Cornflower Books

The Hundred-foot Journey

 

    - The Hundred-Foot Journey by Richard C.Morais.

    - "For anyone who loves food, and who cares for character, the book's a banquet." Simon Callow.

    - The story of Hassan Haji, a boy from Mumbai who embarks, along with his boisterous family, on a picaresque journey first to London and then across Europe, before they ultimately open a restaurant opposite a famous chef, Madame Mallory, in the remote French village of Lumière. A culinary war ensues, pitting Hassan's Mumbai-toughened father against the imperious Michelin-starred chef, until Madame Mallory realises that Hassan is a cook with natural talents far superior to her own.

    - "Easily the best novel set in the world of cooking ever ..." Anthony Bourdain.

Plague Child

 

    - Plague Child by Peter Ransley.

    - A country torn apart. A boy searching. A secret that can kill ...

    - "Oxford, 1625. On a cloudy September evening, plague cart driver Matthew Neave is sent to pick up the corpse of a baby. On his way to the plague pit he hears a cry - the baby is alive. A plague child himself, and now immune to the disease, Matthew decides to raise it as his own. Fifteen years on, a prosperous printer shows interest in Matthew's son Tom, calling into question everything Tom has believed about his family. As the conflict between Charles I and his parliament degenerates into civil war, families are divided - yet Tom is divided in himself. Devil or saint? Royalist or radical?"

    - The first book in a trilogy featuring Tom Neave and set against the backdrop of the English Civil War, Plague Child is to be BBC Radio 4's Book at Bedtime from 11th. to 22nd. April.

    - Peter Ransley is a winner of the Royal Television Society's Writer's Award. Among his extensive television credits is a BAFTA nomination for his BBC adaptation of Sarah Waters' Fingersmith.

The Wedding Wallah

 

    - The Wedding Wallah by Farahad Zama.

    - A Novel of Pride, Prejudice and Unsuitable Arrangements.

    - "In the sleepy coastal paradise that is Vizag, Mr. Ali is the Wedding Wallah, the man to contact when you need a bride for your son or a groom for your daughter. So, it is no surprise when his niece Pari - an impoverished, pretty young widow - receives a proposal from handsome, cosmopolitan Dilawar. Mr. and Mrs. Ali are sure this is a match made in heaven. But modern India is a complicated place ... and Pari's choice between heart and duty is even tougher in a country where everything, from how you live to whom you love, is not only personal but also everybody's business."

    - From the reviews: "A writer of charming and breezy prose."

    - Also in this series, The Marriage Bureau for Rich People and The Many Conditions of Love. 

A Trick of the Light

 

    - A Trick of the Light: An Inspector McLevy Mystery by David Ashton

    - Edinburgh, 1881, Hallowe'en, and the dead are restless.

    - "In respectable Edinburgh society, beautiful young American spiritualist, Sophia Adler, is causing a furore with her dramatic séances. But the ghosts of the past seem hell-bent on retribution." Inspector McLevy teams up with the recently graduated Arthur Conan Doyle to pursue a ruthless killer, and becomes involved with one of the most dangerous women he has ever encountered.

    - From the reviews: "David Ashton impeccably evokes Edinburgh so vividly that you feel the cold in your bones."

    - Though this is a work of fiction, the real James McLevy was a detective in Edinburgh in the 19th. century. He published a series of extremely popular books based on his career, and they were almost certainly read by the young Arthur Conan Doyle who grew up in the city.

    - The other books in this series are The Shadow of the Serpent and Fall from Grace. 

Coming up

    I've got lots of new books to talk about, but instead of doing them in batches by way of portmanteau posts, I thought several short, dedicated pieces would be better - a sort of literary speed dating, if you will - a quick introduction to a book that's just out or on its way. I'll put them up at intervals throughout today and probably beyond, and I hope you'll find among them something that catches your interest as I think there's a lot here to look forward to.

No alarms and no surprises

    What do you read, I wonder, when what you want from a book is "no alarms and no surprises"? What constitutes - as the song says - "the quiet life", in reading terms? I don't necessarily mean comfort reads, though they probably fall into this wider category of the nicely predictable, the safe, the familiar, the formulaic, even.

    This could simply be a favourite re-read, or it might be a writer (or a genre) you can trust to deliver what you expect, no less and no more - they won't venture into unknown territory or test the reader's nerve or tolerance, instead they'll give you a smooth ride. Thrills and spills are all very well, but what book might you choose when what you want is to journey at a sedate pace, your destination certain, satisfaction guaranteed?   

Peace comes dropping slow

    It's been a while since we had any poetry here, but I thought I'd offer some to be listened to, rather than to be read. Anthony Hopkins' rich, melodious voice is the perfect instrument for this, so here is Yeats' The Lake Isle of Innisfree and Dylan Thomas' Fern Hill.

A winning formula

    "Stepping through the door into my laboratory was like gaining sanctuary in a quiet church: the rows of bottled chemicals were my stained-glass windows, the chemical bench my altar. Chemistry has more gods than Mount Olympus, and here in my solitude I could pray in peace to the greatest of them: Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac (who, when he found a young assistant in a linen draper's shop surreptitiously reading a chemistry text which she kept hidden under the counter, promptly dumped his fiancée and married the girl) ..."

    The passage continues (and lest anyone leaps in to nominate other chemistry gods, more are named), but that is a glimpse of master chemist and super-sleuth Flavia de Luce, precocious 11-year-old, and engaging heroine of Alan Bradley's delightful, original crime series, the third of which - A Red Herring Without Mustard - has just come out.

    For anyone not already familiar with Flavia, she lives with her father and sisters in a grand but crumbling house near a sleepy English village - this is in the early 1950s. Her mother disappeared on a Tibetan mountain when Flavia was just a baby, so life at home is somewhat grim, though the spirited youngster finds solace (not that she'd be 'wet' enough to call it that) in solving mysteries and doing experiments in the well-appointed Victorian chemistry lab set up by an ancestor in a now otherwise uninhabited wing at Buckshaw.

    Her latest adventure concerns an attack on a gypsy fortune-teller who had a stall at the village fête, and then the mysterious death of a local ne'er-do-well who meets his end by means of .... let's just say 'uncommon implements'. Usually one step ahead of her adored Inspector Hewitt, Flavia's selfless daring, sharp deductive faculties and knowledge of chemistry lead her to work out who did what to whom and why, and this book is just as much fun as the earlier ones - brisk, breezy, nicely eccentric, full of obscure but fascinating detail, making it a great read.

    I'm so looking forward to Volume IV.

Good lines: the sound of the palette

 

    "I squeeze the tubes of oil paint on to the palette, one by one.

    I love the colours and their secret singing.

    Aureolin, a gentle golden yellow that is soft and hums, and high-pitched lemon yellow, sharp and startling, then the low velvet tone of alizarin crimson, and the seductive cobalt blue. It fills me with longing, if cobalt blue was a man I'd run away with him. He calls with a longing to far away. Blue is a calling-away colour and its sound is a sound so beautiful it makes you want to leave the earth. Not red though, red pipes up, especially cadmium scarlet. 'Do-do-doooo', it says like a trumpet, it runs in your blood the same sound, 'yes, this is life!' It gets hot and passionate. If you put it in a painting it jumps forward, 'I am here!' it says, 'right here, ME!' and I love red for that. Then the beautiful violets, half red, half blue. Cobalt violet, singing in the range next to pink, but with more majesty, more mystery, and ultramarine violet, gentle, tender, like the shadows in the twilight, but deep, with dignity and a hidden depth, like someone who walks among people but knows they are really a seraph.

    Then translucent golden green that is like the sun shining through the leaves, cinnabar green, spring leaves unfurling in the new light, chrome green, heavy like a green stone washed by the waves...

    The rose doré ground is ready. Orange pink. It is a small canvas, a foot square, but big enough for a world. I put some cinnabar green, some rose pink mixed with white, some royal blue. The colours sing together on the surface and already there is a space and a distance, a place for something to arrive."

    From Invisible River by Helena McEewen.

Stop press!

 

    I know that Linda Gillard's many fans will be delighted to hear that her latest novel is now available to download. House of Silence is "a country house mystery ... a family drama ... a gothic romantic comedy. Rebecca meets Cold Comfort Farm"! Who could resist that?

    If you haven't got a Kindle you can still read the book on your computer or phone by means of the appropriate app. (you'll get details by clicking on the link above).

    All of us who loved Star Gazing, especially (there's a post on it here), have been eagerly awaiting Linda's next book, and now here it is. If I can possibly squeeze it in with this week's reading, I shall.

Paper and paint

 

    Out now in paperback - the cover featuring a tasteful tin of Farrow & Ball - Diane Meier's lovely novel The Season of Second Chances. This was one of my favourite books last year: "warm and elegant, fluent and absorbing; a grown-up coming-of-age story, but a witty and unpredictable one", (the rest is here).

     I know many of you have read it and loved it, too, but in case you missed it at the time, I mentioned the book as one of my cross-generational reads, and Diane herself kindly commented on that.

UK literature blogs

    Wikio have kindly sent me this preview of the latest UK literature blog rankings, and they do welcome feedback, so if you have any observations, e.g. on refining classification, please comment. You may also be interested to read what Dark Puss had to say last month by way of an explanation of the technicalities behind the list.

    1 Charlie's Diary    2 tales from the village    3 Making it up         4Playing by the book    5 Reading Matters    6 Book Chick City         7BubbleCow     8 Cornflower Books    9 Stuck In A Book    10My Favourite Books        11 Savidge Reads    12An Awfully Big Blog Adventure     13 Asylum     14 Vulpes Libris    15The Book Smugglers   16 Juxtabook   17 booktwo.org   18 Open a Bookshop, what could possibly go wrong?   19 Serendipity     20 State of Independents

Ranking made by Wikio.co.uk

The coming week's reading

 

    A dully descriptive title for the post, but some very inviting books to read over the next few days. From the left, and briefly:

    I've already introduced Flavia vol. 3, and quoted a lovely passage from Invisible River, and if you've seen recent Friday flower posts on Cornflower such as this one and this, you'll know about The Morville Year.

    Just arrived is a book I hadn't come across before, but Ms Hempel Chronicles by Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, a novel about a young teacher alone in New York "navigating the mysterious hinterland between childhood and adulthood", gets lovely comments from reviewers - "... as piquant and refreshing as a squeeze of lemon - this is everyday life illuminated in a soft, flattering light...", "pure pleasure" and "utterly charming". I'll let you know...

    Lastly, some Elizabeth Taylor, and The Wedding Group, "a quietly ironic exploration of the ways in which the parental mould is not easily broken." Have you read this story of the dependent Cressy and her marriage to the 'apron strung' David - "an act of escape for both of them which proves a powerful form of bondage"?