As all subscribers and Twitter followers must know by now, I am a huge fan of The Skelf series. I’m a Skelfaholic and it’s become a strange cycle of waiting for the next book to be published, devouring it overnight then longing for the next one. It’s even worse this time because I have it on good authority that this might be the penultimate book in the series. So one more book and no more Skelfing! I’m going to be like a weasel with a sore head when I have to go cold turkey. It has been wonderful to be back in Edinburgh with this family: part private investigators, part undertakers and all round incredible women. For those who haven’t met them yet, the Skelfs are three generations of one family. Grandmother Dorothy is in her seventies, but is still active in both the investigative and the funeral parts of the business. In her spare time she still drums like a badass and has a lover almost twenty years her junior. Daughter Jenny is back home, living above the business and struggling with memories of psychopath ex- husband Craig. She’s drowning her pain with alcohol and sex. Jenny’s daughter Hannah is now a PhD student, working in the astrophysics department, but still finding time to help out. She’s now married to Indy, feeling settled and starting to move past what happened to her father. The women are brought some unusual cases, both for funerals and PI work. A gentleman approaches Dorothy after his wife’s funeral, to ask if they can help him with a nighttime visitor. He believes his wife’s spirit is punishing him and he has the bruises to prove it. Hannah is approached by Laura, a young woman who claims to know her, but Hannah has no recollection of her. When Laura starts to turn up wherever Hannah goes, she suspects mental health problems. She stops being harmless the closer she gets to the family, especially when Hannah drops into the funeral parlour and finds Laura talking to Indy. Laura wants them to do her mother’s funeral, but Hannah thinks it’s unwise. How can she let this fragile girl down gently?
Aside from their cases Johnstone picks up those storylines that weave throughout the novels. In the main we are drawn back to Craig, Jenny’s ex-husband and Hannah’s father, who is still haunting the family. Jenny is most visibly affected by her interactions with Craig’s family, most notably his sister, who seems to have inherited his ability to manipulate and turn to violence to get what she wants. Will Craig ever leave them alone and will Jenny be able to tread the line between her own pain as his ex and Hannah’s pain as his daughter. Both tend to overlook the grief that Dorothy still feels at the loss of her own husband Jim, complicated now by her relationship with police detective Thomas. Indy’s grief is also overlooked a lot, especially since she’s just gone through disinterring her parents in order to give them the cremation in line with their faith. Hannah and Jenny bring the drama and it’s Jenny I was particularly worried about. She’s getting messy, day drinking and embarking on a highly controversial sexual relationship with the wrong person. She never wakes up feeling better, but in the moment she has to drown out the constant pictures in her head. This is PTSD and she’s in danger of drawing others into her drama, especially Archie who works for the funeral business. Can she rein in her behaviour? Even professional help seems doomed to failure at this point.
Aside from these incredible women, and the lovely Indy of course, the things I most love about these books is Doug Johnstone’s love for Edinburgh and the way he weaves incredible ideas, philosophy and physics into his novels. I’ve not been to Edinburgh since I was in my twenties, but the way he describes the city makes me want to go back. He doesn’t sugar coat the place either, there’s good and bad here, but as a whole it’s a poem to a place that’s in his soul. Dorothy muses on her home town a lot in this novel and considering she was born in America, this place is her heart’s homeland. She ponders on the people this city produces, including her husband and child, the history, the architecture almost as if she’s taking stock. She concludes that she’s a person who always looks forward to where life’s going, but grief is like the tide and there’s no telling when those waves will wash ashore again. Jenny tends to frequent the less salubrious areas of the city. She’s stuck. Her past has quite literally washed ashore and the problem with losing someone is you’re not the only one grieving and everyone grieves differently. She’s not mourning Craig as he truly was. She’s grieving the loss of all that hope; the hope they both had for the future on their wedding day and when Hannah was born. Similarly Craig’s mum and sister aren’t missing the Craig who committed all those terrible crimes. Violet misses the little boy she had and the life she wanted for him and his sister misses her baby brother. Hannah seems to be the person most resigned to the loss of her father. She always seems older than she is and with Indy alongside her she has the support she needs. There’s so much wisdom in these two young women, honed from a combination of Indy’s spirituality, years of working with grieving families and Hannah’s physics knowledge, especially where it tries to explain the universe. The supermassive black holes that are thought to be at the heart of every galaxy are mysterious. We know that they have a huge power that acts like a magnet, drawing in items from across the universe.
I loved the element of Japanese spirituality and having read Messina’s novel The Phonebox at the Edge of the World, I loved the concept of the wind phone. I’ve always thought that a good way of letting go of the past, especially when you’re struggling emotionally, is to make a physical gesture or step in the direction you want to go. That might mean taking off a wedding ring when you’re getting divorced, or moving house where it’s full of old memories. I found talking to my late husband in my head a bit strange and it only made me miss him more. So I wrote to him in my journal instead. To have a phonebox dedicated to speaking with those who have died seems a very effective way of keeping them in the present with you, but in a controlled and deliberate way. Samuel Beckett said:
“Memories are killing. So you must not think of certain things, of those that are dear to you, or rather you must think of them, for if you don’t there is the danger of finding them, in your mind, little by little.”
Each of the Skelf women have their own grief to bear, a black hole at the centre of their heart. Each must find their own way to remember a little, to prevent becoming overwhelmed by their memories. Only by reconciling this, can they live in the present moment and make plans for their altered future.
Meet the Author
Doug Johnstone is the author of fifteen novels, most recently The Space Between Us (2023). Several of his books have been bestsellers, The Big Chill (2020) was longlisted for the Theakston Crime Novel of the Year, while A Dark Matter (2020), Breakers (2019) and The Jump (2015) were all shortlisted for the McIlvanney Prize for Scottish Crime Novel of the Year. He’s taught creative writing and been writer in residence at various institutions over the last two decades including festivals, libraries, universities, schools, prisons and a funeral directors.
Doug is a Royal Literary Fund Consultant Fellow and works as a mentor and manuscript assessor for many organisations, including The Literary Consultancy, Scottish Book Trust and New Writing North. He’s been an arts journalist for over twenty years and has also written many short stories and screenplays. He is a songwriter and musician with six albums and three EPs released, and plays drums for the Fun Lovin’ Crime Writers, a band of crime writers. He’s also co-founder of the Scotland Writers Football Club.
I have already created two new hashtags for this third novel in the Skelf family series. The first was #bookbereavement, because when I finished it I wanted to turn straight back to the first page and start again. The second was #Skelfaholic and I am a fully paid up member. It is agreed that if this series ends (please no!) then we Skelfaholics will be holding a wake by drinking whiskey in a funeral home, followed by star-gazing at the observatory. It’s hard to put across how much I love the Skelf women, their cases, the way they conduct their funeral business with such dignity, and their investigation business with more balls than most men. I read this book almost as soon as I received it, and I’ve been sitting on it excitedly ever since, desperately trying not to say anything until the blog tour. Now I can happily say Doug Johnstone has done it again. This is a fantastic read.
For those who are new to the series, the Skelf women are three generations living under the same roof: Dorothy the grandmother, Jenny the mother, and Hannah the granddaughter. They ‘live above the shop’; their businesses being a strange mix of funeral directors and private investigators. Oh and Dorothy is a music teacher too, so there are often teenagers wandering in and out and playing the drums. In fact there are often waifs and strays under the Skelf’s roof. Hannah’s girlfriend Indy was one of their waifs, brought into the fold when her parents died and the Skelf’s organised their funeral. She now looks after the funeral business with the same calm and dignity she brings to Hannah’s life. Einstein the dog arrived when a police chase ended with a van crashing nose first into one of their graves, during the funeral. The dog was in the van and with his owner dead, he became part of the household and a companion of Schrodinger, the cat. Jenny mainly works on the private investigation side, but has a lot of her time taken up by her ex and Hannah’s father, Craig who escaped prison and is now closer than they think. Finally, there’s Hannah, starting her PhD with the astrophysics department and pondering the question of why other life in the universe has never tried to contact us – the ‘Great Silence’ of the title.
The book begins with a strange event. Dorothy takes Einstein for a walk in the park and he fetches a human foot, even more strange is that it appears to be embalmed. This embroils Dorothy in a very unusual case that could be deadly. Jenny is dealing with the aftermath of her ex-husband’s actions in the last book, she’s still healing emotionally and potentially regretting the end of her relationship with painter, Liam. She misses him, and wonders if perhaps they could rekindle something. Then the other daughter of her ex-husband disappears and Jenny wonders if her life will ever be free of this man, as she joins forces with the other woman in his life to find her daughter. Finally, Hannah is facing massive changes in her academic and personal life. In a sense she’s being pulled between past and future. Her graduation becomes a double celebration when Indy proposes, but then she’s pulled into the past when their flat is broken into and someone makes it clear they still want to be part of her life. Her academic supervisor asks her if she’ll look into one of the central questions of astrophysics, if there is extraterrestrial life, why haven’t they replied to our messages? José has had a reply, but doesn’t know where it’s come from. Is it really from another life form or is someone playing game with him?
There’s so much packed into this novel, but Doug Johnstone never loses a thread. Each storyline is given equal time and care. As I was reading the novel and writing this review, my husband saw my search history on my iPad and looked confused. I had tabs open for SETI (an institute set up to search for possible extraterrestrial life), the embalming process, numbers of big cats kept in domestic homes in the U.K, and Hindu funeral rites. Yes, the author does go to all these different places in the novel, not to mention the Italian gigolo and elderly lady, and they all interweave harmoniously. I love the unexpected situations they find themselves in, such as Indy and Hannah taking a walk in the park and encountering a black panther. I also love how these women throw off expectations and be themselves. Dorothy is an elderly lady, but she goes to clubs when one of her students is playing a gig, and has a healthy sex life with her long time friend and police contact, Thomas. She’s investigating the ‘foot’ incident, which becomes more urgent once another foot turns up belonging to someone different. She’s also investigating the panther incident and visits experts keeping wildcats at their homes. In between she’s supporting Abi, now living with the Skelfs, who gets a huge shock when a man claiming to be her birth father shows up.
Jenny has to face her ex- husband and there is a sense that this might be their final showdown. They had originally thought he’d be far away in another country, but with huge estates covering thousands of acres in Scotland, it’s not inconceivable that he’s been hiding close by all along. The strength of both Hannah and Jenny in facing him again, is amazing. They’re scared – so much so that Hannah and Indy move back in to the family home – but know that the only way to stop this man ruling their lives is to find him and have him locked away again. I felt for Jenny, who had just turned a corner emotionally and was considering her life moving forward, and whether she wanted to remain alone. She’s also investigating on behalf of a brother and sister who are concerned their elderly mother is being misled by an Italian playboy. As usual Jenny is professional with her investigation, but uneasy about her clients and their motives. Meanwhile, behind all these fireworks, the kind and loyal Indy is having a crisis about her grandparents. They are traditional, but to Hannah’s surprise they want to fly over from India for their wedding. They don’t mind their granddaughter marrying a woman it seems, but they do have a huge request relating to the death of Indy’s parents. Leading to some very hard choices for Indy, who I’m especially fond of.
Doug Johnstone is so many things at once: a gritty crime writer; a poet; a philosopher; a lover of the city where he bases this series; and an incredible writer of women. Johnstone writes real women, women who are intelligent, ballsy and true to themselves which is why I love them so much. One philosophical idea that stood out to me was ‘sonder’. It’s a word I’ve become aware of because it’s the title of my work in progress – where there are people in a difficult situation desperately trying to understand each other. Sonder is the sense I often get in a very busy train station when I look around at all the people and realise that every one of them has a complex and unique life just like mine. It’s the name of a cafe that Hannah visits near the university campus and as she sits there after her graduation, with Indy, Jenny and Dorothy she realises something. These three women come into people’s lives at a terrible moment, but have the ability to treat each person’s grief as if it was the most important thing to them. It reminded me of bringing a client into my counselling room, creating a safe space where, for an hour, the most important thing in the room is this person and whatever they bring to talk about. I think this is possibly why I feel such a strong kinship with these women. Jenny will take a drink with a homeless person and pass the time of day and Dorothy will connect with a young person fifty years her junior and make them feel welcome. I hope a little of the Skelfs rubs off on all of us. There was something about this book that felt like a finale, but I’m hoping against hope there’s more to come from these characters who I love. I’ll miss them, till next time.
Meet the Author
Doug Johnstone is the author of fifteen novels, most recently The Space Between Us (2023). Several of his books have been bestsellers, The Big Chill (2020) was longlisted for the Theakston Crime Novel of the Year, while A Dark Matter (2020), Breakers (2019) and The Jump (2015) were all shortlisted for the McIlvanney Prize for Scottish Crime Novel of the Year. He’s taught creative writing and been writer in residence at various institutions over the last two decades including festivals, libraries, universities, schools, prisons and a funeral directors.
Doug is a Royal Literary Fund Consultant Fellow and works as a mentor and manuscript assessor for many organisations, including The Literary Consultancy, Scottish Book Trust and New Writing North. He’s been an arts journalist for over twenty years and has also written many short stories and screenplays. He is a songwriter and musician with six albums and three EPs released, and plays drums for the Fun Lovin’ Crime Writers, a band of crime writers. He’s also co-founder of the Scotland Writers Football Club.
Sam Shephard is on the verge of returning to work after maternity leave and the traumatic circumstances around Amelia’s birth. In order to make the transition as easy as possible, Paul is staying home with Amelia for the first week Sam returns. As is predictable, her boss DI Johns isn’t the most welcoming and gives her a cold case – the murder of Rev. Mark Freeman outside his own church. There’s one potential issue, Mark Freeman was the father of DI Johns wife Felicity. Felicity’s mother has been diagnosed with cancer and the boss would like her to go to her grave knowing who killer her husband. My first thought was that this had the potential to blow up in his face: he’d be all over her progress, creating conflict of interest for Sam that would be exploited if a case ever went to court. He was also being his typical sensitive self by ensuring that his mother-in-law would spend her final months reliving the most terrible experience of her life. Rev. Freeman was found at the bottom of the stone stairs leading up to the church entrance. He had been stabbed in the stomach by a small knife, but that wasn’t the cause of death. His subsequent fall down the steps broke his neck, immediately cutting off his ability to breathe. Horrifically he was found by his son Callum, who had ventured back out into the pouring rain when his father hadn’t returned home after the service. Yet we know at least one other person witnessed the killing, because the book begins with their anonymous account of the murder. The boss has essentially handed Sam a poisoned chalice and she fears one of two outcomes – she won’t be able to solve the case, so will be held responsible for disappointing his wife and her mother or she will solve it, making the previous investigation seem incompetent and potentially tearing his family apart in the process. If we as readers know one thing, it’s that Sam will not rest until the case is solved.
I loved the happy family life Sam and Paul have created with baby Amelia. Their relationship feels like a real long-term partnership with the added bonus that Paul is also a detective. They understand that it’s hard for either of them to switch off when they’re working a case, so can happily bounce ideas and theories off each other in the evening. The addition of Amelia to their relationship is something they’ve taken in their stride. It isn’t always easy. There’s a return to work poonami that had me laughing; how do you shit in your own hair? There’s also an afternoon where each thinks the other is picking her up from childcare, but other than this they’re coping well. The author brings home to us the difficulties of being a working mum. Sam misses Amelia and has to call home to check in and hear what they’re doing. There’s also the issue of expressing milk at work, the family room is at her disposal but it feels awkward and isn’t as private as it could be. It doesn’t take long to get used to her new routine though and she’s soon busy using the time to go through interview notes and test out different scenarios. Paul is incredibly supportive, totally backing Sam up in her eventual decision to swap to bottle-feeding. Of course her mother has plenty to say, but she’s besotted with her granddaughter so that helps ease tensions. This is a case that brings up a lot of personal feelings and memories for Sam, because she too was brought up in a church environment and talking to Callum and Felicity, Mark Freeman’s children, brings up some memories of her own that it might be time to disclose.
“What I hadn’t factored in, though, was the emotional toll it took. The wrench of being away from Amelia when I loved every second of being in her company. The regret about going back to work and putting her into childcare, which felt like paying for someone else to bring up my child. And the guilt over the immense sense of relief I felt at getting away from her and from the relentless demands and responsibility of looking after a baby.”
The Freeman children and their mother are first on the list of people Sam needs to re-interview, but as she suspected, keeping her boss away from her case is difficult. He blows up over the fact she’s interviewed his wife without his knowledge and express permission. He wants all access to the family to come through him, but Sam stands her ground. If his fingerprints are all over this case it doesn’t matter what she finds out. The case would be thrown out of court, a fate even worse than failing to find the killer. I loved how Sam stuck to her guns though and called him out in front of the whole team. He has to stay away from the case and trust her. If he keeps a stranglehold on who she can talk to and what avenue her investigation takes, he will ultimately be responsible for it’s failure. The Freeman family seem lovely, but as Sam knows that’s no indicator of innocence. Sam has had a church upbringing, something I have in common with her, so we know better than anyone that sometimes people hide within a congregation. Their Christianity is a mask, a mask that seems to confer an unquestioning trust on them. Most people Sam talks to see the Reverend as a saint, but Sam isn’t taken in and knows she just has to ask the right people. Luckily, she has two potential witnesses: Aaron Scott was an operative in an Organised Crime Group and he certainly appears ferocious with his size and his Māori tattoos, then there’s Mel Smythe, former youth leader and now a drunk living in a hostel. What Aaron tells her blows the Freeman’s timeline totally off kilter and gives her a glimpse into an angrier and self-righteous Mark Freeman. Mel was well-known for being a bit of a rebel, mainly because she was gay yet she was still a youth leader. I found myself wondering whether the church was quite progressive after all. Despite her heavy involvement at the church during the time of the murder, she was soon caught up in the aftermath. She also brings throws new light on the case, but only twenty-four hours later she’s dead. Stabbed in the stomach in her lonely and bleak hostel room.
The author brings up something about church people that I was very aware of as a Christian teenager. They can seem welcoming, hospitable, even saint-like but if you breach one of their most important rules you can meet a completely different side to that person. While they might preach forgiveness, there are certain things they hold true and they are immovable. Aaron certainly places a new spin on the Reverend, with whom he’d had a great friendship. What he overheard that night showed that when faced with a challenge to his Christian values he wasn’t so great at forgiving. Mel Smyth backs up his story with a revelation of her own, a problem that was brought to her perhaps because she was different and lived outside the traditional Christian view of relationships. These new statements show that the original investigation missed so many leads or simply didn’t follow them up. That it took the saintliness of the Reverend and others around him at face value, perhaps because he was a figure of authority in the community. It’s also leading her towards conclusion that the boss isn’t going to like. As the rest of the team, including Paul, take on the Mel Smyth case Sam feels more supported. She knows that Paul and Shortie have her back and trust her methods to get results. I loved how the author gave us more on the relationship between Sam and her mother too, especially now she has a grandchild to dote on. It’s clear to see in any conversation with her mother where Sam’s self-doubt and over-thinking come from. Trying to please a critical parent is a self-defeating task and even here when talking about the Reverend Freeman case, her mother shows a total belief in the church and it’s figures of authority that’s probably hard for us to fathom in this day and age. Yet it gives us some indication of why the original case had been conducted in the way it was and how powerful church figures were several decades ago.
At the end of the case I felt so sad, that belief in the church and it’s rules were often put before the well-being and love of family and the real and flawed people who make up a congregation. I felt it because I lived it, being a teenager in an evangelical church was no picnic and I got out as soon as I could. I regularly see other waifs and strays who are no longer in the church and thankfully we get a lot of humour and relief or closure from each other. We can say ‘that was a bit mad wasn’t it?’ and hear confirmation that yes, it was utterly bonkers. I was so incredibly proud of Sam to know she was ready to talk to her mother about what happened during those years. It’s common that having your own child triggers feelings about your childhood and how you were parented, especially where there are unresolved issues. It’s no coincidence that in this novel she’s ready to take on the boss and the past, perhaps not just because of Amelia but because of the family unit she’s building with Paul. That was the feeling I took away from this novel overall, it’s main theme is family whether that’s a nuclear family in its most traditional sense, a work family that grows in professions like policing, or a church family. It also gave me a reminder that in all of these relationships, it’s communication and honesty that are the most important facets. If those two things are broken or over-shadowed by authority, a web of secrets and lies are woven that can prove very difficult to unravel. I love Sam, she’s a no bullshit character and at this moment when I am still struggling with my health and keeping up, she gave me some healthy reminders that it’s ok to let things slide a little. This was another great novel in this series, Sam is a character I’d love to go for a drink with and seeing her stand up to her boss was a real highlight!
“I suspected I’d get bored and frustrated with a life of domestic bliss. I certainly wasn’t cut out to be a domestic goddess. Six months of maternity leave had driven that home. Fortunately for me, I wasn’t aware of anyone dying from a lack of vacuuming, bed-making and not managing to get out of their PJs all day.”
Out in August 2024 from Orenda Books
Meet the Author
Vanda Symon is a crime writer from Dunedin, New Zealand, and the President of the New Zealand Society of Authors Te Puni Kaituhi o Aotearoa. The Sam Shephard series, which includes Overkill, The Ringmaster, Containment, Bound and Expectant, hit number one on the New Zealand bestseller list, and has also been shortlisted for the Ngaio Marsh Award. Overkill was shortlisted for the CWA John Creasey (New Blood) Dagger and Bound and Expectant have been nominated for USA Barry Awards. All five books have been digital bestsellers, and are in production for the screen. She is also the author of the standalone thriller Faceless, and lives in Dunedin with her family.
First posted on publication and being shared as part of #SkelfSummer.
How have I come this far in my reading life without reading Doug Johnstone? The Skelfs are the family I didn’t even know I was missing. To prepare for reading the second novel in Johnstone’s Skelf series, I made the decision to read the first novel entitled A Dark Matter. I couldn’t have imagined this incredible group of women, but now I feel like I know them personally. Set within the city of Edinburgh, this is a family of undertakers and private investigators. Just to set up the kind of family they are, the author places their residence and place of work at No 0 – somewhere that doesn’t exist. Grandmother Dorothy is a Californian lured to Edinburgh after falling in love with Jimmy Skelf who has passed away at the beginning of book one. Dorothy works in the funeral business with employee Archie, but also takes on PI duties and in her spare time teaches spunky young girls to play the drums. Mum Jenny is at a loose end so comes into the family business after her father dies. She jumps into the PI business with both feet, which is how she seems to do most things. Granddaughter Hannah is studying physics at Edinburgh University and lives with her girlfriend Indy. She has a good relationship with her parents and her grandmother. The first book concerns the disappearance of Hannah’s uni friend Mel and the shock when her killer is revealed is seismic, hitting all the Skelf family hard.
The beginning of The Big Chill reads like the explosive ending of most books. In a scene as comical as it is tragic, Dorothy and Archie are overseeing a routine funeral at the cemetery when sirens start moving closer and drowning out the service. The guests and undertakers stare aghast as a van driven at high speed forces its way through the cemetery gates followed by the police. As the van careers towards them, mourners start to scatter and Dorothy narrowly misses being ploughed into ground, as the van speeds straight into the grave nose first. Dorothy clambers in to check on the driver and finds he has died instantaneously from a head injury. However, what does survive is a scruffy Collie dog she names Einstein to sit alongside Schroedinger the cat. She immediately offers the Skelfs’ services for the man she names Jimmy X but she would like to find a little more out about him before she conducts his funeral. So, Dorothy sets out, with Einstein in tow, to find out how Jimmy X ended up living in a van that literally ‘ended up’ in an open grave.
Of course, this is only one of the mysteries the women are investigating. Hannah makes friends with an elderly physics professor at university when he asks if she’ll help with a memorial for Mel. Not long after they are performing dual duties for him too, when he dies suddenly and unexpectedly. Hannah can’t accept his death and even if it is just a displacement activity, begins to look into his personal life for answers. Dorothy is overstretched with cases when one of her drumming students doesn’t turn up for practice. This is so unusual because Abi loves to drum and has never missed a lesson. When she visits Abi’s home she is told that she was unwell, but Dorothy senses an undercurrent in the air and eventually finds our that Abi has run away. In order to find her, 70 year old Dorothy will have to start thinking like a 14 year old girl, which isn’t easy when the back ache doesn’t go away as quickly as it used to. The scars of her assault in the previous novel are not just mental.
Hanging over them all is the trial of Mel’s killer, known intimately to the Skelf women and still keeping a hold over them where he can. Not only did he kill the pregnant Mel but when found out he attacked Jenny. He stabbed her in the stomach and beat Dorothy too. He has found a psychiatrist to claim he was incapacitated by mental illness at the time of the original killing. Even worse he lures Jenny to visit him, then presses charges when she assaults him. In the aftermath, Hannah is drowning. She’s well supported by Indy, but can’t sleep, feels anxious and when under pressure has panic attacks and passes out. It may take a seismic change to shake her from personalising all these difficult life experiences and thinking she is the only victim. She is having counselling, but there’s so much to unpick and she is in danger of ignoring the one person who helps her most. The women usually gather at the end of the day in the kitchen and catch each other up on the days events, but when even that ritual starts to fall apart Dorothy knows her family are stretched to breaking point. Yet, everyone has to heal in their own time and in their own way. She is wondering whether there is life after Jimmy, and whether her long held friendship and working relationship with a certain Swedish police officer, could become more?
These women are great characters. They’re tough, but still vulnerable. Full of quirky detail and boundless energy. They are also wonderfully good at picking up ‘waifs and strays’. They try not to judge people. I loved Jenny, trekking round homeless shelters and approaching groups in the street, but stopping to pass the time of day or joining them in beer. As someone who is also very good at collecting people, I know how much it widens horizons, teaches us about our own preconceptions and sometimes brings unexpected but wonderful friends. Their arms and their home are open. I found myself thinking a lot about the wonderfully patient and wise Indy, who comes into contact with the Skelfs as a teenager organising her parents funeral after a car accident. She is always quietly working in the background: cooking mouthwatering curries when Hannah hasn’t eaten; taking the reins at funerals when private investigating takes over; listening to bereaved family and respecting the person who died with so much attention to detail. There are such hidden depths here and I found myself hoping that’s explored more in later novels.
I loved the Edinburgh backdrop. In fact it becomes a character in its own right from the touristy areas, to the student quarter, to the areas that missed regeneration, this is such a varied and richly atmospheric city. I don’t know it well but I feel this has taken me under that tourist facade to find something more interesting. We also see such a variety of people from those on the streets to those who in academia or in private education. Death is a great leveller though and these people are often side by side once they reach Skelf’s undertakers. We also see that these extremes can all be found in one person; there isn’t a ‘type’ that becomes homeless or commits a murder. I also find the way Hannah makes sense of her world through science really interesting. She muses on quantum suicide and whether we, like Schroedinger’s Cat, can be alive and dead at the same time. People often think that science is anathema to concepts like faith, hope and a belief in God. However, there is beauty and wonder in everything Hannah knows about space.
What I take away most from this book is the way the author writes with bluntness, but also kindness, acceptance and wonder about the human condition and the strange galaxy we call home. Hannah muses on the end of the universe with her counsellor:
‘stars will stop forming, the sun will wink out, the solar system will collapse. Then in the black-hole era galaxies disband, all proton matter decays, supermassive black holes swallow everything, then they’ll evaporate too, all the energy and matter in the cosmos gone […] it’s called the big chill’.
Hannah comments that it’s not such a bad way to go, but her counsellor reminds her that it’s a long way into the future. Dorothy has the same thoughts as her mind is flooded with images of everything they’ve experienced. She has felt the cold, icy creep of death:
‘death so close that she could feel its breath on her neck, could smell it every day when she woke, could feel its icy touch spreading from her mind to her limbs’.
So she sits behind her drums, plays the Black Parade album by My Chemical Romance, and starts to tap out a rhythm until she can feel the music within her, warming her veins and bursting to life. While we’re here we have to find a way to keep living.
Shared as part of #SkelfSummer
Meet the Author
Doug Johnstone is the author of fifteen novels, most recently The Space Between Us (2023). Several of his books have been bestsellers, The Big Chill (2020) was longlisted for the Theakston Crime Novel of the Year, while A Dark Matter (2020), Breakers (2019) and The Jump (2015) were all shortlisted for the McIlvanney Prize for Scottish Crime Novel of the Year. He’s taught creative writing and been writer in residence at various institutions over the last two decades including festivals, libraries, universities, schools, prisons and a funeral directors.
Doug is a Royal Literary Fund Consultant Fellow and works as a mentor and manuscript assessor for many organisations, including The Literary Consultancy, Scottish Book Trust and New Writing North. He’s been an arts journalist for over twenty years and has also written many short stories and screenplays. He is a songwriter and musician with six albums and three EPs released, and plays drums for the Fun Lovin’ Crime Writers, a band of crime writers. He’s also co-founder of the Scotland Writers Football Club.
‘This is my family story. From all I’ve sown together, through all I couldn’t ask. I want to be the bud who makes it.’
In Bloom tells of strength, survival, forgiveness, resilience and determination, and the fierce love and unbreakable bonds between mothers and daughters.
Ever since Sol’s untimely death left her pregnant and alone at twenty-two, Delph’s kept herself small as a form of self-protection. Now, over a decade later, she lives with their daughter Roche and her new partner Itsy, a kind and protective cabbie, on the fourteenth floor of Esplanade Point on the Essex coast.
But Delph’s protective bubble bursts when Roche moves in with her estranged nan, Moon. Feeling on the outside of the bond between her fierce-yet-flaky tarot-reading mother and volatile martial-arts-champion daughter, Delph begins questioning her own freedom. And when Roche’s snooping into her grandmother’s past unearths a familial line of downtrodden women; a worrying pattern emerges. Has keeping small and safe truly been Delph’s choice all these years…?
I’m hosting the paperback blog tour for this wonderful book today and it’s lost none of its charm and power since I read it last year. I don’t believe in trigger warnings, despite their intended purpose to flag up material that may ‘trigger’ difficult emotions in the reader, I feel that they might stop someone experiencing a connection with a text. It might well be a trigger, but that doesn’t always have to mean it’s a negative one. It might be a trigger that starts a healing process. If anyone should have avoided this book it was me, because I was Delphine. I lost the love of my life in my early thirties and then sleepwalked into a coercive and damaging relationship. Yes, it was a hard read at times, but it wasn’t a remotely negative experience. Moon, Delphine and Roche are three generations of a family. Each woman has her own issues, but they all stem from one place. Right back at the beginning.
As the book opens Roche can no longer live with her mother and Itsy, the man she’s been living with for most of Roche’s life. So she decamps to her grandmother Moon’s house. Roche can’t stand Itsy, he dislikes her and wishes she wasn’t there. In fact what he wants is Delphine all to himself, it’s easier to control someone who’s isolated. Delphine has had a glazed over look ever since he arrived in her life and she doesn’t seem like her mum anymore. Delphine has done everything she can to keep Itsy happy. She’s changed how she dressed, made herself less beautiful, stayed at home and stopped going out with friends. Every day she makes herself smaller to make more space for him and Roche can’t watch it anymore. However, things are changing slowly. Delphine has a job she enjoys at B & Q, new connections with her colleagues and today she has made a choice. Delphine is pregnant and she knows deep down in her soul that ‘the thought of more years, more life, tied to him’ is more than she can bear. She goes quietly on her own for an abortion, the quietest but most powerful act of rebellion she can make. Then comes her opportunity, Itsy receives a phone call from Jamaica to tell him his mother is dying. He must jump straight on a flight, so Delphine lets him go alone, knowing that now she has several weeks to herself. She doesn’t stop Roche from moving out and accepts this as her time to heal, time to be the parent that so often Roche has to be for her. However, this isn’t the only recovery needed in the three generations of this family thanks to the actions of men.
I felt at first that I was slowly piecing together the story of a client. Being a person- centred therapist means letting the client choose what they want to talk about. I would use my counselling skills to tease out that story and ask questions where it needs to be clarified or where I might only be getting one perspective. Here the story has it’s own pace and each woman narrates her own section. We flit back and forth, also delving into the past here and there and it’s like doing a jigsaw puzzle but only being handed one piece at a time, then another from a different angle. It takes some time to perceive the whole and that was definitely the case here. Only we the reader can see where they all are in relation to one another. The reality of being a woman in today’s world is explored fully, there is no doubt that these women’s lives would have been immeasurably better had they not encountered men. It takes Roche to articulate this properly with the words and wisdom of her generation.
“Roche knows, remembers, how her life changed at around the time she started secondary, and her bubble of invisibility popped. How, despite the school uniform screaming otherwise, she very suddenly became the inhabitant of a woman’s body, complete with a depressing self-awareness that this was now Roche’s life until one day men deemed her invisible again. In fairness, it’s not her contemporaries who usually do the perving – no, it’s men, grown–ass men who have always done the bulk of the wolf–whistling, the innuendoes and basic compliments that they expect her to ‘smile, love’ and be grateful for.”
As a middle aged woman I now know the power of that invisibility and how, in many ways, it’s a blessing.
I love how carefully the author drew the threads between generations, those behaviours that create a pattern of intergenerational trauma. There are moments in her journey where Delph needs her daughter by her side, but she recognises that it’s a selfish need. Delphi’s lived experience stops her; “is not for a child to fix the parent. Nor is Roche the ointment to Delph’s current troubles”. Then we go back into her mother Moon’s early years, when her grandmother is in hospital, suffering from mental ill health. Her name was still Joy back then and her job is to dispense sunshine to a women who can’t even remember her name. ‘Come on,’ Ma says, in a giddy-up way. ‘You know how happy your little face always makes her.’ This a learned behaviour, people pleasing and exactly what Delph is trying to avoid for her own daughter, three generations later. By sitting with her own pain, Delph is avoiding instilling that behaviour in her own daughter, she’s actively breaking the cycle. Yes, there are traumatic moments in these women’s lives, Moon’s story being particularly harrowing, but we can also see the women’s determination to change. It’s that change and what it means for Roche that brings such an uplifting feeling to the book. For me it’s Delph’s struggle that touched me deeply. The loss of Sol, who’d been there her entire life, is devastating. So moving out of Itsy’s orbit and the mental paralysis she’s been living with means opening up her emotions. That’s all of the emotions including her grief, but it’s a process that needs to happen so that Roche can talk about her father openly and in a joyful way. I found myself more engrossed in the later stages of the book as I had to see whether these women could heal together. This is beautifully written and manages to be funny, moving and hopeful.
Every month this year seems to drift far away from my plans, for life in general and for reading! This last month my husband and I finally caught COVID as we welcomed his daughter back from university for the summer. We were both consigned to bed for a few days in his case and a whole week in mine. I’ve since had a sinus infection that’s caused nose bleeds and facial pain, plus I’m still struggling with my breathing so am on steroids, antibiotics and have an inhaler. We took a holiday to Wales and thankfully, took my carer and her children too. I spent a lot of time looking out at the view, reading and resting – what a view it was! While everyone else took turns looking after me. I did manage to get a couple of days in my favourite haunts of Beddgelert and Porthmadog, where I went to a favourite bookshop – Browsers Books. I made some great purchases from their second hand collection that I’ll show you in a few days when we’re fully unpacked. My dog Bramble had a lovely walk in the morning with my carer Louise before getting me organised and my husband managed to get some fishing done. I watched a lot of films that had been clogging up my watchlist on Netflix too. I came home on Thursday night and went straight to hospital on Friday morning for a radio frequency denervation on my back, so I’m now in bed recovering and trying to stay off my feet. I’ve managed to catch up on some Squad POD reads this month, which I was terribly behind on and I was late with blog tours. Sometimes book blogging doesn’t go according to plan, but luckily book people are some of the kindest I’ve ever met. Thanks to everyone for your patience and kindness this month ❤️❤️❤️
I loved this wonderful debut from Harriet Constable. Set in the magical city of Venice in the 18th Century, this shows a different side to the same place where Casanova was prowling the richest parties. We follow the fortunes of Anna, an orphan who was passed into the care of nuns at the Ospedale Della Pieta. The orphanage has a hatch in the wall, just big enough to accommodate a newborn baby and this is how Anna came to be at the orphanage with her friends. The girls are schooled but the specialism is music and Anna is playing the violin. She is a bright, sparky and ambitious girl absolutely bristling with energy and promise. When she catches the eye of the music master she hopes to reach the level where she can audition for the orphanages elite orchestra. Everyone knows that orchestra girls get special treatment, perform in the best venues in the city and receive gifts from patrons. She has definitely caught the eye of the master, who has organised for her to have her very own custom made violin. However, it isn’t until she’s a little older that she sees how precarious her position is. Those girls who don’t become elite musicians are introduced to eligible men, often rich but very old. For Anna this seems a fate worse than death, all she wants is to play the piano and be the best. In order to get there she will sacrifice everything… but will it be worth it? This is a fantastic debut, full of rich historical detail and brimming with tension.
In a remote region of the Norwegian arctic, a community struggles with its secrets when a young man called Daniel goes missing. This is the period called the Russ when teens who are about to leave school go through a period of partying, practical jokes and letting off steam. Svea is an elderly woman who has lived in the area for all her life. She has a simple life with her dog Aster and heads down to the cafe for her breakfast each morning. More often than not Odd Emil joins her, not that they have an arrangement. They’ve known each other all their lives and he was once in love with Svea’s beautiful younger sister Norah who disappeared many years ago, thought to be drowned. There are so many secrets here that it’s hard for the police to find Daniel. A fancy dress Russ party took place that weekend, Svea’s granddaughter Elin and her best friend Benny decide to attend in drag, with Elin surprised to find herself kissing Daniel despite her pink beard. Benny sees Daniel’s friends abandoning his car at a local hotel, so it looks like he started out on a walking trail. Can Benny tell the police what he’s seen without disclosing what he was doing there himself? When a body is found in a cave during the search, the police release that it has been there too long for it to be Daniel. But if it isn’t the missing teenager, who can it be? This was a brilliant thriller, depicting a seemingly ordinary town full of secrets and lies.
I loved this tale of Nigerian girl Funke, living a happy life on the university campus with her father and mother, plus brother Femi. Her life is turned upside down one ordinary morning on the way to school, when an accident kills both her mother and brother. Funke’s mother kept her in-laws at bay most of the time, knowing that her mother-in-law disapproved of her son’s marriage to a white woman. Now, with her father in shock, her grandmother is in charge and her ‘bush’ ways are having an influence. How could Funke have come out of the same crash without a single mark on her? Funke’s aunties can see which way the wind is blowing and make a decision that it would be best to send her to her mother’s family in England. The white side of her family. Totally out of her depth, Funke has never met her mum’s family or been to England. The Ring, her mum’s childhood home is an old mansion and not the fairy tale place she talked about to Funke and her brother. Even worse is Aunty Margot, a bitter and angry woman who blames her sister Lizzie for ruining her wedding; when Margot’s fiancé found out Lizzie had run away with a Nigerian man he broke off the engagement. If it wasn’t for her cousin Liv, Funke would have felt lost. She was determined to make Funke feel at home and wants to become her best friend. Can she succeed or is Funke’s life always going to be turbulent and changeable? This is a gorgeous book, vibrant and life affirming.
Pine Ridge is an idyllic coastal village on the south coast and it’s almost August so it’s time for the ‘Down from London’ crowd to start arriving on the ferry. This is one of those places struggling due to the amount of local property bought up as second homes and holiday lets. This August the two sides are set to clash more than ever as locals have set up a campaign group – the NJFA or Not Just For August movement. They have a series of publicity stunts set up for the coming month, starting with egging visitors cars as they come off the ferry. Amy and Linus are coming to stay in their new holiday home for the first time, sharing a week’s holiday together until work starts on their renovation. Having been introduced to Pine Ridge by friends Perry and Charlotte, Amy was determined to have a home with a sea view and a summerhouse just like theirs. Perry bought their house outright with his banker’s bonus and Charlotte created The Nook where everyone congregates for drinks in the evening. Locals Robbie and Tate live in the caravan park, only just able to afford the rent on a static home, which is boiling during the summer. They and their girlfriends have jobs that serve the incomers, but they’re not well paid and even the smallest flats have been pulled off the rental market to become AirBnB lets. The two sides will clash, but everyone seems shocked when a summerhouse is bulldozed over the cliff and on to the beach. Even more so when the police find a body inside! This a smart contemporary thriller with a perfect satirical look at the upper middle classes.
This is one of the most moving books I have ever read. Lissette’s baby son has been unwell and she’s had to take him to hospital on the west side of Berlin. When the medics try to get her to go home and sleep she’s very unsure, but they convince her to get some sleep and bring more supplies back in the morning. Lisette makes her way back to East Berlin, feeling more confident about her baby son’s recovery. When the household wakes the next morning a seismic change has happened. A barrier has been created between East and West Germany overnight. Lissette runs to where soldiers are guarding entry to the west and begs them, surely if she just explains that her baby is in a hospital just a few streets away they’ll let her through. He needs his mother. As the hours turn into days Lissette is grieving for her son and daughter Ellie wants to find a way to make things right again. She has a gift for music and hears people’s emotional state as a melody, but her mother’s music has gone. She makes a decision. She is going to find a way of getting across the new border and into the west. There she will find her brother. The historical research for this book is clearly extensive and I was actually ashamed of how little I knew about this time in history. We also go back to WW2 and Lissette’s teenage years in a city at war, giving us background on the family and how Berlin and Germany came to be separated. This is a heart-rending and emotional story showing how an historical event affected the real people living through it. Really exceptional writing.
I’m a big fan of Charity Norman because she’s great at bringing the conflicting issues of society into family relationships, exploring whether they grow stronger or whether they crack. Livia Denby is a probation officer on trial for attempted murder and the jury have reached a verdict. Everything went wrong two years before, as Livia and her family are celebrating daughter Heidi’s birthday. Her gift is a new bike and she’s planned a bike ride to a local pub with her dad. Scott has promised to take her for a birthday lunch and she’s really excited to have her dad to herself. Scott has lots of responsibilities; he’s a father, an English teacher and cares for his brother who has Down’s Syndrome and diabetes. As Scott’s phone keeps ringing, Heidi can see their outing slipping away. Her uncle has already called twice because he’s confused they’re not going to Tesco as usual. Before the phone can ring again, Heidi slips it down the back of the armchair. It’s a momentary decision with terrible consequences. Livia awaits their return with terrible news. Scott’s brother accidentally locked himself out of the house and had a hypo. Despite help from passers by, the paramedics were unable to revive him. He died before he even reached the hospital. When Scott finally finds his phone there’s one plaintive, heartbreaking voice mail he can’t get over and his guilt complicates his grief. Scott starts looking for answers and fixates on one witness who said the ambulance took a long time and the paramedics were slow to act. He starts to research medical negligence, watching videos on YouTube and making links with content creators who talk about ‘Big Pharma.’ Before long he has fallen down the rabbit hole into conspiracy theories that separate him from his family. This is such a hot topic at the moment and the author has brilliantly portrayed how people can be brainwashed and radicalised by social media. I thought this was a fantastically tense and incredibly intelligent read.
This is a fascinating story about Dora Maar, a photographer and artist who exhibited alongside some of the greatest artists in the Surrealist movement. She lived in Paris for most of her life, most notably, during the German occupation in WWII. Born Henrietta Theodora Markovitch in 1907, she used her photographic art to better represent life through links with ideas, politics and philosophy rather than slavishly photographing what was naturally there. She was exhibited in the Surrealist Exposition in Paris and the International Surrealist Exhibition in London in 1936. In the same year she was exhibited at MOMA in NYC. She first encountered Picasso while taking photos at a film set in 1935, but they were not introduced until a few days later when Paul Elduard introduced them at Cafe des Deux Magots. Dora is intent on catching his eye and sat alone, using a pen knife to stab between her splayed fingers. Where she missed, blood stained the gloves she wore and Picasso kept them with his most treasured mementoes. The gloves are a metaphor for their entire relationship – he fed off her emotions. We are inside Dora’s mind at all times giving her control of her story. In a world where Dora is known best through her relationship with a man, instead of her own work, Treger is simply redressing the balance. You’d have to be utterly blind to think there’s any other way of looking at his treatment of her and the other women he was involved with. In the nine years they were together, she was subjected to mental and psychological abuse. She was underestimated as an influence on his work, particularly Guernica and his politics. I felt that Picasso was drawn to her masochism and fed on the pain he caused her for his personal satisfaction and his art. Picasso comes across as a narcissist; constantly told he was a genius he believes everything revolves around his needs and his freedom to work. This is seen in The Weeping Woman series of paintings where she’s depicted as a woman who is constantly tortured and distressed, when she’s so much more than this. This is a brilliantly researched piece of art history told as a memoir.
This isn’t the first time I’ve read Eva Verde’s novel but I was asked to read it again for the paperback publication on 1st August. I worry about trigger warnings, they stop people reading books they might connect with emotionally and potentially prevent a healing process. If anyone should have avoided this book it was me, because I was Delphine. I lost the love of my life in my early thirties and then sleepwalked into a coercive and damaging relationship. So this was a hard read at times, but that wasn’t remotely negative. Moon, Delphine and Roche are three generations of a family. Each woman has her own issues, but they all stem from right back at the beginning. As the book opens Roche can no longer live with her mother and Itsy, the man she’s been living with for most of Roche’s life. So she decamps to her grandmother Moon’s house. Roche feels like Itsy dislikes her and wants Delphine all to himself. Of course it’s easier to control someone who’s isolated. Delphine has a ‘glazed over’ look and has done everything she can to keep Itsy happy. She’s changed how she dressed, made herself less beautiful, stayed at home and stopped going out with friends. Every day she makes herself smaller to make more space for him and Roche can’t watch it anymore. However, Delphine is changing, she has a job she enjoys at B & Q, new connections with her colleagues and today she has made a choice. Delphine is pregnant and she knows deep down in her soul that ‘the thought of more years, more life, tied to him’ is more than she can bear. She goes quietly on her own for an abortion, the quietest but most powerful act of rebellion she can make. Then comes an opportunity, Itsy receives a phone call from Jamaica. His mother is dying and he must jump straight on a flight. Delphine lets him go alone, knowing that now she has several weeks to herself. She doesn’t stop Roche from moving out and accepts this as her time to heal, time to be the parent that so often Roche has to be for her. However, this isn’t the only recovery needed in the three generations of this family thanks to the actions of men. This was such a real, emotionally engaging story that focused on relationships between mothers and their daughters especially those responses to trauma that we pass on to the next generation. This was so emotionally intelligent and uplifting.
This was a fascinating mystery, set within the art world and told from different points of view within three timelines. In 1938, Juliette Willoughby is living and painting alongside her lover Oskar in Paris. A British heiress, she left her family and their money behind for a life as an artist who is best known for her painting ‘Self-Portait as Sphinx’, thought to be lost in a studio fire where Juliette also lost her life. We meet our main characters Caroline and Patrick at Cambridge in 1991, where they are both studying art history and specialise in the Surrealists. They are sent to the same dissertation supervisor and while researching come across something sinister about Juliette’s death. Their investigations may expose terrible secrets about the Willoughby family, who are acquaintances of both students and an aristocratic family who don’t want their family history out in the open. Our final timeline is present day Dubai where Patrick is an art dealer and lives with his wife. Caroline is now an academic and expert on Surrealism, especially Juliette Willoughby so when a new ‘Self-Portrait as Sphinx’ is uncovered he asks her to fly to Dubai and authenticate the painting. A sale is on the cards and Patrick needs to know if this painting is definitely a second version by Juliette and potentially worth millions. He plans a night for collectors to view the painting and offer sealed bids, but the night ends with Patrick in a cell accused of murdering one of his closest friends – the last surviving member of the Willoughby family. There are now three suspicious deaths linked to this painting, but can Caroline unlock the mystery before Patrick is charged with a crime he didn’t commit? This book creeps up on you, a slow building tension grabs you and doesn’t let go. You will find yourself desperate to know about the painting and what happened in the Willoughby family.
Nordland. A region in the Norwegian Arctic; a remote valley that stretches from the sea up to the mountains and glaciers.
It is May in what was once a prosperous mining community. The snows are nearly gone and it’s a time of spring and school-leavers’ celebrations – until Daniel, a popular teenage boy, goes missing. Conflicting stories circulate among his friends, of parties and wild behaviour.
As the search for Daniel widens, the police open a disused mine in the mountains. They find human remains, but this body has been there for decades, its identity a mystery.
Everyone in this tight knit, isolated community is touched by these events: misanthropic Svea, whose long life in the area stretches back to the heyday of the mines, and beyond. She has cut all ties with her family, except for her granddaughter, Elin, an outsider like her grandmother. Elin and her friend Benny, both impacted by Daniel while he was alive, become entangled in the hunt for answers, while Svea has deep, dark secrets of her own.
After a move into historical fiction with her fabulous The Beasts of Paris, this feels like a more pared back novel set in modern day Norway. It is a crime novel, based around a missing teenage boy called Daniel. We see a lot of the action through the eyes of an elderly woman called Svea, who has lived here all her life with her two younger sisters. Her youngest sister Nordis, went missing many years ago, thought to have drowned herself in the sea. Svea lives with her puffin hound Asta and has a simple routine of walking into town with her dog for a coffee and pastry, often sharing her breakfast with Odd Emil, another elderly resident of the town who was once in love with the very beautiful Nordis. Daniel is Emil’s grandson and he’s struggling with his inability to do anything, he can’t help. Svea’s granddaughter Elin had been to a russ ball, a little like a senior prom. During russ, school leavers play pranks on each other and issue dares. It’s a time period that teachers tolerate with a roll of the eyes, but never usually goes too far. Both Elin and her friend Benny go in drag and become celebrated for the evening, the heroes of the popular kids. Elin even has a interlude with Daniel – she’s surprised to find this beautiful boy kissing her despite her pink beard! In the early hours of the next morning, Benny is having a liaison of his own when he sees Daniel’s friends parking his car behind the hotel. Then Daniel is reported missing on the trail and Benny is torn, he should mention that Daniel wasn’t in the car but what excuse can he give for being there? Benny has a secret, but he isn’t the only one and some secrets have lasted a lifetime.
I loved the sense of place the author created here. There’s a stillness and isolation about the landscape, it’s beautiful but unforgiving territory. It is like a lot of towns in the north of England, where mining was once the major industry and now they’re closed. There’s something missing in these places, a community that was once focused around the work they shared is gone. I felt this dislocation was an important part of the novel, because although it’s primarily a crime narrative it’s also a look at how much the small community has changed. As the mines closed and the outside world starts to bleed in through the internet and individual mobile phones the town has something of an identity crisis. It explores these contemporary changes in the younger characters like Elin and Benny, but by having Svea as our narrator we can see how seismic the changes have been within her lifetime. Also she breaks the fourth wall a lot which I love in a narrator. For Svea and Emil, who meet for coffee each day, their relationship is loose and undefined. They don’t even say they’ll see each other tomorrow, but usually do. It’s an understanding that’s taken a lifetime. Yet her narration, where she talks directly to us, is more conversational and intimate. Then the author lapses into text speak and emojis for the younger people’s communication. It’s instant, punchy and sometimes indecipherable by someone over forty.
“If you constantly express love as a red tiny heart – ‘bounceable’ and unbreakable – does that diminish the complexity and subtlety of your feelings?”
Svea doesn’t fully understand everything her granddaughter Elin is telling her, but there is an acceptance that shows wisdom rather than comprehension. On the evening of the ball with Benny in his dress and Elin in a suit complete with the pink beard, Elin informs her grandmother that she feels gender fluid. This is possibly an issue at home where her father is the local minister. Benny is openly gay, but his love life is extremely private. He has caught the eye of a hotel guest, a man much older than Benny. He sneaks out to the hotel to meet him, only Elin knowing where he’s going. There can’t be anything wrong with it, because the sex was enjoyable. He didn’t feel forced or taken advantage of, but it did feel strange when he left a huge sum of money for him as if it was a tip. He knows if he admits where he was when he witnessed Daniel’s friends, people will be jumping to all sorts of conclusions.
When a body is found in a cave, during the search for Daniel, people start to speculate. It’s been there for some time and it will take DNA testing to find the answers. I did wonder if it might be Svea’s sister Nordis, who didn’t succumb to the sea after all. The past is coming back to haunt them all and what a past it is. Svea explains that her own mother fell in love with a German prisoner of war, much to the disgust of villagers. Svea was known as a Nazi girl and this heritage stayed with her for life in more ways than one. We know something terrible happened because Svea’s father was the enemy, but she leads up to it very slowly, keeping us abreast of the investigation but also delving back into the past. It was this mystery as much as the unsolved crime that drew me in and kept me reading. This is a slow burn, but Svea relates the story as if we’re a friend or acquaintance. It’s as if she’s the spider at the centre of a very dark web and we’re drawn further and further in. The tension of Daniel’s disappearance starts to build as the days go by too. However, it’s not just this that’s fascinating. The interesting relationship between Elin’s father and Marylinn from the school, being conducted in secret so they don’t upset Elin who already has an inkling. Also, being let into the lives of these young people who are so vulnerable, dealing with their emotions, the pressures of school and popularity and trying to work out who they are when there are so many options. Then we’re shot back to Svea’s teenage years and the reminder of all that adolescent angst makes us realise the full implications of what she went through. This is a novel of relationships, romantic and familial as well as the deep bonds of friendship. We see both ends of the spectrum too, those trying to make sense of where they are by harking back to the past and those working themselves out for the first time. It’s also about how we love, whether in secret, in the open, with fireworks or a quiet love that doesn’t even identify itself.
Published by Quercus.
Meet the Author
Stef Penney is a screenwriter and the author of three novels: The Tenderness of Wolves (2006), The Invisible Ones (2011), and Under a Pole Star (2016). She has also written extensively for radio, including adaptations of Moby Dick, The Worst Journey in the World, and, mostly recently, a third installment of Peter O’Donnell’s Modesty Blaise series.
The Tenderness of Wolves won Costa Book of the Year, Theakston’s Crime Novel of the Year, and was translated into thirty languages. It has just been re-issued in a 10th anniversary edition.
This book was an absolute joy to read, which may sound strange considering the subject matter but somehow it awakened my senses, stirred my emotions and kept me reading. In fact I read it so quickly I was finished in an evening that turned into morning before I knew it. Funke lives in Nigeria with her mother, known as Misses Lissie to most people, her father and brother Femi. Mum is a teacher and Dad works at the university. Their entire world is shattered one morning as they make their normal run to school when their mother’s car fails to stop and ploughs directly under a lorry. The drivers side of the car is destroyed but Funke’s side is left completely unscathed. She loses her mother and brother in a moment. In his grief, her father Babatunde is inconsolable and he takes it out on Funke. How did she get out without a scratch? Encouraged by his superstitious mother, he calls Funke a witch and insists she must be protected by some magical being. Seeing how Funke will be treated by her grandmother, her aunties put their heads together and decide she should be sent for a while to her mother’s family in England. Her white family. Funke is ripped away from everything she knows and sent to The Ring, the mansion where her mother and Aunty Margot grew up. There, although she isn’t being hit or accused of evil spells, she feels the resentment of Aunt Margot and her cousin Dominic. They call her Kate, after all it’s easier than pronouncing Funke isn’t it? There’s no colour, bland food and where she was accused of being white in Nigeria, here she is seen as black – with all the racist connotations that come alongside it. Especially in white, upperclass Britain. England’s only saving grace is her cousin Liv. Liv scoops her up and feeds her comfort food. The problem is it’s not the food or the comfort she’s used to.
This is a book about being in between. Funke’s mother was ostracised by her family for marrying a Nigerian man. Aunt Margot sees Lizzie’s relationship with Babatunde as the reason for her own engagement being called off just before the wedding. In her eyes Lizzie was selfish, pursuing her own feelings at the expense of her family. She feels Lizzie had the looks, the charisma and the man she loved, while Margot was left heartbroken and with parents who seemed to miss Lizzie more than they enjoyed Margot’s presence. She sees Funke as her mother’s daughter and a threat to her own children. Her parents seem to love Kate, as they’ve christened her, and Margot doesn’t want her to take all the attention, the love and their eventual inheritance. She’s a bitter woman who is very hard to like. Sadly for Funke, history repeats itself and on the night of their prom a series of events mean they must drive home early. Liv is drunk and high. Yet even Funke, who is teetotal, feels unwell. Dominic throws caution to the wind and decides to drive them home, despite his own drinking, and a terrible accident occurs. Everyone survives but Liv suffers a bad break to her leg. In the aftermath Dominic asks Funke to admit to driving, which she agrees to, not knowing that covering for her cousins will lead to her life being uprooted for the second time.
Funke feels like she belongs nowhere. In Nigeria when her mother was alive they had a wonderful life, even if children would follow her singing a song about her pale skin. That’s nothing to the blatant racism she faces in England, but she faces it down and it fuels her will to succeed. Then she’s back in Nigeria and is again the odd one out. This time she’s in her dad’s new family and their lifestyle in the village is very different to the childhood she remembers on the university compound. His new wife and their children eat and live in ways her dad would have dismissed as ‘bush’ when Funke was a child. Her small brother and sister are black and fascinated with her pale, mixed race skin. Things are familiar, such as the spicy red stew and the heat, but it’s a changed land without her mother in it. At least in England she didn’t expect her mother to be there. Now she faced with the shock of her absence all over again. Will she ever find home? Meanwhile, back in Britain, when Liv finally comes round from the accident she asks for Kate. What will her mother tell her?
I thought the author brilliantly showed how different people cope with mental pain. Funke takes a bottle top from her mother’s hoard (for craft projects) and holds it in her hand so hard that it cuts into her palm. Liv is horrified that she’s hurt herself like this, but for Funke it’s the only thing that distracts her from the grief of losing her and her brother. Liv also deals with motherly absence, but externalises her feelings in a different way. She has a mother who is present, just not for her. Liv starts to drink excessively, uses marijuana and acid tabs to blank out the feelings that she isn’t loved and therefore isn’t worth anything. When we’re children and we’re rejected by a parent, we never assume it’s the parent’s fault and we don’t stop loving them. Instead we internalise their criticism and think we are the problem. Liv has a lot of casual sex because she thinks it sex is all she really has to offer. Meanwhile Funke struggles to give love and truly trust someone. She is in a relationship with a young man who is keeping his true sexuality under wraps, because it’s not accepted in his family or community. The younger people are aware he’s gay and call Funke his ‘beard’, but how far can she take this relationship? What if he suggests a more permanent arrangement and is Funke willing to give her life away so easily? The the same root cause, a loss of the mother figure they so needed, affects both girls, it just manifests in different ways. With them both on opposite continents, how will they ever find each other again? The spaces between can be painful and isolating places to be and the author depicts that with such tenderness and understanding. However, liminal spaces are also freeing. Being in-between gives us the space to choose, to take bits and pieces from each place, each family and make our own identity. I found the end chapter so uplifting and it gave me hope that we can each forge our own identity, once we’ve explored who we truly are. This is a fascinating, touching story about growing up and how we become who we are. It’s vibrant, atmospheric and an absolute must read.
Meet the Author
Born in Bristol, raised in Lagos, I’m proud to be Anglo-Nigerian. I ran a successful ad agency before turning to writing and now live in Dorset with my husband, two standard schnauzers, and way too many books.
My debut novel WAHALA was inspired by a long (and loud) lunch with friends. It was published around the world in January 2022 and is being adapted into a major BBC TV drama. This Motherless Land is my second novel.
Charity Norman is one of my must-buy authors, because although you don’t see many people talking about her work I find it really intelligent with a particular insight into difficult and dysfunctional relationships of all kinds. She’s also great at bringing the issues of modern day society to bear on those relationships, exploring whether they get stronger or whether they crack. Livia Denby is a probation officer on trial for attempted murder and the jury have reached a verdict. Everything went wrong two years before, on a particular Saturday morning as Livia and her family are celebrating daughter Heidi’s birthday. Livia and husband Scott have bought her a new bike and she’ll get to try it out on her planned bike ride to a local pub with her dad. Scott has promised to take her for a birthday lunch and she’s really excited to have her dad to herself. Scott is one of those people with lots of responsibilities; he’s a father, an English teacher and cares for his brother who has Down’s Syndrome and diabetes. The phone keeps ringing and Heidi can see their outing slipping away, her uncle has already called twice because he’s confused they’re not going to Tesco as usual. So before the phone can ring again, Heidi takes it and slips it down the back of the armchair. It’s a momentary decision with terrible consequences.
Livia awaits their return with terrible news. Scott’s brother accidentally locked himself out of the house and then had a hypo. Despite help from passers by, the paramedics were unable to revive him. He died before he even reached the hospital. When Scott finally finds his phone there are several missed calls and one plaintive, heartbreaking voice mail that Scott can’t stop listening to. Guilt complicates grief and Scott starts looking for answers. He fixates on something one of the passers by said about the ambulance taking a long time and the paramedics taking a while to make a decision. He starts to research medical negligence, watching videos on YouTube and making links with content creators who talk about ‘Big Pharma.’ I could already see the path he was on because it happened to my husband last year when our local air base was requisitioned by the government for asylum seeker accommodation. He did his basic training there and knew it had been used for refugees before after WW2. Sadly, right-wing racist group from a different part of the country hijacked local protests and turned the camp gates into a protest against all asylum seekers. My husband was so angry they were using images and the legacy of the Dam Busters to peddle hatred. It consumed him so much that he was constantly on social media fighting against their viewpoint and became sucked into a hellish echo chamber of Nazism. He felt like the whole world was racist, but he hadn’t realised that the algorithm behind social media channels is simply to give you more of what you’re viewing. I had to explain using BookTwitter which is mostly a lovely, benign and accepting part of Twitter/X. Thankfully he closed his account and instead is taking positive steps to support the asylum seekers when and if they arrive. As I was reading I could see that Scott was so vulnerable, so desperately sad and ripe for manipulation.
Scott finds a content creator called Dr Jack who claims to work in the NHS but in Scotland. He hides behind a mask, a voice simulator and a cartoon avatar. He talks about Big Pharma, the danger of vaccines and how health fears can be used to control the population. Behind it all is the global conspiracy of the New World Order, a shadowy cabal of billionaires, celebrities and politicians who are the real power in the world. They have the ability to control governments and democracy, both of which give us an illusion of control. It’s not long before he is messaging Scott directly and taking him deeper down the rabbit hole. Heidi is due to have her HPV vaccine at school and after contacting Dr Jack, Scott is keen to take direct action. Without talking to Livia he refuses to sign Heidi’s consent form. Then he uses a video suggested by Dr Jack in his English class, making a link between vaccines and fatal consequences. The video shows a supposedly dead girl in the morgue, a girl with long red hair rather like Heidi. By lunchtime the school is full of terrified teenage girls and the head is inundated with calls from angry parents. Poor Heidi is thrown into the spotlight and the head is left with no option but to suspend Scott. When Livia tries to talk to him she can’t get through and Scott tells her she’s just not listening to him. When she looks into her husband’s eyes all she can see is the fervour of the fanatic.
Meanwhile, Livia is acting slightly out of character too. She’s working with an old con called Charlie who’s about to be released from prison into a hostel, where Livia will act as his probation officer. He’s served most of his sentence with time off for good behaviour. Livia is sure they’ll make a strong team and she’s sure Charlie is reformed from his days as a gangland enforcer called The Garotter. Charlie is a great listener and once he’s in the community they meet at a local cafe for lunch and to check in, so it’s easy to slip into confidences. Something personal is disclosed and she immediately checks herself, she must keep her professional boundaries. However, as Scott’s obsession worsens Livia feels like she’s losing her best friend and the usual person she would talk to. Despite being off work, he isn’t pulling his weight at home. He’s up till the small hours, researching his theories and then haranguing people with them at parties. Livia is lost and embarrassed. She needs somewhere to offload and surely it can’t do any harm to disclose to Charlie now and again? At least Scott has his old university friend nearby, giving him someone to talk to and take him to the pub when it all gets too much for Livia. She is the only one keeping the family on track and the pressure is huge. She’s trying to shield Heidi from Scott’s wilder ideas and managing their son Noah’s asthma. The kids seem ok but it’s hard to know. In the section narrated by Heidi we realise she isn’t ok. She’s pouring herself into making music with her friend Flynn, but the guilt is killing her. She thinks she caused her uncle’s death and finds herself drawn to risky behaviour. There’s no doubt that this is a family in crisis; when will these hairline cracks finally give and begin to break apart? Slowly in the background, we learn about a new coronavirus outbreak in China and it creeps ever closer.
The tension built by the author is too much to bear. She builds her characters so well that they feel authentic and I could feel Livia’s heartbreak that the man she loves is slipping away. I could also feel Scott’s desperation as he tries to make sense of a tragedy that’s so difficult to comprehend there must be a reason. When faced with a tragedy humans have to make sense of what’s happened. We’re hard wired to detect patterns in events, because it’s terrifying to accept that life is random and chaotic. There must be a reason, because how could the King of rock and roll come to an undignified end in a bathroom? How could a politician and new president who’s filled his countrymen with hope have his life ended by one lucky shot from a random man? Surely a beautiful Princess can’t meet her end in a Paris tunnel because of a drunk driver? There must be something behind it, an intent, a missing clue, a conspiracy. I enjoyed the clever inclusion of experts in the field of online grooming and brain washing and that they were there to support Livia. When someone we love is behaving so illogically, it’s easy to wonder whether everything you’ve thought is wrong and maybe there’s actually some truth in what they’re saying. Livia needs people to say ‘it’s not you’. I was desperate for this lovely family to get through this. Yet I couldn’t help but think a further tragedy lay ahead and that Scott would fall so far out of reach, Livia wouldn’t be able to catch him. As we came closer finding out why Livia was on trial I wondered whether I would be able to understand her actions. I did understand and I hope I would have the courage to do the same in these circumstances. The author captures this whirlwind of feelings so well that I felt emotional. I thought she captured the strangeness and dislocation of the pandemic incredibly well too. This is a book that takes the most traditional of institutions, a nuclear family, then shows us how the dangers of modern life can literally tear it apart. This was an incredible read and I recommend it very highly.
Out on August 1st from Allen and Unwin
Meet the Author
Charity is the author of six novels. She was born in Uganda, brought up in draughty vicarages in the North of England and met her husband under a truck in the Sahara desert. She worked for some years as a family and criminal barrister in York Chambers, until, realising that her three children barely knew her, she moved with her family to New Zealand where she began to write.
After the Fall was a Richard & Judy and World Book Night title, The New Woman a BBC Radio 2 Book Club choice. See You in September (2017) was shortlisted for best crime novel in the Ngaio Marsh Awards. Her sixth, The Secrets of Strangers, was released on 7th May 2020 and is also a Radio 2 Book Club choice.
Charity loves hearing from readers. Please visit her on facebook.com/charitynormanauthor or Twitter: @charitynorman1
‘Evil demanded little of me. It merely asked me to stay silent – to do nothing. And I complied.’
Imagine waking up and a wall has divided your city in two. Imagine that on the other side is your child…
Lisette is in hospital with her baby boy. The doctors tell her to go home and get some rest, that he’ll be fine.
When she awakes, everything has changed. Because overnight, on 13 August 1961, the border between East and West Berlin has closed, slicing the city – and the world – in two.
Lisette is trapped in the east, while her newborn baby is unreachable in the west. With the streets in chaos and armed guards ordered to shoot anyone who tries to cross, her situation is desperate.
Lisette’s teenage daughter, Elly, has always struggled to understand the distance between herself and her mother. Both have lived for music, but while Elly hears notes surrounding every person she meets, for her mother – once a talented pianist – the music has gone silent.
Perhaps Elly can do something to bridge the gap between them. What begins as the flicker of an idea turns into a daring plan to escape East Berlin, find her baby brother, and bring him home….
This book filled me with such complex and difficult emotions I had to put it aside for a couple of weeks and read it when I felt stronger. I don’t know whether it was the theme of baby loss, something I’ve sadly experienced, or whether it was because I felt unwell but the response was visceral. There’s a scene in Friends where Joey finds the emotion of Little Women so upsetting he has to put the book in the freezer, something he’s only done with books that terrify him before. As I clicked out of my digital ARC and snapped the cover of my iPad closed with a snap, I felt like I needed to bury it under a few pillows so it couldn’t reach me. As Lisette realises that she can’t get to her son, I felt that maternal bond stretched to it’s limit. Until it begins to tear. When I started to feel better I restarted it and it really is an exceptional piece of writing. If you love historical fiction and work that really burrows into the human psyche and our complex emotions then this is an absolute must read for you. The quote above really hit home with me because this is something Lisette expresses when she sees Jews being marched out of Berlin to an unknown but terrible fate. In fact the family seem to avoid rumour and talk about them being placed somewhere else, whether that’s another city or country. During the war, when Lisette stumbles across the mass movement of Jewish people from her neighbourhood a woman calls out in desperation, pleading with Lisette to take her baby. Lisette feels so much guilt for looking away, for pretending not to hear, but I put myself in her shoes and couldn’t see what else she could do. If she’d been seen taking the baby she could have been arrested or killed. I thought she was so hard on herself.
The author sets her story across two timelines: one at the end of the WW2 and the other is set in the months following the erection of the Berlin Wall in 1961. She starts her story in the hours between Lisette leaving her sick baby son in the West Berlin hospital and the authorities beginning to build the wall. It really is a matter of hours. The panic when she realises she can’t get back to him is devastating and I felt her grief so deeply. Then we go back Berlin in 1945, when the war is really beginning to bite. The promised victory seems more and more distant: food is scarce; more men are being called up; bombs are starting to fall on Berlin. This is where ordinary German people, at least those who haven’t bought into Hitler’s rhetoric, are starting to realise that victory is a long way away. Maybe, they might even lose. Often in dual timeline novels I am drawn to one story line more than the other, but here the author strikes a perfect balance. Both timelines are compelling, evocative, terrifying and deeply moving.
The depth of research behind these wonderful characters and their devastating story is clear from the outset. It was brilliant to be able to read more in the author’s notes because if you’re like me and only remember the Berlin Wall coming down, there’s a lot to learn here. Firstly I had no idea of the geography. In my brain there was a wall running through the capital because Berlin was fairly central to Germany. That is not the case at all. The county was divided, but Berlin was within the East German side of the country. Previously, people living in East Germany could openly travel to the West of the country. Comparing the two sides, Lisette is aware of her side of Berlin seeming like a monochrome version of the world but they could travel across to the more colourful and vibrant side. This colour wasn’t just to do with Western money, Lisette is aware of living in fear of the Stasi, a network of agents who spy on their own citizens. I had no idea that West Berlin was essentially split amongst the allies so there were distinct areas patrolled by the French, American and British forces. It’s the small horrific details that hit home though – there were streets on the edge of the new barrier that provided an escape route if you passed through one of the houses but as the days go by the windows are slowly bricked up. These facts ground the author’s story in it’s time and place, both timelines showing a city divided. From the rhetoric of 1945 that slowly separates the Jewish residents using derogatory language and propaganda, the targeting of their businesses and homes, forcing them to wear a yellow star and subjecting them to violence before removing them from their neighbourhoods towards the trains that will take them to Belsen and Auschwitz. Then we’re thrust into the paranoia of the 1960’s where even your neighbour might be a Stasi spy and I had my suspicions about their neighbour with her budgie in it’s cage – a metaphor for the new cage they find themselves in. They sell the wall as an ‘anti-fascist barrier’ with strange echoes of Putin’s excuses for the invasion of Ukraine. Elly’s father isn’t the only one who realises that this is not for keeping others out, it’s for keeping them in. The city’s buildings are still peppered with bullet holes and bomb damage, a visual representation of it’s residents who bear the internal scars of war. War is indiscriminate. Once it comes to ordinary people there’s never a bad and good side, every resident is affected by poverty, trauma and loss.
I loved the more unusual aspects of the characters, such as Lisette’s daughter Elly, who has a synaesthetic way of encountering the world. She knows that the people of this city have lost their music. She experiences others in terms of a melody only she can hear that expresses their emotional state. It is the first thing that connects her to the Russian soldier she meets. They don’t speak each other’s language but Elly can feel his music and for the first time it combines with hers creating a beautiful harmonious melody. Along with her mother’s silenced voice, people have lost that unique way of expressing themselves through sound. In East Germany there are many ways to be silenced and the Stasi have instilled a fear in their own people, that they’re always being listened to. I loved reading the notes at the end of the book and it has already inspired me to read further. I knew about the Berlin Wall of course but not where it was situated and how the rest of Germany was divided was totally new to me. I sort of knew one side was communist and the other wasn’t, but that was all. I hadn’t even realised that Berlin was situated inside the East part of the country. I’d imagined just one long dividing wall down the country that also separated Berlin, with a no man’s land between. I hadn’t known that until the 1960’s people could pop easily between East and West Berlin, giving them the possibility of escaping into the west permanently. With the hospital on one side of the wall and their home on the other Lisette starts to fall apart, but not all was rosy in this household to begin with. We get a glimpse into how things have been for all three generations in the flat, there are so many memories weighing these people down, one more haunting than the other. Yet we are given a little hope when one family decides they must get to the other side. Adventurous and thrilling as it is, their life is at stake, something that really hits home when they see someone try to swim across. The author takes us effortlessly back and forth in time to understand this family and my heart kept breaking for them over and over for. While I struggled to read this at first, I’m so happy that I went back to it because it was breathtaking. It was as if someone had bottled both moments in time and simply poured them onto the page, raw and confronting. This is an absolute must read for historical fiction fans and a book I will definitely go back to in the future.
Meet the Author
Born in Sweden, to a family of writers and readers, Josie Ferguson moved to Scotland when she was two. She returned to Sweden in her twenties, where she completed a vocational degree in Clinical Psychology (MSc). Upon graduating, she moved to London to pursue a career in publishing, something she had dreamed about since delving into fictional worlds as a child, hidden under the duvet with a torch.
She later moved to Asia in search of an adventure and a bit more sun. She currently works as a freelance book editor in Singapore, where she lives with her husband and two young children. While training to become a clinical psychologist, Josie learned about the complexity of human nature, something she explores as a writer. She believes books about the past can change the future and she aspires to write as many as possible. The Silence in Between is her debut.
The Lotus Readers 