The Night of the Mi’raj by Zoë Ferraris

Published on by Margaret3 Comments

Abacus| 16 August 2012 | 360 pages| e-book edition| My own copy| 4*

The Night of the Mi’raj (published as Finding Nouf in the USA) is the first book in Zoë Ferraris’  Katya Hijazi series, set in modern day Saudi Arabia, featuring Nayir al-Sharqi, a desert guide and a laboratory technician Katya Hijazi. When sixteen year old Nouf ash-Shrawi disappears from her home in Jeddah, just before her arranged marriage, her brother, Othman, asks his friend, Nayir to find her. After searching the desert for ten days, Nayir fails to find her, but then Nouf’s body is found in a desert wadi. It appears that her death was an accident and that she died by drowning in the wadi after a sudden storm.

Nayir is puzzled. Why did Nouf run away to the desert, leaving behind her fiance and a luxurious life with her wealthy family? He’d never failed before to find a lost traveller and he assumed if she had run away it was because she didn’t want to be found. Her family accept the verdict of accidental death, but when Katya tells Nayir she has found evidence that Nouf was murdered he feels compelled to uncover the truth about her death. The more the two of them discover the more problems and challenges arise.

What is most fascinating in this book for me is not the mystery, but the developing relationship between Nayir and Katya and the description of life in Saudi Arabia. Nayir is not a Bedouin or a Saudi, he’s a Palestinian. But the Bedouin had taught him about the desert:

From here he had a sprawling view of the desert valley, crisp and flat, surrounded by low dunes that undulated in the golden colour of sunset. … The wind picked up and stroked the desert floor, begging a few grains of sand the better to flaunt its elegance, while the earth shed its skin with a ripple and seemed to take flight. The bodies of the dunes changed endlessly with the winds. They rose to peaks or slithered like snake trails. The Bedouin had taught him how to interpret the shapes to determine the chance of a sandstorm or the direction of tomorrow’s wind. Some Bedouin believed that the forms held prophetic meanings too. Right now, the land directly ahead of him formed a series of crescents, graceful half-moons that rolled towards the horizon. Crescents meant change was in the air.

I was puzzled by the title of the UK publication – The Night of the Mi’raj, so I was pleased that Zoë Ferraris explained why she chose it in her Author’s Note. The mi’raj is both a physical journey and a spiritual climax, a moment of revelation for Mohammed. She states that; ‘In this book Nayir’s journey to learning the truth behind Nouf’s death is, for him, both a physical and a spiritual discovery too.’

There are two more books in the Katya Hijazi series: City of Veils and Kingdom of Strangers.

Six Degrees of Separation from The Snow Child to Crime at Lark Cottage

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.

The starting book this month is The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey. I have a copy of this book but haven’t read it yet. So all I know is that it is set in Alaska in the 1920s where a childless couple build a child out of snow. The next morning the snow child is gone–but they glimpse a young, blonde-haired girl running through the trees.

It was a nominee for the Goodreads Choice Award in the Best Historical Fiction category in 2012. My First link is to the winner of that Award, which was The Light Between Oceans by M L Stedman. It’s set on a lighthouse keeper’s island, where the Indian Ocean washes into the Great Southern Ocean in the 1920s. A boat washes up on the shore of the island. It holds a dead man – and a crying baby. The only two islanders, Tom and his wife Izzy, are about to make a devastating decision.

My Second Link is a book with a similar title, both books containing the word ‘between‘, The House Between Tides by Sarah Maine. I confuse the two. It is set in the Outer Hebrides, on a crumbling estate with a century-old secret, historical fiction set in 2010  and in 1910, described as ‘An echo of Daphne du Maurier‘. One of the characters is called Hetty,

My Third Link also contains a character called Hetty. In Adam Bede by George Eliot Adam, a hard working young man, a carpenter, with a strong sense of right and wrong, strong and intelligent, is in love with Hetty Sorrel. But she is attracted by the seductive charm of Arthur, the local squire’s son. They begin to meet in secret, with tragic consequences. 

George Eliot is the pseudonym of Mary Anne Evans and my Fourth Link is another novel written under a pseudonym. It’s The Chalk Circle Man, the first book in the Commissaire Adamsberg novels by Fred Vargas, the pseudonym of the French historian, archaeologist and writer Frédérique Audoin-Rouzeauin. It’s a very cleverly constructed and quirky mystery with a twist at the end. Strange blue chalk circles start appearing on the pavements of Paris and then the body of a woman with her throat savagely cut is found in one of them.

Thinking about other books set in Paris brings me to Georges Simenon’s Maigret books. So my Fifth Link is a short story – A Maigret Christmas – set in Paris on Christmas Day in which Maigret and his wife receive two unexpected visitors who lead him on the trail of a mysterious intruder dressed in red and white. I liked the light it throws on Maigret and his wife, their relationship and the sadness they feel at being childless, particularly so at Christmas.

My Sixth Link – is Crime at Lark Cottage by John Bingham a short story in The Christmas Card Crime and Other Stories. One snowy Christmas car trouble and poor weather lead John Bradley to Lark Cottage, the home of Lucy Shaw and her young daughter Julia. Her husband, serving a life-sentence for murder, has escaped from Lanforth Prison, and she implores her unexpected visitor to stay the night. 

My chain this month starts with a snow child in Alaska and ends with another child in a country cottage one snowy Christmas, travelling through an island in the Great Southern Ocean, to the Outer Hebrides and France before ending in England.

Next month (7, Janusry 2022), we’ll start with Beach Read by Emily Henry.

Book Beginnings & The Friday 56: A Heart Full of Headstones by Ian Rankin

Published on by Margaret13 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.

One of the books I’m currently reading is Ian Rankin’s latest and 24th Rebus novel, A Heart Full of Headstones. I’ve read all the earlier books.

The first Rebus book I read was Set in Darkness, the 11th book in the series. It was obvious that this featured characters that had been in the earlier books but I didn’t find it difficult to follow who was who and their relationships. Even so I decided I needed to start at the beginning and read them in sequence. And I think, for me at least, that works best, in order to fully understand the background and how the characters interact and evolve.

My Book Beginning:

John Rebus had been in court plenty of times, but this was his first time in the dock.

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:

Rebus had just finished eating an early dinner of microwaved haggis when he heard the doorbell. Brillo trotted with him to the door. Siobhan was standing on the step.

‘Well, well,’ Rebus said, while Brillo’s welcome was more effusive, ‘In you come then.’

Synopsis:

John Rebus had been in court plenty of times, but this was his first time in the dock…

John Rebus stands accused: on trial for a crime that could put him behind bars for the rest of his life. Although it’s not the first time the legendary detective has taken the law into his own hands, it might be the last.

What drove a good man to cross the line? Or have times changed, and the rules with them?

Detective Inspector Siobhan Clarke faces Edinburgh’s most explosive case in years, as a corrupt cop goes missing after claiming to harbour secrets that could sink the city’s police force.

But in this investigation, it seems all roads lead to Rebus – and Clarke’s twin loyalties to the public and the police will be tested to their limit.

A reckoning is coming – and John Rebus may be hearing the call for last orders…

Oh, my goodness – the call for last orders? How will this book end? I just have to read it!

What do you think? Have you read it, or are you going to read it?

Throwback Thursday: The Last Enchantment by Mary Stewart

Published on by Margaret4 Comments

Today I’m linking up with Davida @ The Chocolate Lady’s Book Review Blog for Throwback Thursday. It takes place on the Thursday before the first Saturday of every month (i.e., the Thursday before the monthly #6Degrees post). The idea is to highlight one of your previously published book reviews and then link back to Davida’s blog.

The Last Enchantment by Mary Stewart is the third book of the Arthurian Saga, a book of myth and legend and about the conflict between good and evil. I first reviewed it on April 5, 2014.

My review begins:

I love books that take me away to another time and place – The Last Enchantment (1979) by Mary Stewart is just such a book, magically whisking me back to the time of King Arthur and Merlin. This is not a book to read quickly, but a book to savour both for the story and for Mary Stewart’s descriptive writing.

Click here to read my full review

The next ThrowbackThursday post is scheduled for January 4, 2023.

Two Novellas in Now and Forever by Ray Bradbury:#NovNov22

Published on by Margaret2 Comments

HarperVoyager| 25 June 2012| 240 page| e-book| 4*

Now and Forever is the first book by Ray Bradbury that I’ve read. It contains two novellas – Somewhere a Band is Playing, in which a young writer discovers that all is not as it seems in a nostalgic community, and Leviathan ’99, a retelling of Moby Dick set in space. Two very different stories, each one fascinating, and both with a long history, as Bradbury wrote each one over several decades. They contrast both in style and content. I enjoyed both, but Leviathan ’99 is my favourite.

In the first, Somewhere a Band is Playing, (102 pages) a reporter James Cardiff arrives in Summerton, a small town in the middle of Arizona, a town which seems perfect, a quiet peaceful place. He can hear in the air the quiet sound of a band playing. But the more he explores the more mysterious Summerton becomes. For one thing there are no children and no hospitals or doctors because no one gets ill and even stranger the graves in the cemetery are empty. The story has a nostalgic feel, a sense of melancholy and myth as James, under the guidance of a beautiful young woman, Nefertiti, discovers the truth about Summerton.

Bradbury’s introduction to Somewhere a Band is Playing explains that he begun writing a screenplay and short story about a small town somewhere in the desert and how he had kept encountering Katharine Hepburn either in person or on the screen and was attracted by the fact that she remained youthful throughout the years. Then in 1956 she had made the film Summertime and this had led him to put her at the centre of a story and so Somewhere a Band is Playing slowly evolved. Another element of the story came when he saw the film, The Wind and the Lion and was so taken with the score that he wrote a long poem based on the enchanting music. He then put these elements together to produce this novella, which he dedicated to Anne Hardin, who had encouraged his work and to Katharine Hepburn.

Leviathan ’99’ (101 pages) is dedicated to Herman Melville because after spending a year writing the screenplay for John Huston’s Moby Dick he’d fallen under the spell of Melville and his ‘leviathan whale’. Bradbury then wrote his first script of Leviathan ’99’, which was eventually produced by BBC Radio in London, then as a longer version as a play in 1972. Finally thirty years later he finished writing it as a novella as his ‘final effort to focus and revitalize what began as a radio dream.’

I haven’t read Moby Dick, but I enjoyed this story about spaceships instead of sailing ships, mad astronaut captains instead of seafaring captains and the blind white comet instead of the great white whale. It’s set in 2099 and begins as Ishmael, an astronaut joins the Cetus 7, the largest interstellar ship ever built. The spaceship is on a mission, travelling beyond the stars. His cubicle roommate is Quell, a seven feet tall, green spider who is a telepath. The captain is mad, obsessed with finding the comet, Leviathan, the largest comet in history that had blinded him thirty years earlier. As Quell described it ‘the universe set off a light-year of immensity of photographic flash. God blinked and bleached the captain to this colour of sleeplessness and terror.’

It is an incredible achievement transposing Melville’s 19th century epic into a hundred page novella set in the future.

Top Ten Tuesday: Cozy Mysteries

Published on by Margaret13 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 Cozy Reads. My list is of Cozy Mysteries, all of which I’ve read or have waiting to-be-read*. A  cozy mystery is a mystery that doesn’t usually have any bad language, sex scenes, or gruesome details about the killing, and the main character is often an amateur detective.

Betrayed in Cornwall by Janie Bolitho – the fourth book in the Rose Trevelyan series. When a young man falls off a cliff in suspicious circumstances, Rose starts to make connections and things start to go terribly wrong. The characters are quickly drawn, but I still felt they were believable, the writing is fluent, and the Cornish location is superb.

The Body on the Beach by Simon Brett – the first in the Fethering Mysteries. It’s an easy read, set in a fictitious village on the south coast of England, where Carole Seddon has taken early retirement from her career at the Home Office. One morning she discovers a dead body on the beach, but by the time the police go to investigate it had disappeared.

Dying in the Wool by Frances Brody  – the first of the Kate Shackleton Mysteries set in Yorkshire in 1922, with flashbacks to 1916. Bridgestead is a peaceful mill village, until the day in 1916 when mill owner Joshua Braithwaite went missing after apparently trying to commit suicide.

Death at Wentwater Court by Carola Dunn – the first Daisy Dalrymple book, a quick and easy read, a mix of Agatha Christie and PG Wodehouse, set in 1923 at the Earl of Wentwater’s country mansion, Wentwater Court. 

Faithful Unto Death by Caroline Graham – a Midsomer Murder Mystery. I’ve enjoyed watching the TV series over the years. Midsomer is obviously a dangerous place to live with all those murders happening so regularly, but they are not the gory kind – it’s murder of a sanitised nature.

The Marlow Murder Club by Robert Thorogood – easy to read and fast paced. Seventy-seven year old Judith, and her friends discover who killed Stefan, who was found dead in the Thames, with a bullet hole in the centre of his forehead. The first book in the Marlow Murder Club series.

The Heiress of Linn Hagh* by Karen Charlton – the first book in the Detective Lavender Mystery series. Northumberland, November 1809. A beautiful young heiress disappears from her locked bedchamber at Linn Hagh. The local constables are baffled and the townsfolk cry ‘witchcraft’.

Stealing the Crown* by T P Fielden – London, 1941: Major Edgar Brampton is found shot dead in his office in Buckingham Palace. All signs point towards a self-inflicted tragedy, but when Palace authorities hurry his body away and order staff to stay silent, fellow courtier Guy Harford’s suspicions are raised. The first book in the Guy Harford Mystery series,

Agatha Raisin and the Haunted House by M C Beaton – there are three deaths for Agatha to resolve when an old woman reports that her house is haunted and is later found murdered. More deaths follow. I thought this book was all rather silly and Agatha herself is a silly woman.

The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman – in a peaceful retirement village, four unlikely friends meet up once a week to investigate unsolved killings. This is quietly humorous in parts, not laugh out loud funny, but it did make me smile in a few places. The murder mystery element is over complicated with far too many twists and turns, suspects and false trails. It didn’t turn out to be as good as I’d hoped!