Category: Fiction

Two Novellas for Novellas in November The Library Cat & the Ghost Cat by Alex Howard

Published on by Margaret6 Comments

Novellas in November, is a challenge hosted by Cathy at 746 books and Rebecca at Bookish Beck, books under 200 pages long.

Here are two novellas by Alex Howard that I really enjoyed reading.

Rating: 4 out of 5.

Library Cat The Observations of a Thinking Cat by Alex Howard (161 pages Black & White Publishing 2016) Winner of the People’s Book Prize 2017 Beryl Bainbridge Award for Best First Time Author.

Library Cat, the resident cat of the University of Edinburgh’s Main Library, is not like other cats. He is a thinking cat. You can tell by the canny glint in his eye, his disdainful whiskers and his unrelenting interest in books and piles of paper.

This is a book for cat lovers as well as library lovers – that’s me for one, so although I thought the beginning of this book was rather slight I was soon captivated by the Library Cat. He is black and white, with one ‘white paw and one black paw with a white tip that makes it look like it has been dipped into a churn of fresh milk.’

This is a story about Library Cat’s thoughts and his own search for completeness in this fractured world. It is a funny, witty and irreverent look at the world, seen through the unusually observant eyes of Edinburgh University Library’s resident cat. The chapters are quite short to start off with, getting longer towards the end, as he thinks about life, muses on the strange behaviour of humans, particularly of students and ponders the work of Nietzsche. At the end of each chapter there’s a list of Recommended Reading, notes on the food he ate, his Mood, and he Discovers about Humans.

I enjoyed this light, yet philosophical little book complete with the Library Cat’s Bibliography, listing all the recommended books.

Rating: 5 out of 5.

The Ghost Cat by Alex Howard ( 192 pages & White Publishing 2023}

I preferred this one as it is more developed, following Grimalkin’s life after his mother abandoned him as a kitten, in 1887, through his nine lives in Edinburgh. He was found, near to death in an icy stable, by Eilidh, a maid servant to Mr Calvert who lived at 7/7 Marchmont Crescent.

A cat has nine lives. For three he plays, for three he strays and for the last three he stays. ~ English proverb.

His death came in 1902 as he lay sleeping in front of the fire and ‘as the rising flames beat their warmth upon his fur, the twist of his thoughts fell silent for the last time ever in this life.’ (page 14)

From then on the story follows Grimalkin as he experiences the rest of his nine lives and witnesses the changes of the next 120 years, prowling unseen among the inhabitants of an Edinburgh tenement, while unearthing some startling revelations about the mystery of existence, the unstoppable march of time and the true meaning of feline companionship.

He found himself in another world and with a new existence and meets the Cat-sith,* a huge cat that walks on its hind legs. The Cat-sith has missed his death, thus depriving him of his nine lives. The only way he can make amends is to give Grimalkin a choice of passing over to oblivion immediately or to return to earth and spend his remaining eight lives observing its future. However, although this would prevent him from experiencing physical pain it wouldn’t guard him against a great many painful emotions, albeit with many more positive ones. All these live and 2022s will take place in the supernatural realm. He becomes a Ghost Cat.

This is history as seen through the eyes of a cat from 1902 to 2022. I’m not going to go into detail about his remaining lives, other than to say he witnessed events in 1909, 1935, 1942, 1969, 1997, 2008 and 2022. As well as the main story there are Grimalkin’s observations and notes explaining various events and technological changes that had taken place in each period.

I was fascinated and just loved it, such a novel experience, informative and full of emotion right to the end. I shall certainly look out for more of Alex Howard books – the next book is The Ship’s Cat, described as an epic new adventure for feline fans. The Ship’s Cat is the Odyssey with cats – a heroic yet feel-good tale of unlikely friendship on the high seas.

*According to Wikipedia the Cat-sith is a fairy or spirit creature from Celtic mythology, said to resemble a large black cat with a white spot on its chest that walks on its hind legs. Legend has it that the spectral cat haunts the Scottish Highlands.

Alex Howard is an author, editor and theatre professional from Edinburgh. His TikTok page, Housedoctoralex, has nearly 300,000 followers and his been featured on television and in the national press.

A doctoral graduate of English literature, Alex wrote his first book Library Cat (B&W Publishing) while completing his PhD. It won the People’s Book Prize in 2017, and has been translated into French, Korean and Italian. He also writes poetry, which has been published in New Writing Scotland, Gutter and The London Magazine, among others, and his academic book Larkin’s Travelling Spirit was published in 2021 by Palgrave McMillan.

Alex works at Capital Theatres as a creative engagement coordinator and editor while renovating his Edinburgh tenement flat at weekends, with his cat Tabitha, son Sasha and wife, Ellie.

Maigret’s Doubts by Georges Simenon: a Novella

Published on by Margaret2 Comments

Rating: 5 out of 5.

Maigret’s Doubts by Georges Simenon, translated by Shaun Whiteside is the 52nd Maigret novel (first published as Les scrupules de Maigret in 1957), and published by Penguin in 2018, one of the books in the Maigret Capsule Collection, a selection of twelve of Georges Simenon’s iconic Inspector Maigret titles.

Description from Goodreads

Inspector Maigret finds himself caught in the middle of a husband and wife duo’s case of “he said/she said”—with murderous consequences

An unusually quiet day for Inspector Maigret at the Quai des Orfèvres is disturbed by a visit from mild-mannered toy salesman Xavier Manton. Maigret is taken aback by Manton’s revelation that he suspects his wife of plotting to poison him. And when he receives a visit from Madame Manton expressing her own grave concerns later that day, he finds himself deeply conflicted, unsure of whom to trust. Maigret heeds the advice of his seniors and begins investigating the couple—and with every turn, new complications arise. When the case comes to a boil and a body is discovered, everyone, including Maigret, is shocked.

Maigret’s Doubts is an engrossing mystery of marriage and deceit that forces the reader to question whether our brilliant inspector may be fallible after all.

My review:

I recently reviewed Simenon’s earlier book, The Yellow Dog, which baffled me because I had little idea about what Maigret was thinking or even doing. Maigret’s Doubts is just the opposite as it is very clear what he is thinking as Simenon describes his thoughts in detail.

It begins on the 10th January, after the holidays finding detectives at the Quai des Orfèvre, strangely quiet with little to do except dull administrative tasks, a period of dead calm. Maigret wasn’t in good form, feeling lethargic and wondering if he wasn’t coming down with the flu. And he’s worrying about his wife’s health after their family doctor has told him he’s prescribed her some pills at the same time telling him there was absolutely nothing to worry about. It makes him melancholy as he realises they are both getting to the age of minor ailments that need attention.

A visit from Xavier Marton, the head of the toy department at the Grands Magasins du Louvre, a model train specialist, breaks into Maigret’s melancholy, telling him that he thinks his wife wants to poison him. Later that same day his wife, Gisèle also visits Maigret and tells him that her husband is having delusions, leaving him unsure who is telling him the truth. The next day, Manon visits Maigret again and warns him that if his wife poisons him, he’ll shoot her before he dies. But it soon becomes clear that Manon and Jenny, his wife’s sister are in love, although not actually having an affair and that Gisèle, on the other hand, is having an affair with her employer, Monsieur Harris.

Maigret is puzzled by what Manon and his wife have told him and asks Dr Pardon his family doctor for his opinion and consults books about psychiatry, making this book more of a psychological study than a police investigation. Maigret isn’t faced with a crime that has been committed but one that could be committed. But it was just as possible that it wouldn’t be committed at all.

What he had to do this time was not to reconstruct the actions and gestures of a human being, but to predict his behaviour, which was difficult in a different way.(page 114)

But Maigret doesn’t find the books of much help:

In the end he got up, as a man who has had enough threw the book on the table and, opening the sideboard in the dining room picked up the bottle of plum brandy and filled one of the little gold-rimmed glasses.

It was like a protestation of common sense against all that scientific gobbledygook, a way of getting back to earth.

I really enjoyed this book, although not a lot actually happens. Maigret fears that there is going to be a murder but who will be the victim and how can he make an arrest when no crime has been committed? The narrative moves at a slow pace as the tension steadily rises culminating in a murder as the book moves to its end.

Novellas in November is hosted by Cathy at 746 Books and Bookish Beck.

Nonfiction November 2025: Week 3: Book Pairings

Published on by Margaret12 Comments

Week 3 (11/10-11/16) is hosted by Liz, an ex-librarian, a freelance editor and transcriber, a runner and a volunteer. She blogs about everything from social justice and geology nonfiction to YA romance and literary fiction at Adventures in reading, Running and Working from Home

This week, pair up a nonfiction book with a fiction title. Maybe it’s a historical novel and the real history in a nonfiction version, or a memoir and a novel, or a fiction book you’ve read and you would like recommendations for background reading. Or maybe it’s just two books you feel have a link, whatever they might be. You can be as creative as you like!

My nonfiction book is The Pattern in the Carpet by Margaret Drabble. I’ve always enjoyed doing jigsaws. So when I saw this book about jigsaw puzzles, their history and their place in her life I wanted to read it. They were a big part in my childhood and I still enjoy doing them.

Margaret Drabble describes her book thus:

This book is not a memoir, although parts of it may look like a memoir. Nor is it a history of the jigsaw puzzle, although that it was what it was once meant to be. It is a hybrid. … This book started off as small history of the jigsaw, but it has spiralled off in other directions and now I am not sure what it is.

I think is a memoir because what she does in this book is to weave her own story into a history of games, in particular jigsaws, which have offered her and many others relief from melancholy and depression. She writes about the importance of play and notes the way that doing a jigsaw is like creating order out of chaos, and because they have no verbal content they exercise a different part of the brain, bringing different neurons and dendrites into play. 

I enjoyed parts of immensely – those parts about her childhood, and life at Bryn, her grandparents’ house in Long Bennington and about her beloved Aunt Phyl (Phyllis Boor) and of course those parts about jigsaws, both personal and historical, about mosaics (looking at them as a form of jigsaw), the history of children’s games and puzzles and amusements. She does ‘spiral off in other directions’ which meant in parts it lacks a clear structure in a sort of ‘stream of consciousness’ style, particularly in her reminiscences and nostalgia about life (reproduced in some jigsaws) in a rural community that no longer exists.

I’m pairing it with The Jigsaw Maker by Adrienne Dines, another book that appealed to me because it’s about jigsaws.

The Jigsaw Maker is a beautifully written novel, one with pace and tension in just the right places. Lizzie Flynn has a shop in a village near Kilkenny, a sort of knick-knack shop selling a variety of goods, cards, flower arrangements, and home-made sweets. The ‘Jigsaw Maker’ is Jim Nealon, a stranger who walks into her shop one morning and asks her to sell his beautiful jigsaws.

But these are no ordinary jigsaws. Jim makes wooden jigsaws, tiny intricately shaped pieces ‘finely cut so that they were more like buttons than jigsaw pieces’  And each one is individual showing a photograph of a real place accompanied by a personalised history of the scene.

He proposes to take photos of places, not the tourist attractions, but the places their ancestors might have lived and worked. He asks Lizzie to help him by writing about the scenes. To begin with he shows her a photo of the local school and asks her to picture herself back there in 1969 and write what she remembers – what it was like to be a pupil there.

It just so happens that 1969 had been quite an eventful year. This opens up the floodgates of memory for Lizzie as painful and puzzling events from that year almost over power her. Looking back at the child she was she realises that not everything was as it had appeared to her then.

It is just like a jigsaw – all the pieces are there and both the reader and Lizzie have to put them together correctly to get the correct picture. I could visualise the scenes and the characters and I became anxious for Lizzie as she realised the truth not only about the events she had seen, but also about her place in those events. There are plenty of repressed secrets that come to the surface and an added mystery too – who is Jim? Why has he come to the village and why did he ask Lizzie in particular to help him?

The Yellow Dog by Georges Simenon

Published on by Margaret4 Comments

The Maigret books are also a good choice for Novellas in November, they’re all under 200 pages. I’ve been a Maigret fan for a long time, ever since I was in my teens, watching the TV series with Rupert Davies in the title role. And I’ve been reading the Maigret series as I’ve come across the books in libraries, bookshops, and more recently as e-books, so not in the order they were originally published.

Penguin| 2014| 164 pages| My own copy| 3*

This is a short review because, once more I’m behind with writing reviews. The Yellow Dog is the 5th book in the new Penguin Maigret series, translated by Linda Asher. It was first published in 1931 and also published in a previous translation as A Face for a Clue. It’s a tale of small town suspicion and revenge.

In the windswept seaside town of Concarneau, a local wine merchant is shot. In fact, someone is out to kill all the influential men and the entire town is soon sent into a state of panic. For Maigret, the answers lie with the pale, downtrodden waitress Emma, and a strange yellow dog lurking in the shadows…

It’s only 134 pages but with a slow start it did seem longer than that. It begins with the shooting of Monsieur Mostaguen, a local wine merchant, followed by the appearance of the yellow dog, a big, snarling yellow animal, and then an attempt at poisoning for Maigret to investigate. I wondered what the significance of the yellow dog was and who it belonged to; no one seems to know. The locals had never seen it before and they all viewed it with fear and suspicion. I’ve read some of the earlier Maigret and have noted before that I’ve been confused and baffled, with little idea of what was going on and it was just the same with this book. Maigret doesn’t seem to be very concerned about the man who was shot and seriously injured, nor about the attempted poisoning until there’s a murder and another man disappears. He walks around the town, observing but not actively investigating.

Simenon is good at conveying atmosphere and skilled at setting the scene and drawing convincing characters in a few paragraphs.  As the book begins there’s a south-westerly gale slamming the boats together in the harbour in Concarneau and the wind surges through the streets. Contrast the weather at the beginning of the book with the change by the time Maigret is getting close to clearing up the mystery – the weather turned fine, with a vibrant blue sky, the sea sparkled, and ‘the Old Town’s walls, so gloomy in the rain, turn a joyful, dazzling white.‘

I don’t think this is one of the best Maigret book, but it is puzzling with Maigret keeping his thoughts to himself until the end of the book, when like Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot, he explains it all.

The Black Loch by Peter May: Book Beginnings on Friday & The Friday 56

Published on by Margaret10 Comments

Every Friday Book Beginnings on Friday is hosted by Gillion at Rose City Reader where you can share the first sentence (or so) of the book you are reading. You can also share from a book you want to highlight just because it caught your fancy.

The book I’m currently reading is The Black Loch by Peter May, the fourth book in May’s Lewis Trilogy. I’ve read and loved the first three books. So I was keen to read it, and so far (I’ve read 45%) it’s living up to my expectations.

The book begins with a Prologue:

The sun set some time ago. Although it is not yet dark enough, somehow for murder.

Also every Friday there is The Friday 56, hosted by Freda at Freda’s Voice, but she is taking a break and Anne at My Head is Full of Books has taken on hosting duties in her absence. You grab a book and turn to page 56 (or 56% of an eBook), find one or more interesting sentences (no spoilers), and post them.

Page 56:

‘Did I ever tell you about the whaling boy?’

He never had.

‘You know what a whale is, Finn?’

‘Of course!’

‘Well there was a time when we killed them all over the planet. Hundreds and thousands of them.’

Description from Amazon:

A MURDER

The body of eighteen-year-old TV personality Caitlin is found abandoned on a remote beach at the head of An Loch Dubh – the Black Loch – on the west coast of the Isle of Lewis. A swimmer and canoeist, it is inconceivable that she could have drowned.

A SECRET

Fin Macleod left the island ten years earlier to escape its memories. When he learns that his married son Fionnlagh had been having a clandestine affair with the dead girl and is suspected of her murder, he and Marsaili return to try and clear his name.

A RECKONING

But nothing is as it seems, and the truth of the murder lies in a past that Fin would rather forget, and a tragedy at the cages of a salmon farm on East Loch Roag, where the tense climax of the story finds its resolution.

If you have read this book, what did you think?

Loitering with Intent by Muriel Spark: Book Beginnings on Friday & The Friday 56

Published on by Margaret6 Comments

Every Friday Book Beginnings on Friday is hosted by Gillion at Rose City Reader where you can share the first sentence (or so) of the book you are reading. You can also share from a book you want to highlight just because it caught your fancy.

Loitering with Intent by Muriel Spark is a book I’ve had since 2017, when I bought it from Barter Books in Alnwick, one of my favourite secondhand bookshops. One of my favourite books is The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, so I was hoping to love this book too. I did enjoy it, but not as much as Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.

The book begins:

One day in the middle of the twentieth century I sat in an old graveyard which had not been demolished, in the Kensington area of London, when a young policeman stepped off the path and came over to me.

Also every Friday there is The Friday 56, hosted by Freda at Freda’s Voice, but she is taking a break and Anne at My Head is Full of Books has taken on hosting duties in her absence. You grab a book and turn to page 56 (or 56% of an eBook), find one or more interesting sentences (no spoilers), and post them.

Page 55-56:

Several people turned round to look at Edwina as she spoke with her high cry. People often turned round to stare at her painted wizened face, her green teeth, the raised, red-blood fingernail accompanied by her shrieking voice, the whole wrapped up to the neck in luxurious fur. Edwina was over ninety and might die at any time, as she did about six years later. My dear, dear Solly lived into the seventies of this century, when I was far away.

Description from Amazon:

A funny and clever novel about art and reality and the way they imitate each other, from the author of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. With an introduction by Mark Lawson.

Would-be novelist Fleur Talbot works for the snooty Sir Quentin Oliver at the Autobiographical Association, whose members are at work on their memoirs. When her employer gets his hands on Fleur’s novel-in-progress, mayhem ensues when its scenes begin coming true.

If you have read this book, what did you think?