Category Archives: Fiction

October 16, 2022 · 7:45 pm

The Murder of Mr Wickham – Claudia Grey

The Murder of Mr Wickham – Claudia Gray

This is like the love child of Agatha Christie and Jane Austen, a country house murder mystery with Jane Austen characters.

Here’s the blurb …

A summer house party turns into a whodunit when Mr. Wickham, one of literature’s most notorious villains, meets a sudden and suspicious end in this mystery featuring Jane Austen’s leading literary characters.

The happily married Mr. Knightley and Emma are throwing a house party, bringing together distant relatives and new acquaintances—characters beloved by Jane Austen fans. Definitely not invited is Mr. Wickham, whose latest financial scheme has netted him an even broader array of enemies. As tempers flare and secrets are revealed, it’s clear that everyone would be happier if Mr. Wickham got his comeuppance. Yet they’re all shocked when Wickham turns up murdered—except, of course, for the killer hidden in their midst.

Nearly everyone at the house party is a suspect, so it falls to the party’s two youngest guests to solve the mystery: Juliet Tilney, the smart and resourceful daughter of Catherine and Henry, eager for adventure beyond Northanger Abbey; and Jonathan Darcy, the Darcys’ eldest son, whose adherence to propriety makes his father seem almost relaxed. The unlikely pair must put aside their own poor first impressions and uncover the guilty party—before an innocent person is sentenced to hang.

This was a fun read, well-written and interesting. I am not sure that the Knightley’s and Wentworth’s would have been duped by Wickham’s investment schemes, and I have a different view of Edmund Bertram. However, I kept turning pages to find out who the murderer was. I think you could read this without knowing Jane Austen, but it is definitely for Jane Austen fans.

Another review.

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October 11, 2022 · 9:10 pm

Before the Coffee Gets Cold – Toshikazu Kawaguchi

Before the Coffee Gets Cold – Toshikazu Kawaguchi

This is my book club book for November. I know the third one has just been released and lots of people are talking about this story.

Here’s the blurb …

What would you change if you could go back in time?

In a small back alley in Tokyo, there is a café which has been serving carefully brewed coffee for more than one hundred years. But this coffee shop offers its customers a unique experience: the chance to travel back in time.

In Before the Coffee Gets Cold, we meet four visitors, each of whom is hoping to make use of the café’s time-travelling offer, in order to: confront the man who left them, receive a letter from their husband whose memory has been taken by early onset Alzheimer’s, to see their sister one last time, and to meet the daughter they never got the chance to know.

But the journey into the past does not come without risks: customers must sit in a particular seat, they cannot leave the café, and finally, they must return to the present before the coffee gets cold . . .

Toshikazu Kawaguchi’s beautiful, moving story explores the age-old question: what would you change if you could travel back in time? More importantly, who would you want to meet, maybe for one last time? 

This was an easy read. I would describe it as inter-connected short stories. We follow the people who choose to go back in time. What I did notice is that everyone who went back in time began to see the situation from the other person’s perspective (which can’t be a bad thing). I am not sure if I will read anymore, although it would be nice to learn about the ghost lady.

A review

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October 1, 2022 · 8:09 pm

People We Meet on Vacation – Emily Henry

People We Meet on Vacation – Emily Henry

After reading and enjoying Book Lovers, I was keen to read more novels by Emily Henry.

Here’s the blurb …

Two best friends. Ten summer trips. One last chance to fall in love.

Poppy and Alex. Alex and Poppy. They have nothing in common. She’s a wild child; he wears khakis. She has insatiable wanderlust; he prefers to stay home with a book. And somehow, ever since a fateful car share home from college many years ago, they are the very best of friends. For most of the year they live far apart—she’s in New York City, and he’s in their small hometown—but every summer, for a decade, they have taken one glorious week of vacation together.

Until two years ago, when they ruined everything. They haven’t spoken since.

Poppy has everything she should want, but she’s stuck in a rut. When someone asks when she was last truly happy, she knows, without a doubt, it was on that ill-fated, final trip with Alex. And so, she decides to convince her best friend to take one more vacation together—lay everything on the table, make it all right. Miraculously, he agrees.

Now she has a week to fix everything. If only she can get around the one big truth that has always stood quietly in the middle of their seemingly perfect relationship. What could possibly go wrong?

While I was reading this, I thought it was very reminiscent of When Harry Met Sally; the car journey together organised by a third party, their friendship, etc. So I was pleased to read in the Reading Guide at the back of the book that it was an homage to When Harry Met Sally. This was a well-written, witty, fun read, with a bit of character development along the way.

I shall be definitely be reading more of her novels (I have reserved Beach Read at the library).

A review

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September 27, 2022 · 5:12 pm

The Housekeeper and the Professor –

The Housekeeper and the Professor – Yoko Ogawa

I heard about this on Twitter maybe?

Here’s the blurb …

He is a brilliant math Professor with a peculiar problem–ever since a traumatic head injury, he has lived with only eighty minutes of short-term memory.

She is an astute young Housekeeper, with a ten-year-old son, who is hired to care for him.

And every morning, as the Professor and the Housekeeper are introduced to each other anew, a strange and beautiful relationship blossoms between them. Though he cannot hold memories for long (his brain is like a tape that begins to erase itself every eighty minutes), the Professor’s mind is still alive with elegant equations from the past. And the numbers, in all of their articulate order, reveal a sheltering and poetic world to both the Housekeeper and her young son. The Professor is capable of discovering connections between the simplest of quantities–like the Housekeeper’s shoe size–and the universe at large, drawing their lives ever closer and more profoundly together, even as his memory slips away.

The Housekeeper and the Professor is an enchanting story about what it means to live in the present, and about the curious equations that can create a family.

This is a really lovely story about the families we create for ourselves. And it has stuff about maths, primes, number theory, etc. I did find the story just petered out at the end, but I really liked it for two-thirds.

A review.

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September 24, 2022 · 5:34 pm

The Marriage Portrait – Maggie O’Farrell

The Marriage Portrait – Maggie O’Farrell

Hamnet was my favourite book of 2020, so I was keen to read this new novel.

Here’s the blurb …

I thought I had made myself clear. I want something that conveys her majesty, her bloodline. Do you understand? She is no ordinary mortal. Treat her thus.’

Florence, the 1560s. Lucrezia, third daughter of Cosimo de’ Medici, is free to wander the palazzo at will, wondering at its treasures and observing its clandestine workings. But when her older sister dies on the eve of marriage to Alfonso d’Este, heir to the Duke of Ferrara, Modena and Reggio, Lucrezia is thrust unwittingly into the limelight: Alfonso is quick to request her hand in marriage, and her father to accept on her behalf.

Having barely left girlhood, Lucrezia must now make her way in a troubled court whose customs are opaque and where her arrival is not universally welcomed. Perhaps most mystifying of all is her husband himself, Alfonso. Is he the playful sophisticate he appears before their wedding, the aesthete happiest in the company of artists and musicians, or the ruthless politician before whom even his formidable sisters seem to tremble?

As Lucrezia sits in uncomfortable finery for the painting which is to preserve her image for centuries to come, one thing becomes worryingly clear. In the court’s eyes, she has one duty: to provide the heir who will shore up the future of the Ferrarese dynasty. Until then, for all of her rank and nobility, her future hangs entirely in the balance.

It took me a while to get into this one. It’s told from Lucrezia’s point of view, so although you know something is not quite right, you’re in the dark as to what is actually going on. The writing is beautiful and I was facsinated by the lifestyle of aristocratic Italians in the 16th century. The descriptions of the palazzo and the fortessa, the clothes and the food were fascinating.

I still preferred Hamnet to this one, but I enjoyed it.

A review

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September 11, 2022 · 12:59 pm

Book Lovers – Emily Henry

Book Lovers – Emily Henry

I am not sure where I first heard of this novel, but I certainly read about it somewhere and I reserved it at my library. It took a few months to be my turn.

Here’s the blurb …

One summer. Two rivals. A plot twist they didn’t see coming….

Nora Stephens’ life is books—she’s read them all—and she is not that type of heroine. Not the plucky one, not the laidback dream girl, and especially not the sweetheart. In fact, the only people Nora is a heroine for are her clients, for whom she lands enormous deals as a cutthroat literary agent, and her beloved little sister Libby.

Which is why she agrees to go to Sunshine Falls, North Carolina for the month of August when Libby begs her for a sisters’ trip away—with visions of a small-town transformation for Nora, who she’s convinced needs to become the heroine in her own story. But instead of picnics in meadows, or run-ins with a handsome country doctor or bulging-forearmed bartender, Nora keeps bumping into Charlie Lastra, a bookish brooding editor from back in the city. It would be a meet-cute if not for the fact that they’ve met many times and it’s never been cute.

If Nora knows she’s not an ideal heroine, Charlie knows he’s nobody’s hero, but as they are thrown together again and again—in a series of coincidences no editor worth their salt would allow—what they discover might just unravel the carefully crafted stories they’ve written about themselves.

I really enjoyed this novel; it’s witty and well-written. I thought for a minute it was going to have a sophisticated unhappy ending, but fortunately that wasn’t the case.

A review

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September 10, 2022 · 5:28 pm

On the Way to the Wedding – Julia Quinn

On the Way to the Wedding – Julia Quinn

I have made it to the end of the Bridgerton novels.

Here’s the blurb…

A funny thing happened…

Unlike most men of his acquaintance, Gregory Bridgerton believes in true love. And he is convinced that when he finds the woman of his dreams, he will know in an instant that she is the one. And that is exactly what happened. Except…

She wasn’t the one. In fact, the ravishing Miss Hermione Watson is in love with another. But her best friend, the ever-practical Lady Lucinda Abernathy, wants to save Hermione from a disastrous alliance, so she offers to help Gregory win her over. But in the process, Lucy falls in love. With Gregory! Except…

Lucy is engaged. And her uncle is not inclined to let her back out of the betrothal, even once Gregory comes to his senses and realizes that it is Lucy, with her sharp wit and sunny smile, who makes his heart sing. And now, on the way to the wedding, Gregory must risk everything to ensure that when it comes time to kiss the bride, he is the only man standing at the altar…

This one was fun. I have enjoyed them all, except for, maybe, Benedict’s story (I suspect I am not alone in this because the TV series is skipping him and moving onto Colin and Penelope). There were balls, pretty clothes, nice houses and awful relatives. All in all a fun romp.

A review

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August 29, 2022 · 11:46 am

Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow

Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow – Gabrielle Zevin

A friend recommended this one and as I have read (and loved) The Collected Works of AJ Fikry, I was very keen to read this one.

Here’s the blurb…

In this exhilarating novel by the best-selling author of The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry two friends–often in love, but never lovers–come together as creative partners in the world of video game design, where success brings them fame, joy, tragedy, duplicity, and, ultimately, a kind of immortality.

On a bitter-cold day, in the December of his junior year at Harvard, Sam Masur exits a subway car and sees, amid the hordes of people waiting on the platform, Sadie Green. He calls her name. For a moment, she pretends she hasn’t heard him, but then, she turns, and a game begins: a legendary collaboration that will launch them to stardom. These friends, intimates since childhood, borrow money, beg favors, and, before even graduating college, they have created their first blockbuster, Ichigo. Overnight, the world is theirs. Not even twenty-five years old, Sam and Sadie are brilliant, successful, and rich, but these qualities won’t protect them from their own creative ambitions or the betrayals of their hearts.

Spanning thirty years, from Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Venice Beach, California, and lands in between and far beyond, Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is a dazzling and intricately imagined novel that examines the multifarious nature of identity, disability, failure, the redemptive possibilities in play, and above all, our need to connect: to be loved and to love. Yes, it is a love story, but it is not one you have read before. 

This was a fabulous story and if you are a gamer (I’m not) you’re going to love it. However, you don’t have to be into games to enjoy this novel; the characters, the relationships, the beautiful writing about the games are all fabulous.

A review.

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August 20, 2022 · 9:21 pm

The Invisible Life of Addie Larue – V E Schwab

The Invisible Life of Addie La Rue – V E Schwab

After the success of listening to The Lady’s Guide to Fortune Hunting, I decided I needed to listen to something else. I found this one on Mr H’s audible list.

Here’s the blurb …

France, 1714: in a moment of desperation, a young woman makes a Faustian bargain to live forever-and is cursed to be forgotten by everyone she meets.

Thus begins the extraordinary life of Addie LaRue, and a dazzling adventure that will play out across centuries and continents, across history and art, as a young woman learns how far she will go to leave her mark on the world.

But everything changes when, after nearly 300 years, Addie stumbles across a young man in a hidden bookstore, and he remembers her name.

First, the narrator (Julia Whelan) was fabulous. I really enjoyed listening to this novel. The story was fascinating; it was told from two different times – contemporary and historical. In the historical section, we learn how Addie copes with the curse and discovers its limitations and advantages. In the contemporary section, she has been living with the curse for three hundred years and she meets (finally) Henry, the first person in three hundred years to remember her. The writing was beautiful, I particularly enjoyed the start of each part.

I am not sure how I feel about the ending, however, I am also not sure how I wanted it to end.

A review.

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August 16, 2022 · 8:23 pm

Euphoria – Lily King

Euphoria – Lily King

Having really enjoyed Five Tuesdays in Winter, I was keen to read a novel. This was the only one available at my library.

Here’s the blurb

English anthropologist Andrew Bankson has been alone in the field for several years, studying the Kiona river tribe in the Territory of New Guinea. Haunted by the memory of his brothers’ deaths and increasingly frustrated and isolated by his research, Bankson is on the verge of suicide when a chance encounter with colleagues, the controversial Nell Stone and her wry and mercurial Australian husband Fen, pulls him back from the brink. Nell and Fen have just fled the bloodthirsty Mumbanyo and, in spite of Nell’s poor health, are hungry for a new discovery. When Bankson finds them a new tribe to divert them from leaving Papua New Guinea, the artistic, female-dominated Tam, he ignites an intellectual and romantic firestorm between the three of them that burns out of anyone’s control.


Set between two World Wars and inspired by events in the life of revolutionary anthropologist Margaret Mead, Euphoria is an enthralling story of passion, possession, exploration, and sacrifice.

Once again the writing was beautiful, but the subject didn’t appeal to me.

Another review

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