Cornflower Books

Friday reads

    I have just this minute finished Peter May's Entry Island and I'm pleased to report that, as you'd expect, it's a great read. Mr. C. will be glad to hear that he can now have it - he's been hovering eloquently, silently urging me to get to the end and hand it over. More on the book soon.

    Now, what to read next?

    While I browse the shelves, do please tell us what you will be reading this weekend.

Books of the day

    Here are two excellent-looking books to look out for in due course, the first being The Ghost of the Mary Celeste by Valerie Martin, published in the UK next month.

    "A mystery unsolved to this day. A mystic who confounds the cynics. A writer looking for the story that will make his name.

    A ghost ship appears in the mist. To the struggling author Arthur Conan Doyle, it is an inspiration. To Violet Petra, the gifted American psychic, it is a cruel reminder. To the death-obsessed Victorian public, it is a fascinating distraction. And to one family, tied to the sea for generations, it is a tragedy.

    In salons and on rough seas, at séances and in the imagination of a genius, these stories converge in unexpected ways as the mystery of the ghost ship deepens. But will the sea yield its secrets, and to whom?

    Intricate, atmospheric, and endlessly intriguing, The Ghost of the Mary Celeste is a spellbinding exploration of love, loss and the fictions that pass as truth."

    I can't wait to read this one from the author of the Orange Prize-winning Property and Mary Reilly (which, by the way, is relevant to our CBG book for February), but meanwhile let me draw your attention to the cover design which appears as you see on the picture above left, but achieves that misty, ghostly effect by means of a semi-opaque jacket over the image in the picture on the right.

    

     I've mentioned Harriet Lane's eagerly anticipated second novel before, but details were scanty then. Her new book, Her, won't be out until June, but that gives plenty of time for library requests and pre-orders, so here's the gist:

    "Two women; two different worlds. Emma is a struggling mother who has put everything on hold. Nina is sophisticated and independent - entirely in control.

    When the pair meet, Nina generously draws Emma into her life. But this isn't the first time the women's paths have crossed. Nina remembers Emma and she remembers what Emma did.

    But what exactly does Nina want from her?

    And how far will she go in pursuit of it?"

    You will remember Harriet Lane as the author of the superb Alys, Always, a brilliant debut and one of my books of the year in 2012 - if you haven't read it you'll find a post on it here, and you'll see why I'm so looking forward to reading her new book.

Bargain of the day

   

    Among the Kindle daily deal books today is Maggie O'Farrell's The Hand That First Held Mine, one of my 'books of the year' in 2010, a novel marked by the deftness of the writing. Here's my post on it.

                        ~~~~~

    Today's deals include former Costa award-winners, and along with the O'Farrell Matthew Hollis's biography of Edward Thomas, Now All Roads Lead to France, is among them. I've added it to my TBR mountain.

The Costa Book of the Year is ...

    ...The Shock of the Fall by Nathan Filer (the winner of the First Novel category).

    Kate Atkinson was heavily tipped to win for Life After Life, but she has been beaten by the debut novelist whose book "tells the story of Matthew and Simon, two brothers who are separated yet united by a tragic accident. Exploring themes of loss, grief and mental illness, this extraordinary novel transports the reader directly into the mind of Matthew and his slow descent into madness as he confronts his role in the boyhood death of his older brother ten years earlier."

    "Hilarious and heartbreaking", "a stunning debut", "engaging, funny and inventive".

    Congratulations to Nathan Filer.

If you flee fate ... fate will find you

   

    "It is evident from the way the stones are set into the slope of the hill that industrious hands once toiled to make this pathway. It is overgrown now, the shallow impression of a ditch on one side. He makes his way carefully down towards the remains of the village, pursued by the oddest sense of treading in his own footsteps. And yet he has never been here.

    The silhouette of a broken-down drystone wall runs along the contour of the treeless hill above him. Beyond it, he knows, a crescent of silver sand curls away towards the cemetery and the standing stones on the rise. Below him, the footings of the blackhouses are barely visible among the peaty soil and the spikes of tall grasses that bend and bow in the wind. The last evidence of walls that once sheltered the families who lived and died here.

    He follows the path between them, down towards the shingle shore where a ragged line of roughly hewn stones vanishes into waves that cast their spume upon the pebbles, frothing and spitting. They are all that remain of some long-forgotten attempt to build a jetty...."

    I know a lot of us were big fans of Peter May's Lewis Trilogy, The Blackhouse, The Lewis Man, and The Chessmen (which I don't think I wrote about here), so it's good news that he has recently published a new novel. Entry Island begins with the passage I've quoted above, and I've just started reading it today so can't say much yet other than that it links Canada and the Hebrides and features Detective Sime Mackenzie on what appears to be a routine investigation, but one which seems to have another dimension ...

   More on it soon, I hope, but while we're talking about Peter May, I must recommend his pictorial accompaniment to The Lewis Trilogy, the very beautiful Hebrides with photographs by David Wilson, and if you've ever marvelled at his output, in this short video he explains his writing methods and how he 'hits the ground running' with every book.

Cornflower Book Group - Tom's Midnight Garden

   

    Reading my notes on Philippa Pearce's much-loved children's book Tom's Midnight Garden, I'm struck by how straightforward it seems but how complex is the thinking behind it.

    It was first published in 1958, and the contemporary part of the story is indeed of its time - urgent communication was by telegram! This has a certain nostalgic charm. But beyond the simple device of a lonely boy's finding his way into a garden which no longer exists, of making a friend there, and of his growing attachment to both place and person coming to dominate his thoughts and actions - strong and appealing in itself - is the concept of time, and the intricacy of the author's use and examination of it.

    A clock striking thirteen, and seeming thus to mark an extra hour in the day; the clock that is always there, even when its surroundings change, "time in, time out"; the time past that is not a fixed or linear time for Tom in that he can visit the garden at all seasons and hours of the day, and can go and back and forward within the garden's time, unlike in his own, where "Time was marching steadily onwards in the way it is supposed to go: from minute to minute, from hour to hour, from day to day". The ticking of the clock sounds to Tom like a human heart, "alive and beating", and by extension his life in the garden and his friendship with Hatty is so much more real and vivid and absorbing for him than the contained, mundane hours spent in his aunt and uncle's flat. But time itself is both friend and enemy, each second taking him closer to his next longed-for visit to the garden, but also to his eventual return to his own home, the loss of his nocturnal adventures and the companionship of Hatty.

    "Tom thought again: Time no longer - the angel on the grandfather clock had sworn it. But if Time is ever to end, that means that, here and now, Time itself is only a temporary thing. It can be dispensed with, perhaps; or, rather, it can be dodged. Tom himself might be able to dodge behind Time's back and have the Past - that is, Hatty's Present and the garden - here, now and for ever. To manage that, of course, he must understand the workings of Time."

    In the end, Tom comes to understand that as Hatty - now Mrs. Bartholomew - tells him, "... nothing stands still, except in our memory." He cannot live in the past, but has a secret he can hug to him, memories to sustain him, and will return home content.

    I found it a very touching book, a satisfying one, clever and thought-provoking. I can see why it has become a children's classic and has earned a place on many people's 'favourites' shelves, and also how it could be re-read and enjoyed - and perhaps appreciated differently - at any age or stage in life.

    What did you think of it?

    While you're gathering your thoughts, do go and have a virtual slice of cake.

Book of the day - Reckless

   

    Just arrived, a novel I've been looking forward to for some months, Reckless by William Nicholson, out on 6th. February.

    This is what the author says about it on his blog today: "It’s my most ambitious to date. Still part of the sequence that began with THE SECRET INTENSITY OF EVERYDAY LIFE, but as with MOTHERLAND I’ve gone back into the past of my characters, this time to 1962. If you read MOTHERLAND you may remember Kitty and Ed’s little girl, Pamela. In the new novel Pamela is 18, and arrives in the London of Stephen Ward and Christine Keeler at the time of the Cuban missile crisis. She’s beautiful, naive, and eager for adventure, with disastrous consequences. I’ve extended my technique of entering the minds of many different characters to the world stage, and re-create the mental processes of Khrushchev, Kennedy, and Mountbatten as the crisis unfolds. There’s a second plot too, about a girl who sees visions of the Virgin Mary…"   

    Motherland was a favourite novel of mine last year, and William Nicholson is a gifted, multi-faceted storyteller, so I'm particularly eager to read his new book.

A winter jacket

    I love the jacket on Elizabeth Jane Howard's All Change, the fifth of her Cazalet Chronicles, which I've started today and am greatly enjoying.

    The design is by Alice Tait, and do click there to see more of her work including covers for Jane Gardam's The People on Privilege Hill and Elizabeth Jenkins's The Tortoise and the Hare*.

    Helpfully, All Change includes a family tree to remind us how the Cazalet characters are related to one another, and the endpapers are Merton, a William Morris wallpaper design, so this is a handsome book.

 

*a memorable CBG read.

Trollope on the radio

    Many thanks to everyone who has mentioned that The Warden - our CBG March book - is to be dramatised on BBC Radio 4 beginning this coming Sunday (the 26th.) at 3.00pm. The rest of the Barchester Chronicles are to follow.

    For those interested in Trollope himself, tomorrow - Thursday - at 11.30am. you can hear a programme about him made by Michael Symmons Roberts who has adapted the novels for this new series (and is the recent winner of the Costa Poetry Prize).

Bargain of the day

    My internet connection is likely to be very patchy today, so I'm nipping in while I can to flag up one of today's Kindle deals, Mary Stewart's Thornyhold, which I read last year and loved - pure escapism!

    "Thornyhold is a house deep in a wild wood like somewhere out of a fairy tale. To Gilly, it is an enchantment. Her very own enchantment, left to her by the cousin whose occasional magical visits had brightened her childhood. And as she explores, she discovers more about the woman who had come to seem like a fairy godmother for her: her herbalists's skills, her still room, her abilities to foresee and to heal. She discovers also that the local people believe that Gilly has inherited not just the house but the magical spell-weaving powers that live on in the house and garden. Slowly, quietly, she comes to realise that they are right."

    For those who haven't seen it, may I recommend again this video interview with Lady Stewart.

Findings

    A couple of quick links, firstly to this lovely post by Celia Rees on serendipity (and do read the comments, too), and secondly (in case you haven't already come across it) to BBC Radio 4's Books and Authors podcasts - lots of lovely listening!

Cornflower Book Group - February & March 2014

 

    As you know, the Cornflower Book Group is reading Tom's Midnight Garden by Philippa Pearce as our January book (we'll talk about it from next Saturday), but today let's look ahead to our February and March titles as a bit of advance notice is helpful. I hope you'll approve of both novels I've chosen and will be as keen to read (or re-read) them as I am.

    In February, a short, dark book for what will still be quite short, dark days (at least up here in the northern hemisphere): Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, first published in 1886, a classic which really needs no introduction.

    For the lighter, brighter March days, I've taken Julie's prompt (see her comment here) and decided to offer Anthony Trollope's The Warden (1855), the first of his Chronicles of Barsetshire, as a group read, and if that goes down well, we might even cover more of the series in future months.

    The chances are you'll have copies of both books already on your shelves, but if not they should be easy to come by. There are numerous paperback editions, audiobooks (for example here and here), Kindle versions are available free (and should you be so inclined you could go the whole hog and get the Complete Works of Anthony Trollope - all 47 novels, stories, notes, biographies, criticism and so on - for £1.39, and the slighter but nonetheless comprehensive Stevenson canon too), and if libraries don't have them to hand then sharp words are in order!

    Let's say we set our discussion dates as from Saturday, 22nd. February for Dr. Jekyll, and Saturday, 29th. March for The Warden.

    I'm looking forward to some good reading with these two, and I hope you'll join in and read them with me.

This year ...

   

    Blackwell's sent an email today recommending various books and headed "Make this the year you finally read ...".

    A timely reminder, I thought; perhaps this year I shall finally read Trollope.

   How about you? Do you have some long-postponed book, or an author you've never got round to picking up? If you're willing to 'make this the year you finally read ...', do leave a comment and tell us.

   

    For my part, I've taken The Warden off the shelf and shall begin it as soon as commitments allow - and not before time!

 

Recent arrivals - 2

   

    "When Conrad Sands returns a wristwatch to an old flame after 20 years apart, a remarkable chain of events begins.

    The watch passes through the hands of a gold-digger, a journalist, an enchantress, and a professor. It touches the lives of a rogue art collector, a domestic helper, and an environmental campaigner. It influences a reverend's apprentice, a kept wife, and a self-made man. All of them are strangers, yet all are intricately linked in ways that none of them see.

    A deeply thought-provoking debut novel, Once Upon a Timepiece by Starr Wood is a gripping portrayal of humanity's relationship with time and the unseen threads of history that bind us together. Told through a series of twelve inter-connected short stories, it explores memory and regret, ambition and weakness, and the texture of time that lies behind all our lives."

    Here's an extract from early in the first chapter, January: Seize the Day -

    "Conrad pulled open the desk drawer and took out a second watch, cleaning it on his shirt. He had never worn this one, but he had held it countless times over the past 19 years, staring at its features. The watch was a 1946 Breitling Chronomat made from rose-coloured gold. Mariana had told hime it was designed during World War II for aviators. It had two extra dials on its face and a rotation bezel marked with various scales and measurements. In the right hands, the watch could be used to work out speeds, distances, percentages, fuel consumption and numerous other calculations.

    Mariana had given him the watch over their last breakfast. It had belonged to her grandfather, who had left it to her in his will. Mariana had worn it every day that Conrad had known her. It was one of his defining memories of her - a slim 23-year-old woman wearing an antique men's gold watch that dwarfed her wrist. The leather strap showed clearly where she had punched an extra hole to make the fit tight enough.

    Conrad has protested at the gift, but Mariana had waved away his concerns and insisted he keep it to remind him of her. At the time it had felt like a promise to keep in close contact, that their parting was just a temporary break. He had been 21, and thought they'd be apart for a few months, perhaps a year at most. He certainly hadn't expected to be 40 years old when they reconnected.

    He wound up the Breitling and set the time so that it now ticked in unison with his first watch. It was 5.30pm, and already dark outside. He was due to meet her in two hours."

Recent arrivals - 1

   

     "Historian James Appleby uncovers a dangerous secret hidden deep in a chest of 400-year-old documents. To his horror, its discovery ignites a global firestorm that threatens to engulf all that he loves.

    As Appleby's research inspires a worldwide movement, his enemies begin a murderous hunt from Amsterdam to Washington, New York and all over England.

    Scorched by the embers of his marriage and his weakness for extra-marital affairs, Appleby finds out just how dangerous ideas can be."

    That's A Man Against a Background of Flames by Paul Hoggart (brother of the late Simon), and here is the opening passage:

    "When the landline rang it was so unexpected that it made him jump. As it turned out later this was a rather mild reaction. If he had had the slightest notion of what lay in store as a result of his answering it, Appleby might have wrenched the antiquated handset from its socket, hurled it through the quaint little oriel window and watched with grim satisfaction as it splashed into the river. But having no such clairvoyant intimations, he took the conventional course of action and picked it up.

    It was a glowing Wednesday evening in late May, and he was installed for the rest of the summer in cosy, if cramped, rooms in Despenser College. Despenser is one of Cambridge University's oldest, smallest and most obscure foundations, and he was in one of the few buildings whose medieval walls are lapped by the Cam. Another man might have been blissfully content in such privileged surroundings, but as one of his closest friends put it, Appleby was 'good-humouredly dyspeptic'...."

    Inclined to read on? I am.

Dreaming green dreams

    "Spring returned to England. Birds followed ploughs. Stones were warmed by the sun. Rains and winds grew softer, and were fragranced with the scents of earth and growing things. Woods were tinged with a colour so soft, so subtle that it could scarcely be said to be a colour at all. It was more the idea of a colour - as if the trees were dreaming green dreams or thinking green thoughts."

From Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke - which I've now finished! Here's a picture to go with that passage.

A bit of a long shot, but ...

    ... does anyone know of a site which allows you to search for books by cover artist or illustrator?

    I ask because having posted a picture by Frank Weston Benson over on Cornflower today, I was looking at some of his other works and thought I recognised one or two from book jackets. It's just idle curiosity which prompts my question, but it would be a lovely resource to browse if such a thing does exist.

Shown here is Benson's The Reader, c.1910.

Northern lights

   

    Following on from our posts on writers' lives and literary anniversaries, another of today's recommendations from the London Review Bookshop (the first is here) is Tove Jansson Life, Art, Words: The Authorised Biography by Boel Westin, just published here in time for its subject's centenary year.

 

   Speaking of things 'northern', how do you fancy a writers' retreat in Iceland? As you'll see there, among the writers leading workshops is Geraldine Brooks, someone who would be very much worth hearing, I should think.

 

   

    Catch, if you can, Donna Tartt on Radio 4's Bookclub talking not about her latest book The Goldfinch but her famous first novel The Secret History - which our own book group read.

    In conversation with James Naughtie and the studio audience she discusses, among other things, the "northern light and northern gloom" which pervade the book, the influence of Greek drama on it, and her love of Dickens.

The medieval helpdesk

    This video came to mind earlier when Mr. C. needed a little help getting his Kindle to work. It links rather neatly to this:

Writers' lives

    Artemis Cooper is to write an authorised biography of Elizabeth Jane Howard, who sadly died on 2nd. January aged 90. While we wait for that, may I recommend Elizabeth Jane Howard's memoir Slipstream (and Artemis Cooper's life of Elizabeth David, Writing at the Kitchen Table).

                                                    ~~~~~

    While we're on the subject, which writers' auto/biographies would you rate highly?

    I've spoken recently of Hermione Lee's Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life, and Alister McGrath's excellent C. S. Lewis: A Life; I've got Anne Chisholm's Rumer Godden: A Storyteller's Life waiting in the TBR pile, and I have my eye on Kevin Crossley-Holland's The Hidden Roads: A Memoir of Childhood.

    Do any others spring to mind?