Spell the Month in Books – April 2025

Published on by Margaret5 Comments

Spell the Month in Books is a linkup hosted by Jana on Reviews From the Stacks on the first Saturday of each month. The goal is to spell the current month with the first letter of book titles, excluding articles such as ‘the’ and ‘a’ as needed. That’s all there is to it! Some months there are optional theme challenges, such as “books with an orange cover” or books of a particular genre, but for the most part, any book you want to use is fair game!

This option this month is Animal on the Cover or in the Title, which I found much easier to do than some of the previous options. These are all books I’ve read, apart from Inchworm.

A is for Animal Farm by George Orwell is an allegorical novella, of the Russian Revolution and the rise of the Soviet Union. It tells the story of a farm where the animals rebel against the farmer, Mr Jones, and throw him off the land. They hope to create a society where they are all equal, free and happy. Ultimately, the farm ends up in a state that is as bad, if not worse than it was before, under the dictatorship of a pig named Napoleon. It begins as the old boar Major tells the animals about his dream of overthrowing the human race when the produce of their labour would then be their own and he incites them to rebel. In the story that follows the Major is based on Marx, Farmer Jones on the Tsar, the pigs Napoleon and Snowball are based on Stalin and Trotsky respectively. Their revolution began by declaring that all animals are equal and ended with the added phrase but some animals are more equal than others.

P is for The Pale Horse by Agatha Christie. Neither Hercule Poirot, nor Miss Marple feature in this novel and Mrs Ariadne Oliver has only a small part. Detective Inspector Lejeune is in charge of the investigation into the murder of Father Gorman who was killed one night on his way home. A list of names is found on Father Gorman’s body, seemingly unconnected in any way. The title,  a reference from the Book of Revelation  to a pale horse ridden by Death suggested to me from the beginning that what they had in common was death.

The Pale Horse is an old house  which was formerly an inn in the village and is now the home of three weird women, thought by the locals to be witches. The Pale Horse is also the name of a sinister organisation that arranges murders based on black magic. It’s a fascinating book conveying a feeling of real menace.

R is for The Raven’s Head by Karen Maitland. Set in 1224 in France and England this is a dark book. I found parts of it very uncomfortable and disturbing to read and yet also very compelling. Life in the medieval world was cruel and brutal and The Raven’s Head describes that world in minute detail, evoking the superstitious fear of the period.

The story is told from the three main characters point of view – Vincent, Wilky, a young boy taken from his family to live in a monastery in Norfolk where unspeakable terrors await him and the other young boys, and Gisa also living in Norfolk, working in her uncle’s apothecary’s shop. Their lives are connected through Lord Sylvain who is trying to find a way to bring the dead back to life and the abbot, trying to find the elixir of life – both experimenting with alchemy.

I is for Inchworm by Ann Kelly. Gussie is a twelve year old girl from St. Ives in Cornwall. She is passionate about learning, wildlife, poetry, literature, and she wants to be a photographer when she grows up. But her dreams were put on hold as she struggled with a serious heart condition. Now she has got what she needed: a heart and lung transplant. But it isn’t working out quite the way she thought. Firstly she has to leave her beloved Cornwall to live in London and in the months following her operation she is unable to do very much except read and adopt a stray kitten, but she could do that when she was sick. She craves adventure and experience beyond her four walls, until, that is, she hits upon a plan – she is going to get her divorced parents to fall in love again. It’s not going to be easy, her mum is still dating her doctor boyfriend and despises Gussie’s father, who happens to be living with his new girlfriend – the Snow Queen. But Gussie is a determined girl and there is only one thing that could stop her now.

L is for Lion by Conn Iggluden. This is the first book in Conn Iggulden’s Golden Age series set in Amcient Greece in the 5th century BCE. I thoroughly enjoyed it which surprised me as generally speaking I’m not keen on reading battle scenes and the book starts and ends with battles. But I had no problem with following the action of the battles between the Greeks and the Persians, and was able to visualise what was going on without any difficulty. The characters’ names took me a little while to get clear in my mind but I soon got used to them. The two main characters are both young men, Cimon the older of the two has more authority than Pericles, the younger man. Lion is the story of their early careers.

The next link up will be on May 3, 2025 when the theme will be: Freebie

Six Degrees of Separation from  Knife by Salman Rushdie to The Likeness

Published on by Margaret16 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 Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder by Salman Rushdie, a searing, deeply personal account of enduring—and surviving—an attempt on his life thirty years after the fatwa that was ordered against him.

My first link is The Subtle Knife by Philip Pullman, the second book in the His Dark Materials trilogy. Taken together the books form a grand epic, encompassing parallel universes and their inhabitants. It’s a fabulous story, featuring armoured bears who talk, witches, spectres, angels, and tiny hand sized creatures who fly on the backs of dragonflies.

In The Subtle Knife the action takes place in several universes and Will becomes the bearer of the Subtle Knife, which enables him to cut windows from one universe into a parallel one. In one of these worlds he meets Lyra and they join forces.

My second link is Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel, the second book in her Wolf Hall trilogy. I didn’t enjoy it as much as the first book Wolf Hall and I had just a little feeling of anti-climax about it, but then the novelty of Wolf Hall for me was the way Hilary Mantel not only brought the Tudor world alive but also how she overturned my ideas of both Thomas Cromwell and Sir Thomas More. As there is no denying that I knew that Anne Boleyn was not going to make a go of her marriage to Henry VIII, there was little drama there for me. I didn’t even want her to escape her fate.

And yet, Bring Up the Bodies is still a brilliant book. It’s beautifully written, full of colour and detail so that there is no doubt that this is 16th century England, with vivid descriptions of the people, buildings, fabrics, and landscapes of both town and countryside.

My third link is a book with just one body, The Body in the Ice by A J MacKenzie, the 2nd Hardcastle and Chaytor Mystery set in Romney Marsh and the surrounding countryside in 1796-7. This is the period after the end of the American War of Independence, so Britain and America are at peace, but Britain and revolutionary France are at war with the constant threat of a French invasion. A J Mackenzie is the pseudonym of Marilyn Livingstone and Morgen Witzel, an Anglo-Canadian husband-and-wife team of writers and historians.

Version 1.0.0

My fourth link is Losing You by Nicci French, a fast paced, take-your-breath-away book about Nina whose teenage daughter, Charlie goes missing. I read it at break-neck speed, switching between being completely engrossed, and desperate for her to find her daughter before it’s too late and being annoyed by her attitude to the police. It’s set on Sandling Island (a fictional place based on Mersea Island, Essex) off the east coast of England and the feelings of isolation and oppression fill the book. ‘Nicci French’ is the pseudonym of wife and husband Nicci Gerard and Sean French.

My fifth link is to another missing teenage daughter in Eyes Like Mine by Sheena Kamal, her debut novel. Everything about this book fascinated me from the characters and in particular the main character, Nora Watts, the gripping storylines that kept me racing through the book, to the atmospheric, gloomy setting in Vancouver and in beautiful British Columbia with its snow, mountains and plush ski resorts.

The plot is intricate, complicated and fast moving, highlighting various issues such as mixed race inheritance and differences in treatment based on skin colour, homelessness, and environmental issues. These never overpower the story, but form part of the book as a whole.

My final link is the word like in the title – The Likeness by Tana French, which I read recently for Reading Ireland Month 2025. 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. 

My chain goes from Rushdie’s Knife to another book with the word ‘knife‘ in the title, then to two books that are second books in trilogies, two books with a body/bodies in the titles, to two books featuring missing teenagers and finally to two books with ‘like‘ in the titles. It travels from New York, through parallel universities, Tudor England, Romney Marsh, Sandling Island, Vancouver and British Columbia and Ireland.

What is in your chain, I wonder?

Next month (May 3 , 2025), we’ll start with an historical novel longlisted for the 2025 Stella Prize, Rapture by Emily Maguire.

The Singing Sands by Josephine Tey: Book Beginnings on Friday & The Friday 56

Published on by Margaret12 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 Singing Sands, by Josephine Tey, an Inspector Grant mystery, one of the books I’m currently reading.

It was six o’clock of a March morning, and still dark. The long train came sidling through the scattered lights of the yard, clicking gently over the points.

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.

I’ve seen the lighthouse on the point there standing up in the air. Yes. halfway up in the sky. I’ve seen the hill there change shape until it looked like a great mushroom. And as for those rocks by the sea, those great pillars of stone, they can turn light and transparent and move about as if they were walking through a set of the Lancers.

Description:

En route for the Outer Hebrides on sick leave, Inspector Grant literally stumbles upon the body of a young man in a train compartment that reeks of whisky. Grant firmly walks away from the corpse, determined to let nothing interfere with his holiday plans.
But he absentmindedly carries a newspaper away from the scene with him, a newspaper with a cryptic poem scribbled in the margin: The beasts that talk, The streams that stand, The stones that walk The singing sand . . . That guard the way To Paradise.
The memory of the unknown dead man’s face and the strange verse drive Grant into investigating, even though the police are content to call it an accidental death. What are the beasts that talk? Who wrote it? When? It isn’t long before Inspector Grant finds that his holiday is becoming more and more a busman’s holiday. Trail leads to trail: some blind alleys, some red hot. Who was the passenger in compartment B Seven? Was his death accidental or was it murder?

Josephine Tey was a pseudonym for Elizabeth Mackintosh(1896 – 1952). She was a Scottish author who wrote mainly mystery novels. I’ve read four of her books before and enjoyed them, especially The Daughter of Time, a mix of historical research and detective work. Inspector Alan Grant is in hospital and to keep his mind occupied he decides to discover whether Richard III really did murder his nephews – the Princes in the Tower.

This one is looking good, so far. What do you think? Are you tempted to read it? If you have read it would you recommend it? Do let me know.

Top Five Tuesday:Top 5 anticipated reads for Q2 2025

Published on by Margaret10 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 January to March, see Meeghan’s post here.

Today the topic is Top 5 anticipated reads for Q2 2025. It’s time to talk about all the shiny new books coming out in April, May and June in 2025. What are the books you can’t wait to hold in your hands the most?

I’ve listed these books in date of publication order – four books by authors whose books I’ve read before and one by a new-to-me author.

The House of Lost Whispers by Jenni Keer – 27 April, because I loved her book, The Hopes and Dreams of Lucy Baker.

On 15th April 1912, RMS Titanic sank and Olivia’s life changed forever… but what if a world existed where it hadn’t?

When the ill-fated maiden voyage of the Titanic leaves thirteen-year-old Olivia Davenport orphaned, she’s sent to live with her guardians, the Fairchilds, in their huge Jacobean mansion – Merriford Manor. But the Fairchilds have more to worry about than a grieving young girl – with war in Europe imminent and four sons to protect.

Olivia feels alone and friendless. That is, until she hears a voice from behind the wall in her tower bedroom. A voice from a man called Seth. Convinced he’s merely a product of her grieving imagination, she learns to live with him but it’s not until after the heartbreak of the war that Olivia, now a young woman of twenty, discovers that he exists in an overlapping world that is just a shudder in time away from her own. A world where the Titanic never sank… And everything since has been just slightly… different.

All Olivia wants is to find a way into his reality. And not just to see the faces of her beloved parents once again. But also to meet Seth. Who might just be the love of her life…

The Elopement by Gill Hornby – 22 May, because I loved her earlier books, Miss Austen and Godmersham Park.

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?

Fire on the Fells by Cath Staincliffe – 8 May, because I loved The Silence Between Breaths.

Summer can be murder, out on the sun-scorched Yorkshire Fells.

No one loves the Fells like Tyler Prasad. An eighteen-year-old dreamer who came here to join an eco-protest. But Tyler’s past followed hot on his heels. Now Tyler lies dead in a ditch. His handsome face shot to pieces in a brutal attack that baffles Detective Leo Donovan.

There’s no shortage of gunmen roving the land in search of grouse — most of them staying at luxury country-house retreat, Patefield Grange. The shooting party guests tell Detective Leo the victim’s name means nothing to them. But Leo knows a lie when he hears one.

The Grange is a hotbed of smouldering secrets. Which was worth killing for? Detective Leo and his partner Shan must solve the case before it all goes up in smoke . . .

By Your Side by Ruth Jones – 22 May, because although I haven’t read anything by her before I love the TV series Gavin and Stacey that she co-wrote with James Cordon.

Linda and Levi will never meet. But they’re going to change each other’s lives.

In her role at the council’s Unclaimed Heirs Unit, Linda Standish investigates the lives of those who’ve died alone and tracks down any living relatives. She’s been a friend to the friendless for the past thirty-three years. And now she’s looking forward to an early retirement.

But before she hangs up her lanyard, Linda takes on one last case – that of Levi Norman – a Welshman who made his home on a remote Scottish island for the past five years.

What brought Levi here? And who did he leave behind? Obliged to travel (by hearse) with her arch nemesis Fergus Murray, and helped (and hindered) by local residents, Linda searches for clues to a life now lost. And in the process unexpectedly makes new friends, and discovers things about herself she never knew.

Bursting with all the heart and humour that has made Ruth’s name as a screenwriter and author, By Your Side is about finding joy in the most unlikely connections, and the importance of holding onto friendship, love and community – especially when life gets messy.

Between the Waves by Hilary Tailor – 29 May, because I loved two of her earlier books, The Vanishing Tide and Where Water Lies.

Twenty years ago, during a family holiday on the savage and remote island of Little Auger, eleven-year-old Hazel left her bed and was never seen again. The unanswered questions surrounding Hazel’s disappearance tore three families apart and the girls left behind all experience their own terrible guilt. Roz, because she broke a promise; Catrin, because it was her idea; and Nina, who slept through it all. Their friendship never recovers and all three women go on to lead vastly different lives.

Twenty years later, they each receive a phone call from Stella Cox, a true-crime podcaster, who has unearthed new evidence about Hazel’s disappearance. There is no doubt Stella has found something important but the question is, how can the women—once best friends, now strangers—trust her, or each other?

Will their return to the island finally reveal the truth, and if it does, is it something any of them are prepared to learn?

Are you interested in reading any of these? What books are you anticipating?

My Beautiful Imperial by Rhiannon Lewis

Published on by Margaret3 Comments

I’m cutting this fine as today is the last day of the Reading Wales Month 2025 hosted by Karen at BookerTalk.  Yesterday I posted my review of Resistance by Owen Sheers. I’ve also read My Beautiful Imperial by Rhiannon Lewis, a book that was a Mother’s Day present from my son, a few years ago. It was her debut novel and was listed by the Walter Scott Prize Academy as one of its 20 recommended historical novels of 2018. Originally from Cardigan, she now lives near Abergavenny. This short post really does not do justice to this beautiful book. I can only say that to realise how excellent it is, is to read it for yourself!

Victorina Press| 2017|395 pages| e-book |5*


I loved My Beautiful Imperial. It’s historical fiction set in the 19th century in both Wales and Chile. It begins in Wales in March 1865 with Davy Davies, a young teenager who is at the age when he must decide whether to work at the mill or to be a sailor like father, the captain of the Ellen of Cardigan. Life at home for him changed for ever after his young sister, Elen, was killed when their barn caught fire and his mother wrongly blames him for Elen’s death, and so he leaves home and he sets sail on the Royal Dane. As time went by he worked his way up the ranks until he became Captain of the Imperial, a steamship transporting mail and cargo up and down the Chilean coast. Then in 1891 his life changed when civil war broke out in Chile and his ship was commandeered by the government under President Balmaceda, to carry arms and transport troops.

It captured my imagination completely. I was caught up in this story of friendship, love, war and the dangers of life at sea and during the civil war in Chile history. It’s well written, so much so, that I didn’t want to put the book down. What makes it even more enjoyable is that Davy’s story is based on the actual events of the Civil War in Chile and the experiences of the author’s ancestor, Captain David Jefferson Davies. Rhiannon Lewis spent twenty years researching his life beginning with a book of etchings and an old photograph album. She discovered new evidence and has tried to make her book as historically accurate as possible, stating in her Author’s Note that it is ‘ultimately a novel and a work of fiction.’

Resistance by Owen Sheers

Published on by Margaret2 Comments

I decided to read Resistance by Owen Sheers for the Reading Wales Month 2025 hosted by Karen at BookerTalk. It’s another one of my TBRs, a paperback that I bought in 2008. It was first published in 2007 by Faber and Faber (349 pages). Resistance was his first novel.

Owen Sheers was brought up in Abergavenny. The winner of an Eric Gregory Award and the 1999 Vogue Young Writer’s Award, his first collection of poetry, The Blue Book, was shortlisted for the Welsh Book of the Year.

From Owen Sheer’s website:

1944. After the fall of Russia and the failed D-Day landings, a German counter-attack lands on British soil. Within a month, half of Britain is occupied.

Sarah Lewis, a 26-year-old farmer’s wife, wakes to find her husband Tom has disappeared. She is not alone. All the other women in the isolated Welsh border valley of Olchon also wake to find their husbands gone. With this sudden and unexplained absence the women regroup as an isolated, all-female community and wait, hoping for news.

A German patrol arrives in the valley, the purpose of their mission a mystery. When a severe winter forces the two groups into co-operation, a fragile mutual dependency develops. Sarah begins a faltering acquaintance with the patrol’s commanding officer, Albrecht Wolfram. But as the pressure of the war beyond presses in on them, the valley’s delicate state of harmony is increasingly threatened, before being broken completely, with devastating consequences.

Imbued with immense imaginative breadth and confidence, Owen Sheers’ debut novel unfolds with the pace and intensity of a thriller. A hymn to the glorious landscape of the border territories and a gripping portrait of a community under siege, Resistance is a first novel of considerable grace and power.

My thoughts:

I love historical fiction, but this is different – it is alternate history. Sheers speculates upon how the course of history might have been altered if Germany had won the Second World War and invaded and occupied Great Britain, an alarming prospect. The plot centres on the inhabitants of the isolated Olchon valley in the Black Mountains of south-east Wales close to Hereford and the border between Wales and England.  It’s set in 1944–45, shortly after the failure of Operation Overlord and a successful German counter-invasion of Great Britain.  

I enjoyed it mainly for Sheers’ beautiful descriptions of the Welsh countryside, so vivid that I can easily imagine I was there, and the daily tasks of farming life, but this does make it slow reading. The main characters are Sarah, and the other women, Maggie, Mary, Menna and Bethan, living in the valley whose husbands had left, Albrecht, an English speaker and ex-Oxford scholar, who leads a German patrol ordered to establish an observation post in the valley, and George, a teenager, recruited by ‘Tommy Atkins’, a British Intelligence officer, to join the British Resistance movement observing the enemy troop movements.

This is a very visual book, and character driven with very little action until the second half of the book. After reading so much crime fiction and fast action novels I had to adapt my reading speed to appreciate this book and to fully enjoy it. It’s a book to read slowly absorbing the language and descriptions. I particularly liked the details about the Welsh poet, who told Sarah of the tales of King Arthur, Lancelot and Percival (knights of the Round Table) and about Welsh princes, Irish princesses and English armies. One of the stories was about a Welsh king and his army, beaten in the hills by Edward I. Beaten but not killed and not captured and never seen again.

Thousands of men swallowed within the muscles of the earth that formed Wales’ natural defences against her invaders. And they were still there. At this point the poet paused in his painting, placed his brush into a cloudy jar of water and leant closer to Sarah’s listening face. His voice dropped, so quiet she could barely hear him over the running of the streams. Yes, he’d whispered, still there in the hills, deep inside them, buried under the peat, heather, gorse, rowan, bog-cotton, stone and soil. Asleep. Not dead, asleep. An entire army and their king, ready to wake and defend the country in its hour of need. (pages 176 and 177)

Sarah wonders if that’s where their husbands have gone deep underground. She wanted to believe that it was so, that their husbands would be coming back to defend their country. This is a story I’ve come across before, but in England, a legend of a cavern beneath Alderley Edge in Cheshire, full of knights in armour awaiting a call to decide the fate of a great battle for England. There is no king named, but there is a wizard involved, who is referred to as Merlin in later versions of the legend.

Another part that struck a chord with me is when Albrecht took Sarah up into the hills, luring her through a crack in the rock in the cliff wall to a large cavity, where the Mappa Mundi was kept hidden from the SS. It’s a medieval map of the world – I’ve seen it in Hereford Cathedral. Scholars believe it was made around the year 1300 and shows the history, geography and destiny of humanity as it was understood in Christian Europe in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. In his Afterword Owen Sheers states that the Mapp Mundi was removed from Hereford Cathedral and eventually kept in a coal mine in Bradford-upon-Avon.

There is much more in this book that I’ve not described – the relationship between the women and the Germans, particularly that between Sarah and Albrecht, who eventually realised what they had in common, a love of music and literature. I haven’t described how the wider community reacted to the invasion, and the suspicion and fear that they all experienced. And, having said that there is very little action in this book there is plenty of detail and thoughts about war, occupation, death and above all about Wales. The ending is particularly poignant.

Owen Sheers’ Afterwood explains where he got the idea to write an alternative history. He had first heard of the plans for a British resistance organisation when he was working for a builder in the Llanthony valley and the builder told him how during the war some farmers in the area were given caches of arms which they’d hidden in underground bunkers in the hills. Should the orders come they were to leave their homes and wives and take to the Black Mountains to resist the German army. Later on, in 2001 he heard a radio interview on the Today programme with George Vater, who had, as a young man, been recruited into the Auxiliary Units Special Duties Section comprising local people trained to spy on an occupying German force. Sheers knew George Vater and visiting him, George had shown him cuttings, maps and photographs and told how he had been approached by a man calling himself ‘Tommy Atkins’ who invited to join his Special Duties Section. So, whilst this is a work of fiction it is based on fact, woven into Sheers’ story and he writes that only the valley is real.

I enjoyed it far more than I expected and I’d love to read more of Owen Sheers’ work.