Category: Fiction

Library Books 19 February 2025

Published on by Margaret2 Comments

It’s been a while since I posted about the books I’ve borrowed from the mobile library van. It’s one of three mobiles in the County Library service that comes round once a month, visiting villages and remote rural areas. It parks near our house. This week I borrowed three books.

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The Daylight Gate by Jeanette Winterson. I thought this looks promising. The Trial of the Lancashire Witches in 1612 was the first witch trial to be documented. Thomas Potts, a lawyer, wrote his account: The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the County of Lancashire. It’s supposedly an eyewitness verbatim account and Winterson follows the historical account and the religious background in telling her story. The places are real places and the characters were real people, although she has taken liberties with their motives and means. She states that the story of Alice Nutter (not the Alice Nutter of history) and Elizabeth Southern is her own creation and has no basis in fact. And she was pleased that there might have been a connection with Dr John Dee, and with Manchester, London as well as with Shakespeare himself. And she says: ‘Pendle Hill is still the enigma it ever was though the Malkin Tower is long gone.’

The Forest of Pendle used to be a hunting ground, but some say that the hill is the hunter – alive in its black-and-green coat cropped like an animal pelt.

Good Friday, 1612. Two notorious witches await trial and certain death in Lancaster Castle, whilst a small group gathers in secret protest. Into this group the self-made Alice Nutter stakes her claim and swears to fight against the rule of fear. But what is Alice’s connection to these witches? What is magic if not power, and what will happen to the women who possess it? (Amazon UK)

The Perfect Storm: A True Story of Men Against the Sea by Sebastian Junger I took this off the shelf and flicked through the pages, wondering what to expect from this book, described as creative nonfiction. It recounts a storm in October 1991 that resulted in the fishing boat Andrea Gail going down off the coast of Nova Scotia with the loss of all six crew members.

In 2000, the book was adapted by Warner Brothers as a film of the same name, starring George Clooney and Mark Wahlberg.

It was the storm of the century, boasting waves over one hundred feet high—a tempest created by so rare a combination of factors that meteorologists deemed it “the perfect storm.” In a book that has become a classic, Sebastian Junger explores the history of the fishing industry, the science of storms, and the candid accounts of the people whose lives the storm touched. The Perfect Storm is a real-life thriller that makes us feel like we’ve been caught, helpless, in the grip of a force of nature beyond our understanding or control. (Amazon UK)

Little Ern! the Authorized Biography of Ernie Wise by Robert Sellers and James Hogg. For years I loved watching comedians Morecambe and Wise, also known as Eric and Ernie, on TV. Their partnership lasted from 1941 until Morecambe’s sudden death in 1984. And watching their shows years later they still make me laugh.

Even though they are the most famous comedy double act Britain has ever seen, until now there has never been a biography of Ernie Wise. Seen by some as just the straight man in the partnership, in fact ‘Little Ern’ was regarded by his peers as a great comedian in his own right. It took no ordinary talent to be the perfect foil for the genius of Eric Morecambe, and to be his friend, business partner and co-performer for nearly forty years. Morecambe’s personality flared with ego and insecurity, and theirs was a personal relationship that had to be nurtured as carefully as were their on-screen personas.

Nearly thirty years after their last appearances, the pair still dominate the landscape of British comedy, and are loved and revered as ever. With the cooperation of Ernie’s widow Doreen, and drawing on unpublished material from the family archive as well as interviews with friends, Robert Sellers and James Hogg have shifted the spotlight sideways to examine for the first time the true and patient genius of one of the greatest entertainers of his generation. (Goodreads)

The Classics Club Spin Result

Published on by Margaret10 Comments

The spin number in The Classics Club Spin is number …

Bleak House by Charles Dickens.

The rules of the Spin are that this is the book for me to read by 11 April 2025.

Synopsis from Goodreads

As the interminable case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce grinds its way through the Court of Chancery, it draws together a disparate group of people: Ada and Richard Clare, whose inheritance is gradually being devoured by legal costs; Esther Summerson, a ward of court, whose parentage is a source of deepening mystery; the menacing lawyer Tulkinghorn; the determined sleuth Inspector Bucket; and even Jo, the destitute little crossing-sweeper. A savage, but often comic, indictment of a society that is rotten to the core, Bleak House is one of Dickens’s most ambitious novels, with a range that extends from the drawing rooms of the aristocracy to the poorest of London slums.


I first read Bleak House after watching the 2005 Andrew Davies’ adaptation of the novel on BBC1 with Gillian Anderson as Lady Dedlock and Charles Dance as lawyer, Mr Tulkinghorn, with many more well known actors in the cast. I’ve been meaning to re-read it sometime and so I am pleased to be reading it again.

Did you take part in the Classics Spin? What will you be reading?

Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen

Published on by Margaret11 Comments

Summary from the Jane Austen shop:

It would be an excellent match for he was rich, and she was handsome” Sense & Sensibility, 1811

When Elinor and Marianne Dashwood’s father dies, they with their mother and younger sister are forced to leave their family home Norland Park and take up residence in a small rented cottage. There they experience love, romance, and heartbreak. Marianne falling madly in love with the dashing Mr. Willoughby while Elinor silently hides her own broken heart from those nearest to her. A story of very mixed fortunes in love.

Jane Austen is one of my favourite authors and I’ve read all of her novels, beginning with Pride and Prejudice, which I’ve reread over the years many times, and watched TV and film adaptations. This year is the 250th anniversary of Jane Austen’s birth, so this is an ideal time to reread some of her books and I’m joining Brona at This Reading Life in her Austen 2025 project to reread her books, along with the Classics Club’s Sync Read (or readalong).

I first read Sense and Sensibility when I was at school but have never reread it. This time I read the annotated edition, edited by David M Shapard that gives explanations of historical context, citations from Austen’s life, letters, and other writings, definitions and clarifications, literary comments and analysis. There are multiple maps of England and London, an introduction, a bibliography, and a detailed chronology of events with more than 100 informative illustrations. I found I already knew some of the information given in some of these notes but others enhanced my understanding of the period. I particularly liked all the illustrations and the details about the cultural context, the social customs and conventions of the period.

Sense and Sensibility was Jane Austen’s first published novel. There was an earlier version, called Elinor and Marianne, that Jane Austen wrote in the form of letters probably in 1795 when she was nineteen. She returned to it after she began First Impressions, which later became Pride and Prejudice. Towards the end of 1797 she returned to Elinor and Marianne, modifying it and changing its name to Sense and Sensibility. It wasn’t until 1810 that she finished the book and it was published in 1811.

It focuses on the two Dashwood sisters, Elinor (aged 19) and Marianne (aged 16), who have contrasting temperaments. On the surface Elinor, the older sister represents sense or reason while Marianne represents sensibility or emotion. However as the story develops they both exhibit varying aspects of each characteristic. Marianne comes over at first as a rather silly teenager, emotional and passionate, who openly expresses her likes and dislikes, letting everyone know how much she is grieving for her father and how much she loves her new friend she met whilst living at Barton Cottage, John Willoughby. Elinor, however, is more restrained and discrete, controlling her emotions and reactions, even though she has strong feelings for her sister-in-law’s brother, Edward. Later in the book, however, both sisters display both ‘sense’ and ‘sensibility’, which I think makes them more believable as characters.

I’m not going into any more detail about the plot. A lot happens, there are misunderstandings and many secrets are exposed. I liked the way the story moves between the two sisters switching from one to another. At first I did feel more sympathetic towards Elinor, but Marianne did grow on me by the end of the book. They both grew in complexity as Jane Austen developed their characters. There are many other characters, some foolish or absurd providing comic relief and others who are nasty and selfish and cause both Elinor and Marianne much anguish and heartache.

I thoroughly enjoyed the book!

And now I’m looking forward to re-reading Pride and Prejudice.

Only Murders in the Abbey by Beth Cowen-Erskine

Published on by Margaret6 Comments

Hodder & Stoughton/ 13 February 2025/ 363 pages/e-book |Review copy| 5*

I read the first Loch Down Murder Mystery, Loch Down Abbey in 2021 and enjoyed it very much, so I was looking forward to reading Only Murders in the Abbey, set in 1930s Scotland . And I’m glad to say that I thought it was even better than the first one.

Description from the publishers:

Mrs MacBain, thank god it’s you.’ Without another word, he grabbed her arm and pulled her into the room, locking the door behind them. Mrs MacBain turned around, clearly offended at being manhandled, but then gasped, ‘Is that blood?’

Loch Down Abbey is full of guests for a Highland Ball. Including several uninvited members of the Inverkillen clan, the Abbey’s former residents. Housekeeper Mrs MacBain thinks her biggest challenge will be finding suitable rooms for everyone and keeping the peace at cocktail hour.

Until the morning after the ball, when one of the guests is discovered inside the Abbey’s library – as dead as a doornail.

Who would have had motive to want them dead? And how did they manage to commit their crime and escape while keeping the door locked from the inside?

With an Abbey full of suspects and secrets, it is down to Mrs MacBain to catch the killer before they strike again…

The Abbey, formerly the ancestral home of the Ogilvy-Sinclair family is now an hotel, owned by several of the long-standing employees and staffed mainly by the former servants, led by Mrs Alice McBain as the Director of Operations. The manager of the hotel is The Honourable Fergus Ogilvy-Sinclair, the youngest grandson of Lady Georgina, the Dowager Countess of Inverkillen. Her eldest grandson is Lord Angus Inverkillen, the current Earl of Inverkillen.

There are so many characters in this book including family members, hotel staff and guests that I found it difficult to keep track of all of them. However the main characters are very clearly defined and there is a list of all the characters at the beginning of the book, which is a great help.

The book begins the morning after a Highland Ball as Hudson, one of the co-owners of the Abbey, is doing his rounds when he finds a dead body in the Small Library, which had been locked for the Ball. The name of the victim is not revealed. The narrative then goes back to the fortnight before the Ball, introducing the characters and their relationships and it is not until the second half of the book that the identity of the victim is revealed.

Detective Inspector Jarvis from the local constabulary is called in to investigate, but as Mrs McBain thinks he is not ‘the sharpest axe in the shed’. And it is mainly down to her to get to the bottom of the mystery – how a murder could take place in a locked room, who had the motive to commit murder and how was the opium trade in Shanghai involved. As the victim had been stabbed to death the number of suspects includes all the men at the ball who were in Highland dress which includes a sgian-dubh, (pronounced ‘skeen doo’), a small single-edged knife, worn as part of Highland dress in the sock of a kilted Scot. So, there are many suspects, making the investigation tremendously complicated and involving many red herrings, and twists and turns as several secrets and scandals are revealed.The Epilogue introduces yet another unexpected turn.

How on earth Beth Cowan-Erskine kept so many strands in play, set in a richly described location and with believable characters is totally beyond me. But she did, with immense skill making this a most enjoyable book. As she describes it it is ‘a lunatic world’ that she has created. I really hope there will be a third Lock Down Murder Mystery.

Many thanks to the publishers for a review copy via NetGalley.

Spell the Month in Books – February 2025

Published on by Margaret3 Comments

Spell the Month in Books is a linkup hosted by Jana on Reviews From the Stacks on the first Saturday of each month. The goal is to spell the current month with the first letter of book titles, excluding articles such as ‘the’ and ‘a’ as needed. That’s all there is to it! Some months there are optional theme challenges, such as “books with an orange cover” or books of a particular genre, but for the most part, any book you want to use is fair game!

This month I’m not taking the option, which is Valentine’s Day/something sweet on the cover, but instead I’m featuring books from my blog, some from the early days of the blog.

F is for Fair Exchange by Michele Roberts – historical fiction set in England and France in the late 1700s/early 1800s during the French Revolutionary period. While drawing hints and facts from the lives and secret affairs of two of the most famous and passionate figures of the late 18th century – Mary Wollstonecraft and William Wordworth – the intriguing mystery surrounding these two women, is Michèle Roberts own fascinating creation. It’s about William Saygood a fictional friend of Wordsworth’s. Mary Wollstonecraft appears in the novel but Roberts has ‘plundered various aspects of her life’  for the character, Jemima Boote.  There is a fair bit in this book about women’s rights and their place in society, and about the question of nurture versus nature in bringing up children.

E is for Elizabeth is Missing by Emma Healey – Maud has dementia – but she knows her friend Elizabeth is missing. I enjoyed the TV adaption with Glenda Jackson as Maud much more than the book. Emma Healey’s depiction of dementia is convincing showing the confusion and bewilderment that Maud must have felt. It’s heart-rending. As Maud continues her search for Elizabeth, she also recalls the search for her sister, Sukey, who disappeared in 1946. And no matter who tells her to stop going on about it, to leave it alone, to shut up, Maud will get to the bottom of it. Because somewhere in Maud’s damaged mind lies the answer to an unsolved seventy-year-old mystery. One everyone has forgotten about.

B is for Bad Science by Ben Goldacre – a splendid rant against the lack of education and knowledge about health with the inevitable result that we are unable to understand and judge for ourselves the effectiveness of the various treatments on offer. He describes how placebos work,  just what homeopathy is, the misunderstandings about food and nutrition, and above all how to decide what works and what is quackery, scaremongering or downright dangerous. I found this easy to understand, apart from the statistics, which cause my eyes to glaze over at the mere sight of a graph, tables or columns of figures. Fortunately there’s not a lot of that in this book.

R is for Resurrection Men by Ian Rankin, an Inspector Rebus book. Resurrection Men isn’t about body-snatchers (as I wondered it might be), but about the cops who need re-training, including Rebus. They’re at Tullialian, the Scottish Police College and they are a tough bunch indeed, ‘the lowest of the low‘ as one of them, DI Gray tells a witness he is interrogating. To help them become team players – fat chance of that I thought – they’ve been given on old, unsolved case to work on. But Rebus was involved in the case at the time and begins to get paranoid about why is on the course. It’s a tough, gritty story and as with other Rebus books, there’s more than one investigation on the go, several, in fact, needing concentration to keep tabs on each one. I thought it was excellent.

U is for Ulysses by James Joyce – I have started this book and given up several times. I’d love to say I’ve finished it, but I haven’t. It deals with the events of one day in Dublin, 16th June 1904, now known as “Bloomsday”. The principal characters are Stephen Dedalus, Leopold Bloom and his wife Molly. Loosely modelled on the wanderings of Homer’s Ulysses as he travelled homewards to Ithaca, Joyce’s novel follows the interwoven paths of Stephen, estranged from his father and Leopold, grieving for his dead infant son. Written over a seven-year period, from 1914 to 1921, Ulysses has survived bowderlization, legal action and bitter controversy.

A is for All Bones and Lies by Anne Fine. I had high hopes I would like this book and that it would be a funny book – Anne Fine has won Awards for her children’s books and the film, Mrs Doubtfire, starring Robin Williams, is based on her book Madame Doubtfire. Although I didn’t enjoy the story, I did find it an indictment of how old age is looked upon by some people – an angry, unsettling and cruel look at our society.

Colin, works for the council and visits his aged mother, Norah. Norah is a grumbler, completely self-absorbed and constantly belittling Colin who can never please her. At times I found it confusing, just what was real and what was in his imagination and how the book hung together. Of course, everything goes wrong as events spiral out of Colin’s control. 

R is for The Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy, one of my favourite authors and I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It’s a dramatic and tragic love story. It has a large cast of characters, with lovers who change their affections throughout the novel and it’s full of intrigue with striking moonlit scenes, disputes, heated quarrels and misunderstandings, along with rustic characters and traditional celebrations, for example Guy Fawkes night, May Day and a Mummers’ play at Christmas. It’s not a book to read quickly and it transported me back to a time that ceased to exist before I was born, where time moved more slowly, ruled by the seasons and the weather, and with a clearly defined social hierarchy. And yet, I was surprised to find that youngsters were scribbling graffiti on ‘every gatepost and barn’s doors’, writing ‘some bad word or other’ so that a woman can hardly pass for shame some time.’

Y is for You Talkin’ To Me?: Rhetoric from Aristotle to Obama by Sam Leith a TBR. Sam Leith traces the art of argument from ancient Greece down to its many modern mutations. He introduces verbal villains from Hitler to Donald Trump – and the three musketeers: ethos, pathos and logos. He explains how rhetoric works in speeches from Cicero to Richard Nixon, and pays tribute to the rhetorical brilliance of AC/DC’s “Back In Black”. Before you know it, you’ll be confident in chiasmus and proud of your panegyrics – because rhetoric is useful, relevant and absolutely nothing to be afraid of.

The next link up will be on March 1, 2025 when the theme be Science Fiction

WWW Wednesday: 5 February 2025

Published on by Margaret16 Comments

WWW Wednesday is run by Taking on a World of Words.

The Three Ws are:

What are you currently reading?
What did you recently finish reading?
What do you think you’ll read next?

Currently I’m reading Only Murders in the Abbey by Beth Cowan-Erskine.

This is the second Loch Down Abbey Mystery, to be published on 13 February. Set in 1930’s Scotland the story revolves around Loch Down Abbey which has now been turned into a hotel. The Abbey is full of guests for a Highland Ball, including several uninvited members of the Inverkillen family, the Abbey’s former owners. Housekeeper Mrs MacBain thinks her biggest challenge will be finding suitable rooms for everyone and keeping the peace at cocktail hour. Until the morning after the ball, when one of the guests is discovered inside the Abbey’s library – as dead as a doornail.

The last book I read was The Frozen People by Elly Griffiths

This is the first in a new series – an Ali Dawson Mystery to be published on 13 February. I loved it. It’s the first in a new series. It’s not like her other books, but it’s still a murder mystery. You do need to suspend your disbelief because she heads a cold case team who investigate crimes so old, they’re frozen – or so their inside joke goes. Most people don’t know that they travel back in time to complete their research.

I do hope there are more Ali Dawson books in the pipeline. The way this one ends it looks as though there will be at least one more.

What will I read next? I’m not sure. At the moment I think it won’t be crime fiction as I fancy a change.

So it might be Greek Lessons by Han Kang, the winner of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature, a new-to-me author. This is a new translation by Deborah Smith and Emily Yae Won, of the 2011 novel that explores how a teacher losing his sight and a pupil losing her voice form a poetic bond. It is a short book, of just 149 pages narrated by the two unnamed characters, one a woman grieving for her mother and her son, now in the custody of her ex-husband. She is also experiencing the loss of her ability to speak. The other is a man losing his connection to place and family, as well as the loss of his eyesight.  They meet when the woman attends his Ancient Greek lessons.

Or it could be something else.