Travel – The Lotus Readers

The Last Ten Books I Bought

Posted on 17th Mar 2026 by thelotusreaders

I thought that today I’d share with you the last ten books I’ve bought. Sometimes people think that because I review books on my blog, I get given every book I review but that’s far from the case. I still buy an enormous amount of books every month. It’s my main indulgence, aside from Doc Marten boots and a weird fascination with animals in clothes (probably best left unexplored but I’m sure it has to do with Mr Tumnus). I’d do get proof copies but they are becoming more scarce these days so mainly they come from the reviewing I do through the Squad Pod Collective – a group of blogger friends who have come together to share the book love – or through blog tours. More often it’s digital copies that are available, either offered by the publisher or through NetGalley. There are many reasons I might buy a book, as discussed last week there are come authors who are must-buy and are usually pre-ordered for a discount. Another reason might be that I’ve loved a book on Netgalley or digital proof and I’d like a finished copy. Then there’s the bookshop purchases where I have a terrible love of spredges and beautiful book cover art as well as the story itself. Finally comes those I buy second-hand in charity shops, second hand bookshops like Barter Books in Alnwick or Vinted, which is a great hunting ground for special editions. I also collect various copies of old classics or my favourites – I have about six different copies of The Night Circus for example. Currently on my radar is the Folio Society copy of The Colour Purple which is stunning but will take up a whole month’s book budget! Here are my latest buys:

I love Will Dean’s Tuva Moodysson series and pre-order those always, but his stand-alone novels I tend to buy on Kindle. This has all the hallmarks of a heart-stopping thriller.

Three of them adrift on the narrowboat.
Mother, son, and wickedness.

Peggy Jenkins and her teenage son, Samson, live on a remote stretch of canal in the Midlands. She is a writer and he is a schoolboy. Together, they battle against the hardness and manipulation of the man they live with. To the outside world he is a husband and father. To them, he is a captor.

Their lives are tightly controlled; if any perceived threat appears, their mooring is moved further down the canal, further away from civilisation. Until the day when the power suddenly shifts, and nothing can be the same again.

I left the parking ticket bookmark in this one, because I bought this from my local bookshop on Saturday and then my other half went to Screwfix so I read five chapters in the car out of boredom. I wanted to read this before I watched the BBC series and as usual I’ve left it to the last minute. I recently thoroughly enjoyed Rachel Pariss’s novel about Charlotte Lucas and I’d forgotten how lovely it is to be in Austen’s worlds so I thought this would be light relief, both from other reading and the news.

In Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, we know the fates of the five Bennet girls. But while her sisters are celebrated for their beauty or their wit, Mary is the “plain” middle sister, the introvert in a family of extroverts, and a constant disappointment to her mother.

Lonely and lacking connection, Mary turns to the only place she feels safe: her books. Determined to be “right” since she can never be “beautiful,” she prepares for a life of solitude at Longbourn.

One by one, the other sisters move on: Jane and Lizzy for love, and Lydia for respectability. Mary is destined to remain single, at least until her father dies and the house is bequeathed to the reviled Mr Collins.

But when that fateful day finally arrives, the life Mary expected is turned upside down. In the face of uncertainty, she slowly discovers that there is hope for the “plain” sister after all. . .

Experience the witty, life-affirming tale of a young woman finally finding her place in the world.

This book falls into the special edition category as it’s one I might normally have bought on Kindle, but couldn’t resist this beautiful signed edition complete with stunning spredges and endpapers.

It’s the summer of 1939. London is on the brink of catastrophic war. Iris Hawkins, an ambitious young woman in the stuffy world of City finance, has a chance encounter with Geoff, a technical whizz at the BBC’s nascent television unit.

What was supposed to be one night of abandon draws her instead into an adventure of otherworldly pursuit – into a reality where time bends, spirits can be summoned, and history hangs by a thread. Soon there are Nazi planes overhead. But Iris has more to contend with than the terrors of the Blitz. Over the rooftops of burning London, in the twisted passages between past and present, a fascist fanatic is travelling with a gun in her hand.

And only Iris can stop her from altering the course of history forever.

Just look at those beautiful spredges. I’m itching to dive into this but need to get my blog tour reading done first.

As you can see another ‘nostalgic’ purchase. Wuthering Heights is one of my favourite books of all time, despite the problematic middle bit where too many people die at once, so when I bought Essie Fox’s beautiful retelling through Catherine Earnshaw’s eyes I couldn’t resist this new edition of Wuthering Heights. The spredges are to die for!

With a nature as wild as the moors she loves to roam, Catherine Earnshaw grows up alongside Heathcliff, a foundling her father rescued from the streets of Liverpool. Their fierce, untamed bond deepens as they grow – until Mr Earnshaw’s death leaves Hindley, Catherine’s brutal brother, in control and Heathcliff reduced to servitude.

Desperate to protect him, Catherine turns to Edgar Linton, the handsome heir to Thrushcross Grange. She believes his wealth might free Heathcliff from cruelty – but her choice is fatally misunderstood, and their lives spiral into a storm of passion, jealousy and revenge.

Now, eighteen years later, Catherine rises from her grave to tell her story – and seek redemption.

Essie Fox’s Catherine reimagines Wuthering Heights with beauty and intensity – a haunting, atmospheric retelling that brings new life to a timeless classic and lays bare the dark heart of an immortal love.

As you will know I’ve been raving about this one after reading it last month and yes I do have a proof copy but I do like to support independent publishers, authors and bookshops so I went to Lindum Books for her signing a few weeks ago. Sadly, by the time I arrived they’d run out of copies so they were waiting for new stock and Rachel kindly supplied a signed bookplate for it.

Lincolnshire, 1914. As the First World War approaches, three women are living, trapped between the unforgiving marsh, the wide, relentless river, and the isolation of the fen.

Their lives are held fast by profound grief, haunted by the spectres of the past. Trapped by the looming presence and eerie stillness of a hospital that has never admitted a single patient.

Eleanor longs to escape. To make a life with the man she loves, leaving her sister, and all her ghosts behind. Clara’s marriage is crumbling and violent and she yearns for peace and security for both herself and her innocent children. Meanwhile, Lily, a formidable force of will, stands resolute against the relentless tide of change. She will stop at nothing, no matter the devastating cost, to ensure that life, and her family, remain frozen in an unyielding embrace of the past.

The author, Rachel Canwell, grew up with the story of this forgotten hospital. Isolated, stocked weekly and cleaned daily but never admitting a single patient. The hospital was real, tended by her family for over sixty years and set against the ethereal beauty and loneliness of the Fens, is the inspiration for her novel.

This beauty is the independent bookshop copy of Almost Life that came from Lindum Books. I always love the artwork from Kiran’s books and this is a stunner.

One chance encounter can define a lifetime

Erica and Laure meet on the steps of the Sacré-Cœur in Paris, 1978. Erica is a student, relishing her first summer abroad before beginning university at home in England. Laure is studying for her Ph.D. at the Sorbonne, drinking and smoking far too much, and sleeping with a married woman.

The moment the two women meet the spark is undeniable. But their encounter turns into far more than a summer of love. It is the beginning of a relationship that will define their lives and every decision they have yet to make. Spanning cities, decades and heartbreaks, fate brings them within touching distance again and again.

But will they be brave enough to seize the life they truly want?

My next purchases are two for the Kindle and after recently reading and reviewing her third Cal Hooper novel The Keeper, I decided I need to catch up on the first two in the series. I’d previously read her Dublin Murders series so I know I enjoy her writing and I read The Keeper through Netgalley so these are a treat for when I have a gap ?!

The Searcher covers Cal Hooper’s move to Ireland and the fixer-upper he’s bought in a remote Irish village, thinking it would be the perfect escape. After twenty-five years in the Chicago police force, and a bruising divorce, he just wants to build a new life in a pretty spot with a good pub where nothing much happens.

But then a local kid comes looking for his help. His brother has gone missing, and no one, least of all the police, seems to care. Cal wants nothing to do with any kind of investigation, but somehow he can’t make himself walk away.

Soon Cal will discover that even in the most idyllic small town, secrets lie hidden, people aren’t always what they seem, and trouble can come calling at his door.

The Hunter takes us back to Ardnakelty and blazing summer, when two men arrive in the village they’re coming for gold. What they bring is trouble.

Two years have passed since retired Police Detective Cal Hooper moved from Chicago to the West of Ireland looking for peace. He’s found it, more or less – in his relationship with local woman Lena, and the bond he’s formed with half-wild teenager Trey. So when two men turn up with a money-making scheme to find gold in the townland, Cal gets ready to do whatever it takes to protect Trey. Because one of the men is no stranger: he’s Trey’s father.

But Trey doesn’t want protecting. What she wants is revenge.

My final book came from the indie Northodox Press and features a place I know very well indeed. The Adelphi Hotel in Liverpool is a famous landmark I’ve known all my life, with my mum being a Liverpool girl. A former grand hotel, designed to look like the interior of an ocean liner it still has spectacular bones although its more recent furnishing choices in the original tea room have made it look more like a nursing home. Every time I go past it we say someone could make a lot of money doing that place up, it could be gorgeous. I live in hope, but currently she’s a strange mishmash of styles from art deco to faux leather BarcaLoungers. It’s a great cheap place to stay in Liverpool and my dad particularly enjoyed the prostitute’s card that was slipped under his door in the middle of the night!

Where better to work than the famous Adelphi Hotel?

Alistair Monroe is keen to make his way in Nineteenth Century Liverpool. The Adelphi is a landmark known for its grandeur, drawing many visitors, including Clemency Martin, an American psychic.

She too needs to make her way. But Alistair discovers that power and darkness lie at the heart of the hotel, and he must finally take risks to bring the truth to light. Step into the atmospheric world of the Adelphi…

So that’s all my recent purchases and buying secrets, but I’m sure there’ll be more next month, if I can resist The Folio Society that is.

Netgalley

Getting Away by Kate Sawyer

Posted on 14th Mar 202613th Mar 2026 by thelotusreaders

Margaret Smith is at the beach.

It is a summer day unlike any other Margaret has ever known.

The Smith family have left the town where they live and work and go to school and come to a place where the sky is blue, the sand is white, and the sound of the sea surrounds them. An ordinary family discovering the joy of getting away for the first time.

Over the course of the coming decades, they will be transformed through their holiday experiences, each new destination a backdrop as the family grows and changes, love stories begin and end — and secrets are revealed.

Getting Away takes us into the lives and the secrets of four generations of the Smith family, through their holidays. From an east coast beach in the UK just after the war to the early 21st Century, Maggie is central to this, moving from childhood to old age. Through each character in the novel, the author creates snapshots of the century from Maggie’s father Jim and his war injuries to an renewed openness about individual sexuality and her brother Tommy having to police the first Pride in London. He’s worried about the lads at work and their response, he’s not keen either but change is the only constant. We can also see the huge changes in social mobility across the generations. We start with Jim and Betty and their daughter Maggie just affording a day at the beach with a picnic brought from home. Later, Maggie’s brother Tommy and his wife Debbie buy an apartment in Spain and then her granddaughter Melissa is the first in the family to go ‘travelling’ as a young woman as opposed to having a holiday. The shifts are seismic when seen together like this and it made me realise that my own grandchildren will look at me and my husband and realise we were born in the last century. Just like I did with my grandma who was born in 1913, they’ll probably imagine all the changes we’ve seen in that time. That’s what reading this felt like, as morals, finances and our ability to connect with others changes beyond recognition. When Robert takes a holiday with his friend Fitz while Susan is pregnant, they have to send a telegram to one of his destinations to get him to come home urgently. By the next generation, Melissa is island hopping around Asia and keeps them all updated via Instagram and her blog. What is amazing about Kate Sawyer is this doesn’t feel contrived and all these things in the background are just that, because the real drama is happening within this family and the secrets each generation keeps from the next.

Maggie is at the centre though and hers is the most carefully guarded secret. I loved how she and her mother Betty slowly grew to understand each other, but also how one secret breeds another. Her husband Alec knows Maggie is vulnerable when he meets her on a break with her friends, but he’s looking for a wife who won’t make demands and will be happy to travel around the world for his job buying fabric. He is a protector and he remains that way throughout her life, although things do change within their marriage. Maggie has panic attacks near the sea, although her friends don’t know why. We know something happened on a day by the sea when the Americans from Jim’s work travelled with them, but she keeps the secret for decades. However, she isn’t the only one with a huge secret. Maggie’s brothers couldn’t be more different. Tommy comes across as very brash and often drunk, very proud of how well he’s doing at work and happy to splash the cash around. Robert is the baby of the three and a lot more sensitive than his brother. I rooted for him and his girlfriend Susan who he’s desperately in love with. As secrets start to come out their relationship suffers, but I was sure they’d never stopped loving each other. Their children are the final generation we get to know, but it felt like Robert was impacted most by decisions made about his life, even though it was a common choice in that situation. I love how this author writes about her character’s inner lives, she even makes me root for people when their behaviour isn’t great. Once I’m a few chapters in these are real people and I’m feeling every one of their emotions.

Having once had a spectacularly bad holiday with my lovely family I was amazed that they all persevered over years. There are all those little details about each character and how they irritate each other. When they undertake a trip to Florence with Maggie, Betty is exhausted and the others are bored. Maggie likes to stride about the city while her husband Alec is working, sight-seeing and learning about art, architecture and the local food. With all good intentions she wants to make sure those she loves get the most out of being here, but everyone else wants some shade and a cold drink. Tommy is more of a drink by the pool and English food sort of person, it’s clear he has a drinking problem and it doesn’t help his temper. Bringing us into the 21st Century, I loved how Joe and his husband Piotr’s daughter Maja has travelled all over the world when she’s only a toddler. This family have gone from greenhouse tomatoes by the North Sea to being more like the Americans who visited Jim and Betty and scoffed at how backward the British seemed. They also go through every complicated situation a family can, with secrets, affairs, divorce, violence and the addition of those who become ‘found family” like Robert’s lifelong friend Fitz and his daughter. I loved that their friendship survived huge upheaval and betrayal, and that it happened on a holiday pilgrimage. I particularly enjoyed Maggie’s solo holiday after her divorce and her sexual adventure, beautifully written and much needed in order to heal from the past and claim her future as a desirable woman. Maggie’s favourite book is A Room With a View so she felt like a kindred spirit and the passion in that book obviously appealed to this woman who had to reach middle-age before desire was a priority. I loved that this family kept its in-laws close, even after divorce and we can see that as everyone comes together for Joe’s wedding. I became utterly absorbed by this family, so much so I felt like I’d seen one of them as a client. It emphasises the secret complexity of everyday lives and made we think about the fascinating narratives in both sides of my own families. The ending felt like the best one we can ever hope for, which is a family taking time and trying to heal together.

Out now from Zaffre Books

Meet the Author

Kate was born in Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, UK where she grew up in the countryside as the eldest of four siblings, after briefly living with her parents in Qatar and the Netherlands.

Kate Sawyer worked as an actor and producer before turning her hand to fiction. She has previously written for theatre and short-film.

Having lived in South London for the best part of two decades with brief stints in the Australia and the USA she recently returned to East Anglia to have her first child as a solo mother by choice.

Netgalley

Let the Bad Times Roll by Alice Slater

Posted on 21st Jan 202619th Jan 2026 by thelotusreaders

THEN

Alone in New Orleans, Selina is struggling to fit in until a charismatic stranger invites her for a drink. It feels like fate, but who is Daniel, and what does he want from her? Just as the humidity and the hangovers start to take their toll, Daniel vanishes

NOW

Daniel is missing. No one has seen or heard from him in weeks. Beside herself with worry, his sister Caroline hosts an intimate gathering in her London home so those closest to Daniel can come together and compare notes. But what should have been five courses of a Cajun-style feast has now become an interrogation. Those left behind must piece together their shared understanding of the man they thought they knew.

And all isn’t quite as it seems: Caroline has invited a stranger to the table, an accomplished psychic who claims to have met Daniel four thousand miles away in New Orleans. As evening turns to night, the dark truth of what really happened begins to emerge…

As a lifelong fan of Harry Connick Junior I have always fancied a trip to New Orleans. I certainly don’t want this trip to New Orleans, although the author presents a city that’s full of life and her descriptions of the food, cocktails and atmosphere really set the scene for me. It feels like a place where you could have a very good time or a very bad time with nothing in between. I felt something was ‘off’ very quickly, both at Caroline’s house and during their dinner guest Selina’s story of her trip to New Orleans. As Daniel’s friends gathered at his sister’s London home it took me a while to get to know everyone, but something about the gathering and their relationships seemed strange. If my brother had gone missing somewhere in the world, I’m not sure I’d have gone out of my way to cook a dish from that place. It felt a little suffocating and even in their reminiscences Caroline seemed unusually attached to her brother. We know their parents are dead and they only have each other, but they went to university together, live together and Caroline was trying hard to control her brother’s share of their inheritance. I was starting to think that if I were Daniel, I might have disappeared. As the novel begins she is getting ready for her brother’s return like Mrs Dalloway, picking up flowers and shopping for a special dinner almost as if she’s preparing for a lover. Then there’s Richard, friend to them both and their housemate at university. His attachment to Caroline does go further than friendship, but it feels one sided with one flashback that may be the most awkward sex scene I’ve ever read.

As psychic Selina starts to relate her story of meeting Daniel in New Orleans the discomfort continues. I liked Selina and related to her feelings of empathy for Daniel, but she has no boundaries. She’s booked an ordinary New Orleans tourist experience, but once Daniel is involved he seems determined to show her his version of the city and she goes willingly. He had me on edge immediately because he felt like a swan, seemingly chilled and witty on the surface, but clearly pedalling like mad underneath to keep up a front. I suspected early on that he was struggling, emotionally and financially, latching onto people who would be susceptible to his charm. With his white shirt and long hair (I might have imagined the leather trousers) his appearance made me think of Michael Hutchence – very dynamic and magnetic but perhaps hasn’t washed for a few days! I kept veering between thinking he was genuine then suspecting that he’d noticed Selina’s alternative look and her habit of consulting her tarot cards in public places. Did he see her as gullible and potentially his next mark? He matches the city perfectly. Underneath the usual tourist hotspots there’s a decadence in the food, the bars and even the people. Some of the food and drink scenes made me queasy. It sounds delicious in theory but never tastes quite right, it’s too rich and full of seafood. There’s a particular shot that’s like oysters, it feels like drinking ‘phlegm’ something I’m almost phobic about. Daniel suggests trips to a death museum and out to the Bayou trail where morbid death stories are the norm. He’s like an energy vampire, feeding off making someone else unsettled and slowly Selina becomes more unsure of herself, her judgement and even her psychic abilities. We shouldn’t be surprised, after all this city is the home of voodoo priestesses, ghosts and vampire stories. Death seems to be everywhere and the city starts to feel as claustrophobic as Caroline’s flat.

Of course this is Selina’s version of events and it’s a brave thing to do, going into Daniel’s home and meeting his closest friends and family. Especially when the story you have to tell either puts their loved one in a bad light or confirms they’re in danger. However, as we learn more about his friends between Selina’s story, I couldn’t understand what kept them together as a group. There’s a history of Daniel taking from people, whether it’s knowledge, sex, or money and he never seems to be held accountable. Caroline is always there to mop things up, like an overprotective mother. There are so many unspoken feelings here, Selina loves Max but suspects he loves Daniel. Richard still loves Caroline. They clearly care about Daniel, but their memories throw up so many questions about him. I didn’t really like any of them. There are so many twists and turns in their reminiscences as well as in Selina’s tale. They take us as far back as their shared university years and through many unexpected places and events before we reach the end. Everyone has a reason to dislike Daniel. He is a strange combination of both scared and reckless. It’s as if Caroline has been holding on so tight because she knows that out of her sight he will self destruct, taking more risks and falling further than ever. Is her tendency to control coming from a place of fear? It’s almost as if Daniel can only throw himself into life fully if he knows it has a finite end. I won’t tell you anymore, but it doesn’t end the way you expect. This is very clever writing and I really didn’t know how I felt at the end. I disliked pretty much every character, but still couldn’t put this book down. Everyone is hiding something and the journey to find out their secrets is unnerving, confusing and very disturbing indeed.

Meet the Author

Alice Slater is a writer, podcaster and ex-bookseller from London. She studied creative writing at MMU and UEA. She lives in London with her husband and a lot of books. Death of a Bookseller is her first novel.

Personal Purchase

Venetian Vespers by John Banville

Posted on 31st Oct 202529th Oct 2025 by thelotusreaders

This felt like the perfect autumn read – a sinister mystery filled with atmosphere and a slowly building sense of menace. Evelyn Dolman embarks on his honeymoon with his new wife Laura and it proves to be anything but the honeymoon he expected. The couple are greeted by servants at their lodgings, but soon the landlord of Palazzo Dioscuri is there to introduce himself and tell tales of his grand and adventurous ancestors, many of whom Evelyn suspects as figments of the Count’s imagination. Simply a tale to entertain guests. Evelyn fought hard for Laura’s hand, knowing she was far above him in terms of class and finances as he is merely a struggling writer. He’s been looking forward to getting away and as they settle into their rooms he’s sure they’ll have a successful trip. Despite his awareness of the rot and instability underneath some of the grand palazzos they saw from the vaporetto Evelyn is still dazzled by the faded beauty, the light and the history of this group of islands that make up the city. So, with Laura settling in early for the night he decides to go for a walk and perhaps a drink somewhere close by and she suggests Florian, a cafe that first opened in 1720 and still serves Venetian visitors today. A chance meeting is followed by a night of drinking and one unforgivable act. So when he wakes in the morning, sluggish and nauseous and finds his wife isn’t next to him in bed, he imagines she has taken herself to another room. However, as the morning progresses it becomes clear that Laura has simply disappeared.

I picked this book up on a solid recommendation from the bookshop owner, he said his wife was reading it and was torn between devouring it or savouring every chapter. After reading the first couple of chapters I knew exactly how she felt. I love the city of Venice and I love fiction that is set there, particularly stories that conjure up the feel of the city. I’ve been lucky enough to visit the city twice, both times for a full week of exploring. It was the perfect holiday for me – the gothic feel of the place, the incredible architecture, the artisans creating in their workshops and the history of the islands. This is a city with a potential story round every corner. John Banville has captured this perfectly and the strange atmosphere that goes with it. Venice likes to fool you. Not just at carnival time with its costumes and masks, although there is something thrilling and terrifying about that time, this is a sleight of hand that’s in the everyday: the theatre that is actually a supermarket, a nondescript red brick church adorned with clouds and painted cherubs above the altar, it’s turning off a bustling street full of tourists into an empty piazza, devoid of sound. I think every visitor has the experience of turning into a quiet corner and knowing it’s been like this for centuries and you could have stepped into a completely different time. This idea of the city as a trickster is used cleverly by the author to wrong foot both the reader and our narrator.

Our first strange event happens in Florian, the gilded and opulent cafe recommended by his wife. As Evelyn begins to settle in with his coffee and brandy a man approaches his table with a shout of surprise. A red haired man introduces himself as Freddie Fitzherbert and can’t believe Evelyn doesn’t recognise him, since they went to the same school. Evelyn has the conviction that he’s never seen this man before, but he seems to know Evelyn and out of politeness he allows himself to be ushered to sit with Freddie and his sister Francesca Ransome, whose charms don’t go unnoticed:

“This enchanting creature of the heart-shaped face, lustrous eyes and invitingly intimate smile […] how deeply, warmly hued her gleaming ringlets”.

As Evelyn is coerced into joining them at a late drinking establishment he senses he may be making a terrible mistake.

We see everything through Evelyn’s eyes and he is bluntly honest about his feelings and behaviour. He desires Cesca and once felt a similar craving for his wife, but just like this city appearances can be deceptive. Their marriage looks like a love match, but could it be sitting on gradually rotting foundations. On the night he proposed, Laura accompanied him to his rooms and there “the deed of tender initiation was at last enacted” but far from being the unknowing virgin he expected, his fiance knew the deed and proved more experienced in it than him. She was also eager to participate:

“To say it plainly her deft embraces and practised kisses were such as to leave me gasping less in ecstasy than astonishment, even dismay.”

Despite his own initiations that were paid for in a certain type of establishment, he resents hers. Despite the passion, he doesn’t feel he fully possessed Laura. She felt absent to him but the night was never discussed or repeated. Even since the marriage Laura had shown no indication of being receptive to his advances and he is beginning to think that the carnal side of their relationship is over. As he returns to the palazzo, so drunk he is accompanied by Cesca, he is so full of alcohol and lust that he is on course to act in a way that is unforgivable. When he wakes, foggy and nauseous the next morning, it takes a few moments to remember the night before. Once reality hits he searches their rooms and the rest of the palazzo for his wife but he can find no trace of her. Did she leave? Has she gone to a hotel to cool off for a while? Or did more transpire last night than he remembers?

This is a mystery as labyrinthine as the city itself and despite having only one narrator we are left with so many questions. There’s a vagueness about every detail that could be an adherence to social etiquette but could also be deliberate. Evelyn seems easily pulled into harms way and claims to feel utterly detached from his wrongdoing. It’s as if he’s too weak to be autonomous or stick to his principles, or he could be trying to fool us. Despite claiming not to recognise Freddie he was easily swayed to go late night drinking with them and even secures them rooms at the Palazzo Dioscuri when their lodgings on Guidecca need to be vacated. He claims to be bewitched by his wife’s dark haired beauty but very quickly switches interest to Cesca. Could he really be this callous? It seems our narrator is not to be trusted and he’s not alone. Count Barbarigo drifts in and out at will, with long fantastical stories of his ancestors that must be false. Cesca is very enigmatic, seductive one moment and pulling back the next. Where is her husband? What does she expect from Evelyn? We get the feeling that everyone is behaving oddly as if there’s something else going on just out of Evelyn’s sight. As Freddie and Cesca join the palazzo the Count provides a lunch for his guests, a gathering Evelyn refers to as a Mad Hatter’s party and it’s an apt description of this strange assortment of strangers. He notices the servants are sitting with the guests. He gets the sense of watching a play unfold in front of him, with everyone playing their part but something feels ‘off’. To me it felt like the house of misrule where the usual social order is being turned on its head. Not to mention Laura is still nowhere to be found.

Doubling is also a theme, with Laura seeming to be the quiet, ideal wife but she has this unexpected sexual past. Cesca is pointed out as Laura’s double by the count, with the only difference being her hair colour. Evelyn even wishes his wife was more like Cesca. She does admit to her dual nature and even likens it to the city.

“You will get used to the pantomime that Venice makes of life.”

The reference to pantomime again brought up that twelfth night sense of misrule, where women are principal boys and men are the pantomime dames. Cesca claims that the venality of Venice makes her feel like the essence of respectability. Evelyn flirts around this statement, wondering about her respectability elsewhere in the world also wishing to be a wilder version of himself. He bemoans his character, wishing that Cesca could see this other self that’s the perfect fit for Venice in all its elusiveness and deceit.

“Wherever I end up I will still be Evelyn Dolman, a northerner born and bred, utterly un- Venetian.”

He wishes for the ability to be a wild rover like Freddie, tied down by no one and no principle or creed either. This part of him longs for Casanova levels of debauchery, but as leans his head against the damp wall of the palazzo he longs for his tidy house in Chiswick and the smell of furniture polish. Will this suburban, safe Evelyn win the day or will he allow his darker, shadow self to control his actions?

There are clues to what is transpiring here but they are subtle. The writer has incredible sleight of hand and they seem inconsequential or at list explicable. Some completely passed me by. As I opened the book again for writing this review it made me think of The Sixth Sense and how no one saw the clues on their first watch of the film but when they watched for a second time they couldn’t believe they’d missed them. Each character is slippery and elusive with an unpredictable quality that felt dangerous. I lived this uncanny feeling the author created which grows organically from the city. This is a sparking jewel of a city that’s risen from the mud and brackish waters of the lagoon. Evelyn mentions the fin de siécle, that time of decadence towards the end of the 19th Century and that timing certainly informs some of the events in the book, particularly the fluid social order and sexual licentiousness. We’re told constantly that Venice is decaying and sinking. One day it may be completely under water, but the decay isn’t what you see when you first visit. Venice bewitches you with its golden domes, Morrison arches, coloured glass and the way sparkling light from the surface of the water bathes everything in a soft light. Then suddenly, only a street away you notice a tree growing out of someone’s house and at night most residences seem in darkness now that families can no longer live in the water logged lower floors. Banville captures this ‘double’ city utterly, describing the timeless romance of a gondolier serenading his passengers but also the jarring sound of the vaporetto. We see the sparkling water but also smell the mud as the passing boats churn it up. He links this duality with human nature, our surface selves and the real us, even the parts we avoid and keep locked away. Everything about this novel is a conjuring trick and I fell head over heels in love with it.

Meet the Author

John Banville was born in Wexford, Ireland, in 1945. He is the author of thirteen previous novels including The Book of Evidence, which was shortlisted for the 1989 Booker Prize. He has received a literary award from the Lannan Foundation. He lives in Dublin.

Sunday Spotlight

Sunday Spotlight. City Break in a Book: Prague

Posted on 3rd Aug 202531st Jul 2025 by thelotusreaders

Prague is one of those places on the bucket list that I’ve never managed to get to, but I’m very drawn to it. There’s something about Prague that’s a touch gothic, mystical and dark. It strikes me as being like Venice, a place where you can almost touch the layers of history. A thin place, where you might take a wrong turn and end up in the 18th Century. Prague knows you are temporary, while it endures forever. That is probably just a romantic notion, but I’m looking forward to testing out my impressions. Much of the fiction I’ve read deals with the city’s history and I’m hoping some of these choices might tempt you to visit too, if only in one of these books.

An intriguing and almost hallucinogenic novel that has Kafka in its DNA. Blake is a pornographer who photographs corpses. Ten years ago, a young man becomes a fugitive when a redhead disappears on abridge in the rain. Now, at the turn of the millennium, another redhead has turned up in the morgue, and the fugitive can’t get the dead girl’s image out of his head. For Blake, it’s all a game — a funhouse where denial is the currency, deceit is the grand prize, and all doors lead to one destination: murder. In the psychological noir-scape of Kafkaville, the rain never stops, and redemption is just another betrayal away. Armand is an Australian writer who lives in Prague and is director of the Centre of Critical and Cultural Theory. This is definitely not for everyone, but just go with it as he strips bare this society and reveals it in all its decadence.

Prague Spring is a wonderfully atmospheric portrait of the city as well as a political and historical thriller with dashes of espionage. It’s the summer of 1968, the year of love and hate, of Prague Spring and Cold War winter. Two English students, Ellie and James, set off to hitch-hike across Europe with no particular aim in mind but a continent, and themselves, to discover. Somewhere in southern Germany they decide, on a whim, to visit Czechoslovakia where Alexander Dubcek’s ‘socialism with a human face’ is smiling on the world. Meanwhile Sam Wareham, a first secretary at the British embassy in Prague, is observing developments in the country with a mixture of diplomatic cynicism and a young man’s passion. In the company of Czech student Lenka Konecková, he finds a way into the world of Czechoslovak youth, its hopes and its ideas. It seems that, for the first time, nothing is off limits behind the Iron Curtain. Yet the wheels of politics are grinding in the background. The Soviet leader, Leonid Brezhnev is making demands of Dubcek and the Red Army is massed on the borders. How will the looming disaster affect those fragile lives caught up in the invasion? This is a great read about a city teetering on the edge of one of it’s most significant moments in history.

The banned books club was only the beginning; a place for the women of Prague to come together and share the tales the Germans wanted to silence. Is she brave? No, she’s just a bookshop girl doing whatever she can.

For bookshop owner, Jana, doing the right thing was never a question. So when opportunity comes to help the resistance, she offers herself – and her bookshop. Using her window displays as covert signals and hiding secret codes in book marks, she’ll do all in her power to help.

But the arrival of two people in her bookshop will change everything: a young Jewish boy with nowhere else to turn, and a fascist police captain Jana can’t read at all. In a time where secrets are currency and stories can be fatal, will she know who to trust? If you enjoy Kristin Hannah you’ll love this story from WW2.

Oh my friend, won’t you take my hand – I’ve been so lonely!

One winter night in Prague, Helen Franklin meets her friend Karel on the street. Agitated and enthralled, he tells her he has come into possession of a mysterious old manuscript, filled with personal testimonies that take them from 17th-century England to wartime Czechoslovakia, the tropical streets of Manila, and 1920s Turkey. All of them tell of being followed by a tall, silent woman in black, bearing an unforgettable message. Helen reads its contents with intrigue, but without knowing everything in her life is about to change. I love creepy little novellas like this and Sarah Perry does everything right here. I loved the almost Victorian ‘Dear Reader’ and the Dracula-like inclusion of letters and diaries. The fear comes from that very Freudian juxtaposition of repulsion and fascination or death and desire. It assumes we all have that thing we’ve done that we wish we hadn’t, buried at the back of the mind or written in a decades old diary. Melmoth is the embodiment of the thing we’ve repressed and she will come for you. Dark, mysterious, thrilling and scarier than you’d think.

Paris, today. The Museum of Broken Promises is a place of wonder and sadness, hope and loss. Every object in the museum has been donated – a cake tin, a wedding veil, a baby’s shoe. And each represent a moment of grief or terrible betrayal. The museum is a place where people come to speak to the ghosts of the past and, sometimes, to lay them to rest. Laure, the owner and curator, has also hidden artefacts from her own painful youth amongst the objects on display. A marionette from her time in Czechoslovakia as a teenager.

Prague, 1985. Recovering from the sudden death of her father, Laure flees to Prague. But life behind the Iron Curtain is a complex thing: drab and grey yet charged with danger. Laure cannot begin to comprehend the dark, political currents that run beneath the surface of this communist city. Until, that is, she meets a young dissident musician. Her love for him will have terrible and unforeseen consequences.

It is only years later, having created the museum, that Laure can finally face up to her past and celebrate the passionate love which has directed her life. It may seem strange that someone would base their whole life’s work on an experience at the age of 18, but that misunderstands the power of traumatic experiences. While the objects in the museum may seem mundane, their importance is in the wealth of emotion in those memories. It is by holding or valuing these things that we remain connected to the past and the person in it.

Errand requiring immediate attention. Come.

The note was on vellum, pierced by the talons of the almost-crow that delivered it. Karou read the message. ‘He never says please’, she sighed, but she gathered up her things.

When Brimstone called, she always came.

In general, Karou has managed to keep her two lives in balance. On the one hand, she’s a seventeen-year-old art student in Prague; on the other, errand-girl to a monstrous creature who is the closest thing she has to family. Raised half in our world, half in ‘Elsewhere’, she has never understood Brimstone’s dark work – buying teeth from hunters and murderers – nor how she came into his keeping. She is a secret even to herself, plagued by the sensation that she isn’t whole. Now the doors to Elsewhere are closing, and Karou must choose between the safety of her human life and the dangers of a war-ravaged world that may hold the answers she has always sought.

I’m not usually a fan of fantasy but this is an exception and Prague is the perfect setting for a girl with blue hair who does the bidding of a chimera who’s part human, ram and lion! Karou is my kind of heroine and I’d happily take her for a drink. I blew through the first third of the novel without thinking, just wishing I had an imagination like this.

This is probably best described as ‘faction’, while it is shelved as a novel there is so much fact in it that it reads like a true crime story, except the author keeps interrupting his own narrative. Two men have been enlisted to kill the head of the Gestapo, in a mission named Operation Anthropoid. In Prague, 1942 two Czechoslovakian parachutists are sent on a daring mission by London to assassinate Reinhard Heydrich – chief of the Nazi secret services. Known as ‘the hangman of Prague’, ‘the blond beast’ and ‘the most dangerous man in the Third Reich’. His boss is Heinrich Himmler but everyone in the SS says ‘Himmler’s brain is called Heydrich’, which in German spells HHhH.

It is an incredible story, occasionally interrupted so the author can point out something he’s made up for dramatic effect – such as, ‘I don’t really know if a tank was the first vehicle to enter Prague’. Or even re-writing a paragraph if he later finds he got it wrong. It’s strange and a little jarring but you get used to it. In fact I don’t doubt his research, you will see the acres of documents and history books in his bibliography. This is a very clever panorama of the Third Reich told through the life of one outstandingly brutal man, a story of unbearable heroism and loyalty, revenge and betrayal. It is a moving work of fiction you will not forget.

Prague 1939. When the Nazis invade, Eva knows the danger they pose to Jewish families and the only way to keep her daughter Miriam safe is to send her away – even if it means never seeing her again. Eva is taken to the concentration camp Terezin, her secret is at risk of being exposed.

In London, Pamela volunteers to help find places for the Jewish children arrived from Europe. Befriending one unclaimed little girl, Pamela brings her home. Then when her son enlists in the RAF, Pamela realises how easily her own world could come crashing down…

Moving between England and Czechoslovakia this is a heart-rending story made all the more poignant for me as my mother-in-law Hana was sent from Poland as a child to England, separated from all her family and was eventually reunited with her mother after the war. I loved the themes of motherhood and music too. This is one of those historical novels that concentrates on emotion and character rather than acres of detail, but thar makes it all the more heart-rending.

In 1934, a rabbi’s son in Prague joins a traveling circus, becomes a magician, and rises to fame under the stage name the Great Zabbatini, just as Europe descends into World War II. When Zabbatini is discovered to be a Jew, his battered trunk full of magic tricks becomes his only hope for survival.

Seventy years later in Los Angeles, ten-year-old Max finds a scratched-up LP that captured Zabbatini performing his greatest illusions. But the track in which Zabbatini performs the spell of eternal love—the spell Max believes will keep his parents from getting divorced—is damaged beyond repair. Desperate for a solution, Max seeks out the now elderly, cynical magician and begs him for help. As the two develop an unlikely friendship, Moshe discovers that Max and his family have a surprising connection to the dark, dark days the Great Zabbatini experienced during the war.

With gentle wisdom and melancholy humor, this is an inventive, deeply moving story about a young boy who needs a miracle, and a disillusioned old man who needs redemption.

Sunday Spotlight

City Break in a Book: Vienna

Posted on 27th Jul 202526th Jul 2025 by thelotusreaders

I’ve never been to Vienna but it’s very firmly on my list of places I’d like to visit. Firstly I love Klimt with a passion and have been to any and every exhibition of his work, but never in his homeland. I’m also interested in Freud, for obvious reasons. I’d like to eat a piece of Sachertorte there too. For now I’ll have to keep reading books set in the city.

Set in 1938 in London and Vienna, this is a tense and atmospheric thriller told from within a climate of uncertainty and fear as World War Two threatens. As war looms over Britain and there is talk of gas masks and blackout, people are understandably jumpy and anxious. Stella Fry, has been working in Vienna for a Jewish family and returns home with no job and a broken heart. She answers an advertisement from a famous mystery writer, Hubert Newman, who needs a manuscript typed. She takes on the job and is shocked the next day to learn of the writer’s sudden, unexplained death. She is even more surprised when, twenty-four hours later, she receives Newman’s manuscript and reads the Dedication: To Stella, spotter of mistakes. Harry Fox, formerly of Special Branch and brilliant at surveillance, has been suspended for some undisclosed misdemeanor. He has his own reasons for being interested in Hubert Newman. He approaches Stella Fry to share his belief that the writer’s death was no accident. What’s more, since she was the last person to see Newman, she could be in danger herself.

It is 1966, and Robert Simon has just fulfilled his dream by taking over a café on the corner of a bustling Vienna market. He recruits a barmaid, Mila, and soon the customers flock in. Factory workers, market traders, elderly ladies, a wrestler, a painter, an unemployed seamstress in search of a job, each bring their stories and their plans for the future. As Robert listens and Mila refills their glasses, romances bloom, friendships are made and fortunes change. And change is coming to the city around them, to the little café, and to Robert’s dream.

A story of the hopes, kindnesses and everyday heroism of one community, The Café with No Name has charmed millions of European readers. It is an unforgettable novel about how we carry each other through good and bad times, and how even the most ordinary life is, in its own way, quite extraordinary.

Hedy Lamarr possessed a stunning beauty. She also possessed a stunning mind. Could the world handle both?

Her beauty almost certainly saved her from the rising Nazi party and led to marriage with an Austrian arms dealer. Underestimated in everything else, she overheard the Third Reich’s plans while at her husband’s side, understanding more than anyone would guess. She devised a plan to flee in disguise from their castle, and the whirlwind escape landed her in Hollywood. She became Hedy Lamarr, screen star.

But she kept a secret more shocking than her heritage or her marriage: she was a scientist. And she knew a few secrets about the enemy. She had an idea that might help the country fight the Nazis…if anyone would listen to her.

A powerful novel based on the incredible true story of the glamour icon and scientist whose groundbreaking invention revolutionised modern communication, The Only Woman in the Room is a masterpiece.

The year is 1853, and the Habsburgs are Europe’s most powerful ruling family. With his empire stretching from Austria to Russia, from Germany to Italy, Emperor Franz Joseph is young, rich, and ready to marry.

Fifteen-year-old Elisabeth, “Sisi,” Duchess of Bavaria, travels to the Habsburg Court with her older sister, who is betrothed to the young emperor. But shortly after her arrival at court, Sisi finds herself in an unexpected dilemma: she has inadvertently fallen for and won the heart of her sister’s groom. Franz Joseph reneges on his earlier proposal and declares his intention to marry Sisi instead.

Thrust onto the throne of Europe’s most treacherous imperial court, Sisi upsets political and familial loyalties in her quest to win, and keep, the love of her emperor, her people, and of the world.

With Pataki’s rich period detail and cast of complex, bewitching characters, The Accidental Empress offers a glimpse into one of history’s most intriguing royal families, shedding new light on the glittering Hapsburg Empire and its most mesmerizing, most beloved “Fairy Queen.”

Erika Kohut teaches piano at the Vienna Conservatory by day. By night she trawls the city’s porn shows while her mother, whom she loves and hates in equal measure, waits up for her. Into this emotional pressure-cooker bounds music student and ladies’ man Walter Klemmer.

With Walter as her student, Erika spirals out of control, consumed by the ecstasy of self-destruction. A haunting tale of morbid voyeurism and masochism, The Piano Teacher, first published in 1983, is Elfreide Jelinek’s Masterpiece.

Jelinek was awarded the Nobel Prize For Literature in 2004 for her ‘musical flow of voices and counter-voices in novels and plays that, with extraordinary linguistic zeal, reveal the absurdity of society’s clichés and their subjugating power.

The Piano Teacher was adapted into an internationally successful film by Michael Haneke, which won three major prizes at Cannes, including the Grand Prize and Best Actress for Isabelle Huppert.

Vienna at the dawn of the 20th century. An opulent, extravagant city teeming with art, music and radical ideas. A place where the social elite attend glamorous balls in the city’s palaces whilst young intellectuals decry the empire across the tables of crowded cafes. It is a city where anything seems possible – if you are a man.

Edith and Adele are sisters, the daughters of a wealthy bourgeois industrialist. They are expected to follow the rules, to marry well, and produce children. Gertrude is in thrall to her flamboyant older brother. Marked by a traumatic childhood, she envies the freedom he so readily commands. Vally was born into poverty but is making her way in the world as a model for the eminent artist Gustav Klimt.

None of these women is quite what they seem. Fierce, passionate and determined, they want to defy convention and forge their own path. But their lives are set on a collision course when they become entangled with the controversial young artist Egon Schiele whose work – and private life – are sending shockwaves through Vienna’s elite. All it will take is a single act of betrayal to change everything for them all. Because just as a flame has the power to mesmerize, it can also destroy everything in its path…

It’s Ball Season in Vienna, and Maria Wallner only wants one thing: to restore her family’s hotel, the Hotel Wallner, to its former glory. She’s not going to let anything get in her way – not her parents’ three-decade-long affair; not seemingly-random attacks by masked assassins; and especially not the broad-shouldered American foreign agent who’s saved her life two times already. No matter how luscious his mouth is. Eli Whittaker also only wants one thing: to find out who is selling American secret codes across Europe, arrest them, and go home to his sensible life in Washington, DC. He has one lead – a letter the culprit sent from a Viennese hotel. But when he arrives in Vienna, he is immediately swept up into a chaotic whirlwind of balls, spies, waltzes, and beautiful hotelkeepers who seem to constantly find themselves in danger. He disapproves of all of it! But his disapproval is tested as he slowly falls deeper into the chaos – and as his attraction to said hotelkeeper grows. Diana Biller’s The Hotel of Secrets is chock full of banter-filled shenanigans, must-have-you kisses, and romance certain to light a fire in the hearts of readers everywhere.

Vienna, 1913. It is a fine day in August when Lysander Rief, a young English actor, walks through the city to his first appointment with the eminent psychiatrist Dr Bensimon. Sitting in the waiting room he is anxiously pondering the particularly intimate nature of his neurosis when a young woman enters. She is clearly in distress, but Lysander is immediately drawn to her strange, hazel eyes and her unusual, intense beauty. Her name is Hettie Bull. They begin a passionate love affair and life in Vienna becomes tinged with a powerful frisson of excitement for Lysander. He meets Sigmund Freud in a café, begins to write a journal, enjoys secret trysts with Hettie and appears – miraculously – to have been cured. Back in London, 1914. War is imminent, and events in Vienna have caught up with Lysander in the most damaging way. Unable to live an ordinary life, he is plunged into the dangerous theatre of wartime intelligence – a world of sex, scandal and spies, where lines of truth and deception blur with every waking day. Lysander must now discover the key to a secret code which is threatening Britain’s safety, and use all his skills to keep the murky world of suspicion and betrayal from invading every corner of his life. Moving from Vienna to London’s West End, from the battlefields of France to hotel rooms in Geneva, Waiting for Sunrise is a feverish and mesmerising journey into the human psyche, a beautifully observed portrait of wartime Europe, a plot-twisting thriller and a literary tour de force from the bestselling author of Any Human Heart, Restless and Ordinary Thunderstorms.

The artistic stagnation of Vienna at the end of the nineteenth century was rudely shaken by the artists of the Secession. Their works at first shocked a conservative public, but their successive exhibitions, their magazine Ver Sacrum and their dedication to the applied arts and architecture soon brought them an enthusiastic following and wealthy patronage. With 60 new colour illustrations, this classic book, now in its third edition, brilliantly traces the course of this development, of the Wiener Werkstätte that followed, and the individual works of the artists concerned. The result is a fascinating documentary study of the successes and failures, hopes and fears of the members of an artistic movement that is so much admired today.

This is the true story that inspired the movie “Woman in Gold” starring Helen Mirren and Ryan Reynolds. Anne-Marie O Connor brilliantly regales us with the galvanizing story of Gustav Klimt’s 1907 masterpiece, the breathtaking portrait of a Viennese Jewish socialite, Adele Bloch-Bauer. The celebrated painting, stolen by Nazis during World War II, subsequently became the subject of a decade-long dispute between her heirs and the Austrian government.When the U.S. Supreme Court became involved in the case, its decision had profound ramifications in the art world. Expertly researched, masterfully told, “The Lady in Gold” is at once a stunning depiction of fin-de siecle Vienna, a riveting tale of Nazi war crimes, and a fascinating glimpse into the high-stakes workings of the contemporary art world.

Seventeen-year-old Franz Huchel journeys to Vienna to apprentice at a tobacco shop. There he meets Sigmund Freud, a regular customer, and over time the two very different men form a singular friendship. When Franz falls desperately in love with the music hall dancer Anezka, he seeks advice from the renowned psychoanalyst, who admits that the female sex is as big a mystery to him as it is to Franz.

As political and social conditions in Austria dramatically worsen with the Nazis’ arrival in Vienna, Franz, Freud, and Anezka are swept into the maelstrom of events. Each has a big decision to make: to stay or to flee?

Sunday Spotlight

Sunday Spotlight. City Breaks in a Book: Paris

Posted on 20th Jul 2025 by thelotusreaders

A weekend trip to the City of Lights is usually on everyone’s bucket list but if you can’t travel these books will give you a flavour of Paris. Whether it’s an escapist romance or a travelogue each will give you an insight into life in Paris, from the fin de siecle through two World Wars and all the way through to the COVID pandemic and it’s aftermath, these choices take in the Twentieth Century and beyond. Hope you find something you enjoy.

Not the best known of Jojo Moyes’s books, but a series of short stories all with the backdrop of Paris.

In Paris for One, Nell is deserted by her boyfriend minutes before setting off on what was supposed to be a fantastic romantic weekend away to Paris. Can she forget him and find herself? Honeymoon in Paris is a tale of the early days of two marriages in both 1912 and 2012, featuring Liv and Sophie from Jojo Moyes’ bestselling romance The Girl You Left Behind.

Beth is faced with a difficult decision in Bird in the Hand when she bumps into an old flame at a party, with her husband . . .

This is classic Jojo Moyes fiction – easy to read and within a few lines you’re pulled into the story. The characters are absorbing and soon have you on side, rooting for their romantic dreams to come true.

Historical Fiction

This book is utterly charming from start to finish, while seemingly sprinkled with fairy dust our heroine has some very painful and difficult setbacks. Mrs Harris is a salt-of-the-earth cleaner living in London, struggling financially with her husband never returning from WWII. She cheerfully cleans the houses of the rich and one day, when tidying Lady Dant’s wardrobe, she sees the most beautiful thing she has ever seen in her life – a Dior dress. In her fairly drab and working class existence, she’s never seen anything as magical as this dress. It seems to be alive, like living and wearable work of art. She’s never wanted a material thing so much in her life. Mrs Harris scrimps, saves and slaves away, often finding that the very rich avoid their bills and has to assert herself. Then one day, after three long years, she finally has enough money to go to Paris. However, when she arrives at the House of Dior, she could never have imagined how her life is going to be transformed and how many other lives she will touch in return. Always kind, always cheery, she finds time to charm the ladies who create Dior’s designs in the atelier and organise the love lives of other key staff. Mrs Harris really does takes Paris by storm and learns one of life’s greatest lessons along the way. This treasure is from the 1950s introduces the irrepressible Mrs Harris, part charlady, part fairy-godmother, whose adventures take her from her humble London roots to the heights of glamour in Paris until eventually she has the dress of her dreams. It only highlights those lovely qualities that we know have been there all along. I am absolutely in love with this character.

Rene is the concierge of a grand Parisian apartment building. With the residents she keeps up a professional facade and to them she’s what they expect, a helpful and reliable concierge but not as sophisticated or cultured as they are. Underneath is this the real Rene – a woman who’s incredibly passionate about culture and probably knows more than her rather snobbish residents. Her loves are Japanese Arthouse Cinema and her cat, Leo Tolstoy. Meanwhile, several floors above, is twelve-year-old Paloma Josse, another person keeping their knowledge to themselves. She doesn’t want the empty future her parents have laid out for her and decides she will end her life on her thirteenth birthday. Unknown to both Rene and Paloma, the sudden death of one of their privileged neighbours alter everything for them. The simplicity of the story is what makes this book magical. It shares deep truths about the choices we make in life and the way they change everything. It’s quirky and has an intelligent humour, but is also elegantly written. The charm of it seems quintessentially Parisian.

Doria is in a difficult place. That place is the Paradise Estate, dreadfully misnamed and situated on the outskirts of Paris showing a different side to the city. In Doria’s unforgettable voice, we learn that her father has returned to Morocco. He’s looking for a new wife, who can produce a boy. So her mother is trying to get by a single mother, but she can’t speak French and is illiterate. The only work she can find is cleaning. It could be worse, Samra who lives above them has a father who won’t let her out. Another young resident, Youssef, has been put in prison for stealing cars and supplying drugs. One good thing is her weekly appointment with a psychologist, who listens even if she doesn’t have answers. The author has created a memorable character in Doria who is knowing beyond her years but also heart-breakingly naive. This book gives us a beautifully drawn alternative to the romantic tourist impression of Paris.

A woman called Mado is determined to make her mark and begins a journey that will change everything. Set on a train to Paris in 1895, and based on a real incident when a train crashed into the platform at Montparnasse, a young woman boards the Granville Express with a deadly plan. The author sets us firmly in the fin de siecle, not just with the clothing but with the attitudes. We can see a shift from the Victorian ideals of the previous seventy years. We have Alice who is travelling for work and taking the opportunity to talk her boss into a new investment. Marcelle is a pioneering scientific researcher inspired by Marie Curie. Mado’s androgynous clothing and short hair make her stand out as someone unconventional and modern. She’s definitely a feminist, but is also an anarchist and I could feel the tension in her body as I read, how far is she willing to go to make her political point? The prose speeds up as the train edges closer and closer to Paris and more passengers climb aboard until the reader is almost breathless.
.

Another wonderful historical novel here, this time set in Paris during WWII. It’s 1944 and Jean Luc is working on the railway under the Nazi occupation when a train bound for Auschwitz is passing through. In an act of desperation a mother makes the ultimate sacrifice and gives the thing she loves most to a stranger. Now she can face her own future with the hope that she’s done the right thing.

Ten years later in Santa Cruz and Jean Luc is happy to have left the memories of the occupation behind. The scar on his face is the daily reminder of the horrors of life under the Nazis. His new life has given him the family he’s always wanted and he doesn’t expect the past to come knocking. That one night on the train platform has shaped all of the futures in a way none of them imagined.

This is such an emotional story, beautifully researched and gives us some insight into life in Paris under the occupation and the terrible choices people had to make to save the ones they love.

Could one split second change her life forever?

Hannah and Si are in love and on the same track – that is, until their train divides on the way to a wedding. The next morning, Hannah wakes up in Paris and realises that her boyfriend (and her ticket) are 300 miles away in Amsterdam!

But then Hannah meets Léo on the station platform, and he’s everything Si isn’t. Spending the day with him in Paris forces Hannah to question how well she really knows herself – and whether, sometimes, you need to go in the wrong direction to find everything you’ve been looking for…

PARIS, 1920. On the bohemian Left Bank, Sylvia runs a little bookshop called Shakespeare and Company. Here she welcomes the greatest writers of the day – and from the moment James Joyce finally walks through her door, the two become friends.

When Joyce’s controversial novel Ulysses is banned, Sylvia is determined to publish it herself.

But championing the most scandalous book of the century will come at a cost – and Sylvia finds herself risking ruin, her reputation and her heart, all in the name of the life-changing power of books.

Set in post-war Paris, The Paris Bookseller is a sweeping story of love, courage and betrayal – and a breathtakingly beautiful love letter to books.

Sixteen-year-old Alice is spending the summer in Paris, but she isn’t there for pastries and walks along the Seine. When her grandmother passed away two months ago, she left Alice an apartment in France that no one knew existed. An apartment that has been locked for more than seventy years.

Alice’s grandmother never mentioned the family she left behind when she moved to America after World War II. With the help of Paul, a charming Parisian student, she sets out to uncover the truth. However, the more time she spends digging through the mysteries of the past, the more she realizes there are secrets in the present that her family is still refusing to talk about.

THEN:

Sixteen-year-old Adalyn doesn’t recognize Paris anymore. Everywhere she looks, there are Nazis, and every day brings a new horror of life under the Occupation. When she meets Luc, the dashing and enigmatic leader of a resistance group, Adalyn feels she finally has a chance to fight back.

But keeping up the appearance of being a much-admired socialite while working to undermine the Nazis is more complicated than she could have imagined. As the war goes on, Adalyn finds herself having to make more and more compromises—to her safety, to her reputation, and to her relationships with the people she loves the most.

Because Paris is always a good idea…

Years ago, Juliet left a little piece of her heart in Paris – and now, separated from her husband and with her children flying the nest, it’s time to get it back!

So she puts on her best red lipstick, books a cosy attic apartment near Notre-Dame and takes the next train out of London.

Arriving at the Gare du Nord, the memories come flooding back: bustling street cafés, cheap wine in candlelit bars and a handsome boy with glittering eyes.

But Juliet has also been keeping a secret for over two decades – and she begins to realise it’s impossible to move forwards without first looking back.

Something tells her that the next thirty days might just change everything…

In the depths of the archive, Hannah dances with the ghosts of Vichy France, lost in testimony and a desire to hear the voices of the past. Back in her apartment, Moroccan teenager Tariq crashes on her sofa, consumed by his search for the mother he barely knew. Their excavations will unearth rich histories that will teach them both just how much the future is worth fighting for.

She is there to study the wartime experiences of women living there under German Occupation, while still licking the wounds of a painful, decade-old romance.Paris Echo knocks on big subjects such as the legacy of empire and identity, but mostly it’s a heart-warming masterclass in storytelling that weaves and winds and brims with a deep affection for Paris: its otherworldliness, and the ghosts of history that lurk around every beautiful, tree-lined avenue.

Paris Echo is a propulsive and haunting novel of empire and identity, told with biting wit and tenderness, which exposes the shadows of the city of lights.

PARIS, 1939
Odile Souchet is obsessed with books, and her new job at the American Library in Paris – with its thriving community of students, writers and book lovers – is a dream come true. When war is declared, the Library is determined to remain open. But then the Nazis invade Paris, and everything changes.
In Occupied Paris, choices as black and white as the words on a page become a murky shade of grey – choices that will put many on the wrong side of history, and the consequences of which will echo for decades to come.

MONTANA, 1983
Lily is a lonely teenager desperate to escape small-town Montana. She grows close to her neighbour Odile, discovering they share the same love of language, the same longings. But as Lily uncovers more about Odile’s mysterious past, she discovers a dark secret, closely guarded and long hidden.

When you’re a woman of a certain age, you are only promised that everything will get worse. But what if everything you’ve been told is a lie?Come to Paris, August 2021, when the City of Lights was still empty of tourists and a thirst for long-overdue pleasure gripped those who wandered its streets.

After New York City emptied out in March 2020, Glynnis MacNicol, spent sixteen months alone in her tiny Manhattan apartment. She was 46, unmarried and the isolation was punishing. A whole year without touch. Women are warned of invisibility as they age, but this was an extreme loneliness, so when the opportunity to sublet a friend’s apartment in Paris arose, MacNicol jumped on it. Leaving felt less like a risk than a necessity.What follows is a decadent, joyful, unexpected journey into one woman’s pursuit of radical enjoyment.

The weeks in Paris are filled with friendship and food and sex. There is dancing on the Seine; a plethora of gooey cheese; midnight bike rides through empty Paris; handsome men; afternoons wandering through the empty Louvre; nighttime swimming in the ocean off a French island. And yes, plenty of nudity. I’m Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself is an intimate, insightful, powerful, and endlessly pleasurable memoir of an intensely lived experience whose meaning and insight expand far beyond the personal narrative. MacNicol is determined to document the beauty, excess, and triumph of a life that does not require permission.The pursuit of enjoyment is a political act, both a right and a responsibility. Enjoying yourself—as you are—is not something the world tells you is possible, but it is.

When Paris Sizzled vividly portrays the City of Light during the fabulous 1920s, when Parisians emerged from the horrors of WWI to find that a new world greeted them. This world reverberated with the hard metallic clang of the assembly line, the roar of automobiles, and the beat of jazz. Mary McAuliffe traces a decade that saw seismic change on almost every front, from art and architecture to music, literature, fashion, entertainment, transportation, and, most notably, behavior. The epicenter of all this creativity, as well as of the era’s good times, was Montparnasse, where impoverished artists and writers found colleagues and cafés, and tourists discovered the Paris of their dreams. Major figures on the Paris scene―such as Gertrude Stein, Jean Cocteau, Picasso, Stravinsky, Diaghilev, and Proust―continued to hold sway, while others now came to prominence―including Ernest Hemingway, Coco Chanel, Cole Porter, and Josephine Baker, as well as André Citroën, Le Corbusier, Man Ray, Sylvia Beach, James Joyce, and the irrepressible Kiki of Montparnasse. Paris of the 1920s unquestionably sizzled. Yet rather than being a decade of unmitigated bliss, les Années folles also saw an undercurrent of despair as well as the rise of ruthless organizations of the extreme right, aimed at annihilating whatever threatened tradition and order―a struggle that would escalate in the years ahead. There are rich illustrations and an evocative narrative, through which Mary McAuliffe brings this vibrant era to life.

Personal Purchase

The Year of Zara Holt by Kimberley Freeman

Posted on 4th Jul 20253rd Jul 2025 by thelotusreaders

I discovered Kimberley Freeman’s novels about ten years ago and read all of them in one go. It was the combination of historical fiction, with an emphasis on Australian and women’s history that drew me and the romance element is always rooted in that context. I’ve been waiting a very long time for a new novel and this is particularly interesting as it’s based on a true story. I did drop everything to read it. She takes us through a large part of the early – mid Twentieth century through the life of Zara Holt. We join her as a teenager, living with her parents and dreaming of becoming a fashion designer. She spends hours drawing elaborate evening and wedding dresses with Betty her best friend. On a night out together Zara meets Harry, a handsome and ambitious young man who is aiming to get into law or politics. They have an instant connection and Zara feels it, almost like a jigsaw puzzle clicking into place. Their love will dominate her life as she also builds her own fashion empire and travels the world. As fiery as the couple are, it’s never an easy road and Zara will have to make difficult choices about whether she follows her head or her heart.

I had to keep reminding myself that this was set in the earlier part of 20th Century. Zara feels like a woman far ahead of her time, so that when she comes up against male attitudes and societal expectations it feels like a surprise. It did take me a little while to realise she was a real woman, born in Kew Victoria in 1909 as Zara Kate Dickens. In 1929 when she was still just 19, she approached her father who was a successful businessman for a loan. She made the case that her sister had an expensive wedding and since she had no plans to get married in the near future, could she use the equivalent money to start her own business. With the money and her friend Betty in tow, she opened a dress shop called Magg. They provided a bespoke service with Zara designing for the client and Betty as the seamstress. When Betty got married and left the business, Zara tried to continue alone but was exhausted by her own success. At this point she was expecting a proposal from Harry, which wasn’t forthcoming. On her mother’s advice she liquidated the business, coming out with $1500 ($125,000 in today’s money). She used her money to travel the world, including an impromptu trip to India with Colonel James Fell who she met on her return voyage. James did propose and became her first husband, but this wasn’t the end of Harry and it wasn’t the end of Magg.

I found Zara such a compelling character and admired her boundless energy for business and travel. She is endlessly creative, never losing that urge to sketch a dress or incorporate a detail she’s seen into a new collection. She was particularly inspired by her time in India and the bold colours and decorative flourishes in women’s clothing. In later years, as Harry becomes more important in government she has to try combining her business affairs with the role of a political wife, using her new contacts and always trawling markets in other countries for fabrics to ship back to India. With more age and experience she manages to keep Magg running, even expanding and hiring new seamstresses and designers. I loved her little rebellions, such as talking to a gathering of women about business rather than her life as ‘first lady’. She also changes an opera fundraiser to a fashion show, both rewarded by the enthusiasm of her audience.

In her personal life she finds it a lot harder to stick to her guns. Harry is utterly single- minded and only proposes when he’s boxed into a corner. She has suspicions about his womanising early on, but it takes decades for him to be honest with her. He never makes promises he can’t keep, aside from his vows, and while he professes to love only her he will not hear ultimatums. What I found hardest to swallow was his disregard for places and people that were special to him and Zara as a couple, he trashes Zara’s special memories of finding a natural waterfall near Bingle Bay where they stay with close friends, eventually buying their own home there. Harry ruins both by taking a mistress there and my sympathies for him were gone at that moment. I wanted Zara to leave him and use all her energy into her work and children. I felt he did not hear her or deserve her. She is left with the age old compromise, that the little bit of him she does have is better than nothing.

Kimberley has Zara narrate the full story and that’s wise because she really is the main draw of the book. I was full of admiration for the way she bucked the system. When living in India she finds out that their head servant is taking such a huge cut of the other servant’s wages they can’t afford to eat. She’s told it’s best to turn a blind eye and that the British don’t meddle in servant’s affairs, but she has him fired anyway. She also builds a friendship with an Indian doctor and academic that she meets at the stables, often riding out with him in the mornings. Her husband James forbids this and is furiously jealous. She has a sense of fairness and equality in how she approaches life which is appealing and interesting when you read about some of the policies that Harry works hard for as prime minister, when he eventually gets there. She stands up for her interest in fashion and is incredibly proud of knowledge and skills she’s built. She can look at any woman and see what dress style will best suit her body and how to combine current trends with what will suit the client. She knows how confident a woman feels when she is well dressed and aims to give all her clients that feeling of looking their best. She also defends it as an art form. Her designs are her preparatory sketches and the fabrics are her paints, what is created from her imagination and these materials is no less an art than an oil painting in a gallery.

I wanted her to have the same confidence in her personal life and to trust that she will find someone who loves her and gives her the attention and fidelity she deserves. Yet her love for Harry seems to transcend his behaviour. If you know anything about the Holts it’s probably the mystery surrounding Harry’s disappearance while swimming in a bay he knew well. It is assumed he was caught in a rip tide and drowned, but his body was never found. Zara wrote her own book about their life together. Her achievements included winning ‘Gown of the Year’ in 1961 and in 1962 Miss Australia, Tania Verstak, wore a Magg gown in the Miss International contest, which she won. Zara also advised on Australian uniforms for events such as Expo ‘67 in Montreal and the Mexico Olympic Games in 1968. In 1979 she was appointed as chair of the Yves Saint Laurent board in Australia. She had a bubbly personality and could say the wrong thing, occasionally portrayed as a bit scatterbrained by the press she was actually incredibly astute with a business brain. She also claimed that her eye for fashion was inspired by her own figure, being rather short and round in shape – something I share with her. When she died in 1989 she left over $5 million dollars and several properties to her three sons. I think Kimberley Freeman does an incredible job of capturing this fascinating woman, including the odd hilarious public gaffe. I thoroughly enjoyed getting to know Zara and I’m sure many other readers will too.

Out now from Hachette Australia

Meet the Author

Kimberley was born in London and her family moved back to Australia when she was three years old. She grew up in Queensland where she currently lives.

Kimberley has written for as long as she can remember and she is proud to write in many genres. She is an award-winning writer in children’s, historical and speculative fiction under her birth name Kim Wilkins. She adopted the pen name Kimberley Freeman for her commercial women’s fiction novels to honour her maternal grandmother and to try and capture the spirit of the page-turning novels she has always loved to read. Kim has an Honours degree, a Masters degree and a PhD from The University of Queensland where she is also a senior lecturer. She lives in Brisbane with her kids and pets and lovely partner.

Sunday Spotlight

Sunday Spotlight: Going Down Under

Posted on 1st Jun 202531st May 2025 by thelotusreaders

I’ve always been unconsciously drawn to books set in Australia and New Zealand, perhaps because I have family in both countries and want to familiarise myself with their lives. My mum lived there as a ten pound Pom in the 1960’s, leaving Liverpool behind and living in hostels meat Sydney. My grandad loved it out there and would tell us about nature, mostly horrific stories of people having spider’s nest in their ears or brains. My brother-in-law went out to New Zealand to work as a tree surgeon on a huge farm. He met the love of his life out there, Jenny, and although Jan died a few years after my husband I’m still in touch with Jenny and my two nephews. I was also hugely influenced by mum who was an enormous fan of The Thorn Birds – although hated Rachel award as Meggie in the TV mini-series. I’ve always thought that people down under are resilient, rather sweary and very straightforward. They say what they think – something I admire even where I don’t agree. I love the diversity of the cities and fascinated by Aboriginal and Māori. Some of my choices were read on my post-colonial literature course at university, a module that I found so inspiring and forced me to read writers I’d never have picked up as a casual reader. Here are just a few of the books and authors that can take you on a trip round both countries.

Classics

When her wealthy family prepares to host a lavish summer party, the young, hitherto sheltered Laura Sheridan suddenly feels a kinship with the staff and the helpers hired to set up the venue for the festivities. As she learns of the death of one of their working-class neighbours, this burgeoning sense of class consciousness is heightened by a realization of her own mortality. Published in 1922, at the height of literary modernism, ‘The Garden Party’ is now considered one of the key texts of that movement. This volume, which also includes all of Katherine Mansfield’s other published short stories, is an invaluable resource for anyone wishing to discover one of the early twentieth century’s finest writers. I first read this collection at university and I still have it today because it stands up against any short story collection from that period.

Integrating both Maori myth and New Zealand reality, The Bone People became the most successful novel in New Zealand publishing history when it appeared in 1984. Set on the South Island beaches of New Zealand, a harsh environment, the novel chronicles the complicated relationships between three emotional outcasts of mixed European and Maori heritage. Kerewin Holmes is a painter and a loner, convinced that “to care for anything is to invite disaster.” Her isolation is disrupted one day when a six-year-old mute boy, Simon, breaks into her house. The sole survivor of a mysterious shipwreck, Simon has been adopted by a widower Maori factory worker, Joe Gillayley, who is both tender and horribly brutal toward the boy. Through shifting points of view, the novel reveals each character’s thoughts and feelings as they struggle with the desire to connect and the fear of attachment.

Compared to the works of James Joyce in its use of indigenous language and portrayal of consciousness, The Bone People captures the soul of New Zealand. After twenty years, it continues to astonish and enrich readers around the world.

Mythology and contemporary Māori life are woven together seamlessly in this spectacular collection by Aotearoa’s foremost short story writer.

The titular story ‘Bird Child’ plunges you deep into Te Kore, an ancient time before time. In another, the formidable goddess Mahuika, Keeper of Fire, becomes a doting mother and friend. Later, Grace’s own childhood vividly shapes the world of the young character Mereana; and a widower’s hilariously human struggle to parent his seven daughters is told with trademark wit and crackling dialogue.

Moving artfully across decades, landscapes, time and space, with tenderness and charm, Bird Child and Other Stories shows an author as adept and stimulating as ever. This isn’t an easy read but fascinating and the comparison between Māori and other creation myths from around the world was fascinating.

Contemporary Fiction

Cassy smiled, blew them a kiss.

‘See you in September,’ she said.

It was a throwaway line. Just words uttered casually by a young woman in a hurry. And then she’d gone.

It was supposed to be a short trip – a break in New Zealand before her best friend’s wedding. But when Cassy waved goodbye to her parents, they never dreamed that it would be years before they’d see her again.
Having broken up with her boyfriend, Cassy accepts an invitation to stay in an idyllic farming collective. Overcome by the peace and beauty of the valley and swept up in the charisma of Justin, the community’s leader, Cassy becomes convinced that she has to stay.

As Cassy becomes more and more entrenched in the group’s rituals and beliefs, her frantic parents fight to bring her home – before Justin’s prophesied Last Day can come to pass. I love Charity Norman’s writing because she gets to the heart of family relationships and shows how families can fracture when placed under stress. I’d recommend any of her books but this one is set in New Zealand. I highly recommend Remember Me and Home Truths.

At a suburban barbecue one afternoon, a man slaps an unruly boy.

The boy is not his son.

It is a single act of violence, but the slap reverberates through the lives of everyone who witnesses it happen.

Christos Tsiolkas presents the impact of this apparently minor domestic incident through the eyes of eight of those who witness it. It’s honestly hard to find someone to like here, but it is a fascinating look at contemporary Aussie relationships. It’s an unflinching interrogation of the life of the modern family, a deeply thought-provoking novel about boundaries and their limits…

The Lambert sisters have secrets…

When 15-year-old Cathy Lambert runs away from her Dublin home, she is scared and pregnant. Settled in New Zealand with her new son Conor she believes the secret she carries will never be revealed…

Rebecca Lambert was eighteen when her parents died and she took responsibility for her younger sisters. Years later, she is haunted by fears she hoped she’d conquered.

Freed from family duties, mother of three Julie Chambers is determined to recapture the dreams of her youth.

Married to a possessive older man, Lauren Moran embarks on a frantic love affair that threatens to destabilise her fragile world.

Anxious to make peace with her three sisters, Cathy invites them to her wedding.

But as the women journey together through New Zealand towards their reunion, they are forced to confront the past as the secret shared histories of the Lambert sisters are revealed. I couldn’t put this book down as it’s a great mix of emotions, adventure, secrets and a lot of humour.

EVERY ENDING IS A NEW BEGINNING…

Ruth is ignoring the news. Like most people, she has relationship problems, job stress, friends and family who need her. Ruth has a life.

But the news is about to catch up with Ruth, and her problems are going to be swept away…along with the rest of the world. While on a plane to New Zealand, something starts to happen to the world. Arriving, Ruth makes her way to her coastal destination but never expected to be sharing the inside of a dead whale with a stranger as a world ending event happens. It takes this to change Ruth’s outlook completely. Only when the comforts and complications of her old existence are gone, does she finally realise how she might be able to live to the fullest. This was a mesmerising debut from Kate and I still recommend it constantly. It made me think about something drastic like this happening in my lifetime, but also question why we fall in love with the people we do and how commitments to others are nurtured and lad

Romantic Fiction

Love isn’t an exact science – but no one told Don Tillman.

A thirty-nine-year-old geneticist, Don’s never had a second date. So he devises the Wife Project, a scientific test to find the perfect partner. Don has a regimented life of work

Enter Rosie – ‘the world’s most incompatible woman’ – throwing Don’s safe, ordered life into chaos.

But what is this unsettling, alien emotion he’s feeling? . . .

This is a deeply funny, but emotional and fascinating in terms of Don’s neuro-divergence. He eats the same meal on the same night every week as part of his rotation of menus. His life felt like a never-ending to-do lust and I knew that he would drive me up the wall. Rosie is a woman of great patience! However, I also knew that my lack of systems and routine would have an equally detrimental effect on his mental health. Watching how these two people try, fail and try again to communicate their needs and feelings within the relationship is a lesson for every couple. It’s also brilliantly funny. There is a trilogy now so treat yourself to all of them.

In the rugged Australian Outback, three generations of Clearys live through joy and sadness, bitter defeat and magnificent triumph, driven by their dreams, sustained by remarkable strength of character… and torn by dark passions, violence and a scandalous family legacy of forbidden love.

The Thorn Birds is a poignant love story, a powerful epic of struggle and sacrifice, a celebration of individuality and spirit. Most of all, it is the story of the Clearys’ only daughter, Meggie, who can never possess Ralph de Bricassart, the man she so desperately adores. Ralph will rise from parish priest to the inner circles of the Vatican… but his passion for Meggie will follow him all the days of his life.

What a saga this is and I have to say the book is ten times better than the series, mainly because we get more of the family dynamic and get to know Meggie as a little girl. Her story of slowly growing up with such a harsh mother really builds and we understand more her bond to the young priest who befriends her, noticing that in a family of many sons she is largely ignored. He is her knight in shining armour and the only one, after her eldest brother is gone, who will hug and comfort this lonely girl. Catholic readers will recognise how powerful the religion is for Irish families and the schooling that nuns provide. The book is an epic and covers Father Ralph’s lifetime, but it has an incredible sense of place and time and really is worth a read for that alone.

n 1929, Beattie Blaxland had dreams. Big dreams. She dreamed of a life of fashion and fabrics. One thing she never dreamed was that she would find herself pregnant to her married lover, just before her nineteenth birthday.

In 2009, Emma Blaxland-Hunter was living her dream. A prima ballerina with the London Ballet, she had everything… Until the moment she lost it all.

Separated by decades, both women must find the strength to rebuild their lives. A legacy from one to the other will lead to Wildflower Hill, a place where a woman can learn to stand alone long enough to realise what she really wants.

I’d never read this author before so it came as a complete surprise when I enjoyed it so much. It is historical fiction too, but I loved that this was a ballsy woman who was determined to succeed at Wildflower Hill and her love story with an aboriginal worker would have been so transgressive at the time. It’s an unashamedly romantic story and if you enjoy love with a side order of feminism, family secrets and a dual-timeline this is for you.

Historical Fiction

A faded photograph. An abandoned house. A wartime mystery. . .

1939: On the eve of war, young English heiress Grace Grey travels from London to the wilderness of Tasmania. Coaxed out of her shell by the attentions of her Irish neighbour, Daniel – Grace finally learns to live. But when Australian forces are called to the frontline, and Daniel with them, he leaves behind a devastating secret which will forever bind them together.

1975: Artist Willow Hawkins, and her new husband, Ben, can’t believe their luck when an anonymous benefactor leaves them a house on the remote Tasmanian coast. Confused and delighted, they set out to unmask Towerhurst’s previous owner – unwittingly altering the course of their lives.

2004: Libby Andrews has always been sheltered from the truth behind her father Ben’s death. When she travels to London and discovers a faded photograph, a long-buried memory is unlocked, and she begins to follow an investigation that Ben could never complete. But will she realise that some secrets are best left buried . . .?

This gorgeous story that spans the twentieth century was one of my books of the year last year. The mystery of how all these timelines added up, the beautiful setting of Tasmania and the historical context around WW2 drew me in. The love story is simply gorgeous and potentially heart-breaking. I know this is a story I’ll want to read again.

1896, Bannin Bay, Australia. When British pearl-boat captain Charles Brightwell goes missing out at sea, rumours of mutiny and murder swell within the bay’s dens and back alleys. Only his headstrong daughter, Eliza, refuses to believe her father is dead, and sets out on a dangerous journey to uncover the truth.

But in a town teeming with corruption, prejudice, and blackmail, Eliza soon learns that the answers she seeks might cost more than pearls. How much is she willing to sacrifice to find them?

This incredible debut is richly atmospheric from the get go, throwing us straight into the strangeness of 19th Century Western Australia as if it is an alien landscape. In fact that’s exactly what it is for the Brightwell family, particularly Eliza whose childhood eyes we see it through for the the first time. The adult Eliza has to negotiate her way through the community’s corruption, violence, blackmail and the criminal elements of the pearling business. All the while reading her father’s diary for clues and guiding us to some fascinating characters, some of which are based on historical figures. You’ll love Eliza’s early feminist stance and sense of adventure. The twists and turns her journey takes are gripping and pull you deep into the story. It’s a fantastic debut, full of life and death, just like it’s setting.

Crime Fiction

A killer targeting pregnant women.

A detective expecting her first baby…

The shocking murder of a heavily pregnant woman throws the New Zealand city of Dunedin into a tailspin, and the devastating crime feels uncomfortably close to home for Detective Sam Shephard as she counts down the days to her own maternity leave.

Confined to a desk job in the department, Sam must find the missing link between this brutal crime and a string of cases involving mothers and children in the past. As the pieces start to come together and the realisation dawns that the killer’s actions are escalating, drastic measures must be taken to prevent more tragedy.

For Sam, the case becomes personal, when it becomes increasingly clear that no one is safe, and the clock is ticking…

There’s something about Aussie and NZ crime fiction. It’s gritty and immediate. This is the fifth in Vanda’s Sam Shepherd series and I can honestly say they’re all brilliant but this one …. I was on the edge of my seat! It feels like Sam has just let her guard down and accepted what’s next in her life, when everything could be ripped away from her. Even though she’s the one who most understood the killer’s motivations, will she still be shocked by their identity? Sam’s vulnerability is terrifying and I was praying that she would be okay, as if she’s a living and breathing human being. That’s the power of Vanda Symon’s writing and how much of that magic she’s poured into this brilliant character.

Lou O’Dowd travels across the world from Australia to Edinburgh for a job with the organisation SASOL. Her new life will be living with her cousin and working shifts at a halfway house for high risk offenders including two killers, a celebrity paedophile, and a paranoid coke dealer. After orientation, Lou will be on shift alone dealing with these offenders with little more than her own instinct to guide her. What could possibly go wrong?

Lou is a controversial character, living off a sugar daddy for a while she’s had no need to work, but when the relationship ends disastrously she has no choice but to leave. On her first day in Edinburgh she meets a man at a play who has a similar attitude to risk, enjoying mainly outdoor sex. He comes from a rich family, so maybe he could be more than a fling? I loved how the mundane domesticity of the job was mixed with genuine fear and horror of what could happen if residents flare up. There’s an evening ritual of cocoa for each resident, but it has to be to perfectly timed in order to interrupt one resident’s suicide ritual. These are the extremes a job like this entails, but it’s only the beginning….

A few more suggestions:

Travel Fiction

Summer Holiday Reads: The Greek Islands

Posted on 18th May 202518th May 2025 by thelotusreaders

Classics

Three classic tales of childhood on an island paradise – My Family and Other Animals, Birds, Beasts and Relatives and The Garden of the Gods by Gerald Durrell – make up The Corfu Trilogy.

Just before the Second World War the Durrell family decamped to the glorious, sun-soaked island of Corfu where the youngest of the four children, ten-year-old Gerald, discovered his passion for animals: toads and tortoises, bats and butterflies, scorpions and octopuses. Through glorious silver-green olive groves and across brilliant-white beaches Gerry pursued his obsession . . . causing hilarity and mayhem in his ever-tolerant family. This book is joyous and has the reputation of being the only book my brother loved. The Durrells are gloriously eccentric and this trilogy transports you to Corfu so well it’s like taking a holiday.

It is 1941 and Captain Antonio Corelli, a young Italian officer, is posted to the Greek island of Cephallonia as part of the occupying forces. At first he is ostracised by the locals but over time he proves himself to be civilised, humorous – and a consummate musician.

When Pelagia, the local doctor’s daughter, finds her letters to her fiancé go unanswered, Antonio and Pelagia draw close and the working of the eternal triangle seems inevitable. But can this fragile love survive as a war of bestial savagery gets closer and the lines are drawn between invader and defender? Forget the awful film, in which barely anyone was Greek, and pick this up if you haven’t already. Not only is it a great chronicle of WW2 in Greece, but it is a touchingly beautiful love story you’ll want to read again.

‘That summer we bought big straw hats. Maria’s had cherries around the rim, Infanta’s had forget-me-nots, and mine had poppies as red as fire. . .’

I read a recent review where Three Summers was touted as a Greek I Capture The Castle and that draws me in straight away. This is a warm and tender tale of three sisters growing up in the countryside near Athens before the Second World War. Living in a ramshackle old house with their divorced mother are flirtatious, hot-headed Maria, beautiful but distant Infanta, and dreamy and rebellious Katerina, through whose eyes the story is mostly observed. Over three summers, the girls share and keep secrets, fall in and out of love, try to understand the strange ways of adults and decide what kind of adults they hope to become. A beautiful story of growing up, sisterhood and first love.

Retold Myths

Now that all the others have run out of air, it’s my turn to do a little story-making . . . So I’ll spin my own thread.

Penelope. Immortalised in legend and Greek myth as the devoted wife of the glorious Odysseus, silently weaving and unpicking and weaving again as she waits for her husband’s return from the Trojan war.

Now Penelope wanders the underworld, spinning a different kind of thread: her own side of the story – a tale of lust, greed and murder. This is one of the first novels to write back to Greek Myth, to tell the story of a sidelined character in the tale of Odysseus. Atwood tells a tale of the Trojan War from a feminist perspective, looking through the eyes of Penelope who has no action or agency in the original myth, only appearing as the dutiful wife.

‘So to mortal men, we are monsters. Because of our flight, our strength. They fear us, so they call us monsters’

Medusa is so hard done to who acts like a cautionary tale about the meddling Greek gods. Medusa is the sole mortal in a family of gods. Growing up with her Gorgon sisters, she begins to realize that she is the only one who experiences change, the only one who can be hurt.

When Poseidon commits an unforgiveable act against Medusa in the temple of Athene, the goddess takes her revenge where she can: on his victim. Medusa is changed forever – writhing snakes for hair and her gaze now turns any living creature to stone. She can look at nothing without destroying it.

Desperate to protect her beloved sisters, Medusa condemns herself to a life of shadows. Until Perseus embarks upon a quest to fetch the head of a Gorgon . . .

After ten blood-filled years, the war is over. Troy lies in smoking ruins as the victorious Greeks fill their ships with the spoils of battle.

Alongside the treasures looted are the many Trojan women captured by the Greeks – among them the legendary prophetess Cassandra, and her watchful maid, Ritsa. Enslaved as concubine – war-wife – to King Agamemnon, Cassandra is plagued by visions of his death – and her own – while Ritsa is forced to bear witness to both Cassandra’s frenzies and the horrors to come.

Meanwhile, awaiting the fleet’s return is Queen Clytemnestra, vengeful wife of Agamemnon. Heart-shattered by her husband’s choice to sacrifice their eldest daughter to the gods in exchange for a fair wind to Troy, she has spent this long decade plotting retribution, in a palace haunted by child-ghosts.

As one wife journeys toward the other, united by the vision of Agamemnon’s death, one thing is certain: this long-awaited homecoming will change everyone’s fates forever. This is a brilliant retelling of a myth we know so well and the reality of war from a female perspective.

Crime Fiction

Mykonos had always had a romantic reputation, until the body of a female tourist was found on a pile of bones under the floor of amountain church. The island’s new police chief starts finding bodies, bones and suspects almost everywhere he looks. This thriller has a great atmosphere, is perfect for readers who love a good mystery and also Greek legends, which the author weaves throughout her story. The reader is firmly on the side of the heroine, trying desperately to escape her fate. You will also be rooting for Inspector Kaldis, who was recently demoted from Athens to the isle of Mykonos. He’s trying to avoid the political pitfalls on the island as he pursues the Killer, whose identity is not revealed until the end of the story. This is a fun one for the reader to speculate on as the action builds to a nail-biting climax. Highly enjoyable and addictive.

SOMEONE’S POISONING PARADISE

Detective Inspector Jack Dawes is travelling to a tiny Greek island with wife Corinne, ready for a bit of sun, sea and sand.

However, one of their fellow travellers is a ruthless killer.
When a storm destroys the island’s primitive communications, cutting it off from civilisation, people begin to panic. One victim is poisoned, followed swiftly by another. Then a woman is found in a grotto to St Sophia, the island’s patron saint. She is badly beaten. It feels as if the island’s visitors are being picked off one by one. Can Jack uncover the truth before the killer ups the ante?

Who will return home — and who will be sacrificed to the island?

Historical Fiction

It’s May 1941, when the island of Crete is invaded by paratroopers from the air. After a lengthy fight, thousands of British and Commonwealth soldiers are forced to take to the hills or become escaping PoWs, sheltered by the Cretan villagers.

Sixty years later, Lois West and her young son, Alex, invite feisty Great Aunt Pen to a special eighty-fifth birthday celebration on Crete, knowing she has not been back there since the war. Penelope George – formerly Giorgidiou – is reluctant, but is persuaded by the fact it is the 60th anniversary of the Battle. It is time for her to return and make the journey she never thought she’d dare to. On the outward voyage from Athens, she relives her experiences in the city from her early years as a trainee nurse to those last dark days stranded on the island, the last female foreigner.

When word spreads of her visit, and old Cretan friends and family come to greet her, Lois and Alex are caught up in her epic pilgrimage and the journey which leads her to a reunion with the friend she thought she had lost forever – and the truth behind a secret buried deep in the past…

Victoria Hislop is the Queen of fiction set on the Greek Islands, ever since her book The Island

25th August 1957. The island of Spinalonga closes its leper colony. And a moment of violence has devastating consequences.

When time stops dead for Maria Petrakis and her sister, Anna, two families splinter apart and, for the people of Plaka, the closure of Spinalonga is forever coloured with tragedy.

In the aftermath, the question of how to resume life looms large. Stigma and scandal need to be confronted and somehow, for those impacted, a future built from the ruins of the past.

Victoria Hislop returns to the world and characters she created in The Island – the award-winning novel where we first met Anna, Maria, Manolis and Andreas in the weeks leading up to the evacuation of the island… and beyond. Alexis Fielding longs to find out about her mother’s past. But Sofia has never spoken of it. All she admits to is growing up in a small Cretan village before moving to London. When Alexis decides to visit Crete, however, Sofia gives her daughter a letter to take to an old friend, and promises that through her she will learn more.

Arriving in Plaka, Alexis is astonished to see that it lies a stone’s throw from the tiny, deserted island of Spinalonga – Greece’s former leper colony. Then she finds Fotini, and at last hears the story that Sofia has buried all her life: the tale of her great-grandmother Eleni and her daughters and a family rent by tragedy, war and passion. She discovers how intimately she is connected with the island, and how secrecy holds them all in its powerful grip…

In The Figurine we are taken beneath the dust sheets in the Athens apartment that Helena McCloud has inherited from her grandparents, There she discovers a hidden hoard of rare antiquities, amassed during a dark period in Greek history when the city and its people were gripped by a brutal military dictatorship.

Helena’s fascination for archaeology, ignited by a summer spent on a dig on an Aegean island, tells her that she must return these precious artefacts to their rightful place. Only then will she be able to allay the darkness of the past and find the true meaning of home – for cultural treasures and for herself.

It seems crazy to think of the 1960s as a historical era, but it is now 60 years ago! In this dreamy and bohemian novel, Erica is eighteen and ready for freedom. It’s the summer of 1960 when she lands on the sun-baked Greek island of Hydra and is swept up in a circle of bohemian poets, painters, musicians, writers and artists, living tangled lives. Life on their island paradise is heady, dream-like, a string of seemingly endless summer days. But nothing can last forever.

Romance and Self-Love

Set on the breathtaking island of Andros, The Jasmine Isle is one of the finest literary achievements in contemporary Greek literature. Mina Saltaferou is the despotic wife of a ship’s captain, Savvas Saltaferos. Her tyrannical influence over her two daughters is unquestionable and unrelenting, like nature itself. Tragedy becomes inevitable when Mina’s beautiful, eldest daughter, Orsa, is sentenced by her mother to marry a man she doesn’t love and watch as the man she does love weds another.

I love a family saga and this one spans half a century in the history of modern Greece, this novel explores the solace and joy women find in each other’s company during the insufferably long absences of their husbands, sons, and lovers. The story alternates between descriptions of domestic life and evocations of the world’s seas and ports, as it follows both the men who embark on voyages lasting months and the lives of the women who remain behind

Calli’s world has fallen apart – her relationship is suddenly over and her chances of starting a family are gone. So when she’s sent to write a magazine article about the Greek island of Ikaria, it seems the perfect escape.

Travelling to Crete, where her family is from, Calli soon realizes there is more to discover than paradise beaches and friendly locals. When her aunt Froso begins to share the story of her own teenage heartache, will the love, betrayal and revenge she reveals change Calli’s life forever?

As a young woman, Helena spent a magical holiday at Pandora, a beautiful house in Cyprus – and fell in love for the first time. Now, twenty-four years later and following the loss of her godfather, she has inherited Pandora. And, though it is a crumbling shadow of its former self, Helena returns with her family to spend the summer there.

When, by chance, Helena meets her childhood sweetheart, her past threatens to collide with her present. She knows that the idyllic beauty of Pandora masks a web of secrets that she has kept from her husband and thirteen-year-old son. And that, once its secrets have been revealed, their lives will never be the same . . .

Sophie Keech has it all. A new life in Greece with a handsome man enables Sophie to leave her mundane job and her estranged mum. But four years on, a domineering mother-in-law to be and the reality of living in Greece not being what Sophie imagined, strains her relationship with Alekos.

When her mum is involved in an accident, Sophie jumps at the chance to escape. Time to reassess her life and make amends is sorely needed. Yet an attraction to a good looking and newly divorced man, and a shock discovery, complicates things.

Can Sophie and Alekos’ love survive the distance?

Can one house hold a lifetime of secrets?

Corfu, 1930, the moment Thirza Caruthers sets foot on Corfu, memories flood back: the scent of jasmine, the green shutters of her family’s home ― and her brother Billy’s tragic disappearance years before. Returning to the Greek house, high above clear blue waters, Thirza tries to escape by immersing herself in painting ― and a passionate affair. But as webs of love, envy, and betrayal tighten around the family, buried secrets surface, is it finally time to uncover the truth about Billy’s vanishing?

New To Look Forward To.

Could discovering a family secret encourage Kat to follow her heart?

Shattered by the sudden loss of her twin, Nik, Kat is lost in grief. The comfort of family feels both soothing and suffocating, but everything changes when she inherits a house on the breathtaking Greek island of Agistri from a mysterious uncle she’s never met.

Arriving on Agistri, Kat is mesmerized by its crystalline waters, lush pine forests, and the citrus-scented air. Among the white-washed houses and warm, welcoming locals, she begins to feel her heart heal. The island offers more than solace, sparking courage in Kat to face her loss — and maybe even embrace the spark of unexpected love…

But as she unearths her family’s buried past, Kat must also confront her own fears of belonging, forgiveness — and the possibility of rediscovering happiness in the shadow of heartbreak…