The Testaments by Margaret Atwood: Book Beginnings on Friday & The Friday 56

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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 Testaments by Margaret Atwood is one of the time limited deals on Amazon at the moment and because I read The Handmaid’s Tale many years ago before I’d even heard of book blogs, I jumped at the chance to buy it.

The book begins:

Only dead people are allowed to have statues, but I have been given one while still alive. Already I am petrified.

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:

I don’t remember that school day very much, because why would I? It was normal. Normal is like looking out a car window. Things pass by, this and that and this and that, without much significance.You register such hours; they’re habitual. like brushing your teeth.

Description from Goodreads:

When the van door slammed on Offred’s future at the end of The Handmaid’s Tale, readers had no way of telling what lay ahead for her–freedom, prison or death.

With The Testaments, the wait is over.

Margaret Atwood’s sequel picks up the story more than fifteen years after Offred stepped into the unknown, with the explosive testaments of three female narrators from Gilead.

In this brilliant sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, acclaimed author Margaret Atwood answers the questions that have tantalized readers for decades.

I’m probably way behind many other bloggers who have read this book! If you have read it what do you think? Did you like it?

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.

Top Five Tuesday: Books with Colours in the Title

Published on by Margaret3 Comments

Top 5 Tuesday was created by Shanah at Bionic Book Worm, and it is now being hosted by Meeghan at Meeghan Reads. You can see the Top 5 Tuesday topics for the whole of 2025 here. 

Today the topic is Books with Colours in the Title.

Blonde by Joyce Carol Oates, a work of fiction, not a biography of Marilyn Monroe. I had to keep reminding myself of that as I was reading, because it was so easy to believe in the characters. it’s a tragic story, intense and shocking in parts. It begins with a Prologue – 3 August 1962 with Death hurtling along towards 12305 Fifth Helena Drive, Brentwood, California. It then follows Norma Jeane Baker’s life in chronological sections from The Child 1932 – 1938 to The Afterlife 1959 – 1962. It switches from one narrator to the next, and from third person to first person perspective throughout. It’s brutal, tender and both lyrical and fragmented

Blue Heaven by C J Box. The action takes place over four days in North Idaho one spring. It’s a story about two children, Annie and William who decide to go fishing without telling their mother, Monica, and witness a murder in the woods. One of the killers sees them and they run for their lives. It’s written in a style that appeals to me – straightforward storytelling, with good descriptions of locality and characters, secondly characters that are both likeable and downright nasty, but not caricatures, and finally the ending was what I hoped, and also dreaded it would be.

 The Crimson Rooms by Katharine McMahon, set in London in 1924, with Britain still coming to terms with the aftermath of the First World War. Evelyn Gifford, one of the few pioneer female lawyers, takes on the case of Leah Marchant, who wants to get back her children who had been taken into care. She was accused of trying to kidnap her own baby. It’s early days for women to be accepted as lawyers and Evelyn struggles to defend Leah who distrusts her and wants Daniel Breen, Evelyn’s boss to defend her. It clearly shows the prejudice these women had to overcome just to qualify as lawyers, never mind the difficulties of persuading law firms to employ them and clients to accept them.

Gray Mountain by John Grisham, a book that puts the big American coal companies under the microscope, companies that are  ruining the environment by strip-mining in the Appalachian mountains. I was amazed to read the details – clear-felling the forests, scalping the earth and then blasting away the mountain tops to get at the coal. All the trees, topsoil and rocks are then dumped into the valleys, wiping out the vegetation, wildlife and streams. Gray Mountain is one of the mountains destroyed in this way.

The Man in the Brown Suit by Agatha Christie. The novel is a mix of murder mystery and international crime organised by an arch-villain known as ‘the Colonel’, involving violence (but not graphic) and suspense. Anne Beddingfield saw a man fall to his death on the live rails at Hyde Park tube station. He had a terrified look on his face and turning round Anne sees a man in a brown suit, who quickly becomes The Man in the Brown Suit both to her and the newspapers. A second death follows, this time a young woman, found strangled at Mill House, the home of Sir Eustace Pedler, MP. She was thought to be a foreigner. Anne decides to investigate and the trail takes her on board the Kilmorden Castle sailing to Cape Town. As usual there are a number of suspects and Anne has to work out who she can trust and who to believe

The Death of Shame by Ambrose Parry

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Canongate Books| 5 Jun. 2025| 427 pages| e-book| Review copy| 5*

Description:

1854, Edinburgh.
Respectable public faces hide sordid private sins.

Apprentice Sarah Fisher is helping to fund Dr Will Raven’s emerging medical practice in exchange for being secretly trained as a medic, should the rules barring women ever change. Sarah needs no instruction in the inequalities that beset her gender, but even she has her eyes opened to a darker reality when a relative seeks her help in searching for her missing daughter. Annabelle Banks was promised a situation in a prestigious household, but there has been no word from her since she left home, and the agency that arranged her position says she never appeared.

Sarah’s inquiries lead her to reforming campaigners trying to publicise the plight of the hundreds of girls ensnared in Edinburgh’s houses of assignation. Sarah learns how young women are lured, deceived, trafficked and raped, leaving them ruined in the eyes of a society obsessed with moral purity, and where virginity is prized as a lucrative commodity.
Drawing upon real historical events, The Death of Shame takes Raven and Sarah into a treacherous labyrinth of exploitation, corruption, high-level complicity and Victorian-style revenge porn.

Ambrose Parry is the pseudonym of crime fiction author, Chris Brookmyre and Marisa Haetzman, a consultant anaesthetist. The combination of a crime fiction writer and an anaesthetist works excellently in Ambrose Parry’s novels. The research into the history of medicine is extensive, making this book a combination of historical fact and fiction, a tale of murder and medical matters, with the social scene, historical and medical facts slotting perfectly into an intricate murder mystery. 

The Death of Shame by Ambrose Parry is the 5th and final Raven and Fisher book. Dr Will Raven is no longer working with Dr Simpson (a real historical person, renowned for his discovery of chloroform) but is setting up his own medical practice with the financial assistance of Sarah Fisher. Sarah, who began working as a housemaid for Dr Simpson, then as a nurse, has ambitions to train as a doctor, something rarely possible for women in her position. So secretly Will is training her as his apprentice to become a doctor.

It’s set in 1854, when Will and his wife, Eugenie have two children, as she is struggling to bond with her children suffering from postnatal depression. The book begins with the death of her father, himself an eminent doctor with a wealthy practice. It appears he committed suicide but Eugenie can’t accept that and asks Will to investigate. Meanwhile Sarah has also been asked to investigate the disappearance of her young niece who has disappeared after leaving home to start a job in Edinburgh.

The plot is complicated and although you could read this as a standalone book as there is some background to what has happened in the earlier books, I really think it’s better to have read them – and they are well worth reading. Will and Sarah’s separate investigations take them into dark and desperate places dealing with blackmail, murder, suicide, abortion, rape, female exploitation, and prostitution. The position of women and girls in society and the dangers they faced are centre stage.

I always enjoy reading the Historical Notes at the end of the Raven and Fisher books and this one is no exception. It gives the factual background and sources that Ambrose Parry used and information about the real life people who are included in the book as well as Dr Simpson, such as Henry Littlejohn, Edinburgh’s police surgeon who served as Medical Officer for Health and medical advisor to the Crown, and Emily Blackwell, one of the pioneers of women in medicine.

This is a great ending to the series but I’d like to think this is not the end of their stories – I’d love to read more about them! In the meantime there is a short story, The Apple Falls Not Far by Ambrose Parry, a digital exclusive short story from the world of Raven and Fisher to read – more about that in a later post.

Spell the Month in Books – August 2025

Published on by Margaret4 Comments

Spell the Month in Books is a pretty straightforward meme. On the first Saturday of each month Jana at Reviews from the Stacks opens up a thread welcoming participants to leave a comment with a link to their post, but you can join at any point during the month. Find book titles that start with each letter in the month’s name, make a list, share your list, and that’s it!

This month’s theme is favourite authors!

These are just some of my favourite books from some of my favourite authors. I’ve given a very brief description of each book. For more information click on the book titles to go to my posts about them.

A is for The ABC Murders by Agatha Christie, a Poirot murder mystery. A series of murders advertised in advance by letters to Poirot, and signed by an anonymous ‘ABC’.

U is for An Uncertain Place by Fred Vargas, the sixth in Fred Vargas’ Commissaire Adamsberg series in which he investigates a macabre murder.

G is for Gallows Court by Martin Edward, the first Rachel Savernake Golden Age Mystery novel, set in 1920s London. This is an intricately plotted murder mystery, dark and atmospheric, with plenty of suspense and intrigue.

U is for The Uncommon Reader by Alan Bennett, the story of Her Majesty, not named, who visited a travelling library and the books she borrowed. It’s amusing and thought provoking as well. 

S is for Sarah Thornhill by Kate Grenville, set in 19th century Australia, where the convicts, transported or ‘sent out‘ are  now called ‘old colonists‘. It’s the sequel to The Secret River and it does reveals a significant part of that book, so be aware of that if you haven’t read The Secret River.

T is for Tombland by C J Sansom, a Shardlake novel, beginning in 1549, Edward VI is king, a minor and England is ruled by the Duke of Somerset as Lord Protector. Rebellion is spreading in protest against the landowners’ enclosures of the common land.

Are you participating in this meme? If you are, let me know, and I will visit your post. Enjoy your reading!

Top Ten Tuesday: Genre freebie

Published on by Margaret18 Comments

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly meme created by The Broke and the Bookish and now hosted by Jana at That Artsy Reader Girl. For the rules see her blog

The topic today is a Genre freebie (Pick any genre you’d like and build a list around it. You can even narrow the topic if you’d like, such as: thrillers with unreliable narrators, fantasy romance with fae characters, or historical romance with suspense elements.)

I decided to list ten of my favourite historical fiction books:

  1. Nero by Conn Iggulden. Ancient Rome (beginning in AD37)
  2. The Abbess of Whitby: a Novel of Hild of Northumbria by Jill Dalladay (7th century Britain)
  3. The Raven’s Head by Karen Maitland  (13th century England)
  4. Turn of the Tide by Margaret Skea (16th century Scotland)
  5. Dacre’s War by Rosemary Goring (16th century Scotland and England)
  6. Catching the Eagle by Karen Charlton (1809 -1811 Northumberland)
  7. The Potter’s Hand by A N Wilson (the Wedgewood family 1785 – 1805)
  8. Silver Lies by Ann Parker (1880s USA)
  9. A Medal for Murder by Frances Brody (1922 England and 1899 South Africa – the Boer War)
  10. A Climate of Change by Hilary Mantel (1950s Africa and 1980s England)