It’s Tuesday and I’m back with this week’s Book of the Week – which is actually a book that came out last week. I’m even topical. Go me!
The year is 1910 and Haley’s Comet is passing over the earth. On a tidal island of Cornwall, a Viscount is preparing for the apocalypse. But when the staff of Tithe Hall unseal their rooms the next morning, Lord Conrad Stockingham Welt is dead in his office and a murder investigation gets underway. Straight into the police’s crosshairs is Stephen Pike, who arrived at the house fresh from Borstal the day before the murder. But Stephen knows he didn’t do it – he was looking after the elderly aunt of the victim Miss Decima Stockingham, who is foul mouthed, but very, very smart. Soon the two of them are trying to work out who did commit the murder as the policeman in charge of the case makes wild claims to try and pin it onto one of the servants.
This has got such a great premise – I love a cantankerous older woman heroine and the pairing of Miss Decima and Stephen is really entertaining and makes a great use of the above stairs-below stairs nature of the plot. And it’s really quite humorous at times too. I will admit I had the solution worked out well before they did though – but forgive them because there is world building and setting up going on here for a sequel and I am very much here for that when it happens.
My copy came from NetGalley, but it’s out now in Kindle and Kobo as well as in hardback. I’ll be watching out for it in the shops.
Happy Friday everyone! After breaking the rules on Tuesday with my book of the week, I’m back with another later in series book for this Friday’s series post, but I have a reason for this. It’s two years since the previous book in the Emmy Lake series and book four came out last week and I have read it and I wanted to report back.
So the first thing to say is that my prediction that the fourth book would arrive in 2025 was right, and the second thing is that this series is now complete! We rejoin Emmy and the gang in 1944 and by the end of Dear Miss Lake we finally reach the end of the war. In book four, Emmy and the team at Woman’s Friend are trying to find ways to keep morale up on the Home Front as the war drags on, but also starting to think about what might happen afterwards when it’s all over. Emmy’s journalistic career continues to flourish, and her husband Charles* is finally posted back in the UK. But there are still some challenges for the team to face before Victory in Europe finally arrives.
I’ve enjoyed reading this series so much, but every one of them has made me cry at some point – and this one is no exception. And without spoilers, it wasn’t (only) happy tears about the war finally ending for everyone. There is still peril in this one and it’s not insignificant peril. But it’s a book set in wartime, so it wouldn’t feel real if no one in the core group was ever in danger. I’m probably the most avoidant I’ve been of books with potential for deaths of key characters at the moment (murder mysteries don’t count) but I enjoy this series so much that I read it in the run up to release last week (thank you NetGalley for coming through on the copy for me) because I wanted to see how it ended. I’m sad it’s over, but I enjoyed it so much, and I look forward to seeing the characters that A J Pearce creates next.
As I just said, my copy was a preview copy, but it is out now in hardback and on Kindle and Kobo. You really should read the other three books first though to get the most out of it and the good news is that I’ve seen them in in shops on the regular so if you want to read them you shouldn’t have too many issues. Side note: the Audiobook for this series is read by Anna Popplewell, who was Susan in the three Chronicles of Narnia movies that came out about a decade ago.
Have a great weekend everyone!
*yes that’s a spoiler, but it happens in book 2 so what can I do?
It’s Wednesday, and as we have a Papal conclave starting next week, I’m bringing you a Recommendsday themed around the Vatican City and or the Catholic Church. You’re welcome.
Of course one of the big movies of Oscar season was Conclave, which is based on a book of the same name by Robert Harris. So you could read that or if you haven’t already seen the film, now might be the perfect time! But before Conclave, if you’d asked me to think of a book that’s set around the Vatican I would have said Angels and Demons, which is the first book in Dan Brown’s Robert Langdon series. This has the Illuminati and a bomb in the Holy See on the eve of Conclave. This was the third Dan Brown I read, 20 or so years ago and I had started to spot his tropes and patterns by that point, but there’s a reason he’s sold so many books – he’s very easy to read, particularly if you’re not a big reader. There’s a sixth book coming in the autumn – and all of the others have also had strong links to religion in some way. I still think the Da Vinci Code is probably the best of them though.
After not having thought about these books for probably actual years, I’m now mentioning Gyles Brandreth’s Oscar Wilde myseries twice in just a couple of weeks – as book five in that series The Vatican Murders (if you’re buying on Kindle) or Oscar Wilde and the Vatican Murders (if you’re buying in paperback) sees Wilde and Conan Doyle in the Holy See in the aftermath of the death of Pope Pius IX – my review from all the way back in 2016 (!) says it’s a bit like a Victorian Da Vinci Code, so it would seem like a really apt choice for this post!
Not set in the Vatican, but very much about the Catholic Church is Umberto Eco’s In the Name of the Rose. I mentioned this last year in my post of books set in Italy, but it also fits here. Like The Da Vinci Code, it’s one of the best selling books ever published – with about 50 million copies worldwide compared to 80 million for the Da Vinci Code – but people are a lot less sniffy about this one than they are about Robert Langdon. As I’ve said before I read it as part of my history degree because of all the research and detail that Eco put into this, and its set in the fourteen century during the Avignon Papacy. Fun fact: there hasn’t been a French Pope since all of that went down, which didn’t stop the French media from really, really hoping the new Pope would be French during their coverage of the Conclave after the death of Pope John Paul II, which happened while I was living in France. Ahem. Anyway, back to In the Name of the Rose: this has got lots to unpick in it – from the Sherlock Holmesian hero – William of Baskerville – to spotting the deliberate anacronisms and errors and working out why they’re there. There was a TV adaptation five or so years ago (which I found way more gruesome than the book) which was an Italian and German co-production but also featured Rupert Everett in the cast. It was shown on BBC Two (that’s how I watched it) and I enjoyed it but thought some of the dubbing was clunky as well as the simplification of the plot but it’s very expensively done (and they spent the money better than Disney+ did on the Shardlake adaptation) – it’s still available to rent from Amazon should the mood take you.
On my to read list in this sort of area is Katte Mosse’s Labyrinth which has got an archaeological mystery set around some bodies discovered near Carcassone and a crusade 800 years earlier. To be honest the only reason I haven’t read this yet is because it is absolutely huge and my record with very long books right now is not great. I’m pretty sure I’ve got some Medici fiction somewhere on my shelves too – but I can’t remember if it’s Papal-Medici or other Medici doing things around Florence! And I’m also pretty sure I’ve got some Father Brown on my shelves somewhere too.
But what I’m actually doing at the moment is listening to Terry Pratchett’s Small Gods, which is his satire on religion and philosophy and the role of religion in politics. It would have been Sir Terry’s birthday this week and it’s been ages since I read this – and the shiny new recording has Andy Serkis narrating it which is a lot of fun. And in a weird quirk of fate, I’ve just had an email saying it’s actually the Audible Daily Deal today (Wednesday) so if you don’t already own it, now is your chance…
After picking a Kate Shackleton yesterday which was particularly evocative of Yorkshire I thought I’d mention a few more books set around the county
Let’s start with one of my very favourite Georgette Heyer’s – Venetia. Most of this is set in and around Venetia and Damerel’s houses in rural Yorkshire. Venetia is feisty and independent- but Jasper is one of Heyer’s best hero’s and among the most well fleshed out. Another Yorkshire set historical romance – but with a very different vibe – is Sarah MacLean’s Ten Ways to be Adored while Landing a Lord. Our heroine is running the family estate with very little money, and the hero is escaping from fashionable society to the country. This is the second in the Love by Numbers series.
When other people were reading Rivals, I was reading Barbara Taylor Bradford. And A Woman of Substance is set in Leeds and the surrounding countryside. I think this was the first book with sex scenes I ever read but it’s mostly a big old saga as Emma Harte raises herself up from housemaid to department store tycoon. I did read the rest of the trilogy and some of her others, but I think this – which was her big breakthrough was the best.
I mentioned it in the summer when I went to see the stage adaptation at the Open Air Theatre, but a reminder that Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden is set in Yorkshire. I’m going to admit that I haven’t reread this since I was a child, so I can’t swear to how the original is aging… and of course there’s also James Heriot and his adventures in veterinary medicine.
Another book I read recently is Sovereign, the third in the Shardlake series, which sees Matthew following in the train of Henry VIII as he makes his progress to York. As well as a good murder plot it’s also really good at creating sixteenth century York – and given how much of old York still exists you can really conjure up the settings in your head. It was particularly good for me because my history supervisor at university was based in Kings Manor, which is one of the principal locations.
And finally several of the series I really like have installments in yorkshire – including Lady Julia Grey and Royal Spyness, but you really need to ahve read the others to get the most out of them.
Another month over, and as you probably saw on Monday, a mega reading list to finish the month off, because we were on holiday. Only one of these is actually something finished on the holiday – but I promise you will hear more about a bunch of those holiday books at some point. However in the meantime here’s a three of the books I read in November and haven’t told you about yet!
Frequent Hearses by Edmund Crispin
I’m slowly working my way through the Gervase Fen series – so slowly in fact that they’ve now started a fresh redesign since I started reading them. I’ve now read six of the ten slightly out of order as this is in fact book seven. It sees Gervase entangled with the movie making set and trying to untangle the mystery around the death of a young actress who threw herself from Waterloo Bridge one night after a party. I had part of the solution figured out, but not all the whys and wherefores so it was a good read finding out.
Small Bomb at Dimperley by Lissa Evans*
The Second World War is over and Valentine Vere-Thissett is on his way home. Except the war has changed his world – his elder brother has been killed, leaving him with a title he doesn’t want and and now the fate of his family home, built in the 1500s, in his hands. I have really enjoyed a lot of Lissa Evans’s novels, but for some reason this one didn’t quite work as well as I wanted it to. It’s got all the elements – a reluctant younger son taking over, post war setting, an ill-assorted group of people thrown together, but just this time, it didn’t provoke as strong a set of emotions as her books usually do. It’s still good, don’t get me wrong, it’s just not brilliant, and I was hoping for brilliant.
A Body on the Doorstep by Marty Wingate
It’s 1921 and Mabel Canning has moved to London to try and strike out on her own and be a Modern Woman. To this end she’s got a job with the Useful Women’s Agency, but one one of her assignments a dead body turns up on the doorstep when she answers the door. And of course she can’t help but get drawn in to trying to figure out what happened to him. This was the latest in my quest to find a new historical mystery series to fill the gap left by the end of the Daisy Dalrymple books. And it’s not bad – the mystery isn’t the most complicated, but it’s got a fair bit of set up to do and characters to introduce as the first in the series so I don’t mind that too much. It’s in KU so I will likely read more of them as and when I get a chance.
A historical fiction pick today, and one that has taken me a while to read on account of my brain’s refusal to concentrate on long books when I’m tired and my uncertainty on how things were going to turn out and my current need for closure and happy endings!
It’s 1919, the war is over and the world is starting to return to normal. Except that normal seems to mean that all the gains that women have made during the war are being rolled back and having had a taste of independence the world is now trying to relegate them back to domesticity. Helen Simonson’s new novel focuses on three characters trying to figure out what their place is in the post-war world. Constance had taken over the management of an estate, but is now losing her job and her home to make way for returning men. After nursing the mother of her employer through influenza, she is sent with her to the seaside, where she meets Poppy and her group of lady motorcycle riders, and Poppy’s brother Harris, an injured wartime pilot who is still coming to terms with his new reality. And then there is Klaus, German by birth but a naturalised British citizen, who has got a job as a waiter again, but is finding that he has to keep a low profile on account of his name and accent.
This is a smart and thought-provoking novel set at an interesting time that is ripe for fiction. It’s also a coming of age story, but there is a deal of darkness to balance the tea dances and parties. The interwar period is one that I love reading about – but I haven’t read a lot of fiction set exclusively at the start of that period, and it gave me plenty to think about as well.
My copy came from NetGalley, but it’s out now and available on Kindle, Kobo and in hardback.
For today’s Recommendsday I’m taking the opportunity to talk about a couple of books from last years read the USA that I hadnt got to yet!
Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead
This is the story of an aviatrix in the first half of the twentieth century but intercut with the story of the Hollywood actress who is playing her in a biopic. Given my reputation with award winning bond, it may not surprise you that this was a slog for the first half. It has took me literal months to read this despite having bought it on Kindle to try and get it finished because I wasn’t prepared to lug the paperback around everywhere with me. The early stages of Marion’s story are so depressing and such hard work it made it hard for me to spend too much time with it at once. But once we got to the Second World War it really came alive and I read the last couple of hundred pages in a few days and the end was more satisfying than I had feared it would be.
Wild Dances by William Lee Adams
So this one is a little unusual because I know the author. William is one of the preeminent Eurovision bloggers but also someone u work with in my day job. This is his memoir about growing up in Georgia with a profoundly disabled mother and an undiagnosed bipolar mother, and that’s only the half of it. William discovered learning as his escape and it took him to Harvard and then eventually to the UK. It is a brilliantly written and almost heartbreaking in places, but I know that because I know William I might be biased. Anyway, even though it’s sold as how Eurovision helped him, it’s actually about much more than that, and if you know him as a Eurovision figure, don’t go into this expecting lots of ESC info because it’s mostly about William and his life from childhood onwards.
When in Rome by Sarah Adams
This is another famous person and normal person romance – in this case a slightly Taylor Swift- y popstar and a small town baker. This was my first Sarah Adams and I quite liked it although it was more New Adult than I was expecting I think, but I can’t quite put my finger on why. I liked the small town vibe, I liked famous people and normal people romances (go read Nora Goes Off Script if you haven’t already, it’s wonderful) and I liked the twist of it being the heroine that’s famous and the guy that’s normal. But something just didn’t click to tip it over into great for me. Hey ho.
And there you are, three more books and we’re done. If I was going to put links to all the other books from Fiftyt States that I’ve already talked about I’ve been linking all day, so I’m just going to point you at the wrap up post which had them all there’s for you already.
As I said yesterday, although I should have been reading Christmas books and books that ticked off missing states in my reading challenge, actually last week I was reading a bunch of other stuff, so today’s pick is Sarah Sigal’s The Socialite Spy.
It’s 1936 and Lady Pamela Moore is somewhat unconventional socialite – she’s married but she’s the writer of a newspaper column called Agent of Influence – it’s about fashion and high society. When her editor asks her to interview Wallis Simpson for a puff piece about her wardrobe, she has no idea what will come next. She’s approached by MI5 to keep an eye on Mrs Simpson and Edward VIII and to report on their links to Nazi Germany. As she finds herself moving around in high society and political circles she discovers that things are not quite as she thought they were – but is she putting herself in danger?
My love of 1930s set books is well known and I have a particular soft spot for books and novels about the abdication crisis so this really appealed to me. If you’ve read other books set around this period you can probably figure out who Lady Pamela is going to be meeting and what Wallis is getting up to. This isn’t as good as my all time favourite Gone with the Windsors, but it’s doing something different to that with the thriller/espionage element. But it was still a fun read that stuck pretty closely to what I understand the actual history to be. But of course it did make me want to go back and read Laurie Graham all over again – which I really didn’t need to add to my list at the moment because I have plenty of other books to read.
If you like the Royal Spyness series, this will probably work for you as well – it’s got slightly more peril than those so, but it’s in quite similar sort of area in a way. I think there’s a chance we could get a sequel to this – which I would happily read, just to see what Sarah Sigal does with Pamela next.
I read The Socialite Spy via Kindle Unlimited – which of course means that it’s not on Kobo (at the moment anyway) but I can see the paperback also available on Waterstones too – with some click and collect availability.
Yes, I’m cheating because I finished this on Monday, but as ever they’re my rules and I’m allowed to break them if I want and nothing else on last week’s list qualifies for a variety of reasons. So here we are.
It’s 1957 and Henry and Effie are on honeymoon in Cape May, New Jersey. They’re staying at Effie’s uncle’s house, where she spent some of her childhood summer holidays. Except the season is over and the place is deserted. Or nearly deserted. Staying at the house down the street is Clara, now a beautiful socialite but formerly one of the children Effie used to sometimes play with. With her are her lover Max and Alma, Max’s half sister. Over the course of their trip, under the influence of a lot of gin, Effie and Henry’s marriage will be tested and the pattern of their lives will be set as they run riot through the town, swept up in the glamour and decadence of their new friends.
This has been sitting on the tbr pile for some considerable time, but this weekend I felt in need of something a bit different. The cover has a blurb that compares it to The Great Gatsby, and I can sort of see why – Clara’s world is a heady alcoholic world of yachts by day, illicit wanderings by night and gallons of alcohol. Effie and Henry are the outsiders – from Georgia compared to the other three’s big city sophistication and the reader can see that they’re heading for trouble and heartbreak.
The narrative follows just Henry and his actions, which is a little frustrating because I wanted to know what Effie was thinking and doing, but given that the author is a man, possibly for the best as I didn’t always love the way the sex scenes were written as it was so maybe I would have liked the book less if I’d been given more of Effie’s inner life. So, not perfect but I still read it in just over 24 hours so it’s very readable despite that. It’s not really Rich People Problems, because Effie and Henry definitely aren’t rich, but it is Rich People Problems-adjacent – in that the rich people are the ones who are causing the problems!
This was Chip Cheek’s debut – and I’d read more from him if/when it appears. I had my copy of this in the NetGalley backlog (!) but it’s on offer on Kindle and Kobo for £1.99 at the moment which is a pretty good deal. I can’t say I remember seeing it in bookshops, but I’m also not sure I ever specifically looked for it and it’s had a couple of different covers now too. Anyway, worth a check if you’re at a shop with a fairly decent literary fiction selection.
It’s turned terribly cold here this week. The car is frozen in the mornings when I head for the station and I’ve caved in and cracked out the big coat. So today my recommendations are books ideal for reading while wrapped in a blanket, maybe in front of a fire, ignoring the cold outside.
Is it cheating to start with Murder on the Orient Express? Because the train literally gets stuck in a snow drift on the night of the murder. It’s also one of my all time favourite murder mysteries for reasons that I can’t explain without spoiling the plot. And I know it’s nearly ninety years old and if you’ve only read one Agatha Christie it’s probably this one, but it’s so clever I don’t want to ruin it for any first timers even now!
A similar sort of age but completely different, Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca is creepy and atmospheric and for some reason just feels like a book to read as the nights are closing in and it gets dark early. Be grateful you don’t have a creepy house keeper watching your every move as the second Mrs de Winter discovers a few things her new husband hasn’t told her about.
And now for something much more recent, and a former Book of the Week back in 2019. Evvie Drake Starts Over was Linda Holmes’ debut novel and features a widowed older heroine and an injured baseball player in Maine. They have actual conversations, they seem to like each other and it’s just a big warm hug, despite the death in the backstory. Also a romance, but a very different end of the gene, I want to give a mention to Nora Roberts – I know sinner people like romantic suspense at this time of year, but I’m never a big romantic suspense reader, so I’m going for a straight up romance and The Next Always which features a heroine with kids, a bookstore and a possibly haunted hotel. Perfect for a rainy day and if you like it, it’s the first in the Inn at Boonsboro trilogy.
Now I know it has its issues, but there aren’t many books that have transported me to a world like Memoirs of a Geisha did. Arthur Golden’s novel is about the life of a young woman in Kyoto in the run up to the Second World War as she trains to become a Geisha. It’s much better than the movie was. I promise. Just writing this has made me want to read it again. And that’s your lot, i hope there’s something that appeals to you.
Verity Reads Books (lots of them) 