Category Archives: 5

September 2, 2023 · 3:17 pm

The Unknown Ajax – Georgette Heyer

The Unknown Ajax – Georgette Heyer

I love Georgette Heyer’s regency romances and this might be my favourite one.

Here’s the blurb …

Miles from anywhere, Darracott Place is presided over by elderly Lord Darracott. Irascible Lord Darracott rules his barony with a firm hand. The tragic accident that killed his eldest son by drowning has done nothing to improve his temper. For now, he must send for the next heir apparent–the unknown offspring of the uncle whom the family is never permitted to mention. He also summons his bickering descendants to the rundown family estate. Yet none of that beleaguered family are prepared for the arrival of the weaver’s brat and heir apparent…

This was a lot of fun with all of the usual Heyerisms – lots of cant terms, silly young man, sensible (not to mention wealthy) slightly older man, a bit of action and amazing historical research. And the ending is particularly clever and inventive.

Here’s a fabulous article from Jennifer Kloester (she wrote a biography of Heyer).

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May 1, 2023 · 6:21 pm

Small Things Like These – Claire Keegan

Small Things Like These – Claire Keegan

I had been tempted to read this book for a while and then it popped up on Borrowbox as an audio book. It’s very short – about two hours.

I loved it, I think it’s my favourite read (so far) for the year.

Here’s the blurb …

It is 1985 in a small Irish town. During the weeks leading up to Christmas, Bill Furlong, a coal merchant and family man faces into his busiest season. Early one morning, while delivering an order to the local convent, Bill makes a discovery which forces him to confront both his past and the complicit silences of a town controlled by the church.

Already an international bestseller, Small Things Like These is a deeply affecting story of hope, quiet heroism, and empathy from one of our most critically lauded and iconic writers.

This is a beautifully written story. It’s about family, community and kindness, but it is also about cruelty and judgement and meanness

A review

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January 23, 2023 · 2:45 pm

The Netanyahus – Joshua Cohen

The Netanyahus – Joshua Cohen

A dear friend gave me this book for chirstmas. I didn’t know anything about it all, and I wasn’t sure what to expect, but I loved it.

Corbin College, not-quite-upstate New York, winter 1959-1960: Ruben Blum, a Jewish historian – but not an historian of the Jews – is co-opted onto a hiring committee to review the application of an exiled Israeli scholar specializing in the Spanish Inquisition. When Benzion Netanyahu shows up for an interview, family unexpectedly in tow, Blum plays the reluctant host, to guests who proceed to lay waste to his American complacencies. Mixing fiction with non-fiction, the campus novel with the lecture, THE NETANYAHUS is a wildly inventive, genre-bending comedy of blending, identity, and politics – ‘An Account of A Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Incident in the History of a Very Famous Family’ that finds Joshua Cohen at the height of his powers.

It’s first person narration (which I always like) and the language is rich, I had to stop and look words up all the time. Also, I was intrigued by jewish history; was the Spanish Inquisition lead by the monarchy and not the church to reduce the power of the nobles? I even looked on Wikipedia to find out how Israel was formed after World War Two.

A review

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January 11, 2023 · 2:01 pm

The Whalebone Theatre – Joanna Quinn

The Whalebone Theatre – Joanna Quinn

A friend mentioned that she had enjoyed this novel, so I reserved it at the library and my turn came around quickly, I think someone else is now waiting for it. This was great, so much detail.

Here’s the blurb …

A transporting, irresistible debut novel that takes its heroine, Cristabel Seagrave, from a theatre in the gargantuan cavity of a beached whale into undercover operations during World War II—a story of love, family, bravery, lost innocence, and self-transformation.

“The Whalebone Theatre is absolute aces…Quinn’s imagination and adventuresome spirit are a pleasure to behold.” —The New York Times

One blustery night in 1928, a whale washes up on the shores of the English Channel. By law, it belongs to the King, but twelve-year-old orphan Cristabel Seagrave has other plans. She and the rest of the household—her sister, Flossie; her brother, Digby, long-awaited heir to Chilcombe manor; Maudie Kitcat, kitchen maid; Taras, visiting artist—build a theatre from the beast’s skeletal rib cage. Within the Whalebone Theatre, Cristabel can escape her feckless stepparents and brisk governesses, and her imagination comes to life.

As Cristabel grows into a headstrong young woman, World War II rears its head. She and Digby become British secret agents on separate missions in Nazi-occupied France—a more dangerous kind of playacting, it turns out, and one that threatens to tear the family apart.

I found it compelling, there is so much going on – family relationships, theatre, country house between the wars, world war 2, art, french resistance, …

It was beautifully written, despite being long I never thought it could do with an edit (very unusual for me).

If you love big, meaty, with lots of themes historical fiction, then this book is for you.

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December 26, 2022 · 2:36 pm

Shrines of Gaiety – Kate Atkinson

Shrines of Gaiety – Kate Atkinson

I like all of Kate Atkinson’s novels – here’s a previous review – and I found this one compelling.

Here’s the blurb …

London 1926. Roaring Twenties.
Corruption. Seduction. Debts due.

In a country still recovering from the Great War, London is the focus for a delirious nightlife. In Soho clubs, peers of the realm rub shoulders with starlets, foreign dignitaries with gangsters, and girls sell dances for a shilling a time.

There, Nellie Coker is a ruthless ruler, ambitious for her six children. Niven is the eldest, his enigmatic character forged in the harsh Somme. But success breeds enemies. Nellie faces threats from without and within. Beneath the gaiety lies a dark underbelly, where one may be all too easily lost.

This novel was beautifully written (and researched). It’s all about London night life of the 1920s, everyone is trying to have a good time after the deprivations of the war. But it is also about the seedier elements of the nightlife; the crime, the drugs and the girls (who seem disposable).

This is definitely one of my favourite books for the year.

A review

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August 4, 2022 · 7:58 pm

The Lady’s Guide to Fortune Hunting – Sophie Irwin

The Lady’s Guide of Fortune Hunting – Sophie Irwin

I was looking for something to read on my Kindle that had an audible book and I found this one in my electronic pile.

It was fabulous; the love child of Georgette Heyer and Jane Austen.

Here’s the blurb …

A whip-smart debut that follows the adventures of an entirely unconventional heroine who throws herself into the London Season to find a wealthy husband. But the last thing she expects is to find love…

Kitty Talbot needs a fortune. Or rather, she needs a husband who has a fortune. Left with her father’s massive debts, she has only twelve weeks to save her family from ruin.

Kitty has never been one to back down from a challenge, so she leaves home and heads toward the most dangerous battleground in all of England: the London season.

Kitty may be neither accomplished nor especially genteel—but she is utterly single-minded; imbued with cunning and ingenuity, she knows that risk is just part of the game.

The only thing she doesn’t anticipate is Lord Radcliffe. The worldly Radcliffe sees Kitty for the mercenary fortune-hunter that she really is and is determined to scotch her plans at all costs, until their parrying takes a completely different turn…

This is a frothy pleasure, full of brilliant repartee and enticing wit—one that readers will find an irresistible delight

Currently, this is my favourite read of the year. Well-written, clever and witty.

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November 10, 2021 · 11:33 am

Still Life – Sarah Winman

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Still Life – Sarah Winman

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.

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July 6, 2021 · 6:26 pm

Edie Richter is Not Alone – Rebecca Handler

Edie Richter is Not Alone – Rebecca Handler

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).

Here is another review.

Five out of five (my first for the year!)

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January 22, 2020 · 5:56 pm

Bridge of Clay – Marcus Zusak

Bridge of Clay – Marcus Zusak

This is my book club book for this month (January) – not a book I would have chosen and I am not sure why as I really enjoyed The Book Thief.

Bridge of Clay is about a boy who is caught in the current – of destroying everything he has, to become all he needs to be. He’s a boy in search of greatness, as a cure for memory and tragedy. He builds a bridge to save his family, but also to save himself. It’s an attempt to transcend humanness, to make a single, glorious moment:

A miracle and nothing less.

I loved it – found it compelling. It had a generous spirit (and I am not sure why but reminded my of Trent Dalton’s Boy Swallows Universe – maybe just all of those boys). 5/5

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January 15, 2020 · 6:17 pm

Seven Types of Ambiguity – Elliot Perlman

Seven Types of Ambiguity – Elliot Perlman

I was on holiday and wanted to buy a paper book by an Australian author – this was the one I chose.

Seven Types of Ambiguity is a psychological thriller and a literary adventure of breathtaking scope. Celebrated as a novelist in the tradition of Jonathan Franzen and Philip Roth, Elliot Perlman writes of impulse and paralysis, empty marriages, lovers, gambling, and the stock market; of adult children and their parents; of poetry and prostitution, psychiatry and the law. Comic, poetic, and full of satiric insight, Seven Types of Ambiguity is, above all, a deeply romantic novel that speaks with unforgettable force about the redemptive power of love.

The story is told in seven parts, by six different narrators, whose lives are entangled in unexpected ways. Following years of unrequited love, an out-of-work schoolteacher decides to take matters into his own hands, triggering a chain of events that neither he nor his psychiatrist could have anticipated. Brimming with emotional, intellectual, and moral dilemmas, this novel-reminiscent of the richest fiction of the nineteenth century in its labyrinthine complexity-unfolds at a rapid-fire pace to reveal the full extent to which these people have been affected by one another and by the insecure and uncertain times in which they live. Our times, now. 

I loved it – it was dense (but not hard to read), literary and compelling (it’s long and I read it in a week). 5/5 (my first for the year).

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