Category: TBRs

The Boy With No Shoes: a Memoir by William Horwood

Published on by Margaret4 Comments

Headline Book Publishing| 2004| Hardback edition| 440 pages| 5*

Five-year-old Jimmy Rova is the unwanted child of a mother who rejects him, and whose other children bully him. The one thing he can call his own is a pair of shoes, a present from the only person he feels has ever loved him. When they are cruelly taken away, Jimmy spirals down into a state of loneliness and terrible loss from which there seems no recovery.

This triumphant story of a boy’s struggle with early trauma and his remarkable journey into adulthood is based on William Horwood’s own remarkable childhood in south-east England after the Second World War. Using all the skills that went into the creation of his modern classics, Horwood has written an inspiring story of a journey from a past too painful to imagine to the future every child deserves. (Amazon)

William Horwood is an English novelist. He grew up on the East Kent coast, primarily in Deal. His first novel, Duncton Wood, an allegorical tale about a community of moles, was published in 1980. It was followed by two sequels, forming The Duncton Chronicles, and also a second trilogy, The Book of Silence. William Horwood has also written two stand-alone novels intertwining the lives of humans and of eagles, The Stonor Eagles and Callanish , and The Wolves of Time duology. Skallagrigg, his 1987 novel about disability, love, and trust, was made into a BBC film in 1994. In addition, he has written a number of sequels to The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame.

When I saw The Boy With No Shoes on the secondhand bookshelves in my local village hall I thought I’d like to read it. It was a great choice as I think it’s one of the best books I’ve read this year. It’s important to read the Author’s Note carefully before you read the book, and not dive straight into it. I had to re-read it after I’d read a few chapters as I was beginning to wonder if this was really fictional. I also wasted time searching on maps to find where he lived growing up.

In his Author’s Note at the front of the book he explained why he wrote about himself as Jimmy Rova:

When I was thirty-four and had been iller than I knew for two long years, my recovery began in the strangest and most magical dream of ways. |I woke one day from dreaming and saw myself when very young, as clearly as in a black and white Kodak photograph. I saw how desperately the little boy I once was had needed someone to talk to in a world where no one wanted to listen. I decided there and then to travel back in time and let myself as adult be listener to the child. This book and my final healing is the result of that imaginative listening, over very many years.

Because the boy seemed other than himself he gave him a different name and changed the name of his home town. By so doing he was able to fill in gaps, paper over the cracks and visit distant places of emotion that he would never have reached.

It is a long and detailed book that took me nearly a month to read. It is beautifully written and as he tells the story of his very early life there are many times when it moved me to tears. His writing is so clear that the places and people he describes spring to life as you read. All the characters have depth and are believable as people.

He is just as good at portraying Jimmy’s feelings and emotions. I could feel his depth of despair, fear and confusion as he describes his first memory about the man in a time long ago who bought him a pair of shoes. That day entered his heart and stayed there forever. He called him The Man Who Was, the man who left him standing in the rain, holding his Ma’s hand, full of fear that he would not be there to keep him safe from Ma, who treated him appallingly, and he would be all alone. All that was left to him were the shoes. So, imagine how awful it was when the shoes disappeared, cruelly taken from him.

But life for Jimmy did eventually get better, especially when Granny came to live with them, but even she could not protect completely from his abusive Ma. I loved all the details of Granny’s time in Africa with ‘The African Gentleman’, who wore a funny hat on his grey and grizzled hair, and his clothes were striped black and yellow. In his hand he carried a wand like a magician. Also unforgettable is his first love, Harriet, and how his mother ended their affair.

There were others too who were kind to him. I loved his description of a new English teacher at the Grammar School, who in contrast to the Head and other teachers believed in the boys. He inspired Jimmy and transformed his life by showing him how to believe he could succeed and how to prepare for his O levels.

There were others too, His Uncle Max who took him hiking in Snowdonia. Moel Saibod was the first mountain he climbed and then others, including Snowdon, the tallest mountain in Wales and England. Then, Mr Boys who taught him to read, Mr Bubbles, a fisherman and his wife, who lived along the shore and taught him all about fishing. I could go on and on, but really if this interests you the best thing is to read the book for yourself. It is a wonderful book, that captures what life was like in the 1950s and even though my childhood was nothing like his, it brought back memories of growing up. I too, as a young woman) climbed Snowdon – Welsh name, Yr Wyddfa (I did not take the Snowdon Mountain Railway either up or down) and also Moel Saibod.

Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift

Published on by Margaret9 Comments

The summary on Goodreads:

A wickedly clever satire uses comic inversions to offer telling insights into the nature of man and society. Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read.

Gulliver’s Travels describes the four voyages of Lemuel Gulliver, a ship’s surgeon. In Lilliput he discovers a world in miniature; towering over the people and their city, he is able to view their society from the viewpoint of a god. However, in Brobdingnag, a land of giants, tiny Gulliver himself comes under observation, exhibited as a curiosity at markets and fairs. In Laputa, a flying island, he encounters a society of speculators and projectors who have lost all grip on everyday reality; while they plan and calculate, their country lies in ruins. Gulliver’s final voyage takes him to the land of the Houyhnhnms, gentle horses whom he quickly comes to admire – in contrast to the Yahoos, filthy bestial creatures who bear a disturbing resemblance to humans.

I think Gulliver’s Travels is such a strange book, definitely not a children’s book as I had thought. There are very many editions of this book. The edition I read is the e-book edition based on the text of Swift’s 1726 original, with the 1899 illustrations of Arthur Rackham. It’s a satire on human nature and the imaginary travellers’ tale literary subgenre about Lemuel Gulliver, a ship’s surgeon who travels to four strange and distant lands.

This is one of those books that I’ve known of since childhood and have known bits of the story, but have never read. I did see a TV cartoon version several years ago and I’ve been meaning to read it for years. It’s a book, which operates on several levels, as the Introduction in one of my copies (an Odhams Press Limited publication) states:

An embittered, middle-aged man sat down to write a book that would scourge the vices and follies of mankind. That book, with its sting mellowed during the passage of two hundred years, has become – of all things – a children’s classic. ‘Gulliver’s Travels’ was the splenetic outburst of a passionate mind, whose genius gave immortality to so transient a thing as satire; but that immortality had a permanent basis – a child-like delight in marvels, a freshness of invention, a limpid style and a selective perception that created images of giants, dwarfs and fabled races with a vivid pulsating life of their own.

I don’t think I’d have liked it very much if I’d read it as a child as there are many passages that would have bored me stiff and which even now I found tedious and heavy going in parts. It satirises the political situation during Swift’s lifetime, and is full of political and social allusions, a lot of which, interesting as it is, passed over my head.

But it is a fantastical fantasy set in such different places, the ones I found most interesting are Lilliput inhabited by tiny people Brobdignag, the land of giants, and the country of the Houyhnhms, where a race of talking horses, rule the Yahoos, strange, filthy humanoid animals that Gulliver viewed with contempt and disgust. Gulliver became a part of one of the horse’s households and grew to admire and wanted to emulate the Houyhnhms’ way of life, which left him horrified with humanity. Less interesting is his visit to Laputa, a flying island and it’s rebellious cities.

It was not really what I expected, and whilst I think a lot of it is absurd and amusing, it’s certainly not a book I can say that I enjoyed, I think it was worth reading and I’m glad I finally got round to reading it.

Completely Unexpected Tales by Roald Dahl

Published on by Margaret12 Comments

I’m taking part in Short Story September hosted by Lisa at ANZ LitLovers LitBlog She asks us to read a collection and then choose just one story to review, defining a short story as one that can be read in under an hour. It’s fine to mention the titles of other stories in the collection that you also enjoyed, of course. Aim for a review that’s less than 800 words, but this is not a hard-and-fast rule because some stories need less and others need more.

Roald Dahl is well known for his children’s books. He was a poet, screenwriter and a wartime fighter ace, a military pilot who had officially shot down a minimum number of enemy aircraft, typically five or more, during aerial combat.

He also wrote numerous short stories for adults. There are several collections of these. I have just one – Completely Unexpected Tales by Roald Dahl, which is made up of two collections: Tales of the Unexpected and More Tales of the Unexpected. I first came across Roald Dahl back in 1979 when I used to enjoy watching these tales in the TV series, Tales of the Unexpected. There are 25 short stories in total in this book, some of them are very short, but I prefer the longer stories. As the title suggests these short stories all end with an unexpected twist, some are more predictable than others, but others did take me by surprise with a sting in the tail.

Roald Dahl was born n Llandaff, Glamorgan. His parents were Norwegian. I bought this book at The Roald Dahl Museum and Story Centre in the village of Great Missenden, Buckinghamshire where Dahl lived until his death in 1990. Previously I’ve read and enjoyed some of his children’s books.

On the back cover Completely Unexpected Tales is described as a superb compendium of vengeance, surprise and dark delight. I haven’t read all the stories yet but a couple stand out for me.The first is William and Mary, which was originally published in 1959 and included in his 1960 collection Kiss Kiss, a sinister story about the darker side of human nature.

After William Pearl died his wife, Mary received a letter which both surprised and shocked her. It wasn’t at all what she had expected. A domineering, unpleasant man he began in usual bossy way by telling her to:

continue to observe those precepts which have guided you so well daring our partnership together. Be diligent and dignified in all things. Be thrifty with your money. Be very careful that you do not . . . et cetera, et cetera.

She had hoped he might have written her something beautiful, that maybe he’d thank her for giving him thirty years of her life and for ironing a million shirts and cooking a million meals and making a million beds, something that she could read over and over again, once a day at least.

But, no this was a letter describing a scientific experiment that Doctor Landy, an Oxford University colleague wanted to do on his brain immediately after his death from cancer. She was shocked and appalled as he proceeded to tell her in great detail what it entailed.

He ended his letter with a postscript reminding her not to drink cocktails… waste money… smoke cigarettes… buy a television apparatus.

After she read it all, she reached for a cigarette, lit it, inhaling the smoke deeply and blowing it out in clouds all over the room. Through the smoke she could see her lovely television set, brand new, lustrous, huge, crouching defiantly but also a little self-consciously on top of what used to be William’s worktable. What would he say, she wondered, if he could see that now?

He disapproved of smoking and also of children and they’d never had any. But after thirty years of doing what he told her, she felt she had to follow his instructions and rang Landy to see whether the experiment had gone ahead. It had and Dahl describes it in disgusting and repulsive detail.

This is a story about control, revenge and the dark side of human relationships and as I read it I wonder how Mary would react. She’d already gone against his ban on smoking and watching television. But would she really break free of his control and could she indeed take revenge on him?

The other story features a couple with a very different marriage – Mrs Bixby and the Colonel’s Coat. Mrs Bixby has been having a secret affair for years with an extremely wealthy man known as the Colonel. When he gives her a beautiful mink coat she wonders what to tell her husband about where she got it. In the end she decides to pawn the coat and tell him she found the pawn ticket in a taxi and then she can retrieve the coat. But will this plan work? Is her dentist husband really as ignorant of her affair as she thinks. I was pleased with the ending of this story of betrayal and deception.

Short Story September 2025

Published on by Margaret5 Comments

Lisa at ANZ LitLovers will be hosting a new reading event – Short Story September, running from September 1 to 30. On September 1st Lisa will set up a post where all contributions can be posted so that they form a valuable resource that is easy to find.

To participate, please keep it simple.  We all know that it’s hard to review short story collections, so all you are asked to do is to read a collection and then choose just one story from that collection to review.  To sidestep all the yada-yada about how many words a short story can be, just choose a story that can be read in under an hour.

Contributions should include the name of the short story and its author, and the title of the collection that you found it in, and its editor is there is one.  Please #NameTheTranslator for all translations.  It’s fine to mention the titles of other stories in the collection that you also enjoyed, of course.

Aim for a review that’s less than 800 words, but this is not a hard-and-fast rule because some stories need less and others need more.

I’ve four collections of Agatha Christie’s short stories I’ve been meaning to read for ages. So, I got them down from the bookshelves:

Poirot’s Early Cases – Captain Hastings recounts 18 of Poirot’s early cases from the days before he was famous from theft and robbery to kidnapping and murder – were all guaranteed to test Poirot’s soon-to-be-famous ‘little grey cells’ to their absolute limit.

The Golden Ball and Other Stories – bizarre romantic entanglements, supernatural visitations and classic murders.

Miss Marple and Mystery: the Complete Short Stories, an omnibus of 55 short stories, presented in chronological order 1923 -1958.

The Complete Parker Pyne, Private Eye – this edition brings together all 14 stories featuring the rather fat and unconventional Mr Parker Pyne.

The Librarian by Salley Vickers

Published on by Margaret11 Comments

Penguin |26 April 2018 | 388 pages| paperback| 3*

Description from Amazon:

In 1958, Sylvia Blackwell, fresh from one of the new post-war Library Schools, takes up a job as children’s librarian in a run down library in the market town of East Mole.

Her mission is to fire the enthusiasm of the children of East Mole for reading. But her love affair with the local married GP, and her befriending of his precious daughter, her neighbour’s son and her landlady’s neglected grandchild, ignite the prejudices of the town, threatening her job and the very existence of the library with dramatic consequences for them all.

The Librarian is a moving testament to the joy of reading and the power of books to change and inspire us all.

‘Underneath the delightful patina of nostalgia for post-War England, there are stern and spiky questions about why we are allowing our children to be robbed of their heritage of story.’ Frank Cottrell Boyce

‘Vickers has a formidable knack for laying open the human heart’ Sunday Times

The Librarian is one of my TBRs (a paperback I bought four years ago) and also one of the books I decided to read as one of my 20 Books of Summer 2025. Frances @ Volatile Rule also identified it as one of her 10 Books of Summer and suggested we could do a buddy read. I am really looking forward to reading what she thinks about it.

I wanted to read The Librarian because I’ve enjoyed some of Salley Vickers’ books – especially Miss Garnet’s Angel and Mr Golightly’s Holiday (both of which I read pre-blogging). But I have to say that I was rather underwhelmed. It seems a bit shallow as I was expecting something that dug deeper beneath the surface, exploring the characters’personalities in more depth. I found the writing style naïve. Nevertheless I did enjoy it. It’s a simple story, simply told, a light read.

Having said that it does reflect life in the 1950s, a time when memories of the Second World War and Hiroshima still lingered. It’s strong on family relationships, and attitudes towards marriage, sex, and morals and shows the class divisions and the social inequality that existed, one in which the role of women was very different from that of today. It also looks at education and the nature of the 11+ exam and its divisive effects on children in deciding whether they went to a grammar or secondary modern or technical school.

In 1958 Sylvia Blackwell moves to East Mole, a fictional town, to become the Children’s Librarian. The town is described as ‘one of those small, middle-English country towns whose reputation rests on an understanding that it has known better days.’ The library is in a redbrick Victorian building that has been neglected over the years and the Children’s Library has suffered from a lack of adequate funding. It contained an outdated collection of books by mainly once fashionable Victorian authors, most of which could ‘hardly pass for children’s reading in the twentieth century.’ Sylvia is keen to update it and to introduce new books to encourage the children to use the library.

Sylvia is renting one of the cottages in Field Row on the outskirts of East Mole, a redbrick terrace, originally a two up, two down building with no inside WC, no bathroom or running hot water. It’s a damp cottage that her landlady, Mrs Bird, had modernised by adding a toilet next to the kitchen and had squeezed in a bathroom upstairs with a chipped bath and water-stained basin. Sylvia thinks it’s rustic and picturesque with its tiled roof greened over with moss.

Sylvia’s neighbours in the terrace of five houses are June and Ray Hedges, and Sam, their son and his little twin sisters, and Mr Collins, a councillor who is a member of the library committee. She gets on well with the Hedges, particularly so with the children. However, Mr Collins is not so friendly, almost antagonistic towards her. She has an affair with Hugh the local doctor, an older married man, putting her job in jeopardy and indeed threatening the closure of the Children’s Library. It causes problems between Hugh’s daughter and Sam. Sylvia’s work life and personal life become entangled, which has both negative and positive consequences for everyone involved.

I think the most interesting part for me is that it is about libraries in 1958, as I was also a librarian, although not a Children’s Librarian, like Sylvia. And I was a child in the 1950s and and used the local town library from the age of 4, so reading this has brought back many memories of using and working in libraries.

I was less enthusiastic about the ending set some sixty years later, when the library was threatened once again with closure. One of the children returned, now a famous author, to speak at an event which they hope might help to keep the library open, thus giving an update on the lives of some of the characters. However, I think it’s too long and neatly ties up all the loose ends. The book doesn’t need it.

In her Author’s Note at the end of the book, Salley Vickers writes:

The years I have spent as a novelist have taught me that there is no knowing how people will take one’s books. And I really believe that a book is finally made by its readers. Books should not be ‘about’ anything but if this book expresses any special interest it is the interest I acquired as a child in reading. The Librarian grew out of my experience as a young girl with a superb local library and a remarkable Children’s Librarian, Miss Blackwell, whose surname I have stolen (I never knew her first name) for my protagonist.

There’s also a list of children’s books from East Mole Library ‘Recommended reading from East Mole Library’, including some of my favourite books I read as a child and some I missed.

What I have taken from this book is Salley Vickers’ love of reading and enthusiasm for opening the children’s eyes to the joy of reading. It centres on Sylvia and her experiences not only as a Children’s Librarian but as a rather naive young woman in her second job away from her parents and her home. And it is that side of the story that I found less engaging. Salley’s inexperience makes her easy prey for Hugh and I thought the outcome was so predictable.

Salley Vickers

Salley Vickers was born in Liverpool, the home of her mother, and grew up as the child of parents in the British Communist Party. She won a state scholarship to St Paul’s Girl’s School and went on to read English at Newnham College Cambridge.

She has worked, variously, as a cleaner, a dancer, an artist’s model, a teacher of children with special needs, a university teacher of literature, and a psychoanalyst. Her first novel, ‘Miss Garnet’s Angel’, became an international word-of-mouth bestseller. She now writes full time and lectures widely on many subjects, particularly the connections between, art, literature, psychology and religion.

Her principal interests are opera, bird watching, dancing, and poetry. One of her father’s favourite poets, W.B.Yeats, was responsible for her name Salley, (the Irish for ‘willow’) which comes from Yeats’s poem set to music by Benjamin Britten ‘Down by the salley gardens’.(Goodreads)

The Singing Sands by Josephine Tey

Published on by Margaret4 Comments

The 1952 Club hosted this week by Karen at Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings and Simon from Stuck in a Book blogs ends today. The idea is simply to read and review books published in 1952.

The Singing Sands: An Inspector Alan Grant Mystery by Scottish author Josephine Tey is the second book I’ve read for this event. It was the last book she wrote whilst she was terminally ill and was found among her papers when she died. It was published posthumously a few months after her death in 1952. Josephine Tey was a pseudonym of Elizabeth Mackintosh. Josephine was her mother’s first name and Tey the surname of an English Grandmother.

My copy is an e-book, published in 2023 by Evergreen Publishers.

This is the 6th and last Alan Grant Mystery. It’s a book you have to read slowly to fully take in all the details. Although the mystery is interesting and puzzling, what I enjoyed the most about this book is Tey’s descriptive writing, her observations, and her characterisation, particularly that of Alan Grant and the analysis of his mind. Her characters are believable, well developed and unforgettable.

It begins as Grant is travelling on an overnight train to the Scottish Highlands on sick leave from Scotland Yard. He planned to spend his time fishing whilst staying with his cousin, Laura who is married to his old school friend Tommy. He is suffering from claustrophobia and it seems as though he has had some sort of mental breakdown. His journey was fraught with anxiety:

Alan Grant, watching the lights of the yard float past beyond the steamed-up window and listening to the gentle sound of the wheels clicking over the points, was glad because the end of the journey was the end of a night’s suffering. Grant has spent the night trying not to open the door into the corridor. Wide awake, he had lain on his expensive pallet and sweated by the hour. He had sweated not because the compartment was too hot – the air-conditioning worked to a marvel – but because (O Misery! O Shame! O Mortification!) the compartment represented A Small Enclosed Space. … But to the initiate, the sad and haunted initiate, it was A Small Enclosed Space.

Overwork, the doctor called it. (pages 1 – 2)

As he left the train at the terminus he passed compartment B7 and saw the sleeping car attendant shaking the passenger trying to rouse him, assuming he was drunk. Although the compartment reeked of whisky, Grant realised he was dead and left the attendant to deal with it, thinking he’d had enough of dead men – they were not his responsibility. But automatically, he had picked up a newspaper and added it to the other papers he had under his arm. And later on he realised it had belonged to the dead man, on which he had scribbled a cryptic poem:

The beasts that talk,
The streams that stand,
The stones that walk,
The singing sand,
That guard the way
To Paradise.

From then on Grant’s state of mind was in turmoil and he was intrigued by this poem and wondered what it meant. Surely he thought there were actually some singing sands somewhere. It totally occupied his mind and a large part of the book is about his thoughts as he became obsessed with finding out who the man was, why he was travelling to Scotland, what was his state of mind that he had ended up drunk on the train. He had a curious feeling of identification with the man in B7 in the sense of having an identity of interests. He wondered if B7 was also ‘wrestling with demons.’

The inquest concluded that the man’s death was an accidental death. He hadn’t been drunk just tipsy. He had a skull injury that was consistent with a backwards fall against the wash basin. But Grant still wanted to know more and continued to investigate.

He visited various places trying to find the singing sands and advertised in newspapers asking anyone who recognised the words of the verse to contact him. He visited Cladda (a fictional place) after Wee Archie, told him there were singing sands there. The singing sands do actually exist – they’re in the Isle of Eigg. I found this description and a photograph on the Walkhighlands website: In dry weather the grains of quartzite make a rasping or singing sound as you walk on them or when the wind scuffs them.

It’s definitely a book of its time and Tey has used a lot of slang and idioms that aren’t so recognisable today. One of her observations I found interesting was the subject of Scottish nationalism and the relationship between Scotland and England and I wondered if maybe she was expressing her own thoughts on the subject, but bearing in mind that this book is fiction, I can’t be sure. Referring to the 1707 Act of Union between England and Scotland Grant says: Scotland stepped thankfully on to England’s band-wagon and fell heir to all its benefits. Colonies, Shakespeare, soap, solvency and so forth.

Wee Archie, was supposedly a Scottish nationalist but was in fact an Englishman who called himself Gilleasbuig Mac- a’-Bruithainn and wielded a shepherd’s crook two feet taller than himself that ‘no shepherd would be found dead with’, and wore a kilt that ‘no Highlander would dream of being found alive in‘. Talking to Grant Archie spoke of ‘England’s iniquities to a captive and helpless Scotland. Anything less captive or helpless than the Scotland he (ie Grant) had known would be difficult to imagine.) Laura told Grant Archie didn’t have ‘a drop of Scottish blood in him. his father came from Liverpool and his mother was an O’Hanrahan.’ Grant remarked ‘Odd how all the most bigoted patriots are Auslanders,’ adding ‘I don’t think he’ll get far with those xenophobes, the Gaels.’ (page 23)

The Singing Sands is not a typical Agatha Christie puzzle type of crime fiction, but more an analysis of the characters’ emotional and psychological obsessions to be found in novels such as those of Ruth Rendell and Patricia Highsmith. I really enjoyed it.

I now want to know more about her and her life and I’ve found this biography that I’d like to read – Josephine Tey: A Life by Jennifer Morag Henderson.