Cornflower Books

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.

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.

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.

Friday reads

 

  Thrillers don't often feature in my reading, but Lisa Jewell's new book None of this is true sounded too good to miss. While celebrating her birthday at a local pub, the well known podcaster Alix Summers meets fellow diner Josie Fair; it's Josie's birthday, too, and as the two women chat they discover that they were born on exactly the same day and in the same hospital.

    The 'birthday twins' bump into one another a few days later, and Josie suggests to Alix that she might be a good subject for a future podcast episode: she has an interesting backstory to tell and is about to make big changes in her life. Alix agrees to a trial interview and finds the whole experience unsettling but intriguing. As Josie divulges the secrets of her past - and present - Alix gets drawn into a dark web; the consequences will be devastating.

    This will have you compulsively turning the pages as the grim truth of the women's situation is gradually revealed.

    Now to Hannah Rothschild's first novel, a tightly-plotted romp that's fun and funny, but with a very serious side too. This is set in the art world and concerns a long-lost painting, the eponymous The Improbability of Love by Antoine Watteau. Formerly the property of royalty, the picture has been found in a London junk shop by impoverished chef Annie McDee. Her impulse purchase - it's a gift for a lover who then stands her up - takes her into the rarefied world of multi-millionaire collectors and experts who are not all that they seem.

    Will Annie escape the troubles of her past and finally find her feet? Will the picture be authenticated and recover its starry status? Will terrible wrongs be righted? Suffice to say that it's a wild ride, but it's also a rich book, studded with scholarship worn lightly (the author is a former Chair of Trustees of the National Gallery), illuminating and hugely enjoyable. I loved it!

A bit of catching up

    What have I been reading since last we spoke? Well, John Moore's The Waters under the Earth was utterly absorbing, and when I finished it I handed it to Mr. C. who rattled through it in no time at all and enjoyed it every bit as much as I did. Yes, it's long (and would be chopped quite a bit were it submitted to an editor these days, I think), but its portrait of a family in changing times - it's set in the early 1950s - is a sensitively vivid one which offers welcome detail rather than a broad brush. Moore is wonderful on the natural world, too, - see this snippet, for example - and on the march of 'progress' which threatens to impoverish rather than enrich the whole, and he's good on shifting societal attitudes and mores, and the opening up of possible futures for people whose options had before been confined. A new reality intrudes on the settled world of the main character Ferdo and his beloved ancient oak woods, harsh truths must now be confronted rather than denied. I'll leave it there and let you discover for yourself, as I hope you will, its intricacies and many charms. 

    Next came Sean Ashton's The Way to Work, a cleverly surreal novel set on a commuter train. In its early stages it reminded me of Susanna Clarke's Piranesi in its Escher-like depiction of a never-ending chain of carriages with weird rules and systems and no apparent means of alighting, but then, if you'll pardon the pun, it went off the rails a bit and left me a touch travel-sick; another reader may of course settle very comfortably to the more disorienting elements of the story.

    Now I'm on to Abraham Verghese's new novel The Covenant of Water which is a whopper at over 700 pages, but almost half way through I can say that for my taste not a word is superfluous and I can't wait to read on.

    What have you been reading recently? Anything you would particularly recommend?

Where's your reading taking you?

    Lately I've been in the fictitious Channel Island of Armorel in the summer of 1940, courtesy of Jerrard Tickell's sparkling novel Appointment with Venus, and now I'm a little further back in time in provincial France in the mid-1930s enjoying Sebastian Faulks's The Girl at the Lion d'Or.

    Who knows where, or to what time period, I shall go next, but possibilities include staying in present day Britain via Sean Ashton's The Way to Work, an intriguing sounding novel set on a commuter train, and India in the first three quarters of the twentieth century by means of Abraham Verghese's new book The Covenant of Water.

    Where's your reading taking you?

Stewkey Blues

    I've just finished D.J. Taylor's collection of short stories, Stewkey Blues, and am strongly tempted to read it all over again right away, so much did I enjoy it, but as I've already promised it to Mr. C. that will have to wait.

    Set in his native Norfolk, the stories have more than just location to bind them together; they are linked by the author's keen-eyed observation, his gift for an illuminating epithet, his economic, character-defining vocabulary, and his understanding of the telling behaviours which reflect our sense of ourselves and of others. 

    Thematically, a common ground is how things are, were, or might have been: what circumstance or event was the 'grit in the oyster' - the formative experience, for better or for worse. There are moments of self-revelation or sudden clear-sightedness, where anxieties, weaknesses or sore points make themselves felt or shed an affirming or consolatory light. Some are set in the recent past with skilled use of cultural references to enrich them. Throughout the book you'll find types to recognise or even identify with, and many of those small moments which time reveals to be major personal turning-points.

    Here's a short passage from Forty Years in which a man attending a joyless school reunion sees his year-group in all their 1978 glory:

    'To look at them as they stared out of the photograph - by turns hopeful, stolid, anxious, expectant, bored or half-amused - was to get a terrible sense of - what exactly? Life working its purpose out? Promise unfulfilled? Some vast, ineluctable pattern whose real implications were still waiting to make their presence felt? It was difficult to tell.'

    If David's work is new to you, there's an interview I did with him a few years ago here, a post on his wonderful novel Ask Alice here, and one on the equally good Kept here.

Books in brief: The Keepsake Quilters

    If you're looking for a lovely warm family story to sink into after the Christmas rush, I can recommend The Keepsake Quilters by Felicity Hayes-McCoy.

    Set in London and Ireland, it follows fiercely independent television producer Penny as she discovers there's more to life than a high-flying career, and her mother Val and grandmother Marguerite as they reflect on loves lost, uncover long-kept secrets, and stitch more than just fabric into a keepsake quilt.

   This article by Felicity will tell you more.

Three things

    A few things which have caught my eye and may be of interest to you:

 

   Starting on 18th August, Sky Arts* are broadcasting a new four-part documentary series, Wonderland: "In one remarkable fifty-year period an unforgettable collection of classic children’s literature was created in Britain. An extraordinary range of writers turned to a form of writing where they created “Wonderlands”, “Neverlands” – places of happiness in which children were portrayed as living in a happy world, where sorrow and the difficulties and tragedies of adult life were simply removed."

    The series explores the lives of the authors of those stories - "Arthur Ransome, Kenneth Grahame, A. A. Milne, J. M. Barrie, Rudyard Kipling, Erskine Childers, Frances Hodgson Burnett, Lewis Carroll, Beatrix Potter - and reveals the pain and tragedy behind their words."

*Edited to add: re. access, see comment below.

                                                    ~

    Dean Street Press now have a Facebook group, so if you're a fan of golden age mystery and mid-century women's fiction (among others) you might look in there.

    My most recent Dean Street reads are Apricot Sky by Ruby Ferguson and Mrs. Lorimer's Quiet Summer by Molly Clavering, both lovely, restful books.

                                                    ~

    I very much like the sound of Fellowship Point by Alice Elliott Dark, out now in the US and on Kindle in the UK, coming here in hardback in September. This is what the book's editor has to say about it:

Recently read

    Favourites among them: The Silver Branch and The Other Bennet Sister (a delight!).

January's books

    All good, but the top three on the pile were the highlights: The Armourer's House by Rosemary Sutcliff is pure delight, Juliet Nicolson's The Great Silence 1918-1920 Living in the Shadow of the Great War, fascinating and moving in equal measure, and The Appeal by Janice Hallett is ingeniously, brilliantly done!

Friday reads

    A mention of Kate Atkinson's brilliant Life after Life (in Cathy Rentzenbrink's Dear Reader: The Comfort and Joy of Books) had me reaching this morning for its sequel A God in Ruins, bought ages ago but not read. I'm off to a flying start with it and hoping it will be as immersive a read as was Life after Life.

    Cathy Rentzenbrink's own book is part autobiography, part 're-reading as medicine': finding comfort in the familiar. I've made a note of some of her favourite novels to read for the first time or to re-visit, as it's good to be reminded of past delights or pointed towards future treats. Here are a few of them:

Any Human Heart, William Boyd (see also Waiting for Sunrise and Love is Blind)

Not that sort of girl, Mary Wesley

Possession, AS Byatt (and see The Children's Book)

Moon Tiger, Penelope Lively

The Blind Assassin, Margaret Atwood (the book group read Alias Grace)

The Silkworm, Robert Galbraith

The Infatuations, Javier Marías

Commonwealth, Ann Patchett (see also Bel Canto - another book group read, and State of Wonder)

Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier (and My Cousin Rachel - the book group again)

    To finish with Kate Atkinson, and for good measure, here's a post on the excellent Transcription.

Recent acquisitions

    I bought these the other day, posted them on Instagram, and got so many comments raving about The Other Bennet Sister. Have you read it - or any of the others?

March past

    A look back through the reading diary reveals some highlights from Marches past:

    Diaries, 1942-1954, James Lees-Milne

    Cakes and Ale, W. Somerset Maugham

    Waiting for the Albino Dunnock, Rosamond Richardson

    Robertson Davies: Man of Myth, Judith Skelton Grant

    The Warden, Anthony Trollope

    The Dead in their Vaulted Arches, Alan Bradley

    The Nine Tailors, Dorothy L. Sayers

    Kept: A Victorian Mystery, D.J. Taylor

    All Kinds of Magic, Piers Moore Ede

    Tea Time for the Traditionally Built, Alexander McCall Smith

    Mrs. Miniver, Jan Struther

    A Month in the Country, J.L. Carr

    Links are all to posts (of one sort or another), if I have them, and the list does not include anything on the gloomy or distressing side.

Friday reads

   

    Niall Williams' This Is Happiness is a novel to be savoured - not least because the author is such a wizard with words - so I'm taking my time over this gentle story before moving on to (I think) Ann Patchett's The Dutch House, and if that book's cover image caught your eye, as it did mine, then this video tells all about it.

    From one story of a painting to another, as my next non-fiction read will be Sargent's Daughters: The Biography of a Painting by Erica E. Hirshler on the subject of John Singer Sargent's The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit.

    I hope your current reading is absorbing and enriching, and if you have anything to recommend do please let us know.

Small Days and Nights

   

    "It's in the little towns that one discovers a country, in the kind of knowledge that comes from small days and nights."

     Tishani Doshi uses that line of James Salter's as the epigraph to her novel Small Days and Nights, and it's an apt choice for a novel which takes a macro lens to some big subjects. This is not a pretty book, in places not an easy one to read, but it is compelling in its dissection of the dis-easedness of life, the ways in which we are unequal to our fate or unwilling to own it.

    Set in contemporary India, it's the story of Grace who has returned to Pondicherry on the death of her mother. She inherits a house on the coast, and a sister she didn't know she had, for Lucy has Down's Syndrome and has been cared for in an institution all her life. With a failed marriage behind her, Grace takes on the house - despite its remote and dangerous location - and makes a home for Lucy and herself, but she is restless, aimless, finds it hard to adjust to her new reality, and as tensions rise in the surrounding area and within the blue-shuttered house by the sea itself, Grace learns about sacrifice, choice, and the accommodations we make which really matter.

    What's skilful here is the way in which not only Grace's past but her parents' history too forms a background for her present story. Memories, moments, longer recollections or discoveries are layered into the narrative like pieces of fabric stitched one on top of another, but this is no prissy embellishment, rather it's workmanlike appliqué using concise offcuts: misshapen, raw-edged, and wearing the stains of past use. In that sense it's a perfect medium for a study of family, for families typically aren't neat but unfinished, made from disparate materials which under tension can pull apart at the seams. Tishani Doshi understands the forces which strengthen and weaken relationships, the 'small days and nights' in which ties bind or break; she presents them here with candour and without apology in a concise and melancholy story which although it travels far and wide in scope and location ultimately comes home.

Looking forward to reading ...

   

    ... The Secret Commonwealth, the sequel to Philip Pullman's La Belle Sauvage and the second part of his The Book of Dust trilogy, out on the 3rd. of October.

    This picks up Lyra's story seven years after the end of The Amber Spyglass. She is now twenty and venturing across Europe and into Asia "in search of an elusive town, said to be haunted by daemons. She is at odds with her own daemon, Pantalaimon, after they unwittingly witness a murder."

    The author says, “Things have been biding their time, waiting for the right moment to reveal their consequences for Lyra Silvertongue. The Secret Commonwealth tells the continuing story of the impact on Lyra’s life of the search for, and the fear of, Dust. I found it intriguing and deeply exciting to discover how great events can turn on a little moment, and how revenge can be nurtured and fed and watered till it grows beyond control.

“Life is not easy for Lyra. It was enthralling for me to remember how powerfully and passionately our minds and opinions can be turned by reading a particular book at the right time. Lyra, as a student, is finding that out. She is also discovering a new and difficult aspect to her relationship with Pantalaimon, and other things about dæmons that she never suspected.

“But those things are background. At the heart of the book are Lyra, the young woman we saw first as a girl of twelve and then as a baby, and Malcolm, whose life as a boy became involved with hers and who now finds their lives helplessly entangled again; and how some emotions can last a lifetime, and others change beyond recognition. It’s the story of some people we know, and others we’ll meet for the first time. Their journey is going to take them far from their homeland towards a mysterious desert in Central Asia, where they hope to find, at last, the secret of Dust.”

Cornflower Blues, 2018

    My books of the year list is a shorter one this time (here is last year's for comparison).

    In non-fiction, Henry Marsh makes a reappearance, this time with Admissions his second volume of memoirs, while Laura Freeman - an outstanding newcomer - shares top spot for The Reading Cure.

    In fiction, Dear Mrs. Bird came along at a very difficult time, but A.J. Pearce's perfect pitch helped me through; Anne Youngson, showing that you're never too old to begin a new career, is a worthy Blue with her debut Meet Me at the Museum (which is getting the wider recognition it deserves), and joining them on the podium are two old hands, Kate Atkinson for Transcription, and William Boyd for Love is Blind.

    If you have a moment, perhaps you'd share your reading highlights of the year.