Cornflower Books

Joan Aiken's centenary

    Joan Aiken was born 100 years ago today, 4th. September, and what better way to mark that anniversary than by directing you to this post by Lizza Aiken, Joan's daughter.

    The Manderley Press collection of stories Lizza mentions, Tales of London Town, is out now and can be found here.

    London readers may be interested in the launch event at Hatchards on 17th. October (keep an eye on their events page for details nearer the time).

    Here is our book group post on The Wolves of Willoughby Chase.

Matching your books

    "When you've finished tidying your books, step back and take a good look at your bookshelves. What kind of words leap out at you from the titles on their spines? [...]

    The energy of book titles and the words inside them are very powerful. In Japan we say that 'words make our reality'. The words we see and with which we come into contact tend to bring about events of the same nature. In that sense, you will become the person who matches the books you have kept. What kind of books would you want in your bookcase to reflect the kind of person you aspire to be? If you choose which books to keep on that basis, you may find that the course of events in your life changes dramatically."

    Food for thought there from Marie Kondo's Spark Joy.

Friday reads

    I'm reading Ben Macintyre's Operation Mincemeat with great interest and enjoyment (I read Duff Cooper's Operation Heartbreak a while ago and loved his fictional version of this audacious wartime story). I'm now keen to see the film.

    The book I've just finished, Second Act by Henry Oliver mentions in passing Vita Sackville-West's lovely novel All Passion Spent - a treat in store for anyone who hasn't read it.

    I popped into a local bookshop today and came away with Cutting for Stone, Abraham Verghese's first novel. His second, The Covenant of Water, was for me an outstanding book last year, so I'm keen to read his earlier hit.

Window-dressing

    "[Books] have voices; and our job as window dresser was to see that they were saying the right thing to the right people in the most effective way.

    So we were like the puppeteer who, standing unseen, pulls unseen strings; or like the conductor of the orchestra who, silent himself, gets the best from each instrumentalist. Each book has its own individual voice, saying 'I am me: buy me!' Some books say this very loudly, clearly and persuasively. You put them in the window and people at once know all about them and come hurrying in for them. These are our soloists, and probably our best soloist when we opened was The Cruel Sea. Other books are better in chorus. 'We are cookery books. We are gardening books. There are lots more of us inside.' Some books speak for themselves. Books with titles like Devon or Sea Fishing for Beginners need no help from us: they say exactly what they are. But Jim Davis needs a little notice pointing out that it is an exciting smuggling story with a Dartmouth setting. Only those with the best voices qualify for the window or for display face forwards inside the shop, and each must be carefully chosen not just for what it has to say but to whom we want it said..."

    From The Path through the Trees by Christopher Milne.

    Christopher Milne (1920-1996) was the son of A.A. Milne, immortalised of course as 'Christopher Robin'. He and his wife Lesley owned and ran The Harbour Bookshop in Dartmouth, Devon from the early 1951 to 1983. The shop sadly closed some years ago.

Friday reads

 
    Two extremely popular novels I'm late to come to:-

I've just finished Miss Austen by Gill Hornby, a very enjoyable imagining of Jane Austen's beloved sister Cassandra in later life, and an explanation of why she destroyed so many of Jane's letters;

I'm currently reading Small Pleasures by Clare Chambers, an intriguing story set in 1957, full of period detail and thus far very engaging indeed.

    I hope you've got something good to tuck into this weekend.

Writers' houses: Rosamunde Pilcher

    Designed and built for the Pilcher family, Over Pilmore at Invergowrie near Dundee is currently for sale. 

    Click here for a virtual look around the house which has had only one owner since its famous occupant.

Slightly Foxed is celebrating ...

... its 20th birthday with a prize draw in aid of children's reading charity BookTrust.

Tickets - which are available until 16th. September - cost £5 each, and if you follow that link and click on the image on the left side of the page you can scroll through the twenty excellent prizes, some of which are shown above.

    Happy birthday, Slightly Foxed, and belated congratulations to founders Gail and Hazel who earlier this year were awarded MBEs for services to literature.

The Night in Question

    It's been a busy time here lately - hence the lack of posts - but I couldn't not pop in to tell you about Susan Fletcher's impressive new novel The Night in Question as I enjoyed it so very much.

    It's described as an "uplifting literary murder-mystery", and that really appealed to me, and having read some of Susan's earlier books (this one, for instance) I know she's a fine writer, so I felt sure I'd be on safe ground.

    The setting is Babbington Hall, a very upmarket assisted living establishment in rural Oxfordshire, whose residents include Florence Butterfield, 87 years old, confined to a wheelchair, but as sympathetic and spirited a heroine as you could wish for. When dramatic and distressing events occur at Babbington, it is Florence who determines to get to the truth behind them, and in a story as warm and touching as it is finely woven, her own eventful life is gradually revealed alongside the solving of the present day mystery.

    I loved the book's tone, its generous heart, its beautifully observed details, and the story absorbed me and carried me along just as I'd hoped it would. Florrie is an excellent character through and through, congenial, shrewd and engaging as a sleuth, worthy of respect, admiration and affection as a person - I was sorry to turn the final page and come to the end of my acquaintance with her.

    To sum up, this book is a joy, and an absolute highlight of my reading year so far.

Friday reads: house and home

    Following on from the last post, I enjoyed The Seeker so much that I've passed it on to Mr. C. who is galloping through it, and I've bought the second in the series. S.G. MacLean writes beautifully and really fits her fiction to the facts.

    Now I'm reading Hannah Rothschild's second novel, House of Trelawney. Her first one, The Improbability of Love, was among my books of the year last year, and this one is similarly great fun. Can't wait to see how it ends!

    I hope you're tucked up with some excellent reading this weekend.

Friday reads

 

 

    "1654. In the teeming warren of spies, exiles and assassins that is Cromwell's London, the Lord Protector's most feared agent is Damian Seeker. No one knows where Seeker comes from, or even his real name. But one thing is certain - nothing remains hidden from him for long.

    When a popular captain and hero of Cromwell's all-powerful army is murdered, and Elias Ellingworth, an outspoken critic of Cromwell's regime, is found standing over the bleeding body clutching a knife, his guilt seems to be without question.

    Yet Seeker is not convinced. He will stop at nothing to unmask the true killer and save Ellingworth from the gallows, and Seeker knows better than any man where to search ..."

    S.G. MacLean's The Seeker won the 2015 CWA Endeavour Historical Dagger. I'm glad to know that it's the first book in a series because I am loving it and looking forward to more. Here's a short interview with the author (whose The Bookseller of Inverness was one of my best books of 2023).

Long time no see!

    I don't know where the time has gone - I certainly did not mean to be away from here for this long - but before the year is out, here's a quick look at my reading highlights of 2023. In no particular order:

    A Fortunate Woman, Polly Morland

    The Bookseller of Inverness, S.G. MacLean

    The Waters under the Earth, John Moore

    And a Dog called Fig, Helen Humphreys

    The Covenant of Water, Abraham Verghese

    The Improbability of Love, Hannah Rothschild

    The Secret Hours, Mick Herron

 

    Wishing you the best in books and in all things in 2024!

September's highlights

    The Secret Hours by Mick Herron - more here - and Helen Humphreys' And a Dog called Fig, a memoir/meditation on the writing life and the life-enhancing companionship of dogs; both books stand out from the rest of the month's reading.

    I hope you've had a satisfying reading month and have something good to sit down with as the days darken.

For sale

    Robert Louis Stevenson's birthplace (a stone's throw from me) is on the market. Full details - and lots of photographs - here.

    More posts on writers' houses over here.

Imprinted

    "My grandmother is long dead. Her house, which she lived in for over sixty years, was sold after her death and renovated by the new owners. I found the listing online a few months ago, when it was being sold again, and I looked through the twenty-six photos of the house and garden.

    The rooms downstairs have all been reconfigured into one open-plan layout. Gone is the poky kitchen and the dining room where I had once written an excruciatingly bad novel... The casement windows have given way to French doors that open onto a blank, green lawn. My grandmother's circular rose garden, once the focal point of the back garden, has been completely grassed over. The orchard is gone, and the conservatory ... In fact, the whole house, except for the iron-studded oak front door, is unrecognisable.

    But this is what I wonder: if sometimes the people who lived there after my grandmother, and the people who will live there after them, walking through the new, massive, kitchen and dining area, found themselves thinking of a word or phrase, saying it out loud perhaps. A word like heart or star or breath, one of the words that I shook out from that blue book of charms, from Sylvia Plath's Collected Poems, all those years ago, and which might still float around that space, even though the space has become so changed. And I wonder if there is ever a mysterious scent of apples in the autumn on the bare strip of grass where the orchard used to stand, or if sometimes the new occupants wake to the barking of a dog, and when they rise and go to the window, there is nothing out there."

    Helen Humphreys, And a Dog called Fig: Solitude, Connection, the Writing Life.

Friday reads: a class act

    I went to a Mick Herron event* a couple of days ago. That's the second time I've been to see him, despite not having read any of his books, but Mr. C. is a big fan, and MH is extremely entertaining, so much so that I bagged his new book straightaway and am reading it now.

    The Secret Hours is not one of the famous Slough House series, though there is some common ground, I believe, but 100 pages in I am enjoying it greatly. Mick Herron told us something of his writing process the other night: he does not plan, preferring to let the story take shape organically on the page, and he takes particular pleasure in crafting his sentences to make each one just right, especially with regard to its rhythm and how it maintains the greater rhythm of the passage or paragraph in which it sits. This attention to detail really shows in the finished piece which I'm finding clever, witty, sharply topical, and elegantly constructed.

    As to the subject-matter, here's the blurb: "Two years ago, the Monochrome inquiry was set up to investigate the British secret service. Monochrome's mission was to ferret out misconduct, allowing the civil servants seconded to the inquiry unfettered access to confidential information in the service archives.

    But with progress blocked at every turn, Monochrome is circling the drain ... Until the OTIS file appears out of nowhere.

    What classified secrets does OTIS hold that see a long-redundant spy being chased through Devon's green lanes in the dark? What happened in a newly reunified Berlin that someone is desperate to keep under wraps? And who will win the battle for the soul of the secret service - or was that decided a long time ago?

    Spies and pen-pushers, politicians and PAs, high-flyers, time-servers and burn-outs. They all have jobs to do in the daylight. But what they do in the secret hours reveals who they really are."

 

*I have photographs but can't post them here due to some technical glitch.

Pricey little books

 

    Freddie Mercury's Beatrix Potter collection, sold this afternoon at Sotheby's for £19,050.

Child's play

    Lee Child, author of the Jack Reacher books, is to be the judge in the inaugural The Big Bang! Black Spring’s Best Opening for a Crime/Thriller Novel Prize. 'All' you have to do to enter is write 50 to 200 words of an opening for a crime/mystery/thriller novel which will grab your reader immediately and compel them to read on. You're not required to have written the rest of the book yet! If you fancy having a go you'll find full details here.

    Lee Child is the guest on the most recent episode of the Always Take Notes podcast. I've not read his books but I found what he had to say - particularly regarding his working method - very interesting. Further to that, I'm drawn to the book Reacher Said Nothing: Lee Child and the Making of Make Me by Andy Martin, "a one-of-a-kind meta-book, an uncompromising account in real time of the genesis, evolution and completion of a single work, Make Me. While unveiling the art of writing a thriller Martin also gives us a unique insight into the everyday life of an exemplary writer. From beginning to end, Martin captures all the sublime confidence, stumbling uncertainty, omniscience, cluelessness, ecstasy, despair, and heart-thumping suspense that go into writing a number-one bestseller."

Books from front to back: The Secret Lives of Colour

    The Secret Lives of Colour by Kassia St. Clair

August's books

    Seven books, all good.

    I picked up The Sword in the Stone because Monty Don quotes a beautiful and moving passage from it in Nigel: My family and other dogs, (and I recalled Laura Freeman also mentioning it in her excellent The Reading Cure). Very much in the same vein as John Masefield's classics, it's funny, poignant, and shows very vividly TH White's deep relationship with the natural world.

    Shirley McKay's Fate and Fortune gets a little post here, and Helen Humphreys' The Evening Chorus is here.

    The two Persephones are Dorothy Whipple's High Wages and The Rector's Daughter by FM Mayor - both excellent. 

    Last but not least is nature writer John Lewis-Stempel's La Vie, a very enjoyable account of life on his farm in the Charente region of France through a calendar year. This excerpt will give you the flavour.

The summer was over at last ...

    "... and nobody could deny any longer that the autumn was definitely there. It was that rather sad time of year when for the first time for many months the fine old sun still blazes away in a cloudless sky, but does not warm you, and the hoar-frosts and the mists and the winds begin to stir their faint limbs at morning and evening, with the gossamer, as the sap of winter vigour remembers itself in the cold corpses which brave summer slew. The leaves were still on the trees, and still green, but it was the leaden green of old leaves which have seen much since the gay colours and happiness of spring - that seems so lately and, like all happy things, so quickly to have passed. The sheep fairs had been held. The plums had tumbled off the trees in the first big winds, and here and there, in the lovely sunlight too soon enfeebled, a branch of beech or oak was turning yellow: the one to die quickly and mercifully, the other perhaps to hold grimly to the frozen tree and to hiss with its papery skeletons all through the east winds of winter, until the spring was there again."

    T.H. White, The Sword in the Stone.