Books – Page 98 – BooksPlease

First Chapter, First Paragraph

Published on December 6, 2016 by Margaret8 Comments

Every Tuesday Diane at Bibliophile by the Sea hosts First Chapter First Paragraph Tuesday Intros to share the first paragraph sometimes two, of a book that she’s reading or planning to read soon. This week I’m featuring The Red House by Mark Haddon.

The Red House

It begins:

Cooling towers and sewage farms. Finstock, Charlbury, Ascott-under-Wychwood. Seventy miles per hour, the train unzips the fields. Two gun-grey lines beside the river’s meander. Flashes of sun on the hammered metal. Something of the steam about it, even now. Hogwarts and Adlestrop. The night mail crossing the border. Cheyenne sweeping down from the ridge. Delta blues from the boxcar. Somewhere those secret points that might just switch and send you curving into a world of uniformed porters and great aunts and summers at the lake.

I was struck by the imagery of the train unzipping the fields and the mix of different train journeys, with the hint of nostalgia and the promise of something unknown about to happen. And I like the cover – the small black illustrations against the white background and the black lines meeting at the red house.

Blurb (Amazon):

Family, that slippery word, a star to every wandering bark, and everyone sailing under a different sky.

After his mother’s death, Richard, a newly remarried hospital consultant, decides to build bridges with his estranged sister, inviting Angela and her family for a week in a rented house on the Welsh border. Four adults and four children, a single family and all of them strangers. Seven days of shared meals, log fires, card games and wet walks.

But in the quiet and stillness of the valley, ghosts begin to rise up. The parents Richard thought he had. The parents Angela thought she had. Past and present lovers. Friends, enemies, victims, saviours. And watching over all of them from high on the dark hill, Karen, Angela’s stillborn daughter.

The Red House is about the extraordinariness of the ordinary, weaving the words and thoughts of the eight characters together with those fainter, stranger voices – of books and letters and music, of the dead who once inhabited these rooms, of the ageing house itself and the landscape in which it sits.

Once again Mark Haddon, bestselling author of The Curious Incident ofthe Dog in the Night-time and A Spot of Bother, has written a novel that is funny, poignant and deeply insightful about human lives.

What do you think – would you read on or not?

The Marriage Lie by Kimberly Belle

Published on December 5, 2016 by Margaret1 Comment

When I read the publishers’ blurb I thought I’d like The Marriage Lie by Kimberly Belle:

Iris and Will have been married for seven years, have bought their dream house and have begun trying for a family. But on the morning Will flies out for a business trip to Florida, Iris’s perfect life comes crashing down around her: another plane headed for Seattle has crashed into a field, killing everyone on board and, according to the airline, Will was one of the passengers.

Grief stricken and confused, Iris is convinced it all must be a huge misunderstanding. Why did Will lie about where he was going? And what else has he lied about? As she sets off on a desperate quest to uncover what her husband was keeping from her, she begins to unravel a hidden identity behind the man she thought she knew better than herself, and the truth shocks her to the core.

It exceeded my expectations and I loved it. The Marriage Lie is one of those books that gripped me and kept me guessing all the way through. Once I began reading I just didn’t want to put the book down and I raced through it, anxious to know what happened next. And plenty did happen in one of the most convoluted and complex plots I’ve read in a while. The pace is terrific and the tension just builds and builds in this psychological thriller.

Iris thought she had the perfect marriage, with the perfect husband. But the more she tries to discover why he was on a plane to Seattle when he’d told her her was going to Orlando, the more lies she uncovers. Grief-stricken and terrified she doesn’t know who she can trust and she is devastated as the truth is finally uncovered.

I don’t want to give away any spoilers, so all I can say is that through all the twists and turns of this novel, the characters are convincing and although I’d partly anticipated the outcome I was taken by surprise at the final twist as the book reaches its dramatic climax!

My thanks to the publishers for a review copy of The Marriage Lie. It’s due to be published on 29 December 2016.

Paperback: 384 pages
Publisher: HQ (29 Dec. 2016)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1848456646
ISBN-13: 978-1848456648

Books Read in November 2016

Published on December 4, 2016October 31, 2018 by Margaret7 Comments

November was a bumper reading month for me, reading 13 books. I think I read more books than I usually do because I didn’t pause between some of them to write about each one – I still have 4 reviews to write. Two are library books, one is from my TBR shelves and the rest are all newly published books – eight of those are review books! The books shown in bold are all five star books.

These are the books I’ve reviewed:

Nov 2016 Bks

Click the image to enlarge it and click the links below to go to my reviews:

Highlanders’ Revenge by Paul Tors (RB) – this combines historical fiction and military history, set in the Second World War.
Landscapes: John Berger on Art, edited by Tom Overton (RB) – a collection of essays by art critic, novelist, poet, and artist John Berger written over the past 60 plus years. There is very little in this book about landscapes as I know them!
Where Dead Men Meet by Mark Mills (RB) – historical fiction set in 1937 in pre-Second World War Europe, with a fast-moving plot.
The Malice of Waves by Mark Douglas-Hume (LB) – crime fiction, an engrossing mystery, but also a study of the sea, of birds’ eggs, of obsessions and of the way people cope, or don’t cope with grief.
Sweet William by Beryl Bainbridge (RB) – ‘romantic comedy meets social satire in this delirious novel about sexual freedom versus British tradition in swinging 1960s London’.
The Spy by Paulo Coelho (RB) – a fictionalised biography of Mata Hari, accused of being a double agent during the First World War.
To the Bright Edge of the World by Eowyn Ivey (RB) – a novel inspired by a historical military expedition in Alaska, narrated through the journals of Allen Forrester, and the diaries of his wife, Sophie.
His Name was David Freeman by Ruth Kipnis (RB) – a novel based on the author’s research into her family history, mirroring the stories of so many impoverished and poorly educated farmers who emigrated to America from the Ukraine in the late 1880s.
A Life Like Other People’s by Alan Bennett (LB) – non fiction, Alan Bennett’s memoir in which he recalls his childhood and writes about his family.

These are the books I have yet to review:

Nov 2016 Bks1

I hope to get round to writing the outstanding posts quite soon!

Mystery in the Channel by Freeman Wills Croft (RB) – a British Library Crime Classic in which two men are found dead on an abandoned yacht.
Rather Be the Devil by Ian Rankin – crime fiction, the latest Rebus, with Siobhan Clarke, Darryl Christie, Malcolm Fox and Big Ger Cafferty
A God in Ruins by Kate Atkinson – a beautiful novel about Teddy Todd, a pilot during the Second World War
Silas Marner by George Eliot (TBR) – a short novel set in the early decades of the nineteenth century in rural England about a weaver wrongly accused of theft.

It is so difficult to pick my Book of the Month, reading 5 Five Star books in one month, but the one that stands out most in my mind, the one that took me by surprise at how much I enjoyed it is –

27917957

To the Bright Edge of the World by Eowyn Ivey

This is a book full of love, the love of Allen and Sophie and the love of the country, the landscape and its people. A story of great beauty and I loved it.

Six Degrees of Separation: From Revolutionary Road to On Chesil Beach

Published on December 3, 2016July 30, 2019 by Margaret20 Comments

Six Degrees of Separation is a monthly link-up hosted by Kate at Books Are My Favourite and Best. Each month, a book is chosen as a starting point and linked to six other books to form a chain. A book doesn’t need to be connected to all the other books on the list, only to the one next to it in the chain.

revolutionary-road-chain

This month’s chain begins with:

Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates, set in America in 1955, focussing on the hopes and aspirations of Frank and April Wheeler, self-assured Connecticut suburbanites.

I haven’t read Revolutionary Road, so knowing very little about it I’m using the title as the link to: The Ghost Road by Pat Barker. I haven’t read this one either but I’ve had a copy on my shelves for a few years. It’s set in 1918 during the last months of the First World War.

Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks is also set during the First World War and is yet another book I haven’t read yet. In 2012 I watched the two-part television adaptation, starring Eddie Redmayne as Stephen Wraysford, the main character. I loved the story, so I’m looking forward to reading the book.

Eddie Redmayne was also in the film The Theory of Everything. This is a beautiful film based on Jane Wilde Hawking’s memoir Travelling to Infinity: My Life with Stephen and another book I own that I haven’t read yet!

This leads me on to another biography and to another TBR that has sat partly read on my shelves for several years. It’s Thomas Hardy:The Time Torn Man by Claire Tomalin. Hardy is one of my favourite authors.

And this is one of my favourite books of his – The Mayor of Casterbridge, which I first read at school. It’s set in Hardy’s Wessex, a fictional area covering the small area of Dorset in which Hardy grew up. Casterbridge is the name he used for Dorchester, his home town. Michael Henchard, a man of violent passions who sells his wife and child, subsequently becomes the rich and respected Mayor, but ends his life in ruin and degradation. (the cover I’ve shown above is of the paperback I first read).

The chain ends with On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan, a book also set in Dorset – in a hotel at Chesil Beach on the Dorset coast in 1962, where a newly married couple struggle to suppress their fears of their wedding night to come.

My chain goes from books I haven’t read to books I’ve loved and from 1950s America via the First World War and the life and work of Stephen Hawking to that of Thomas Hardy and finally to Dorset in 1962.

A Life Like Other People’s by Alan Bennett

Published on December 1, 2016 by Margaret5 Comments

A Life Like Other People's

Alan Bennett’s A Life Like Other People’s is a poignant family memoir offering a portrait of his parents’ marriage and recalling his Leeds childhood, Christmases with Grandma Peel, and the lives, loves and deaths of his unforgettable aunties Kathleen and Myra. Bennett’s powerful account of his mother’s descent into depression and later dementia comes hand in hand with the uncovering of a long-held tragic secret. A heartrending and at times irresistibly funny work of autobiography by one of the best-loved English writers alive today. (Amazon)

I really like Alan Bennett’s work and was pleased to find this little book in the mobile library recently. It’s a beautifully written book taken from his collection Untold Stories and illustrated with black and white photographs. There is drama in this memoir, but written with clarity and keen observation in quiet tones about lives that are anything but ordinary. It is a completely absorbing book as Bennett recalls his childhood. He writes about his family including his two aunties, Kathleen and Myra, two very different characters from their sister, his mother. They saw themselves as ‘dashing, adventuresome creatures, good sports and always on for what they see as a lark.‘ They wore scent and camiknickers, and had the occasional drink and smoked.

He writes of mother’s fears – ‘of being spied on, listened to, shamed and detected‘ of her dread of being ‘the centrepiece‘ especially at her wedding. His parents didn’t like ‘splother‘, his father’s word for ‘the preening and fuss invariably attendant on the presence of the aunties.‘ Then there are the sad facts about his mother’s depression and subsequent dementia as she descended into delusion, her stays in hospital and the effect that had on the family.

There are revelations of family secrets and many touching and sad (but never sentimental) episodes, for example the futile search for Aunty Kathleen, suffering from a condition similar to Alzheimer’s, after she just walked out of her hospital ward. She was found several days later in drenched undergrowth in a wood near the M6.

It is a sad book but also a heart-warming story – the love of his parents and family shines throughout the book.

Hardcover: 256 pages
Publisher: Faber & Faber; Main edition (3 Sept. 2009)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0571248128
ISBN-13: 978-0571248124
Product Dimensions: 13.5 x 2.3 x 17.5 cm
Source: Library

Where Dead Men Meet by Mark Mills

Published on November 28, 2016 by Margaret3 Comments

I’ve been reading books so quickly this month that I am now far behind with writing about them, so this is just a short post about an excellent new book by Mark Mills, published on 17 November.

I’ve been meaning to read more of Mark Mills’ books ever since I read The Savage Garden in 2008, a book I enjoyed very much, so I was keen to read his latest book, Where Dead Men Meet. It is historical fiction set in 1937 in pre-Second World War Europe, with a fast-moving plot as Luke Hamilton, an intelligence officer at the British Embassy in Paris, tries to discover why someone wants him dead, why Sister Agnes, the nun who had been his mentor and guide at the orphanage for the first seven years of his life had been bludgeoned to death, and who his real parents were.

Although the war in Europe is imminent it is by no means the main focus of this book, but forms an excellent backdrop as the action moves from Paris across the continent. At first he assumes that the assassin has mistaken him for someone else, but the tension builds as Luke realises that he is not the victim of a mistaken identity, but that someone is determined to kill him. He finds himself on the run, helped by a number of people, including the first man who tried to kill him. It seems the answers lie in his past. It is a complicated story that had me unsure of who Luke could trust and whether he would ever escape, or find out about his real family.

I thoroughly enjoyed this brilliant book with its interesting characters and a convincing plot full of mystery and intrigue. I shall now look out for more books by Mark Mills.

I received a copy of this book from the publisher, via NetGalley, for review.