Trauma – The Lotus Readers

The Wine Dark Sea by Victoria Hislop

Posted on 9th Aug 20268th Aug 2026 by thelotusreaders

Greece, 1946. In the power vacuum remaining after the Second World War, a brutal civil war erupts between rival left- and right-wing factions. The conflict spirals as the country pays a bitter price in human lives and fighting soon erupts in the mountains, turning villages into battlefields and pulling ordinary women and children into the fray.

When the government soldiers come to Kalopetra, Fotini is nursing her newborn second child. She urges her daughter, Iliana, to hide with the older children as she and the other women are herded into trucks. Weeks later, soldiers return for the children . . . but they are not to be reunited with their mothers, a wholly different fate awaits them.

Fotini finds herself transported to a prison on the island of Chios, where she befriends Markella, whose little son, Nikos, is wise beyond his years. After months of imprisonment, when Fotini and Markella find themselves separated from one another – and from Nikos – Fotini vows to hunt not only for her own child but for Markella’s too.

The Wine-Dark Sea tells of families flung apart across continents and of a strong, determined mother who resolves not to let war destroy hers.

This epic story from Victoria Hislop really taught me a lot about a period of history I know little about. She has taken an incredible amount of research for this novel and I imagine some of it was harrowing. She has taken the stories from women living through this time and shown some of them through one family, magnifying their power. The events happen after the end of WW2, a turbulent time that has already seen the punishment of Nazi collaborators and now many would like to see the end of their right wing government. The setting is one little village called Kalopetra where Fotini’s husband has gone to fight for government forces against the communists. This immediately causes a schism in the family because Fotini’s sister Stella has a husband who fights for the communists. The sudden divide is causing friction across the village, but the women left behind must work together if they’re to survive. When government forces come to the village they capture all the women and Fotini is allowed to bring her baby son with her. However, her older daughter Iliana is left behind along with a group of older children. How will they survive? That moment of Iliana chasing the truck with her mother unable to do anything to reassure her is burned into my memory. Although soon enough communist forces will round up the children and move them into camps where they are fed, clothed and then sent on to other countries like Yugoslavia. After having the entire burden of the other village children on her shoulders, Iliana is relieved to be fed and clothed by such kind people and so the process of brainwashing begins. All Fotini can think about is returning to her peaceful village and living the rustic existence that has survived for centuries, she doesn’t know that her way of life is already dead and nothing will be the same again.

The author uses Fotini as her main narrator, but we also have chapters from Iliana’s perspective as she grows into adulthood and some through Nikos, the clever son of Fotini’s friend in their camp. These two narratives show how far and wide one family could be spread as Iliana thrives in the communist way of life and Nikos is chosen for a programme directly backed by the Queen of Greece. Iliana sums it up perfectly when she asks:

“Was there a single family on earth that had remained intact, or in the place they belonged or wanted to be.”

One of the benefits of a communist system is that women are seen as equal to men and this intrigues Iliana who knows that if they’d remained in Kalopetra her fate would have been the same as her mother and grandmother. She’d be married to someone in the village and bring up babies. Here she could learn to drive or even fly a plane. She longs to be an engineer and hopes if she studies hard she will have the opportunity to go to university. It’s easy to see how a young woman like her would see communism as an improvement on what she expected from life, scratching out a living from the land and being second to a man. In the government camp Fotini is holding out against signing a confession that she was a communist. Those who do sign the waiver are set free but forever marked as traitors to the government, especially in the eyes of their fellow villagers. Fotini doesn’t want that hanging over their family when they return home. She doesn’t know whether her husband is alive or dead, but isn’t longing for his return. She makes friends within the camp, particularly with Markella who comes from an island with a leper colony where she used to work. It’s where she plans to return. As her baby Mitsos grows he plays with Markella’s interesting boy Nikos, something of a child prodigy when it comes to numbers. His fascination is with ships and he will build them out of any material he can find to hand. It’s not long before he’s noticed and singled out for a different institution backed by the Queen. From there he seems to disappear and Fotini is determined to find both her daughter and Nikos when she is released. When she is released it’s clear one thing hasn’t changed – the generosity of Greek people. As Fotini and Mitsos travel to search for the lost children people take them in, share their own dwindling food supplies and clothe them too. It restores her faith in humanity that there is still such generosity left in a people who have been tearing each other apart. There is a glimmer of hope for the future.

I really enjoyed the later parts of the novel where we see Fotini piecing life back together in the city of Piraeus. It’s a massive change for this country girl but she can see the benefits of more job opportunities, entertainments like the cinema and eating good Greek food again at a lovely restaurant run by Demetrios. He’s such a kind man and gently reminds Fotini that she can’t spend the rest of her life wandering and looking for the children. The best thing she and Mitsos can do is stay in one place and hope the children find her, the place she was trying to get back to is gone. There was so much material to choose from in this book that it could have filled a trilogy. I had questions about all sorts of characters, such as Fotini’s relationship with her sister Stella. I also had questions about Nikos’s journey and his adoptive mother, there just seemed to be more about her that could have been explored. However, I loved Iliana’s growth and her life as an adult living under communism. The differences between Greece and Hungary were fascinating and imagine some very heavy editing of this material had to be done to get it into one novel. As always the author captures the beauty of the Greek islands, their isolation and wildness and how this conflict disrupts a way of life that existed for centuries. The book symbolically ends with a circular dance that’s life affirming and perhaps a way of capturing, just for a few moments, that lost way of being.

Out from Headline Books September 24th 2026

Meet the Author

Victoria Hislop is the international bestselling author of The Island and The Return. In the United Kingdom, she writes travel features for The Sunday Telegraph, The Mail on Sunday, House & Garden, and Woman & Home. The Island sold over a million copies in the UK and has been translated into 24 languages. Victoria’s second novel, The Return, has been published in more than a dozen languages. She lives in Kent, with her husband Ian and their two children.

Monthly Wrap Up

Best Reads July 2026

Posted on 8th Aug 20267th Aug 2026 by thelotusreaders

It’s been a very busy month with a reduced time for reading and reviewing. First my mum and I went to Liverpool to see Moulin Rouge which was brilliant. Then I was back less than a week later to see my stepdaughter graduate with a first class degree in Early Childhood Education. We stayed in the philanthropic village of Port Sunlight and I soaked up the arts and craft architecture for a few days. We also visited the Redbrick Market, a labyrinth of tiny craft and antique stalls in an old brewery complex in the Baltic Quarter too. Then I needed to rest up for a few days to give my body chance to recover I did some reading and lots of sleeping. As always but I’m very behind with reviewing. My favourites have mainly been thrillers, with a beautiful Irish fiction debut too. August is quieter with just one tour, so I’m setting aside a stack of novels I’ve been dying to get to for months. I try and have a mood read month twice a year, otherwise I think I’d burn out. So here’s what I enjoyed last month ❤️📚

Sugartown was one of the Squad Pod Collective’s featured books last month. I loved it and was really surprised to learn it had so many rejections before publication so it really does pay to keep plugging away. Now it’s up for a major Irish fiction prize. Our story follows Saoirse as she returns to her Irish town after trying out living and working in London. She’s come back to lick her wounds and hoped for a little grace from mum Màire, but she’s on her almost immediately, making sure she’s up at a reasonable hour and pointedly hoovering outside her room if she doesn’t. Màire is what Saoirse has always called her mum at her instruction. She absolutely refused to be called Mammy, but now that she has three younger daughters she’s a model mum. Saoirse sees how organised she is, getting all three ready for school in the morning with identical plaits and immaculate uniforms. All she can do is wonder why she didn’t do that for her? Saoirse only hears her mother’s criticism and there is plenty of it.

She insists that Saoirse takes a job and then finds one for her, even bullying her out of bed for the interview and driving her there. She’s very insistent that her stepdad shouldn’t have to keep her. To cope with the boredom of small town life and the job at a hardware store she goes out with her best friend Doireann, drinking to excess and trying whatever drug is going. Her dreams have shattered and she can’t see the point. It’s then she meets Charlie and there’s an immediate attraction, will this prove to be the love Saoirse needs or will her excesses prove to be her undoing? I remember being this age and I felt equally uncomfortable, having missed my uni place at Liverpool by one point I had to stay in my small town and grabbed a job in a nursing home and a local pub. I felt a little lost but luckily I had god friends and family around me. I could feel Saoirse’s pain about her relationship with Mum and the on and off again relationship with Charlie doesn’t help. It’s not long before Saoirse hits rock bottom. This is a fascinating look at motherhood and how our maternal relationship is so important for self-esteem and identity. I was relieved when she starts counselling because it’s the only way to improve her life and it’s revelatory to hear she doesnt have to have a relationship wiith Mum. The author captures young adulthood perfectly and how, if we don’t know who we are, we can’t choose healthy relationships or build a life for ourselves. This is beautifully written, devastating but also hopeful.

I think I’m the last person to read this brilliant court room thriller with a killer of a twist. Leila is a barrister, working at a chambers in the north east of England. Leila has worked hard from a poor background to university and into the law, often difficult for those without family money. She is married to Julian who used to her mentor when she was just a pupil, but now a case has come in where they’ll be pitted against each other. This isn’t necessarily unusual, but she would have recused herself if the client hadn’t insisted on her especially. However, the solicitor on the case doesn’t know why he wants Leila, especially since the last time she represented him she lost. Jack has been accused of the murder of Anthony Smythe, a well respected high court judge. He informs Leila he’ll be pleading not guilty, but won’t be disclosing his defence before he takes the stand to give evidence. This makes Leila twitchy and nervous. As the trial draws near Leila finds a distance growing between her and Julian, as well as a condescension and arrogance that she’s never seen before. She also feels voices from the past might be closer, people she thought she’d outrun. This felt like one of my favourite drama series, Silk, starring Maxine Peake. I love the drama and the way everything started to shift and change around our central character. This is a belter of a thriller, fiendishly clever and although I did guess the twist it didn’t ruin my enjoyment at all.

Vikas Swarup’s heroine Devi grabs hold of you the minute she starts to tell her own story in this episodic novel set in Delhi. The opening brings Devi to the lair of an unknown assailant who tells her he has seven people on the phone line who want to bid for her destiny. This auction will take one night and seven stories, stories she thought were secrets. As Devi tells each tale her kidnapper will take a bid on her life and he hopes to reach seven figures. However, Devi’s circumstances have not been easy and the fact she is alive is down to her cunning and experience. Has the kidnapper underestimated his prisoner or are Devi’s lives finally running out?

I was hooked from the first story as Devi explains how she started in a family home in the slum area known as Rail Basti, because the train tracks ran straight through the centre of the huts. This was Devi’s early childhood and despite the poverty she has happy times. She tells us about her annoying brothers, the eldest a maths prodigy and the youngest a terrible bedwetter, the daily sequence of trains that seem to rattle the ground under their hut and depth of water that rises indoors in monsoon season. Change comes when her parents choose an unorthodox plan to make an almost life-changing sum of money and fortune seems to turn almost immediately. Devi is an intelligent, funny and excitable nine year old and sometimes it’s hard to read about her daily life, never mind the more perilous and painful circumstances she finds herself in. She learns through necessity, takes chances where she sees them, soon inured to the fact that the only constant in her life is change. There’s so much energy in this novel. It leaps off the page and its biggest achievement is its mix of addictive suspense and emotional insight. I came away from it feeling a little bit battered by the force of the story and it might take a few days to fully sink in. I liked Devi as a child, but as time and experience move her forward she becomes more morally questionable, complex and deeply conflicting. Although even if I didn’t always like her I could understand why she makes the choices she does and how she’s come to each terrible conclusion, every time wondering if this present adventure will be her last. It’s easy to forget when you’re deeply embedded in one of her stories that this is where it’s brought her, tied to a chair and listening as each person bids on her life. If you like to kept in suspense and to experience an extraordinary life lived in destitute and dangerous circumstances this is definitely for you.

Ben is living in Penzance, taking a break from his home island of Bryhir in the Scilly Isles after the events of the previous novel. He’s taking a break from police work and instead has found a job at a joiner and cabinetmakers, using the skills he learned building boats with his Uncle. It’s settled and therapeutic work as Ben slowly creates beautiful pieces of furniture and starts to deal with his grief and loss. Noah is a little confused to be away from everything he knows, but he’s enrolled at a kindergarten near Ben’s work so life has some routine and peace. He is starting to be brought into the community too, with an arts festival on the horizon he’s bound to be pulled into the planning, even just as a steward he’s happy to do his bit. Then life takes a sinister turn as he’s on the beach and sees a young mother with a baby in a pram. One moment of distraction and a black figure jumps out of the shadows and racing towards the pram it grabs the baby and throws it into the sea. Ben and Shadow are running before they’ve even thought and he dives into the sea to rescue the baby. He’s now a local hero, but the disturbing and traumatic event plays on his mind. How could someone do such a thing and will they do it again?

The author weaves her story around the local myth of the Zennor Mermaid, a figured carved into one of the pews in Zennor church. By the time the festival arrives everyone has done all they can to keep families safe, with a security perimeter at the park that can’t be broken, of course that assumes the attacker isn’t one of the stewards. I was still suspecting the nursery nurse, the festival organiser, a police officer, a young man who is abused by his older brother and even the DCI’s nanny. The author has created short, urgent chapters here. They ramp up the tension as we flip between Ben’s inner world and the attacker’s, following them and their newest victim to the dark, wildness of the festival’s other site at Zennor. We can sense the mystical feeling of Cornwall and how it’s become warped in this person’s mind. It’s pitch black and rough terrain, plus with miles and miles of coastline can they be sure to find the right place in time. I defy anyone to put the book down at this point and I devoured it in one sitting. Ben still knows he’s missing a part of the puzzle and we have to trust that his intuition will click in before it’s too late. This is a great thriller and taking Ben out of his natural habitat does bring a different feel to the series, though I hope he does eventually return to island because he belongs there. We can see in the aftermath that he needs his found family and just like Zoe he will always return to the island and each other.

I love it when a new Mark Edwards novel appears and this one really did grab me from the off. It’s a familiar set up. Holly seems like the perfect girlfriend. Clever, funny, beautiful – Patrick feels like he’s hit the jackpot. Until he meets her family.

Her dad has a mysterious new girlfriend. Her sister is unwelcoming. Her brother is clearly lying about something. And Patrick gets the sense all of them share a dark secret – even Holly. When he finds out about the body that was found nearby on their last family holiday, Patrick sets out to find the truth. But as skeletons tumble out of the family’s closet, Patrick realises he needs to be careful. Because in this family, loyalty is everything – and at least one of them is willing to kill to keep their secrets…

The best bit about reading this was that I didn’t really like any of Holly’s family. In fact her sister and brother-in-law are horrific human beings. Anyway, I loved the setting, a remote part of Scotland where not many people visit and the family have a holiday home. However it hasn’t always been a happy place. This is where Holly’s mother died many years before and also where something happened to a teenager from the village – the brother of their cleaner. Then there’s the added stress of Dad’s new American girlfriend. The family dynamic is toxic before she arrives and when she does it causes a meltdown! Meanwhile Patrick is trying to find out what happened at the caves when Holly was a teenager and why a young man was found dead nearby in the dead of winter in summer clothing. As snow starts to fall and the village becomes cut off the family’s behaviour becomes more extreme and Patrick makes discoveries that leave him fearing for his life. I loved the look at tech companies and their ethics, or lack of them and the tension between the locals and the family. Another great thriller from this prolific author.

Lisa Jewell really is a must buy author as I can’t remember a time when I was disappointed by one of her novels and as she mentions in the acknowledgements, this is her twenty fourth! I gelled with the main character Jane very quickly, perhaps because I related to her a little bit. I don’t have a mansion house, but I do have rescue animals, step-children and a similar turn of phrase – a couple of her lines genuinely made me laugh out loud. I never expected to hear the line “with all due respect, Stuart, I’m not sure what could actually be worse than Daisy being abused by a pervert dressed as a clown.” It’s also a good point to mention that I actually hate clowns. Hate them all. They scare me. I don’t like masks, mime artists or anything else where someone is trying to change their face. This might have led to me finding this novel incredibly creepy. Jane comes across as forthright and opinionated but I love those qualities. Basically she’s the perfect investigator because she’s quite happy to ask uncomfortable questions and to suspect the worst of people, although I don’t think she imagined returning a lost west highland terrier would lead her into the darkness of the Black family. Under her exterior she has a big heart and whether it’s her rescue dogs or her step-children she’s always there, especially for Dexter who she spends a lot of time with. When she comes across the strange disappearance of a young girl called Daisy from a local AirBnB she never imagined taking a step back into her past and a house she fled from many years ago. Told through Jane and Daisy’s stepfather Stuart this is a masterclass in generational trauma and the different traits that can run in families. When Jane glimpses an open drawer that contains white gloves, handcuffs and a clown mask I was creeped out and then Stuart finds shackles in the outhouse! This is a very dark thriller with moments of humour that made me laugh out loud. Another belter from this talented author.

August’s reading looks like this:

Personal Purchase

It Could Have Been Her by Lisa Jewell

Posted on 7th Aug 2026 by thelotusreaders

It was the night she almost died.

Newly divorced and feeling a little lost, Jane Trevally agrees to accompany a man she doesn’t know to his house in the darkest corner of Hampstead Heath.

She’s offered a drink. She steps inside.

And then she hears a scream.

Jane runs.

Twenty five years later, Jane finds herself outside the same house, this time to return a dog who’s been found near her home. A dog whose owner has just been reported missing.

A fleeting glimpse of a haunted looking woman through the window sends Jane on a mission to uncover the house’s secrets – secrets more terrifying than she could have ever imagined.

And she can’t stop thinking:

It could have been her . .

Lisa Jewell really is a must buy author. I can’t remember a time when I was disappointed by one of her novels and as she mentions in the acknowledgements, this is her twenty fourth! I gelled with the main character Jane very quickly, perhaps because I related to her a little bit. I don’t have a mansion house, but I do have rescue animals, step-children and a similar turn of phrase – a couple of her lines genuinely made me laugh out loud. I never expected to hear the line “with all due respect, Stuart, I’m not sure what could actually be worse than Daisy being abused by a pervert dressed as a clown.” It’s also a good point to mention that I actually hate clowns. Hate them all. They scare me. I don’t like masks, mime artists or anything else where someone is trying to change their face. This might have been the reason I found this novel particularly creepy. Jane comes across as an independent, forthright and opinionated woman of middling age and I loved those qualities in her. Basically she’s the perfect investigator because she’s quite happy to ask uncomfortable questions and to suspect the worst of people, although I don’t think she imagined returning a lost west highland terrier would lead her into the darkness of the Black family. Under her exterior she has a big heart and whether it’s her rescue dogs or her step-children she’s always there, especially for Dexter who she spends a lot of time with. When she comes across the strange disappearance of a young girl called Daisy from a local AirBnB she didn’t imagine taking a step back into her past and the house she fled from many years ago.

This particular house is a brilliant setting, residing in a quirky little part of London called the Vale of Health on Hampstead Heath. I had to look it up because it sounded so odd and fell in love, because it’s almost like a village within a city. The house Jane is looking for is at the far end of a lane and quite isolated, but Jane knows it as soon as she arrives and meets a man called Stuart who lives there with a woman called Jessamine Black, Daisy’s mother. She’s worried that Daisy hasn’t returned home or to the house she rented to revise for her exams. There’s Déjà vu for Jane as she sits on the same sofa she sat on years before, because nothing much has changed here. Of course our houses do tend to represent us and they often stand in for our bodies when we dream about them – the attic in particular standing in for our psychological state. This doesn’t bode well for this family because the house is untidy and unloved. Being nosey, Jane sees that Stuart has left a drawer slightly open she peers inside. There are the secateurs he was looking for, but also some handcuffs, white leather gloves and a plastic clown mask. Needless to say I’d be back on a train before that drawer was closed. From there Jane is hooked and gets the chance to house sit for a friend in London so she can follow up on Daisy and her hunch that something very dark has happened in that house and the family that live there.

Though Jane is our main protagonist we have flashback chapters from Stuart’s perspective and we see how he meets Daisy’s mother Jessamine at his local pub. Stuart has been homeless for many years, but has been living in a coveted spot in a squat with several other people. He’s noticed Jessamine a couple of times and there’s something winsome about her big eyes and waif-like frame, but he realises very quickly that she has a drink problem. Always arriving immaculate at opening time and then slowly becoming more messy as it gets towards the end of the school day as she seems to scurry off to be at the school gates. When she becomes very unsteady on her feet one day Stuart turns Good Samaritan and helps her to get home. This is how he ends up meeting her daughter Daisy and takes Jessamine up on her offer to stay, which he does for a few days. As these flashbacks continue we see that Jessamine is not the victim Stuart originally thought she was. She has the ability to be neglectful of her daughter, prioritising alcohol and is surprisingly manipulative. Stuart is surprised that Jessamine’s mother doesn’t say anything to her daughter and he wonders if he’s imagining that something is off about her too. There’s a total lack of accountability, particularly from Jessamine who at one point tries to cut off his ear, then saying “I know I’m a handful” like she’s bought another pair of shoes or had one too many at a hen night. When Stuart comes under pressure to return to the squat or lose his space he decides to return, but will Jessamine agree to that and what might she do to ensure he stays? Jane realises he has largely been there for Daisy and while he has been a great stepfather, he has enabled Jessamine. It’s as if everyone in the house turns a blind eye to the issue and he worries she will drink herself to death. He’s also found some things disturbing. He doesn’t know who Daisy’s father is, but no one else seems to know either. In the outhouse there are metal rings attached to the walls and a chair, as if someone has been chained up there. There’s a room upstairs referred to as the au pair’s room, but there hasn’t been an au pair for some time and no one talks about Jessamine’s father or brother either. The family story is that the brother ran away to join the circus and Jane is wondering if he is the clown? Like Stuart she’s starting to wonder about this family and their generational trauma.

This is a great plot, revealed deliciously slowly as Jane begins to realise that other women have gone missing in that part of Hampstead Heath. She and Dexter put their heads together and start to investigate in earnest, unearthing photos of the missing women and several incidents across the country involving a clown. Dealing with those allegations send to her to drink, asking Dexter to fix her anything that “will take the edge off the thought of that tiny masked clown pulling a scarf out of a woman’s ear in a car park with a hard-on.” Another laugh out loud moment. Jane relates to Daisy struggling to survive in this dysfunctional family, because she did too. Her parents neglected her and her brother until they were malnourished and practically feral. This is probably why she takes her role as a stepmother so seriously, she knows what it’s like to have no one from a very young age. I thought the twists and turns were done so well here, paced beautifully and not rushed as they sometimes are in thrillers. I read the end and felt satisfied, like every question had been answered and I wasn’t having to turn back through the pages and read it again to be sure I’d understood who’d done what. Nevertheless I still managed to devour it in a couple of days and I’m sure you will too. This is as thriller that comes highly recommended for it’s grasp of family dynamics and psychology of trauma, but I fear I will always be on alert for tiny little clowns from now on.

Meet the Author

LISA JEWELL was born in London in 1968.

Her first novel, Ralph’s Party, was the best- selling debut novel of 1999. Since then she has written another twenty novels, most recently a number of dark psychological thrillers, including The Girls, Then She Was Gone, The Family Upstairs, The Family Remains and The Night She Disappeared, all of which were Richard & Judy Book Club picks.

Lisa is a New York Times and Sunday Times number one bestselling author who has been published worldwide in over thirty languages. She lives in north London with her husband and two daughters.

Squad Pod Collective

Under Story by Chloe Benjamin

Posted on 4th Aug 2026 by thelotusreaders

WHAT IF TOMORROW WAS ALREADY WRITTEN, BUT YESTERDAY WAS YOURS TO CHANGE?

At an isolated research station in Antarctica, biologist Laurel Salter washes dishes for a living ten hours a day, six days a week. She tells no one why she left her career, or why her marriage ended.

But even in this remote outpost, Laurel can’t outrun her past. When a strange light appears across the ice and draws a group of physicists to McMurdo, her former husband, Eli, won’t be far behind.

Laurel is captivated by the Arc: its surreal glow; the way it seems almost alive. And though Eli is reluctant to test her wildest theory, Laurel is convinced that the Arc leads down a rabbit hole, and into a world they can barely imagine. Can she persuade him to risk everything to fix the burden that hangs between them – to turn back the clock and live their story a second time?

And this time, live it differently.

Once read, never forgotten, Under Story is a genre-defying exploration of the promise of this life, what might lie beyond it, and how far we would go for more time with the people we love.

This is my book of the year so far and I can’t stop talking about it. I’d read it on NetGalley in the spring and I was desperate to review but it felt too early. So when I found out my fellow squadettes were reading this in August I had to join in. I was quite simply blown away by this complex and beautiful story of science, loss and second chances. I still think about it all the time. Our heroine Laurel is a scientist, studying fungus and how it grows but for some reason that isn’t clear at first, she’s on a research station in the Antarctic, away from her former husband Eli and without any fungus in sight. When she develops a fascination in the Arc that appears above the pole she thinks about its significance, but when she becomes aware there is a matching basin underneath the water, her imagination becomes fired. Could this possibly be a portal? A gateway to a different world? She knows Eli won’t be far behind her because she remembers his theory of the ‘duoverse’, the idea that at the moment of the big bang time and space was formed in two directions: our universe, the planets and the development of the world we know and in the other direction it’s complete opposite. I am not a scientist, in fact I barely have GCSE Biology, so I wasn’t aware of any background to this idea so could drift with it and enjoy two incredible minds exploring ideas. I was fascinated with Laurel’s experiments with fungus growing in a maze and whether it moved in a specific direction. She was disappointed to find it tried out all routes then doubled back on itself, but then a second batch made straight for the right route as if it had learned from the previous batch’s mistakes. It felt like a demonstration of Jung’s collective consciousness:

“Ideas spread and somehow we’re all plugged into them.”

I often feel this about ideas, like when several books come out on the same subject at once. It reminded me of something I’ve read before – that ideas are hanging in the air and if we don’t grab them someone else will. As Laurel presents her paper at conference she’s asked some particularly tough questions by one delegate who is unimpressed with her work, claiming she’s applying a human lens to interpret her results. Laurel’s retort is to ask why the delegate is assuming that all intelligence is human? Laurel knows that we like to separate ourselves from animals and plants, safely in our own superior category, but oxygen from our atmosphere is running through our veins and the word human comes from the Latin word ‘humus’ meaning soil. Thinking that we are of the earth is the only thing that comforted Laurel when her dad died. She thinks about how bronchi in our lungs branch like trees and how a ‘neural network in the brain is structured like a galaxy’. I loved reading these aspects of the book and really appreciated how cleverly the author plants these ideas in the first part of the book and they grow in the second part.

Our characters are fascinating, Eli and Laurel are a couple who were made for each other but their relationship is real and they face tough times, particularly devastating events crash into their lives but I never doubted their love for each other. It’s fascinating to watch their characters face the concept of the duoverse, not just whether it is a portal, but if it is what will their relationship look like there and will going backwards fix whatever tore them apart. I felt both were analytical and might even appear cold at times, but in the moments of heightened emotion we really see who these characters are and the deep wells of love they hold. It was two other characters that caught my imagination though: Gloria and Mr Nakamura. I absolutely loved Gloria who is Laurel’s mentor in our universe and her house in San Francisco was so brilliant I wanted to live there:

‘It was an old Arts and Crafts house on Prospect Avenue, dark wood with purple roses growing in the garden and ivy trailing over the windows. Inside was enchantment; half melted candles, cabinets of oddities, a Maine Coon cat the colour of midnight.’

Gloria is intelligent, feisty and an incredible mentor to Laurel and I had a feeling they would meet in any universe. Mr Nakamura is a character from later in the book who is an ‘overtaker’ – a thought I’ll leave with you – who’s incredibly wise and understanding, helping with the difficult parts of life’s journey with dignity. Every character springs to life and has a backstory.

The book’s settings are incredible. First the frozen wasteland of the Antarctic and its different scientific research bases are fascinating. I had no idea how many were there, but McMurdo is like a mini town and it’s the tiny details that give it authenticity. Many of the scientists go home for the winter months when it’s impossible to go outside and cabin fever can really kick in. Some people have an ‘ice-wife’ or husband who they’re in a relationship with in the summer months, then go home to their real spouses in the winter. Bits of the real world come through, such as the disappointment in a second Trump presidency, but it feels like a different world and the perfect place to avoid reality too. Every world the author presents to us feels absolutely real even though some of it seems impossible. I was on tenterhooks wondering about the duoverse under the ice and if Lauren is right whether they’ll ever be able to return? I found myself wondering how this world would look as time scrolled backwards. I was genuinely scared for them but also full of admiration for their bravery. The mirroring is so cleverly done, showing how life always comes full circle and we’re often helpless at the end and the beginning, if we’re lucky enough to lead a full life. As someone who worked in nursing homes in my twenties this really made me think of the role of nostalgia and how often elderly people hanker after experiences from their childhood. Laurel wants her mother’s blueberry pancakes, to watch a film she’s seen a million times and disappear into a favourite book because there’s comfort in it. It might seem like science has sent them on this potential journey, but it isn’t. The totally unscientific emotion of love is what pushes them on, but also guilt, hope and desperation. Loss is a huge theme in the novel, something that always hits me in the heart, and I was deeply moved by how the author dealt with grief across the novel and how the scientific concept of a duoverse changes this experience. This novel was moving, profound, invigorating, deeply intelligent and so full of life. I kept thinking about the symbols of the cover, the circle and the tree, the same under the ground as they are over it. As Laurel observes:

“A line implies before and after; a circle says And then, and then…”

Out 1st September from Tinder Press

Meet the Author

Chloe Benjamin is the author of THE IMMORTALISTS, a New York Times Bestseller, and THE ANATOMY OF DREAMS. Her third novel, UNDER STORY, will be published in September 2026.

A Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection, LibraryReads favorite, and #1 Indie Next pick, THE IMMORTALISTS was named a best book of 2018 by NPR, The Washington Post, Entertainment Weekly, and others. THE ANATOMY OF DREAMS received the Edna Ferber Fiction Book Award and was long listed for the 2014 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize.

Originally from San Francisco, CA, Benjamin is a graduate of Vassar College and the M.F.A. in fiction at the University of Wisconsin. Her work has been translated into over thirty languages. She lives with her husband in the San Francisco Bay Area.

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The Girl With Seven Lives by Vikas Swarup

Posted on 31st Jul 202629th Jul 2026 by thelotusreaders

Devi is a fighter. Growing up in the slums of Delhi, she has learnt that survival comes at a cost – and naturally, that means she’s made a few enemies along the way.

Now she’s being held captive, her life up for sale in an online auction, where the highest bidder will determine her fate.

With her existence hanging in the balance, Devi proceeds to give her captor ‘a confession to beat all confessions’ – as over the course of a single night, Devi unveils the secrets of her seven extraordinary lives.

Devi is the ultimate survivor – a girl from the gutters who dares to rewrite her own destiny. But will she survive the longest night of her life?

The author’s visceral descriptions of the slums, the crime and violence and particularly the treatment of young girls of her caste are a hard read. He conjures up a picture of her family home perfectly with deftly layered descriptions of their space and the surrounding crowded alley ways:

“Sanitation in the slum was non-existent. The open surface drains looked like a river of green, clogged with garbage and plastic trash. For toilet the men would go with their lotas to the railway track. Mercifully for the women and girls there were a few communal latrines at the southern end of the slum that afforded a degree of privacy, though the long lines in the morning meant waits up to an hour.”

Once the family’s circumstances improve a little there are small improvements to daily life, like the arrival of a television that keeps Devi rapt for hours and helps her learn more than she ever has before. Her father decides they need to move, into a better area of the slum with the luxury of two rooms and its own toilet. It was more solid and didn’t let the rain in. However, the monthly payment was crippling financially and soon there was nothing left, they couldn’t ‘freeboot’ the electricity so television was strictly rationed and they were back living hand to mouth. Devi is the best storyteller, drawing you into their lives and then destroying you when disaster befalls them. I felt she was a very lonely person, aside from her early alliance with ‘German Sheffered’ dog Sheru. Each time she trusts someone, her parents, the police, authority figures, they all let her down. She has never known what it is to have someone absolutely in your corner.

The author captures the noise and colour of New Delhi so perfectly it’s almost a sensory overload as you read. The combination of this and the terrible ordeals that Devi faces are overwhelming sometimes and definitely left me feeling privileged in life. Devi’s narration keeps us constantly alert because that’s how she lives her life, constantly in the moment and ever alert to what’s going on around her. Her intelligence and experience mean she can sense when something’s wrong, such as noticing some girls in her dormitory at Muskan juvenile facility are more moody and unpredictable than normal. These young women are utterly powerless, so not only are they preyed upon by bullies and evil men but the system is so corrupt there is never any justice. No one is listening. I realised with surprise that the conversations she has on this one night with her kidnapper are perhaps the most intimate she has ever had. She gets to bare her soul and disclose secrets she has never told anyone. To be this vulnerable and knowing a terrible fate might await you at the end is both cathartic and terrifying.

The pacing is perfect as at the end of each story the phone call is made and the offer increases. She knows who must be on the end of the line and understands their capacity for revenge, she’s wanted it for herself enough times. It’s such a compelling read that I read this in a day, feeling like I’d visited Punjab, Goa, Kerala and finally Mumbai with Devi. The feel of each place is captured beautifully and the contrasts of her rollercoaster life kept me glued to the page. We know how red in tooth and claw the world is but what I found most hard to comprehend is how people could blind themselves from the suffering going on around them. It’s as if the British immigrants and millionaires living in Sector 1 of the city see those in the slums as ants, something they simply tread on as they get on with their vastly superior lives. We see the contrast when Devi lives with a woman who is a banker and wants to use Devi as her muse. On her daughter’s birthday there’s an orgy of gift giving with designer scarves, sunglasses, bracelets and a laptop are unwrapped, with her main present being a vintage Cartier watch. By contrast on Devi’s birthday there’s no party, just a cake and one present – a brand new Sony Handycam. Devi is overwhelmed and when the banker tells her to film the slums she does. She films people she knew, other kids dancing and play fighting, imitating famous people and having fun. Her benefactors are unsatisfied, they don’t want kids enjoying themselves they want to see the dirt and degradation, the alcohol, the drugs and the domestic violence. They want slum porn and she certainly delivers it, raw and unedited, but she knows that no film can truly capture what it’s like to live there.

There’s so much energy in this novel. It leaps off the page and its biggest achievement is its mix of addictive suspense and emotional insight. I came away from it feeling a little bit battered by the force of the story and it might take a few days to fully sink in. I liked Devi as a child, but as time and experience move her forward she becomes more morally questionable, complex and deeply conflicting. Although even if I didn’t always like her I could understand why she makes the choices she does and how she’s come to each terrible conclusion, every time wondering if this present adventure will be her last. It’s easy to forget when you’re deeply embedded in one of her stories that this is where it’s brought her, tied to a chair and listening as each person bids on her life. If you like to kept in suspense and to experience an extraordinary life lived in destitute and dangerous circumstances this is definitely for you.

Out 13th August from Head of Zeus

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Sugartown by Caragh Maxwell

Posted on 25th Jul 2026 by thelotusreaders

What do you do when you’ve ruined your life? You go home to your mother, if you’re lucky enough still to have one. Saoirse Maher wouldn’t recommend it.

Leaving home wasn’t supposed to be temporary. When she moved to London, Saoirse was leaving Ireland behind for good, and with it her messy, broken family. But it turns out that starting again isn’t as easy as she imagined, and when her five-year relationship goes south, Saoirse finds herself out of options. And so here she is, trudging back to her mother Máire’s house up a side road on the outskirts of Irish civilisation.

Except the world she comes back to is nothing like the one she left behind. Her mother has a new family, and everyone else seems to be moving on. But between the drinking, drugs, and an entirely healthy, not-problematic-at-all-thanks relationship with Charlie, there’s plenty to distract her.

Don’t look too closely, and everything’s fine. Saoirse is just fine.

This was one of those books where the narrative voice captures you straight away and you know you’ll follow wherever she takes you. Saoirse is in her early twenties, newly returned to a small town in the Irish midlands when her big life in London doesn’t go as planned. Now back under the roof of her mother, her second husband JJ and their three perfect daughters, all Saoirse can see is the difference between the mother her little sisters have and the mother she had at the same age. Back then Máire was young and struggling, with a husband who’d rather drink his wages than bring them home to his wife and child. In fact Saoirse can remember being in her mother’s car, driving from pub to pub to look for him. There was so much drama between her parents she might as well have been invisible. When she contrasts this with Lily, Grace and Emilia’s life she can see the difference but she can’t understand it; are they just more lovable than her? She notices the way her mother Máire dotes on them, puts their hair into identical plaits but stops short of identical clothes, reads to them at night and makes sure they’re cared for and these small expressions of love hit Saoirse like poison darts. Her sisters even get to call her Mammy, something that Máire was very clear about:

“I was christened Máire Lynch. Not Mammy. That is not my name. I won’t speak to you if you don’t use my name.”

Sometimes she wonders if the impression she has of their relationship is distorted but then she remembers Granny Lynch, the person who cared for her most asking her aunt to give her some leeway; ‘leave her be, you’ve met her mother.’ Granny’s is the only place she had stability and felt loved for herself, just for existing. Even now, at the age of 24, Saoirse feels her mum’s bite as she bullies her out of bed in the morning, insists she does an interview for the local hardware store and is insistent that JJ shouldn’t have to keep her. Saoirse just wanted a few days grace to gather her thoughts and adjust, but now she’s everything she didn’t want to be, living back with her mother in a small Irish town and doing a job that has no meaning and pays enough money to get by week to week. Then, with her friend Doireann she spends it on alcohol and drugs to forget the tedium and disappointment of life for a few hours. She isn’t even allowed to express her disappointments because Máire is right there, ready to tell her what it was like to be her age with a baby and an alcoholic husband. The author uses wit and humour, even within the darker themes and here Saoirse talks about the ‘overarching theme of the Annual Irish Suffering Olympics’. If you complained about a broken toe, someone else had lost their foot in a mowing accident, so you should ‘get over yourself’. This was such a familiar moment of Irish family humour that it made me smile.

It’s easy to forget Máire’s struggles because Saoirse’s voice is so compelling. It’s no wonder her mother enjoys the routine and stability of her relationship with JJ after the turbulence of marriage to Saoirse’s father. When Saoirse hits rock bottom her dad is briefly there for her, but it’s the first time. Although we concentrate on the mother/ daughter relationship, he has been completely absent in her life. He’s one of those Irishmen who are great at stories and for the craic down at the pub, but they don’t see the state he’s in at home and the way he chooses drink over his family again and again. He seems stable enough at the moment, living with his second wife and making bodhrains in his garden workshop, but he will always let her down. I was concerned that Saoirse would end up living her mum’s life, young, pregnant and with a partner who can’t be trusted. I felt so maternal towards Saoirse throughout and I could see that her lack of parental support left her craving love and acceptance. It’s like a huge hole that can never be filled. Unfortunately it also leaves her open to damaging relationships and when she meets Charlie, through Doireann and her on again off again boyfriend Connor, she falls headlong into tumultuous and possessive feelings.

I was holding on to hope that she could get her life back on track, even when it hits rock bottom and she wakes up in hospital. In the end she turns to counselling and one of the first things they talk about is that emptiness Saoirse feels where the love and support of a parent should be. One line of dialogue in the book broke my heart more than anything and it’s when Máire is throwing all her anger and resentment at her daughter. Their fight turns physical when Saoirse reminds her that she forgot she had a fourth child. When she asks her mother what she’ll tell her little sisters Máire says ‘I’ll tell them to be anyone but you.’ It’s so harsh it stopped me short. Of course in order to heal we look for closure and Saoirse has tried drugs, alcohol, relationships and acting out to fill that hole at her centre. The counsellor asks her some searching questions. What if that closure never comes? What if she doesn’t have a relationship with her mother? Somehow she has to learn to feel that uncomfortable absence without trying to fill it with other things. I felt there was hope that she would build self esteem, because even in the throes of first love she finds Doireann’s relationship with Connor uncomfortable. When she tries to clarify whether they are together or not, Doireann says they’re not ‘together, together’ but it’s great because they both get their space and they’re not making claims on each other. Saoirse is confused and asks Doireann who else she’s seeing, but she’s only seeing Connor while he’s seeing other girls.

“So you do all the things a couple does without the security of knowing you’re not going to get cheated on.”

Of course she could be cheated on whether in an official relationship or not, but the need to point out that only Connor benefits from their arrangement shows that Saoirse does have some expectations and standards. She knows she doesn’t want that kind of relationship. She wants boundaries, exclusivity and respect it’s just that her desperate need for love and acceptance means she settles for less. She also knows that her own capacity for love is immense, saying she would tear herself down to make sure Charlie grew because ‘it was just my way.’ Luckily at this point she moves in with Doireann and her family and sees a totally different way of parenting, a seemingly natural maternity in her mum Karen who struggled to become a parent and sees her daughter as something of a miracle. Saoirse notices that they have saved mementoes of every milestone in their daughter’s life and yet are still able to listen and support her plans to move away from home. When Karen’s had a hard shift at the hospital, Saoirse listens and makes her a cup of tea and Karen tells her she’s a ‘good girleen’ but the compliment is so alien to her she doesn’t know what to do with it. Being mothered makes her realise how complicated it is and opens up the guilt, anger, resentment and thoughts that she could ‘fuck up’ her own daughter. Yet she’s already thinking about how to stop repeating the pattern.

This is a remarkable debut. Every single character felt completely real and the author has captured the awkward vulnerability of youth and a girl who has never had that parental safety net that allows her to experiment and work out who she is. The language is beautiful too from the viciousness of a resentful parent, to the delirium of drug addled parties and the tedium of the hardware store. She describes a silence between her and her mother as weighing on her like ‘wet wool’ and I could feel its heaviness. It all rings true and struck a chord with me about my own teenage years and not always being understood. Some of the descriptive passages are so layered they create tiny moments of stillness within the turbulence becoming passages to breathe in. I found myself responding to the book bodily, so immersed that when the author described a panic attack I realised I was holding my own breath. I felt sad, angry and deeply maternal towards Saoirse and with my counsellor head on I wanted to help. I wanted her to see that she wasn’t the sum of her parents and all the bad things that had happened, that even in the darkest moments there is a tiny spark of light. Any writer that can make a reader feel so much for her characters and their journey is special and I can’t wait to read what Caragh does next, but for now I know Saoirse will be staying with me for a while.

Out now from OneWorld Publications

Caragh Maxwell is a writer living in Sligo town. She graduated from the Trinity College MPhil in Creative Writing in 2023, and her essays, poems and stories have been published in The Irish Times, The Cormorant and other publications. Her writing focuses on the self, memory, and womanhood. Sugartown is her debut novel, and was shortlisted for the 2025 A Post Irish Book Awards.

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The Sisters of Hope Square by Faith Hogan

Posted on 21st Jun 2026 by thelotusreaders

All Blythe Carney ever wanted was to become a hotelier and run her family’s business, the Hope Square Hotel. But fate, and her grandfather, intervened and it fell into her younger sister Rae’s lap, taking her dreams with it. Now Blythe owns Still Water House, the most exclusive guest house on Pin Hill Island, but she can’t help but feel she’s still not living the life she was meant to.

Rae Johnson had no interest in taking over the hotel, her dreams lay elsewhere, but when she ended up with the family business her sister had set her heart on, her sense of duty to continue their family legacy with her husband was too strong to ignore.

Now, fifteen years later, newly widowed Rae is struggling to keep the hotel afloat and she knows that selling it could be the final straw in her already fragile relationship with her sister.

What do you do when your sister lives the life that you’d set your heart on? And when the perfect storm is brewing, surely, it’s time to put aside the jealousy and disappointment that can tear a family apart, and fight for the future you have always dreamed of?

I love the joy and care in Faith Hogan’s writing and this has been a brilliant book to sit back and enjoy while we’ve been having a few weeks of very warm weather. Her characters always have so many layers and usually plenty of secrets and these women are no exception. I also feel like she cares about them and wants us to understand their journey. The author takes us back and forth in time to give us the story of the Hope Square sisters, Blythe and Rae. In the present Blythe runs a very successful guest house on Pin Hill Island, at Still Water House, the home she shares with husband Kip and daughter Siggy. By contrast her sister Rae lives alone in what was the family business and the only hotel on the island, the Hope Square Hotel. The sisters couldn’t be more different. Blythe has the drive and ambition of a great business woman whose only dream was to gain her degree and take over at the helm of the family business after her grandfather. Blythe runs a tight ship, even at home, and while she and Kip are an excellent team on the business side, of late there’s been some tension between them. Their main point of contention is Blythe’s treatment of their daughter Siggy who is a teenager ready to start planning the next stage of her life, perhaps going away to university? Blythe has closed her mind to this idea, she rarely lets Siggy hang out with other kids on the island and refuses any activity she believes is unsafe. Kip is becoming frustrated, not only does he feel taken for granted, he wants his daughter to be allowed to grow up. However, there is no reasoning with Blythe. Siggy often escapes to work at Hope Square with her Aunt Rae. Rae feels fragile, not surprising since she’s a recent widow, but there’s something more that seems to be keeping her paralysed, unable to make plans and move forward. She and Marcus didn’t have children so she values her precious time with Siggy, but her relationship with Blythe has never fully recovered since Rae and Marcus took over the hotel. How did this sequence of events happen?

The author takes us back and forth in time with both sisters so we can see events and decisions that led us here, but she also uses it to let us in on secrets the sisters have kept from each other. We as readers have the full picture, so behaviour that seems unreasonable or excessive to other characters has some context for us. It’s very frustrating to see characters misunderstanding each other completely. One such instance is Blythe’s behaviour when a new resident comes to Pin Hill Island. Val and her grandson Danial are refugees, he’s eager to find work and she’s keen to join groups and make friends. Blythe’s behaviour around Val seems utterly irrational, but there must be a reason probably buried deep in the past. I found Blythe a challenge I must admit but I couldn’t quite believe she was just a hateful person. The major question that keeps popping up is why would the girl’s grandfather make the inexplicable decision to pass the hotel to Rae and her boyfriend Marcus? The answers will come, but needless to say there were some men in this book who needed a bit of reeducation. Meanwhile as Danial volunteers at the hotel for Rae to get some work experience, he and Siggy spend some time together. Could there be romance on the cards? If there is, Blythe will be definitely have something to say about it and I worried it would have implications for her relationship with her daughter.

All these misunderstandings and secrets are set against a picturesque backdrop on this isolated island. The incredible scenery is clearly what draws people to visit, but is there still enough to sustain two hotels? Blythe is determined to get in a tourist guide and in one of the best comic moments she has a guest from hell, who she suspects is an inspector. I have to admit I imagined Maggie Smith playing this role at her most imperious. The vision of Blythe having to tolerate smoking, moving furniture and waiting on this woman hand and foot made me laugh. Her eventual response to 48 hours of this treatment was priceless. There’s a lot of trauma to unpack here. There’s so much loss for both these women, even after they lost their parents. There are themes of bereavement, motherhood, domestic abuse and being a victim of crime as well as the central family feud. As always the author gives these subjects the depth they deserve and they do have impact especially when it’s a revelation from the past that gives us more insight into the characters. What I like is that she always keeps us hopeful, that there’s a chance for healing and light in what seems a dark world at the moment. As the tension and miscommunication builds I just wanted the two sisters to talk openly and honestly, but it reaches a dramatic conclusion I didn’t expect. This is a great summer read and something of an escape from reality, full of intrigue and family drama but with bucketloads of warmth and hope.

Out now from Aria Books

Meet the Author

Faith Hogan is an award-winning, million copy best seller. She is a USA Today, Irish Times Top Ten and an Amazon UK Number 1 Best Selling writer of contemporary fiction novels. Her stories have charmed readers around the world – she’s sold internationally and translated widely. She writes grown up women’s fiction which is unashamedly uplifting, feel-good and inspiring.

The Bookshop Ladies was shortlisted for an An Post Book Award in 2024.

The Sisters of Hope Square is her brand new summer read coming June 2026. It is a gripping and poignant story of two sisters divided by jealousy and disappointment who must put their differences aside to save the inheritance that drove a wedge between them decades earlier.

She writes twisty contemporary crime fiction as Geraldine Hogan.

She lives in the west of Ireland with her family and their Labrador named Penny. She’s a writer, reader, enthusiastic dog walker and reluctant jogger – except of course when it is raining!

Instagram @faithhoganauthor

Personal Purchase

The Calamity Club by Kathryn Stockett

Posted on 18th Jun 202616th Jun 2026 by thelotusreaders

Eleven-year-old Meg Lefleur has learned the hard way to rely on no one.
Ever since her beloved mother failed to come home last Christmas Eve, she’s been one of the ‘unadoptable’ girls at the town’s orphanage, where she fights each day to keep her wits sharp and her spirit unbowed.

When she meets Birdie, a young woman who has come to Oxford determined to remind her socialite sister of the impoverished family she left behind, for the first time in a long while it seems someone else might care about Meg’s future. But as the Depression tightens its grip, Birdie begins to suspect her sister’s charmed life may be founded on a tapestry of lies. Then, Birdie encounters Charlie, a woman haunted by loss who has been pushed to the brink with nothing left to lose. Drawn together by circumstance, they find unexpected kinship among a disreputable, determined band of women.

But in a town steeped in hypocrisy, even the smallest act of defiance can have dangerous consequences …

In our prologue we find Birdie in the pharmacy of a small town in the southern states of America buying ‘Merry Widows’ condoms by the dozens. I then became so engrossed in the story of this fascinating woman and the relationship she makes with a girl called Meg at the orphanage that I forgot all about the question that came to mind; why she would be buying so many? Thankfully all questions are answered in this incredible book that’s moving, infuriating, saddening and hilarious all at once. The plot takes us on a journey as Birdie travels to visit her newly married sister Frances who is living with her in-laws at their house Idlewilde. Frances is at great pains to point out her new family, the Tartts, are well to do and Birdie must try not to show her up. In truth, Birdie can only ever be her glorious self and Mrs Tartt is too much of a Southern lady to show anything but politeness to a guest. Frances’s husband, Rory Tartt, is a good looking man, but to Birdie he seems to have something on his mind. He’s eager to leave in the morning and eager to be in his office in the evenings, even retiring to his own bedroom at the end of the day and not his wife’s. Frances confides in Birdie that there’s been very little in the bedroom department and Birdie starts to worry. One thing she knows is money and if she didn’t know better she’d be concerned about Rory’s business and where he’s going. When asked to book-keep for the local orphanage Frances again gives her a note of warning. The president of the orphanage board, Mrs Garnett, is very influential and is hoping to be the governor of the Anti-Vice Committee. Birdie is unimpressed with this paragon of virtue and lets Frances do the sucking up, instead she puts her energy into the disgusting room she’s working in alongside one of the orphans, Meg. As far as Birdie can see, Meg is in this room by herself every day away from the other girls. She has nothing to read. The walls are mouldy and she’s not allowed to open the window. She’d think it was a punishment, but Meg doesn’t appear to have done anything wrong. With an attentive adult to clean and paint the room, let the air in and ask her interesting questions Meg starts to blossom, much to Mrs Garnett’s consternation. Birdie can find solutions to most problems and is enjoying her time with Meg, but the Tartt’s troubles loom and Birdie will have to come up with a creative way to help. When she meets Charlie, a woman broken down by the system and longing to get her child back, they make a formidable team.

I absolutely loved Birdie, the sensible person between an anxious mother who thinks the price of canned peaches will put the family over the edge and a sister who is willing to spend every penny they have if it makes her pretty. She is pragmatic, knowing she’s not a beauty she decided she would have to look after herself and got a job bookkeeping at the local store. Frances didn’t even invite her family to her wedding, scared of being found out as poor. Birdie doesn’t believe in trying to be what you’re not and she’s utterly herself which I loved. She’s sensible but also has a loathing of injustice. She has her own moral compass that is based on the Bible, common sense and kindness. She doesn’t believe in people that set themselves up as good in a performative way, just be good because it’s the right thing to do. Meg was fascinating and her story is so deeply sad. She believes her mother left her one Christmas Eve and never came back, so she had to survive on what was in the house until the local doctor found her. She’s absolutely starving for books and learning, even sneaking a Life magazine she finds in the cupboard and gorging on it like a cream cake. She has to some extent accepted her treatment at the orphanage, never expecting to be chosen as one of the eldest there. I found myself hoping Birdie might adopt her, they certainly have an instant affinity. I loved Meg’s sense of humour too, especially when she relates an adoption letter received that states:

“We need us an older girl, on account of I was chopping cotton and it was hot out and the blade swung out my hand and sliced my wife’s arm clean off so we had a proper funeral for it but she cannot lift a pot now.”

As Meg observes, they had a funeral for an arm? That’s quite a letter. It has people, action and weather, with a bit of gore for interest. She’s a girl with so much to say and no outlet at all. It’s a whole lot different than life with her mum who was a feminist and clearly loves her daughter. She celebrated when Meg was placed in the ‘exceptional learners’ and tells her to remember that most men are placed in the slow learners category. Where could this woman have gone?

The themes in this are very much like The Help, injustice, inequality, the strength of women and what we’ll do to survive. In addition there’s the rise of the eugenics movement in America, something I researched at university and when preparing for my PhD. Eugenics supposes there is a master race, that white able-bodied heterosexuals with European origins are superior. This is such an important topic when we see what’s going on in the US today and when The Sanctuary exists in London – a destination that stays out of the press, but launched the Restore party, houses a eugenics magazine and race scientists. People forget that Germany didn’t start this lean towards wanting a superior race. Birdie finds out that Mrs Garnett’s policies for the Anti-Vice group include eugenic thinking such as imbeciles will give birth to more imbeciles, some ethnic groups should be prevented from having more children and that others should be forced onto contraception from a very young age, especially girls from poor, black families. It’s an evil that’s never really gone away, especially in America where some of these measures were still happening in the 1970s. These policies made it easy to get inconvenient people out of the way, just like Meg’s mum whose story brought me to tears. Birdie starts to realise that doing something considered immoral by society might be the best way to survive and she has to weigh it up in her own mind.

There was just so much I want to say about this book and I’ve had to stop myself rambling! Kathryn Stockett has done it again. I can see this on the big screen and it will be brilliant. It also has the added bonus of chatter about merkins at the breakfast table, which made me laugh out loud. I fell in love with Meg and Birdie, but also the women who form a team to get Birdie’s in-laws out of the mess they’re in. This book has so much to say about female strength, friendship and adaptability in terrible circumstances. Every character is so well drawn I could see them. I know a lot about eugenics and its history in the US and this is an important book right now, going against where Christian Nationalist policy is taking the country. It shows the damage that can be done when someone lives the rigid rules of manmade religion rather than the actual message of love given in the Bible. Often those who want the appearance of goodness most, will do anything to keep it. Birdie finds that friendship and loyalty can be found in the most unusual circumstances and with people you never expected. There’s tragedy and brutality but also lightness, humour and so much love. Utterly brilliant!

Out now from Penguin Books

Meet the Author

Kathryn Stockett was born and raised in Jackson, Mississippi. After graduating from the University of Alabama with a degree in English and Creative Writing, she moved to New York City, where she worked in magazine publishing and marketing for nine years. The Calamity Club is her second novel.

Personal Purchase

The Drowning Place by Sarah Hilary

Posted on 15th May 202613th May 2026 by thelotusreaders

Every place has its ghosts.

Edenscar, a town in the Peak District, has more than most. 17 years ago, its inhabitants were hit by tragedy when a school bus veered off the road and everyone on board drowned. Everyone, that is, except Joseph Ashe. His miraculous survival has haunted him and the town ever since.

Now a Detective Sergeant in the local police, Joe is called to the scene of a brutal and apparently inexplicable crime. The whole town is spooked, but Joe’s new boss, DI Laurie Bower, more used to inner-city police work, has no time for superstition. She just wants to find the very real killer who has left no trace and apparently had no motive.

Joining forces, Joe and Laurie work to uncover the secrets of Edenscar, both past and present.

But when you dig up the dead, expect to get your hands dirty…

Detective Laurie Bower has a new job on a very different patch from inner city Manchester. They have returned to her husband Adam’s family home at Edenscar in the Peak District, to live with his father who has been diagnosed with advanced dementia. This is a wild place and a community where every family has been hit in some way by a tragic accident from 17 years ago. Everyone including Laurie’s new DS Joseph Ashe. Joseph was the only survivor of a terrible minibus crash that plunged his primary school class, their teacher and the driver to the bottom of Lady Bower reservoir. The village is haunted by the loss of those children and so is Joseph Ashe, whose best friend Sammi is still always by his side, even though only Joe can see him. This is going to be a hard district for Laurie to get used to, not only will she be living in the family home, which means getting used to less privacy and the presence of different family members all the time, but she’s not used to the tiny roads, rough terrain and awful weather. She has to hit the ground running when they receive a call about a couple who haven’t been seen over the weekend. Joe has a terrible feeling, because he’d heard gunshots late on Friday night but put it down to poachers in the woods. He also saw car lights heading in the direction of Manchester. Joe and Laurie drive out to Chris and Odette Miles’s cottage on the edge of the woods, a place they’ve been renovating and now share with baby Eric who is almost a year old. As they enter it’s immediately obvious the couple have been dead all weekend, shot in their own kitchen. Laurie chooses to search upstairs to spare Joe from what she fears has happened, a fear that sadly comes true when she finds Eric drowned in only a few centimetres of bath water. Now they must work together, with Sammi alongside, to discover who Chris and Odette were behind the image of a happy family, and then to find their killer.

The atmosphere of this novel is amazing with an opening section that takes us into the minibus to experience that crash as the children did, bringing home just how terrifying it must have been.

“It hit the water hard. Went under, fast. Waves of broken glass from the front to the back […] water like thunder was filling the bus, roll after roll of it, black.”

It’s astounding that Joe survived, but he has been seen with suspicion ever since with whispers that he and Sammi were messing around on the back seat, distracting the driver. Sammi has never left his side since and appears as if he’s the same age as Joe. However, once the bereaved villagers thought Joe could see their lost children he has been something of an oddity. For some the ability to see their child with Joe can be a comfort, but for others it must be distressing and confronting. The moments when this happens lift the hairs on the back of the neck, one child’s ’little icy fingers’ were reminiscent of Cathy trying to get into the window at Wuthering Heights. They’re always visible as if conjured from under the water, dripping wet and wreathed in shattered glass, their eyes black as night. Laurie’s husband Adam is a therapist and he dismisses it as ‘emotional contagion’, a shared trauma that causes mass hallucination. However, they are usually for a set time period and then fade, but Joe’s powers never go away. The weather is also full of foreboding, with several seasons in one day and the woods near the Miles house not recommended after dark. Laurie’s home set up is also unsettling. She is bereaved, but doesn’t share with Joe that she has lost her sister to addiction. She’s also uneasy at her father-in-law’s house, because Pete’s dementia means he behaves differently, becoming agitated towards sunset in a behaviour known as sundowning. He sometimes doesn’t know Laurie, but then when he does recognise her he becomes threatening. This is a place that has secrets and Joe and Laurie need to uncover them if they are going to solve the murders.

Neither detective is in the best place for an investigation and Laurie realises one of the main differences in policing an area where you live. In Manchester she had anonymity from who she was investigating, but here everyone is connected and has an opinion. To hear Chris’s parents talk about the murdered couple they sound like an idyllic family, with his father very proud of his son’s skill as an electrician. In fact he’s been doing so well recently that he’s been able to send his parents on holiday abroad. Odette’s mother has a slightly different perspective, wondering whether the pressure of the renovations and a new baby were taking their toll on her daughter who seemed to be providing most of the child care. Neighbour Bobby, who is an incredible bit of comic relief with habits that could earn him an ASBO and his arse constantly hanging out of his trousers, is more forthcoming. He thinks Chris was up to something to bring in the sort of money he was making. He often heard the couple arguing even though their house is some distance away. Bobby himself has has trouble with developers wanting to buy his ramshackle house, that is currently devaluing the holiday let next door. The team go through several theories – could Chris have been distributing drugs, keeping stolen goods or weapons? This is going to take a deep dive into his business records and asking more searching questions of his resentful family.

I loved how the author has woven in the real-life concerns of a village in an area like Derbyshire within the Peak District. There’s the difficulty for young people who grow up there not being able to afford a decent home as second home owners and investors buy up the local cottages for their portfolio, some with unscrupulous business practices. Laurie feels herself an outsider in this space, the weapons are different for a start as the pair encounter a crossbow booby trap, animal traps and then shotguns in her first few days. Even the motives and suspects are different to those she encountered back in Manchester. She can also see the pressure Joe is under as a receptacle for the village’s resentment and grief. The horrors here are both manmade and supernatural. The pair peel back the layers of secrets and find a neglected kid practically living wild, a plan for hunting in the woods that could have come from the Epstein files and someone who likes to watch their fellow villagers. These twists and turns of the case are fascinating and kept me reading all day. The ghosts are both horrifying and desperately sad, with parents who long to see their child again but not in the way they appear with deep black pools for eyes and dripping with water. It culminates in a terrifying showdown from a totally unexpected direction. The survivor’s guilt is unbearable and I kept hoping that Laurie’s presence and this awful case might be a catalyst for change. Both her and Joe are outsiders in different ways and I could see that distance from the community being useful in terms of their policing but painfully lonely in private. This was a deeply atmospheric and devastating start to a series I can’t wait to dive back into.

Out now from Harvill Publishing

Meet the Author

Sarah Hilary is the critically-acclaimed author of nine novels. Her debut, Someone Else’s Skin, won the Theakston Crime Novel of the Year 2015 and was a World Book Night selection, a Richard & Judy Book Club pick and a finalist for both the Silver Falchion and Macavity Awards in the US. No Other Darkness, the second in her DI Marnie Rome series, was shortlisted for a Barry Award.

In April 2026, The Drowning Place will introduce readers to DS Joseph Ashe at the start of a brand new series set in the Peak District.

Sarah is Programme Director for St Hilda’s Crime Fiction Weekend, and co-founder of Ledburied, a crime fiction festival in her home town. Her short stories have won the Fish Criminally Short Histories Prize, the Cheshire Prize for Literature, and the SENSE Prize.

Netgalley

Love Lane by Patrick Gale

Posted on 15th May 202612th May 2026 by thelotusreaders

A reunion. A journey. A longing for a place called home… When veteran Canadian wheat farmer, Harry Cane is obliged to sell up and sail home to an England transformed by two world wars, his arrival triggers unwelcome self-examination for the family he abandoned, and for whom he has never been more than a distant myth. His daughter feels duty bound to take him in but is riven with doubt and ambushed by a long buried anger she has never before expressed. Harry’s effect on the next generation is less predictable, and enables his granddaughter to deal with an unspeakable trauma, while her gentle husband feels seen for who he truly is. Can Harry stay and make a new life before it’s too late, or will he find himself cast out again, punished for having witnessed and understood too much? LOVE LANE is a searing portrayal of escape and entrapment, and a powerful exploration of what home and family can really be.

I was thrilled when I found out that Patrick Gale had written a sequel to one of my favourite books of all time, A Place Called Winter. This first book followed Harry as a secret is discovered and he’s advised to leave the country by his wife’s family. Leaving both wife and daughter behind Harry embarks on a new life in Canada as a pioneer. This book finds a much older Harry living on his homestead with his dog and secret nightly visits from his neighbour Paul who he loves. When a woman and her young son come to Harry’s place looking for work, Harry says he has nothing, but that Paul might need help. He takes her to Paul’s and they settle her and her son into Paul’s cabin, separate from the main house. It only takes a few days for his whole world to change, with Paul’s houseguests now living in the main house. Harry isn’t all that surprised when Paul tells him they’re to be married, but assumes their arrangement will continue exactly as it did when Harry married Paul’s sister, who died a few years before. However, for Paul this signals the end of their relationship leaving Harry heartbroken. At the same time Harry has been receiving letters from his estranged daughter Betty who is now married. Her cabal of aunts have kept her away from her father but now she wants to get to know him and they start a tentative correspondence. So, years later when Harry is forced to sell the homestead he suggests a visit to England and with no set plan he sets sail for Betty’s city of Liverpool.

Gale splits the novel into five narrators: Harry, Betty, her husband Terry, their daughter Pip and her husband Mike, with Harry closing the story. I know this character’s inner world so well but have never really seen him through someone else’s eyes. Liverpool couldn’t be more different to the wheat fields of Canada and it’s interesting to hear it described as it would have been when my mother was born there. I was experiencing my favourite city as my grandma and grandad would have done. It’s also a big change for Betty, from the moneyed world of the aunts and their large family home at Strawberry Hill. This is post WW2 and the city is rather grey and dismal, more dirty and industrial than it is now. Knowing the docks as I do it was strange to see it actually being used where now it’s all museums, hotels and galleries. If Harry finds Liverpool a little imposing and grey, Betty is shocked at his appearance, thinking he looks like ‘a man who has been through a series of shattering ordeals or a war.” This is a man who has worked very hard and never had spare money to spend on himself and Betty can see he is in need of clothes and a dentist at least. She expected more warmth, but can see that he’s a man of restraint who values his privacy. Will they even get on and what will her daughter Whistle make of him?

Terry’s section focuses on his work as prison governor, with Harry arriving just as two executions are to be carried out, something that Whistle finds particularly difficult to cope with as their street becomes overrun with protestors and journalists. I found it interesting how women are kept sheltered from the details of prison life, perhaps a hangover from the reality of WW2. For Pip’s section we travel to Wakefield and Harry stays with their family for a couple of weeks. Pip’s husband is also in the prison service and they have children, making Harry a great grandfather. What she finds in Harry’s silence is someone who will listen and she can confide in, knowing it will be guarded as a secret. I was astonished about what she almost discloses. Mike is a very controlled individual who worries about money, Harry is perceptive and on walks with the dog realises things about Mike that no one else has. The effect Harry has on several generations of this family is fascinating for a man who is so taciturn and unable to reveal his true self. Gale paints a picture of a closeted England, with homosexual men furtively making secret connections in fear of the law. Terry has met many men who are imprisoned not for what they’ve done but for who they are something he seems to find unjust. He has known men who prefer men during the war, but hasn’t noticed that his own tailor is living with a man. Harry notices their matching rings straight away. There’s also a secret bar on the voyage across the Atlantic where Harry is invited by one of the stewards. It’s probably the only openly gay space Harry has ever been in and my heart broke for him as he glimpses a little of the freedom to come.

Another person who responds to Harry is his granddaughter Whistle, she doesn’t have her own narrative but we can see she’s very different to her sister Pip. Betty describes her as beautiful but sensitive, born ‘without Pip’s protective layers’. One evening close to the execution she has a panic attack in her bedroom and Betty is shocked when she finds Harry has come into the room, talking to her quietly and calmly, encouraging her to breath slowly and bringing her anxiety down much quicker than Betty can. We can see this side of him in his chats with Mike also, proving that he’s an emotionally intelligent observer who never lets on the depths of his own heartbreak. We can see so much about the mid-Twentieth Century in these generations, from the Great Aunts of Harry’s generation to Pip we can see the collapse of the social order. There’s a drop from upper middle class to lower middle class in two generations. Betty bemoans the fact that a girl as beautiful as Whistle would have had a ‘mantle-piece crowded with invitations but rationing and bereavements and shortages had made everyone so cautious and life rather drab.” There are devastating moments delivered with such matter of factness – Harry’s only proof that Paul loved him destroyed by blackmail, Mike’s handling of the family dog, Pip’s secret about her hospital appointments and more than anything the chillingly robotic way Pierrepoint and his executioner apprentices measure out the correct drop to break a young man’s neck in the name of justice. Behind it all I felt a huge anxiety about where Harry was going to go? Would Betty ask him to stay or will he have to make his home back across the Atlantic with strangers. I cried in those final pages with Harry. Patrick Gale has created a character I’ve grown unexpectedly fond of and I didn’t want him to live out his final years alone. This is a beautiful companion to A Place Called Winter full of compassion and unspoken yearning, not just for a lost lover but for a place to call home in the twilight of life.

Out Now from Tinder Press

Meet the Author

Patrick Gale is a cellist, gardener and patron of North Cornwall Book Festival, Penzance LitFest and the Charles Causley Trust. He lives with his husband, the farmer and sculptor, Aidan Hicks (aidanhicks dot com), on their farm at Land’s End. In addition to his latest, Love Lane, published on March 26, 2026, his eighteen novels include Mother’s Boy (2022), Take Nothing With You (2018), which was his fourth Sunday Times bestseller, Rough Music (2000), Notes From an Exhibition (2007), A Perfectly Good Man (2012) and A Place Called Winter (2015). In 2017 his two part drama Man in an Orange Shirt was screened by BBC2 as part of the Gay Britannia season. Continuing to be broadcast regularly around the world, this won the International Emmy for best miniseries and is now in development as a musical. He is working on a television adaptation of A Place Called Winter and a stage version of Take Nothing With You. Extracts from the BBC documentary All Families Have Secrets – the Narrative Art of Patrick Gale can be seen on his website galewarning dot org. The garden at Trevilley was featured on Gardener’s World and is opened under the National Garden Scheme every June.