I saw this one on Jen Campbell’s youtube channel and was keen to read it. And then I found a copy at my local Dymocks.
I would describe it as a ‘woke Jane Austen’ – it was fun
The hilarious debut novel from Lex Croucher. A classic romcom with a Regency-era twist, for fans of Mean Girls and/or Jane Austen.
Abandoned by her parents, middle-class Georgiana Ellers has moved to a new town to live with her dreary aunt and uncle. At a particularly dull party, she meets the enigmatic Frances Campbell, a wealthy member of the in-crowd who lives a life Georgiana couldn’t have imagined in her wildest dreams.
Lonely and vulnerable, Georgiana falls in with Frances and her unfathomably rich, deeply improper friends. Georgiana is introduced to a new world: drunken debauchery, mysterious young men with strangely arresting hands, and the upper echelons of Regency society.
But the price of entry to high society might just be higher than Georgiana is willing to pay …
Entertaining and witty, if you like regency romances then this one if for you.
I have read Tinman and When God Was A Rabbit and enjoyed both (for some reason I haven’t blogged about them), so I was keen to read this one and I wasn’t disappointed. In fact, I think this is her best novel yet.
Here’s the blurb
Tuscany, 1944: As Allied troops advance and bombs fall around deserted villages, a young English soldier, Ulysses Temper, finds himself in the wine cellar of a deserted villa. There, he has a chance encounter with Evelyn Skinner, a middle-aged art historian who has come to Italy to salvage paintings from the ruins and recall long-forgotten memories of her own youth. In each other, Ulysses and Evelyn find a kindred spirit amongst the rubble of war-torn Italy, and set off on a course of events that will shape Ulysses’s life for the next four decades.
As Ulysses returns home to London, reimmersing himself in his crew at The Stoat and Parrot — a motley mix of pub crawlers and eccentrics — he carries his time in Italy with him. And when an unexpected inheritance brings him back to where it all began, Ulysses knows better than to tempt fate, and returns to the Tuscan hills.
With beautiful prose, extraordinary tenderness, and bursts of humor and light, Still Life is a sweeping portrait of unforgettable individuals who come together to make a family, and a richly drawn celebration of beauty and love in all its forms.
It was a generous, kind, funny and interesting story. The characters were kind to each other.
I saw a review of this in The Australian review and thought it sounded interesting. My local bookstore ordered it in for me (I don’t think it’s widely available)
And I wanted to expand my reading by reading a novel written by a neuro-diverse author.
A brilliant debut from a neuro-diverse author that explores a young woman’s magical, sensitive, and passionate inner world.
A young woman gets ready to go to a party. She arrives, feels overwhelmed, leaves, and then returns. Minutely attuned to the people who come into her view, and alternating between alienation and profound connection, she is hilarious, self-aware, sometimes acerbic, and always honest.
And by the end of the night, she’s shown us something radical about love, loss, and the need to belong.
It was an easy read, and I am glad that I have read it, but it wasn’t for me.
I can’t remember why I purchased this novel – cover maybe?
A stunning, simply told story of great compassion and insight, from the author of the Stella Prize-shortlisted An Isolated Incident. Nic is a forty-five-year-old trivia buff, amateur nail artist and fairy godmother to the neighbourhood’s stray cats. She’s also the owner of a decade’s worth of daily newspapers, enough clothes and shoes to fill Big W three times over and a pen collection which, if laid end-to-end, would probably circle her house twice. She’d put her theory to the test, if only the pen buckets weren’t currently blocked in by the crates of Happy Meal toys and the towers of Vegemite jars, take-away containers and cat food tins.
Nic’s closest relationship is with her niece Lena. The two of them meet for lunch every Sunday to gossip about the rest of the family and bitch about work (they’re both checkout chicks: Lena just for now, Nic until they prise her staff discount card from her cold, dead hands).
One Sunday, Nic fails to turn up to lunch and when Lena calls she gets a disconnection message. Arriving at the house she hasn’t visited in years (‘Too far for you to come, hon. Let’s meet in the middle.’) she finds her aunt unconscious under an avalanche of stuff.
Lena is devastated that her beloved aunt has been living in such squalor all this time. While Nic is in hospital, she gets to work cleaning things up for her. Her first impulse is to call in the bulldozers and start searching Gumtree for a roomy caravan. But with the help of her reluctantly recruited brother, Will, she gets the job done.
This heroic effort is not appreciated by the plastered up, crutch-wielding Nic. She returns to an empty, alien place unrecognisable as her home and the unbearable pity of her family who have no idea what they’ve destroyed. How can she live in this place without safety and peace? And how can she ever forgive the niece who has betrayed her.
This was a lovely story, generous and heart-warming. It’s about family, kindness and understanding. And what it really means to have a happy and successful life. I particularly enjoyed the descriptions of Nic’s stuff and how she felt about it.
I have read Sweet Caress and Love is Blind and I am sure I watched an adaptation of this (with Matthew Macfadyen) and I have had a copy on my Kindle for a very long time.
Here’s the blurb …
Every life is both ordinary and extraordinary, but Logan Mountstuart’s – lived from the beginning to the end of the twentieth century – contains more than its fair share of both. As a writer who finds inspiration with Hemingway in Paris and Virginia Woolf in London, as a spy recruited by Ian Fleming and betrayed in the war and as an art-dealer in ’60s New York, Logan mixes with the movers and shakers of his times. But as a son, friend, lover and husband, he makes the same mistakes we all do in our search for happiness. Here, then, is the story of a life lived to the full – and a journey deep into a very human heart.
Any Human Heart will be enjoyed by readers of Sebastian Faulks, Nick Hornby and Hilary Mantel, as well as lovers of the finest British and historical fiction around the world.
I enjoyed it – I do like learning a bit of history along the way. 4 out of 5.
Mr Reid lives in the same city as me and he came to my book club (historical books) to give a presentation. As that was such a kind thing to do, I wanted to buy one of his books (we did read one for that particular book club).
Here’s the blurb …
Frances, a New Zealand woman, is laid to rest in an unmarked grave in Jamaica in 1892. Her enigmatic husband, the Reverend William Hammond, cannot be found. Frances is not Reverend Hammond’s first wife, and his movements have always been elusive. Reverend Hammond has travelled by steamship and rail across continents, but when Frances joins him, the thrill of exotic travel is soon overshadowed by a sense of foreboding. Does he really want her or is she in the way? Later on, reports are sent to Frances’s brothers, alleging cunning, fraud, and possible murder. The End of Longing is a thrilling, bitter-beautiful novel which skillfully explores identity through circumstance, redemption, and love. It is a lyrical, mature, and interesting story about a confidence trickster in the late 19th/early 20th century, set as a travelogue of escape through Melbourne, Canada, Japan, the US, and through to New Zealand. There is a substratum of fact to The End of Longing. A couple bearing the same names as the two main characters did travel to the places described in this novel at the times indicated, and had some similar experiences. Indeed, the main female character is based on author Ian Reid’s distant relative.
I found it to be compelling – very much a page turner. I am not sure if it would be possible now to move on and escape your past.
I waited and waited for this book to be released and I wasn’t disappointed. Bek is my friend and her writing is magnificent.
Here is the blurb …
Funny, acerbic Edie Richter is moving with her husband from San Francisco to Perth, Australia. She leaves behind a sister and mother still mourning the recent death of her father. Before the move, Edie and her husband were content, if socially awkward?given her disinclination for small talk.
In Perth, Edie finds herself in a remarkably isolated yet verdant corner of the world, but Edie has a secret: she committed an unthinkable act that she can barely admit to herself. In some ways, the landscape mirrors her own complicated inner life, and rather than escaping her past, Edie is increasingly forced to confront what she’s done. Everybody, from the wildlife to her new neighbors, is keen to engage, and Edie does her best to start fresh. But her relationship with her husband is fraying, and the beautiful memories of her father are heartbreaking, and impossible to stop. Something, in the end, has to give.
Written in clean spare prose that is nevertheless brimming with the richness and wry humor of the protagonist’s observations and idiosyncrasies, Edie Richter is Not Alone is Rebecca Handler’s debut novel. It is both deeply shocking and entirely quotidian: a story about a woman’s visceral confrontation with the fundamental meaning of humanity.
It is witty, sad and shocking, but ultimately hopeful. And the writing – not a wasted word (as a reader this is definitely my favourite writing style).
Ali Smith is a very popular novelist amongst the bloggers, booktubers and podcasters that I follow that it seemed imperative to read one of her novels. Spring was the one the library had.
Here’s the blurb …
What unites Katherine Mansfield, Charlie Chaplin, Shakespeare, Beethoven, Brexit, the present, the past, the north, the south, the east, the west, a man mourning lost times, a woman trapped in modern times?
Spring. The great connective.
With an eye to the migrancy of story over time, and riffing on Pericles, one of Shakespeare’s most resistant and rollicking works, Ali Smith tells the impossible tale of an impossible time. In a time of walls and lockdown, Smith opens the door.
The time we’re living in is changing nature. Will it change the nature of story? Hope springs eternal.
I liked it, but not as much as I expected given all of the rave reviews from others. Is it because I started with this one rather than Autumn? Possibly I am not literary enough.
I like historical fiction and I like maths. So when I read about this on the Walter Scott prize instagram, I bought a copy immediately.
Here’s the blurb …
Howard Hinton and his family are living in Japan, escaping from a scandal. Hinton’s obsession is his work, his voyages into mathematical pure space, into the fourth dimension, but also his wife and sons, each of whom are entangled in the strange and unknown landscapes of Hinton’s science fictions.
In a bravura and startling meeting of real and philosophical elements, Mark Blacklock has created a ravishing period piece of late-Victorian social, scientific and domestic life. Hinton is about extraordinary discoveries, and terrible choices. It is about people who discover and map other realms, and what the implications might be for those of us left behind.
I can’t say that I was that taken with it. I did try to read it while I was on holiday in Broome, so not conducive to concentration.
I can’t remember where I first heard about Angela Thirkell – the Backlisted podcast perhaps?
It was easiest to find a Kindle version.
Here’s the blurb …
Successful lady novelist Laura Morland and her boisterous young son Tony set off to spend Christmas at her country home in the sleepy surrounds of High Rising. But Laura’s wealthy friend and neighbour George Knox has taken on a scheming secretary whose designs on marriage to her employer threaten the delicate social fabric of the village. Can clever, practical Laura rescue George from Miss Grey’s clutches and, what’s more, help his daughter Miss Sibyl Knox to secure her longed-for engagement?
Utterly charming and very funny, High Rising is irresistible comic entertainment.
It was fabulous – my favourite book so far this year. Four out of five.
