Category: TBRs

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.

Five Have a Wonderful Time by Enid Blyton

Published on by Margaret17 Comments

I’ve read two books for the 1952 Club, hosted by Karen at Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings and Simon from Stuck in a Book blogs. My first book is

Five Have a Wonderful Time by Enid Blyton, the 11th in the series of 21 books;

The Famous Five are having a brilliant time – on holiday in horse-drawn caravans – and they’ve discovered a ruined castle nearby! The castle looked deserted from a distance – but is that a face at the window? Or is it a trick of the light? The Famous Five just have to find out! Just who is hiding in the castle?

I had a wonderful time as a child reading Enid Blyton’s books. Her books gave me so much pleasure as a child going right back to her Noddy and the Magic Faraway Tree books. Her Malory Towers books were my favourites, but I also enjoyed the Favourite Five, The Secret Seven and the Adventure and Mystery series too.

The Five are Julian, Dick and Anne, their cousin, George (real name Georgina, but not call her that), and Timmy, George’s dog. Their ages aren’t mentioned in this book but according to Enid Blyton.net, Julian was twelve in Five on a Treasure Island, the first in the series, Dick and George were eleven, and Anne was ten. In the next book, Five Run Away Together, they were all a year older since their last adventure on Kirrin Island, a year before. After that in the later books, it seems that their ages were frozen in time (like Agatha Christie’s Poirot) — otherwise they would have been well into their twenties before the end of the series.

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It’s the summer holidays and George is waiting impatiently at home recovering from a cold, whilst the rest of the Five are staying in a couple of old-fashioned gypsy caravans in a field near the village of Faynights, opposite the ruins of Faynights Castle. There’s news that two famous scientists have disappeared, with plans to go abroad and sell their secrets to another country. Julian is worried one of them might be his Uncle Quentin, George’s father. He isn’t and knows the two men, and insists that Derek Terry-Kane, in particular, would never be a traitor.

When George arrives they all go to the village shop to buy ice creams and the shop woman tells them some ‘fair folk’ are coming who usually camp in the field where the children are staying. She says it’s not a fair nor a circus, but a sort of mixed-up show with a fire-eater, a man with snakes, an India-Rubber man, and a man who can get himself free, no matter how tightly he’s tied up with ropes. When they arrive they insist the children have to leave the field, saying ‘No kids are allowed in our field’ and make life very unpleasant for them. Then their caravans disappeared whilst the children were out – the fair people had towed them into the next field. This is only resolved when Jo, a gypsy girl turns up, whose uncle is the fire-eater. She insists that they are her best friends and makes them bring the caravans back.

Julian though, isn’t happy and wants them to leave. But he changes his mind when Dick spots a face in a window-slot at the top of the only complete tower at the top of the castle. He thinks it’s a man’s face with bushy eyebrows. George remembers that Terry-Kane has thick black eyebrows. They decide they can’t leave without exploring the castle and find an explanation for the face – is Terry-Kane in the castle? So the next day they do just that and find themselves in the middle of a very dangerous mystery. It’s only with Jo’s help and the fairground entertainers with their amazing skills that it all ends well.

This really is a book that reflects the lives and attitudes of the 1950s. The children go exploring on their own much more so than they are allowed to do today, playing outdoors, exploring where they lived in the woods and fields, riding bikes with friends, and going swimming. And as a child of the 1950s that’s what my childhood was like, but not to the same extent as the Famous Five! Boys were encouraged to be strong and independent, whilst girls tended to be domesticated. Anne, for example, does the shopping, tidies the caravans and does the cooking, whereas the boys get the water and collect wood for the camp fire. George, a tomboy is the exception – she has short hair, scorns skirts and dresses in shorts and wants to do what the boys do.

Yesterday’s Britain, published by the Reader’s Digest describes the period 1950 – 1959 as a ‘golden age for some people‘, with ‘Britons better off as material prosperity swept away the last vestiges of austerity. “Most of our people have never had it so good,” declared Harold Macmillan.

Public figures were automatically respected, authority was deferred to inside as well as outside the home, and children grew up with an unquestioning sense of security.

It’s a pity that we can’t say the same for today!

About Enid Blyton

She wrote around 760 books during her fifty-year writing career!  The 1950s was her most productive period, often publishing more than fifty books a year. However, her books have been criticised over the years, saying they are mediocre material, formulaic books with fantastical plots, xenophobic and ‘reflected negative stereotypes regarding gender, race, and class.’ Her books are very much of their time – she was born in 1897 and died in 1968. She began writing in the 1920s, with most of her series dating from the 1940s, when lives and attitudes were very different from those of today. I think they are books that provided comfort reading during and after the Second World War. Some of Blyton’s books have been ‘updated’ over recent years to remove or alter potentially offensive language and imagery, in an attempt to make them appeal more to modern children.

I thoroughly enjoyed them, finding them fun to read and completely unaware at the time that there was so much criticism when I read her books. She wrote about children whose lives were very different from mine and that was one reason I liked them. I loved the fact that her books took me to magical places, places of adventure where children could solve mysteries, thwart criminals, be independent of adults and have great fun, a world of mysterious castles and islands, exploring secret passages and hidden chambers and finding buried treasure.

There are a number of websites with information about Enid Blyton – the Enid Blyton Society and Enid Blyton.net to name but two.

My next book published in 1952 is The Singing Sands by Josephine Tey – more about that later this week.

The Likeness by Tana French

Published on by Margaret4 Comments

It’s nearly the end of March when the Reading Ireland Month 2025 hosted by Cathy at 746 Books ends. I had a list of books to choose from and I read one of my TBRs, The Likeness by Tana French, a book I’ve had for eight years. It’s the second book in the Dublin Murder Squad Mysteries. I read the first book, In the Woods, in 2014.

Hodder and Stoughton| 2008| 574 pages| 4*

Description:

Still traumatised by her brush with a psychopath, Detective Cassie Maddox transfers out of the Murder squad and starts a relationship with fellow detective Sam O’Neill. When he calls her to the scene of his new case, she is shocked to find that the murdered girl is her double. What’s more, her ID shows she is Lexie Madison – the identity Cassie used, years ago, as an undercover detective. With no leads, no suspects and no clues to Lexie’s real identity, Cassie’s old boss spots the opportunity of a lifetime: send Cassie undercover in her place, to tempt the killer out of hiding to finish the job.

I loved this book. I couldn’t remember very much about In the Woods, but I had no difficulty in following The Likeness, so I think it’s a good standalone mystery. It’s a gripping fast paced book, set in Ireland, with well drawn characters, including a group of five friends living in a large house in the countryside. French portrays each of these friends in detail, and as the story progresses their backgrounds and relationships are revealed. The book begins as one of the friends, Lexie Madison is murdered.

Astonished by the fact that Lexie is her double, Detective Cassie Maddox, who played a small role in In the Woods, is persuaded to go undercover at the house, and assume the dead women’s identity, the police having told her friends she wasn’t killed, but was merely wounded. Far-fetched, yes, but it didn’t take me long before I found myself accepting this was feasible. If you find that impossible then this book is not for you, which would be a shame as it is well written, outstanding in its depiction of the Irish countryside and the interaction of the characters. It explores their feelings and emotions, their motivations and desires to such an extent that I was totally engrossed in the book, hoping, irrationally, that Lexie was not dead but had survived and all would be well. Of course, that was not possible and the ending was inevitable.

Now I am just as eager to read the next book in the series, Faithful Place, which features one of the other characters in the Murder Squad, Undercover cop Frank Mackay.

Murder at Gull’s Nest by Jess Kidd

Published on by Margaret3 Comments

Faber & Faber| 11 Mar. 2025| 335 pages| review copy| e-book| 4*

Summary from the publishers’ website:

The first in a sparkling new 1950s seaside mystery series, featuring sharp-eyed former nun Nora Breen.

After thirty years in a convent, Nora Breen has thrown off her habit and set her sights on the seaside town of Gore-on-Sea. Why there? Why now? Instinct tells her it’s better not to reveal her reasons straight away. She takes a room at Gulls Nest guest house and settles in to watch and listen.

Somewhere in the north, a religious community meets for Vespers. Here on the southeast coast, Nora Breen prepares for braised liver and a dining room full of strangers.

Over disappointing – and sometimes downright inedible – dinners, Nora realises that she was right to keep quiet: her fellow lodgers are hiding something. At long last, she has found an outlet for her powers of observation and, well, nosiness: there is a mystery to solve, and she is the only person for the job.

My thoughts:

This is the first one of Jess Kidd’s books that I’ve read and I didn’t know what to expect. I enjoyed it. It’s quirky with some odd characters. At times it feels like a cosy crime mystery, but it’s also rather dark and foreboding, whereas at other times there’s some humour and also a hint of a romance. The setting is good in a fictional 1950s British seaside town.

It’s the mystery and the characters (there a lot) that stand out the most in my mind. Nora, the main character, is a no-nonsense person, who has just left a convent after 30 years, where she worked as a nurse. She went to the same guest house at Gore-on-Sea to find her friend, Frieda, a novice who had previously left the same convent due to ill health. Frieda had been writing to her weekly, but Nora hadn’t heard from her for some time and knew something was very wrong.

There are some very strange people. Among these people the ones who stood out for me are Nora, who is adjusting to life outside the outside world, whilst trying not to draw attention to herself. Dinah, who is eight years old, is the daughter of Helena, the owner of Gulls Nest, and is a very strange child. Nora first met Dinah hanging upside down from a curtain rail. Sometimes she hides in a small cupboard and doesn’t speak to anyone, living in a world of her own. Then there is old Professor Poppy, a Punch and Judy man with his puppets, and the mysterious Karel Jezek, who follows the young married couple Stella and Teddy. Teddy is suspicious of Karel, suspecting that something is going on between him and Stella.

Frieda had told Nora that she believed all the people at Gulls Nest were concealing some kind of secret. And indeed they were as Nora finds out. Life at Gulls Nest is tense, as all the residents’ secrets and past lives bubble away under the surface. Matters come to the boil as some of them die, or are they murdered? Nora helps Detective Inspector Rideout of the local police as he investigates the deaths as well as Frieda’s disappearance.

Overall I loved this book, crime fiction that is really in a category all of its own, that kept me wondering what was going on all the way to the end.

Jess Kidd was brought up in London as part of a large family from county Mayo and has been praised for her unique fictional voice. Her debut, Himself, was shortlisted for the Irish Book Awards in 2016, the Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award 2017 and longlisted for the John Creasey (New Blood) Dagger 2017. Jess won the 2016 Costa Short Story Award. Her second novel, The Hoarder, also titled Mr. Flood’s Last Resort (U.S.), was shortlisted for the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year 2019 and longlisted for the 2020 International Dublin Literary Award. Both books were BBC Radio 2 Book Club Picks. Her third book, the Victorian detective tale Things in Jars, has been released to critical acclaim. Jess’s work has been described as ‘Gabriel García Márquez meets The Pogues.’

Jess’s first book for children, Everyday Magic, was published in April 2021. Jess’s fourth novel for adults, The Night Ship, was released in August 2022. Murder at Gulls Nest, the first in the Nora Breen Investigates series will publish in Spring 2025. Jess is currently developing her own original TV projects with leading UK and international TV producers. (Copied from the C & W, a London-based literary agency’s website)

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