Open Book Group - Book List

The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton (Summer 2022)

The Lie of the Land by Amanda Craig (Winter 2022)

The Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy (Spring 2023)

 Anna of the Five Towns by Arnold Bennett (Summer 2023)

 A Far Cry from Kensington by Muriel Spark (Winter 2023)

 The Aspern Papers by Henry James (Spring 2024)

The Broken Afternoon

by Simon Mason

This is the second of Simon Mason’s thrillers featuring Ryan Wilkins (the first is “A Killing in November”). There are several authors currently producing crime novels set in Oxford, but this is one of the best I’ve read. As Simon indicated in his recent talk to WLS, he wanted to get away from the “Dreaming Spires” of Inspector Morse and write about the grittier side of life in Oxford. His anti-hero Ryan Wilkins hasn’t had many chances in life, and those he’s had he’s mostly messed up, including losing his job in the police force, but his determination to avenge his friend’s death and bring a child abductor to justice makes him succeed where conventional police methods fail. The writing is sharp and skillfully structured, and the characters varied and well-drawn; DI Ray Wilkins, in particular, serves as a perfect foil to his namesake, and the children in the novel are written with real insight. A very compelling thriller, but also a very good novel.

Review submitted by Anne Handsley (April 2024)

The Three Graces

by Amanda Craig

This novel is the latest in a series of capacious ‘state of the nation’ novels by Amanda Craig (well known to us in Woodstock for her talks to our society over the years!) But it is also a standalone novel and a great read on its own.  Amanda Craig manages to blend a somewhat dismal view of the contemporary world replete with refugees, Russian oligarchs in hiding, rapid rural decline in a Tuscany full of decaying houses in a depopulated countryside – all of this and more combined with a joyful comedy.  The Three Graces of the title are a reference to the famous Botticelli painting of that name, and summon up a world of myth and beauty.  The Three Graces of the story are three old ladies whose dream of retirement in Tuscany is drawing to a close thanks to old age and illness.  But also there are the young who persist with love and marriage despite the challenges of the modern world.  This is well-crafted tale with many twists and turns and some excellent dialogue, and a complex cast of sympathetic characters.

Review Submitted by Linda Glees (March 2024)

The Mysterious Mr Quin

by Agatha Christie

As an aside to Professor Jeremy Black’s excellent talk, see Reviews, having been the only person to raise their hand in affirmation when the audience was asked if anyone had read ‘The Mysterious Mr Quinn’, I wondered if I might have misremembered.  I was therefore reassured to see my much-thumbed copy, bought in 1971 still safely in place on my bookshelf.  It is a slim volume of short stories featuring Mr Satterthwaite, who feels he has perhaps missed out on life, always the observer of than being in the dramas of life.  Mr Quin appears and Mr Satterthwaite becomes involved in unravelling a series of seemingly insoluble mysteries.  It is an ideal book for dipping into, which must have left an impression for it to remain ‘a keeper’ over the decades.  It is now a book I will revisit.

Review submitted by Julia Johnson (May 2023)

State of the Nation Books as recommended by Amanda Craig:

Jonathan Coe Middle England, Bourneville

John Lanchester, Capital

Ali Smith seasonal quartet (Modernist, not an easy read)

Elena Ferrante The Neapolitan quarter (My Brilliant Friend etc)

John Moore The Waters Under the Earth (Persephone reissue)

Bernadine Evaristo Girl, Woman, Other

Lionel Shriver, So Much For That

Tom Wolfe, Bonfire of the Vanities

Thackeray Vanity Fair

George Eliot, Middlemarch

Dickens, Our Mutual Friend, Bleak House

Amanda Craig’s State of the Nation novels:

A Vicious Circle, Hearts & Minds, The Lie of the Land, The Golden Rule and a forthcoming "State of Europe" in The Three Graces.

Also recommended, Claire Keegan Small Things Like These.

November 2022

Poet Laureate Simon Armitage marks the death of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II

FLORAL TRIBUTE

Evening will come, however determined the late afternoon,

Limes and oaks in their last green flush, pearled in September mist.

I have conjured a lily to light these hours, a token of thanks,

Zones and auras of soft glare framing the brilliant globes.

A promise made and kept for life - that was your gift –

Because of which, here is a gift in return, glovewort to some,

Each shining bonnet guarded by stern lance-like leaves.

The country loaded its whole self into your slender hands,

Hands that can rest, now, relieved of a century’s weight.

Evening has come. Rain on the black lochs and dark Munros.

Lily of the Valley, a namesake almost, a favourite flower

Interlaced with your famous bouquets, the restrained

Zeal and forceful grace of its lanterns, each inflorescence

A silent bell disguising a singular voice. A blurred new day

Breaks uncrowned on remote peaks and public parks, and

Everything turns on these luminous petals and deep roots,

This lily that thrives between spire and tree, whose brightness

Holds and glows beyond the life and border of its bloom.

(September 2022)

The Fortnight in September (1931)

by R.C.Sheriff

The author of this novel is better known for his play Journey’s End (1929) based on his letters home from the trenches of the First World War, which was a resounding success  leading to a career script-writing in Hollywood.  This moving novel speaks in his own unassuming voice about an ordinary family, the Stevens’s, and their annual fortnight each September in Bognor Regis.  There is no drama, and almost no story, and yet we are gripped and charmed.  The details of their days are fascinating and are deployed to uncover deeper currents of feeling.  The reader is swept up into their lives with their hopes and disappointments and understands the momentous nature of their decisions as people with very little money to spare.  As one critic, Kate Morton, has commented: “This book about nothing turns out to be about everything”

Review Submitted by Linda Glees (April 2022)

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Linda has suggested the following may also be of interest:

• Ross King was our speaker in March 2022.  His new book 'The Bookseller of Florence' is out now, well-reviewed. Further information can be found on his YouTube channel.

• Adam and Charlotte Guillain (childrens' authors)

CONGRATULATIONS to Juliet Mash, one of our members, for her success in the  EBook Short Story Competition 2022 run by Oxfordshire Libraries.   Anyone with an Oxfordshire library card can download and enjoy them. 

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Modernist American Novels

Jennifer Egan’s novel ‘A Visit from the Goon Squad’ was published in 2010 and won the Pulitzer Prize in 2011. It covers the adventures and troubles of a number of variously connected and mainly young characters. It is funny at times, sad at others. It’s an easy (I think) and enjoyable read, and may be the first novel with an extended section of PowerPoint presentations.

George Saunders’ novel ‘Lincoln in the Bardo’ was published in 2017 and won the Booker Prize that year. In Tibetan teaching, Bardo is the state between death and rebirth as a new being. Saunders imagines Abraham Lincoln’s young son, who has just died, in that state, surrounded in the cemetery by many people who have been in that state for years and don’t want to leave it. Slowly, in the course of the novel, they all move on, as does Abraham Lincoln himself. It’s a strange novel to start with, but stick with it: it is very moving in the end.

Reviews submitted by Steven Bliss (April 2022)

Cathay

by Ezra Pound

I hesitate to recommend poetry, especially by Ezra Pound, who is best known for being (a) difficult and obscure and (b) a mentally disturbed fascist. But try ‘Cathay’ if you try nothing else (you can get an e-book cheaply). It was published in 1915, before Pound became really obscure and eccentric. All the poems are versions of ancient Chinese poems and they show what a fine poet Pound was – one of the first, and best, to write successfully in free verse. Most of the poems are quite short, and the longest, ‘Exile’s Letter’, is particularly successful in calling up a long-lost society and the emotions of people who lived in it. 

Review submitted by Steven Bliss (April 2022)  

Light Perpetual

by Thomas Spufford

Thomas Spufford’s first novel, Golden Hill, was a prize winner and rightly so. His latest novel is as different as could be, not in terms of quality but in location, period and tone. Whereas Golden Hill was set in mid 18th century Manhatten, Light Perpetual begins in the London of 1944 and follows 5 children’s lives into the 21st century. It is an alternative history because those 5 lives are snuffed out in the first chapter by a bomb in Woolworths in south London. Their lives are gone, their potential unfulfilled. But what if that bomb had not found its target, what if those 5 children had survived the war?

Spufford goes on to chart the course of their lives from childhood to old age, observing them in snapshots from 1949 to 2009, choosing incidents in their lives to describe their personal stories and to tell the tale of England, specifically London, in those decades after the Second World War when so much in our society changed.

Spufford has a unique knack for capturing the essence of a life and of a time whether it be the consequences of a mixed marriage or the effect of the print workers’ strikes of the seventies. He chronicles the development of this country from the bombing of the war to the technological era we live in today and he gives us portraits of 5 very different and fascinating characters whose lives might have ended in Woolworths in 1944, but did not.

This novel is well worth reading; it is original, thought provoking and a pleasure.

Review submitted by Trevor Caldecott (April 2022)

A Good Read – Three Good Reads in fact!

The Great Gatsby by F.Scott Fitzgerald, 

Bright Star Green Light by Jonathan Bate,

and Journal of a Disappointed Man by W.N.P.Barbellion

I’ve recently much enjoyed a rediscovery of The Great Gatsby – F.Scott Fitzgerald’s  1925 romantic drama about lost youth, regret and the impossible allure of the past. With so much still to read for the first time I would not have imagined returning to Fitzgerald any time soon (never say never), as his concerns and style felt passé, and there are elements of snobbishness and racism in the man that come out in some of his characters which I disapproved of. What piqued the renewed interest was Bright Star, Green Light, Jonathan Bate’s recent dual biography of Fitzgerald and Keats. The “Bright Star” refers to one of Keats’s best known sonnets, traditionally supposed to have been among the last things he wrote, addressed to Fanny Brawne on board a ship in the Channel on his way to his doom in the arms of Joseph Severn, in the small apartment by the Spanish Steps in Rome. The “green light” is what Gatsby stares out at every night across the Sound – the light at the end of Daisy Buchanan’s dock – like a bright star. One of the many small details Bate elucidates is the history of the composition of Bright Star which is not as is popularly supposed. He does similarly with the genesis of Gatsby. His scholarship, research and literary judgement are constantly throwing up matters to think about and chew over, and the book is a thoroughly good read. Like many such dual biographies however it is not fully successful - it leaves you wishing he had written separate works on each, as there is not enough on either and parts of the narratives of each life feel  skimped. Furthermore the parallels between poet and Jazz Age novelist do not feel as close as Bate tries to maintain and the conjunction feels forced at times. It’s true that Fitzgerald was a connoisseur of Keats (“tender is the night” is a quote from the Ode To A Nightingale), and he read and re-read the poetry from his college days onwards, often referring to the man or his work. Bate makes a convincing case that Fitzgerald saw himself in that Romantic tradition, and consciously wrote in a rich and sensuous prose style (Fitzgerald’s own poetry he himself quickly agreed was best forgotten), voluptuous, controlled, detailed, with a power to evoke mood and scene so different from Hemingway, but as a successor in a sense to Keats. Bate’s comments on this are illuminating. But writers of Fitzgerald’s time and before and since, English and American, generally revered Keats and the Keatsian aesthetic and Fitzgerald’s sense of connection with Keats doesn’t seem uniquely important. Their actual lives were really very different, and the life and tragically early death and stifled talent of John Keats followed  a very different trajectory from Fitzgerald’s own - the equally tragic if somehow self-inflicted  not-quite-so-early, death from a heart attack after a life-time of alcoholism. But Bate who has biographies of Wordsworth, Ted Hughes, Wordsworth, Shakespeare and John Clare to his name is a big-hitter in literary lives and the book is well worth the read despite the somewhat shaky premise. And, as I say, it brought me quickly to Gatsby again, and I’m grateful. Bate reminds us what a very good novelist Fitzgerald is – creating characters we care about and scenes we are drawn into in which their troubles and conflicts , of their time but universal, grip us as they play out. The melancholy at the end of Gatsby is the melancholy of Life itself.

Although a near contemporary of Fitzgerald’s, W.N.P.Barbellion led a life far more closely aligned with that of John Keats, and seems from his writings to have had a very similar ability to absorb himself  fully into the physical sensations of life (he writes rapturously about the sun, sea-bathing, rain, wind… ); his  descriptions are  sensuous and passionate, he responds to every stimulus, he constantly examines and reassesses his attitudes and reactions, and makes judgements and assertions all the while. He is extremely funny in places – witty, farcical, self-deprecating, alive to the ridiculous – and there are quotable gems on every page, just as you find in Keats’s letters. His Journal of a Disappointed Man is an edited version of the diary he kept from the age of 13 until ill health finally forced him to give it up 2 years before he died in 1919 at the age of only 30. What he died of was multiple sclerosis, a diagnosis he was ignorant of until 1915, despite being plagued by illnesses, ailments and symptoms of many associated kinds since his teens. The Journal describes his responses to and battles with his afflictions while still holding down a job (an entomologist at the British Museum) and leading a young man’s life in Edwardian London, almost at times like one of the Three Men in a Boat. The book is held in high regard by MS sufferers and MS societies round the world for its accurate descriptions of the affliction but also as an example of the greatness of the human spirit. It was a German friend who has MS (fortunately not as aggressively as Barbellion did) who first directed me to him (I’d never heard of him before), and I was thrilled to find a copy recently in one of the Woodstock charity shops. Thank you to whoever donated it. It is a great read. Barbellion – real name Bruce Cummings – was evidently quite a card, as witness his nom de plume – Wilhelm Nero Pilate Barbellion. His early death, like Keats’s, robbed the world, but unlike Keats he was able to marry and his wife bore them a daughter before he died, while the publication of his journal brought him recognition and some fame in his lifetime (it has since become a literary classic). It is a solace to know therefore that he was not entirely disappointed at the end.

Review submitted by Mike Spilberg (March 2022)

West

By Carys Davies

When Peter Kemp reviewed West in The Sunday Times he described it as a miniature masterpiece and that is exactly what it is. Only 149 pages long, the novel deals with colonialism, love, loneliness, extinction, race, lack of fulfilment and, most of all, grief and loss.

Set in the America of the early 1800s it is a fairy story based in historical fact, centred on the quixotic attempt of Cyrus Bellman to seek the monsters he has read about, in fact the extinct dinosaurs whose bones were starting to be discovered in the mid West. He leaves behind his young daughter Bess in the care of his sister. Bess is the heroine of the book, an emotionally strong little girl who at the end of the novel might just have a better life ahead of her because, despite Bellman’s doomed quest and the threat of extinction of the Native American tribes permeating the story, this is a positive novel in which, like all proper fairy stories, good triumphs over evil. The evil characters do not succeed and the good do, and there is a stellar cast of characters. From the driven Cyrus, who simply must follow his noble dream, to the sinister and  predatory Elmer Jackson, from the neglectful and rigid Aunt Julie to the heroic Bess; and most memorable of all Old Woman From A Distance, the young Native American who accompanies Cyrus on his trek and who finally returns to Bess in the form of an avenging angel and rescuer.

West is an exciting page turner as well as a subtle depiction of the grief within the Bellman family (Cyrus’s wife has died before the novel starts) and of Old Woman’s grief for his lost way of life and the home he has been forced to leave. It is also a telling examination of the difficulty of communication, both physical and emotional, in the America of the early 19th Century.

Carys Davies is a fine writer, and her award winning short stories are well worth seeking out. This 2018 debut novel enhances her reputation as does her latest and longer novel The Mission House.

Review submitted by Trevor Caldecott (March 2022)

Walking With Ghosts

By Gabriel Byrne

Autobiographies by famous actors are ten a penny. This one is different in at least four ways. First, Byrne is painfully honest about his own failings (e.g. a long period of alcoholism) and modest about his successes. Second, he captures his working class childhood in Ireland accurately and movingly, and also the way it never really leaves him. Third, he is very funny at times, especially when other actors are involved (for instance, meeting Laurence Olivier for the first time, he has nothing to say except to ask him the time). Fourth, in an unfussy way he writes well. I liked him as an actor, and I like him more after reading this.

Review submitted by Steven Bliss (March 2022) 

A Pair of Sussex Stories

 The first book was serendipity on a visit to Waterstones to spend a book token on something I could take home and immediately be gripped by.  I was surrounded by books but couldn’t settle on a title.  I was about to leave when I spotted:

The Burning Girls

By C J Tudor

The back cover promised intrigue and suspense spanning three entwined periods, 500 years ago with the burning of three martyrs, 30 years ago when two teenagers vanished and 2 months ago when a vicar died mysteriously.  The main characters are, Rev. Jack Brooks and teenage daughter Flo who hope to make a fresh start in the close-knit village of Chapel Croft.  I was hooked within a few pages.  There were many twists and turns throughout.  Just as I thought I knew what the reveal would be, the final twists made me gasp!

The second book had been sitting on my bookcase for some time unread.  The setting in Chichester and the coastal marshes towards Fishbourne drew me back as it is an unfamiliar area I was due to visit:

The Taxidermist's Daughter

by Kate Mosse

Set in 1912 it opens in a village Churchyard where a woman lies dead.  Our heroine is the eponymous Connie Gifford who through a childhood accident has lost significant memories which as the story unfolds gradually start returning and tragic events of the past are revealed with consequences.  The descriptive passages are full of atmosphere, conjuring up images of the wild remoteness of the coastal marsh land as flood waters rise adds to the perilous drama.  It was a page-turner but perhaps not for the faint hearted as there were some unusually gruesome scenes.

Reviews submitted by Julia Johnson (March 2022)

Hamnet 

by Maggie O'Farrell

Few facts are known about the life of William Shakespeare but from the few that are Maggie O'Farrell has woven a compelling story about family, loss and love.

Told from various viewpoints, the novel is based on the early death of Shakespeare's son and the reaction of his mother, sisters and father. Grief takes many forms. For example the return of the father to London and his work in the theatre almost immediately after the funeral is incomprehensible to his wife and yet so necessary for him.

O'Farrell does not pass judgment on the characters. This is after all Tudor England and death is a common fact of life. They all have their faults and the dynamics of the extended family could quite easily be those of the 21st Century with its jealousies, compassion, misunderstandings and stoicism. They, the place and the period are brought to life by the author's attention to detail.

Whether or not Hamnet's death was the inspiration for Hamlet is neither here nor there. This is a fine novel about a family coming to terms with the loss of a son.

Review submitted by Trevor Caldecott (June 2021)

Fortune’s Rocks

by Anita Shreve

June 1899; Olympia, is at the moment of transition between being a girl and a woman. Sheltered and educated home she has returned with her parents to their cottage for their annual summer holiday. Her studious father and delicate mother give a dinner party.  John Haskell and his attractive wife are invited; the doctor, in his forties, has written about the working condition of the mill girls in the nearby town and offers them both his skill and his medical care. Olympia is attracted to him at once and we sense an electric current that passes between the two. They launch into a clandestine, overwhelming love affair that leaves her constantly 'in a state of suspension' between their stolen meetings and passionate intimacy. Inevitably their secret is out with dramatic and devastating consequences for both them and their respective families. Olympia now realises 'that she has begun something that will be larger than herself and that she will not be able to stop'. She now realises that 'he is not hers, he was never hers'.

Then the inevitable happens, she has a son.  The rest of the novel concerns her fight to keep her baby boy.

This is story of love and dread. Shreve's compassionate, mellifluous voice gives us a metaphorical seascape with its tides coming in and receding, and describes the coastal houses, one in the process of being built, one rundown, another abandoned; these, like the title 'Fortune’s Rocks', offer us telling and underlying meanings.

Review submitted by Jan Lee (March 2021)

An appreciation of Dorothy Whipple 1893-1966

Literary fame is a curious phenomenon.  Take Dorothy Whipple, a best- selling novelist of the thirties, forties, and fifties. Two of her novels They Knew Mr Knight and They Were Sisters were made into  films, the latter starring James Mason.  Her books were frequently selected to be Book Society Choices, and her work was admired by H.G.Wells, J.B. Priestley and E.M.Forster.  But then after her death, oblivion.  Fortunately for posterity the pioneering imprint Persephone Books made the inspired decision to re-publish all her novels, starting with the re-issue in 1999 of her final, and some would say finest, book Someone at a Distance (1953)

Why the oblivion?  Maybe her work was seen as middle-brow and middle-class (wrongly, in my view, as she dared to write about domestic violence and alcoholism, among other issues) or maybe as one sympathetic critic has commented her name was just wrong, sounding both northern and old-fashioned.  She may well have done better with a more sophisticated name.  But Dorothy was a grounded northern woman who would have laughed at the very notion of curating one’s image.

So why all the admirers?  She wrote strong narratives in exquisite prose and with a clear and shrewd eye of the lives of families struggling with the economic instability of her troubled times.  Her canvas was small, usually a family or two in a small town.  Her obvious predecessors are Jane Austen and Mrs Gaskell.  But unlike them, she intuited a mythic quality to her characters, especially her villains.  For example, Mr Knight a small -time swindler who ruins the family in The Knew Mr Knight (1934) is described as diabolical, with echoes of hell, when standing on a railway station platform.  Equally, the French au pair girl in Someone at a Distance (1953) who seduces her employer's husband and almost destroys both his family and his firm, has an ancient lineage.  Dorothy skirted near-tragedy in her tales but in the end her characters just about survive all the challenges, maybe a message for readers during the long anxious years of depression and war.  Reading Dorothy Whipple is like spending time with a clear-eyed, very clever friend.

Review submitted by Linda Glees  (February 2021)

Endorsement - Dorothy Whipple

I heard about Dorothy Whipple about 18 months ago. I read 'Someone at a Distance' and was surprised to find it completely engrossing. I quickly read two more of her novels and each one gave the same delight. The narratives engaged me immediately and were engrossing, the characters were utterly credible and I liked Dorothy’s seemingly effortless, lucid prose. The stories, written and set in the 1930s, about middle-class families, are not just cosy tales which might have been serialised in women’s magazines for example. They cover some of the most fundamental aspects of human life and relationships.

About a year later I decided to read 'They were Sisters' - another very unassuming title which would not jump off the shelf to you. I did wonder whether I would be less engrossed this time, familiarity dulling the edge as it were.  But not a bit of it.  If anything I found this novel even more compelling. Without spoiling the story, I would just say that here Dorothy portrays problems which are very much of today - the unreachable anguish of addiction, the bullying and controlling of women and even children. Without any description of sordid scenes or use of ugly language, she manages to convey the full horror of a father’s behaviour in a way which I found truly shocking.

But true to life, the stories also show the best of human nature. Though never a mother herself, Dorothy gives wonderful, insightful depictions of the feelings of a mother and also of what goes on in the minds of children at all stages.

Dorothy Whipple has been a real 'find', a literary friend I shall keep by me.

Review submitted by Wendy Ralph  (March 2021)

A Perfect Spy 

by John le Carré

The name John le Carré conjures up thoughts of espionage, the Cold War, international criminals and the like, and rightly so. We have all enjoyed the various film and television adaptations of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, The Night Manager and The Constant Gardener.

He is however so much more than a writer of beautifully crafted spy novels, and his 1986 work A Perfect Spy is quite simply a fine novel which bears comparison with anything written in the second half of the 20th Century.

It takes the form of a retrospective on the life of Magnus Pym, secret agent, at the time of a crisis in his life following the death of his father Rick, one of the most memorable and outlandish characters of British fiction. Pym takes the reader through his life from birth to school to university to secret service and le Carré constantly changes the perspective, ranging from Pym’s point of view to that of his wife and then of his colleague Jack Brotherhood. The narrative is complex but then so is the moral dilemma Pym has created for himself.

It is a tale too of Pym's relationship with his father, almost an exorcism of the negative effects of that relationship. Espionage is present but the book is more a dissection of character than an action novel and the backgrounds are very convincing, this being the most autobiographical of le Carré's books.

The reader is not surprised by the conclusion. There is a certain inevitability about it all, and yet that does not matter. This reader, certainly, was gripped from beginning to end.

Review submitted by Trevor Caldecott  (February 2021) 

Elizabeth Strout

Most widely known for her 2008 novel 'Olive Kitteridge', Elizabeth Strout is an author who justifies the description of one of the best novelists writing in English today. In fact 'Olive Kitteridge' has been described as the best novel of the 21st century. Elizabeth Strout is however much more than the author of 'Olive Kitteridge'. Her work, set mainly in small town America, has a universal quality; it is not just about the communities she describes but all communities.

Elizabeth Strout said that she “records the human experience as honestly as I can” and it is that honesty which strikes the reader time and again. Olive herself is completely honest, too honest in fact. She is one of the great characters, flawed and compelling, and like so many Strout characters presented with tough minded humanity. It is clear the author likes people, no matter how difficult they are, and identifies with them. 'Olive Kitteridge' is essentially a series of short stories in which Olive features, sometimes prominently, sometimes not, and the novel is a picture of Olive and her community, how different people see Olive in different ways. It contains great truth and understanding.

In 'My Name is Lucy Barton' a successful New York writer looks back on a time in her life when she had a spell in hospital and when her estranged mother came to stay with her in her hospital room. Through the prism of that time Lucy looks back on her childhood poverty, her daughters, her marriage and her escape from rural Illinois. Like all Strout novels there is a wealth of understanding, of people and their faults, and the self knowledge which comes from reflecting on the younger self from the vantage point of middle and old age. The novel is a spare, apparently simple account, through the fog of memory, of a family dealing with life, hardship and rejection, yet with a thread of hope running through it.

'The Burgess Boys' is very different. The author uses a much broader canvas but still anchors her story in small town Maine where she grew up. Its themes range wider than the other novels, into the contrast between the life of the city and that of the small town, the return home to their roots of the successful local boys, dysfunctional sibling relationships, the culture wars in America, immigrants and marriage breakdown. Always however she is very good at the little things, the observed gestures and expressions, the dialogue of everyday, the recognition that life is messy and imperfect. She is a truly remarkable recorder of the human experience.

Review submitted by Trevor Caldecott 

On Seamus Heaney           

by Roy Foster

Those members who enjoyed Roy Foster’s talk on Seamus Heaney in February 2018 may be interested in his new book on the poet, part of the Writers on Writers series from Princeton University Press. The book is very much a personal interpretation of Heaney’s work rather than an exhaustive biography. Roy was recently interviewed on Radio 3’s Free Thinking programme and also appeared on The Spectator Book Club podcast, both of which are worth listening to. Joe Biden quoted Heaney in his acceptance speech for the Democratic nomination which speaks to his continued relevance in these trying times and resulted in a flurry of requests for comment from Roy!

Review submitted by Caroline Priday

See further information and a Q&A with Roy Foster.

Middle England           

by Jonathan Coe

Jonathan Coe’s Middle England is a useful reminder of what we used to talk and argue about before March 2020. They are all there - Brexit, immigration, political correctness, the generation gap. There is not a whiff of Covid 19 in sight, and how refreshing it is to think again about issues that will be waiting for us if and when we emerge from our pandemic.

The author is well known for his comic skewering of the British tribes and his latest novel is an entertaining look at the extended Trotter family and assorted friends. It ends a little too neatly and predictably but along the way paints highly amusing portraits of the irascible grandfather, the failing children's entertainer, the rebellious teenager and the cynical journalist. Amongst the humour Coe makes a number of serious points about the country’s journey from the Coalition to the Referendum and on to Brexit. Certain politicians do not come out of it well but that is not surprising.

So, be indulgent, and lose yourself in Middle England.

Review submitted by Trevor Caldecott

The Custom of the Country           

by Edith Wharton

Edith Wharton may have been writing ‘The Custom of the Country’ in the high summer of the Edwardian era, but its anti-heroine Undine Spragg might well be a character from our own times. She is fascinating and dislikeable, and yet try as the reader might it is difficult not to have a sneaking regard for her despite her faults. Set in the gilded world of early 20th century New York and the invasion of Europe by wealthy Americans, the novel is first and foremost an addictive narrative, and as subtle as the best of Wharton’s work. It is perfect for a long sunny afternoon in the garden. It is a masterly portrait of the clash of three cultures - American, French and British - and all the more relevant today for that.

Undine Spragg is however the heart, if that is the right word, and soul of this novel. She would be suited to today’s world of social media, celebrity culture and conspicuous consumption. She is quite a character.

Review submitted by Trevor Caldecott

Where The Crawdads Sing           

by Delia Owens

I was immediately hooked and captivated by this book.  Set in the marsh lands of North Carolina this is so much more than a murder mystery. There are evocative descriptions of nature as we follow the trials and tribulations of Kya, the ‘Marsh Girl’. A couple of times I thought I’d worked out ‘whodunnit’, only to be confounded and then gasped out loud when all was revealed.  I can easily imagine this book will at some time transfer to the big screen, but the pictures created in my head will linger longer!

Review submitted by Julia Johnson

A Gentleman in Moscow           

by Amor Towles

The restrictions we’ve lived with over recent weeks have no doubt made many of us turn to books.  In my case it’s been very much as a ‘comfort blanket’, going back to old favourites which I knew would amuse, entertain or delight me, shutting out the hard facts and uncertainties of life at the moment.  Avoiding anything new or challenging, I felt better sticking to what I knew.  And then a kind neighbour  offered me ‘A Gentleman in Moscow’.  She told me nothing about it other than saying she had enjoyed it and would leave it in her garden shed for me to collect.

It engaged me as soon as I started reading.  The story is set in Moscow, covering the years between 1922 and 1954,  a period of great change in Russia.  I do not propose to expand on the narrative of the novel, except to say that the title of the first chapter is 'Appearance of Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov before the Emergency Committee of the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs.'  This didn’t engage me at all, but the ensuing brief dialogue certainly did, because that’s when we get our first glimpse of The Gentleman, Count Rostov.  The result of his ‘appearance’ is to condemn him to house arrest for the rest of his life, to be shot dead if he ventured out.

He is escorted by guards to his future accommodation in the Hotel Metropol in Theatre Square, Moscow, a tiny room in the attics, amounting to one hundred square feet, with a window the size of a chess board in the ceiling.

Tiny though the room is, this is not a story of imprisonment, restriction and wistful imaginings.  The author, and the Count himself, somehow expand this little box so that we experience life in Russia before the Revolution, throughout the various stages of Russian political upheaval up to 1954, as well as in Europe and elsewhere and in the company of all sorts of people.  It is not a political novel but we find out a lot about politics and history, not as the cold facts of a history book, but as lived and felt by people.  We move from philosophy, to art, to literature and music, via French and Russian ‘cuisine’, love, grief, cowboy films and much more besides.  

Amor Towles writes with freedom and ease, changes the pace of the story, includes a few intriguing ‘coups de theatre’ and breathes life into the Count as a man of great charm and intelligence, with delightful humour whose witty remarks enliven the text like grace notes in a piece of music.   Towles is equally convincing when portraying sadness and creating suspense.  At times I laughed out loud, and at others realised that I had read a whole sequence of pages with a smile on my face.  This is a glorious novel and one which kept my attention right up to the very last sentence.  

Review submitted by Wendy Ralph

The Last Attachment

by Iris Origo

This is the story of Byron and Teresa, Countess Guiccioli. It is wonderful. Origo, using the masses of letters which the Guiccioli family have kept and to which she had access, gives a joint biography concentrating on those years of Byron's exile in Europe which he spent in Italy and when he formed this final attachment to the young Countess. He was faithful to her in a most uncharacteristic way for him, leaving her only to go to Greece and die. La Guiccioli was at the time married to a considerably older, much-married man, and the saga of her developing relationship with Byron and eventual escape from her husband's clutches, a process that involved her father, the courts, and even the Pope, makes for quite a read. The light it all throws on Byron's personality as well as hers, and his friendship with Shelley too, also fascinates. There is such a contemporary feel about all these characters. His own letters are written with such immediacy.  If you get into the groove, I'd recommend following up with:

Lord Byron's Jackal

by David Crane

A book about that arch-hanger-on, fantasist, adventurer, fraud, sailor, farmer and part-time brigand Edward Trelawney, whose time in Italy and Greece overlapped Shelley's and Byron's and whose career is straight out of fiction.  He designed Shelley's yacht (the one that fatally sank) and it was he who burnt Shelley's body on the beach when it washed up some days later. He outlived them all by decades and in curmudgeonly old age had plenty of scores to settle when giving his version of Life With The Romantics to rapt young Victorians hanging on his every word.

Reviews submitted by Michael Spilberg

The Human Stain

by Philip Roth

This novel is set in 1997, the year of the Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky scandal which gripped and divided America.  The national scandal forms the backdrop to a local scandal set in a small American college, a scandal which escalates tragically out of control.  This dramatic, fast-paced, and totally absorbing novel is one of Roth's best.  His rolling energetic prose sets the reader on a rapid trajectory through racial, sexual, and psychological traumas.  To say more would be to reveal the plot..... This is a story which is both contemporary and archaic, as 'the human stain' of the title is the stain of existence.  

Review submitted by Linda Glees

The Giver Of Stars

by Jojo Moyes

Inspired by Eleanor Roosevelt’s initiative to promote reading and the love of books Jojo Moyes, author of the celebrated ‘Me Before You’, has written a moving and absorbing novel, ‘The Giver of Stars’. In a small town in Kentucky during the Depression five very different women, from various backgrounds and coping with daunting problems of their own, come together to establish and run a travelling library delivering books on horseback through a dangerous terrain to isolated dwellings. Faced with resistance, misogyny, poverty and racism, they soldier on unbowed by their men until tragedy strikes. Moyes has given us a shower of dazzling stars in this fascinating story.

Review submitted by Janine Lee

Good Reads

I would happily revisit all my Barbara Erskine and Elizabeth Harris stories plus the following  which all, apart from Geraldine Brooks, have an element of time slip: 'The Hours' by Michael Cunningham, a story following three women in the 1920s, 1940s and 1990s with the common thread of Virginia Woolf and 'Mrs Dalloway’.  Two books set locally but spanning time so settings are both familiar yet different: 'Bleak Midwinter' by Peter Millar and 'Doomsday Book' by Connie Willis and finally, 'A Year of Wonders' by Geraldine Brooks set during the 1665/1666 Plague in Eyam.

Recommendations submitted by Julia Johnson

The Mirror and the Light

by Hilary Mantel

This long awaited and long book was worth the wait. Concluding the Wolf Hall trilogy, Hilary Mantel provides us with a fascinating detailed picture of Tudor life and manages to get inside Thomas Cromwell’s head, his opinions of others, his previous life in Italy and his childhood. The seeds of his downfall are scattered throughout the book as he becomes just too powerful but curiously, despite knowing how the story will end, the reader suspends belief and is on Cromwell's side. Why is that? I think it comes down to Mantel's consummate skill in understanding her character, a rounded portrait of a man who is cruel, kind, realistic, a dreamer, competent, and ultimately careless.

The novel is a portrait of a corrupt oligarchy at the centre of the state, detached from the rest of the country, as the Pilgrimage of Grace section makes clear. It is a brutal world and any character on the slippery path to ruin has no way of recovering, not even Cromwell. The end comes quickly and with inevitability. Perhaps not the best of the trilogy, nothing can surpass the freshness and surprise of Wolf Hall, but a truly excellent modern historical novel.

Review submitted by Trevor Caldecott

Death in the Dordogne           

by Martin Walker

Since the Covid crisis started I have hugely enjoyed escaping in my reading to pre-pandemic times and places, and the series of detective stories written by Martin Walker set in the Dordogne have provided the perfect opportunity. The first in the series is 'Death in the Dordogne' and there are currently thirteen books in the series, so plenty to keep one happy. Martin Walker is a distinguished political journalist for the Guardian newspaper, and has also written some highly respected political books. So he is a polished writer, now enjoying letting his hair down writing about a region of France he loves.

Although the detective narrative is always good, carried forward by his appealing character, Bruno, Chief of Police in the imaginary town of St Denis, these are not totally light books as there is always a multilayered political and social context. But their chief delight for me, and I suspect most of his readers, is Walker's portrait of the Dordogne, its landscape and seasons, and its fabulous food. Indeed by characterising Bruno as a skilled cook and gourmet we read of some delectable meals (and learn about Chinese truffle smugglers!)

So, totally multi-layered escapism, and all the more welcome for it.

Review submitted by Linda Glees