Novellas – BooksPlease

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

Published on November 7, 2026 by Margaret10 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.

My Year in Novellas 2026

Published on November 1, 2026 by Margaret14 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.

The Christmas Clue by Nicola Upson
The Aspern Papers by Henry James
Homeward Bound by Hamza Yassin
The Christmas Guest by by Peter Swanson
The Rose and the Yew Tree by by Mary Westmacott (Agatha Christie)
Quartet in Autumn by Barbara Pym
Brat Farrar by Josephine Tey
The Third Man and The Fallen Idol by Graham Greene
Maigret in Vichy by Georges Simenon
Maigret and the Old People by Georges Simenon
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.

Maigret and the Old People: Book Beginnings & Review

Published on October 23, 2026 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.

The Third Man by Graham Greene: #The 1949 Club

Published on October 18, 2026 by Margaret4 Comments

This is my second and final book for this week’s 1949 Club, hosted by Simon of Stuck in a Book and Karen of Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings. I read an e-book copy of The Third Man by Graham Greene, which includes a short story, The Fallen Idol. This is just a short review with some thoughts that struck me as I read the book.

Vintage Digital/ 2010/ e-book/ Print length: 162 pages/ My own copy/ 4*

The Third Man was not intended to be a book. It was an early draft for a screenplay, commissioned in 1947 by the film producer Alexander Korda. Greene wrote it whilst he was on holiday in Italy in 1948. After the release of the film in 1949, Greene’s draft was published as a short novel, or novella, in 1950.

Description from Amazon:

The Third Man, Graham Greene’s most iconic tale, takes place in post-war Vienna, a ‘smashed dreary city’ occupied by the four Allied powers. Rollo Martins, a second-rate novelist, arrives penniless to visit his friend and hero, Harry Lime. But Harry has died in suspicious circumstances, and the police are closing in on his associates…

The Fallen Idol is the chilling story of a small boy caught up in the games that adults play. Left in the care of the butler and his wife whilst his parents go on a fortnight’s holiday, Philip realises too late the danger of lies and deceit. But the truth is even deadlier.

I’ve not seen the film and knew very little about The Third Man, apart from the fact that it’s about Harry Lime. But I’d no idea who he was, or what he did.

Vienna after the end of the Second World War is vividly described, ‘a smashed dreary city’ partitioned into four zones – in the control of Four Powers, the Russian, British, American and French, each region marked only by notice boards. Each Power was responsible for the security of the city for a month at a time. This was new information for me as I knew nothing about what had happened in Italy after the War.

The book begins as Rollo Martin, a writer of cheap American westerns, arrives in Vienna. His old school friend, Harry Lime had invited him, promising him a job. But he arrives in time for Harry’s funeral, where he meets a British military policeman Colonel Calloway, who narrates the story. Harry died in a road accident outside his apartment.

It has a terrific atmosphere throughout, classic noir, seedy, somewhat dreary and depressing. There is a enormous feeling of danger, fear and tension as Rollo tries to find out exactly how Harry had died and who was the third man who had witnessed the accident. Greene’s writing conveys a sense of the melancholy and tiredness that filled Vienna at that time.

Colonel Calloway describes it as

… a city of undignified ruins which turned that February into great glaciers of snow and ice. The Danube was a grey flat muddy river a long way off the Second Bezirk, the Russian zone where the Prater lay smashed and desolate full of weeds, only the Great Wheel revolving slowly over the foundations of merry-go-rounds like abandoned millstones, the rusting irons of smashed tanks which nobody had cleared away, the frost-nipped weeds where the snow was thin. (page 7)

And as Ian Thompson describes in his Introduction ‘Virtually every Viennese was involved in black-marketeering of one kind or another; there was not merely defeat in the former Nazi outpost, but debasement.’

I did find it confusing in places and some time I’d like to re-read it to clarify the sequence of events. But I thoroughly enjoyed it. Don’t read the Introduction by Ian Thompson before you read the book, because it gives away the plot. It compares the book and the film and gives a summary of The Fallen Idol. It is very interesting and worth reading – after reading the book.

The Fallen Idol tells the story of a small boy who was left alone in a grand London house in the care of the parents’ butler and his jealous wife. It has a tragic ending but I thought it was interesting because its seen partly through the little boy’s eyes. Like The Third Man it has a great sense of unease and dread.

Many thanks to Simon and Kaggsy for choosing 1949. I found both Brat Farrar and The Third Man give fascinating insights into what life was like in 1949!

Quartet in Autumn by Barbara Pym

Published on September 26, 2026 by Margaret5 Comments

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.

Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes by Robert Louis Stevenson – Short Nonfiction

Published on November 30, 2025 by Margaret6 Comments

Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes: A Journey of Solitude and Reflection by Robert Louis Stevenson, first published 1879

The wild Cévennes region of France forms the backdrop for the pioneering travelogue Travels with a Donkey, written by a young Robert Louis Stevenson. Ever hopeful of encountering the adventure he yearned for and raising much needed finance at the start of his writing career, Stevenson embarked on the 120-mile, 12-day trek and recorded his experiences in this journal. His only companion for the trip was a predictably stubborn donkey called Modestine. Travels with a Donkey gives the reader a rare glimpse of the character of the author, and the journalistic and often comical style of writing is in refreshing contrast to Stevenson’s more famous works. (Goodreads)

This is a short nonfiction book, just right for both Nonfiction November and Novellas in November. It’s a book I’ve had since 2011 and I’m glad to say that it was well worth the wait. I enjoyed it on several levels, as travel writing, history of the Cévennes region, descriptive writing of the French countryside in 1878, observations of the local people and Stevenson’s thoughts on religion.

He began his journey through the Cévennes, a range of mountains in south-central France, at Le Monastier, a highland valley fifteen miles from Le Puy, where he spent a month preparing for his excursion southward to Alais (modern name, Alès) a distance of 120 miles.

I was struck by what he took with him – a sleeping sack, because he didn’t intend to rely on the hospitality of a village inn, and a tent was troublesome to pitch and then strike. Whereas, a sleeping sack was always ready to get into. His was extraordinary, made of green waterproof cart-cloth lined with blue ‘sheep’s fur’, nearly six feet square plus two triangular flaps to make a pillow at night and the top and bottom of the sack by day. It was a huge sort of long roll or sausage, large enough for two at a pinch. And that was why he bought a donkey from an old man. He called her Modestine because she was

a diminutive she-ass, not much bigger than a dog, the colour of a mouse, with a kindly eye and a determined under-jaw. There was something neat and high-bred, a quakerish elegance, about the rogue that hit my fancy on the spot.

But he soon discovered that unless he beat Modestine with a staff, which he didn’t want to do; it sickened him – and me too. He had to let her go at her own pace and patiently follow her and there were times when she just stopped and wouldn’t go any further. This was extremely slow and in the end he resorted to a goad, which was a plain wand with an eighth of an inch of pin which worked wonders on poor Modestine, who carried most of his equipment.

As well as his clothing, he also took his travelling wear of country velveteen, pilot coat and knitted spencer (a short waist-length, double-breasted, man’s jacket, originally named after George Spencer, 2nd Earl Spencer), some books, a railway rug, food, and a variety of other things including a revolver, a spirit lamp, lantern, candles, a jack-knife and large leather flask, a bottle of Beaujolais, a leg of cold mutton and a considerable quantity of black bread and white for himself and the donkey and of all things an eggbeater, which he later abandoned. He wasn’t travelling light!

The book is full of Stevenson’s descriptions of the countryside, such as this one of the landscape as he approached the Trappist Monastery of Our Lady of Sorrows:

The sun had come out as I left the shelter of a pine-wood, and I beheld suddenly a fine wild landscape to the south. High rocky hills, as blue as sapphires, closed the view, and between these lay ridge upon ridge, heathery, craggy, the sun glittering on veins of rock, the underwood clambering in the hollows, as rude as God made them at first.

Modestine had to stop at St Jean du Gard, as she just couldn’t travel any further and needed to rest. He sold her and continued on to Alais by diligence (a public stagecoach). He missed her after she was gone.

For twelve days we were fast companions; we had travelled upwards of a hundred and twelve miles, crossed several respectable ridges, and jogged along with our six legs by many a rocky and many a boggy road. After the first day, although sometimes I was hurt and distant in manner, I still kept my patience; and as for her, poor soul! she had come to regard me as a god. She loved to eat out of my hand. She was patient, elegant in form, the colour of an ideal mouse, and inimitably small.

And he wept!

I was rather surprised by how much I enjoyed this book, mainly because I didn’t know anything about it other than its title and thought it was perhaps fiction. Of course it isn’t and it’s full of detail of his hike that I haven’t mentioned in this review. I shouldn’t have been surprised as I’ve enjoyed other books by Stevenson – Treasure Island, Kidnapped and Catriona.

I read in Wikipedia that Stevenson’s purpose in making his journey ‘was designed to provide material for publication while allowing him to distance himself from a love affair with an American woman of which his friends and family did not approve and who had returned to her husband in California’, but without giving a source for this information. In his book Stevenson does say when talking to a monk he met at the Trappist Monastery that he was not a pedlar (as the monk thought), but a ‘literary man, who drew landscapes and was going to write a book’.