Tough choice for Book of the Week this week. An honourable mention goes to Trisha Ashley’s new novella A Vintage Christmas, but it’s quite short, and she has a new book out in October, so in the interests of keeping my powder dry, I’ll just leave you a Kindle link to it. Subtle right? There was another close contender, but I’ve reviewed that for Novelicious, so in the interests of not stealing their thunder, I won’t tell you what it is. Yet.
I Feel Bad About My Neck got the nod because, although it’s aimed at a slightly more mature lady than me, this collection of essays and general thoughts on life made me really laugh. In this, Ms Ephron takes a witty look at ageing, through the eyes of a baby boomer. I think my favourite is the one about maintenance – and how long women spend on upkeep!
Nora Ephron wrote the screen plays for two of my favourite films when I was a teenager – When Harry Met Sally and You’ve Got Mail and I laughed my way through her novel Heartburn a few years back. Heartburn is a fictionalised version of the break-up of her second marriage – and some of the themes from that reoccur here. This isn’t a long read, but it is a very fun one.
My enjoyment of this book was tinged with sadness – as Nora Ephron was already suffering with leukemia at the time that she wrote this, although almost no-one knew that she was ill right up until she died in 2012. I’ll be keeping my eyes open for more of her other writing and it’s a shame there won’t be any more.
Crivens! This week’s BotW will come as no surprise – it’s the final Terry Pratchett novel, the 41st Discworld book and the fifth to feature Tiffany Aching. I managed to force myself to read it slowly (for me anyway) and made it last a week. I’m already listening to the audiobook on my walks to work.
As you can see I have the others in the series in paperback, but I wasn’t prepared to wait this time.
In the Chalk, something is brewing. Tiffany can feel it coming, the Kelda can feel it coming. An old enemy is gathering strength. To quote the back of the book, Tiffany stands between the light and the dark, the good and the bad. And there will be a reckoning.
And to be honest, that’s about all that I can say about the plot of The Shepherd’s Crown without giving too much away. I encountered a massive spoiler in the Audible sample a week before the book came out – and my sister ran into the Guardian review which reveals the same Major Event – and I’ve become really concious of the fact that I don’t want to ruin the story for anyone reading this the way that plot twist was spoilt for me.
What I can say about the book is that it made my cry, repeatedly. But it’s not a sad book. As the back cover says, it is a time of endings and beginnings, and they’re handled beautifully. It is a Young Adult book and there are Serious Issues in there, but it deals with them very well, with Sir Terry’s trademark wit and warmth. I laughed and smiled and really enjoyed Tiffany’s adventure.
I wish there were going to be more. But as I said earlier this year (in this post), we knew that the end was coming sooner than anyone could have wished for. I still want the Moist the Tax Collector book. I am greedy for more from the Discworld. And the afterword in Shepherd’s Crown drops tantalising hints about what could have been. But I absolutely respect (and agree with) Rhianna Pratchett’s decision that if her father is not here to write them, there will be no more new Discworld books.
To reiterate – No I don't intend on writing more Discworld novels, or giving anyone else permission to do so. They are sacred to dad.
— Rhianna Pratchett 🧙🏻♀️ (@rhipratchett) June 5, 2015
I will be involved with spin-offs, adaptations and tie-ins, but that's it. Discworld is his legacy. I shall make my own.
— Rhianna Pratchett 🧙🏻♀️ (@rhipratchett) June 5, 2015
And if the end had to come, The Shepherd’s Crown is a very good place to finish. There are plenty of old favourite characters and there are some new favourites too. Of all the Discworld regulars, Mistress Tiffany has more life ahead of her than the others (unless you count Young Sam Vimes) and so it seems fitting that she is the centre of the last book.
The Shepherd’s Crown doesn’t feel like a goodbye, like a world is coming to an end – it feels like the Great A’Tuin is still out there, swimming through space with the elephants and the Disc on his back, it’s just that we won’t get to hear about the goings on there anymore. And maybe that’s Sir Terry’s greatest achievement – he’s created a fantasy world so real that we can’t believe that it could stop.
It’s not as if I had a matching set to start with, so I’ll cope with the non-matchingness.
I’m planning to re-read the whole series. If you haven’t discovered Tiffany yet, start with The Wee Free Men and enjoy her whole journey. If you are a Discworld fan, who’s been hesitant about reading this, don’t worry. I don’t think this will be a disappointment to you. It is safe to read it. It feels right. You should be able to get hold of a copy of The Shepherd’s Crown anywhere which sells good books – but just in case: Amazon, Kindle, Foyles (sadly no discount), Waterstones.
Enjoy it. Make it last. Raise a glass to it’s creator. And mind how you go.
For those reading The Shepherd's Crown 'Mind how you go' are considered to be the Pratchett magic words.
This week’s BotW is The Paris Wife by Paula McLain – which has been sitting on my to-read pile for far too long What’s new. How many times have I said that now? But yes, once again, a really good book stuck in the backlog for ages. You’d think I’d learn by now, and yet The Pile is still out of control. Hey ho. Moving on.
The Paris Wife tells the story of the marriage between Ernest Hemingway and his first wife Hadley Richardson. The novel is told predominantly from Hadley’s perspective, interspersed with occasional diary style snippets from Hemingway. Hadley and Ernest are clearly very much in love when they get married and this paints a very convincing portrait of a marriage torn apart by genius, ego, Jazz Age Paris, children and other women. You can see the train wreck coming and they can see it coming – but they don’t seem to be able to do anything to avert it. But this isn’t a miserable book, it’s sad in places, but it’s also fascinating.
Whilst I haven’t read a lot of Hemingway’s work, I have read a fair bit of F Scott Fitzgerald’s – who is another member of this crew – and as I’ve mentioned before, I love this interwar time period. After reading this, I’ve realised that I’ve got a bit of a glut of books about this set sitting on my shelves – not only Mrs Hemingway, but also Villa America and I think another one that I can’t remember the title of. I might have to space out reading them so I don’t get too confused/overloaded, but I am looking forward to reading them soon.
I wouldn’t expect you to have too much difficulty tracking this down in the bookshops – it’ll probably be on the shelves rather than the tables by now though. But here’s a link to Foyles and Kindle just in case.
This week’s book of the week is a rediscovered Classic crime novel, Christopher St John Spriggs’ Death of an Airman – first published in 1934 and now re-released as part of the British Library’s Crime Classics series. Regular readers of this blog will know that I love Golden Age Crime (and re-listen to a Peter Wimsey audiobook at least once a month) and this was right up my alley.
George Furnace is a flying instructor at Baston Aero Club – killed when his plane crashes. But the people who knew him are baffled – he was a skilled pilot and the plane was in perfect condition. Although the inquest decides it was death by misadventure, a visiting Australian bishop suspects the truth may be more complicated. Is it suicide? Or murder? Together with Inspector Bray a very cunning scheme is uncovered.
This is brilliant. I’ll admit that I don’t know enough about flying (and in particular 1930s flying) to be able to tell you how accurate the aeroplane information is, but it certainly all made sense to me – and the titular death is brilliantly contrived. I didn’t figure out all the solution until very late on – at which point I appreciated how clever Spriggs had been in dropping hints earlier in the book which passed off as totally innocuous at the time.
I’ve now read about half a dozen titles in this British Library Crime series – and have really enjoyed discovering forgotten murder mysteries from my favourite era – which in many cases rival their more well known counterparts – the Wimseys, the Poirots etcs. The actual paperback copies look lovely (although they are a weird inbetween size) and some serious knowledge of the genre has clearly gone into the selection. I read two from the series last week – I didn’t enjoy the other one as much, but it was clearly an important book in the development of the genre – and I’ll keep looking out for more.
My copy came via NetGalley – but it should be out now in book shops (I’ve seen and bought titles in the series in both Waterstones and Foyles usually displayed with a couple of others from the series) but if you can’t wait to get to a proper book seller, then here are some links – Foyles, Waterstones, Amazon, Kindle – although I couldn’t find it on Kobo.
So, last week was a holiday week and I read a fair few books (some of which will feature in a holiday reads post in the near future) but my favourite book of the week was Ben Aaronvitch’s Rivers of London. This appeared on my radar as an if you like then you might like recommendation from someone/somewhere and I laid in a copy and saved it for one of my paperbacks for the holiday and it was so, so good.
I love the cover illustration, but I’m not sure it actually reflects the sort of book this is
Peter Grant is a newly non-probationary police constable in the Met. He’s just been assigned to the unit which does the paperwork so everyone else doesn’t have to, when he tries to take a witness statement from a ghost after a particularly unusual murder in Covent Garden. Then Chief Inspector Nightingale turns up and he’s suddenly an apprentice wizard. And that’s where the fun begins.
This book is a total mash-up of some of my favourite things – it’s a police procedural (but not too thrillery chillery) with a strong fantasy element (magic! ghosts! spirits!), which knows exactly how its world works and isn’t going to dump it all on you at once, with a cast of intriguing and complex characters and a load of humour too. So Urban Fantasy Crime Comedy. Maybe. Anyway, it’s fabulous and I need to read the next one, not least because there are still some fairly important questions unresolved about the characters and the wider world.
You should be able to get a copy of Rivers of London at any good bookshop – I checked a mid-sized WH Smith in a local supermarket shopping centre* and they had two copies and 3 other books from the series. If you have poor impulse control (like me) the kindle edition is just £1.99 at time of writing. Or you can buy actual copies from Amazon, Waterstones, Foyles and the like.
* The sort of shopping centre that is based around a giant supermarket. Like you get in France, but less classy as this particularly shopping centre was on the front page of the Daily Mail website the other week as the Tesco shoppers went a bit nuts over reduced price meat.
This week’s BotW Death at the Opera and also is a bit of a compare and contrast. I read of Gladys Mitchell’s Mrs Bradley Mysteries last week – this one I loved and the other I could barely get through. As I didn’t read a huge amount last week – and two of them were books I’m reviewing for Novelicious (which I can’t preempt here) – I’ve made Death at the Opera my book of the week. Death at the Opera ticks a lot of my boxes – it’s a murder mystery set in a girls school – but Mrs Bradley is a bit different to a lot of the Golden Age Sleuths. She’s going to track down whodunnit, but she’s not necessarily going to hand them over to the authorities when she does. And that’s what makes her interesting – she wants to know, but often without having a yearning for justice for the victim – she’s more detached and curious than some of the other dectectives of the time.
Death at the Opera is fulled with interesting and intriguing characters, some of whom have very modern attitudes, and a twisty turny plot that I didn’t work out until right at the end. I absolutely zipped through it and went straight on to another Mrs Bradley from the to-read pile (I picked up three from the charity shop a couple of months back) – and what a contrast that was. I really struggled with Come Away, Death. I didn’t like the characters or the setting and I found it really difficult to get into. I finished it, but only just – and only because I liked the Death at the Opera so much I was hoping it would improve. But I guess when a series is so long running there’s bound to be a few duds. Hey ho.
This week’s BotW is Charlaine Harris’ Day Shift – the second book in the Midnight, Texas series – which I think is going to be a trilogy (or that’s how it looks at the moment anyway). And yes, I know Midnight Crossroad was Botw 2 months ago. But this was the best thing I read last week excepting Janet Evanovich, and we’ve already had that discussion…
We pick up where we left off (almost) in Midnight – the same characters that are left at the end of the last book are still in situ, but there’s a strange (even for Midnight) boy who is staying with the Rev and a mysterious company has started renovating the abandoned hotel. This book is faster paced than it’s predecessor and works the better for it. Some of the characters in book one were hard to warm to because they were just *so* mysterious. Well a lot of that is cleared up in book two – although there’s still a lot of unresolved plot strands at the end of the book. And of course Day Shift has a mystery-of-the-week too – which is neat and intriguing – and works well alongside the Bigger Picture puzzle as well.
But what I really loved was the crossovers. Oh the crossovers. I mentioned in my review of Midnight Crossroad that there were some familiar faces from previous series, but in this one the guest appearances are brilliant. I can’t say anymore (as per usual) or I’ll spoil it, but I was thrilled to see some more old friends reappear – I’m the sort of reader who doesn’t like to say goodbye to characters* and so crossovers like this, and side characters from previous books reappearing in bigger roles really makes me happy. I’ve got my fingers crossed for more in the last book!
And that’s pretty much all I can say without spoiling the plot and the excitement for you. I honestly don’t know how well these would work for you if you were coming entirely new to Charlaine Harris’ worlds, but for me, I passed several happy hours reading this.
Day Shift is only in hardback and e-book at the moment, but you can get your copy from all the usual sources – here’s Day Shift at Amazon, Foyles, Waterstones and on Kindle. And if harback prices are too eye-watering for you, then Midnight Crossroad is available in paperback from Amazon, Foyles, Waterstones and Kindle.
* I’m always hoping for a sequel to rom coms to see the happily ever afters, but get really annoyed when sequels turn up where the couple break up and make up to create a plot. Yes I know. A book full of happy people wouldn’t be very interesting. What can I say. I’m a difficult audience.
This week’s BotW is Deanna Raybourn’s Silent on the Moor – which is the third in her Lady Julia series, and I think these best so far in that two books worth of serious tension and angst comes to the boil in the harsh and unforgiving setting of the Yorkshire Moors.
Lady J had invited herself to Nicholas Brisbane’s new house, which is not only in the middle of nowhere, but had some unexpected (to Julia at least) residents. There are secrets and tensions and grim discoveries and oh so much Gothicky drama. I hasn’t realised that this was what this series has been waiting for, but it totally was. And thinking about it – unconventional widows, gypsies, seers, eccentrics – should have screamed melodrama to me.
The solution to the book’s puzzles is suitably ghastly – with definite ick factor – but it’s so in keeping and well executed that it seems both perfect and obvious once you’ve read it. Do not let the horrible pink cover of my copy confuse you, is is not saccharine or run of the mill by the numbers romance. There is romance (mostly of the will they won’t they kind) and there’s mystery, but Julia (although she makes mistakes) is not a too stupid to live heroine. You’ll jump to some of the same conclusions she does, albeit with a nagging voice in the back of your head that you’ve missed something somewhere that she doesn’t always have.
I know I keep mentioning books that are from series and then telling you to go back to the start first, but I really do mean it with this, you need two books worth of build up to get the full emotional whack from this. So good. And a catnip (as the Smart Bitches say) that I didn’t know I had!
I had trouble picking a BotW again this week – my top rated books of last week were Janet Evanovichs (and I can’t do another of hers for BotW or you’ll all think I’m insane) and a Nora Roberts that I’ve reviewed for Novelicious (I’ll post a link to the review when it goes up). So, instead I’ve gone for the fifth in Sabrina Jeffries’s Hellions of Halstead Hall series – because I’ve really enjoyed reading about the Hellions, and wanted to share it with you.
So, these are historical romances about the Sharpe siblings, whose parents died in scandalous circumstances when they were very young and who have issues tied up with that. At the start of book 1, their domineering grandmother – who holds the purse strings – tells them she’ll disinherit them if they don’t all find themselves spouses with the year. Over the course of the books we see them all find their happiness – and they investigate what really happened to their parents all those years before.
I suggest that you read the books in order – not because you’ll spoil who the other siblings end up with but because you’ll ruin the mystery plot if you don’t – and I don’t think it would be the easiest to follow that part of the book if you haven’t got the full backstory.
My favourites in the series were the first two books and I didn’t love book four, but as a whole the Hellions’ stories ticked a lot of boxes for me and gave me 10 (ish) hours happy reading – hence the BotW post on book five. There is a sixth book in the series – featuring a secondary character from the previous five – which bridges the gap between this series and Jeffries next one – The Duke’s Men (which I’ve already read one of, out of order ), which I’m going to try and get my hands on soon.
So there you go. An unusual BotW from me – and a reminder that I need to slow down on the Janet Evanovich’s to keep my reading material balanced…. You should be able to find Sabrina Jeffries’ Hellions series where ever you usually pick up your US romance novels – I read mine on Scribd, but you can also get them on Kindle and in paperback. The first one is The Truth About Lord Stoneville – and I suggest you start there.
This week’s BotW is Louise Candlish’s The Sudden Departure of the Frasers – which was my Curtis Brown Book Group book for April, but which didn’t get finished until last week because that was when the discussion was.
This has such a striking cover I know I would have looked at it in the shop, I’m not sure if I would have bought it without the Book Club
The Sudden Departure of the Frasers tells the story of Christy and Joe Davenport, who have just bought the house of their dreams in a leafy London area they never expected to be able to afford. The previous owners, the Frasers, renovated the house and then abruptly disappeared. As the Davenports settle in to their new home, Christy becomes obsessed with why the Frasers left and particularly what happened to Amber – beautiful, popular, charming and the centre of the social whirl – and why the atmosphere on the street is so tense.
This is another book that I probably wouldn’t have picked out for myself – but ended up really enjoying* – in fact, I read the vast majority of it across the course of one afternoon and evening because I got sucked in and then I Needed To Know. It’s one of those books where you can’t put it down because your brain is frantically trying to work out what has gone on and you just need to read one more page/chapter/section because then you might be able to figure it out.
One of the reasons this book worked so well for me is that the setting and the characters seem utterly believeable. I’m sure I’m not the only one who has had the fantasy that one day the dream home that you’ve always wanted will pop up on the market miraculously in your price range despite being worth oh-so-much more usually. And then obviously the old adage about “if it looks too good to be true, maybe it is” springs into your mind. Now scenarios like this usually lend themselves to horror or ghost stories (definitely not my thing) but this is neither. It’s a gripping little thriller, which will mess with your head but not leave you with nightmares about blood and gore and ghosts.**
Now I am breaking one of my own rules in writing about this now – because The Sudden Departure of the Frasers doesn’t come out until the 21st. But after a long deliberation I’ve put it up as this week’s BotW – because a) it was really good, b) if I didn’t BotW would probably be another Janet Evanovich (the obsession continues) and c) it will be a really, really good beach read, so preorder it for your holiday and you’ve one less thing to worry about!
You can pre-order The Sudden Departure of the Frasers from all the usual outlets – here is a selection of links – Amazon, Waterstones, Foyles and Kindle – and I suspect that when it does come out it may pop up in your local supermarket as it’s being published by Penguin.
* Which illustrates why I have such a massive to-read pile. I like so many different books. And if I had bought myself this, it would probably have sat of the shelf for years because of the backlog because it’s not obviously a book that I’d like. Then you’d get another of my patented posts saying that I loved it and I can’t believe how long it sat on the shelf and why didn’t I read it sooner. I know. I’m a nightmare.
** I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that there isn’t any blood or gore or ghosts. It’s not that sort of book. But you know what I mean.
