman could be so perfect.

Although I found the novel a little slow at first, but I soon realised that the inner thoughts and feelings are slowly building towards action. Once strange things start happening around the theatre the pace picks up and I became intrigued. In the well under the theatre, where the dancers like to go for pre-performance rituals, a single shoe is found floating in the water like an evil portent. Then life changes start to come tick and fast. Clara receives an offer she has never imagined, but it will mean moving away from Nathan and choosing independence from her sister. Their mother, the woman who inspired their career choice, is deteriorating in a nursing home. Her imminent passing is another sign – do they still need to be in each other’s pockets? Usually they need their combined strength but without their mothers rigid ideals to live up to could they go it alone? The author hints at these changes of identity, with one sister choosing to borrow the other one’s clothes, perhaps hoping for a little of their attitude too. She often feels like a mere echo of her sister, but I worried that this ‘doubling’ would land one or both of them in further danger. This tension is offset by Samuel’s story, of being led away from an obsession towards something more real. Living instead of watching. If the ballerinas represent perfect objects of desire, he is being offered a real relationship. But is it Samuel who watches the twins and can he see that someone to love and support you is more important than appearance? As the hidden desires and obsessions of these characters come to the surface and explode into action more than one of them will be in danger. This thriller has real atmosphere and characters with fascinating psychological issues that drive the plot.

Published 2nd Feb by Magpie Publishing.

Meet the Author

LUCY ASHE trained at the Royal Ballet School for eight years, first as a Junior Associate and then at White Lodge. She has a diploma in dance teaching with the British Ballet Organisation. She decided to go to university to read English Literature at St Hugh’s College, Oxford (MA Oxon), while continuing to dance and perform. She then took a PGCE teaching qualification and became a teacher. She currently teaches English at Harrow School, an all-boys boarding school in North London. Her poetry and short stories have been published in a number of literary journals and she was shortlisted for the 2020 Impress Prize for New Writers. She also reviews theatre, in particular ballet, writing for the website Playstosee.com.

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Expectant by Vanda Symon

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Expectant is the fifth novel in Vanda Symon’s Detective Sam Shephard series and I finished this late last night so I can reveal it’s brilliant and full of tension as the countdown to catch a murderer coincides with the last weeks of Sam’s pregnancy. This great series, set in Dunedin New Zealand, never lets me down. Sam is a fantastic character, who I’d happily go for a drink with. She’s professional and has one of those faces that people trust immediately, meaning she can elicit new leads and confessions from the unlikeliest criminal. She’s stubborn and outspoken, very ballsy and, although she tries her best not to use it, has an incredible swearing vocabulary. She and partner Paul are expecting their first child and she’s working up to two weeks before her due date. They haven’t found time to organise their endless piles of baby kit into a nursery when a case comes in that Sam can’t help but be drawn into. A group of kids who are hoping to tag the wall down a quiet side street find a woman covered in blood and only one of them has the conscience to stay and ring an ambulance. He’s willing to face the music for the graffiti if he can save her. At first it’s thought to be a stabbing, but it soon becomes clear this is something more sinister. A pregnant woman has been subjected to a rudimentary Caesarian and left for dead, even worse there’s no sign of the baby. This must be someone with a certain amount of medical skill. For Sam, who’s at her most vulnerable, it’s scary to think this might have been someone the victim trusted and it makes her more determined to catch her killer.

I found the pace slightly slower than previous novels, but I found that fitting considering that Sam is slowing down too. The days are winding down towards her maternity leave and her due date. In fact the days are dragging as her boss is reluctant to have her start something as important as a murder case before her leave starts. He feels it would be disruptive to the family and her colleagues, so she’s on desk duty, trawling through evidence. That’s before we factor in her physical condition, she’s so big that she gets stuck in some automatic barriers; a brilliant comic moment in this dark subject matter. Luckily it’s partner Paul on hand to lift her clear. Also, with unusual sensitivity, the boss thinks that placing a pregnant woman with the family would be distressing for them. Especially until they find the baby. This isn’t just a murder case, the baby is missing and the reasons why someone would steal a newborn baby are running through the heads of every team member. However, this is where Sam’s pregnancy could be a super power, being an expectant mum means her thoughts are different to the others. Could they provide a breakthrough?

The theme of mothers and their children, particularly daughters, is front and centre in this story. Whether it is Sam’s relationship with her own mother who has concerns about her working this close to her due date. There’s also Sam’s best friend, currently still living with her but due to move away imminently. She has a unique position in Sam’s life and is always there as a shoulder to cry on, but here she provides some important psychological insight. Sam’s need to be involved with this case could be linked to the spare room full of decorating supplies and boxed nursery furniture. There are so many changes coming, might Sam be paralysed from moving forward? Of course it is Sam who makes some major breakthroughs in the case in the final moments before she clears her desk. One of which seems to be a coincidence at first. As the final chapters started to race and fill with tension my heart was pounding. Just as Sam has let her guard down and accepted what’s next in her life, everything she’s looking forward to could be ripped away from her. In fact, if you are pregnant, maybe keep this one for after the birth. I was genuinely scared for her and even though she’s the one who most understood the killer’s motivations, will she still be shocked by their identity? You’ll be holding your breath to the very end with this one. Sam’s vulnerability is terrifying and I was praying that she would be okay while reading. As if she’s a living and breathing human being. That’s the power of Vanda Symon’s writing and how much of that magic she’s poured into this brilliant character.

Published 16th Feb 2023 by Orenda.

Meet the Author

Vanda Symon lives in Dunedin, New Zealand. As well as being a crime writer, she has a PhD in science communication and is a researcher at the Centre for Pacific Health at the University of Otago. Overkill was shortlisted for the 2019 CWA John Creasey Debut Dagger Award and she is a three-time finalist for the Ngaio Marsh Award for Best Crime Novel for her critically acclaimed Sam Shephard series. Vanda produces and hosts ‘Write On’, a monthly radio show focusing on the world of books at Otago Access Radio. When she isn’t working or writing, Vanda can be found in the garden, or on the business end of a fencing foil.

Posted in Random Things Tours

The Marmalade Diaries by Ben Aitken

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I was so charmed by this wonderful book about writer Ben and his unusual experiences during the COVID lockdowns. Something I could truly understand as the lockdowns bonded me with my partner and his two girls at a speed and depth that couldn’t have happened at any other time. Ben is looking for a new place to live, when through a charity scheme he sees an apartment in a great part of town. There’s one catch. He will have a housemate. The charity places younger people in homes belonging to the elderly. The aim is to help the homeowner stay independent and in their own homes far longer than normally possible and in houses with way more room than they need. Winnie is 85 years old and a formidable woman with very set opinions about how things are done. Winnie doesn’t suffer fools and isn’t very gentle with her criticism. There’s a gulf between the pair in so many areas: their politics, their class and their ages. How can two people with so many differences live together harmoniously?

This is a book that can be read so quickly. It’s in a diary form so there’s always that temptation to read just one more entry. Ben’s previous work has been travel writing and he brings all of those skills to this book. Physically he’s in the same place, but he’s taking a voyage into this person, seeing her like no one else has and experiencing her in very different types of weather. Winnie is grieving her husband of 65 years. Henry died suddenly, in their marital bed upstairs, less than a year ago so she’s in a very emotionally vulnerable state. Of course Winnie doesn’t seem terribly vulnerable, unless you count ‘busyness’ as a response to grief. I think Winnie has always been a busy person, possibly through anxiety or perhaps a work ethic instilled by her upbringing, but this has been exacerbated by living alone. Her son Stewart and his family tried to move in for a few months over summer, but that didn’t work out and fairly quickly Ben can see why. Imagining that he would largely live upstairs and help when called upon, he’s surprised that as soon as they’re alone Winnie asks him what he’s cooking for tea? The apartment has a small kitchen, but it seems Winnie expects him to cook and eat with her downstairs. Not that these meals are appreciated, with Winnie dishing out critique that would seem harsh on Masterchef.

As soon as the dishes are cleared she lays the table for breakfast and lays it for two – something she says she still does without thinking. Ben gets into the habit of lighting the fire and then having breakfast, although there are rules to be observed here. Winnie makes her own marmalade, but only once a year when the Seville oranges are available, so she puts only the thinnest scraping of marmalade on the toast to make it last. Heaven forbid they run out and have to buy some. That wouldn’t be on at all. Eggs have a language all their own, with certain specimens warranting their own message written on the shell in pen and left in the fridge. One rather philosophically asks whether it is cooked or not? Another has been giving her nightmares because he’s ‘been harbouring it for yonks.’ It was her wry little comments on the newspaper that made me giggle. When she sees a picture of comedian Matt Lucas in the paper, she observes ‘well he won’t survive the pandemic’. She’s also remarkably cunning, willing to pull out the poor little old lady card when its to her advantage and let people think she didn’t hear or understand them. When she asks Ben to let the coal man through the side gate one day, there’s a misunderstanding about the delivery. Ben indicates they need it tipping into the bunker (an extra £10) but Winnie has only paid for it to be dropped at the edge of the property. Ben wonders if she’s forgotten or misunderstood, but the coal man says no, she does this every time. Once the coal is safely in the bunker and an extra invoice issued Winnie miraculously appears and denies all knowledge of the problem.

There’s some beautiful observation around the family, because Ben is in the perfect position to analyse their relationships as an outsider on the inside. Out of her three children, it is Arthur who seems to have her heart and most of her time. Arthur lives in a group home within walking distance for Winnie and even in a pandemic she’s not going to stop taking him the paper, the fruit from the garden or a daily yoghurt. Once a week she spends a good hour cleaning out his electric shaver, which always looks like he’s pruned the garden with it. Arthur had cerebral palsy and had a traumatic birth where Winnie’s pelvis was cut to get him out before he was deprived of any more oxygen. Maybe it’s his vulnerability due to his disability, or that shared traumatic experience right at the start of his life, but Winnie doesn’t seem complete until Arthur is there to look after. The other two children seem to have accepted this arrangement, but there is some underlying resentment, especially when it comes to Winnie forgetting theirs and their children’s birthdays. For Stewart and his family, their far more relaxed way of being clashed with Winnie’s distrust of anyone in bed past 9am, people who have their marmalade more than wafer thin and people who lounge for more than ten minutes without a schedule for their next task.

I guess Winnie is selfish in a lot of ways, she’s not self-aware and really finds it hard to prioritise other people’s way of doing things. Some of her habits would have driven me to distraction, particularly her ability to pick up new tasks just as it’s time to leave the house. Even after making a plan she could leave her housemate waiting for hours because the roses needed deadheading. My other half has a similar ability to be doing one thing, cooking tea for example, then pick up a second job that didn’t need prioritising, such as reprogramming the TV channels or syncing the car with his new phone, often leaving tea to burn to a cinder. So I felt Ben’s pain, but also understood the deep connection he started to form with this formidable woman. I feared what would happen when the arrangement came to an end and I found the ending so poignant. Ben’s feeling that he knows this person better than anyone, that her idiosyncrasies are just that and not a sign of something more sinister is beautiful considering where they started. A deep friendship and respect has formed, despite their difference in age and outlook. The pandemic and it’s lockdowns have bonded them in a way that couldn’t have happened at any other time. We fall in love with the Winnie he sees, without rose-tinted spectacles or sentimentality, and I think that’s the greatest compliment he could have given her.

Published by Icon Books 10th March 2022

Meet The Author

Ben Aitken was born under Thatcher, grew to 6ft then stopped, and is an Aquarius. He followed Bill Bryson around the UK for Dear Bill Bryson: Footnotes from a Small Island (2015) then moved to Poland to understand why everyone was leaving. A Chip Shop in Poznan: My Unlikely Year in Poland (2019) is the fruit of that unusual migration. For The Gran Tour: Travels with my Elders (2020), the author went on six package coach holidays – Scarborough, Llandudno, Lake Como et al – with people twice or thrice his age in order to see what they had to say for themselves and to narrow the generation gap a notch. The Marmalade Diaries (2022) is the story of an unlikely friendship during an unlikely time, and stems from the author’s decision to move in with an 85 year old widow ten days before a national lockdown.

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The Pain Tourist by Paul Cleave

Posted on by thelotusreaders

‘In movies the monsters are always zombies, vampires, or some weird kind of mutant, but in this moment his eleven year old brain tells him he was wrong all this time. What he’s looking at now are monsters. Real monsters.’

I loved the central premise of this novel from Paul Cleave, the idea that there are pain tourists – people who gain satisfaction from soaking up the pain and misery of others. I’ve always used the term ‘emotional vampires’ to describe something similar and it has levels, from those who revel in reading lurid tabloid coverage of a celebrity break-up to something much more disturbing. We all know those people who have a tendency to insert themselves into other people’s life dramas and grief or who get a kick out of watching true crime or the accounts of serial killers, such as the page after page of obscene detail that filled the pages of tabloids following the discoveries at Cromwell Street, the home of Fred and Rose West. It seems lately as if everyone is watching serial killer documentaries and actors from Dominic West to David Tennant are queueing up to play them. I think here, by imagining the more disturbing lengths someone might go to in order to feel part of that crime or tragedy, the author really made me think about this trend.

The novel opens as a tense and violent crime is being committed. An eleven year old named James is watching his parents being threatened at gunpoint by three masked men who have broken into the family home in the night. As the intruders try to obtain the whereabouts of a safe from his parents, using whatever means to make them talk, James is trying to set up an escape plan for his sister Hazel. As both James and his mother’s lives were threatened, my heart was racing wondering why his parents don’t tell the gunmen! James’s quick thinking saves his sister, in a heart-stopping escape she gets to a neighbouring house, but it earns him a bullet to the head after watching both his parents killed. The terrible tragedy is compounded by the fact James’s family did not have a safe. However, one had been recently fitted a few doors away where a diamond dealer had just moved in with his family.

Cleverly, Cleave then splits the narrative in two directions, in an almost ‘sliding doors’ type story. James’s life continues into the future with his family intact or James comes out of a nine year coma, convinced he’s been living a life way beyond the four walls of his hospital room. For the cops who worked the case, a lot has happened in the last nine years since they failed to solve the murder of Hazel and James’s parents. Theo Tate left the force and is now a private investigator after a terrible tragedy touched his own family. Rebecca Kent is still a police officer, but is marked by tragedy in a more physical way, every reaction from strangers reminds her she now has a scar running down her face. The pair come together to revisit the case, when Kent is informed that James has woken up. Now, despite her relentless hunt for a serial killer nicknamed Copy Joe, Kent is tasked with reopening the cold case. Feeling hopeful that James may remember some new detail to add to existing evidence she also wonders if he could become a target for the killers, who are still at large? James can’t speak, but can communicate with pen and paper. The investigators are shocked by the detail packed into James’s story as he starts to write more. His ‘ComaWorld’ diary seems to flow out of him with very little thought or res. Nine notebooks, one per year, document a life unlived by anyone but James. Familiar names and events start to become apparent to his sister, such as his accuracy on each day’s weather or the book she was reading to him slipping into the narrative. What nobody expected him to reveal is that Kent has more than one serial killer on her hands.

This was such an original and complex thriller. As you might expect, considering I’m a writing therapist, the ‘Coma World’ stories were fascinating to me. The aspects of real life that Hazel notices are brilliant plot devices, but also play with the idea that the unconscious mind is still very much alive and picking up on what’s going on around it. From a therapy angle, James’s narrative could be seen as the mind’s way of healing itself while his body is asleep. One therapy technique I’ve seen involves the client writing a different narrative ending to something that’s happened. It helps the client discuss how a different ending might feel – would they feel more closure about the event for example? By exploring this, we can then discover and discuss why the real ending caused so many problems. The way James writes, in longhand and over a period of days fascinated me too. Is he scared if he doesn’t write it down it will be lost to the truth? The complex level of detail is incredible, as if he’s still seeing it running like a movie in his mind’s eye. I wondered how he kept it so rigidly to one year per book, suggesting there was a lot of detail he chose not to record. What we choose to edit out of a narrative is sometimes as important as what we leave in. When it becomes clear he’s been aware of other patients in the room, we can see how his mind is weaving their names and other facts into his narrative – he’s heard all their conversations too.

Tate and Kent were great characters to guide us through these complex interwoven cases. Kent is driven, but slightly less idealistic than Tate. She’s made peace with the fact that some cases don’t get solved in a way he hasn’t. It’s clear why she’s stayed inside the police force and he’s preferred to forge his own path. He’s an incredible investigator but perhaps not so good at office politics and coping with an imperfect system. Kent is desperately trying to solve the case of Copy Joe, a serial killer who copies the methods of previous serial killers, like the Christchurch Carver. Whoever he copies, he likes to leave the crime scene exactly the same way, almost like an homage to the murderers, showing his admiration. Are they looking for a fan of the ‘True Crime’ genre? Someone who perhaps started with the odd book, the podcasts, and the documentaries until he’s had to experience the same thrill. It’s an uncomfortable concept and made me question our enjoyment of such narratives, especially when true crime documentaries are constantly in the daily top ten on Netflix or other streaming service. When it comes to curiosity, how far is too far? When does an interest become an urge, an action. Tate’s private life was so devastatingly sad and I was moved by his visit with his wife. He loves her still and they sit and talk like any other married couple, the difference being, that as soon as Tate walks out of the room she will forget everything all over again. He chooses to bear a terrible loss alone. This showed another, devastating, side of brain injury -a patient who is physically capable, but with a brain that erases every interaction leaving a blank slate. She is happy in the moment, but that present moment is all she has.

From the explosive opening, which really gets the adrenaline flowing the tension ebbs and flows depending on the narrative or case we’re following that chapter. Towards the end, as all these cases come together in one terrible night, the heart really started pounding again. I did get a bit confused between locations and who was where towards the end. So I had to keep going back, desperately trying not to miss a moment as the twists and turns came thick and fast. I found it was Tate and Kent I was rooting for, not just that they would solve their cases, but that they would survive! I found the way James was constantly moved around in these final chapters a bit concerning. My experience in occupational health and care needs had me asking all sorts of questions. If James couldn’t walk how was he managing in these different spaces, using various different surfaces to sleep on from beds to couches? I kept wondering how he was getting to the loo – I’m laughing at myself as I write this, because honestly the way my brain works! This says so much about my inner life. I just kept thinking ‘how has he been discharged from hospital without an occupational therapy assessment and a multi-disciplinary meeting?’ Of course these facts are like the days James edits out of his narrative, not very interesting or helpful to the plot. The details of a character’s loo habits tend to dissipate the tension and excitement. This was an incredibly fast read, giving you some idea of the pace and that addictive pull you want in a thriller. Each character is cleverly written to draw you in, but you’re always left on edge and unsure. The multiple endings are brilliant, I just thought it was solved and I could breathe, then the author pulled the rug out from under me. Yet I loved that we get to have multiple endings, as James’s doctor suggests they write a book together, framing the narrative in yet another way.

Meet The Author


Paul is an award-winning author who often divides his time between his home city of Christchurch, New Zealand, where his novels are set, and Europe, where none of his novels are set. His books have been translated into over twenty languages. He’s won the won the Ngaio Marsh Award three times, the Saint-Maur Crime Novel of the Year Award, and Foreword Reviews Thriller of the Year, and has bee shortlisted for the Ned Kelly, Edgar and Barry Awards. He’s thrown his Frisbee in over forty countries, plays tennis badly, golf even worse, and has two cats – which is often two too many. The Pain Tourist is his (lucky) thirteenth novel

Posted in Random Things Tours

Jacqueline in Paris by Ann Mah

Posted on by thelotusreaders

Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis is one of those iconic women that we can’t help but be curious about. From watching the film JFK and numerous documentaries about the death of President Kennedy with my mother, I started to be curious about the woman in the blood-stained pink suit. I think people are drawn to women who remain silent. As far as I’m aware she has never spoken directly about the horrific, life changing events of that day. She has almost seemed stoic. The perfect widow, in her lace mantilla at the funeral, still seeming numb and shell-shocked. When she surprised everyone by marrying Aristotle Onassis, the millionaire shipping magnate, I think it was driven by a need to hide. She needed a place to be without cameras following her every move and on his yacht she was definitely away from prying eyes. Perhaps his protection allowed her to grieve and come to terms with her trauma. I wanted to read this book, because I was fascinated to meet this version of Jackie – the Jacqueline before she was Jackie in. I always had the impression that she could have been a woman in her own right, more than the political wife she became.

Ann Mah has set her book in one particular year. In 1949 Jacqueline Bouvier travelled abroad for her junior year at college. It was to be her last year of freedom. She was aware that despite being poised and ready for society, her family were on the edge financially and she felt pressure from her mother to make a good match on her return. She met Jack Kennedy in 1952. Jacqueline lives in an apartment with a widowed French countess and her daughters. She finds a world of champagne, avant-garde theatre and jazz clubs and socialises with people she would never have met in her home town or the social circles at Vassar. There’s even romance with a man who loves literature like she does, but who would be totally unsuitable back home. Yet Paris isn’t all fun and glamour, because this is the aftermath of WW2 and its clear that the city’s people have suffered. The countess and her daughters have suffered too, as part of the resistance. The whole city is haunted by events during the Occupation and it will take many years for them to recover from the lies, betrayals and suspicion that lurk round every corner.

I love that Mah has written this novel in the first person, so we have Jacqui’s unguarded thoughts and emotions from the start. Even though it is a fictionalised self we’re getting to know, it still feels like a rare window into the innermost thoughts of a very private woman. It may sound strange to regard her as private when she was later married to the most powerful leader in America and arguably the world. Jacqui is private though. From this part of her life when she has the most freedom she’s ever known she’s testing people out for herself, but there’s still a natural reserve. She gets to decide who to spend time with and who to trust. On her return to the US and her subsequent relationship with John Kennedy, she is private by design. It’s part of the mystique of being a powerful politician’s wife who should show loyalty, discretion and control of her emotions. Once she’s in those circles, who can she trust to be a true friend? Where many might have seen her as the archetypal political spouse, this was the ambition of her mother rather than Jacqui’s own desire. Here we see her when she was naive and idealistic. Her love of art and for the city of Paris is evident. She’s also keen to make friends and experience real French life, but that reserve can make it hard for others to feel they know the real her.

She finds that one of the biggest differences between the US and Europe is a political one. During the war, Parisian people did what they had to in order to survive and there are still grudges against those forced to collaborate. She learns which subjects to avoid. Madame de Renty is a lively and colourfully dressed woman during the day, but she was imprisoned at Ravensbrück concentration camp during the war and Jacqui hears her crying in the night. Some truths can never be spoken. Aside from the post-war adjustments and the effects of trauma that will last for generations, Jacqui is most shocked by the Parisian’s politics. There is a lean towards communism here, something that’s unthinkable in the US where it’s considered in the same breath as Nazism. Her mind is broadened by friends who explain it’s underlying principles – an equal, fair society. This has huge resonance for us, because we understand she will be First Lady during the Cuban missile crisis, and the 1950’s saw a wave of suspicion about communism that fuelled the McCarthy era.

Despite these darker undercurrents there’s also the joy of seeing Paris through her eyes, for the very first time. The beautiful language, the smells of incredible food and early morning croissants. There’s also Jacqui’s love of learning and through this I could see glimmers or the different life she could have had, if her family had valued her as more than a marriage commodity. This is a well-researched account that held some of the answers I’d pondered about her life: that pull between the security of marriage and the more precarious life of her own; the love of Europe that would see her return there after Kennedy’s death; the education from a really great college versus the education of how to be a wife provided by her mother. I thought the author found a great balance between fleshing out a story and what we know of Jacqui’s year abroad through historical research. I understood this Jacqui and felt I’d met her before in my own reading. Now I have to give this straight to my mum so we can talk about it.

Meet the Author

Ann Mah is an American food and travel writer. She is the author of the USA
Today and Wall Street Journal bestseller The Lost Vintage, as well as three other books. She contributes regularly to the New York Times Travel section, and her articles have appeared in the Washington Post, Condé Nast Traveler, The Best American Travel Writing, The New York Times Footsteps, Washingtonian magazine, Vogue.com, BonAppetit.com, Food52.com, TheKitchn. com, and other publications

Posted in Random Things Tours

Suicide Thursday by Will Carver

Posted on by thelotusreaders

I’m usually well ahead of time when it comes to my blog tour reviews, sometimes by a month, but this one ……. AAaaarrrghhh! I can’t put into words why I can’t put into words what I thought about this novel. If you’ve read the book you’ll understand. I don’t think there’s a literary convention Will Carver hasn’t wanted to subvert. It’s been difficult to write reviews for Will Carver’s books in the past, but I’ve never been down to the wire like this before. I’ve been trying to scribble down my thoughts only hours before the review is due. So, I’m sorry if this doesn’t always make sense, or if it doesn’t do justice to Carver’s inventiveness and originality, but it’s the best I can do. This writer is simply too clever for me!

Eli Hagin can’t finish anything.

He hates his job, but can’t seem to quit. He doesn’t want to be with his girlfriend, but doesn’t know how end things with her, either. Eli wants to write a novel, but he’s never taken a story beyond the first chapter.

Eli also has trouble separating reality from fiction.

When his best friend kills himself, Eli is motivated, for the first time in his life, to finally end something himself, just as Mike did…

Except sessions with his therapist suggest that Eli’s most recent ‘first chapters’ are not as fictitious as he had intended … and a series of text messages that Mike received before his death point to something much, much darker…

Mike can do something Eli can’t. Eli can’t commit to a narrative, leaving behind him reams of first chapters. He can’t commit to Jackie either, even though they’ve been together for the length of time it would take most people to live together or get engaged. Mike wanted to kill himself and he’s followed it through. Eli finds him sitting there, on his newly polished living room floor, with his hands embedded in the lacerations on his thighs. Even in his numbed and shocked state, there is jealousy that Mike has finished what he started.

Eli, Mike and Jackie are a trio. Eli and Mike are friends. Jackie and Eli are in a relationship that Eli doesn’t want, or does he? There are times when he could end it, but doesn’t. It is their anniversary two days after Mike dies. Two days after Jackie slept with Mike. Eli knows, but seems ambivalent. I found myself laughing at their ludicrous anniversary dinner, where Eli’s scrabbling on the floor for some dropped cutlery and Jackie semi- manipulates this into a proposal. Eli has turned indecision into an art. He has a job, but doesn’t enjoy it. He wants to leave, but just can’t make the first step. Eli feels a lot of the same emotions as his friend Mike. The ennui, the despair and the sense of being lost. Yet Mike had the guts to do something about it.

I was fascinated with the chapters headed ‘Fake Therapist’. In fact Eli has a session on Suicide Thursday and as he points out, just because it’s such an important day for Mike, it doesn’t mean he can miss therapy. Immediately, I wondered how he would know it’s the day that Mike is going to commit suicide. It seems to me that there’s a problem with the fake therapist? The problem being ….. there’s no therapist.

Eli then has to speak first (of course he does, no one else is there). He still regurgitates the same information he always does, almost as if each session is with someone new. There is no accumulation of knowledge or shorthand that comes from working with a therapist for a while. In fact each session is like one of his first chapters – the same stuff just expressed differently. I was interested in his knowledge of therapy, such as the comment on eye contact and his inhibitions. Has he had therapy in the past? Is that where he was confronted by things he didn’t want to talk about? The comment about any corporeal therapist directing the session, wanting to talk about Mum when he isn’t ready, is a bit of a giveaway. It seems therapy is great, as long as he can control it.

‘I pull the chair from beneath my desk in the first-chapter library and move it to a position where it can face the couch – my £2000 black, leather, archetypal therapist’s couch. It’s on a slight angle, a classic psychoanalyst’s trick to avoid eye contact, allowing me to overcome any inhibitions I may have. I place the Dictaphone on the seat, lie back and wait for the first question.’

I can’t tell you anymore of the story, not only would it ruin the reading experience, but I don’t really know where to begin. I can’t place it in a genre. I can’t really explain my reaction to it. The story unfolds in such an unorthodox way I’m scared of revealing something that I’ve dismissed as unimportant, but that opens up the whole story for someone else. I think it’s one of those books, where the meaning is dependent upon the reader. There were revelations that really made me rethink Eli, such as those text messages he sent to Mike before his suicide. It then changes everything you’ve read before. I would call this an ‘active’ reading experience. My brain, my emotions and often my ability to sleep were constantly engaged. As for trigger warnings, I can’t imagine that anyone who’s affected by suicide would pick up a book with this title. I didn’t find the subject matter triggering, despite personal experiences, but I was slightly disturbed that I wasn’t more triggered by Mike’s despair and eventual suicide. It think it’s because I was so engaged thinking ‘WTF?’ I was so busy thinking, I didn’t respond emotionally. If you like your books to be original, creative, mind-bending and tricksy, then this is the one for you. I didn’t respond to it at first. In fact it took a bit of work, but I can promise I’ll still be thinking about it weeks from now.

Published by Orenda Books 24th November 2022

Meet The Author


Will Carver is the international bestselling author of the January David series and the critically acclaimed, mind-blowingly original Detective Pace series that includes Good Samaritans (2018), Nothing Important Happened Today (2019) and Hinton Hollow Death Trip (2020), all of which were ebook bestsellers and selected as books of the year in the mainstream international press. Nothing Important Happened Today was longlisted for the Goldsboro Glass Bell Award 2020 and Theakston’s Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year. Hinton Hollow Death Trip was longlisted for Guardian Not the Booker Prize, and was followed by three standalone literary thrillers, The Beresford, Psychopaths Anonymous (both optioned for TV) and The Daves Next Door. He lives in Reading with his family.