Excellent Women by Barbara Pym

Published on by Margaret3 Comments

Rating: 5 out of 5.

Excellent Women was first published in 1952, Barbara Pym’s second published novel. In his introduction to the book Alexander McCall Smith describes it as ‘one of the most endearingly amusing English novels of the twentieth century‘. It’s certainly not laugh-out-loud funny, but it is most entertaining, subtly and gently comic. And as McCall Smith says it’s about ‘those small things in life that become immensely important to us … a novel that on one level is about very little [but] is a great novel about a great deal.’

It’s set just after the end of the Second World War, about the everyday life of Mildred Lathbury, an unmarried woman – in other words a spinster – in her early 30s. The daughter of a clergyman she is one of those ‘excellent women’ who could be relied upon to help out at Church jumble sales, garden fêtes, to make tea when required or to make up numbers at social gatherings. She finds herself involved in the quarrel between her new neighbours, Helena and Rockingham (Rocky) Napier, a married couple who live in the flat below her, as well as in the difficult relationship between Julian Mallory, the local vicar and his unmarried sister, when he finds himself trapped by Allegra Grey, a vivacious widow when she moves into their spare room.

I’ve been meaning to read some of Barbara Pym’s books for years, so I was delighted that I found it so enjoyable. It’s such a change from some of the books I’ve been reading recently, as Pym is such a keen observer of human nature, giving the little details that bring the characters to life. I found them all totally believable, each with their own eccentricities. She writes so simply but with such depth. It’s a slow-paced book but all the better because of that.

I read the Virago e-book edition, published in 2011, print length 299 pages.

Book Beginnings & The Friday 56: Blood, Sweat and Tyres: The Autobiography by Si King and Dave Myers (The Hairy Bikers)

Published on by Margaret9 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.

This week the book I’m highlighting is Blood, Sweat and Tyres The Autobiography by Si King and Dave Myers, who are The Hairy Bikers. I love their TV programmes and we own some of their cookbooks, so when my husband said how good this book is I thought I’ll have to read it too. It’s their autobiography. They tell their stories in alternating chapters.

The opening chapter is by Dave telling how he made a cheese-and-potato pie for tea when he was seven years old.


‘Mam can’t cook, she’s not very well. I’ve made your tea.’

Also every Friday there is The Friday 56, hosted by Freda at Freda’s Voice, where 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: (also one of Dave’s chapters)

Mr Eaton arranged lots of trips to art galleries in Manchester and Liverpool and, thanks to him, I became obsessed with the Pre-Raphaelites, which incidentally was my specialist subject when I went on Celebrity Mastermind a few years back.

Mr Eaton was Dave’s art teacher at school.

Description from Goodreads:

Si King and Dave Myers, AKA the Hairy Bikers have travelled an interesting road. Born in the north of England, both Si and Dave had their childhood challenges. For Si, being bullied as the fat kid in class was part of his daily school routine. For Dave, his life changed when he became a childhood carer for his mother. But through the challenges of their early years came a love of really good food.

And it was food that brought Si and Dave together. Their eyes met over a curry and a pint on the set of a Catherine Cookson drama, and they knew they would be firm and fast friends for life.

From deserts to desserts, potholes to pot roasts, the nation’s favourite cooking duo reveals what’s made their friendship such a special and lasting one. They’ve eaten their way around the world a good few times, but have never lost sight of what matters: great friends, great family and great food.

In this heartwarming memoir of friendship and hilarious misadventure, Si and Dave take you on the ride of their lives!

What do you think, does it appeal to you? What are you currently reading?

Six Degrees of Separation from Born to Run to The Dead Secret

Published on by Margaret2 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.

I completely forgot about this meme until today, busy at the weekend, so here it is nearly a week late.

The starting book this month is Born to Run by Bruce Springsteen, a book I haven’t read, but it is described on Amazon:

Born to Run will be revelatory for anyone who has ever enjoyed Bruce Springsteen, but this book is much more than a legendary rock star’s memoir. This is a book for workers and dreamers, parents and children, lovers and loners, artists, freaks, or anyone who has ever wanted to be baptized in the holy river of rock and roll.

Here’s my chain:

For my First link I’m going to another memoir: Bookworm: A Memoir of Childhood Reading by Lucy Mangan, which is more than an account of what Lucy read, it’s also a history of children’s books, details of their authors and a memoir of Lucy’s childhood.

My Second Link is one of the books Lucy mentioned. I was delighted to find that she too loved Teddy Robinson by Joan L Robinson. Teddy visits a toy-shop, keeps house while Deborah and her mother are out, does some conjuring tricks, meets a china gnome, and lots more.

The author’s second name takes me to my Third Link – the author Peter Robinson who writes the Inspector Banks books. The first book in the series is Gallows View.

My Fourth Link is via the title of another book with the word Gallows in the title – Gallows Court by Martin Edwards, also the first in a series, the Rachel Savernake series. It’s set in 1930s London.

As is my Fifth Link, Bats in the Belfry by E C R Lorac, which incidentally has an introduction by Martin Edwards. A corpse is discovered, ‘headless and handless‘ in a spooky Gothic tower.

My Sixth Link is to another novel with a Gothic tower is The Dead Secret by Wilkie Collins – Porthgenna Tower in Cornwall in the 1820s. A dying woman, Mrs Treverton leaves her husband a letter confessing to a great secret.

My chain has worked its way from a memoir mainly through crime fiction to a 19th century ‘sensation’ novel. Not where I expected it to end.

Next month (6 May 2023), we’ll start with a book on the Stella Prize 2023 shortlist – Hydra by Adriane Howell.

WWW Wednesday: 5 April 2023

Published on by Margaret6 Comments

WWW Wednesday is run by Taking on a World of Words.

The Three Ws are:

What are you currently reading?
What did you recently finish reading?
What do you think you’ll read next?

Currently I’m reading four books:

The Children’s Book by A S Byatt. I started this in February and am taking it slowly. It spans the Victorian era through the World War I years, and centres around a famous children’s book author and the passions, betrayals, and secrets that tear apart the people she loves. I’m still not very far into this book (chapter 7). I’m also reading Daemon Voices: On Stories and Storytelling by Philip Pullman, a beautiful book my son bought me for Mother’s Day. It’s a collection of his essays and I’m dipping into it choosing an essay at random. The third book I’m reading is Asking for the Moon by Reginald Hill, four novellas about Dalziel and Pascoe. I’ve read the first one, The Last National Service Man which is about their first meeting. And the final book is The Road to Little Dribbling by Bill Bryson, a follow-up to his Notes from a Small Island, seeing how Britain had changed twenty years later. I’m nearing the end of this book

The last book I read (on Kindle) is Snow Country by Sebastian Faulks, set mainly in Austria from the years before the First World War to 1933. I found parts of it very slow with too much about Freud. Anton and Lena are the main characters and I much preferred Lena’s story. I may write about it in more detail later on.

Next I’ll be reading – Tortilla Flat by John Steinbeck, my Spin book for the Classics Club.

Although this is a weekly meme I’m only taking part occasionally.

This Nowhere Place by Natasha Bell

Published on by Margaret2 Comments

Mo, Cali, Jude.

Three teenagers befriend each other on the white cliffs, thinking they’ll save each other.

Within months, two of them are dead and the third is scarred for life.

Ten years later, documentary-maker Tarek Zayat and his film crew are in town, asking difficult questions, looking for secrets in the silence around that fateful summer.

Because in the shadow of the white cliffs it’s easy for stories, histories and people to get lost. And in a small town, the truth is something that must be carefully unburied – in case it buries you.

I was really expecting to like this book, attracted by the synopsis, but unfortunately I didn’t enjoy it. It’s one of the books that has been on my NetGalley shelf for too long because I made several attempts to start it. I found it difficult to follow at the beginning and didn’t like the format with extracts from a TV/film Tarek is making. This made the beginning disjointed, switching between different characters. So I was in two minds about reading the book, and put it aside whilst I read other books. But there was enough mystery about what was going on to make me want to keep reading and I started it again recently, this time finishing it.

The narrative moves between 2016 and 2026, which usually doesn’t bother me but in this case I did have difficulty for a while sorting out the time line and what all the characters were doing – and when and how they were connected. This Nowhere Place covers a number of difficult issues – racism, immigrants, suicide, drugs and mental health problems. It also explores family relationships, and friendships. After a slow start the pace didn’t pick up for most of the book. The mystery element wasn’t too puzzling to work out despite all the twists and turns and the fact that most of the characters are lying or withholding information. I was relieved when I reached the ending with yet another twist, which I had suspected for a while.

On the plus side I think it’s well researched and the author recommends a list of books for further reading. The Dover setting is also well described, which has made me interested to find out more about the locations of the Western Heights fortifications, the Grand Shaft with its triple staircase, and the White Cliffs, in particular, the Shakespeare Cliff.

My thanks to Penguin, the publishers for a review copy via NetGalley.

  • ASIN: ‎ B08C793RMB
  • Publisher ‏: ‎ Penguin (18 March 2021)
  • Print length: 367 pages
  • Review copy
  • My rating : 3*

Top Ten Tuesday: Books for People Who Like Historical Crime Fiction

Published on by Margaret5 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.

This week’s topic is Books for People Who Liked Author X but I’m changing it a bit to Books for People Who Like Historical Crime Fiction/thrillers. I haven’t included any of the authors I listed in an earlier TTT post on historical fiction.

  1. Death Comes as the End by Agatha Christie, set in 2000 BC Egypt, a novel of anger, jealousy, betrayal and murder in 2000 BC. A young woman, Nofret, is found dead, apparently having fallen from a cliff. More deaths follow.
  2. Night of the Lightbringer by Peter Tremayne – one of the Sister Fidelma mystery series, a medieval murder mystery, set in Ireland in AD 671 on the eve of the pagan feast of Samhain. featuring a Celtic nun who is also an advocate of the ancient Irish law system. (TBR)
  3. The Story Keeper, set on the Isle of Skye in 1857 where Audrey Hart has been employed to collect the folklore and fairy tales of the local community. One by one young girls go missing from their homes and the locals believe they have been taken by the spirits of the unforgiven dead.
  4. An Expert in Murder by Nicola Upson, set in the theatrical world of  the 1930s, one of her novels featuring novelist Josephine Tey (Elizabeth Mackintosh 1896-1952).
  5. The Franchise Affair by Josephine Tey, set in a post Second World War England but based on a real case from the 18th century of a girl who went missing and later claimed she had been kidnapped.
  6. Murder on the Eiffel Tower by Claude Izner, the Eiffel Tower opened in 1889. Eugénie Patinot and her nephew and niece sign the visitors’ book, and then Eugénie collapses and dies, apparently from a bee-sting. Victor Legris, a bookseller is determined to find out what had really happened. 
  7. The House of Silk by Anthony Horowitz, set in the late 19th century, capturing the spirit and tone of Conan Doyle’s original stories while devising a new mystery for modern readers. Horowitz’s plot is cunning, full of twists and turns, with allusions to Conan Doyle’s stories.
  8. Prophecy by S J Parris – one of the Giordano Bruno series of historical thrillers, set in Elizabethan England. Giordano Bruno was a 16th century heretic philosopher and spy. This book begins in the autumn of 1583, when Elizabeth’s throne is in peril, threatened by Mary Stuart’s supporters scheme to usurp the rightful monarch.
  9. The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton – set in a 1920s English country house, where Evelyn Hardcastle, the young and beautiful daughter of the house, is killed. But Evelyn will not die just once as the day will repeat itself, over and over again. Every time ending with the fateful pistol shot. (a TBR)
  10. The Mistress of the Art of Death by Ariana Franklin, a murder/mystery book set in Cambridge in 1170 during the reign of Henry II. A child has been murdered and others have disappeared (also found murdered). The Jews are suspected and have been held in the castle for their own safety.