Category: Fiction

Six Degrees of Separation: From The Gate of Angels to A Killing of Angels

Published on by Margaret4 Comments

This is a monthly link-up hosted by Kate at Books Are My Favourite and Best. On the first Saturday of every month, a book is chosen as a starting point and linked to six other books to form a chain. Readers and bloggers are invited to join in by creating their own ‘chain’ leading from the selected book.

Books can be linked in obvious ways – for example, books by the same authors, from the same era or genre, or books with similar themes or settings. Or, you may choose to link them in more personal ways: books you read on the same holiday, books given to you by a particular friend, books that remind you of a particular time in your life, or books you read for an online challenge.

A book doesn’t need to be connected to all the other books on the list, only to the ones next to them in the chain. This month we are staring with a novella that’s on your reading list – in recognition of Novellas in November.

I’m starting with The Gate of Angels by Penelope Fitzgerald, a novella on my reading list. It is 1912, and at Cambridge University the modern age is knocking at the gate. Fred Fairly, a Junior Fellow at the college of St Angelicus, where for centuries no female, not even a pussy cat, has been allowed to set foot, lectures in physics. Science, he is certain, will explain everything. Until into Fred’s orderly life come Daisy. Fred is smitten. Why have I met her? he wonders. How can I tell if she’s quite what she seems? Fred is a scientist. To him the truth should be everything. But even scientists make mistakes.

My first link is Angels and Insects by A S Byatt – two mesmerising novellas are set in the nineteenth century another novella. In Morpho Eugenia, an explorer realises that the behaviour of the people around him is alarmingly similar to that of the insects he studies. In The Conjugal Angel, curious individuals – some fictional, others drawn from history – gather to connect with the spirit world. Throughout both, Byatt examines the eccentricities of the Victorian era, weaving fact and fiction, reality and romance, science and faith into a sumptuous, magical tapestry.

Next another novella, Where Angels Fear to Tread by E M Forster. When a young English widow travels to Italy and makes an unexpected decision that shocks her conservative family, the consequences ripple across cultures and relationships. E. M. Forster contrasts the warmth, spontaneity, and passion of Italian life with the restraint and propriety of Edwardian England, creating a story filled with tension, irony, and quiet tragedy..

I’m staying with ‘angels’ and books on my reading list, but the next books are not novellas.

The Time of Angels by Iris Murdoch – The central character is Carel is a widowed rector presiding over a London church destroyed during the war. He believes that, God being dead, His angels have been released. This is a novel described on the back cover as ‘chilling‘ with an ‘all-pervading sense of evil you can almost touch – evil from which no-one can escape.’

The Wine of Angels by Phil Rickman, the first Merrily Watkins novel, in which the Rev Merrily Watkins tries to be accepted as the vicar (or priest-in-charge as she insists she ought to be called) in the country parish of Ledwardine in Herefordshire, steeped as it is in cider and secrets and echoes of the poet Thomas Traherne who was once based in the area.

The Weight of Angels by Catriona McPherson. I’ve read several of her Dandy Gilver books and enjoyed them. This book is a standalone psychological thriller, in which Alison McGovern takes a job as a beautician in a private psychiatric facility near her rented cottage and the ruins of Dundrennan Abbey.  A body is discovered in a shallow grave by the abbey on Ali’s first day at work.

A Killing of Angels by Kate Rhodes – the second book in her Alice Quentin series. I haven’t read the first book but I thought this looks good – it’s a psychological thriller. At the height of a summer heatwave, a killer stalks the City of London.The avenging angel leaves behind a scattering of feathers with each body – but why these victims? What were their sins?

All the books are linked by their titles with the word Angels and they are all books on my books to be read list.

Next month (December 2, 2026), we’ll start with a story that takes place at Christmas – Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan – a book I have read and another novella.

Pinkerton’s Sister: Friday Book Snippets

Published on by Margaret3 Comments

Friday Book Snippets combining Book Beginnings on Friday and the Friday 56, is 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.

This week I’m featuring Pinkerton’s Sister by Peter Rushforth.

1st snippet, Chapter 1 :

The mad woman in the attic was standing at the window.

Something about the slant of her body – slimped , drooping to one side – gave her a look of Marianna-like weariness,

2nd snippet, page 113:

Time ceased to exist, and she became one with what she read, what she contemplated, within the work of art, like her namesake Alice within the looking glass. It happened every time she studied Linnaeus’s painting in the school room. The water in the ewer was still hot, steam rising. It must be like dreaming was supposed to be, when time was concentrated into a few seconds, or like drowning, when a life passed before the eyes in moments. Maggie Tulliver must have experienced this, clasped in Tom’s arms as she and her brother sank to their deaths beneath the flood water: beating her doll’s wooden head against the pillars, cutting her hair jaggedly, Behaving Worse than She Expected, Trying to Run Away from her Shadow …

Description from the book cover:

Though her neighbours consider her a simpleton, in reality Alice’s mind is razor sharp. She is thirty five years of age, and all she has is her books. Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde, Edgar Allen Poe are her inspirations: Jane Eyre, Maggie Tulliver her companions, nourishing her lonely life. And as she moves through the witless world around her, observing its prejudices, its shallow culture, its hatred of truth, she transports those who belittle her into these books, where they can no longer hide, forced to reveal their true characters.

Twenty five years in the making, heartbreakingly funny, fiercely intelligent Pinkerton’s Sister is an extraordinary work of imagination, about imagination.

My thoughts:

I first read this book in October 2005 before I began writing this blog. At that time I decided I wanted to know more about it and a Google Search led me to Book World’s Blog where Sandra had written a post about it (I can no longer find her blog to thank her.) I had not heard about blogs before, but I was hooked and using her blogroll I discovered more book blogs. I decided to write one myself mainly to keep a record of what I’d read, but it took me another year before I plucked up the courage to make a start in July 2006 with a very short post and another nine months before I really got going in April 2007. I’d just left work and had more time to read and write about books, so I began this blog partly to help me remember what I’ve read and also to extend the pleasure of reading. And so ‘BooksPlease’ was born.

In November 2019 I wrote this about Pinkerton’s Sister: It’s a bizarre story seen through the main character’s, Alice’s eyes, which because she lives in a world of books is a very strange place indeed. It’s funny, well, ludicrous at times, full of literary and musical references and I got lost in it for hours.

Now, I want to re-read it!

My Year in Novellas 2026

Published on by Margaret13 Comments

For the SEVENTH year in a row, Cathy of 746 Books and Rebecca of Bookish Beck are co-hosting Novellas in November as a month-long blogging and social media challenge. A novella technically contains 20,000 to 40,000 words, but to keep things simple they define it as any work under 200 pages.

I’m beginning with looking back at the novellas I have read since the end of last year’s Novellas in November.

  1. The Christmas Clue by Nicola Upson
  2. The Aspern Papers by Henry James
  3. Homeward Bound by Hamza Yassin
  4. The Christmas Guest by by Peter Swanson
  5. The Rose and the Yew Tree by by Mary Westmacott (Agatha Christie)
  6. Quartet in Autumn by Barbara Pym
  7. Brat Farrar by Josephine Tey
  8. The Third Man and The Fallen Idol by Graham Greene
  9. Maigret in Vichy by Georges Simenon
  10. Maigret and the Old People by Georges Simenon
  11. Maigret’s Pickpocket by Georges Simenon

I hope to write more about the ones I haven’t reviewed yet.

These are some I haven’t read yet:

Maigret Defends Himself by Georges Simenon – When suspicion turns on Inspector Maigret for a crime he did not commit, he must use every investigative tool in his arsenal to clear his name.

Seascraper by Benjamin Wood – this follows shanker Thomas Flett as his quiet life in a small English coastal town is forever changed over the course of one fateful day.

Grief Is the Thing with Feathers by Max Porter – Goodreads tells me this is part novella, part polyphonic fable, part essay on grief, Max Porter’s compassion and bravura style combine to dazzling effect. Full of unexpected humour and profound emotional truth.

The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club by Dorothy L. Sayers – the fifth book in the Peter Wimsey series, in which he unravel the mysteries of ninety-year-old General Fentiman’s death.

Brief Answers to the Big Questions by Stephen Hawking – his final thoughts on the universe’s biggest questions in this brilliant posthumous work.

North to Paradise: A Memoir by Ousman Umar – The inspiring true story of one man’s treacherous boyhood journey from a rural village in Ghana to the streets of Barcelona—and the path that led him home.

Evil in High Places: Friday Book Snippets

Published on by Margaret10 Comments

Friday Book Snippets combining Book Beginnings on Friday and the Friday 56, is 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. 

Today I’ve just started to read Evil in High Places by Rory Clements, the second book in his Detective Sebastian Wolff series. This is historical fiction, a murder mystery set in 1936 as Germany is hosting the Olympic Games.

First snippet: Chapter One:

When Elena Lang went missing, Sebastian Wolff couldn’t work out what all the fuss was about.

‘She’s a film star,’ he told his boss, ‘She’s probably overslept – in someone else’s hotel room, That’s how this business works.

Second snippet: Page 103

It suddenly occurred to Seb that he had his police pistol in a shoulder holster under his jacket. He was not more than thirty metres away from Hitler. With one well-aimed shot he could change the course of history.

The moment passed and the Walther remained unfired.

Description from Amazon UK:

HOW DO YOU CATCH A KILLER WHO BELIEVES THEY’RE ABOVE JUSITCE?

Munich, 1936. All eyes are on the Bavarian capital for the upcoming Olympic Games. As athletes fight for gold and the Nazis fight for power, Detective Sebastian Wolff faces a battle of his own.

A famous actress has disappeared and Wolff has been ordered to find her, fast. But Elena Lang is no ordinary film-star: she is the mistress of Joseph Goebbels – Hitler’s right-hand-man in the party that Wolff despises.

But this is a country on the brink of war, and corruption runs deep. In a search that will take him from high society to the city’s darkest corners, Wolff will soon learn just how fine the line is between justice and jeopardy…

I enjoyed the first book in this series, Munich Wolff, set in 1935 and so I’m keen to read what happens next as Hitler moves Germany towards the Second World War.

What do you think? Would you read on?

Love Lane by Patrick Gale

Published on by Margaret6 Comments

Tinder Press| 26 March 2026| 294 pages e-book| Review copy| 5*

Synopsis

A journey. A reunion. A longing for a place called home…
When veteran Canadian wheat farmer, Harry Cane sails home to an England transformed by two world wars, his arrival triggers unwelcome self-examination for the family he abandoned.

His daughter feels duty bound to take him in but is ambushed by a long buried anger she has never before expressed. Harry’s effect on the next generation is less predictable, and enables his granddaughter to deal with an unspeakable trauma, while her gentle husband feels seen for who he truly is.

Can Harry stay and make a new life before it’s too late, or will he find himself cast out again, punished for having witnessed and understood too much?

LOVE LANE is a searing portrayal of escape and entrapment, and a powerful exploration of what home and family can really be.

I’ve read two of Patrick Gale’s books – Notes from an Exhibition and A Perfectly Good Man and enjoyed both of them. So when I saw Love Lane was available on NetGalley I requested it hoping it would be just as good – it is! Actually it’s a follow up to Gale’s earlier book, A Place Called Winter, which I haven’t read, but it reads perfectly well as a standalone. I love it. It’s so beautifully written and I quickly became engrossed in the story.

Set in the 1950s this is above all a character-driven plot about Harry Cane and his family. Harry was born in England, but the story begins in Canada, where had lived, near the town of Winter, Saskatchewan, for many years. In his earlier novel, A Place Called Winter, Gale tells the story of Harry’s life when he had emigrated to Canada and his relationship with Paul, a neighbouring farmer, secret lovers although each lived alone. Now, nearing retirement, Harry is forced to sell his farm, and leaves Canada to return to Liverpool in England to reunite with his daughter Betty and the family he had abandoned. All their lives change as they get to know each other again. It’s not just Harry’s story as we see events through Betty’s eyes and those of her husband Terry, a prison governor and of Pip, his granddaughter and her husband Mike, also a prisoner officer.

I really enjoyed this book for the characterisation, each person comes across as real, portrayed with compassion and understanding. It examines several issues, family relationships above all, and the attitudes to homosexuality. This really is a book that takes you back in time and place to a world long gone.

Patrick Gale has based his novel on the life of his maternal grandfather, using memories, stories and letters passed down to him by his family. In particular he used his grandmother’s unfinished memoir and the many letters between her and his parents. But he states that Love Lane is a novel, not a memoir.

And now I must read A Place Called Winter!

Many thanks to the author and Tinder Press for a review copy via NetGalley.

Maigret and the Old People: Book Beginnings & Review

Published on by Margaret8 Comments

Friday Book Snippets combining Book Beginnings on Friday and the Friday 56, is 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.

This week I’m featuring Maigret and the Old People by Georges Simenon, book 56 of 75 Inspector Maigret.

1st snippet, Chapter 1 :

It was one of those exceptional months of May, the kind you only encounter two or three times in your life, and which have the luminosity, the smell of childhood, memories. Maigret called it a ‘May of hymns’, because it reminded him both of his first communion and his first spring in Paris, when everything was still new and wonderful to him.

2nd snippet, page 113:

Here everything was too perfect. Everything had a logical explanation, everything except the old man’s death.

Description from Goodreads:

When a wealthy aristocrat is found murdered in his home, Inspector Maigret must navigate a high-stakes case in the moneyed world of Paris’s upper crust.

Maigret is called to the home of Armand de Saint-Hilaire, a highly respected diplomat who has been found by his housekeeper, shot dead in his study. Maigret is urged to be discrete in his investigation, but after interviewing everyone concerned, the inspector is at a loss to the identity of the perpetrator—until he comes across a series of letters spanning decades between the victim and a widowed woman. As Maigret uncovers the details behind the pair’s relationship, he gets closer to discovering the tragic truth behind the official’s demise.

With the pressure mounting, the inspector must navigate class divides and his own position in society to uncover the killer. Maigret and the Old People is an absorbing mystery and a thoughtful examination of the different worlds money creates.

My thoughts:

Georges Simenon wrote 75 novels and 28 short stories featuring Inspector Jules Maigret, published chronologically in French from 1931 to 1973. I’ve been reading the Maigret books completely out of order for years now and I think they read well as standalones. Maigret and the Old People (aka Maigret in Society) is the 56th book, first published in 1960, so one of the later books in the series. My copy is an e-book, translated by Shaun Whiteside and published by Penguin. It’s a novella of 159 pages.

I really enjoy these books, following Maigret’s life and career as he ages. As the title indicates old age is one of the themes in this book. Maigret himself is aging, nearing retirement and, apart from him, all the characters are aged between 65 and 85. It begins as Maigret is remembering his childhood, thinking of his communion and his first spring in Paris. He is feeling both light and melancholy, reflecting about his awe when he first entered the Police Judiciaire building, and realising that the Seine hadn’t changed and neither had the anglers who were still in the same spot, as if they hadn’t moved from it. This is one of the things I enjoy about Simenon’s writing, the way he describes the setting, as in the opening sentences so that we know that is spring in Paris, followed by the insight into Maigret’s thoughts and his nostalgic mood.

The novel is full of Maigret’s memories of his childhood, spent in the shadow of the chateau owned by the Count and Countess of Saint-Fiacre where his father was the estate manager. It is in this frame of mind that he investigates the death of the former ambassador, the Count of Saint-Hilaire, who had been found shot in his study, by his housekeeper of 42 years, Jaquette Larrieu. Maigret is asked to be discreet, but with no obvious motive or suspects, he is hampered. He proceeds with caution, not wanting to make hasty judgements. But, he had lost his confidence

… unprepared in the face of people whose existence he hadn’t even suspected. All their attitudes, their ideas, their reactions were alien to him, and he tried in vain to classify them under any particular category. (page 146)

He finds a bundle of letters from Princess Isabelle of V, who had been a lifelong friend of Saint-Hilaire’s. The two of them had fallen in love, but she had married Prince Hubert of V, of one of the great French families. So for fifty years they had written to each other every day, but they had never met.

After interviewing everyone concerned, Maigret is still puzzled. And so was I. I thoroughly enjoyed it. I particularly enjoy Maigret’s methods of investigating, his intuition and the way he spends time pondering the psychology of the characters. I also liked the glimpses into his past, explaining his awkwardness with the aristocracy, as well as the insights into his life with his wife, Louise, usually referred to as Madame Maigret.

I have no expectations that I’ll read all 75 of the Maigret novels, but I’d like to read as many as I can.