Directions: Share two snippets (a sentence or short paragraph) from a) the book’s opening and b) page 56 (or another page) from the book you are currently reading. No spoilers, please.
I’m currently reading Brat Farrar by Josephine Tey, a novel about the Ashbys, an English country-squire family, first published in 1949.
Book beginning, Chapter One:
‘Aunt Bree,’ said Jane, breathing heavily into her soup, was Noah a cleverer back-room boy than Ulysses, or was Ulysses a cleverer back-room boy than Noah?’
Second snippet: Page 6
How shadowy was he to her: the kind solemn little boy who should have been coming into his inheritance next month? She tried to call up his face in front of her but there was only a blur. He had been small and immature for his age, but otherwise he was just an Ashby. Less an individual than a family resemblance.
Description from Amazon UK:
Young orphan, Brat Farrar, closely resembles the dead heir to Latchetts, a centuries-old family estate on the south coast of England. Against his better judgement, Brat is persuaded to pose as Patrick Ashby, the true heir, and claim the inheritance. Most of the Ashbys accept the imposter, only one suspects him, but his reasons are so strange that Brat comes to believe something very evil has happened to Patrick…
Judi Dench and Brendan O’Hea take us on a heartfelt and hilarious tour of her extraordinary life and career. From growing up in York and being miffed at not getting the part of Mary in the school Nativity play, to playing before sold-out houses on Broadway and in London’s West End, she’s done it all. She walked the red carpets of Hollywood, turned James Bond’s M into the most astute, unflinching Head of MI6 anyone could ever have imagined, and won an Oscar, a Tony, Golden Globes, Oliviers, and BAFTAs along the way.
The last book I read was Missing Joseph by Elizabeth George, the 6th Inspector Lynley book. I hadn’t read any of the Inspector Lynley novels, although I’ve watched the TV adaptation. It does fill in some of the background of the main characters, so it did work reasonably well as a standalone.
There are several strands to the book which I did find somewhat confusing at times. The main one is the mystery surrounding the death the story of an Anglican priest, Robin Sage, who apparently died as a result of accidental poisoning. Deborah and her husband, Simon, turn to their old friend, Inspector Lynley to solve it.
However, there’s too much description for me (and I do like description) of everything with too much detail about small things that have nothing to do with the plot, and too many minor characters. The main story doesn’t really get anywhere until the last third, or so, of the book. There’s also too much detail about teenage sex and also a particularly nasty rape scene, that didn’t have much, if any, relevance to the plot. Inspector Lynley only has a minor role and Detective Sergeant Barbara Havers has an even smaller role. The main theme is about children, mothers desperate to have a baby, and relationships between parents and children.
Overall I was a bit disappointed, although I kept reading because I wanted to know why and how Sage died.
What will I read next? I’m not sure, but it could be Brat Farrar by Josephine Tey, a Golden Age crime mystery novel.
A stranger enters the inner sanctum of the Ashby family posing as Patrick Ashby, the heir to the family’s sizeable fortune. The stranger, Brat Farrar, has been carefully coached on Patrick’s mannerisms, appearance and every significant detail of Patrick’s early life, up to his thirteenth year when he disappeared and was thought to have drowned himself.
It seems as if Brat is going to pull off this most incredible deception until old secrets emerge that threaten to jeopardise the imposter’s plan and his very life…
I haven’t read The Life of M, so here is the description from Amazon:
M is a film star, and one of the most recognisable faces of our time
With such fame, her life has the appearance of freedom: people are instantly obliging, spaces are altered to accommodate her, time can be rM is a film star, and one of the most recognisable faces of our time.
With such fame, her life has the appearance of freedom: people are instantly obliging, spaces are altered to accommodate her, time can be rearranged. For her, it seems, the rules of reality have melted away.
Now M has agreed to let a stranger write her biography. Their project will sprawl and expand: to the olive groves and holiday beaches where M spends her days; across hotel rooms, bourgeois facades, film sets; through endless modern cities. It is hard not to feel ugly next to M, hard not to feel insignificant. But what truths – about the very experience of living – might this proximity allow the writer to briefly capture? And what in the end will M make of their work?
There’s another character known only as M in one of Rachel Cusk’s earlier novels, Second Place. She invites L, a well-known artist, to stay at her cottage. Having read D. H. Lawrence: the Life of an Outsider by John Worthen, I’d had an inkling that L was based on D H Lawrence and indeed in her Acknowledgement at the end of the book Cusk refers to Mabel Dodge Luhan’s 1932 memoir of the time D H Lawrence stayed with her in Taos, New Mexico.
Worthen’s biography is a detailed portrait of Lawrence’s life from his birth in 1885 in Eastwood in Nottinghamshire to his death at the age of 44. I read it in November 2013 and in the same month I also read N or M? by Agatha Christie, a Tommy and Tuppence spy story, and another book with characters known only by their initials. Tommy is asked to go under cover to track down members of the Fifth Column, two German agents, whose mission is to infiltrate British society. All that is known about them is that N is a man and M a woman and they are thought to be at Leahampton on the south coast.
Following the publication of N or M? Agatha Christie was investigated by MI5 because she had named one of the characters ‘Major Bletchley’ and MI5 suspected she had a spy in Britain’s undercover code breaking centre, Bletchley Park.
In The Predicament by William Boyd, Gabriel Drax is spy who doesn’t want to be a spy. He is being drawn into the dangerous and shadowy world of espionage by his fascination/obsession with Faith Green, his MI6 handler, who effortlessly manipulates him. Part of the book is set in Berlin where Drax is assigned to assist the CIA prevent the assassination of President Kennedy.
Berlin is the setting of The Dancing Bear in the aftermath of World War Two, from Autumn 1946 to Autumn 1949. It’s Frances Faviell’s memoir mainly about her friendship with the Altmann family, who lived on the ground floor of a large ruined house – the upper storeys had disappeared and just the twisted iron girders remained, sticking up grotesquely against the sky. The ground floor looked very shaky, the windows were covered in cardboard and the door had been repaired from odd pieces of wood.
The Family Upstairs by Lisa Jewell is about a completely dysfunctional family, living in 16 Cheyne Walk, London. Their house is dark, mysterious and steeped in a malevolent atmosphere, with panelled walls, locked rooms, a secret staircase and a full-size cannon in the front garden. And within its walls the family lived in fear, locked away from the outside world, dominated by a megalomaniac.
My links are characters known by their initials, two are by the same author, two are spy novels, two are books set in Berlin, and finally two books about families and their houses.
In recognition of Novellas in November, next month (November 7, 2026) start with a novella that’s on your reading list.
In 1970s London, Edwin, Norman, Letty and Marcia work in the same office and suffer the same problem – loneliness.
Lovingly and with delightful humour, Barbara Pym conducts us through their day-to-day existence: their preoccupations, their irritations, their judgements, and – perhaps most keenly felt – their worries about having somehow missed out on life as post-war Britain shifted around them. In 1970s London, Edwin, Norman, Letty and Marcia work in the same office and suffer the same problem – loneliness.
I’ve enjoyed a few of Barbara Pym’s books – Excellent Women, Jane and Prudence, A Glass of Blessings and now Quartet in Autumn, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize when it was published in 1977. She had written six books between 1950 – 1961. Then she was rejected by her publisher, only to be accepted after an article in the TLS in 1977, when both Philip Larkin and Lord David Cecil nominated her as ‘the most underrated writer‘. It is a darker novel than the other two books of hers that I’ve read and the saddest, covering the themes of loneliness and the feeling of being isolated that can happen as one ages.
It’s a quiet novella about the everyday lives of Edwin, Letty, Marcia and Norman who have little in common, except that they have worked in the same office for many years. We never find what their jobs actually are, nor who they work for. Despite their loneliness they never met outside work and revealed little of their personal lives to each other. They are ordinary, but individual and eccentric people. They’re conscious of the way the post girl looked at them,
perhaps seeing Edwin, large and bald with a pinkish face, Norman, small and wiry with his bristly gray hair, Marcia with her general look of oddness, Letty, fluffy and faded, a Home Counties type, still making an effort with her clothes. (page 7)
Edwin is the only one who was married. He is now a widower, with a son and a grandson, and spends his spare time attending different churches. Letty is the only one who has a friend, Marjorie who is a widow. They had planned to share a cottage in the country when Letty retired. But when Marjorie announces she is getting married to a clergyman, younger than herself, that all changes and Letty is left on her own in her bedsitter.
Marcia is anti-social, avoiding contact with anyone, including the social worker who visits her after she’d had a serious operation. She was not a whole woman; some vital part of her had been taken away, though whether breast or womb was not generally known‘. She’s a hoarder, collecting empty milk bottles, storing them in her garden shed, keeping plastic bags neatly folded in a drawer and although she buys plenty of tinned food, she rarely eats any of it. Marcia thinks Norman is a ‘rather silly little man‘, who fusses over his shopping, reading out his shopping lists in the office. He doesn’t know what to do with himself when he’s not working; an angry, cynical and sarcastic man.
The characters are the main focus of the book, each one, springing to life as I read on. Pym is such a keen observer of human nature, giving the little details that bring the characters to life. The narrative alternates between each of them, following their daily lives and revealing more of their background. They are all elderly and looking forward with trepidation to what comes next after they reach retiring age. But they are isolated from each other until a crisis brings three of them together at the end of the book. It is a melancholy book, lightened at times with a little humour and ending on an optimistic note as Letty realises that ‘life still held infinite possibilities for change‘.
I enjoyed it and would like to read more of her books.
A Quartet in Autumn is my Classics Club Spin book to be read by 4th October 2026.
Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly meme created by The Broke and the Bookish and now hosted by Jana at That Artsy Reader Girl. For the rules see her blog.
The topic this week is Books on My Fall 2026 To-Read List. The first two books are NetGalley review copies. The rest are from my Kindle TRB list.
Is It Too Late to Make a Run for It? by Judi Dench – Dame Judi Dench tells us of her life on the stage, on the screen, and, above all, behind the scenes …
The Recruit by L D Sharpe, a spy thriller, previously published by Burning Chair in 2022 as The King’s Pawn by Lucy Hooft.
The Prince and a Spy by Rory Clements – a Cambridge spy must unravel a dangerous mystery that goes all the way to the heart of the Third Reich – and the British Monarchy.
The Years by Virginia Woolf – a novel about a large upper-class London family, spanning three generations of the Pargiter family from the 1880s to the 1930s.
Maigret’s Dead Man by Georges Simenon – a series of strange phone calls leads Inspector Maigret through the Paris streets towards a man out of his depth amid a network of merciless criminals.
The Women of Arlington Hall by Jane Healey – historical fiction about female code breakers in the Cold War, in the late 1940s.
Journeys to Impossible Places: In Life and Every Adventure by Simon Reeve – nonfiction. BBC travel presenter Simon Reeve opens up about the personal story behind his most astonishing adventures – around the planet and close to home.
Today I am pleased to welcome a new weekly event. It is Friday Book Snippets, combining Book Beginnings on Friday and Friday56, co-hosted by Anne@HeadFullofBooks and Olivia at Bemused and Bookish.
Directions: Share two snippets (a sentence or short paragraph) from a) the book’s opening and b) page 56 (or another page) from the book you are currently reading. No spoilers, please.
I like this idea of using any page number for the second snippet.
One of the books I’m currently reading is It Could Have Been Her by Lisa Jewell. This is her latest book, published in June this year.
The book begins with a Prologue:
4 June 2005
I liked the girl. She had a nice smile. She was friendly. I could tell she liked us.
Page 4:
On the eighth day of May 2026, Jane Trevally does something terrifying.
She invites an estate agent into her home.
Page 51:
She has never told Tony about the night she went home with a complete stranger on the flimsy promise of a job. She’s certain he would not judge her, not all these years later, but still, she can’t quite bring herself to let him see the desperate broken fool she’d once been.
Description from Amazon UK:
It was the night she almost died.
Newly divorced and feeling a little lost, Jane Trevally agrees to accompany a man she doesn’t know to his house in the darkest corner of Hampstead Heath.
She’s offered a drink. She steps inside.
And then she hears a scream.
Jane runs.
Twenty five years later, Jane finds herself outside the same house, this time to return a dog who’s been found near her home. A dog whose owner has just been reported missing.
A fleeting glimpse of a haunted looking woman through the window sends Jane on a mission to uncover the house’s secrets – secrets more terrifying than she could have ever imagined.
And she can’t stop thinking:
It could have been her . . .
I’ve enjoyed all of Lisa Jewell’s books that I’ve read, so it’s no surprise that this one too is promising to be just as good.
