Tag: Family

Posted in Netgalley

Things Don’t Break On Their Own by Sarah Easter Collins.

Posted on by thelotusreaders

It seems to be a year of incredible debuts and this one is definitely going to stay with me. We open at a dinner party. Robyn and her wife Cat are hosting an evening for their friends Willa and Jamie, Robyn’s brother Michael and his partner Liv, and Cat’s brother Nat and his new girlfriend Claudette. It’s the first time the group will meet Claudette and Robyn hopes to make it a chilled, relaxed evening. Robyn and Michael grew up in a rambling and ramshackle farm house in the south west of the UK. Their father Chris was a potter and it was a bohemian, relaxed place to grow up. Robyn had a scholarship for a private girl’s school and she ‘buddies’ with Willa who was a new sixth former. They shared a study bedroom and Robyn soon learns that Willa’s life is overshadowed by the disappearance of her sister Laika. Her boyfriend Jamie is a wine merchant who lived in South Africa and his confidence can become overbearing. Michael’s girlfriend Liv is a psychologist and she begins a discussion about implicit and explicit memories. Our explicit memories include times, dates and places and they tend to be formed by older children. Implicit memories are usually from unconscious emotional recollections and can be an amalgamation of several memories, as well as a few bits of what others have told us. These are memories created when we’re very small, usually pre-school age. Jamie isn’t convinced and Liv’s assertions seem to unsettle the party. As Jamie gets louder, Willa tells a memory of being tickled until she wets herself. She has always hated being tickled. However, someone in the party knows this isn’t actually Willa’s memory. It’s her sister Laika’s.

One of Willa’s other memories is that her sister called their dad’s personal assistant his ‘sexetary’ but doesn’t know why. This shows us that we only ever know part of the bigger picture. The author uses several narrators to show us that we can be present at the same event but see it totally differently. Laika had a memory of knocking over a tiered cake full of sugar flowers. In fact she’d stepped into the pantry to pick off the flowers and let them melt on her tongue. Then her dad and his secretary stepped into the cupboard and start to fool around. Laika is horrified and tries to get out, but then her dad notices her and is furious. He grabs her arm and yanks her out from under the shelf with so much force there’s an audible snap as he breaks her arm. Laika is screaming from pain but also because her dad is naked from the waist down. When her mother appears she’s confused by his explanation that her arm just broke; ‘things don’t break on their own’ she replies. Willa is a witness to her father’s abuse of Laika and her mother, but she is his ‘PP’, short for prized possession. I hated this sense of ownership. In her own narrative Laika talks about feeling rage and there were places where I really felt it. On one occasion, when Laika has tried to trim her own fringe, her father pins her down and hacks her hair off with the scissors. The sense of powerlessness that comes across in this scene made me feel physically sick. At a family gathering Laika finds a baby bird and takes it to her parents for advice, but her aunt snatches it from her and throws it into the waiting jaws of her dogs. Willa submits and doesn’t provoke her father, but Laika won’t and this makes his treatment of her even worse. Willa doesn’t even realise they’ve spent their childhood utterly controlled, because she’s never been anywhere else. She thinks all families are the same until she stays with Robyn’s parents in the school holidays. Their easy way of being, the gentle nurturing love and the emphasis on people not things is a revelation to Willa. By contrast her home is a sterile mausoleum to her father’s achievements with pictures of him with important people and shelves of prized Chinese ceramics without a speck of dust.

Another theme in the book is that of kintsugi, a Japanese practice of putting broken pottery back together with glue mixed with liquid gold. The broken pot becomes more beautiful because of it’s cracks. Robyn’s family is like this. They each show each other their broken parts and that familial love, acceptance and non-judgemental compassion is the glue that makes a person whole. By contrast, Willa’s father’s ceramics are distant and pristine, not to be handled. They have the same brittle beautiful exterior he expects from the women in his family, because their behaviour reflects on him. When we move into Laika’s narrative, we see another show of love and what it can do for someone who’s never had it. As she leaves home that morning she hides at a house she’s often seen in passing. It stands alone and is the home of an elderly lady who has many cats. She plans to sneak in and stay just one night to think about her next steps, but ends up staying for a while. The lady, Frieda, has nobody. There’s a carer who’s supposed to stay till lunchtime but only stays half an hour. Laika feeds Frieda properly, cares for her and she also listens. Frieda’s last living relatives are avaricious and only come round to see if they can find the family jewellery. Frieda knows what it is to powerless at the hands of a tyrant. As a German Jew she had to escape to the UK during WW2, but her sister didn’t make it. She knows that people only leave their friends and family if they’re desperate.

At school Willa needed the closeness of another person and enjoyed the physical comfort of sleeping next to Robyn. This blossomed into a relationship. For Robyn this was first love and their break-up just before exams was hard for her. She didn’t get the grades she’d wanted for medicine so instead she studied radiography. As an adult, Robyn has found Cat, a woman she knows she can build a life with and maybe become parents. Willa comes back into her life fifteen years later and has made a website about her sister Laika where people can post any sightings and Willa can write to her. When someone claims to have seen her she comes to Robyn for support and they fly to Thailand at a moment’s notice, much to Cat’s surprise. Cat wants a commitment and not to be second best. So she makes a choice to keep Willa as a friend, but to put Cat and their family first. When the couple visit Willa’s home it’s like an out of body experience. Crammed into a tiny flat in London, the couple are overwhelmed by the scale of the house. The wealth on display is slightly shocking, but the women, including Willa’s mother, have a great time. They read by the pool, visit local landmarks and cruise around in their convertible with George Michael on full blast. When her dad appears unexpectedly, Cat and Robyn look on open mouthed as Willa and her mother run to get changed into flowery dresses and start to wait on his every whim. They have become Stepford wives. We realise that Willa has always conformed, whereas Laika disrupted the picture perfect family. After her visit to Robyn, Willa tries to push her father a little but it takes Frank Zappa at full volume to really get under his skin. It’s clear at the dinner party that Jamie is Willa repeating a pattern. He’s so like her father and the pair get on well, with Willa’s weekends filled with visits home so they can play golf together. In fact Jamie spends more time with her father than he does with Willa. They share so many attributes and behaviours: the drinking and womanising, long trips abroad, strident right wing views, lack of empathy and he breaks things. In fact it’s his assertion ‘it just broke’ that wakes Willa up and makes her realise this is not normal.

The psychological dynamics of the dinner party are explained by the narratives from Robyn, Willa and Laika. This is a thriller, finding out what happened to Laika, complex in its psychology and often philosophical too within it’s twisty thriller structure. We each carry hidden histories within us, some aspects of which are subconscious. There are parts of that history that give us strength and resilience, others that give us an outlook of loving life, and others that help us fulfil our potential. Other parts of our history can unravel us. In counselling there’s a brick wall analogy. Something happens to us that we don’t process or resolve, so it sits there like a faulty brick. We continue to build our wall, but because of that dodgy brick the wall isn’t stable, it wobbles and might even collapse. In order to rebuild a strong wall, we must use the counselling process to slowly take away each brick until we reach the one that’s faulty. Then we remove it and replace it with a much healthier brick that comes from talking therapy, helping the client process trauma so their new wall stands the test of time. I loved the analogy of the natural pool where Robin’s parents take everyone to bathe. It’s a direct contrast to the sterile and man made pool at Willa’s home, that her mother turns into a rose garden. By contrast the natural pool at Robyn’s family home is filled with this self-made family that includes their friends too. Robyn and Michael’s family have so much love that it can easily take in others, old friends and new generations. Their love is like the natural spring that feeds the pool, constantly flowing and endlessly replaced.

‘I think about my duties and obligations […] as a decent human being. The things I have always known and understood , the things I’m prepared to stand up for, put my name to, hold myself accountable for. I think about my beautiful parents and how their love has helped me grow into the person I am.’

Meet the Author


Sarah Easter Collins grew up in Kent and studied at Exeter University before moving to Botswana and later Thailand and Malawi. A mother to a wonderful son, she now lives on Exmoor with her husband and two dogs. She is a graduate of the Curtis Brown Creative novel-writing course and holds a diploma in creative writing from Oxford University. When not writing, she works as an artist.

Posted in Publisher Proof

Spitting Gold by Carmella Lowkiss

Posted on by thelotusreaders

What a year it’s been for debuts!! This is another excellent read that I’d put on the back burner because I had over committed myself to blog tours. I’m so sorry I didn’t read it sooner because I absolutely LOVED it. This is my absolute favourite genre – gothic, historic fiction – but when added to the elements of spiritualism, transgressive females and dysfunctional families this would definitely come up on Goodreads as highly recommended. In Paris, 1866, a couple of sisters are living very separate lives; Sylvia who is now Baroness Devereaux and Charlotte Mothe, the sister she left behind with a drunken, violent father. When Charlotte pays a heavily disguised visit to Sylvie’s home she assumes their father is ill, but it’s a different aspect of her past she’s bringing to her sister’s door. Their mother had a business as a spirit medium, but Sylvie promised to put such shady dealings in the past when she married the Baron. Charlotte needs her sister for one last con, to pay her father’s medical bills. The aristocratic de Jacquinot family think they are being haunted by an aunt killed in the revolution. They will need to use all their tricks to frighten money out of this family, but they didn’t bank on being absolutely terrified too.

The Perrault fairy tale underpinning this story is ‘The Fairies’ but the sisters don’t necessarily agree on the interpretation. One sister is asked a favour by an old crone, a glass of water from the well, but she ignores her and is cursed to expel toads every time he opens his mouth. On the next day the other sister is commanded to provide a glass of water by a young beautiful woman and grants her the favour. The second sister opens her mouth and gold coins spill out. Perrault says one sister is good and one is bad and Sylvie accepts this, but Charlotte thinks changing her disguise was a mean trick.

“The test is rigged from the start – even before the fairy turned up, when Perrault labelled one sister good and one bad on the very first page, before either got a chance.”

However, by the end Sylvie has changed her perspective. She muses that if she had a daughter would she be toads or gold? She decides not to read her Perrault; ‘I think I will let her decide for herself how a girl should be.”

The de Jacquinot family are dysfunctional and have narrowed all their problems down to the daughter, Josephine. They are clearly struggling to stay afloat, with clear spaces on the wall where there used to be paintings. Yet none of them are working or making any money, still living like the aristocrats they once were. The grandfather seems grumpy but is convinced they have a visiting spectre – Aunt Sabine who died in the revolution when her throat was cut. Brother Maximilien is cynical, in his book there is no such thing as spirits and his sister is suffering from a prolonged bout of lunacy brought on by a dalliance with a once trusted friend of his. Josephine is absolutely convinced there’s a spirit. Charlotte and Sylvie started their routine and I’d not expected them to be charlatans! I loved the details of their routine – the snuffing out of candles, the ring of salt. I thought that the story of creating waxed spectral hands with their mother was a brilliantly quirky childhood memory! Charlotte adopts the patter again straight away, talking about “penumbral disturbances” and “liminal spaces”. Sylvie almost admires her sister as she weaves a tale around the de Jacquinot home and their errant daughter.

However, everyone is shocked when Sabine appears to possess her niece. Josephine has become a different person, babbling about something being taken from her and spitting with anger at her grandfather. Then she’s overcome, with ectoplasm pouring from her mouth. This is something they’ve heard of but have never seen spontaneously like this. That night the library walls are trashed and the ancestral paintings are slashed to pieces, all expect Sabine’s. The family suspect a poltergeist but how could they have slept through such destruction? After this even Maximilien is on board, yet Sylvie suspects something isn’t what it seems. Charlotte was vociferous in her defence of Josephine, almost as if she actually cares. Sylvie knows that her sister has become unnaturally attached to young women before. Before they can go any further Sylvie’s husband confronts her at home. He’s had her followed and suspects an affair with Maximilien de Jacquinot who is closer to Sylvie in age. Sylvie tries to protest her innocence, but it’s difficult when she has betrayed her husband, just in a different way. She can’t reason with him and can only do what he asks, to leave. Now she is back in her miserable childhood home, listening to her father snoring as she lays awake and bereft.

Here the author pulls a brilliant ‘Fingersmith’ style twist, with a change of narrator and perspective of the same events. This narrative is what happens to the girl who spews toads and doesn’t conform. Charlotte is the daughter who stayed behind and still nurses the father who she suspects of killing her mother. In Charlotte’s story, instead of the aristocracy we meet an interesting set of characters who live and love outside the norms of society. I loved meeting Mimi who could fill a book of his own! The atmosphere and settings in the book are brilliant and give a very varied look at the city of Paris, from the poverty Sylvie and Charlotte come from to the remaining aristocrats and their crumbling mansions. This is a society recovering from the shock of revolution and a shift in the existing hierarchy. The de Jacquinot family are like their mansion, falling apart. I loved the dual staircase too, with Josephine and Charlotte using the servant’s exit together when surely they should use the main stairs? There’s are further tantalising hints of people who live outside the rules, quite lavishly if Mimi’s quarters are the example. I could see why Sylvie had opted to disappear into the money classes, because the difference between her rooms and the home she came from is stark. She also truly loves her husband and hasn’t married him for a comfortable life as her sister thinks. Charlotte does feel the dice was loaded when it came to their differing fortunes and I think she sees the Perrault fairy tale as an allegory for her sexuality. Sylvie is able to conform in this way and Charlotte can’t, she’s born the way she is into a world that doesn’t accept her. I was also sympathetic to her situation at home, trying to care for a man who is hard to love and has been violent towards them all. This was an amazing read, genuinely spooky but also a novel about families. Those who fit into their family and those who don’t. This is a fabulous ghost story with an unexpected twist and a wonderful glimpse of a society in flux.

Meet the Author


Carmella Lowkis grew up in Wiltshire and has a degree in English literature and Creative Writing from the University of Warwick. After graduating, she worked in libraries, before moving into book marketing. Carmella lives in North London with her girlfriend. You can follow her on social media @carmellalowkis. Spitting Gold is her first novel.

Posted in Publisher Proof

The Midnight Hour by Eve Chase.

Posted on by thelotusreaders

I was looking forward to the new Eve Chase novel, but really surprised to win a competition for a hardback copy plus a vase of my favourite flowers, peonies. All I’d done was describe what I loved about Eve’s writing: her female characters; the secrets from the past just waiting to spill out; the gothic feel and atmosphere she creates, especially around old houses; lastly, it’s the dynamics she creates between the characters particularly the mothers and daughters. I feel that in this novel she has gathered all those aspects together beautifully with an intriguing plot and such a relatable central character in Maggie. Maggie is an author, living in Paris and struggling with writer’s blog. Something from her shared past with brother Kit keeps coming into her mind. Her mother Dee Dee died from cancer recently and Maggie was there for her, until her last moments. Her mind keeps being drawn back to her late teenage years when Dee Dee was a famous model, living in the Notting Hill area of London, close to the Portobello Road with it’s antique and collectible traders.

One summer morning, Maggie wakes up to find that Dee Dee hasn’t come home. This isn’t too unusual, late parties and sometimes modelling shoots can drag on into the night and she isn’t worried. She loves spending time with Kit anyway. Kit is using his skateboard when he has a fall, breaking one of the wheels. A stranger comes to their aid, dusting Kit down and trying to repair the wheel. He introduces himself as Wolf and when his eyes lock with Maggie’s they’re the clearest blue she’s ever seen, his name becomes him. There’s also an instant spark between them and for Maggie it’s instantaneous, first time and first sight love. He recognises the connection too. It’s what makes him take the skateboard back to his uncle’s antique shop so he can use his tools to fix Kit’s skateboard properly. Just so he has an excuse to go back. These are emotional days as Maggie navigates this new feeling, but also concern for her mother who still hasn’t come home. She calls Dee Dee’s friends and they rally round but still no one knows where she is. Maggie needs to leave her Paris flat and travel back to England and Aunt Cora’s house in the country. It’s time to ask some questions and catch up with Kit. Once in London she makes her way to the old Notting Hill house with the pink door and bumps into a man on his way out. She’s surprised to see this is a much older Marco, Dee Dee’s hairdresser. He tells Maggie he’s digging out the basement of the house, sending her into a complete panic. Maggie knows that secrets lurk in the garden of their old home and it might not be long before they’re found.

Eve really gives us time to get to know Maggie and Kit. As a child Kit was the baby of the family, adopted by Dee Dee when Maggie was a little older. His blonde curls and sunny disposition give him an angelic demeanour and he’s certainly noticed by Wolf who dotes on him. Even grumpy Gav at the antiques shop falls under Kit’s spell, especially when he sees his polishing skills! As an adult Kit is more wary, now a dealer and collector himself, he has learned that not every customer is as honest as they appear. He does have a big heart though, so when an old gentleman comes into his life asking Kit to source some pieces for his new home, he wants to help. Roy appears a little down on his luck and Kit senses a loneliness under the surface. Of course someone’s appearance isn’t necessarily indicative of how wealthy they are, so Kit takes his request at face value. It’s only when Roy starts to turn up unannounced, wants to go for dinner and then talks his way into Kit’s flat that he starts to wonder if Roy is what he appears to be. In fact he isn’t even sure he likes him. He needs to be firm to shake him off but Kit dislikes confrontation and wonders whether he should trust his instincts, or is he just being paranoid? It’s lovely to have Maggie back in the country, they’re still close, but she seems consumed by that summer years ago when they first met Wolf. Kit isn’t sure what happened that summer, but he knows that one night Maggie took him from their home in a hurry and they ended up on a train to Aunt Cora’s in Paris. He knows she was protecting him but doesn’t know why and he knows his mum was missing for a while. They never returned to the Notting Hill house, instead moving to Cora’s in the country, into the house of their grandparents. Kit promises to look for Wolf, finding his real name helps and soon Kit has him tracked down to one of the better auctioneers in London. Will seeing Wolf again put Maggie back on track?

I fell in love with Maggie. I was a similar age when I first fell I love and reading about her summer with Wolf brought back all those feelings. The wonderment when someone suddenly becomes your absolute world. The beautiful surprise when they feel exactly the same. The discovery of sexual chemistry, totally losing yourself in another person, being vulnerable physically and emotionally, it’s all here. In very delicate strokes Eve sketches a teenage girl who is emotional and intelligent. Little hints about her physical appearance makes us aware that she is a curvy girl, she wears glasses and is a little lacking in confidence. She’s astonished that Wolf loves these things about her and Eve captures that self-consciousness, the apprehension about revealing her body to this young man totally swept away by his obvious desire for her. It’s honestly so beautifully captured that it took me right back there. Maggie’s an incredible sister to Kit and nurtures him with a fiercely maternal love that I think comes from him being so much younger. It takes days before she starts to struggle a little with the responsibility, because Kit’s that age where he’s on all the time. Her feelings for her mother range from concern, to anger and incomprehension. It’s Aunt Cora who has always been the fuck-up of the family, an addict who would arrive at Christmas and grace everyone with her acerbic tongue and disappear again. However, she’s been clean for some time when Maggie and Kit arrive in Paris and it seems strange to Maggie that she’s so together and furious with Dee Dee for leaving them alone. Cora concentrates everything on Kit and Maggie, who is heartbroken and possibly hiding something about the last days they were in London.

You will be swept up by the romance, the mystery and the relationships between the women. I loved the atmosphere of the Notting Hill setting and I always love the smell and sound of an antique or junk shop: the library feel of quietness and reverence; the smell of beeswax; the ticking and chiming of several clocks. I always find myself drifting into another time when I’m in an antique shop. The mystery of adult Kit’s visitor grabbed me too, because his influence is subtle and I found myself questioning just like Kit does. Is he being manipulative or is this a coincidence? Did he intend to do that? Is he lingering for genuine reasons or for some other nefarious purpose? I wasn’t sure, but felt an undercurrent of danger for Kit if he didn’t keep his wits about him. What the story tells us is a therapist’s mantra really – unresolved emotions and trauma will always bring themselves to the surface. Whether through a similar event happening or a big change in our lives, these memories float to the surface with more resonance than they should all this time later. This is because they weren’t processed properly the first time. So Maggie is feeling a torrent of emotions as if she’s still a teenager and they’re just as confusing, painful, beautiful and overwhelming. She and Wolf never had a proper ending and I found myself longing for that closure to happen when she comes back to England. This was a wonderful read, deeply emotional but also a compelling mystery. I honestly think this is Eve’s best novel yet!

Out Now from Michael Joseph.

Meet the Author


Eve Chase is an internationally bestselling British novelist who writes rich, layered and suspenseful novels, thick with secrets, unforgettable characters and settings. Her latest novel, The Midnight Hour – ‘Her best yet…I loved every word’ – Claire Douglas – publishes June ’24, in the UK. Other novels include, The Birdcage, The Glass House (The Daughters of Foxcote Manor, US) a Sunday Times top ten bestseller and Richard and Judy Book Club pick, The Vanishing of Audrey Wilde (The Wildling Sisters, US) which was longlisted for the HWA Gold Crown Award, and Black Rabbit Hall, winner of Paris’ Saint-Maur en Poche prize for Best Foreign Fiction. She works in the Writer’s Shed at the bottom of her garden, usually with Harry, her golden retriever.

Say hello @evepollychase on Instagram, X, and Facebook

Posted in Netgalley

The Intruders by Louise Jensen

Posted on by thelotusreaders

One night, at Newington House, the Madley family are disturbed by intruders. It’s the mother who first realises someone is outside and calls the police, but it’s a remote location and it will take them some time to arrive. Once the intruders are in the house they accost the mother downstairs and she sees them for the first time, in sheep masks and carrying knives. She tells them to take anything they want, jewellery and antiques, but they haven’t come for that. Now she’s sure she’s going to die. That night the only survivor in the family was the baby, placed in the priest’s hole by their sister waiting quietly for someone to find them. Written in blood on the wall is ‘tell me where it is’. Several years later, Cass is staying with her boyfriend James for the weekend when he suggests they go out for a drive. She’s surprised when he takes her to a hidden manor house on the edge of a village and tells her they’ve come to view it. An agent comes to meet them and shows them around and it’s weirdly still full of contents. The agent explains that it’s owned by a company who hope to turn it into a retreat, and while this is in the planning stage they need someone to caretake the house. They must live in it, as well as looking after and creating an inventory of it’s many contents. James wasn’t going to tell Cass straight away about the house’s sad history, but the agent does and at first Cass isn’t sure she could live somewhere such a violent act occurred. However, they certainly couldn’t afford anything like this normally. James assures her it will be fine and they agree to take on the contract, an easy thing to do in broad daylight on a lovely day, but Cass will be here alone while James is at work. Can a house hold trauma within it’s bricks and mortar or is Cass just being fanciful?

It doesn’t help that Cass’s father is very protective and isn’t sure about James or Newington House. James and Cass met in a club when she was standing in the shadows watching her friend enjoy her hen night and she is surprised when the attractive man she has just met, stands beside her and holds her hand. Yet it feels completely natural, like they’ve held hands before. Since then, her distance from James has been an issue as they can only see each other at weekends and Cass’s father worries about her travelling so far and being away from his watchful eye. It felt Iike there was something we didn’t know about her because her father’s concern seems out of all proportion. We start to learn that Cass has had issues with her mental health and there’s an allusion to her worrying that someone might be watching or stalking her. This really muddies the waters when it comes to knowing what is real and what is imagination as the couple move into Newington House. Cass is the one who has some strange experiences, perhaps because she’s home more than James or maybe because she’s susceptible to suggestion. Or is something more sinister going on and the house is singling her out? The house itself doesn’t feel creepy at first, but there’s always a sense that something more is going on than meets the eye, as if it’s traumatic past is still playing out within it’s walls. Like a faulty video recording that’s imprinted forever, leaving glimpses and feelings behind.

The previous family’s belonging don’t help, with Cass finding a long dark hair in the silver hairbrushes on her dressing table and the name Rose scribbled on a piece of paper that’s been left in the family suggestion box. The clock in the hall seems to keep stopping at 8.30pm, despite them winding it daily. It’s as if the house has PTSD and keeps experiencing flashbacks. The crime itself is terrifying, the strange addition of sheep’s masks feel so odd and out of place. In between Cass’s narrative we delve into the past with a young girl called Rose who is back at the village after a stint at private school. She doesn’t know many people of her own age in the village and while looking after the baby is fun, she doesn’t want to be a nanny all summer. She takes a walk into the village and meets two boys on the playing field, one of whom is really good looking. I found these sections so bittersweet, because she is a teenager with everything going for her, but we can sense how unsure she is about herself. She hasn’t had many interactions with boys and her innocence leaves her open to exploitation. She desperately wants to be liked, wants her feel that first kiss and know someone desires her. She’s sure to bow to peer pressure all too easily. I thought this character was written beautifully, really conjuring up those awkward teenage feelings. We know the name Rose has a resonance in the house, Cass can sometimes feel a sudden draft and the name comes to mind. Could Rose be the murdered girl at the manor and what is she trying to tell it’s new resident?

I was worried for Cass that perhaps an inexplicable evil lurks at the house, rather like the Overlook Hotel in The Shining where a terrible trauma seems to have infected the very walls of the building compelling residents to repeat history again and again. As the past and present narratives come together there is so much tension. We know the facts of what happened that fateful night but we don’t know the ‘who’ or the ‘why’ because it seems to have come from nowhere. I’m always desperate to know the reasons behind something, more than the whodunnit at times. This is where I felt a little bit lost, because I wanted to know if any of characters was the surviving child but the further we delved into the past the more characters seemed to be involved. My pet theory on why Cass was so vulnerable before meeting James was totally wrong! As we flipped back and forth in time I did have to go back and do some re-reading because I was genuinely confused. There were revelations I didn’t expect at all, adding more aspects to the case and the house than my brain could handle. It was like opening a set of Russian dolls to find that none of them matched the outside. However, the reveal of who was behind the masks was excellent and added an extra layer of danger to the ending. I think the moral of the story is that when you’re offered money to look after a mansion where murders have occurred, think twice. The old adage of ‘if something seems to good to be true it probably is’ really does apply here. I felt the best thing about the book was that sense of foreboding in the place where trauma has occurred, as if the violent acts of that night were imprinted on time like a photograph.

Out now from HQ

Meet the Author

Louise Jensen has sold over a million English language copies of her International No. 1 psychological thrillers ‘The Sister’, ‘The Gift’, ‘The Surrogate’, ‘The Date’, ‘The Family’, ‘The Stolen Sisters’, ‘All For You’ and ‘The Fall’. Her novels have also been translated into twenty-five languages, as well as featuring on the USA Today and Wall Street Journal Bestseller’s List. Her next thriller publishes in Spring 2024.

Louise has been nominated for multiple awards including Goodreads Debut Author Of The Year, The Guardians ‘Not The Booker Prize’, best polish thriller of 2018 and she has also been listed for two CWA Dagger awards. All of Louise’s thrillers are currently under option for TV & film. She has also written short stories for various publications including ‘My Weekly’, ‘Hello’, ‘Best’ and ‘The Sun’, as well as having stories featured in multiple anthologies.

Louise also has a penchant for exploring the intricacies of relationships through writing heart-breaking and uplifting stories under the pen name Amelia Henley. ‘The Life We Almost Had’ and ‘The Art of Loving You’ were international best sellers. ‘From Now On’ is her latest Amelia Henley release.

Louise lives with her husband, children, madcap dog and a rather naughty cat in Northamptonshire. She loves to hear from readers and writers.

Posted in Random Things Tours

Boys Who Hurt by Eva Björg, Ægisdottir

Posted on by thelotusreaders

Translated by Victoria Cribb

We’re back with Detective Elma in the fifth of the author’s Forbidden Iceland series and she is just returning to work from maternity leave when a body is found in a holiday cottage by a lakeside. The victim’s name is Thorgeir, he has grown up in Akranes and in a coincidence typical to small towns, his mother is Elma’s neighbour. The holiday cottage belongs to the family and the evidence suggests Thorgeir was not alone – there were two wine glasses and a lacy thong is found under the bed. He is found in the bed, with stab wounds and the line of a well known hymn written on the wall behind the bed, in blood. With Saever on paternity leave with their daughter Adda, Elma works alongside her boss Hörour to solve the murder. Several leads come to light. Thorgeir was working with his friend Matthías on an exercise and well-being app and had secured a large sum of money as an investment, but from an unexpected source. The hymn is well known, often sung at a popular Christian camp for teenagers and refers to the washing away of sin – had Thorgeir needed such forgiveness? Matthías and his wife Hafdis mentioned a young woman that Thorgeir had been seeing recently, but there is no sign of Andrea anywhere. The friends had often attended camps together as teenagers, but on one such occasion a young man had died out on the lake in the night, in similar circumstances to Thorgeir’s father’s death a few years before. It’s soon clear that many secrets are hidden in Akranes, some of them within Elma’s own home.

I love Elma’s character and what a refreshing change to read about a working woman whose partner is providing the childcare. There’s also none of the usual guilt or tension around her return to work, even as the case becomes more intense and late nights become the norm. She seems to have taken motherhood in her stride and she and Saever seem settled and happy. It’s sad that in the 21st Century this should stand out so much. Usually I read female characters caught between home and work, struggling from lack of sleep and feeling guilty. It’s great to see a woman who is a new mum, as well as a competent detective. The mothers in this novel and their relationships with their children were incredibly complex and psychologically fascinating. I was intrigued by Thorgeir’s elderly mother Kristjana, who happens to live next to Elma and Saever. She’s known as a drinker and is familiar to most people as the owner of a dry cleaners in town. She and Thorgeir didn’t seem close, but she had helped him financially. Was this out of love or guilt? There was something fishy about the business’s finances too, a thread that Höreur picked up and investigated. Kristjana’s home isn’t lavish and she doesn’t look like someone with the sort of money the accounts suggest. Saever finds her behaviour bizarre, even to the point of having to intervene one afternoon when he notices she’s dancing naked with the curtains open. She’s had tablets and alcohol, possibly due to grief and hinting at a troubled inner life but when questioned there’s a wall she puts up that’s metres and years thick. Hafdis is also a fascinating character, she asks for a divorce at the beginning of the book but where has she found the money to move on so quickly. Her relationship with Matthías is already over in her eyes, but I was shocked by her coldness towards her daughter Olof. The family have been having therapy, because Olof has been self-harming but Hafdis doesn’t even seem to have factored her daughter into her plans. Olof confides in her father about her mother, not that she gives her a hard time but that she looks at her daughter as if she’s nothing. What else might such a ruthless woman be capable of?

Saever is at home, but when he’s unpacking he comes across a box that doesn’t belong to them. In fact it belongs to previous residents, full of school exercise books and a holiday journal from the very year that the boy was killed on the lake. It belongs to Mani, one of the group staying in the same cabin as the dead boy, alongside Heioar, Hafdis, Thorgeir and Matthías. This draws him into the investigation and Elma isn’t surprised to find him at the station researching, while bouncing Adda on his knee. I loved the little Icelandic details on child care, such as wrapping the baby up warmly then popping them in the open air for a sleep. I didn’t expect to enjoy Elma working without Saever, but I really enjoyed Höreur being a part of the investigation and found myself amused by his grumpiness. His hip injury brings out a resistant and stoic side to his character, the pain making him increasingly snappish. The case has so many twists and turns that it’s hard to put down and little clues that seem to snag in your brain. I spent most of the book wondering about a second large bloodstain in Thorgeir’s family cottage, strategically covered with a rug. I was sure it was important and every time we got closer to the truth I kept thinking ‘but what about the bloodstain?’

Elma is perfect for the more complex investigative work because she occupies a liminal space in town, she’s both known and not known. Having been born in Akranes and having family that goes back generations in the town, there’s an element of belonging that gets her in the door. However, she’s spent her career so far in Reykjavik meaning she isn’t so involved that she can’t ask difficult questions. She doesn’t have the deference to the elders of the town that others might so she’s bold and doesn’t mind stirring things up a little. She definitely riles the old police chief Otto, so much so that he lets his true nature show. He is so angry that he verbally attacks Elma where it really hurts referring to her previous partner’s suicide and implying she should look closer to home for people who are keeping secrets. It sometimes feels like every home in Akranes holds an ocean of pain and unresolved trauma. There’s so much going on just under the surface, an intergenerational trauma that seems to come partly from religion and partly from rigid expectations. Elma is horrified when Heioar’s parents seem like good people, they adopted him and it seems to have been a good fit, but behind this surface is a very different family life and a total rejection of anything or anyone that doesn’t fit their ideals. I wondered how these women like Kristjana and Heioar’s mother were able to look the other way when their men are treating their children badly. Whether through religious conviction or control the fathers have ruled their homes quite literally with a rod of iron. One of the most complex relationships is between Thorgeir and his new girlfriend. I was fascinated with her narratives showing how attraction and repulsion can co-exist between two damaged people. Also, one terrible deed doesn’t define a person. This was a brilliant thriller, exposing a dark underside to Akranes and keeping me guessing to the very end.

Out from Orenda Books on June 20th 2024

Meet the Author

Eva is an Icelandic author of the bestselling Forbidden Iceland series and her books have been published all over the world. Her first book, The Creak on the Stairs, won the Crime Writers Association New Blood dagger, the Blackbird Award and was shortlisted for the Amazon Publishing Awards and the CrimeFest Specsavers Debut Awards.

In the series she writes about my hometown Akranes, a small town just forty minutes outside of Reykjavík with population of around 8000 people. She writes about dysfunctional families and relationships. She has a degree in Sociology and Criminology and is very much interested in human behaviour, which is perhaps evident in the books.

Eva grew up in Akranes and fell in love with reading at the age of 5. She moved to Norway in her twenties to study her Masters Degree and lived there for two years. When she moved back to Iceland she began writing her first novel, as she had always wanted to write a book. She has been a full time writer ever since it was published!

Posted in Netgalley

Cross Bones (The Accidental Medium 3) by Tracy Whitwell

Posted on by thelotusreaders

There’s a queue at her door, and not all of them are living …

If you haven’t had the pleasure of meeting Tracy Whitwell’s character Tanz yet, you’ve been missing out. This bold, sweary Geordie actress and accidental medium is a delight and this is her third adventure in the series. Tanz is being torn in two directions as she reluctantly agrees to do a fringe play in London, but is also suddenly ‘activated’ as her spirit guide Frank explains. She is sent a new guide who she calls ‘Soft Voiced Lass’ and her flat is suddenly teeming with visions and apparitions, including a nurse who is on duty and walks through the wall into Tanz’s bedroom, which is quite a feat when you don’t have any legs! Luckily she has friend and fellow medium Sheila to rely on, but there’s a lot of sleeping with the light on too. As the play she’s been cast in becomes more dramatic off stage than on, Tanz has time on her hands and is guided down to Southwark and a cemetery known as Cross Bones. This is the burial place of the Winchester Geese, so called because they were prostitutes licensed by the Bishop of Winchester. After their deaths it was decided they could not be buried in consecrated ground and so this small burial ground became theirs and many of the poor in the same parish. Tanz is greeted by a horrific vision of the ground in the Victorian period, when overcrowded tenements spread diseases like wildfire and deaths from cholera, typhus and consumption were the daily norm. What Tanz sees isn’t an ordinary graveyard though. The smell hits her first; death, smoke and sewage creates a miasma that seems to cling to your clothes. In the yard Tanz can see a grave digger with a woman screaming at him, when she looks down she can see some fingers and a skull where he has been digging a body up to make room for more. She is overwhelmed and doesn’t really know what her purpose is here, just that it isn’t going to be easy.

The gates at Crossbones Graveyard

I love Tanz because she’s one of the most real people I’ve ever met in a book, despite the spooky stuff that surrounds her. She’s very down to earth, independent and has a few vices. She’s also very compassionate with the living people she helps and the dead ones too even if they do scare her. She has a couple of solid friends, especially Sheila, but sometimes she gets lonely, especially as she gets older and sees friends pairing off and making new lives together. She’s in the same flat, still scraping by with no big break in sight. The play she’s rehearsing is comical and the small company has such vivid characters they leap off the page. Gerald is a particularly fun addition to her circle – an elderly actor with the old school manners of a man who was inspired to act by Olivier and Gielgud. Everyone except the playwright knows the play is rubbish and the sexual politics in the company are impossible to work with. At home different visions pop up, from an Irish family who look like they’re starving, to a woman at a sewing machine and very strangely, a ghost that lurks in the hallway with a blackened face. She knows all of this must make sense to someone and keeps visiting Southwark and doing her research into the area. The history behind the story is fascinating and had me searching and reading for information afterwards. Eventually the graveyard was used for all the poor in the area and with an influx of families from Ireland, escaping the dreadful famine ( to quote Sinead O’ Connor ‘there never really was one’) overcrowding was common. The place inside that should have been somewhere to view the dead, especially for Catholic families who prefer to have an open coffin, became a charnel house. There were rotting bodies everywhere from those they had no room to bury and those who’d been dug up to make room for more. It’s a vision of hell, made worse when the traumatised gravediggers, dulled by compassion fatigue and possible PTSD, started playing skittles with human skulls. No wonder the woman in Tanz’s vision is screaming.

No 2 in The Accidental Medium Series

Tanz thinks her visions relate to a single Irish family, the family she sees in a tenement room starving and looking completely shell-shocked by their circumstances and their losses. When Tanz sees a soldier called Robert, shot in the head and looking for his wife she starts to piece things together. Could this be several generations of the same family and could any of them still be alive? Between the spooky action there’s a huge injection of dark humour that I really appreciated. I love Tanz’s slightly prophetic phone calls from her ‘mam’ who strangely seems to always know when her daughter’s up to something while scolding Tanz for meddling in spooky situations. Thank God she doesn’t find out about the black faced woman, the homeless man and the knife! There’s also a side order of romance in this novel, with a younger police officer stirring up rather unexpected feelings for Tanz. Usually she wouldn’t consider a younger man, especially one of the good guys, but maybe now is the time for changing habits. It’s nice to see Tanz meet someone who likes and respects her for a change. Maybe Tanz has developed some boundaries and boosted her self-worth enough to accept that someone like this could like her. She’s also stopped the habit of always keeping her eye on the exit in her romantic affairs. She’s taking her gift seriously and maybe has to accept that it’s this type of work that she finds most fulfilling. Although, she also makes a radical move in her acting career too. It’s lovely to see Tanz in such a strong position in life, she’s ready to take on the world and I can’t wait for her next adventures.

Out on 17th July from MacMillan

The first novel in the series.

Meet the Author

Tracy Whitwell was born, brought up and educated in the north-east of England. She wrote plays and short stories

from an early age, then moved to London where she became a busy actress on stage and screen. After having her son, she wound down the acting to concentrate on writing full time. Many projects followed until she finally found the courage to write the first in her Accidental Medium series, a work of fiction based on a whole heap of crazy truth​. Apart from the series, Tracy has written novels in several other genres and also writes mini self-help books as the Sweary Witch.

Tracy is nothing like her lead character Tanz in The Accidental Medium. (This is a lie.)

If you’d like to know more about Crossbones Graveyard this is a great site to start with:

History

Posted in Netgalley

The End of Summer by Charlotte Philby

Posted on by thelotusreaders

Judy left England as a teenager and is lived with her aunt In New York City. Looking for ways to survive she starts scamming and stealing. Judy’s mother drummed it into her that it was wise for a woman to have her own money and never rely solely on a man. This lesson was well learned, but without any real qualifications or means of making money Judy has to be more creative. She’s a grifter, stealing here and scamming there. So when she sees a story in a newspaper about a rich resident of Cape Cod becoming a widower, she decides on her next mark. Judy finds her way to a vineyard in the same area, taking a job there and making herself known until the inevitable happens and she meets Rory. She plays it clever, doesn’t ask for anything and is never pushy or monopolises his time. She’s playing the long game because she wants him to fall for her, hook line and sinker. What she didn’t bank on was falling in love with him. When they marry she has access to some of the wealthiest people in the area so she’s easily sneaking the odd item from their home and from other society people to sell on through a fence. Every summer they spend in their chateau in France and one summer Rory’s asked to hold the local Wine Appreciation Society ball. Judy is left with a dilemma. Her fence in London is blackmailing her, asking her to provide details of the ball including exits and entrances of the chateau and a guest list of who’s attending. She doesn’t want to help, but when he threatens to tell husband Rory about her past she has no choice. As the burglary takes place, Judy is locked in a toilet cubicle listening to the melee. She’s devastated to hear shots and when she runs to look for Rory she finds herself in the aftermath with a man bleeding out on the floor who turns out to be one of the robbers. When he dies she laments that a young man has died because of her and she can’t shake it off. Years later, it’s in her French home that Judy receives the phone call, the one she’s dreaded and expected all at the same time. The police are looking into a murder, but is the victim the man in France?

When Judy’s daughter Francesca gets a visit from the police and journalists it’s like a bolt from the blue. She’s a lawyer, in London and is aghast when police inform her that her mother seems to have fled the country and is wanted for murder. Francesca is left bewildered and unsure what to do. Yet she knows she must protect her mother, after all her mother has always protected her. This is a smart thriller, that doesn’t fall into cliché territory. The two women’s narratives are layered over each other, with some in the present and others set in the past, taking us from the 1960s in Cape Cod, the 1980s in the South of France and the 2000s in Kensington, London. The author is very adept at giving out just enough information, drip feeding little clues here and there that keep you reading and keep you guessing. Then, suddenly, she wrong foots you with a different direction. I found Judy so fascinating that Francesca suffered a bit in comparison. Not only is Judy beautiful, she’s a smart cookie. She can think on her feet and gets out of the tightest spots, her adrenaline running so high that my heart raced on occasions. She’s the female equivalent of the ruggedly handsome rogue, with a habit of stealing from the rich like a modern day Robin Hood. I love that the author gives her this free-spirited autonomy. She wears a mask at times, but after several years with Rory has relaxed a bit, only for a person from the past to find her. There is only one woman who suspects Judy might not be all she seems and she won’t let go of her suspicions, even taking them to the grave. I loved the allusions to Lady Audley’s Secret a Victorian ‘sensation’ novel based around the fact that Lady Audley is living a lie and may be found out. It’s a book I read at university and I was so shocked by how easy to read it was. It wasn’t slow and ponderous like other Victorian novels, it had pace and excitement just like a contemporary thriller. This is in that same tradition, but Judy has more freedom and status in today’s society. There’s less to lose, thanks to never relying solely on a man, but I was pretty sure that Judy would try her hardest to find a way out anyway. Is it wrong that the thought of her getting away with it made me smile?

Out on 20th June from The Borough Press

Meet the Author

Charlotte worked as a newspaper reporter and editor for years before moving into magazines, and then turning her hand to fiction after having her third baby. As a journalist, her work varied from undercover investigations to celebrity interviews – but what really interests her is seemingly ordinary people who do extraordinary things. This is definitely the springboard for the ideas in her novels, which she hopes are as pacey and entertaining as they are transportive. She’s inspired by favourite books including Apple Tree Yard by Louise Doughty, Restless by William Boyd, Alys, Always by Harriet Lane, The Secret History by Donna Tartt and The Constant Gardener by John Le Carre, but she’s also inspired by (and unashamedly addicted to) compelling TV drama, with favourite series including The Night Manager, True Detective, and The Honourable Woman. After spending time exploring the legacy of her grandfather, the double agent Kim Philby, she became interested in spy fiction and decided to write the books she longed to read: female-led stories that are twisty, stylish and multi-layered, tying together global espionage with haunting domestic noir.

Posted in Netgalley

Sandwich by Catherine Newman

Posted on by thelotusreaders

One week in Cape Cod. The perfect family holiday. What could possibly go wrong…?

For the past two decades, Rocky has looked forward to her family’s yearly escape to Cape Cod. Their rustic beach-town rental has been the site of sweet memories, its quirky furniture and mismatched pots and pans greeted like old friends.

Now, sandwiched between her children who are adult enough to be fun but still young enough to need her, and her parents who are alive and healthy, Rocky wants to preserve this golden moment forever. This one precious week when everything is in balance; everything is in flux.

But every family has its secrets and hers is no exception.

With her body in open revolt and surprises invading her peaceful haven, the perfectly balanced seesaw of Rocky’s life is tipping towards change…

Rocky and her husband Nick have reached that middle point in life where adults seem to be at their most stretched. They’re coping with children who have left home or are living at university as well as increasingly elderly parents who need more help than they have before. This is the sandwich of the title. The emotions are conflicting, from the parental support a fledgling teenager still needs to the worry about their independence, as well as the feelings of loss that that come from empty nest syndrome. As for parents, it’s like a whole new stage in the relationship defined in the novel as ‘anticipatory grief’ because as they become increasingly frail there’s a constant reminder that the clock is ticking. This reminder of their mortality brings up feelings of loss and a sense of our own life being at their point where more is behind us than in front of us. I’m saying ‘we’ because I fall bang in the middle of this category. I have parents who have endless medical appointments, particularly Dad who seems to have surgery on a yearly basis like some sort of annuity. However, I also have one stepdaughter away at university, really stretching her wings as she ends her second year and moves in with her boyfriend. We’re only a quick call away though and we’ve gained a third child in the boyfriend. We miss her more than I can express. Then we have my other stepdaughter, one of the generation whose education has been massively affected by COVID. She has so many plans with friends that we now see her less so the loss is twofold. Then there’s the menopause, from sweating to vaginal atrophy it’s a veritable shitshow of symptoms that we’re just supposed to manage alongside everything else. To say I felt a kinship with our narrator Rocky, is an understatement. Again Catherine Newman has managed to put something on the page that’s raw, emotional and relatable. So much so that there were points in the book where I burst into tears.

Rocky is a great narrator in that I was immediately comfortable with her and believed in her world. This book was such an easy read and flowed so beautifully that I finished it in a day. A family trip to the Cape Cod holiday home they’ve rented since the children were small throws a family that’s scattered to the four winds, under one roof. Eldest child Tim is there with girlfriend Maya and student Willa has travelled from her college and meets them there. Later in the week grandma and grandad will join them for two days and of course there’s the ancient cat. They are rather piled in on tap of one another but they couldn’t come here to a different, bigger rental because so many of their memories have been made in this house. During the course of the week Rocky will learn and divulge some secrets, all of them filtered through her anxiety and what husband Nick calls a hint of narcissism. This family were so like my own that I deeply appreciated my upbringing, even though some of it wasn’t easy – we never had money, found a secret sibling then happily lost them again, mum and dad had their turbulent years. Yet I always felt loved and that’s what there’s a surfeit of in this family, everyone loves everyone else even when they disagree. Rocky is a passionate and emotionally intelligent mother, the sort of mum you might go to with a secret. She also happy to be schooled where she gets it wrong, especially where daughter Willa is concerned. She might use the wrong pronouns and need to check her privilege occasionally but largely she’s the sort of mum you want. She feels things almost too deeply and I understood that in her. She wants to breathe in her children when they’re little. She reminds me a little of something my mum and Mother, my great-grandmother, used to say when my brother and me were little: ‘ I could eat you on a butty without salt’.

I think Catherine Newman is brilliant when it comes to trauma and intergenerational family dynamics. There was a moment, as Rocky was reminiscing about a time when she miscarried that made me feel like she’d read my mind. I had recurrent miscarriages in my twenties and I’d never been desperate for children till I lost the first one. No one explained that grief can manifest in strange ways, in fact after my operation (which I’d had to consent to on a termination form) I was told when it would be physically possible to try again, but never that it might be a good idea to grieve first. To take time. As far as emotions went I was given a leaflet of phone numbers of women who’d had miscarriages – with the warning that in a lot of cases I might hear children in the background. I couldn’t bear to hear that so I didn’t call. What I do remember from that time was buying pregnancy tests in bulk and checking frequently whether I might be pregnant again, even if I’d already checked yesterday and knew I wasn’t. The author writes about Rocky staring at pregnancy tests, imagining she can see the second line in the window and trying again for the answer she really wants. I truly felt her pain in those moments and my own. I felt slightly less mad. To realise this was an understandable response to grief was so comforting. Every emotion I felt in those terrible couple of years was due to grief. I felt a failure, defective and terribly separate from people as if I was looking at life through a glass screen. Now thirty years later I’d like to thank Catherine for the way she handled this difficult story line because I finally felt less alone. I really admired the way she wrote about post-natal depression too. When my mum had my younger brother I was only four years old, but for years afterwards she had a morbid obsession that he was going to die. Every time something happened in his life she worried that this would be it. Now he would be taken away from her. I have to say that sometimes this felt very dismissive of me. Her explanation when I asked if she’d ever thought the same about me was that I could look after myself, despite me spending a long time in hospitals. This aspect of PND is something I’d never considered before and helped me to understand where she was coming from a little better.

I thought the author beautifully described how women are more aware of their bodies because we’re trained to be. In a medical world that’s often dismissive of things like period pain ( or anything that falls into the category of gynaecology and obstetrics) as a natural process, the author shows how these things truly feel physically and mentally. We have to ‘know’ as soon as we’ve got our period because the shame of being seen to bleed is fierce, especially as period shaming seems to be rife in secondary schools. Our minds and bodies are connected so we know if something is a normal pain or a pain that has a different feeling or intensity. As Rocky loses the idea of the baby she’s carrying, she’s also physically losing the baby. These moments are raw because the emotions are. There’s a desperation in physically losing a baby. The mind does gymnastics trying to find a way to keep them inside you where it’s safe. As Rocky reminisces about this time, the unresolved emotions are clear and perhaps stirred up by menopause symptoms and having her babies under one roof. I enjoyed Rocky and Nick’s marriage too. It’s not perfect and they haven’t really connected for a while, physically or mentally. When he stumbles on a long held secret it throws their dislocation into the spotlight and gives them the opportunity to talk. He still loves her, despite the fact she’s a bit of a narcissist. She recognises that throughout the holiday Nick has been cooking, organising, driving everyone and just quietly looking after everyone. They’ve been in their mum and dad roles for so long they’ve forgotten how to be Rocky and Nick. It’s something of a relief for Rocky to know that Nick still desires her, despite the expanding waistline and loss of libido. Also, as Nick points out, it’s hard to get close to someone when there’s a huge secret between them.

I connected with this novel so deeply and I raced through it in a day. I simply sat and read without music or any other distractions, that’s how engrossed I was in this family’s story. Each generation had it’s own issues to deal with. The grandparents are facing health issues and their eventual loss of each other, brought into sharp focus when grandma faints at the beach. Ricky’s son and his girlfriend are facing some huge life choices. Even great-grandparents cause a drama when Rocky’s dad lets slip that they were in a concentration camp, something Rocky’s never known. Rocky and Nick are the meat in this emotional sandwich. Catherine Newman has once again written a novel about family that is truthful, funny and life-affirming. I can easily see this being on my end of year list.

Published on 6th June by Doubleday

Meet the Author

Catherine Newman is the author of the kids’ how-to books How to Be a Person and What Can I Say?, the memoirs Catastrophic Happiness and Waiting for Birdy, the middle-grade novel One Mixed-Up Night, and the grown-up novels We All Want Impossible Things (Harper 2022) and Sandwich (Harper 2024). She edits the non-profit kids’ cooking magazine ChopChop and is a regular contributor to the New York Times, O, The Oprah Magazine, Cup of Jo, and many other publications. She lives in Amherst, Massachusetts, with her family.

Posted in Random Things Tours

Toxic by Helga Flatland

Posted on by thelotusreaders

When Mathilde is forced to leave her teaching job in Oslo after her relationship with eighteen-year-old Jacob is exposed, she flees to the countryside for a more authentic life.

Her new home is a quiet cottage on the outskirts of a dairy farm run by Andres and Johs, whose hobbies include playing the fiddle and telling folktales – many of them about female rebellion and disobedience, and seeking justice, whatever it takes.

Toxic was a perfect read for me because the author creates such psychologically detailed characters and a setting so real I felt like I was there. Helga never underestimates the intelligence of her readers, assuming we’ll make sense of these complex characters and their backgrounds. The story is structured using two narrative voices, that of Mathilde and Johs. Johs’s narrative establishes both his family and the setting of the farm where Mathilde will make her new home. At first the narratives seemed completely divorced from each other; life at the farm is only just starting to undergo change after the rather stifling management of their grandfather Johannes, whereas Mathilde is a city dweller who seems hellbent on pushing boundaries and pursuing freedom. It is that search for freedom, during the COVID pandemic, that starts Mathilde hankering after a more rural life and losing her job is the catalyst for taking action. Quickly I became so drawn in by the two narratives that I stopped worrying about a link and once Johs and Mathilde are on the same farm their differences create a creeping sense of foreboding.

Mathilde is a teacher by profession, teaching students up to the age of 18. She is approached by a student, Jakob, and doesn’t even seem to stop and think about what the consequences of a potential affair might mean either for him or for her job and reputation. I was shocked that when called in by the school’s principle she doesn’t even try to deny it. She rationalises that he’s an adult, over 18, so it isn’t illegal. Everything was consensual and in fact Jakob approached her and she has proof of his pursuit in their messages. She was no longer teaching him directly when their affair began. Yet she doesn’t seem to be defending herself with an underlying awareness that what she’s done is at least unethical and an abuse of power. It’s as if she really can’t see the problem. Mathilde has very few boundaries it seems and allows her wants and needs to become her driving force. She doesn’t seem to recognise that she’s made an active choice, instead assuming their encounters were inevitable or ‘just happened’. Her indifference in the meeting at work, becomes obsession afterwards as she messages Jakob frantically wanting to talk. Jakob isn’t an innocent party in this, to me he seems largely indifferent emotionally even when the relationship is at it’s peak. It’s lust rather than an emotional connection on his part and I even felt there was an element of pride that he’s bedded a teacher. He rather likes the status the conquest gives him amongst his friends. He comes across very cold. I was interested to see if she would hear from him again, once she leaves Oslo.

The farm and it’s family are a world of difference to Mathilde’s city routine. Their life is regimented, ruled by the routine of the dairy cattle and the calendar for their arable crops. Andres is the brother who inherited the farm, but it is a family concern and even their elderly mother has the same hardened attitude and work ethic. Even if Johs has decided to take his day off, he often sees his mother rather pointedly starting tasks she thinks he should be doing. There’s a definite imbalance between the way Johs and Andres are treated by their parents. Johs is often quietly infuriated by his brother, who is paranoid about COVID symptoms and often takes sick days when there’s very little wrong. Yet on those days their mother happily picks up Andres chores without any of the attitude she gives Johs. He sees his mother as a cold woman and I would have to agree. She doesn’t show her love for her husband or Johs and even though she appears to spoil Andres she sometimes barely talks to them, just silently follows the routine the farm has always had probably since she was a little girl. Grandfather Johannes looms like a dark shadow over everything, not just the small house where he lived his final years, but the main house too. Johs feels his presence strongly in the living room, where he spent his final days in a hospital bed largely silent except for sudden, shocking expletives and insults about their grandmother. One evening he suddenly yells that he doesn’t want to spend eternity in the same grave as that ‘whore’. There’s an unspoken code here, one that’s different for men and women.

The author uses local Nordic myths and songs to give us a sense of the history of the area, but also the attitudes towards modernity and women. I found these songs harmless at first, simply an understandable part of a community where families have remained for generations. However, the more I heard, especially with their interpretations from granddad Johannes who performs them on his Hardinger fiddle, the more the content felt controlling and misogynistic. He seems to prefer women who are seen and not heard, who don’t interfere in the business of men but work hard and remain loyal to their husbands. All the songs seem to reference young women who want more than the traditional life, who might fall in love with the wrong man or try to leave. They always end with the woman suitably punished, imprisoned somewhere or even killed. I felt that Johannes actively believed in these values and indoctrinated his family with them. That’s not to say his grandsons had an easy life, because he expected hard work on the farm, excellence on the fiddle (Johs is considered not good enough) and feats of strength and masculinity when out in nature, such as making them dive naked into a high waterfall when they were only boys. Johannes was a bully and I hate people who bully. Johs believes his grandad is responsible for his mother’s coldness, towards him and his father. If you never receive love, how can you give it? While Andres has a wife and child, Johs has remained single and lives alone in the big house. He wants to make changes to modernise how they farm and has succeeded in getting the milking process mechanised. Now he wants to rent their grandparents small house next door to his and this brings Mathilde into their orbit.

This is where the book’s tension starts to build and I couldn’t imagine how Mathilde’s lack of boundaries and open sexuality would fit in here. Johs is drawn to her and watches her from his windows that overlook her garden. He seems to find her differences fascinating, although the more everyday aspects of her character do irritate him. She wants to make changes to the house, which he doesn’t mind, in fact the more she erases the smell of his grandfather the better. It’s her lack of work ethic and her waste that he finds difficult. In the spring she asked to plough up some of the lawn to create a vegetable patch, but then never plants anything. By the autumn it’s a muddy patch of weeds but still she sits by it reading a book with no attempt to clear it. She doesn’t cut the lawn and the property is looking shabby. This brought back a reminder of living with my Polish father-in-law who couldn’t understand why we were remodelling our garden but not planting a single vegetable. I was creating a garden we could sit in, enjoy the fresh air and beautiful flowers. He saw it as a waste of land when we could have been self-sufficient. He loved that his other son had bought a property and immediately ploughed up the tennis courts and planted potatoes. It was simply a different background and life experiences coming up against each other. It’s the same here, two totally different upbringings have created different values and lifestyles. Yet I felt that an antipathy was building towards Mathilde and that one wrong move could cause this tinder box to ignite. With her lack of boundaries, that wrong move seemed very possible. I was surprised by where the ending came, although not shocked. As I took a moment and thought back, every single second we spend with each character is building towards this moment. Utterly brilliant.

Meet the Author

Helga Flatland is one of Norway’s most awarded and widely read authors. Born in Telemark, Norway, in 1984, she made her literary debut in 2010 with the novel Stay If You Can, Leave If You Must, for which she was awarded the Tarjei Vesaas’ First Book Prize. She has written six novels and a children’s book and has won several other literary awards. Her fifth novel, A Modern Family (her first English translation), was published to wide acclaim in Norway in August 2017 and was a number-one bestseller. The rights have subsequently been sold across Europe and the novel has sold more than 100,000 copies. One Last Time was published in 2020 and also topped bestseller lists in Norway. Helga lives in Oslo.

Out on 23rd May from Orenda Books

Posted in Netgalley

House of Mirrors by Erin Kelly

Posted on by thelotusreaders

Erin Kelly’s latest novel is a return to characters who started life in The Poison Tree. Rex and Karen are a bohemian couple, who like a quiet life and love their daughter Alice who has flown the nest to live in London with her boyfriend Gabe. Karen is still living with the secret of what she did years ago, constantly worrying that Rex or Alice will discover the truth. Rex came from the wealthy Capel family, but the couple are far from comfortable. Rex is estranged from his wealthy father Roger Capel who has new and much younger wife and family. There’s a reason the couple keep a low profile, as a young man Rex was convicted of double murder. What happened on ‘The Night Of’ has overshadowed them all. Rex and his sister Biba were alone at the family home, when Biba’s boyfriend turned up and an argument ensued. The disturbance alerted the neighbours and one came round to see if everything was okay. Within minutes both Biba’s boyfriend and the neighbour are dead. There are so many questions about what happened that night. What was the argument about? Where did the gun come from? Were Rex and his sister the only ones there that night? Rex took the blame for the murders and served his time, with Karen staying faithfully by his side throughout. Did Rex really commit the crime? However, the mystery that has haunted the family for years is what happened to Biba? After that night she has never been seen again.

Rex and Karen’s daughter Alice is starting a vintage dress shop called Dead Girls Dresses. Strange things have happened since the opening though. Alice has had dropped phone calls at the shop and an oddly dressed woman with her face covered visited the shop. Could it be her Aunt Biba? Then Alice’s grandfather Roger Capel dies and leaves his granddaughter all of the womens clothes from the family home and it’s a treasure trove! Trawling through these pieces and trying them on brings Alice even closer to Biba. I thoroughly enjoyed the Alice in Wonderland details in the book, from the mirrors and chequered floors of the ‘the night of..’ to an Alice themed event at the dress shop. There is a sense, as the story goes on, that we are falling further and further down a rabbit hole. I’m a sucker for fashion and vintage so Alice’s shop was a glorious pick ‘n’ mix of beautiful pieces. This was a shop I would visit and the aesthetic sounded like my study – taxidermy, a white rabbit, antique inkwells, Venetian masks and a candlestick that’s in the shape of a monkey wearing a dress are just some of my weird objects! I thought the general shabbiness of Alice’s apartment was very believable. It’s in a large house where the ground floor is uninhabitable, so they have to squeeze upstairs having no money for repairs. I thought that the author captured Alice’s naivety very well and I could easily believe she would end up in a relationship with Gabe who’s a militant climate change activist. I felt like his activism and relationship with best friend Stef came first in his life, despite professing to be madly in love with Alice. I know that once you start siding with parents in novels and films you’ve reached ‘old’, but I had the same misgivings as Karen. I thought Gabe was gaslighting Alice and making her doubt herself, I just didn’t know why. I kept wishing that Alice would have the strength to recognise and resist him.

Erin Kelly is an author I’ve read since her very first novel and she has a way of writing something utterly compelling and full of tension, but also full of unusual details. There’s the quirky references to Lewis Carroll’s Alice and funny little everyday instances, like trying to unmask the dog constantly using the opposite shop’s doorstep as a toilet. There were also those ideas about twinning, doppelgängers and mirrors that added an uncanny element to the story. Using Alice and Karen to narrate the story in alternate chapters means we can see the relationship between mother and daughter. Karen’s fears for Alice with regards to Gabe and his coercive control really amplified the tension. We see Alice’s frustration with her mum, but also her concern for her father who she believes was innocent of murder. She knows that Rex is loyal to those he loves and she starts to suspect he may have been covering for someone else. I also sensed that there was so much more to the double murder then either Rex or Karen were admitting to, especially to Alice. Possibly something to do with aunt Biba? As Biba started to overshadow Alice’s thinking and the strange calls continued I was on tenterhooks waiting for the truth to be revealed. It’s a massive shock when someone from the past does turn up, but it’s not anyone the family expected. For Karen and Rex this newcomer is an eerie reminder of his sister. They also upset the dynamic of Alice’s relationship and Gabe feels very put out when his attempts to control their role in the group fails and it looks like Alice might become influenced by someone else. I would have thought that Gabe being pushed out would be exactly what Karen wanted but strangely she seems concerned too. I kept remembering that someone in this family is a murderer and they could strike again. I also wondered what those involved might be driven to, in order to keep their secrets. As the final pages came I was still shocked by what actually happened! It’s amazing the lengths people might go to for someone they love.

Out now from Hodder & Stoughton

Meet the Author

Erin Kelly is the Sunday Times bestselling author of The Poison Tree, The Sick Rose, The Burning Air, The Ties That Bind, He Said/She Said, Stone Mothers/We Know You Know, Watch Her Fall and Broadchurch: The Novel, inspired by the mega-hit TV series. In 2013, The Poison Tree became a major ITV drama and was a Richard & Judy Summer Read in 2011. He Said/She Said spent six weeks in the top ten in both hardback and paperback, was longlisted for the Theakston’s Old Peculier crime novel of the year award, and selected for both the Simon Mayo Radio 2 and Richard & Judy Book Clubs. She has worked as a freelance journalist since 1998 and written for the Guardian, The Sunday Times, Daily Mail, New Statesman, Red, Elle and Cosmopolitan. Born in London in 1976, she lives in north London with her husband and daughters. erinkelly.co.uk twitter.com/mserinkelly