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The Boy With No Shoes by William Horwood: Book Beginnings on Friday & The Friday 56

Published on May 2, 2025 by Margaret5 Comments

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.

I’m featuring The Boy With No Shoes by William Horwood, a memoir I started to read today. William Horwood is an English novelist. 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.

In 2007, he collaborated with historian Helen Rappaport to produce Dark Hearts of Chicago, a historical mystery and thriller set in nineteenth-century Chicago. It was republished in 2008 as City of Dark Hearts with some significant revisions and cuts under the pen name James Conan.

The book begins with the Author’s Note:

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 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.

From the Prologue:

My name is Jimmy and there was a man in my time long ago, before the Boy and the Girl, before my Darktime, before Granny came to help me; and the man held my hand and took me out of our cold house into the sun and then along a street to a great big place with a sign outside

From Chapter 1 Running:

The park keeper in his uniform and hat shouted at me and grabbed one of my ears and pulled me towards him.

‘KEEP OFF THE GRASS!’ he yelled, so close it made my eardrums ache.

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.

On page 56 the characters are talking about the day that Edmund Hillary from New Zealand and Sherpa Tensing from Tibet had climbed the highest mountain in the world. No one in the whole history of the world had stood on top of it before.

Uncle Max said, ‘This is a great day for England and the monarchy.’

Granny said, ‘It seems to me that it is a great day for New Zealand and for Tibet, and a bad day for Mount Everest. It is nothing to do with England at all, let alone the Queen.

Description from Goodreads:

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.

Top Ten Tuesday: Books with the Word HOUSE in the Title

Published on April 29, 2025 by Margaret35 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 this week is Books with the Word “[Insert Word Here]” in the Title. I decided to choose books with the word HOUSE in the title. These ten books are all books I’ve read.

The House at Sea’s End by Elly Griffiths – a Ruth Galloway mystery.

The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson – more of a psychological study than a horror story.

The Power-House by John Buchan – a thriller, the first of five featuring the barrister and Tory MP Edward Leithen.

The Giant’s House by Elizabeth McCracken – a love story.

Slade House by David Mitchell – a mixture of a ghost story, science fiction and horror.

A House Divided by Margaret Skea – historical fiction set in 15th century Scotland.

The House of Silk by Anthony Horowitz – a Sherlock Holmes novel.

The House of Stairs by Barbara Vine – a psychological thriller.

Peril at End House by Agatha Christie – a Poirot mystery.

The House at Riverton by Kate Morton – historical fiction.

Have you read any of them?

The Singing Sands by Josephine Tey

Published on April 27, 2025 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 April 22, 2025 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.

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 Talented Mr Ripley by Patricia Highsmith: Book Beginnings on Friday & The Friday 56

Published on April 18, 2025 by Margaret3 Comments

I’m featuring The Talented Mr Ripley by Patricia Highsmith, one of my TBRs. After reading Strangers on a Train I thought I’d try this, the first book in Patricia Highsmith’s five-book Ripley series.

I first came across this several years ago listening to the opening episode of the BBC’s Radio 4 adaptation of the book and thought I’d like to read the book.

Tom Ripley is struggling to stay one step ahead of his creditors and the law, when an unexpected acquaintance offers him a free trip to Europe and a chance to start over. Ripley wants money, success and the good life and he’s willing to kill for it. When his new-found happiness is threatened, his response is as swift as it is shocking.

My copy is a secondhand paperback published by Vintage in 1999, first published in 1955.

MY BOOK BEGINNING

Tom glanced behind him and saw the man coming out of the Green Cage, heading his way. Tom walked faster. There was no doubt that the man was after him.

The American’s name was Freddie Miles. Tom thought he was hideous. Tom hated red hair, especially the kind of carrot-red hair with white skin and freckles. Freddie had large red-brown eyes that seemed to wobble in his head as if he were cocked-eyed, or perhaps he was only one of those people who never looked at anyone they were talking to.

What do you think? Would you carry on reading?

Top 5 Tuesday:Books set in Europe

Published on April 15, 2025 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. For details of all of the latest prompts for April to June, see Meeghan’s post here

We’re continuing reading around the world this month and today the topic is Europe. The books I’ve chosen are crime fiction and historical fiction.

France: When I think of French crime fiction Georges Simenon’s Maigret immediately pops into my mind. Simenon was actually Belgian, not French, but the Maigret books are set in France (mainly in Paris). Simenon wrote 75 novels and 28 short stories featuring Commissaire Jules Maigret and I first knew of them from a friend at school who loved the books. Then there were the numerous TV productions with Rupert Davies as Maigret and more recently Rowan Atkinson has played the role of Chief Inspector Maigret in the 2016 ITV series.

I’ve read several of the Maigret books. The Man on the Boulevard is the 41st book in the series. There were lots of things I liked in this book – the attention to detail, the descriptions of the weather (cold and wet), and the characters themselves. It’s set in Paris and without knowing the location of the various boulevards I could still get a good impression of the city and its suburbs.

It has a puzzling murder to solve – Louis Thouret is found stabbed in a little alleyway. Seemingly a perfectly ordinary man of regular habits who had left his home in the suburbs to go to his job as a storekeeper in Paris for the past twenty five years. It turns out that Louis had a double life that his wife knew nothing about. It appears he had been having an affair and for the past three years he had not had a job. I liked the theme of a man following a double life and the way Louis resolves his problem of keeping up appearances with his wife and family although I thought his method of maintaining his income was rather implausible.

Italy: A Sea of Troubles by Donna Leon, whose books are crime fiction, but also discuss various social and cultural issues and A Sea of Troubles, the 10th Commissario Guido Brunetti novel, is no exception. Brunetti is one of my favourite detectives. He is happily married with two children. He doesn’t smoke or drink to excess and often goes home for lunch to his beautiful wife Paolo, who is a wonderful cook – in this book she treats him to a delicious apple cake made with lemon and apple juice and ‘enough Grand Marnier to permeate the whole thing and linger on the tongue for ever.’ (page 238)

I read it eagerly, keen to get to the bottom of the mystery surrounding the deaths of two clam fishermen, father and son, off the island of Pellestrina, south of the Lido on the Venetian lagoon, when their boat suddenly exploded. As well as the mystery the issues Leon highlights in this book are concerning pollution and the overfishing of clams that is destroying the clam beds.

Spain: C J Sansom’s Winter in Madrid, which I think is one of the best books I’ve read, a book that had me in tears as I was reading about the devastation, desolation and waste of war. It is an action packed thrilling war/spy story and also a moving love story and historical drama all rolled into this tense and gripping novel. Sansom vividly conveys the horror and fear of the realities of life in Spain during the Spanish Civil War and the first two years of the Second World War.

The opening chapter dramatically sets the tone for the book with the brutality of the Battle of Jarama in 1937 then leaps straight into the bombing of London in 1940. Then Harry Brett, traumatised by his injuries at Dunkirk is sent to Spain to spy for the British Secret Service. He is plunged into the terrible living conditions in Madrid where people are starving, children are left homeless to fend for themselves and wild dogs roam the rubble of bombed houses.

Greece: Those Who Are Loved by Victoria Hislop, one of the most moving novels I’ve read. It is historical fiction ‘set against the backdrop of the German occupation of Greece, the subsequent civil war and a military dictatorship, all of which left deep scars’. It begins slowly and it was only at about the halfway stage that it really took off for me. But then, the book sprang to life, the pace increased, and I was totally gripped and moved as history and fiction came together dramatically in glorious technicolor, telling the story of the characters personal lives and their parts in the action.

The main character is Themis Koralis/Stravidis (in Greek mythology Themis is the personification of fairness and natural law). In 2016 she is a great grandmother and realising that her grandchildren knew very little about Greek history she decided to tell them her life story, beginning from when she was a small child in the 1930s, through the German occupation of Greece during the Second World War, the civil war that followed, then the oppressive rule of the military junta and the abolition of the Greek monarchy, up to the present day.

Iceland: The Mist by Ragnar Jonasson, the third novel in the Hidden Iceland series. Detective Inspector Hulda Hermannsdottir is worrying about her daughter, Dimma and her relationship with her husband, Jon. Alongside the story of what is happening in her personal life, she is also investigating the disappearance of a young woman and a suspected murder case, a particularly horrific one in an isolated farmhouse in the east, where Erla and her husband, Einar live. When a stranger, lost in a snowstorm arrives Erla invites him in and the nightmare begins.

I loved the setting, Jonasson’s writing bringing the scenery and the weather to life – you can feel the isolation and experience what it is like to be lost in a howling snowstorm. The emotional tension is brilliantly done too, the sense of despair, confusion and dread is almost unbearable.