Category Archives: 4

March 29, 2026 · 1:09 pm

The Old Haunts – Allan Radcliffe

The Old Haunts – Allan Radcliffe

A friend mentioned that she was reading this and it sounded like something I would enjoy. I had to order it online though – it wasn’t available in my local book store.

Here’s the blurb…

Recently bereaved Jamie is staying at a rural steading in the heart of Scotland with his actor boyfriend Alex. The sudden loss of both of Jamie’s parents hangs like a shadow over the trip. In his grief, Jamie finds himself sifting through bittersweet memories, from his working-class upbringing in Edinburgh to his bohemian twenties in London, with a growing awareness of his sexuality threaded through these formative years.

In the present, when Alex is called away to an audition, Jamie can no longer avoid the pull of the past: haunted by an inescapable failure to share his full self with his parents, he must confront his unresolved feelings towards them.

This was a beautiful evocation of grief and the feeling that more should have been done while his parents were alive. His parents sounded delightful (I can’t imagine they would have been disappointed in his sexuality). The dialogue was fabulous – very real, and I loved the neighbour/land lady at their holiday rental.

It’s a short, quick and enjoyable read.

A review

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March 23, 2026 · 11:51 am

A Family Matter – Claire Lynch

A Family Matter – Claire Lynch

I am not sure where I first hear about this novel – definitely via the internet maybe someone on substack. I borrowed it from the library, so I mustn’t have known much about it (and was a bit loathe to commit to a purchase).

Here’s the blurb …

A mother following her heart
A father with the law on his side
A child caught in the middle

It’s 2022, and Heron, an old man of quiet habits, has just had the sort of visit to the doctor that turns a life upside down. Sharing the diagnosis with Maggie, his only daughter, seems impossible. Heron just can’t find the words to tell her about it, or any of the other things he’s been protecting her from for so long.

It’s 1982, and Dawn is a young wife and mother penned in by the expectations of her time and place. Then Hazel comes into her life like a torch in the dark. It’s the kind of connection that’s impossible to resist, and suddenly Dawn’s world is more joyful, and more complicated, than she ever expected. But Dawn has responsibilities, she has commitments: Dawn has Maggie.

A Family Matter is an immersive and tender debut, at once heart-breaking and hopeful, that asks how we might heal from the wounds of the past, and what we might learn from them.

This had an interesting chapter structure – short and split into sections. I was compelled to keep reading. We have two time periods – 1980s and contemporary, and three major characters – Heron, Dawn and Maggie. Maggie has some great thoughts about being a mother and wife and all of the tasks involved.

It is a beautifully written story – heart break, wit, prejudice, and outrage (mine). And all within recent memory.

A review

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March 19, 2026 · 2:25 pm

Bellman & Black – Diane Setterfield

Bellman & Black – Diane Setterfield

I loved Once Upon a River, and so when I saw this one at the local second hand book shop, I couldn’t resist. That book shop closed a few years ago – it just took me a while to get to this.

Here’s the blurb …

As a boy, William Bellman commits one small cruel act that appears to have unforeseen and terrible consequences. The killing of a rook with his catapult is soon forgotten amidst the riot of boyhood games. And by the time he is grown, with a wife and children of his own, he seems indeed, to be a man blessed by fortune. 
Until tragedy strikes, and the stranger in black comes, and William Bellman starts to wonder if all his happiness is about to be eclipsed. Desperate to save the one precious thing he has left, he enters into a bargain. A rather strange bargain, with an even stranger partner, to found a decidedly macabre business. 
And Bellman & Black is born.

I love historical fiction and this had a bit of magical realism thrown in as well. Set in Victorian times during the Industrial Revolution, I enjoyed all the mill references – improving the mill, improving the dying techniques, feeding the workers to keep them loyal, etc. And then the Bellman & Black emporium – an emporium for mourning – everything you could possibly need or want, coffin?, stationery? a mute to follow the coffin? All possible.

There is also chapters about rooks – different collective nouns, behaviours, two mythical rooks called Thought and Memory (‘They know everything and they do not forget’). I enjoyed the part about the rooks playing on the thermal air currents.

What does it mean to be alive? Who will tell our story when we are gone? What does it mean to be successful? All big questions tackled by this novel.

One of my favourite quotes

Dora will be sad and happy and ill and well. She will live the best she can for as long as she can and when she can do that no longer, she will die.

Sounds like a good formula.

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March 11, 2026 · 11:39 am

In the Margins – Gail Holmes

In the Margins – Gail Holmes

I bought this solely for the cover!

Here’s the blurb …

England, 1647. As civil war gives way to an uneasy peace and Puritanism becomes the letter of the law, Frances Wolfreston, a rector’s wife, is charged with enforcing religious compliance by informing on her parishioners. This awful task triggers memories of her mother, Alice, who inspired Frances’ love of books and secretly practised Catholicism at great risk. Conflicted, she doesn’t report a reclusive and mysterious midwife to delay her going to gaol.

 As Frances takes increasingly bold steps to help the women and children of the parish, she attracts the ire of a patron of the church who questions why Frances collects books that she charges are entertainment. When her mother is gaoled for religious crimes, the secrets Frances hides from her husband begin to surface, and she is faced with an impossible choice: comply with the strict dictates of the new laws, or risk everything to free the women she cares for. 

I like historical fiction and this is the first thing I read set around the time of the English civil war. I was intrigued by the recusancy laws, how quickly a woman could be accused of being a witch, and the restriction on women’s lives.

This novel is well-researched, but wears the research lightly. Society, living conditions etc are just revealed naturally as the story progresses. Being a book lover myself, the sections about Frances’ books and visiting the book seller were lovely (and some of her collection is still around today!). The relationships with her mother and her two boys are very touching.

A review

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March 3, 2026 · 3:13 pm

Trials of Hope – Yirga Gelaw Woldeyes

Trials of Hope – Yirga Gelaw Woldeyes

This book won the Hungerford award in 2024.

Here’s the blurb …

In this profound, groundbreaking narrative, Yirga Gelaw Woldeyes weaves together stories of heritage and heartache. His unique memoir celebrates the beauty of Ethiopian culture while mourning its erosion – first under colonial forces, and later through internal conflict. Framing his work via the Ethiopian belief in the four elemental stages of human experience – water, fire, soil and wind – this is an essential exploration of the human condition, connecting readers to a nation of people whose sagacity and spirit have endured through generations.

This is beautifully written (and the poems in Amharic are visually beautiful as well). The sections of memoir are interspersed with poetry. This made me think about colonisation in a different way. Not so much a violent overthrow, but a more insidious erasure of culture – because, of course, everyone wants to be ‘modern’. Also, I didn’t know anything about Ethiopia, so I enjoyed learning about that as well (all I knew was the terrible famine in 1984). It is also about the immigrant experience, being caught between two worlds, and how would you feel when your new home expects you to be grateful?

An interview.

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Filed under 4, Australian, Hungerford, hungerford, Memoir, Non-Fiction, Paper, Poetry, trials of hope, yirga gelaw woldeyes

· 7:52 am

The Sign of Four – Arthur Conan Doyle

The Sign of Four – Arthur Conan Doyle

I have continued my Sherlock Holmes adventure with number two. Also read by Stephen Fry.

Here’s the blurb …

Sherlock Holmes is bored and case-less, and relieving his boredom by alternating morphine and cocaine. Enter the charming Miss Mary Morstan, with whom Watson is instantly smitten. She requests the assistance of Holmes and Watson to solve the mysterious disappearance of her father, and the subsequent invitation to ‘have justice’ by an anonymous letter writer.

Holmes and Watson happily accompany her to see the anonymous letter writer; only to become deeply embroiled in a mystery concerning treasure, murders, India, escaped convicts and small savages with poisoned blowpipes. 

I enjoyed this – the interesting locations; India, and the Andaman Islands, there is treasure, a man with a wooden leg, an Indian uprising, and a murder in a locked room.

It had the same structure as number one – first half solving the crime and the second half from the criminal’s perspective. Is this the standard Sherlock Holmes’ structure?

Dr Watson meets Mary! What happens now? How can he continue to live with Sherlock?

I am having a bit of a pause while I listen to Bad Actors by Mick Herron (I always like a Slough House novel).

Wikipedia The Sign of the Four

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March 2, 2026 · 11:41 am

Flesh – David Szalay

Flesh – David Szalay

This is my latest book club book. I had it in my digital pile, having bought it thinking I would read all of the Booker prize shortlist for 2025 (I am still going). This won.

Here’s the blurb …

A propulsive, hypnotic novel about a man who is unravelled by a series of events beyond his grasp. 

Fifteen-year-old István lives with his mother in a quiet apartment complex in Hungary. New to the town and shy, he is unfamiliar with the social rituals at school and soon becomes isolated, with his neighbour – a married woman close to his mother’s age – as his only companion. These encounters shift into a clandestine relationship that István himself can barely understand, and his life soon spirals out of control. 

As the years pass, he is carried gradually upwards on the twenty-first century’s tides of money and power, moving from the army to the company of London’s super-rich, with his own competing impulses for love, intimacy, status and wealth winning him unimaginable riches, until they threaten to undo him completely.

Spare and penetrating, Flesh is the finest novel yet by a master of realism, asking profound questions about what drives a life: what makes it worth living, and what breaks it. 

This has a pared back, direct writing style. It is also like a group of short stories connected together with István being the connection. Each chapter has him in a new place or a new phase of his life, and we don’t know how he got there. In the bits we read he seems very passive, but he joins the army, moves to England, moves back to Hungary so he has some agency. This is a biography told through relationships; the older neighbour, his mother, Helen, Thomas, and his son. He seems attracted to women who have power over him (Helen and the neighbour). Despite not being a sympathetic character, I did feel for him in the end.

Service 95 – David Szalay Interview

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February 24, 2026 · 8:46 pm

The Cautious Traveller’s Guide to the Wastelands – Sarah Brooks

The Cautious Traveller’s Guide to the Wastelands – Sarah Brooks

A friend recommended this novel and I noticed that Miss P had a copy (I believe I bought it for her 🙂 )

Here’s the blurb …

It is said there is a price that every passenger must pay. A price beyond the cost of a ticket.

It is the end of the 19th Century and the world is awash with marvels. But there is nothing so marvellous as the Wastelands: a terrain of terrible miracles that lies between Beijing and Moscow.

Nothing touches this abandoned wilderness except the Great Trans-Siberian Express: an impenetrable train built to carry cargo across continents, but which now transports anyone who dares to cross the shadowy Wastelands.

On to the platform steps a curious cast of characters: a grieving woman with a borrowed name, a famous child born on the train and a disgraced naturalist, all heading for the Great Exhibition in Moscow.

But the old rules are changing, and there are whispers that the train isn’t safe. As secrets and stories begin to unravel the passengers and crew must survive their journey through the Wastelands together, even as something uncontrollable seems to be breaking in . . .

I would describe this as historical fantasy – is that a thing? It is set in Europe/Asia on a train voyaging between Beijing and Moscow during the 1800s. The train travels through the ‘wastelands’. On a previous crossing something terrible happened – no one on that voyage can remember what happened. On this crossing everyone is nervous, the wasteland is evolving, but how and into what?

The world building is fabulous, the characters well described. The plot, like many a fantasy novel, could have been a bit tighter (a bit of editing?), but I suspect I am in the minority on that.

A review.

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February 12, 2026 · 1:46 pm

Time of the Child – Niall Williams

Time of the Child – Niall Williams

One of the lovely women in my stitching group lent this to me.

Here’s the blurb …

Doctor Jack Troy was born and raised in the little town of Faha, but his responsibilities for the sick and his care for the dying mean he has always been set apart from his community. A visit from the doctor is always a sign of bad things to come.

 His youngest daughter, Ronnie, has grown up in her father’s shadow, and remains there, having missed her chance at real love – and passed up an offer of marriage from an unsuitable man.

 But in the advent season of 1962, as the town readies itself for Christmas, Ronnie and Doctor Troy’s lives are turned upside down when a baby is left in their care. As the winter passes, father and daughter’s lives, the understanding of their family, and their role in their community are changed forever.

This is beautifully written – is Niall Williams a poet? I could feel the damp and the humidity, not to mention the small town lack of anonymity. The baby doesn’t arrive until about halfway through the novel. Prior to that we are observing the daily lives of these ordinary people, which is made extraordinary simply by the observation. The doctor goes a bit mad when he tries to concoct a plan to keep the baby – this is Ireland in 1962, no one is going to let an unmarried woman keep the baby. However, after getting the curate drunk, sending money for a ticket to a young man in New York, crashing the car, willing an old lady to die, and Ronnie running away only to return – they concoct a good plan. This all sounds very dramatic, but it is a quiet, introspective novel with a real sense of place and character.

A review

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February 1, 2026 · 11:10 am

Children of Time – Adrian Tchaikovsky

Children of Time – Adrian Tchaikovsky

I found this in our Audible library and thought why not? The narrator, Mel Hudson, was brilliant.

Here’s the blurb …

A race for survival among the stars… Humanity’s last survivors escaped earth’s ruins to find a new home. But when they find it, can their desperation overcome its dangers?

WHO WILL INHERIT THIS NEW EARTH?

The last remnants of the human race left a dying Earth, desperate to find a new home among the stars. Following in the footsteps of their ancestors, they discover the greatest treasure of the past age – a world terraformed and prepared for human life.

But all is not right in this new Eden. In the long years since the planet was abandoned, the work of its architects has borne disastrous fruit. The planet is not waiting for them, pristine and unoccupied. New masters have turned it from a refuge into mankind’s worst nightmare.

Now two civilizations are on a collision course, both testing the boundaries of what they will do to survive. As the fate of humanity hangs in the balance, who are the true heirs of this new Earth?

I really enjoyed reading this. There are two narratives that join at the end – one from each civilization and I found both fascinating. I particularly enjoyed the conclusion (no spoilers). I was a bit worried I would have to commit to the next book in the series, but this ended at a good place – I can continue if I want to, but I feel the story has reached a satisfying end.

A review.

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