Category: Book Reviews

Quartet in Autumn by Barbara Pym

Published on by Margaret5 Comments

Picador| 2015| 191 pages| e-book| My own copy| 4*

Description:

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.

The Calamity Club by Kathryn Stockett

Published on by Margaret8 Comments

Penguin| 5 May 2026| 638 pages e-Book| Review copy| 4*

Fourteen years ago I read Kathryn Stockett’s first novel, The Help and loved it. I also watched the film and loved that too. So when I saw on NetGalley she’d written a second novel. The Calamity Club, I requested it and was pleased to find that I loved it, too, although maybe not quite as much as The Help.

Description on Goodreads:

In 1933 Oxford, Mississippi, Prohibition is on the wane, and the Great Depression is tightening its grip. Poor and rich folks alike have fallen on hard times, even as the old social order remains. For women on the margins, the options are few and the price of dignity and self-determination is unbearably high.

Eleven-year-old Meg, one of the unadoptable “big girls” at the Lafayette County Orphan Asylum, fights each day to keep her spirit unbowed. Birdie, unmarried and outspoken, has come to Oxford on a mission to ask her social-climbing sister to help the struggling family she’s left behind. And Charlie is a woman with a past, running low on luck but driven by fire, fury, and grit. When their fates converge, they come up with an audacious plan to take back control of their lives. Together, they form an unlikely sisterhood—but in a place and time where hypocrisy is rife, women’s freedom is fragile, and making an enemy can have dire consequences, will the price they pay for their outrageous risk-taking be too high?

My thoughts:

It took me a long time to read this book as it’s so long and detailed, with lots of characters and covering such emotive and serious issues. Maybe it could have been shorter, without losing any impact and it’s unevenly paced with slow sections that made the story drag at times. And I was surprised that the ending was so abrupt. Having said that the characters are wonderfully depicted, with depth making them really believable, especially Birdie, Charlie and Meg (although I wonder if she comes across as too adult for an eleven year old). The locations are well described, which really helped me as I don’t know the area at all.

The title tells you what you need to know. Set in 1933 during the Great Depression calamity follows calamity for all the characters; the miseries, pain and suffering are unrelenting right from the start as Meg enters The Lafayette County Orphan Asylum for Girls in Oxford, Mississippi. Her mother Charlie had gone shopping on Christmas Eve and never returned, leaving eleven year old Meg to fend for herself, until she was rescued by an unknown man – who he is is only revealed much later in the book. But this is not the end of Meg’s misfortunes as she is cruelly treated by Garnet Pitman, the head of the orphanage.

Birdie, meanwhile is living in Footely (a fictional small town) in the Delta, with her mother and sick grandmother. They fear they’ll lose their home as they are unable to pay the forty-three dollars they owe in property taxes. Her sister Frances has married Rory Tartt, a member of a wealthy family living in Oxford and Birdie travels there to ask for help. However, all is not right in the Tartt family and Birdie finds they’re unable to pay off a mortgage of  $2,754. Birdie then helps Frances and her mother-in-law as they try to raise the money to save the Tartt’s grand house as well as Birdie’s home.

What follows is truly remarkable, when Charlie comes up with a plan to raise the money through the Calamity Club she and Birdie set up in the Tartt’s house, employing a group of prostitutes. This could have developed into a farce, but it’s actually a story highlighting the hardships suffered by women at the hands of men and the Anti-Vice Leagues. So-called feeble minded women and those considered to be sexually promiscuous, were imprisoned and sterilized. Above all it’s a story of the women’s resilience, courage and determination to survive against all the odds. I loved it despite its length.

My thanks to the author and NetGalley for a review copy.

Call for the Dead by John Le Carré – the 1961 Club

Published on by Margaret5 Comments

This week Simon  and  Karen  are hosting the 1961 Club. To join in all you have to do is read and review any book published in 1961 in whatever format, language, place.

I originally thought I’d like to read The Agony and the Ecstasy by Irvine Stone for this event but I ran out of time. But I did find time to read Call for the Dead by John Le Carré, which has been buried deep in my Kindle. I’d bought it back in 2017 and read a few pages, meaning to get back to it before long. But of course I didn’t – until now. It’s a novella of 162 pages.

It’s the first of his many books to feature the tenacious, unassuming and singular George Smiley. Previously I’ve read the third book, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963) and the fifth and sixth books Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy  (1974), which I read before I had a blog, and The Honourable Schoolboy  (1977), which I think is brilliant.

Description:

An apparent suicide. A deepening mystery. A letter from a dead man…

Secret agent George Smgeorge Smiley iley is in trouble. A Foreign Office civil servant, Samuel Fennan, has killed himself, and Smiley realizes that Intelligence head Maston is going to set him up to take the blame. Beginning his own investigation, Smiley is shocked to receive an urgent letter from the dead man, and slowly uncovers a network of deceit and betrayal

This is a spy thriller but George Smiley is not James Bond.

Short, fat, and of a quiet disposition, he appeared to spend a lot of money on really bad clothes, which hung about his squat frame like skin on a shrunken toad. Sawley, in fact, declared at the wedding that ‘Sercomb was mated to a bullfrog in a sou’wester’. And Smiley, unaware of this description, had waddled down the aisle in search of the kiss that would turn him into a Prince.

He married the beautiful Lady Ann Sercomb, but they divorced after two years, when she left him for a Cuban motor racing driver. He was ‘without parents, school, regiment or trade, without wealth or poverty ordinary’.

The first chapter gives a brief history of George Smiley, describing him as ‘breathtakingly ordinary’. The only part of himself that survived was his profession, that of an intelligence officer in the Secret Service. Having read some of the later books it was interesting to find out about his background, his academic life and early career and failed marriage.

He had got to that stage in his career,with the appearance of younger men, when he realised he had entered middle age without ever being young. He had carried out his job during the second world war well, but after that amongst the smart young men he felt old-fashioned and he became more ‘hunched and frog-like’ and had acquired the nickname of ‘Mole’. He was considered too old to go abroad and that was when he was transferred Cambridge Circus in London – the headquarters of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), commonly known as MI6 (Military Intelligence, Section 6).

John Le Carré began writing the book whilst working for MI6. He initially called it A Clear Case of Suicide and there are clear elements of crime fiction at first, but then it develops into more of a spy thriller. Samuel Fennan, who had access to sensitive information had apparently committed suicide. Feenan had been found dead, leaving a letter saying that Smiley had cast doubts on his loyalty, that his career in the Foreign Office was over and that he was the victim of paid informers. He thought the interview was particularly a friendly one and that he’d told Fennan not to worry, that he could see no reason why they should bother him further.

Smiley can’t accept this was suicide, thinking Fennan had been murdered. He then resigned from the service when Maston ordered him to drop the investigation, but with the help of a CID man, Mendel, and Peter Guillam, Smiley’s assistant, Smiley unravels the truth behind Fennan’s death. At the end of the book, Smiley wrote a long report summarising the case, listing the facts and explaining his thoughts in much the same way as Hercule Poirot does in the Agatha Christie books.

I like Le Carré’s writing style, which is clear and straight forward, although Call for the Dead has quite a complicated plot. I thoroughly enjoyed reading it.

I’ve previously read and reviewed read these four books, that were also published in  1961:

The Girl in the Cellar  by Patricia Wentworth, a Miss Silver Mystery. It begins well as the main character finds herself in the dark in a cellar, not knowing who she is or how she got there. Overall, I thought the book was odd and not very convincing. There are too many coincidences, improbabilities, and loose ends.

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie  by  Muriel Spark, was first published in  The New Yorker magazine on 14th October 1961. It is perhaps Muriel Spark’s most famous novel about the ‘Brodie set’. But which one of them causes her downfall and her loss of pride and self-absorption? What really impresses me about this book is the writing, so compact, so perceptive and so in control of the  shifts in time backwards and forwards. It’s a joy to read.

The Pale Horse by Agatha Christie. Neither Hercule Poirot, nor Miss Marple feature in this novel and Mrs Ariadne Oliver has only a small part. Detective Inspector Lejeune is in charge of the investigation into the murder of Father Gorman who was killed one night on his way home. The Pale Horse is an old house  which was formerly an inn in the village and is now the home of three weird women, thought by the locals to be witches. It’s also the name of a sinister organisation that arranges murders based on black magic. The book is a study of evil, a fascinating book conveying a feeling of real menace. 

A Severed Head by Iris Murdoch. Reading this I felt I was looking into a different world and time. It’s not comfortable reading, but it is farcical and entertaining. It’s a tightly-structured novel, with just a few characters, narrated by Martin, who is shocked when his wife announces that she wants a divorce because she is deeply in love with Palmer, her analyst. This sets in motion a sequence of events in which Martin’s weakness and need are clearly evident.

Warning Signs by Tracy Sierra

Published on by Margaret2 Comments

Penguin| 12 February 2026| 336 pages| e-book| Review copy|4*

This is Tracy Sierra’s second book and the first one I’ve read of hers, but it won’t be the last. After a slow and ominous start that made me worried about what was coming next, it then picked up pace. I couldn’t stop reading, totally gripped and fearful of what might happen next.

Description:

There’s something out there in the darkness.
By morning, bones lie in the snow, picked clean.

Zach knows the moods of the mountains – his mother taught him before she was gone. His father and the other men on the ski weekend think they know better though.

Drinking and boasting, they laugh in the face of the icy conditions.

But Zach understands what danger looks like. Can he survive the wilderness, and all the monsters within it?

The book begins as Zach, Bonnie and their mother, Grace are in the Colorado mountains where she is teaching them how to recognise the danger signs of an avalanche. A year later, Zach, now aged twelve, is spending a ski weekend with his father, Bram as he entertains his business investors. Bram is one of the most obnoxious characters I have met in fiction, a cruel, manipulative and narcissistic monster and his relationship with Zach is really awful. Zach, who is desperate for his father’s approval, has to tread carefully to avoid Bram’s vile and explosive temper.

The story is told from Zach’s point of view, which had made me initially wary of reading it. But, it was successful, because it is told in the third person. Despite his lack of confidence due to his father’s behaviour towards him, he is a resourceful, courageous and sensible boy. His mother had instructed him well about the dangers of the mountains and how to survive the conditions. He is a fully rounded character, whereas the other characters are not described in such detail, but sufficiently well enough as a supporting cast.

The setting is just so beautiful, but also claustrophobic as snow continues to fall and the hut where they are staying becomes snowbound. The tension and suspense gradually rise, as they try to find a way to ski down the mountain. The danger increases with the threat of an avalanche and some stupid decisions that Bram and the other men make. They are supremely confident that they can cope with anything the conditions throw at them, unaware of the dangers. And to make matters worse Zack is constantly aware that something or someone is watching them. The discovery of a dead elk on their way up to the hut adds to his fears as he imagines it was killed by a monster. This is a terrifying story filled with horror as their fears of an avalanche become a reality.

My thanks to the publishers, Penguin and NetGalley for a review copy.

The Boy With No Shoes: a Memoir by William Horwood

Published on by Margaret4 Comments

Headline Book Publishing| 2004| Hardback edition| 440 pages| 5*

Five-year-old Jimmy Rova is the unwanted child of a mother who rejects him, and whose other children bully him. The one thing he can call his own is a pair of shoes, a present from the only person he feels has ever loved him. When they are cruelly taken away, Jimmy spirals down into a state of loneliness and terrible loss from which there seems no recovery.

This triumphant story of a boy’s struggle with early trauma and his remarkable journey into adulthood is based on William Horwood’s own remarkable childhood in south-east England after the Second World War. Using all the skills that went into the creation of his modern classics, Horwood has written an inspiring story of a journey from a past too painful to imagine to the future every child deserves. (Amazon)

William Horwood is an English novelist. He grew up on the East Kent coast, primarily in Deal. His first novel, Duncton Wood, an allegorical tale about a community of moles, was published in 1980. It was followed by two sequels, forming The Duncton Chronicles, and also a second trilogy, The Book of Silence. William Horwood has also written two stand-alone novels intertwining the lives of humans and of eagles, The Stonor Eagles and Callanish , and The Wolves of Time duology. Skallagrigg, his 1987 novel about disability, love, and trust, was made into a BBC film in 1994. In addition, he has written a number of sequels to The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame.

When I saw The Boy With No Shoes on the secondhand bookshelves in my local village hall I thought I’d like to read it. It was a great choice as I think it’s one of the best books I’ve read this year. It’s important to read the Author’s Note carefully before you read the book, and not dive straight into it. I had to re-read it after I’d read a few chapters as I was beginning to wonder if this was really fictional. I also wasted time searching on maps to find where he lived growing up.

In his Author’s Note at the front of the book he explained why he wrote about himself as Jimmy Rova:

When I was thirty-four and had been iller than I knew for two long years, my recovery began in the strangest and most magical dream of ways. |I woke one day from dreaming and saw myself when very young, as clearly as in a black and white Kodak photograph. I saw how desperately the little boy I once was had needed someone to talk to in a world where no one wanted to listen. I decided there and then to travel back in time and let myself as adult be listener to the child. This book and my final healing is the result of that imaginative listening, over very many years.

Because the boy seemed other than himself he gave him a different name and changed the name of his home town. By so doing he was able to fill in gaps, paper over the cracks and visit distant places of emotion that he would never have reached.

It is a long and detailed book that took me nearly a month to read. It is beautifully written and as he tells the story of his very early life there are many times when it moved me to tears. His writing is so clear that the places and people he describes spring to life as you read. All the characters have depth and are believable as people.

He is just as good at portraying Jimmy’s feelings and emotions. I could feel his depth of despair, fear and confusion as he describes his first memory about the man in a time long ago who bought him a pair of shoes. That day entered his heart and stayed there forever. He called him The Man Who Was, the man who left him standing in the rain, holding his Ma’s hand, full of fear that he would not be there to keep him safe from Ma, who treated him appallingly, and he would be all alone. All that was left to him were the shoes. So, imagine how awful it was when the shoes disappeared, cruelly taken from him.

But life for Jimmy did eventually get better, especially when Granny came to live with them, but even she could not protect completely from his abusive Ma. I loved all the details of Granny’s time in Africa with ‘The African Gentleman’, who wore a funny hat on his grey and grizzled hair, and his clothes were striped black and yellow. In his hand he carried a wand like a magician. Also unforgettable is his first love, Harriet, and how his mother ended their affair.

There were others too who were kind to him. I loved his description of a new English teacher at the Grammar School, who in contrast to the Head and other teachers believed in the boys. He inspired Jimmy and transformed his life by showing him how to believe he could succeed and how to prepare for his O levels.

There were others too, His Uncle Max who took him hiking in Snowdonia. Moel Saibod was the first mountain he climbed and then others, including Snowdon, the tallest mountain in Wales and England. Then, Mr Boys who taught him to read, Mr Bubbles, a fisherman and his wife, who lived along the shore and taught him all about fishing. I could go on and on, but really if this interests you the best thing is to read the book for yourself. It is a wonderful book, that captures what life was like in the 1950s and even though my childhood was nothing like his, it brought back memories of growing up. I too, as a young woman) climbed Snowdon – Welsh name, Yr Wyddfa (I did not take the Snowdon Mountain Railway either up or down) and also Moel Saibod.

The Seeker of Lost Paintings by Sarah Freethy

Published on by Margaret2 Comments

Simon & Schuster UK| 11 September 2025| 400 pages| e-book| Review copy| 5*

Blurb:

Rome 1939
Arriving in Rome to work for the wealthy Montefalco family, Maddalena is homesick and alone. She finds solace – and love – in the beauty of the city, but as the war in Nazi-occupied Italy rages, she must make a devastating choice.

London, 1997
After her mother Maddalena’s death, Beatrice Fremont discovers a fragment of a painting and a letter that sends her on a hunt to Rome. Helping her is art dealer Jude Adler, who’s convinced they are looking for a lost Caravaggio. For Jude, this could be the find of a lifetime; but for Beatrice their search uncovers a shocking secret and the answer to a mystery kept hidden for years.

I’ve not read Sarah Freethy’s first novel, so I wasn’t sure what to expect from her latest book, The Seeker of Lost Paintings. I am delighted to say I loved it. It’s historical fiction set in two timelines, one in the 1940s in Italy and the other in 1997 in London and Italy. It appealed to me because of the mystery surrounding a lost Carravagio and I really enjoyed that aspect. I’ve read quite a lot of historical fiction set during the Second World War, but I don’t think I’ve read any set in Italy during the Nazi occupation before and it was this part of the story that I enjoyed the most.

The book begins with a Prologue set in Naples in 1610 with an unnamed artist as he starts a painting. Who he is and what he is painting only becomes clear later in the book. The narrative then flies forward to July 1997 and a hot day in London when Beatrice Fremont, yearning to be in Italy where both of her parents were born, is waiting for Jude Adler to arrive to value her late father’s art and photography collections. Her mother, Maddalena is seriously ill and they need to sell his collections to secure the family home.

When Jude spots a small painting, hanging on Maddalena’s bedroom wall, he is convinced he’d seen the image somewhere before. It reminds him of Caravaggio’s painting of St John the Baptist in Youth with a Ram. Caravaggio’s followers had made many copies of that painting and Jude is convinced that if it is one of those it could be worth tens of thousands. But Maddalena wants Beatrice to reunite the painting with its rightful owner. And so after Maddalena’s death, the search to find out more about the painting begins, taking Beatrice and Jude to Italy.

Back in 1939, Maddalena was working as a cook at the home of Conte Luca Montefalco, at the Villa Velare in Rome. Luca’s older brother Roberto had renounced his title and taken up Holy Orders, and is working at the Vatican where he is responsible for an art collection that must be preserved and removed from the Vatican in preparation for the impending war. It was a remarkably tense and difficult time in Italy, under Mussolini and the Fascists, and the local people suffered immensely under the Nazi occupation.

Sarah Freethy’s beautiful descriptive writing and characterisation transported me back to that period, almost as though I was there witnessing what life was like for the ordinary Italians during the war years – the dangers and privations they faced. It really is a remarkable book, drawing together the two strands of the story, both in the past and the present and ending in a satisfying conclusion.

Many thanks to the publishers, via Netgalley for my review copy and I’d love to read more of Sarah Freethy’s books.