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The following is a list of the books which were read by the East Lothian library book group members in 2005.
Notebooks were sent out with the books, for members to record their comments, a selection of which are posted here. The grading (1* being the least popular, 5* the most) is awarded as a result of the general feedback from group members
To read the synopsis and comments, simply click on a title.
Armstrong, Lance It’s not about the bike – my journey back to life
Attenborough, David Life on air
Atwood, Margaret Alias Grace
Berendt, John Midnight in the garden of good and evil
Coelho, Paulo The Alchemist
Dolan, Chris Ascension day
Donovan, Anne Buddha Da
Dubus 111, Andre House of sand and fog
Faber, Michel The crimson petal and the white
Frazier, Charles Cold mountain
Galloway, Janice Clara
Ghosh, Amitav The glass palace
Haddon, Mark The curious incident of the dog in the night-time
Hoeg, Peter Miss Smilla’s feeling for snow
Kneale, Matthew English passengers
Lister-Kaye, John The song of the rolling earth – a highland odyssey
Livesey, Margot Eva moves the furniture
Mankell, Henning The fifth woman
Martel, Yann Life of Pi
McCann, Colum Dancer
McEwan, Ian Atonement
Millington, Mil Things my girlfriend and I have argued about
Moore, Tim French revolutions – cycling the Tour de France
Morgan, Sally My place
Pearson, Allison I don’t know how she does it
Sebold, Alice The lovely bones
Shenk, David The forgetting
Shreve, Anita The pilot’s wife
Simpson, Joe Touching the void
Smith, Ali Hotel world
Smith, Dodie I capture the castle
Trigiani, Adriana Big stone gap
Welsh, Louise The cutting room
Armstrong, Lance It’s not about the bike – my journey back to life
The astonishing and life-affirming story of an athlete at the top of his game only to be diagnosed with testicular cancer.
From a tough background in Texas, Armstrong entered the world of professional cycling and won the world road racing championship. He had a promising career ahead of him, his sights very firmly set on winning the Tour de France, the bike race which takes place over several days, famous for it’s gruelling intensity.
However, in 1996 he was struck by testicular cancer. By the time he visited a doctor, the cancer was advanced and had spread to his lungs and brain. This book charts his treatment and progress with graphic detail: the chemo, the surgical procedures, every single X-ray, IV drip or unfortunate side effect is documented. His astonishing commitment to training, his triumph in going on to achieve his ambition and win the Tour de France, and his positive attitude to all he had to overcome, is an inspiration to us all.
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Attenborough, David Life on air
Sir David Attenborough must surely be one of the best-loved figures to grace our television screens, and he certainly has one of the most familiar and reassuring voices. It is easy to hear this voice, as he tells the story of how he managed to turn his youthful passion into a highly satisfying and successful career. He has managed to bring the wonders of the natural world into millions of homes around the world with an inimitable endearing style. Over 100 photos associated with the huge range of programmes he has been intimately involved with are included in “Life on Air”, a fascinating personal story of our times. He says that he knows of “no pleasure deeper than that which comes from contemplating the natural world and trying to understand it.” Lucky for us then, that he is so skilful in communicating that pleasure and understanding.
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Atwood, Margaret Alias Grace ***
A fictionalized account of a celebrated Canadian murder. Two immigrant servants, James McDermott and sixteen year old Grace Marks, were accused of the brutal slayings of their employer and his mistress, in 1843. Both the accused were found guilty and sentenced to death but Grace’s sentence was commuted. She was confined to Kingston penitentiary, spending some time in the Toronto mental asylum. Margaret Atwood introduces Simon Jordan, a young psychologist, who has been asked to assess Grace’s mental state so that an application for pardon may be made on the grounds of insanity. Dr Jordan listens to Grace’s story with a mixture of disbelief and sympathy. As he draws her towards the day of the murders, an event she claims not to remember, he grapples with the question that haunts the novel – is Grace an innocent victim of circumstance or a vicious murderer?
North Berwick evening
Enjoyed by group but somewhat ambiguous. We don't know if Grace was guilty or not.
Knowsley Park
We agree with North Berwick - even at the end we didn't really know if she was guilty - the events of that day when murders took place remain a mystery
Port Seton evening
The ending really didn't go with the style of the rest of the book.
Gullane
Loved the enigmatic ending.
Much better for re-reading as so much in it that I missed first time around. Superb, heart-rending and illuminating.
Dunbar
Well written and compelling read. Insight into Canadian life at the time. Some of the group struggled to finish.
A common view is that Grace achieved what she wanted after all these years.
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Berendt, John Midnight in the garden of good and evil ****
William Dalrymple was quoted in the Scotsman as saying that this book was “the best book I have read this year … funny, gripping, full of fabulous characters and beautifully written, although it describes itself as a non-fiction novel it is, in fact, as good a travel book as I have read in a decade.”
The book is an account of a killing in a mansion in Savannah, Georgia, in the heart of the American South, in the early hours of 2nd May 1981. Was it murder or self-defence? The unpredictable twists and turns of a murder case are interwoven with a first-person account of life in the Old South. It is part National Geographic style exploration of a foreign and unusual culture, that of Savannah, and part crime thriller.
This book expertly brings the character of Savannah and its people to life. One reviewer commented that he had never in his life wanted to visit anywhere as much as he had wanted to visit Savannah after reading this book. In fact a very vibrant tourist trade has built up with coach loads of tourists clamouring to visit what some have described as “the most beautiful small city on earth.”
Do let me know if anyone decides to take a trip there as a result!
Ormiston
The characters came alive well - difficult to believe some of them were real
North Berwick lunchtime
Savannah is an exotic setting. The pace is uneven but suits the development of the story. Loved the cool New Yorker narrator.
I never what to get involved with the Savannah justice system (almost a contradiction in terms!)
East Linton
Full of delicious gossip!
Dunbar
Excellent, very evocative, memorable characters - all round good fun.
Knowsley Park
The characters were great fun - particularly the Woman of a thousand songs and Chablis the transvestite. Would certainly encourage a visit to Savannah!
Gullane
Good that preface explains how the book came about. 'Story' only begins in part two. Enjoyed the descriptions of the characters and their crazy lives.
Marmion
Mixed opinions - personally I felt it had too many characters, too many parties and bridge clubs etc. Yes, a bit exotic but I would not have persisted if I hadn't been reading for the group.
I enjoyed this a lot, but I like travel books and all the little anecdotes they involve. It made me want to visit Savannah with all it's idiocyncracies and it's beautiful buildings
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Coelho, Paulo The Alchemist
The magical story of Santiago, an Andalusian shepherd boy who dreams of travelling the world in search of a worldly treasure as fabulous as any ever found. From his home in Spain he journeys to the markets of Tangiers and from there into the Egyptian desert. Along the way he meets many spiritual messengers, who come in unassuming forms such as a camel driver, a well-read Englishman and an alchemist, who believes that if a metal were heated for many years it would free itself of all its individual properties and what was left would be the “Soul of the World.”
This story is firmly rooted in the traditions of ancient tribal storytelling, entertaining an audience while incorporating folklore, magical realism, spirituality and moral values.
This is a truly inspiring and thought provoking book; in the words of one member of staff, “really makes you consider life’s journey in a surprising and unexpected way.”
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Dolan, Chris Ascension day
On a dull March afternoon, three people are seen to rise off the streets of Glasgow into the clouds: a young woman, a bedraggled youth and an older woman who has the modesty to hold her skirts around her feet as she rise. Are these genuine ascensions, or just a trick of the light?
There are five main characters in Chris Dolan’s remarkable new novel. William, a retired Glaswegian living the good life in South Africa, his only trouble being his very openly naturist (and septuagenarian) neighbours; Cannibal, who knows nothing but contemporary Glasgow and inhabits a twilight world of half-deserted housing estates and children’s homes; the unfortunately named Paris, living as she does in Glasgow; Morag, who turns out to be William’s letter-writer and then Glasgow itself, remembered still in William’s imagination as the old shipbuilding centre of the world, and the magnet which draws all characters inexorably together.
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Donovan, Anne Buddha Da
The story of Jimmy and Liz and their 12 year old daughter Anne Marie, and their journey of self-discovery, told in a refreshing, engaging style and with great affection for the central characters.
Jimmy, a self-employed painter and decorator finds new meaning to life when he encounters a Buddhist at lunchtime, visits the Buddhist Centre and comes over “dead calm.” However his new found devotion to Buddha places a strain on his marriage. He abstains from booze, gives up meat and tells Liz the pair of them “won’t be daein’ it for a while.” She grabs her emergency pack of fags retorting, “you’d better think hard aboot the consequences. Ah have no intentions of followin’ your example.” And doesn’t.
Those consequences – Jimmy’s dossing down every night at the Buddhist Centre, missing the highlights of AnneMarie’s life as she and her mate record a CD, Liz’s sexual independence – shape the plot of a skilfully told novel in which there is foolishness but no badness.
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Dubus 111, Andre House of sand and fog
Scotsman review by Campbell Armstrong (author)
“Far and away the best novel I read this year was The House of Sand and Fog, the story of a former colonel in the Shah’s army who has settled in California after the rise of the Ayatollah and longs to keep up appearances of former grandeur. Encumbered by a wife accustomed to the finer things of life, the colonel – a deftly drawn character whose exotic background illuminates this novel – keeps up two low-paying jobs and decides to dabble in Californian real estate as a means of restoring his lost dignity. What follows is a brutal account of a man in conflict with a system he can’t understand and having to deal with Americans who don’t understand him. It’s a tragedy, beautifully handled by Dubus.”
Kathy, a recovering alcoholic, separated from her husband, fails to open a series of letters from the tax office. The State seizes her house and it is sold to Behrani, a formerly wealthy Iranian Air Force officer, who had thrived under the regime of the Shah, only to have lost everything during his country’s revolution. He is willing to use what’s left of his family’s life savings to buy the house, at what turns out to be a bargain basement price at a country auction.
Kathy has now lost nearly everything in life, including the one thing that has kept her somewhat anchored, the house she inherited from her father. She has an ally in Sheriff Lester Burden, a married man with children, who believes she has lost the house due to a bureaucratic error, and, smitten by Kathy, determines to help her get the house back, the pair of them willing to stop at nothing to achieve this goal.
Dubus tells his tragic tale from the viewpoints of the two main adversaries, Behrani and Kathy. To both of them, the house represents something more than just a place to live. For the colonel, it is a foot in the door of the American Dream, for Kathy, a reminder of a kinder, gentler past.
The House of Sand and Fog is an exceptionally well written and brilliantly told story of two people whose destinies become intertwined through a simple twist of fate. It is the story of what happens to them and to those who love them, when their respective worlds collide in a climactic and tragic ending.
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Faber, Michel The crimson petal and the white
Set in Victorian London, this is the story of a well-read prostitute named Sugar, who spends her free hours composing a violent, pornographic screed against men. She believes she can make a better life for herself and allows herself to be taken up by wealthy perfumer, William Rackham, becoming his mistress and his children’s live-in governess. She devours the diaries written by Rackham’s increasingly unhinged wife Agnes, in order to learn more about the family and as a possible aid to her desired ascent through the strata of 1870’s London.
At the heart of this ambitious historical novel lies a modern morality tale about class, gender and sexual politics, coupled with the compelling struggle of a young woman to lift her body and soul out of the gutter.
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Frazier, Charles Cold mountain
Inman was not expected to survive a horrific neck wound. Somehow, in dreadful conditions, he manages to care for himself but knows that as soon as he is fit enough to fight he will be sent straight back to the battlefields of Virginia. He resolves to leave behind the broken and dying soldiers and climbs out of the hospital window, intent on returning to his love Ada Monroe, even if he has to walk home. So begins Inman’s epic and painful quest for home and the life he had before the Civil War.
Frazier’s account of Ada’s struggle for survival at Blue Mountain and Inman’s journey across the devastated lands of the South result in a harrowing but truly memorable love story.
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Galloway, Janice Clara
Clara Schumann is best known as the widow of Robert despite the fact that she was herself a child prodigy as a pianist who went on to have her own international career in European concert halls in the latter half of the nineteenth century.
During her early life she was subject to the demands of others; first of her controlling father, whom she had to sue in order to marry Robert, and then of the composer himself, whose own demons exerted control not only over his own, somewhat unstable life, but also of hers. In Clara, Janice Galloway has taken this period to produce a rich and compelling fictionalised account of her life.
Living with Robert was by no means easy. He had to have silence when he was working; he was inconsistent in his behaviour, often blaming her for small infractions over which she had no control. She had no life of her own and yet, despite having eight children to look after, continued to give concerts regularly as she was the primary bread-winner in the family.
Unappreciated and unrecognised by the public, Robert became frustrated and depressed, eventually admitting himself into an asylum where he died in 1856, aged 46, leaving Clara, at the age of 37, a widow with the eight children to support.
The ill-starred love story of Clara and Robert Schumann is as romantic as the music of the composer and his contemporaries, but Janice Galloway keeps this novel on a factual level as much as possible, without attempting to recreate the passionate feeling of their love or their music.
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Ghosh, Amitav The glass palace
Beginning in 1885 with the British invasion of Mandalay and the capture of the Burmese King and Queen, Amitav Ghosh has crated a monument to life in colonial central and Southeast Asia. The story follows three generations from three different families, spanning 100 years and three continents. Yet, despite its epic scale, the story succeeds on focussing intimately on the characters’ lives and personalities. There’s Raj Kumar, the Indian peasant who makes a fortune through teak and his wife Dolly, the breathtakingly beautiful maid of the Burmese royal family; Uma, the Indian widow who becomes a champion for Indian independence after her liberating time in the USA and Matthew, also heavily influenced by American values and ideals, who makes a life in his half-native Malaya as a rubber plantation owner. They and their progeny all suffer during the Second World War, as soldier, refugee or evacuee, discriminated against because of the colour of their skin. Ghosh’s focus during the war period is from the viewpoint of Indian officers in the British army.
The journey this lavish novel takes us, from one glass palace in the lush and rich Burma of the 19th century to another glass palace in repressed and impoverished Myanmar, is satisfying and informative. Not since Vikram Seth’s “A suitable boy” have images of India been so vividly and lovingly recreated.
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Haddon, Mark The curious incident of the dog in the night-time
A recent winner of the Whitbread Award.
Christopher Boone is 15. When he discovers a dead dog on his neighbour’s lawn, obviously murdered (because a garden fork was sticking in it) he decides to solve the crime and write a book about it. Christopher will emulate his hero Sherlock Holmes, the great logician. Christopher can relate to logic above all else because he suffers from Asperger’s syndrome, a form of autism. He is a remarkably compelling narrator. He has a photographic memory, is a mathematical genius, can name every country in the world and its capital city but can’t understand, or relate to, other human beings. As he delves deeper into the mystery of the dead dog, and his search for his missing mother, he finds himself in the completely illogical world of adult relationships and his necessary routine of order and logic begins to disintegrate. The agony Christopher suffers when things are not ‘just so’ is utterly convincing, especially as one can easily identify with the adults around him who are left totally confused, frustrated and in despair of Christopher’s actions and reactions.
This is a very remarkable and deeply affecting book.
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Hoeg, Peter Miss Smilla’s feeling for snow
One winter evening the neighbour's six-year-old son falls to his death from the apartment roof in Copenhagen. Accidental death, say the police, but Smilla Jaspersen, a resourceful, tenacious and bloody-minded Greenlander, knows the boy well; moreover she has a feeling for snow - and those last footprints tell her a tale... Her investigation starts in Denmark and leads to the Arctic ice cap as Smilla doggedly homes in on her quarry. What is unique about this novel is probably the central character. Smilla Jaspersen has a passion for geometry and is one of the world's leading experts on ice. She is also on the wrong side of thirty, single, unemployed, and extremely lonely. She is a fascinating heroine.
Part murder mystery, part philosophical meditation, Høeg's novel is wonderfully atmospheric, with the awesome immensity of the northern ice and sea made blindingly real.
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Kneale, Matthew English passengers
English passengers is an historical novel, set in the 1850’s, which tells the story of a voyage to Tasmania. There are two main stories: that of three eccentric Englishmen who set sail for Tasmania to find the garden of Eden; the other of a young Tasmanian aborigine and his tribe and their struggle against the invading British.
The beautifully drawn characters include Illiam Quillian Kewley, the irrepressible ship’s captain from the Isle of Man who narrowly misses arrest at every turn; Geoffrey Wilson, the self-righteous Yorkshire vicar who believes that a literal interpretation of Genesis puts the Garden of Eden in Tasmania, and sets out to prove it; Renshaw a botanist and Dr Thomas Potter, a racial theorist who believes that his own success is proof of his high position on the chain of being, with the Manx crewmen far below him and the aborigines just a step up from the apes.
At the heart of the action is Peevay, who tells of a time 30 years previously when a revolution was stirring on Tasmania. Over the years white settlers had been encroaching on aboriginal land and relations had deteriorated into violence. The kidnap and rape of Peevay’s warrior mother by white seal hunters has led her to seek revenge by waging a war against the whites. Peevay, previously abandoned by his mother and now desperate to win her love, has joined her.
An engrossing tale of empire, race and seafaring, a worthy
winner of the Whitbread Book of the Year in 2000.
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Lister-Kaye, John The song of the rolling earth – a highland odyssey
David Robinson, writing in the “Scotsman” judges Lister-Kaye’s lyrical book about his highland home and its’ wildlife to be nature writing at its very best. He reports that three years ago, one June afternoon, Sir John Lister-Kaye sat in his boathouse, gazing at the view clear across the loch to the birch woods he had created 25 years ago and started to write.
He didn’t know then what shape his outpourings would take, all he knew was that the words were coming thick and fast and if they turned out to form a book, it would be one he had always been destined to write; the dam had broken. This was to be not only the story of his own life, but also of his home at Aigas, near Beauly in Invernesshire. For more than 25 years Aigas, the first field study centre of its kind in the country has drawn people to the Highlands to study its wildlife and ecology. This is a beautifully crafted book. He shares with us his passion for nature and leaves the reader breathless at the breadth of its scope. He describes with poetic, apt imagery a nesting swift, mating adders, a badger, an otter, a wood wasp, the wood at night, frozen wrens, and the people in the glen – the list is endless. This book is intensely satisfying, offering beautiful prose and vivid imagery. The reader is left feeling that the author has let you share his history and his home, and it’s a privilege to have been invited in.
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Livesey, Margot Eva moves the furniture
At Eva McEwen’s birth, six magpies congregate outside the window – a bad omen. That night her mother dies, leaving her with her aunt and heartsick father – and a woman and a young girl no one else can see. Eva is a lonely girl, brought up in rural Scotland. These mysterious figures, who regularly visit, have a profound and ambiguous effect on her life. At times they appear to have her best interests at heart, saving her from dangerous situations and offering her sound advice, but sometimes their intervention seems less positive and more possessive.
When she grows up Eva moves to Glasgow to become a nurse, working in a burns unit during the second world war. Away from her childhood home she hopes to escape the companions influence, but they continue to visit her and meddle in her affairs, even ruining her relationships.
This is not a ghost story in the conventional sense. It is a moving exploration of loss and loneliness – and the enduring power of love between parent and child.
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Mankell, Henning The fifth woman
Four nuns and an unidentified fifth woman are killed in a savage, night time attack in an Algerian monastery. Months later in Sweden, the news of the unexplained tragedy sets off a cruel vengeance for these killings. Meanwhile Inspector Kurt Wallander is home from an idyllic holiday in Rome, full of energy and plans for the future. Autumn settles over the province of Skåne, and Wallander prays the winter will be peaceful. But when he investigates the disappearance of an elderly bird-watcher he discovers a gruesome and meticulously planned murder - a body impaled in a trap of sharpened bamboo poles. Then another man is reported missing and, once again, Wallander's life is on hold as he and his close knit team work tirelessly to find a link between these murders and those of the nuns. Inspector Wallander is quickly becoming a very popular character: who could fail to be endeared by a policeman in the midst of his thorough investigations who finds time to remind himself to book the laundry room; worry about an over-stressed colleague and grieve for his recently deceased father. If you haven’t read any of these crime novels before, you’re in for a treat. One of Sweden’s most successful exports!
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Mar tel, Yann Life of Pi
After the tragic sinking of a cargo ship, one solitary lifeboat remains bobbing on the wild, blue Pacific. The only survivors from the wreck are a sixteen-year-old boy named Pi, a hyena, a zebra (with a broken leg), a female orang-utan and a 450-pound Royal Bengal tiger named Richard Parker. Not what Pi had expected when his zookeeper father had packed up his family and their menagerie and set sail from India headed for a new life in Canada.
The scene is set for one of the most extraordinary works of fiction in recent years. For 227 days the lifeboat’s survivors drift through shark-infested waters, while fighting hunger, the elements, each other, and Pi’s overactive imagination.
Pi’s story never drags, interspersed as it is with episodes of his practical struggle to survive with rich, hallucinatory passages. Pi's story is so extraordinary that when he finally makes it ashore, he offers a comparatively boring version of the tale to two researchers, acknowledging that humans don't have much of a taste for the miraculous. This played-down version makes Pi's true tale, thanks to Martel's beautifully fantastical and spirited rendering, all the more tempting to believe.
Yann Martel's Life of Pi is a transformative novel, a dazzling work of imagination and a triumph of storytelling.
Winner of the Man Booker prize 2002.
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McCann, Colum Dancer
Dancer is a fictionalised account of the life of Rudolf Nureyev, the Soviet dancer who defected to the West at the height of the Cold War; partnered Margot Fonteyn and became ballet’s first international male superstar. He was to become as famous, or infamous, for his petulance, his lavish lifestyle, his voracious sexual appetite and his tragic AIDS-related death as for his dancing.
The literary agent Giles Gordon, who died last year, wrote the following review.
“I loathe ballet in much the same way as I detest football. Thus I approached Colum McCann’s novel, Dancer, with apprehension, even though his previous books promised a masterpiece. Dancer is a novel – I repeat, novel – inspired by and about the life and death of Rudolf Nureyev, the great dancer who defected from the USSR to the west in 1961 and did from AIDS in 1993. He was a superstar, the David Beckham of his day. The novel is a verbal tour de force, which is what literature should be. The prose dances, leaps and pirouettes as Nureyev did. The biography is there but the life of the dancer, and especially his relationship with Margot Fonteyn, is conjured, thanks to McCann’s inspiration, into another art form. The lush experience of reading Dancer is akin to devouring a sumptuous meal. McCann turns terrible and triumphant biography into urgent and compulsively readable fiction.”
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McEwan, Ian Atonement
We meet 13-year-old Briony Tallis in the summer of 1935, as she attempts to stage a production of her new drama “The Trials of Arabella” not only to welcome home her elder, idolised brother Leon, but also to win the attention of the adults in the big country house. However her directorial ambitions are abandoned when Briony witnesses an event that she does not understand and soon secrets emerge that change the lives of everyone present.
McEwan is expert at exploring the depth of feelings and the intricacies of the lives of a group of people, weaving the plot into a superb web that draws in the reader until the last page, but even more, he is in his element writing about the pleasures, pains and dangers of writing.
A thoughtful, provocative and at times moving book, revealing a poignant and enduring love story which succeeds in generating feelings of love, hate and anger in the reader.
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Millington, Mil Things my girlfriend and I have argued about
Consistently funny and unerringly true, Millington’s website-turned-column-turned-comic novel is one of those reads that leaves you looking like an annoying and mad person on the bus as you chuckle every five seconds.
Pel, an IT manager in a university library, finds himself also holding down three jobs, dealing with Triads, a hidden Biblical-sized biological timebomb, ancient skeletons, bribes and office politics.
“Dad lit” whimsy with machine-gun volleys of humour, a swift pace and a self-deprecating sense of the absurd.
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Moore, Tim French revolutions – cycling the Tour de France
Comic writer Tim Moore trades his ailing Rolls Royce for a bicycle in his quest to pedal the route of the Tour de France, no mean feat for the fit, let alone a self-described suburban slouch. The resulting 2,256-haphazard-mile journey, told in Moore’s dry and consistently self-deprecating style, makes this a very human account of one of the most inhuman challenges in world sport. Along the route, Moore includes plenty of historical anecdotes that show the many faces of the Tour over the years and helps the uninitiated understand the frenzy that grips France each July as the race meanders through incidental villages, over mountains and finally, into Paris. All well as being an hilarious and brutally honest account of an aspiring “giant of the road”, it is also a great travel book.
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Morgan, Sally My place
This wonderful autobiography tells the moving story of three generations of Australian women. Sally Morgan was born in Perth in the 1950’s and grew up in suburban western Australia believing that her family were Indian. It was not until she was at university that she finally found out the truth – that she was part aboriginal. What started out as a tentative search for information about her family turned into an overwhelming emotional and spiritual pilgrimage. Shame and fear (even in the 1960’s and 70’s they believed their mixed-race children would be taken from them) prompted her mother and grandmother to keep their true identity secret. Sally’s beloved grandmother would not even speak about her past.
With characteristic courage and doggedness, Sally sets out to discover the suppressed history of her family. She travels to her ancestors’ lands in the north and uncovers the story of her mother, her grandmother and her great uncle. Revealed is a terrible narrative of exploitation and degradation, of slavery, rape, stolen children and poverty, and yet, by gradually allowing the voices of Gladys, Daisy and Albert to take over, it becomes a testament to their fortitude and resilience.
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Pearson, Allison I don’t know how she does it
Journalist Allison Pearson’s speciality is in perfectly judged, lethally accurate, and very humorous observations of human behaviour. Her novel, based on her weekly Daily Telegraph column, is, according to her publishers, “a comedy about failure, a tragedy about success.”
The heroine, Kate Reddy, spends her life dealing with nagging guilt and the impossible demands put on the modern working woman in an effort to “have it all,” career, relationships and marriage.
Picturing Kate bashing Sainsbury’s mince pies with a rolling pin in an effort to supply her daughter with “home baking,” (giving the pastry that crumbly, freshly made look) to take to school was enough to convince that here was a character worth reading, and caring, about.
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Sebold, Alice The lovely bones
“I was 14 when I was murdered on December 6, 1973.”
So begins this haunting and heartbreaking debut novel, which explores the themes of loss and mourning from the perspective of Susie Salmon, brutally raped and murdered on her way home from school one snowy December day, the latest victim of a serial killer.
Susie relates the awful events of her death, as well as keeping watch over her grieving family and friends, the killer and the sad detective working on the case. As her family disintegrates in their grief: her father embarks on a search for the killer, her mother withdraws, her sister undertakes a feat of amazing daring and her little brother builds a fort in her honour, Susie struggles to adjust to the strange new place in which she finds herself.
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Shenk, David The forgetting
A literary and scientific examination of Alzheimer’s disease and the race to find a cure. Alzheimer’s is fairly uncommon for those in their 40’s and 50’s but 10% of the 65-plus population suffers from it and 50% of the 85-plus age group. Shenk’s book is an account of the scientists who are working to cure the disease and to understand the links between biology and consciousness. The book is punctuated with personal accounts of famous Alzheimer sufferers – Ronald Reagan, Willem de Kooning and Jonathan Swift – as well as many less famous victims.
Shenk’s narrative reads like a well-written biography. Each chapter begins with a short introduction, written by sufferers and carers, which allow us a powerful insight into the minds of whose whom Alzheimer’s has touched.
An extraordinary and thought provoking journey which manages to integrate such topics as genetic engineering, ancient history, psychology and literary works, encouraging the reader to think about Alzheimer’s in a much wider context than they may have done before.
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Shreve, Anita The pilot’s wife
After 16 years of being married to a pilot, Kathryn thought she would be able to handle any situation, but nothing could have prepared her for the late-night knock on her door and the news of her husband’s fatal crash.
Things become even worse when the plane’s black box is recovered, and Jack is deemed to be responsible for the crash. As well as trying to cope with her grief, Kathryn attempts to clear his name, searching for any and all clues to the hours before the flight. As she unearths disturbing facts and rumours, each discovery forces her to realise that she didn’t know her husband of 16 years at all. She is torn between her desire to know the truth, and her instinct to protect her husband’s memory. Eventually she is forced to test the truth of her marriage, and has to face the revelations about the many secrets he had kept from her.
The use of flashbacks and action, style of language and character development combines to make this a compelling, absorbing and tensely paced novel.
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Simpson, Joe Touching the void
This is, quite simply, the best non-fiction book I have ever read. It is a compulsive and enthralling read. Even if you are not interested in mountaineering or climbing books I don’t think you could fail to be gripped by such a tale of personal courage and fortitude.
In 1985 Joe Simpson and his climbing partner Simon Yates, had set out to conquer the, as yet, unclimbed western face to the Siula Grande peak in the Peruvian Andes. Having successfully gained the summit, it was on the descent, at about 19,000 ft. that disaster struck. Joe fell and hit a slope at the base of a cliff, broke his right leg, ruptured his right knee and shattered his right heel. When Simon reached him they both knew the chances of getting Joe off the mountain were virtually non-existent, yet Simon insisted on attempting to lower Joe down, inch by agonisingly slow inch.
After several hours, and about three thousand feet later, Joe dropped off an edge and found himself dangling in space, about six feet away from the ice wall, too far to reach with his ice axe, and 15 feet below the overhang. He was helpless and Simon was being dragged inexorably towards the edge. The dark outline of a crevasse lay waiting 100 feet directly below Joe.
What follows next is one of the most outstanding and dramatic accounts of the human will to survive ever written. Just read it!
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Smith, Ali Hotel world
A heartfelt and introspective ghost story, Hotel World features five women whose lives (and a death) overlap at the Global Hotel, a generic establishment in an unnamed city in England. The novel begins with Sara, a 19-year-old hotel chambermaid who bets the bellboy five pounds that she can fold herself into the dumbwaiter, but when she does so, it plummets to the basement killing her instantly. As her ghost tries to recollect what it was like to be alive we meet Else, a homeless woman who sits and begs on the concrete in front of the hotel, Lise, the depressed receptionist, Penny, a freelance advertising copywriter looking for ways to curb her boredom and Sara's sister, Clare, in search of Sara's spirit. Ultimately, this group helps Clare to come to grips with her sister's death and one night all five women find themselves in the smooth, plush environs of the Global Hotel, where the intersection of their very different fates make for this playful, defiant, and richly inventive novel.
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Smith, Dodie I capture the castle
“I write this sitting at the kitchen sink,” writes 17-year-old Cassandra Mortmain. So begins this novel about love, sibling rivalry and a bohemian, but noble, existence in a crumbling castle in the middle of nowhere.
She lives there with her schoolboy brother Thomas, older sister Rose, fadingly glamorous artist’s-model stepmother, who wafts about communing with nature in a state of semi-undress, loyal servant Stephen and the man to whom they owe both their isolation and poverty – Father. The author of one enormously successful experimental novel and a minor cause celebre, he has since suffered from writer’s block and is determined to drag his family down with him, as they all cheerfully admit that their earning capacity is nil.
Their home is the dilapidated and bewitching Belmotte Castle in Suffolk. The family were drawn to it like moths to a flame. Father declared he would have it if it took his last penny, which it did. Gradually the family breathe life into the ruin, dispatching chickens from the kitchen and undoing much of what the Victorians did to it. Their existence seems to be taken up with the basics: paying the rent, buying milk, keeping their feet warm, and attempting to have baths in this ancient home, whose character and personality conspires against them.
Their romantic world is turned upside down when two young American men and their mother, the Cottons, arrive at the castle. They are the heirs to the nearby Scoatney Hall, and have come to take up residence. The Mortmains are drawn into the wealthy social world of the Cottons, a world of ease, money and leisure, represented tantalisingly by the two brothers Neil and Simon. However, in a series of events that are totally unpredictable, Cassandra and Rose begin to wonder whether such wealth might actually take the pleasure out of things.
A memorable and nostalgic evocation of a time and place peopled by endearing characters.
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Trigiani, Adriana Big stone gap
Nestled in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, the tiny town of Big Stone Gap is home to some of the most charming eccentrics in the state. Ave Maria Mulligan is the town’s self-proclaimed spinster, a thirty-five year old pharmacist whose highlight of the week is the arrival of the Bookmobile.
As the local pharmacist she’s been keeping the townsfolk’s secrets for years. She lives an amiable life with good friends and lots of hobbies until the fateful day in 1978 when she suddenly discovers a scandal in her own family’s past and is shaken by the realisation that she’s not who she always thought she was.
With an unforgettable cast of characters and a heroine with an extraordinary story to tell, all living in this quirky little town, Big Stone Gap is an entertaining, feel-good debut.
(And it has a mobile library in it!).
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Welsh, Louise The cutting room
Welsh gives Glasgow more than a touch of the shadowy noirish atmosphere of Edinburgh’s literary visions in her multi-prize-winning story of an antiquarian auctioneer pulled into an underworld of depravity and murder. The suitably moody Rilke is a cynical forty something, gay, dissolute and self-destructive, called to a mansion in Hyndland and paid to clear it within a week. Suspicions of something amiss become confirmed when he discovers hidden photographs of what looks like a cult sacrifice from the 1940’s. His curiosity about them turns him into a private investigator on the track of an ominous compulsion. As stylish, gripping and decadent a view of Glasgow’s genteel antiques trade as you’ll ever find.
A warning here that one of Rilke’s sexual escapades is described in harsh detail, and some may feel uncomfortable that the main character spends his spare time looking for chance encounters in the park or gents toilets, yet this is a fresh and original novel with an unexpected and surprising twist towards the end. Let me know if anyone guessed it.
A compelling first novel.
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