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.
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.
I watched the 2011 TV adaptation (which is great), then I read a paper copy, and now I have listened to it. Clearly a bit of a favourite.
Here’s the blurb …
Winifred Holtby’s masterpiece is a rich evocation of the lives and relationships of the characters of South Riding. Sarah Burton, the fiery young headmistress of the local girls’ school; Mrs Beddows, the district’s first alderwoman—based on Holtby’s own mother; and Robert Carne, the conservative gentleman-farmer locked in a disastrous marriage—with whom the radical Sarah Burton falls in love. Showing how public decisions can mold the individual, this story offers a panoramic and unforgettable view of Yorkshire life.
I really enjoyed this novel. I think it shows a slice of rural life in England between the wars. The machinations of the local council, the living conditions of the poor (lack of sanitation, not to mention birth control), the lack of welfare services (I am thinking of Lydia having to leave school to look after her siblings after her mother dies), but there is also community spirit and a hope that things will improve.
I have tried to read Villette many times. I usually get to the part when Lucy is desperately lonely and visits the catholic church. However, this time I made it all the way to the end (and it has a happy ending (well maybe a happy ending) – who knew? I thought it was going to be miserable).
Here’s the wikipedia summary
Villette begins with its protagonist and unreliable narrator, Lucy Snowe, aged 13, staying at the home of her godmother Mrs. Bretton in “the clean and ancient town of Bretton”, in England. Also in residence are Mrs. Bretton’s teenaged son, John Graham Bretton (whom the family calls Graham), and a young visitor, Paulina Home (who is called Polly), who is aged 6. Polly’s mother, who neglected her daughter, has recently died and her father is recommended by doctors to travel to improve his spirits. Polly is invited by Mrs. Bretton to stay. Polly is a serious little girl, who is described as unlike normal children.
Polly soon develops a deep devotion to Graham, who showers her with attention. But Polly’s visit is cut short when her father arrives to summon her to live with him abroad.
For reasons that are not stated, Lucy leaves Mrs. Bretton’s home a few weeks after Polly’s departure. Some years pass, during which an unspecified family tragedy leaves Lucy without family, home, or means. After some initial hesitation, she is hired as a caregiver by Miss Marchmont, a rheumatic crippled woman. Lucy is soon accustomed to her work and has begun to feel content with her quiet, frugal lifestyle.
The night of a dramatic storm, Miss Marchmont regains all her energy and feels young again. She shares with Lucy her sad love story of 30 years ago, and concludes that she should treat Lucy better and be a better person. She believes that death will reunite her with her dead lover. The next morning, Lucy finds Miss Marchmont died in the night.
Newspaper illustration from abridged version of Villette, 1909
Lucy then leaves the English countryside and goes to London. At the age of 22, she boards a ship for Labassecour despite knowing very little French. On the ship, she meets Ginevra Fanshawe, who tells Lucy that the directress of her boarding school for girls (based upon the Hegers’ Brussels pensionnat) she is attending, Madame Beck, needs a bonne for her children. She travels to the city of Villette in Labassecour where Madame Beck’s school is located. After a time, she is hired to teach English at the school, in addition to having to mind Madame Beck’s three children. She thrives despite Madame Beck’s constant spying on the staff and students.
“Dr. John,” a handsome English doctor, frequently visits the school at the behest of Madame Beck, and deepens his affection for the coquette Ginevra Fanshawe. In one of Villette’s famous plot twists, “Dr. John” is later revealed to be John Graham Bretton, a fact that Lucy has known since he once asked her why she was staring at him, but has deliberately concealed from the reader.
During the school holidays, all the teachers and pupils have either gone to travel abroad or gone back to their families. The school is completely empty except for a disabled child whom Lucy is supposed to take care of. After the disabled child is fetched away, Lucy is extremely lonely and becomes both mentally and physically ill. She goes to a Catholic church (despite being a Protestant) to confess to a priest. On the way back to the school, she collapses due to fever and mental exhaustion. Dr. John brings her to his home, which he shares with his mother, Mrs. Bretton.
Graham recognises Lucy only after she is brought to Mrs. Bretton’s home. After Dr. John (i.e., Graham) discovers Ginevra’s true character while at the theatre, he turns his attention to Lucy, and they become close friends. She values this friendship highly despite her usual emotional reserve. Lucy soon develops feelings for Dr. John and treasures the letters he sends her once she returns to the pensionnat.
Lucy and Graham meet Polly (Paulina Home) again at the same theatre after a fire, in which Polly is injured. Polly’s father has inherited the title “de Bassompierre” and is now a Count; thus her name is now Paulina Mary Home de Bassompierre. Polly and Graham soon discover that they knew each other in the past and slowly renew their friendship. They fall in love and eventually marry despite the initial reluctance of Polly’s father.
Lucy becomes progressively closer to a colleague, the irascible, autocratic, and confrontational professeur, M. Paul Emanuel, a relative of Mme. Beck. Lucy gradually realises that his apparent antagonism is actually helping her to overcome her weaknesses and to grow. She and Paul eventually fall in love.
However, a group of conspiring antagonists, including Madame Beck, the priest Père Silas, and the relatives of M. Paul’s long-dead fiancée, work to keep the two apart, on the grounds that a union between a Catholic and a Protestant is impossible. They finally succeed in forcing M. Paul’s departure for Guadeloupe to oversee a plantation there. He nonetheless declares his love for Lucy before his departure and arranges for her to live independently as the headmistress of her own day school, which she later expands into a pensionnat.
During the course of the novel, Lucy has three encounters with the figure of a nun — which may be the ghost of a nun who was buried alive on the school’s grounds as punishment for breaking her vow of chastity. In a highly symbolic scene near the end of the novel, she discovers the “nun’s” habit in her bed and destroys it. She later finds out that it was a disguise worn by Ginevra’s amour, Alfred de Hamal, placed in Lucy’s bed as a prank. The episodes with the nun no doubt contributed substantially to the novel’s reputation as a gothic novel. Ginevra keeps in contact with Lucy through letters that show the young coquette has not changed and expects to live off of her uncle’s (Basompierre’s) good graces.
Villette’s final pages are ambiguous. Although Lucy says that she wants to leave the reader free to imagine a happy ending, she hints strongly that M. Paul’s ship was destroyed by a storm during his return journey from the West Indies. She says that, “M. Emanuel was away three years. Reader, they were the three happiest years of my life.” This passage suggests that he was drowned by the “destroying angel of tempest.”
There is not much of a plot to this novel, it’s more about Lucy’s progress through life. Her loneliness, her self-possession, the impact other people have on her (both well-meaning and not so well-meaning – Madame Beck and her surveillance). The story is told from Lucy’s point of view. She is a solitary creature who longs for human connection. It is definitely from the 19th century, there is a lot of thinking, religion, and discussions about duty.
This was long listed for the Women’s Prize for non-fiction in 2024. I promptly bought it and I have just finished it.
Here’s the blurb …
The gripping story of three young women who came of age and into power in a world dominated by men.
Orphaned from infancy, Catherine de’Medici endured a tumultuous childhood. Married to King Henry II of France, she was widowed by forty, only to become the power behind the throne during a period of intense civil strife. In 1546 Catherine gave birth to a daughter, Elisabeth de Valois, who would become Queen of Spain. Two years later Catherine welcomed to her nursery the beguiling young Mary, Queen of Scots, who would become her daughter-in-law.
These years at the French court bound Catherine, Elisabeth and Mary to one another through blood and marriage, alliance and friendship, love and filial piety – bonds that were tested when they were forced to part and take on new roles in different kingdoms. As queens, they lived through the sea changes that transformed sixteenth century Europe; a time of expanding empires, religious discord and popular revolt. They would learn that to rule was to wage a constant war against the deeply entrenched attitudes of their time. A crown could exalt a young women equally it could destroy her.
This was fascinating. I already knew a bit about Mary, Queen of Scots, having read Embroidering Her Truth by Clare Hunter, and I had heard of Catherine de’Medici (and I have watched a bit of The Serpent Queen), but I had never even heard of Elizabeth de Valois.
This book has a nice easy style (conversational almost), not burdened by jargon. The writing is good and the events so compelling, and sometimes exciting, it’s like reading an historical fiction novel.
After my success at listening to War and Peace, I decided to try Anna Karenina, and this version is read by Maggie Gyllenhaal (what could be better?).
Here is the Goodreads blurb …
Acclaimed by many as the world’s greatest novel, Anna Karenina provides a vast panorama of contemporary life in Russia and of humanity in general. In it Tolstoy uses his intense imaginative insight to create some of the most memorable characters in all of literature. Anna is a sophisticated woman who abandons her empty existence as the wife of Karenin and turns to Count Vronsky to fulfil her passionate nature – with tragic consequences. Levin is a reflection of Tolstoy himself, often expressing the author’s own views and convictions.
Throughout, Tolstoy points no moral, merely inviting us not to judge but to watch. As Rosemary Edmonds comments, ‘He leaves the shifting patterns of the kaleidoscope to bring home the meaning of the brooding words following the title, ‘Vengeance is mine, and I will repay.
I am sure that everyone knows the story of Anna Karenina. And I have watched several adaptations; this one – with Keira Knightley, this one – with Sophie Marceau and Sean Bean as Vronsky, and a modern Australian version, The Beautiful Lie – with Sarah Snook.
Given that I felt I knew the story, I was pleasantly surprised by the novel. I have always thought that Karenin and Vronsky dashing and heroic, and Anna makes really bad decisions. However, now I think Karenin was good, but too christian, and Vronsky is a cad, and Anna still makes really bad decisions.
Although to be fair to Anna, this was the time before divorce, and she was stuck in a marriage with an old boring man, and she had nothing to do.
Vronsky should not have pursued her so relentlessly. He was selfish and self-centred.
Anna reminded me of Madame Bovary – that need for drama, romance and love. Not to mention blowing up their own lives. Madame Bovary was serialised in 1856 and Anna Karenina was published in 1878. Was Tolstoy having a conversation with Flaubert? Or is this a common type of woman in the 19th Century?
I did, however, like Levin and Kitty. They made up for all of the awful, selfish characters.
Sarah Perry mentioned reading this book and I was intrigued. I studied physics (as part of my Maths degree), but I am not in any way an expert.
Here’s the blurb …
This playful, entertaining, and mind-bending introduction to modern physics briskly explains Einstein’s general relativity, quantum mechanics, elementary particles, gravity, black holes, the complex architecture of the universe, and the role humans play in this weird and wonderful world. Carlo Rovelli, a renowned theoretical physicist, is a delightfully poetic and philosophical scientific guide. He takes us to the frontiers of our knowledge: to the most minute reaches of the fabric of space, back to the origins of the cosmos, and into the workings of our minds. The book celebrates the joy of discovery. “Here, on the edge of what we know, in contact with the ocean of the unknown, shines the mystery and the beauty of the world,” Rovelli writes. “And it’s breathtaking.”
There are seven chapters, lessons,
The Most Beautiful of Theories
Quanta
The Architecture of the Cosmos
Particles
Grains of Space
Probability, Time and Heat of Black Holes
Ourselves
It’s beautifully written and I think easy to understand even if you don’t have a science background. If you have ever wondered about the nature of time, Einstein’s theories, space or atoms, then this book will fascinate you. Rovelli manages to translate complicated physics ideas into simple understandable language.
I bought this book pretty much as soon as it was published, and then in languished in my pile (pile of death my daughter calls it), but my random number generator selected it, and do I read it. Of the 60 books I have read so far this year, only 22 have been from the pile – I would like it to be half.
Here’s the blurb …
I like this London life . . . the street-sauntering and square-haunting.Virginia Woolf, diary, 1925
Mecklenburgh Square, on the radical fringes of interwar Bloomsbury, was home to activists, experimenters and revolutionaries; among them were the modernist poet H. D., detective novelist Dorothy L. Sayers, classicist Jane Harrison, economic historian Eileen Power, and writer and publisher Virginia Woolf. They each alighted there seeking a space where they could live, love and, above all, work independently. Francesca Wade’s spellbinding group biography explores how these trailblazing women pushed the boundaries of literature, scholarship, and social norms, forging careers that would have been impossible without these rooms of their own.
Of the five women I knew two, Virginia Woolf and Dorothy L Sayers. I haven’t read any of Sayer’s work, but I have just started listening to Whose Body?, which I am very much enjoying.
The other three women were amazing, H. D (Hilda Doolittle), Jane Harrison, and Eileen Power were amazing and it’s appalling that they are so little known today. Eileen Power, in particular, was extremely prescient, discussing the East West divide and how dangerous it could be, and how divisive the dividing of the muslim countries by the allies after world was one would be.
These were liberated women trying to live independent lives – equal to men. They were interested in learning, and creating a better world, and believed that female involvement (collaboration and co-operation) was the way to do that.
I heard the author interviewed on ABC Book Show and thought it sounded interesting, so I tracked down a copy – it did take me a while to get to it (my random number generator is working well).
Here’s the blurb …
Tbilisi’s littered with memories that await me like landmines. The dearly departed voices I silenced long ago have come back without my permission. The situation calls for someone with a plan. I didn’t even bring toothpaste.
Saba is just a child when he flees his home in Georgia with his older brother, Sandro, and father, Irakli, for asylum in the UK after Russia’s occupation of South Ossetia. Two decades later, all three men are struggling to make peace with the past, haunted by the places and people they left behind.
When Irakli decides to return to Georgia, pulled back by memories of a lost wife and a decaying but still beautiful homeland, Saba and Sandro wait eagerly for news. But within weeks of his arrival, Irakli disappears, and the final email they receive from him causes a mystery to unfold before ‘ My boys, I did something I can’t undo. I need to get away from here before those people catch me. Maybe in the mountains I’ll be safe. I left a trail I can’t erase. Do not follow it.’
In a journey that will lead him to the very heart of a conflict that has marred generations and fractured his own family, Saba must retrace his father’s footsteps to discover what remains of their homeland and its people. By turns savage and tender, compassionate and harrowing, Hard by a Great Forest is a powerful and ultimately hopeful novel about the individual and collective trauma of war, and the indomitable spirit of a people determined not only to survive, but to remember those who did not.
This was fabulous – it’s about war and displacement, grief, brothers and there is even a treasure hunt of sorts. Plus it is funny. There are a lot of literary references (I suspect some went over my head), Shakespeare, Charles Bukowski. There is also references to Hansel and Gretel and a trail of bread crumbs.
I can’t believe this hasn’t been more popular or won some awards (it has been nominated for some).
It’s an adventure story and a reckoning with the past.
This was in my husband’s audible library (slightly odd), so I thought I would listen as I liked Portrait of a Lady.
Here’s the blurb …
The Bostonians is a novel by Henry James, first published as a serial in The Century Magazine in 1885-1886 and then as a book in 1886.
This satire of the women’s rights movement in America is the story of the ravishing inspirational speaker Verena Tarrant and the bitter struggle between two distant cousins who seek to control her. Will the privileged Boston feminist Olive Chancellor succeed in turning her beloved ward into a celebrated activist and lifetime companion? Or will Basil Ransom, a conservative southern lawyer, steal Verena’s heart and remove her from the limelight?
This was ostensibly about women’s suffrage, but I think Olive (clearly a lesbian) hated men and wanted a new world order. It came down to a competition between Olive and the handsome Basil Ransom. Poor Olive, you could see it was all going to go horribly wrong for her. She held on too tight. But I pity Verena too, I don’t think life with Basil will be what she expects it to be.
I don’t think this story works for a modern audience. People haven’t changed, but the social situation has. Now days Verena could support herself and not be dependent on Olive or Basil to keep her. She could freely choose, and maybe even have a relationship with both (not at the same time, or maybe at the same time).
The writing is beautiful and some of the incidental characters are fabulous. Mr Tarrant with his mesmeric healing, Mrs Luna and Newton (her spoiled awful son), etc.
I suspect my ignorance of the time and culture mean that I haven’t appreciated this novel as much as I should.
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