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 House of Seymour by Joanna Hickson

Published on by Margaret5 Comments

This is my third short post to catch up with reviewing books I’ve read recently.

HarperCollins |22 May 2025| 406 pages| e-book| Review book| 3.5*

When Isabel Williams is betrothed to John Seymour, Lord of Wolf Hall Manor, she hopes that love and respect will come, despite his cold streak of ruthless ambition.

Jess the shepherdess tends her flock on the wild spaces of Avebury close by, dismissing those who believe it is work for men. Forced to flee after falling under suspicion for the disappearance of a young man, Isabel’s offer of life with the growing Seymour family is the only refuge available to her.

As John’s ambition draws them into the orbit of the divided court of the young King Henry VI, his hunger to succeed takes on a darker edge. Isabel realises her husband will pay any price to get what he wants, even if it means destroying those he has sworn to protect…

I’ve read some of Joanna Hickson’s historical fiction novels so I was hoping I’d enjoy The House of Seymour, the first in a new trilogy. However, even though it is entertaining reading I felt it’s rather underwhelming, but maybe my expectations were too high.

It opens with a Prologue set in 1537 with Jane Seymour towards the end of her pregnancy looking at a proposed new Seymour coat of arms. She was upset that it didn’t include the badges of her mother and grandmother who were commoners.

The story then goes back over a hundred years to 1424 where we meet Isabel Williams, Jane’s great great grandmother, the daughter of a wealthy merchant. She married John Seymour (c. 1395/1402 – 20 December 1464) Lord of Wulf (Wolf) Hall in Savernake Forest, Wiltshire. Isabel and John’s marriage was not an easy one. John was ambitious, cruel and ruthless, determined to gain the support of Humphrey, the Duke of Gloucester and Protector of the boy king Henry VI. Alongside Isabel’s story is that of Jess, a young shepherdess, who left her home at Avebury, accused of witchcraft. She and Isabel had met at the Easton Priory and after hearing her story Isabel offered her a place in her household to look after her young son.

I really liked the settings, Wolf Hall, close to Savernake Forest, a remnant of primeval forest which became a royal forest soon after the Norman Conquest, and the village of Avebury with its henge and stone circles and the Long Barrow on Silbury Hill, a Neolithic burial site. I enjoyed the details of family life in the fifteenth century at Wolf Hall, and the details about hunting wolves and sheep farming. But overall I think this is very light historical fiction.

At the end of the book there is a useful glossary of words, such as ‘manchet‘, which is the best ‘white-flour’ bread served in wealthy homes, and also a section containing the author’s notes, giving information about the places mentioned, which I think are well worth reading.

Many thanks to Netgalley/Joanna Hickson/HarperCollins UK for a digital review copy of this title.

Top 5 Tuesday:Top 5 books with sizes in the titles

Published on by Margaret7 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 top 5 books with sizes in the titles.

These are all books I’ve read with links to my posts on them:

Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan. This won the 2022 Orwell Prize for Political Fiction, an award for outstanding novels and collections of short stories, first published in the UK or Ireland, that illuminate major social and political themes, present or past, through the art of narrative. It also won the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year 2022.

It is 1985 in a small Irish town. During the weeks leading up to Christmas, Bill Furlong, a coal merchant and family man faces into his busiest season. Early one morning, while delivering an order to the local convent, Bill makes a discovery which forces him to confront both his past and the complicit silences of a town controlled by the church.

Claire Keegan’s style of writing is a refreshing change from so many of the long and complicated books I so often read. It is precise, focused, and beautifully written bringing her characters to life – these are real, ordinary people, living ordinary lives in 1980s Ireland. And the detail is there too in all the particulars of everyday life – it packs a lot into its pages. 

Our Longest Days: A People’s History of the Second World War by the writers of Mass Observation. For six years the people of Britain endured bombs and the threat of invasion, and more than 140,000 civilians were killed or seriously wounded. Men and women were called to serve in the armed forces in record numbers, and everyone experienced air raids and rationing. In these terrible times, volunteers of almost every age, class and occupation wrote diaries for the “Mass Observation” project, which was set up in the 1930s to collect the voices of ordinary men and women.

Using many diaries that have never been published before, this book tells the story of the war – the military conflict, and, mainly, life on the home front – through these voices. Through it all, people carry on living their lives, falling in love, longing for a good meal, complaining about office colleagues or mourning allotment potatoes destroyed by a bomb.

An Awfully Big Adventure by Beryl Bainbridge. First published in 1989 and shortlisted for the Booker Prize, this is set in 1950, as a Liverpool repertory theatre company are rehearsing its Christmas production of Peter Pan. The story centres around Stella, a teenager and an aspiring actress who has been taken on as the assistant stage manager.

It’s semi-autobiographical based on Beryl Bainbridge’s own experience as an assistant stage manager in a Liverpool theatre. On the face of it this is a straight forward story of the theatre company but underneath it’s packed with emotion, pathos and drama. And it’s firmly grounded in a grim post-war 1950s England, food rationing still in operation and bombed buildings still in ruins overgrown with weeds.

The title is taken from Peter Pan, the play about the boy who never grew up, whose attitude to death was ‘To die will be an awfully big adventure.’ Bainbridge’s use of Peter Pan emphasises the themes of reality versus imagination, the loss of childhood innocence, and the quest for love.

Dirty Little Secrets by Jo Spain, a psychological thriller, set in Withered Vale, a small, gated community of just seven houses, outside the small village of Marwood in Wicklow in Ireland. On the surface it is a perfect place where the wealthy live their  privileged lives and keep themselves to themselves – until a cloud of bluebottles stream out of the chimney of number 4 and Olive Collins’ dead and disintegrating body is discovered inside. She had been dead for three months and none of the neighbours had bothered to find out why she hadn’t been seen all that time. But someone must have known what had happened to her – the question being who?

The Shortest Day by Colm Toibin, a short story about the mythical past, about the strange carvings found on certain stones, about archaeology, and about the unknown customs and rituals of our ancient past. It’s storytelling at its best – a tale of wonder and mystery.

Professor O’Kelly is writing notes about Newgrange, also called Bru na Boinne, a circular mound with a retaining wall that had a narrow passageway leading into a vaulted central chamber. There are spirals and diamond shaped designs cut into some of the stones both inside the chamber itself and outside the entrance to the passageway. It’s a burial chamber, a prehistoric monument in County Meath in Ireland, that was built around 3200 BC – older than Stonehenge and the Egyptian pyramids. It’s ringed by a stone circle, stones brought from the Mournes and Wicklow Mountains.

Meanwhile deep within the chamber there were whispers among the dead that the professor was coming again. They are concerned that he would discover the secret of the light penetrating the chamber on the winter solstice – the shortest day of the year. Some of the local inhabitants know of the secret but they never talk about it, except in whispers between themselves. When he arrives they put up a number of obstacles to prevent him from entering the chamber.

Six Degrees of Separation from Theory and Practice to The Night Hawks

Published on by Margaret27 Comments

It’s time again for Six Degrees of Separation, a monthly link-up hosted by Kate at Books Are My Favourite and Best. Each month a book is chosen as a starting point and linked to six other books to form a chain. A book doesn’t need to be connected to all the other books on the list, only to the one next to it in the chain.

This month we start with Theory & Practice by Michelle de Kretser, the winner of the Stella Prize for Fiction 2025, praised for its innovative structure and exploration of young love, jealousy, and literary inheritance.  I’ve not read it but it looks interesting. This is Amazon’s description:

It’s 1986, and ‘beautiful, radical ideas’ are in the air. A young woman arrives in Melbourne to research the novels of Virginia Woolf. In bohemian St Kilda, she meets artists, activists, students – and Kit. He claims to be in a ‘deconstructed’ relationship, and they become lovers. Meanwhile, a dismaying discovery throws her work on ‘the Woolfmother’ into disarray.

Theory & Practice is a mesmerising account of desire and jealousy, truth and shame. It makes and unmakes fiction as we read, expanding our notion of what a novel can contain. Michelle de Kretser, one of Australia’s most celebrated writers, bends fiction, essay and memoir into exhilarating new shapes to uncover what happens when life smashes through the boundaries of art..

I’ve read some of Virginia Woolf’s books, including my first link: Orlando, a fictionalised biography of Vita Sackville-West, based on her life. It tells the tale of an extraordinary individual who lives through centuries of English history, first as a man, then as a woman. This is a book steeped in history showing how the passage of time had changed both the landscape and climate of England along with its society. There are many vivid passages – such as her description of the ‘Great Frost’ of 1608, when the Thames was frozen for six weeks and Frost Fairs were held on the ice.

Second link: There have been several Frost Fairs over the centuries. Another one in 1669 is described in Edward Marston’s The Frost Fair, the fourth in the Christopher Redmayne Restoration series about an architect and Jonathan Bale, a parish constable. They are both visiting the fair when one of Bale’s sons gets into trouble on thin ice. They rescue the boy but in the process make a grim discovery – the frozen corpse of a man. The dead man is Jeronimo Maldini, an Italian fencing master who has been missing for some time. Redmayne is inclined to dismiss the case and leave the investigation to Bale; but all that changes when his own brother, Henry Redmayne, is charged with the murder.

Third link: The first Christopher Redmayne book is The King’s Evil set in London in September 1666, just as the Great Fire of London has begun, eventually devastating a large part of the old medieval City of London. It’s also a murder mystery. Redmayne is working to restore London after the Fire, when he becomes involved in investigating the murder of Sir Ambrose Northcott. whose body was found in the cellars of his partly built new house.

Which links nicely to my fourth link about another architect, Cat (Catherine) Hakesby: The Royal Secret by Andrew Taylor set in 1670. This is the 5th book in the Marwood and Lovett series. After designing a poultry house for the young daughter of Lord Arlington, the Secretary of State, Cat Hakesby (formerly Lovett) gains a commission to design one for Charles II’s sister, ‘Minette,’ the Duchess of Orléans. This is a complicated book, as Marwood is investigating the mysterious death of Richard Abbott, one of Lord Arlington’s men. It’s full of political intrigue, danger and conspiracy, involving witchcraft, poisonings, and tricky international relationships.

My Fifth link is conspiracy, which brings me to Agatha Christie’s They Came to Baghdad. Set in 1950 this is a story about international espionage and conspiracy. The heads of the ‘great powers‘ are secretly meeting in Baghdad, where if it all goes wrong ‘the balloon will go up with a vengeance.’ And an underground criminal organisation is out to make sure it does go wrong, aiming at ‘total war – total destruction. And then – the new Heaven and the new Earth.’ Victoria Jones, a short-hand typist, a courageous girl with a ‘natural leaning towards adventure’ and a tendency to tell lies gets involved after meeting with a young man, Edward, who is going out to Baghdad the following day to join an archaeological dig. 

My sixth link is archaeology in The Night Hawks by Elly Griffiths. Ruth Galloway is now Head of the Department of Archaeology at her old university, the fictional University of North Norfolk. The body of a young man who Detective Chief Inspector Nelson guesses is an illegal immigrant, an asylum seeker, is found on the beach at Blakeney Point. Then a skeleton, buried in a mound of what appears to be Bronze Age weapons, is also discovered on the beach by the group known as the Night Hawks when they were searching for buried treasure. Ruth, however is more interested in the hoard of Bronze Age weapons. 

My chain is mostly made up of two of my favourite genres, historical fiction and crime fiction. What is in your chain?

Next month (August 5, 2025), we’ll start with the 2025 Women’s Prize winner, The Safekeep by Yael Van Der Wouden.

The Elopement by Gill Hornby

Published on by Margaret4 Comments

Another short post as I’m catching up with the backlog of books I haven’t reviewed.

Penguin |22 May 2025| 469 pages| e-book| Review book| 3*

1820. Mary Dorothea Knatchbull is living under the sole charge of her widowed father, Sir Edward – a man of strict principles and high Christian values. But when her father marries Miss Fanny Knight of Godmersham Park, Mary’s life is suddenly changed. Her new stepmother comes from a large, happy and sociable family and Fanny’s sisters become Mary’s first friends. Her aunt, Miss Cassandra Austen of Chawton, is especially kind. Her brothers are not only amusing, but handsome and charming.

And as Mary Dorothea starts to bloom into a beautiful young woman, she forms an especial bond with one Mr Knight in particular. Soon, they are deeply in love and determined to marry. They expect no opposition. After all, each is from a good family and has known the other for some years.

It promises to be the most perfect match. Who would want to stand in their way?

The Elopement by Gill Hornby is historical fiction about the life of Jane Austen’s niece Fanny Knight and Mary Dorothea Knatchbull, Fanny’s stepdaughter. I wanted to read it because I loved her earlier books about Jane Austen’s extended family, Miss Austen and Godmersham Park. However, I was a bit disappointed as I think it fails to capture that flavour of Jane Austen’s novels that I have loved ever since I first read Pride and Prejudice as a young teenager.

There are many characters listed at the beginning of the book – there are the Knights of Godmersham Park; the Knatchbulls of Mersham-le-Hatch and the Austens of Chawton Cottage, where Cassandra, Jane Austen’s elder sister, and her mother lived. Cassandra Austen only has a cameo role.

Fanny’s father was Edward Austen, who was adopted by the wealthy Knight family (Thomas Knight was a cousin), taking their name in 1812. In 1820 Fanny married Sir Edward Knatchbull, a widower, with six children. Fanny and Mary Dorothea, the only daughter, had a difficult relationship right from the start, unable to break through their natural reserve. Fanny is not a warm character and Mary is reluctant to accept her as a substitute mother – neither of them are willing to be open with each other and maintain an icy politeness. However, Mary and Fanny’s brothers and sisters get on well; very well with one brother in particular.

I didn’t find it evenly paced, beginning very slowly with a rushed ending. I found the first part of the book was too drawn out (even boring in parts) and I thought I’d have to abandon it, but I read on and the second part held my interest and I finished the book. I liked the insight into the wider Austen family and the social context – family relationships, attitudes towards duty, marriage, the position of women and the dangers of childbirth.

The Author’s Note is very interesting, explaining that the narrative exactly follows Fanny Knight’s record of events she recorded in her daily journals that she kept from 1804, when she was eleven years old until she was eighty. Gill Hornby highlights:

‘ … the perilous nature of the lives of the married women. The birth of every child is a moment of danger. The loved ones of expectant mothers are on high alert. … If you married young and were happily fertile, then it was a game of Russian roulette, year after year.

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

Gabriel’s Moon by William Boyd

Published on by Margaret9 Comments

I’ve been making good progress with my reading, but I’m way behind with writing about the books I’ve read. So it’s time to catch up with a few short posts.

My first one is the first book I read for the 20 Books of Summer Challenge – Gabriel’s Moon by William Boyd.

Description

Gabriel Dax is a young man haunted by the memories of a tragedy: every night, when sleep finally comes, he dreams about his childhood home in flames. His days are spent on the move as an acclaimed travel writer, capturing changing landscapes in the grip of the Cold War. When he’s offered the chance to interview a political figure, his ambition leads him unwittingly into the shadows of espionage.

As Gabriel’s reluctant initiation takes hold, he is drawn deeper into duplicity. Falling under the spell of Faith Green, an enigmatic and ruthless MI6 handler, he becomes ‘her spy’, unable to resist her demands. But amid the peril, paranoia and passion consuming Gabriel’s new covert life, it will be the revelations closer to home that change the rest of his story . . .

Gabriel’s Moon by William Boyd is his 18th book, but it’s the first book by him that I’ve read. I loved it right from the start. It’s well written, one of those books that makes me want to read on and on eager to know what happens next.

I wondered about the title – what is Gabriel’s Moon? The Prologue set in 1936 enlightened me straight away. When Gabriel was six years old his family home burnt down. He escaped, but his mother died in the fire, caused, so the fire brigade claimed, by the naked flame of the nightlight burning by his bed. It was a small candle covered by a glass dome that resembled the moon. His mother would light it as part of a bedtime ritual that was important to him, signifying order and calm. But, his mind has blanked out all his memories of that night, although he still has nightmares about the fire.

By the early 1960s Gabriel had become a successful travel writer and in 1960 he travelled to the newly independent Republic of the Congo to interview the Prime Minister, Patrice Lumumba. And thus he is accidentally drawn into the intrigue surrounding Lumumba’s murder. And then Dax is drawn into the dangerous and shadowy world of espionage.

I loved it. It’s a gripping tale that kept me turning the pages as Gabriel travels from Africa to London, Cadiz and then Warsaw. At home he visits a psychoanalyst, hoping to discover the truth about the tragic events of his childhood. He is drawn deeper and deeper into ever more complex and dangerous situations, whilst in thrall to Faith Green, his MI6 handler, who effortlessly manipulates him.

Gabriel’s Moon is the first novel in a new espionage trilogy. The second book, The Predicament will be released on September 4. 2025 and I’m looking forward to reading more about Gabriel Dax.

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

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Viking
  • Publication date ‏ : ‎ 5 Sept. 2024
  • E-book
  • Print length ‏ : ‎ 263 pages 
  • Source: NetGalley
  • My rating: 5*