I was bowled over by the first novel in the Annie Jackson series – The Murmurs. I already knew that Michael was an incredible writer, able to bring great compassion and intelligence to his characters while delivering a page turning thriller. The added elements of the paranormal and Scottish folklore really grabbed my attention and fulfilled my craving for all things weird and gothic. Here we find Annie living in her little cottage with a view of the loch, the only place that gives her peace from ‘the murmurs’ that can strike at any time beyond the walls of her home. The murmurs are sibilant whispers letting her know that someone close by is near to death. A vision of a skull appears over the person’s face, followed by a horrible premonition of how they meet their fate. One day, while working a shift in the local coffee shop, Annie can hear the whispers and feel the rising nausea. This vision is for a young local man called Lachlan. Annie sees a terrible car accident and Lachlan’s vehicle wrapped around a tree. Torn between warning him and drawing attention to herself, or walking out and ignoring the vision, Annie chooses a middle ground. She tells him his tyres are bald and he really should change them. Even this course of action backfires as only hours later she is berated by a man who comes to tell her Lachlan is dead and she could have prevented it, but didn’t. The rumours about her powers go into overdrive as people realise Annie is the woman who found the bodies of several murdered women.
Annie can’t win. She’s either dismissed as sinister or even mad or she stays quiet and is blamed for whatever ensues. Desperately wanting to hide from the world, she hopes her little cottage will continue to protect her from the murmurs, but hadn’t banked on how angry locals would be. They break her windows and target her house with red paint. Thankfully, her twin brother Lewis arrives to stay and help just as their adoptive aunt visits, hoping that Annie’s gift might help someone in need. She wants them to look into a missing person case; a young man called Damian has disappeared and she suspects something sinister has happened to him. Damian has had a very complicated past, including ending up in prison on one occasion, but in recent months he had calmed down due to the birth of his son Bodhi. While Annie is keen to explain that she isn’t a medium and can’t find people on command, Lewis thinks they might be able to help. Why not research and interview people like a private investigator? Then during their investigation if anything comes up for Annie they can act on her ideas. What awaits them is a surprising and complex puzzle, that seems to include the dark arts and a woman with the ability to ‘glamour’ others. This time Annie could be in serious danger.
Michael moves us through different timelines and perspectives, from Annie and Lewis’s investigations to new characters called Ben and Sylvia who are pupils at a private school several years earlier. I found their tutor very disturbing, almost grooming both of them into his fascination with the occult. He’s chosen exactly the right students to draw into his web, students who are distanced or estranged from family and potentially vulnerable. His name is Phineas Dance – an awesome name for the villain of the piece! He gives them a reading list including Alastair Crowley and other proponents of the dark arts and they take to his teaching very well, particularly Sylvia who we watch become more obsessive as she matures. Their training involves ritualistic sacrifice, as well as the attainment of wealth and success – using their new powers to ensnare other followers of celebrity and influence. This leaves them both free rein to operate where they live, having local dignitaries in their pocket. Every few years they have a chance of ensnaring the Baobhan Sith, a mythical female deity who can unleash havoc. All they need is a sacrifice and who better than Annie? The author excels at creating a nail-biting game between Sylvia and Annie’s powers, with Sylvia drawing Annie towards her beautiful home and Annie’s murmurs being suppressed then surging again. Annie is confused by this strange sensation, that feels as if her brain is dialling in and out of a radio station! I was mentally begging her to resist Sylvia’s strange abilities and stay with her brother who is in a battle of his own. He’s using detective work to find out about their missing man Damien and unearthing a possible link to a terrible fatal accident that happened when he was only a teenager. Could this incident be behind Damien’s reckless and addictive behaviours? I loved his interactions with the detective working the missing person’s case, Clare is deeply suspicious of the brother and sister team at first. However, when she has an inkling that corruption might be at play she works in tandem with Lewis and they make a formidable team. I even detected a a bit of chemistry between them. This is a fast moving case, especially when Annie is targeted, meaning you won’t be able to put the book down until you know if she can be found before the ritual sacrifice begins.
When you finish this book you’ll feel like you’ve been on a fairground ride! The author has a brilliant way of engaging the reader’s emotions, drawing us into the character’s inner lives in a depth that can be rare in thrillers. It’s his ability to make us root for this brother and sister pairing that drives this novel. I feel so much for Annie, who hasn’t asked for this strange ability she has but has to live with the consequences and it’s a lonely life. She’s misunderstood and shunned by people who really don’t understand how powerless and frightened she feels. It was great to see her with the back up of her brother, who accepts her abilities without question and doesn’t judge. Their bond felt very real and setting aside the paranormal elements of their quest, they did remind of the close bond I have with my own brother. When you add these characters to a great case, full of drama and danger, it makes for a very satisfying reading experience. I absolutely raced to the conclusion, never expecting the outcome and enjoying the twists along the way. It left me hoping for more from Annie and Lewis, with a hope that Annie gets a little bit of respite from the murmurs first.
Published by Orenda Books 12th September 2024
For more reviews check out these bloggers on Septembers blog tour.
Meet the Author
Michael Malone is a prize-winning poet and author who was born and brought up in the heart of Burns’ country. He has published over 200 poems in literary magazines throughout the UK, including New Writing Scotland, Poetry Scotland and Markings. Blood Tears, his bestselling debut novel won the Pitlochry Prize from the Scottish Association of Writers. His psychological thriller, A Suitable Lie, was a number-one bestseller, and the critically acclaimed House of Spines, After He Died, In the Absence of Miracles and A Song of Isolation soon followed suit. A former Regional Sales Manager at Faber & Faber, he has also worked as an IFA and a bookseller. Michael lives in Ayr.
On a small uninhabited island off Orkney, the body of a young man is found burned alongside a girl who is barely alive. She has suffered terrible burns to her arms and hands. When Clem receives the call that her daughter Erin is in the burns hospital in Glasgow, she races to her bedside and is horrified to find her in a coma with her damaged eyes stitched shut. Erin had been on a trip to Orkney with her boyfriend Arlo and a new friend Senna, leaving her daughter Freya with Clem. Arlo has been found dead, but Senna is missing. Erin desperately looks for clues as to how this has happened and is startled by a sudden vision of a strange book, with a bark cover and black pages that appear to be blank. Searching her daughter’s room she finds a note that reads ‘Arlo’s hands will need to be bound’. Could Erin have harmed her friends? We’re taken back to 16th Century Orkney as Alison Balfour wakes up and finds both of her children missing in the middle of the night. She tracks them to a clearing where masked and robed figures are holding a ceremony, initiating her children into the Triskele, just as she once was. Her own mother steps forward with the Book of Witching, inviting her grandchildren to ‘sign’ the book with a primal scream. Only a few weeks later she is approached by a nobleman when visiting her husband, who is working as a stone mason on the cathedral. He asks if Alison could create a powerful hex that would end the life of a powerful Earl. She refuses, so it’s a huge shock when she is arrested for practising witchcraft and thrown into a dungeon. Alison knows she has only ever used herbs and charms to help people with their ailments, particularly women. However, she knows what will follow; interrogation, violation and torture unless she confesses to something she didn’t do. Then she faces burning, with her only hope that she is strangled before the fire takes hold. Alison’s story is interwoven with Clem’s story, set in present day Glasgow where she lives with her daughter Erin. Clem is devastated when out of the blue she receives a call from the city’s burns unit. Erin has been admitted to the unit with serious burns and is in an induced coma. Clem is confused because Erin was on a trip to Orkney with her boyfriend Arlo and her friend Savannah. Now Arlo is dead, Savannah is missing and Erin has terrible burns to her arms and hands. She was found on the beach of Gunn, an uninhabited island off Orkney. Why were they in such a remote place and why is Clem had a vision of a blackened, bark covered book which opens to reveal a woman burning at the stake?
C.J. Cooke combines these two stories into a narrative about Scottish heritage, the history of witchcraft and of women. She creates an eerie atmosphere where supernatural abilities abound, based within a breadth of research around the 17th Century moral panic about witches spearheaded by King James himself. These earlier sections are an unusual mix that ground us within the history of a place, but also creates a sense of unease. Alison renounced the Triskele years before and is angry with her mother for going behind her back, so when she’s arrested for witchcraft it’s a shock. The period where Alison is interrogated is incredibly accurate and hard to read in parts. She is entirely at the mercy of the powerful men who keep her in a filthy dungeon, restrict food and water, then use intimidation, violation and torture to elicit a confession. The historical background to the witch trials in Scotland has come up in a couple of novels this year and it might seem strange to the reader that such a belief in witchcraft existed. King James VI of Scotland had a marriage contract with a Danish princess, but her voyage to Scotland is threatened by fierce storms. Witch burnings had already swept across Germany and into Scandinavia and there are rumours that a witch had cursed the princess’s voyage. The North Berwick trials started a wave of panic over witches who might be accused of something as silly as causing a farmer’s cows to stop giving milk. King James voyaged across the North Sea to collect his bride, but does become obsessed with witchcraft using the Malleus Maleficarum as his witch finder’s bible. It includes the idea that witches will have a mark on their body where the devil has left his mark. One of the men interrogating Alison uses a pin to test marks on her naked body, looking for one that doesn’t produce pain when stabbed by the needle. He claims to have found the mark under Alison’s tongue, but also perceives the outline of a hare that turns into a shadowy figure. They are so sure of what they’ve seen that Alison almost thinks she’s seen it herself, but she’s starving, dehydrated, filthy and exhausted from being walked up and down all night to prevent her sleeping. Yet every time she denies their accusations, until they start hurting the people she loves.
Clem meanwhile is horrified by the state of her daughter who is on a ventilator to protect her airway. She’s so vulnerable that she’s even grateful for the presence of her ex-husband at Erin’s bedside. She’s devastated for Arlo’s parents and for those waiting to hear news of Savannah. They’d only become friends very recently and there had been no red flags. Now the police are sniffing around the ICU, waiting for Erin to wake up and give them her account of what happened. When Clem pops home she goes into Erin’s room to feel her daughter. As she looks around she finds a slip of paper and written in Erin’s hand is he instruction that ‘Arlo’s hands must be bound ‘. That is exactly how Arlo was found. Instinctively, Clem pockets the evidence before the police ask to search their home. She must protect her daughter. Yet when Erin wakes up she claims to be someone else. Someone called Nyx. Clem only has to hear her voice to know that this is not her daughter. For me Alison’s narrative is more compelling, possibly because we’re in the midst of the action and everything is so immediate as we experience it through her eyes. By contrast we come into Clem’s story after the terrible event has happened. She’s in the dark, desperately trying to work out what has happened to her daughter. This only gets more complex as Erin wakes up different and she isn’t sure whether it is a case of ICU psychosis as her nurse suggests. This is a psychiatric response to the strange environment where sleep deprivation, being dependent on others and the sensory overload from the various machines and lights being on constantly. It’s also disorientating to wake up and find part of your life is missing. Yet there’s clearly a paralysing fear that something much worse is wrong. Erin has been through something so traumatic she’ll never recover or never be Erin again. The more Clem uncovers the more she feels something paranormal is at play.
I was so impressed with the historical detail put into this novel and how real it made Alison’s experience. The punishments she and her family go through are more horrific than any of the paranormal stuff. We might fear the unexplained and the unknown but the things humans do to each other are far worse. I’ve loved this writer since her first novel and this one had me utterly gripped because she captures the fear of being labelled, noticed as different and blamed for things you haven’t done. Many witches served a purpose in their community, particularly for fellow women and I think she captured the complexity of that position. What’s the difference between giving a herbal remedy, a harmless charm or a spell and who makes that decision? Certainly not women and not those who are powerless or living in poverty. Even the most altruistic intention can be misconstrued or twisted by someone malicious. This was a dangerous time to be a wise woman. I also loved how the author based her story in a magic that was so powerful it could still wreak havoc today. This is another solid read from a fascinating author who has rapidly become a favourite of mine and a ‘must buy’ writer.
Published by Harper Collins 10th Oct 2024
Meet the Author
C J Cooke (Carolyn Jess-Cooke) lives in Glasgow with her husband and four children. C J Cooke’s works have been published in 23 languages and have won many awards. She holds a PhD in Literature from the Queen’s University of Belfast and is currently Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Glasgow, where she researches creative writing interventions for mental health. Two of her books are currently optioned for film. Visit http://www.cjcookeauthor.com
This extraordinary novel weaves a mystical and hypnotic spell around the reader, using the flora and fauna of our heroine’s home in Venezuela and slowly unravelling the truth about her childhood. Dominique is an artist who receives a vision of her father in her dream, so powerful she is able to recreate it on canvas. She hasn’t seen him since her early childhood, so it’s a surprise when he gets in touch and asks her to come to Paris. He is dying and wishes to reconcile with his daughter. Longing for paternal love Dominique travels to Paris, on a physical and spiritual journey to recover that part of her early childhood she spent in Paris with both her parents. There she uncovers repressed memories that reveal the truth of her parent’s marriage and her own birth. She also visits the Venezuelan Amazon where she meets Juan, a mystic and shaman who guides her journey. A gentle and tender love story emerges between them as Dominique tries to heal from what she has uncovered.
I would have known this writer was a poet and an artist from the very beginning because she writes lyrically and creates such striking visual imagery. At first it’s an assault on the senses, a maelstrom of imagery from the Amazonian jungle filled with colour and fantastical animals. A beautiful example of magic realism, the author’s vivid imagery tells of jaguars, birds of paradise and in one case a very disturbing anteater I expected to see in my nightmares. It’s almost hypnotic and I was so overwhelmed and beguiled by the beauty of her words that I didn’t realise the pain and devastation underneath. It’s through her artwork, which is almost shamanistic at times, that she processes her trauma. Her childhood was tainted by her father leaving, seemingly without explanation when she was six years old. She then experienced abuse and resentment from her mother. The process of recovery from trauma is a major theme in the book and we can see how Dominique’s reintroduction to her father triggers the emotions that she hasn’t resolved. In fact his presence triggers nightmares and the re-emergence of events she’s kept locked away in her subconscious. She wants answers to the mystery of her father’s disappearance, but I feared she would be re-traumatised by the truth.These are dark, harrowing memories in parts but it’s clear that the beauty of nature really does have a healing effect on her.
Her descriptions of Venezuela and the incredible Angel Falls made me want to see it for myself! Here things become more mystical as we see Dominique’s beautiful connection to this place and a man she meets from the Pemon community, indigenous to Venezuela. Juan helps her to go deeper inside herself and face whatever unresolved feelings lurk there. He is a shaman to the community and can ward off malevolent spirits, including the type of dark and disturbing emotions that can haunt people who’ve experienced abuse. This is an incredibly personal journey and her time in Venezuela, the rediscovery of her childhood home in Paris as well as reading her father’s correspondence all contribute to her recovery. I found her story deeply moving and challenging to read at times. However, I recognised the catharsis in Dominique’s artistic expression and the importance of documenting traumatic experiences. She needs others to bear witness to the truth of her childhood, because only then can she achieve acceptance and healing. This is a beautifully written novel, that’s lyrical and treads a line between poetry, visual art and prose. I was touched by it and by the deep connection Dominique has with the natural world. There she can be her true self, an imperfect human woven back together by animals who always accept us as we are.
Meet the Author
Pascale Petit’s eighth poetry collection, Tiger Girl (Bloodaxe, 2020), was shortlisted for the Forward Prize and for Wales Book of the Year. A poem from the book, ‘Indian Paradise Flycatcher’, won the 2020 Keats-Shelley Poetry Prize. Her seventh collection, Mama Amazonica (Bloodaxe, 2017) won the inaugural Laurel Prize in 2020, the 2018 Royal Society of Literature’s Ondaatje prize, was shortlisted for the Roehampton Poetry Prize and was a Poetry Book Society Choice. Her sixth collection, Fauverie, was her fourth to be shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize and a portfolio of poems from it won the 2013 Manchester Poetry Prize. T. S. Eliot shortlisted What the Water Gave Me: Poems after Frida Kahlo (Seren, 2010), was also shortlisted for Wales Book of the Year. Salt published her debut novel, ‘My Hummingbird Father’, in 2024 and her ninth poetry collection, Beast, is forthcoming from Bloodaxe in 2025, and is awarded the Arthur Welton Prize.
I really have been blown away by this story set just after WW1 and progressing to the mid-twentieth century. Our characters are two German sisters Leni and Annette who live in Berlin and are the last living members of their family. When we first meet them they’re in dire straits, living in a makeshift shelter in an abandoned garden. Thanks to war and the influenza epidemic they’ve lost their family, so are totally reliant on each other. Leni, the older sister, gets a chance to earn some money at a notorious and rather seedy cabaret club called Babylon Circus. There the naive and rather shy Leni becomes a cigarette girl in a second hand and pinned costume that just covers her modesty, but she is at first shocked by what she sees. With shades of the musical Cabaret the author creates a club that is a mirage of clever lighting, fairground mirrors and risqué musical numbers. It’s enchanting by dark and unwelcoming by day, but it doesn’t matter because this is the type of fun that can only be had at night. The girls are shameless on stage and nudity is everyday in the dressing room, but Leni sees something attractive in their boldness, bawdy gossip and loud raucous laughter. They have a freedom she’s never seen before in women, they’re not afraid of taking up space. The illusion extends to the girl’s costumes, covered at first glance but offering a cheeky glimpse here and there. This is what the crowd turn up for, but one girl manages to shock the audience by crouching on the table of a misbehaving customer and pissing in his face. Everything is overseen by owner Dieter, a man with his own disguise. He rarely enters the cabaret room, but sits in his office with it’s resident cat. Having left half his face on a battlefield he wears a tin mask which chafes at his wounds and leaves his expressions slightly lopsided. This gives a certain sense to the fairground mirrors, if everyone is distorted then no one stands out.
It’s Paul the pianist’s good looks that capture Leni; his talent, his smile and the lock of hair that escapes onto his forehead. When he starts to walk her home she’s evasive, how can she tell him he doesn’t have one? She invents a family, but then has to keep Annette out of her business. Paul’s also in trouble, as his brother has run up debts he can’t repay and the lenders are leaning on him to pay instead. After a warning in the form of a beating he knows he must leave, but what will he do about Leni? Leni and Annette now have rooms, with a landlady who doesn’t mind watching Annette in the evenings while Leni works. I had so many questions. Would Paul ask Leni to go with him? Does he even feel that strongly about her? Where would Annette fit into this? Even after all these questions are answered, jealousy and fate intervene changing everything.
In our second timeline we’re in the midst of the Cold War and a middle-aged Leni is living in Berlin with her teenage daughter, following the death of her husband. She’s surprised by a sudden visit from her sister Annette who now lives in the USA. She seems agitated and anxious, spending all her time in flat brooding and smoking. Leni’s daughter is in the throes of first love, using the guise of drama rehearsals to meet her boyfriend. With nowhere to go they find solace in a strange old cabaret club where there’s a fairground mirror amongst the ruins. This is the perfect place for secret assignations. Leni is concerned that with her sister here the past seems closer than it’s been for years. So many secrets are being kept between these women and when Leni sees a face from the past, it could all come tumbling down like a pack of cards.
Julie writes mid-century women like no one else. I feel like I know them. This is my grandmother’s generation and my grandad actually went to Germany after WWII to help rebuild the country. I remember being shocked by the utter devastation of German cities when they were depicted in the film The Aftermath. I was haunted by a woman getting her daughter ready for school, brushing her hair in their normal routine, but with the outer wall blown away. It was like looking into a doll’s house. The author made me feel the contrast of that wild decadence in the 1920’s with the Cold War period where everything feels grey and routine with nothing to look forward to. The bleakness of Leni’s flat really comes across as it seems to echo the desolation of Annette. Even the once rowdy and colourful club is now derelict and abandoned. I love the way the author plays with place and identity in this way, as well as how the characters see themselves. Their internalised sense of how they look forming part of their identity, but is often at odds with how we see them. Dieter and the girls at the club are almost gaudy grotesques, using appearance and performance to mask true feelings. As for Dieter, I kept thinking about his inability to express emotion in his face and how that affected his ability to connect with others. If we can’t express what we feel what effect does that have on our identity? Dieter can’t look at his new face because it doesn’t reflect the image he has of himself in his mind. It’s only once everyone else becomes distorted that he fits in, only the cat accepts him utterly as he is.
The secrets between the sisters are beautifully constructed. Annette’s adult behaviour is a faint echo of her childhood feelings. Her jealousy and fury when she discovers Leni with Paul is the fear of a child who has almost lost everything and everyone she knows. She only has Leni and what if she leaves her too? As an adult, pulling secrets or feelings from her is almost impossible. She has been holding the past inside herself so tightly and for so many years I was unsure if she would bring it’s truths to the surface without breaking. Towards the end, as another terrible event outside their control looms over Berlin, my heart was in my mouth! Not knowing whether the ending would be what I wanted had my heart racing. I couldn’t bear either sister to suffer any more heartache and this is the beauty of Julie’s writing. She makes you believe in this world and these characters so much, that you’re able to shed real tears for them. This novel is easily one of the best I’ve read this year and I’m in no doubt it will feature in my end of year list too. I’ve loved Julie’s first two novels, but this is certainly Julie’s best novel so far.
Published by Penguin on 12th September. Thanks to Julie and the Squad POD Collective for including me in this month’s book club.
Meet the Author
Her debut novel That Green Eyed Girl was a Waterstones’ Welsh Book of the Month and the official runner up for the prestigious Paul Torday Memorial Prize. It was also shortlisted for Best Debut at the Fingerprint Awards and featured at the Hay Festival as one of its TEN AT TEN debuts.
73 Dove Street was recently named as a Waterstones’ Book of the Year and Daily Mail Historical Fiction Book of the Year with the paperback still to come in April 2024.
As a filmmaker Julie won the Celtic Media Award for her graduation film “BabyCakes” before going on to win Best Short Film at the Swansea Film Festival.
Her writing and short stories have appeared in a variety of publications including Sunday Express, The Independent, New Welsh Review and Good Housekeeping.
She has a Masters in Filmmaking and an additional qualification in Creative Writing & English Literature. Julie is an alumna of the Faber Academy. Circus of Mirrors is the third novel.
I’ve really enjoyed Sharon’s last couple of novels, because I love their mix of strong female protagonists who are facing challenges and growing into themselves. This novel focuses on sisters Nina and Bette, set on their family’s farm in Scotland. When their father dies they have no choice but to be under the same roof for the funeral. The sisters are very different, Bette is ten years older than Nina so the age gap meant they weren’t very close anyway, but when Bette left for university she never came back to the farm. Living in London, Bette is a sought after divorce lawyer and her work is her life. She flies back to Scotland the day before the funeral and aims to leave the next day. Nina is hostile towards her sister, she has the opinion that Bette left the farm and never looked back. As their mother tries to smooth things over, Nina is shocked to discover that Bette and her father kept in regular contact by email and that Bette paid for the new roof on the barn. Both sisters are shocked at the will reading when they find out that their father left them both the farm in two equal shares. However, there are massive debts to manage and Nina has always left the finances to their father, preferring to do the farm work than sit in the office. This is the only safe place Nina and her son Barnaby have ever lived. Could they be about to lose it? When getting the farm valued, Bette and the agent walk the perimeter on the land and stumble across a secret orchard, tucked away with it’s entrance concealed off the coastal path. Could this hidden fruit be the answer to their money woes and possibly a mystery to bring both of them together?
We’re drawn in by an intriguing prologue that suggests an historic love story between two local but rival families. I was dying for Bette and Nina to do some digging on this story and unravel their orchard’s complex back story. The author leaves the crumbs of this story to tantalise us while we move through the present day and the emotional aftermath of Nina and Bette’s father’s death. It’s clear from the outset that these two sisters could be an incredible team. Nina is good at the day to day farming work, rushing between baling and milking while also being there for her son Barnaby. I was on board with Barnaby straight away because he wears his Spider-Man costume everywhere, possibly even to his grandfather’s funeral. This titbit of character and humour reminded me of a little boy who always attended our church for Saturday evening mass and would go up the aisle during communion dressed in costume. Watching his long tail wend it’s way up the aisle so the priest could give a blessing to a mini dragon absolutely made my week. His mum made him take the head off for the blessing, but it was straight back on as he skipped back to his seat. Barnaby is a delight and I enjoyed watching him build a relationship with his Aunt Bette. Bette is brilliant with the financial and legal details, something nether Nina or their father has been able to do. She sets herself the task of working methodically through their chaotic office and showing the bigger picture; they might have been working themselves to the bone, but was all this work actually generating profit?
Bette understands legal procedures and processes too. When she explains they’ll have to get the farm valued Nina immediately flares up, she doesn’t want to sell the farm. She assumes Bette is looking to cash in, but when Bette explains it’s just the first stage in any plan they make whether that’s to sell or to finance the farm better for the future. She’s calmer and more patient with the process and because Bette’s less attached to the land she can make sensible, dispassionate choices which is just as vital for the farm’s survival. Added to the main plot of saving the farm there are a couple of sub-plots. Nina is often helped out around the farm by neighbouring farmer Cam, who is very capable and good with Barney, not to mention easy on the eye. What would I take for friendship to turn into love. There’s also the mystery of why Bette left the farm so definitively all those years ago and when Ryan enters the picture her reaction left me wondering if he was involved. Cam suggests a visit from an expert he knows, to see if the orchard is viable and what would be the best way to bring some income from it. Nina has never known why her sister left, so her reaction to Ryan is puzzling for her. He has great ideas for the apple trees, some of which appear to be very old species that are rarely grown. He sets them on a programme of managing the trees, pruning and grafting them to enhance their health and yield. There isn’t an off putting amount of detail on how to turn the orchard into a cider business, but there’s enough to pique the reader’s interest and I was rooting for the sister’s success.
The sisters have such depth to their characters and their lack of communication with each other has led to so much misunderstanding between them. Nina comes across as quite bitter towards Bette and to some extent she sees her sister as someone who has everything: the job, the money and the fancy London lifestyle. Actually it’s Nina whose had everything – a wonderful relationship with her father and precious time working together. She has Barnaby and although her relationship with his father broke down, she loves her son more than anything. With her mother living abroad with her new husband, Nina has taken on the lion’s share of the work around the farm and keeping an eye of their father but Bette has never expected any financial gain from the business, assuming that it belongs to Nina. I could see how the new plans might bring about a better personal relationship between them and I was kept reading by the promise of a warmer relationship between them, the makings of a new generation of the family. There’s a lot of forgiving to do here, but once they’d discussed why Bette left in the first place I could see another life opening up, one in which she might stay. As always with this author, this was such an uplifting and heartwarming story. The potential for both sisters to have their own love stories was also joyous to read, especially if you’re a sucker for an ‘enemies to lovers’ scenario. There are setbacks of course, some of them natural disasters and others caused by deep-seated rivalry. Sharon Gosling writes this type of story beautifully, as she weaves the threads of the sister’s story and the mystery surrounding the orchard’s origin, not to mention why it had been hidden all these years. The setting is wonderful, particularly the orchard with the salt air and the sounds of waves crashing against the cliffs. It’s so romantic and I loved the detail of how the salt permeates and changes the taste of the fruit making it so unique. This was a wonderfully escapist novel, driven by the character’s of Bette, Nina and of course, Barnaby. I thoroughly enjoyed being in their world for a while and I’m sure you will too.
Out 12th September from Simon and Schuster
Meet the Author
I’ve been writing since I was a teenager, which is now a distressingly long time ago! I started out as an entertainment journalist – actually, my earliest published work was as a reviewer of science fiction and fantasy books. I went on to become a staff writer and then an editor for print magazines, before beginning to write non-fiction making-of books tied in to film and television, such as The Art and Making of Penny Dreadful and Wonder Woman: The Art and Making of the Film.
I now write both children’s and adult fiction – my first novel was called The Diamond Thief, a Victorian-set steampunk adventure book for the middle grade age group. That won the Redbridge Children’s prize in 2014, and I went on to write two more books in the series before moving on to other adventure books including The Golden Butterfly, which was nominated for the Carnegie Award in 2017, The House of Hidden Wonders, and a YA horror called FIR, which was shortlisted for the Lancashire Book of the Year Award in 2018. My last children’s book (to date) is called The Extraordinary Voyage of Katy Willacott, and was published by Little Tiger in 2023.
My debut adult novel, The House Beneath the Cliffs, was published by Simon & Schuster in August 2021. Since then I’ve written three more: The Lighthouse Bookshop, The Forgotten Garden, and The Secret Orchard, which is out in September 2024. My adult fiction tends to centre on small communities – feel-good tales about how we find where we belong in life and what it means when we do. Although I have also published full-on adult horror stories, which are less about community and more about terror and mayhem…
I was born in Kent but now live in a very small house in an equally small village in northern Cumbria with my husband, who owns a bookshop in the nearby market town of Penrith.
I quickly became fascinated with this mix of historical fiction, psychological suspense and the paranormal. We meet Annie Jackson as she tentatively starts her new job in a nursing home in the West End of Glasgow, hoping to get her life back on track. Annie suffers with terrible nightmares where she’s stuck in a car underwater. She also has the sensation that someone is holding her head under water until her lungs feel ready to burst. She also has debilitating headaches and she can feel one threatening as her new manager introduces her to resident Steve. Then something very odd happens, as a blinding pain in Annie’s head is followed by Steve’s face starting to shake, then reform. A whispering sound begins in her head and she sees Steve as a skull, followed by a vision of him falling in his room and suffering a debilitating stroke. She desperately wants to tell him but how can she without seeming like a lunatic? He becomes agitated and upset, as Annie starts to describe the layout of Steve’s bathroom and he asks her to stop. As she’s sent home from another job she starts to think back to her childhood and the first manifestations of her debilitating problem. Annie survived the terrible car accident that wiped her childhood memories and killed her mother. This strange supernatural phenomenon is why Annie is alone and struggles to make friends. These are ‘the murmurs’.
I felt so much compassion for Annie, as the story splits into two different timelines: we are part of Annie’s inner world as a child, but also in the present as fragments of memory slowly start to emerge. We also go back even further to the childhood of Annie’s mother Eleanor and her two sisters Bridget and Sheila. We experience their lives through other people’s stories and written correspondence, especially that of a nun who also works in a residential home. I enjoyed how this gave me lots of different perspectives and how the drip feed of information slowly made sense of what was happening in the present day. Different revelations have a huge effect on the adult Annie and because her memories have been buried for so long she experiences the shock and surprise at exactly the same time as we do. This brings an immediacy to the narrative and I felt like I was really there alongside her, in the moment. With my counselling brain I could see a psyche shattered by trauma, desperately looking for answers, she is piecing herself back together as she goes.
Teenage Annie had a similar vision about a girl called Jenny Burn, who went missing never to return. The murmurs awakened when her mum’s sister Aunt Sheila came to visit them. She tried to openly discuss an Aunt Bridget who also had a ‘gift’ but has ended up in a home. Eleanor, Annie’s mother, asks Sheila to leave, but it’s too late because Annie has already seen that her aunt is dying of cancer. Annie evades her mum and makes her way to the hotel, the only place Sheila can be staying. Unfortunately, Jenny is working on reception. Annie can see her climbing into a red car and she desperately wants to warn her, but she knows she’ll come across as a crazy person. Eleanor is desperately looking for a way to deal with her daughter, she’s a person of importance in the church and she can’t be seen to have a daughter who has visions. Pastor Mosley has Eleanor exactly where he wants her. There’s a control and fanaticism in him that scared me much more than Annie’s murmurs. When Eleanor takes Annie to the pastor, he demonstrates his control by holding her head firmly under his head as he prays for her. When she almost faints, he’s convinced there’s a demon in her. Annie is scared of him, she gets a terrible feeling about him but doesn’t know why. Religion is portrayed as sinister and controlling, with fervent followers who never question, but live in the way they’ve been instructed is Christian? story takes an interesting turn when Annie’s brother Lewis, a financial advisor, becomes involved with the church once more and it’s new pastor Christopher Jenkins, the son of their childhood neighbour. He’s revolutionised the church and through the internet he’s turning it into a global concern. He’s not just interested in saving souls though, he’s also amassing money from his internet appeals. He also seems very interested in meeting Annie.
As the book draws to a close the revelations come thick and fast as both past and future collide. The search for Aunts Bridget and Sheila seems to unearth more questions than answers. Annie finds out that Jenny wasn’t the only woman who went missing in Mossgaw all those years ago. As she starts to have suspicions about her childhood home, Chris seems very keen to draw her back there. Might he be planning a huge surprise? I was a bit confused at first with all these disparate elements, but as all the pieces started to slot together I was stunned by the truths that are unearthed. Then as Annie’s childhood memories were finally triggered I felt strangely terrified but also relieved for her all at once. I hoped that once she’d regained that past part of herself she would feel more confident and free, despite the strange gift she seemed to have inherited. Maybe by facing the past and leaning in to her relationship with her brother, she might feel more grounded and strong enough to cope with her ‘gift’. I thought the author brought that compassion he’s shown in previous novels but combined it with a spooky edge and some intriguing secrets. I really loved the way he showed mistakes of the past still bleeding into the present, as well as the elements of spiritual abuse that were most disturbing. This book lures you in and never lets go, so be prepared to be hooked.
Meet the Author
Michael J. Malone was born and brought up in the heart of Burns’ country, just a stone’s throw from the great man’s cottage in Ayr. Well, a stone thrown by a catapult, maybe.
He has published over 200 poems in literary magazines throughout the UK, including New Writing Scotland, Poetry Scotland and Markings.
BLOOD TEARS, his debut novel won the Pitlochry Prize (judge:Alex Gray) from the Scottish Association of Writers and when it was published he added a “J” to his name to differentiate it from the work of his talented U.S. namesake.
On a trip abroad with her mother, Agnes Templeton meets a handsome young doctor called Christian Fairhaven. He seems completely besotted with her and a romance soon develops. Surely his swift proposal can only mean one thing,it must be love or this a relationship of convenience? Dr Fairhaven needs a wife and a stepmother for his daughter Isobel, while Agnes needs an expert in tuberculosis for to look after her mother who is now dying from the disease. Christian is researching a new cure, something he’s working on at the institute he runs called Hedoné. He lives in a cottage alongside the institute, which is split into an infirmary for very unwell patients and ‘spa’ type accommodation for TB patients who can benefit from the fresher air and rest that the institute provides. When Agnes arrives she finds that not everything is as she imagined. The guests are more glamorous and wealthy than she expected, with their part of the building adjoined by a swimming pool, beautiful grounds and many places for parties. Their access to alcohol and gourmet food gives the place a feel of a luxury hotel. Agnes’s mother is taken into isolation, to be monitored closely and have a period of quarantine. Agnes is allowed to visit her mother’s room as she seems to be immune to TB having nursed both her father and mother through the disease without succumbing herself. As she adjusts to the contrasts of lavish dinners and the sound of partying with the very authoritarian Matron and strict quarantine restrictions, Agnes starts to notice things. Isobel seems to flit around largely unmonitored and doesn’t live with them in the cottage. The beautiful actress Juno Harrington holds court here and seems to have unfettered access to Christian, even in his office. There’s nothing Agnes can put her finger on, but she feels uneasy. She senses there are secrets at Hedoné and perhaps in her marriage too.
The book is largely narrated by Agnes, with small chapters every so often that seem to be narrated by a child. Through this we see the institute in two different ways; Agnes’s conflicting and unexpected impressions alongside those of a person who knows this place inside out and has explored every nook and cranny. I was very interested in the hare motif that repeats itself throughout the book as a symbol for the institute. It’s the keyring on which matron keeps her keys as well as the keys to the cottage, it’s on the signage and repeats throughout the building. I’m very interested in hares as a mystical symbol and a spirit animal, ever since my father found a leveret on the farm and let a four year old me touch it’s silky fur. For me it’s a symbol of huge leaps I have taken in life, some of which paid off and others that didn’t – something you have to accept if you are one of life’s ‘jump in with both feet’ people. I wondered if it had been chosen as a symbol of renewal, recovery and potentially the cure that Christian thinks he may be on the verge of discovering. However, it’s also a fertility symbol, having possible implications for his expectations of Agnes and their marriage. Agnes has jumped in to this marriage with a very short courtship away from the institute that dominates her husband’s life. There is a lot to learn about each other and where Agnes saw a competent and successful doctor, able to run an institute and bring up his daughter alone, the real picture is more complex. Isobel seems to be brought up by whoever is available, but spends a huge amount of time alone. Agnes wants to be a mother to her, but doesn’t want to impose and change what’s clearly a familiar routine. She hadn’t expected formal dinners with a new dress magically appearing each time. Who is choosing them? Christian courts investors for the institute, all drawn in by his claim of a cure. It starts to feel like the
man she met and married was something of an illusion, incidentally that’s one of the risks of taking ‘hare leaps’.
I thought the author cleverly placed doubts in the reader’s mind very slowly and strategically. I was immediately alert to a couple of characters: Juno Harrington who seems to run the social aspects of the institute and Matron, who at first gives off Mrs Danvers vibes and reprimands Agnes if she isn’t following the rules. I could see red flags popping up with Christian, who is clearly not as financially successful as the institute might suggest and the revelation that it is Juno Harrington’s family who are the largest investors answers one or two questions. Being very fond of fashion, I didn’t like the fact someone was choosing Agnes’s clothes, always placing just one new dress in her room as her only option for the evening. It showed a element of control that had my senses pinging straight away. Christian’s strange obsession with her colouring and complexion seemed odd too, constantly referring to her as his ‘English Rose’. When she finally sees a picture of Isobel’s mother, Agnes finds herself eerily similar. He’s also very quick to ask whether she could be pregnant. Agnes has been learning to enjoy their love-making and finds herself actively looking forward to it in their honeymoon period. Is his attention to her genuine or purely based on the potential outcome of having a child? He’s also very cagey about his claims of a potential cure and if the graveyard Agnes finds in the woods is a measure of his competence, it clearly isn’t working.
I wasn’t surprised when the idea of eugenics started to come up, especially considering the period the book is set. It started as a theory in the late 19th Century and was the catalyst for horrific crimes against people deemed genetically inferior. In the USA it was used as the justification for sterilising huge numbers of Native American and young African-American women, especially those living in poverty in the southern states. In the UK it became a way of herding out those who were degenerate, linking criminality to certain facial features. Obviously, the Holocaust was the single biggest crime against humanity based in eugenicist theory. Hitler’s obsession with creating an Aryan master race, was used as a justification for mass murder of those he deemed as ‘life, unworthy of life’. This was mainly those of the Jewish faith, but also included Roma people, Catholics and people with disabilities. His program of sterilising those with disabilities and removing disabled children from their families started in the early 1930’s. In this novel, eugenics are linked to the institute and possibly Agnes’s particular traits – her immunity to tuberculosis and her English Rose colouring. I was becoming worried that the graveyard where Christian’s first wife is buried, alongside so many of his patients, might be the result of experimentation or simply weeding out those too far advanced for him to cure. I loved how these ideas unfolded. We only see what Agnes does so we might suspect, but we
only discover the truth as she does which brings an immediacy to the revelations.
I loved Agnes’s burgeoning relationship with Isobel who felt to me like an abandoned little soul, wandering the grounds and all the secret spaces within the institute, trying to to help sick people where she could and spending time at her mother’s grave. Christian seems to have no plan for her and doesn’t even discuss what his parenting strategy is, probably because he doesn’t have one. He leaves Agnes to get on with it and she does well, simply assuring Isobel that she is there for her and showing a willingness to share the memories she has of her mother and their life together. I think Agnes shows her more love than anyone else. Juno Harrington seems very interested in her but treats her almost as a little pet. I thought Sippy was interesting too, a nightclub singer and the institute’s only black patient. She is valued for her entertainment potential and her voice is incredible, but I didn’t feel she was included as part of the creative and bohemian crowd. She could be on display but not one of them, and I had the sense she was quite lonely day to day. Her friendship with Agnes is based on a real understanding and connection between the women. She’s also enough of a friend to warn Agnes that everything here is not as it seems. As the closing chapters began, secrets unravelled and the tension really did build. I loved how these women helped each other and how the most help came from a totally unexpected source. It is a timely reminder that people can surprise you, especially the ones you are most afraid of. One of the most interesting things for me was the subversion of the Romantic trope of the beautiful, frail and young artist wasting away from consumption. This quote from Byron sums it up beautifully:
‘I look pale. I should like to die of a consumption’. ‘Why?’ asked his [Byron’s] guest. ‘Because the ladies would all say, Look at that poor Byron, how interesting he looks in dying.’
The pale complexion, the fatigue and the ‘rosy’ cheeks of advanced TB were a Romantic staple in fiction, whereas the truth of dying from this disease was different according to gender, race and most particularly, social status. The reality is often saved in literature for those in dire poverty and terrible living conditions. This excerpt from Liberty Hall gives a more accurate picture of the disease:
‘Her body was bent forward on her knees; the joints of this body so thin, that it was almost deformed, were swelled and red and painful. She laboured and coughed for her breath; each time that she breathed she coughed up blood …’
Despite this, TB was a Romantic fashion and the figure of the beautiful, young woman slowly giving her soul up to God was a staple of 19th Century literature – just think of Dora in David Copperfield or Beth in Little Women. I felt like these two contrasting views of TB were embodied by the two types of patient; the free, bohemian and intellectual party-going patients and those locked down in the basement, having a very different experience of the same disease. The visible parts of Hedoné are based on the Romantic ideal and the illusory cure, while the locked and hidden parts contain secrets and patients whose outlook is at best poor and with only matron to tend to them in their final hours. One is an ideal and one is the truth, rather like Agnes’s expectations of her marriage and the strange reality. As the real horror starts to unfold, I was desperate for Agnes to escape and I was desperate for that she not leave Isobel behind, because a definite bond between them. Polly nails the historical background to her story and really emphasises the fate of women between two world wars. Agnes is of a social status where earning a living as a nightclub singer like Sippy or an actress like Juno isn’t possible. In fact she seems in that liminal space where becoming a governess or nurse like matron might be her only working options. I wanted her to be free though, to explore her authentic self and make the life she wants. I wasn’t sure, right up to the final chapters, what her fate would be. This is an entertaining and interesting novel from an author who understands the nuances of relationships and always creates fascinating characters within the most unusual settings.
Meet the Author
Polly Crosby grew up on the Suffolk coast, and now lives with her husband and son in the heart of Norfolk.
Polly writes gothic historical mysteries for adults. Her first novel for young adults – This Tale is Forbidden – a dystopian fractured fairytale with hints of the Brother’s Grimm and The Handmaid’s Tale, came out in January with Scholastic.
In 2018, Polly won Curtis Brown Creative’s Yesterday Scholarship, which enabled her to finish her debut novel, The Illustrated Child.
Later the same year, she was awarded runner-up in the Bridport Prize’s Peggy Chapman Andrews Award for a First Novel. Polly received the Annabel Abbs Creative Writing Scholarship at the University of East Anglia.
Polly can be found on Twitter, Instagram & Tiktok as @WriterPolly
Having just read about female surrealist artists in The Paris Muse by Louise Treager I was so ready for this story about the art world, women painters and a mystery surrounding British artist Juliette Willoughby. The writers tell their story across 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 she 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 aristocrats 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 a second version by the artist 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. 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?
I have a real interest in art history and the lives of artists, probably formed when I studied Victorian art history as part of my literature degree. My particular interests are the Pre-Raphaelites, the Arts and Crafts movement, Klimt and Frida Khalo, so it was brilliant to learn more about the Surrealists who are outside of my experience. My only understanding is that the artists may be representing the contents of their subconscious rather than the conscious. I can be a little bit scathing of some modern art, having my teenage years in the 1990s we were in the world of the YBAs – such as Damien Hurst and Tracey Emin. I have been to gallery openings where I could only conclude that other people had an ability to see something I couldn’t or that everyone was affected by a dose of the Emperor’s New Clothes – too scared to say anything negative they just nodded along and agreed it was good. I will never grasp why people spend a fortune on paintings that are nothing more than a red square on a beige background. As you can imagine, I drove my artist friend crazy when we visited the Guggenheim in NYC. I understand a piece that hits you in the emotions or a true passion to own and look at something incredibly beautiful every day, but it seems that more often than not investors pay millions for something that will sit in a storage unit. I thought I might find the art world in the book pretentious, but I could understand Caroline’s deep fascination with Juliette. There’s something about a female artist, often overshadowed by the man she lives with, that brings out the feminist in me. From Dora Maar whose photography and painting was eclipsed by Picasso to authors like Zelda Fitzgerald, thought to have contributed greatly to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s writing, there’s an urge to uncover their talent and put them in their historical context. This is the passion of Caroline, but Patrick is definitely complicit in trying to solve the mysteries the this particular painting found at a party in the Willoughby mansion.
This story has all the ingredients of a good old-fashioned mystery with the archetypal eccentric aristocratic family at it’s centre. Juliette’s father is an Egyptologist who never got over the death of her younger sister Lucy who drowned in the lake. Juliette is aware that she can never measure up to the baby of the family, who never reached her teenage years or tested her family. After her death, her father built a pyramid shaped sarcophagus on the island in the middle of the lake. Close to Lucy’s death, a maid disappeared from the house and then Juliette’s cat went missing too. Keeping the Egyptian theme was the club the Willoughby men formed at university, which had several similarities to the Bullingdon club. It was like an American college fraternity with it’s own initiation tests, pranks and hazing rituals. All members wear a signet ring with an Egyptian hieroglyph. Patrick was friends with both Harry and Freddie Willoughby, but the brother’ enmity for each other ran deep. At the party attended by Caroline and Patrick, Freddie disappeared after falling from some scaffolding during an argument with his brother. The amount of blood left behind would indicate a severe head injury but he is nowhere to be found, much to the distress of his girlfriend Athenia. It’s this same night when Caroline finds Juliette’s masterpiece and her diary. On impulse she takes the painting, wraps it carefully and places it in the boot of Patrick’s MG. What can she do with it from here and will the Willoughby’s know that it’s gone? Patrick suggests it’s placed in a small country sale where it’s value will go under the radar and they should be able to legitimately buy it, yet the unthinkable happens and the painting soars above when they can afford. Caroline still has the diary though and through it we can hear about her life with Oskar and the inspiration for the painting. She brings 1930s Paris alive for us a d provides clues to the symbolism of her Sphinx painting.
Finally, these sections are interspersed with the present day where Patrick has asked Caroline to come to Dubai. This is all the more tense because she is his ex-wife and Patrick has remarried. He wants her in Paris to answer questions that potential investors might ask. How can she know this piece is by the same artist as the 1930’s painting and is it from the same time period? There are differences in the smaller narrative parts of the painting in the background, why would the artist change them? Soon the presence of the painting brings other people from the past into Dubai, including Freddie’s girlfriend from the 1990’s Athenia. She is advising one investor who wants to remain nameless and as they all gather to make their bids in just one night it becomes clear that Patrick and Caroline’s reputations hang in the balance. However, it’s Patrick who finds himself in a cell, losing his standing, his financial future, his liberty and possibly even his marriage. What could have gone so wrong? This is such a complex mystery and as we get closer to unravelling some of the secrets, the tension starts to build. It definitely grips you and keeps the pressure on. I loved the history unravelled through Juliette’s diary and her take on what it’s like to live and work alongside another artist. There’s a certain point where I found myself reaching for the book in my downtime more than putting on the TV or radio. It’s a real skill to build tension like these authors do, slowly but surely sucking you in. You will find that you want the answers as much as Caroline and Patrick do. I also thought there were more tangled questions than they could ever resolve, but keep going. It’s definitely worth it and there are no loose ends left untied. I found myself focused on Juliette, Caroline and Patrick more than any other characters. Others are definitely hard to like – especially those with the hint of the Bullingdon Club in their pasts and a sense of elitist entitlement in their characters. These are people who will commit any sort of crime to keep their status and the respectability of their family. I found this attitude strangely believable in the recent political climate where lies and cover-ups seem to be the norm. I was amazed how well it was all tied-up and how the author used distraction and first person narrative to make sure we only read what they wanted us to. The novel moves effortlessly from writer to writer and I wouldn’t have known it was a writing team. They are masters at letting us into some secrets while shielding others until later on, right up until the last few pages.
Out now from Pan MacMillan
Meet the Authors
Ellery Lloyd is the pseudonym for New York Times bestselling husband-and-wife writing team Collette Lyons and Paul Vlitos.
Collette is a journalist and editor, the former content director of Elle (UK) and editorial director at Soho House. She has written for The Guardian, The Telegraph, and the Sunday Times.
Paul is the author of two previous novels, Welcome to the Working Week and Every Day is Like Sunday. He is the program director for Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Greenwich.
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.
The Lotus Readers 