Category: Books

The Wicked Boy (2016): Kate Summerscale

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★★★½

The Mystery of a Victorian Child Murderer

This is the third book I’ve read by Kate Summerscale, after Mrs Robinson’s Disgrace and the excellent Suspicions of Mr Whicher, which I haven’t yet got round to posting about. Like her earlier books, it is a vivid recreation of 19th-century history based on dramatic cases heard in the Victorian courts and reported in the press and, like Mr Whicher, it focuses in on a horrific act of murder. Unlike Mr Whicher, however, this is not a whodunnit. The ‘who’ is clearly and frankly admitted from the very beginning. Summerscale’s investigations seek to understand more about the ‘why’ and to unpick the historical context of the crime and the way in which it was reported by the rapacious press.

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The Clan of the Cave Bear (1980): Jean M. Auel

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★★★★

Earth’s Children: Book I

In our first years at secondary school, one of my classmates was much taken with the Earth’s Children series by Jean M. Auel. I remember being very impressed by the thick novels she was carrying around, and decided that I would have to read the books myself one day. And now, twenty years later, I’ve finally got round to it. In the aftermath of The Inheritors, I decided it was time to make a start on this other famous story about contact between Neanderthal man and the new race of Homo sapiens.

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Dragonflight (1968): Anne McCaffrey

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★★★

Between the ages of eleven and thirteen, I read a lot of classic sci-fi novels that my dad had bought in the 1970s and 1980s and then relegated to a box in the attic. These were my first ‘grown up’ books and together they opened up a whole world for me, but I haven’t read them since. However, a few weeks back someone donated a treasure trove of these novels to the book stall at the village fete (not my dad’s copies, I hasten to add), and I saw the perfect opportunity to revisit the stories which had had such an impression on me as a child. First up on the nostalgia road-trip was Dragonflight, which I remembered with great fondness. Inevitably, it didn’t quite stand up to the test of time, but – having forgotten virtually everything about it except the characters’ names and the dragons – I still found it exciting and fast-paced, with a clever blend of sci-fi and fantasy at its heart.

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The Convenient Marriage (1934): Georgette Heyer

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★★★½

I haven’t read a new Georgette Heyer novel since before I started writing this blog, which means it’s long overdue. Her books may be fluffy and predictable; her characters may be much the same from story to story; but I adore her: she never fails to delight and distract from whatever life throws at me. At the moment that’s an irritating cold, so I was much in need of witty Regency escapades to divert myself from snuffling. There are times when a girl simply needs a bit of frivolity. And The Convenient Marriage delivers on all fronts. With balls, card-parties, duels and highwaymen, it’s a gloriously frothy story dressed up with fabulous gowns, extravagant wigs and two very appealing protagonists.

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A House Full of Daughters (2016): Juliet Nicolson

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★★★★½

Granddaughter of Vita Sackville-West and daughter of Nigel Nicolson, Juliet Nicolson certainly has writing in her blood. After publishing several books about the social history of the early 20th century, she now turns her eye on her own remarkable family. Nicolson introduces us to seven generations of women, from the black-eyed Spanish dancer Pepita in the mid 19th century to Nicolson’s own infant granddaughter Imogen and tells their stories. Delivered with passion and compassion, this is a beautifully crafted tale of what it means to be a woman: as daughter, lover, wife and mother.

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A Life Discarded (2016): Alexander Masters

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★★★★

148 Diaries Found In A Skip

This was a little breath of fresh air in my recent reading. I’d read an article about the book some time ago, probably in the Guardian, which whetted my appetite (though in retrospect I wish I hadn’t seen it because it gave away all of the developments and surprises). Masters, who has written two other books based on extraordinary lives – neither of which I’ve yet read – here takes on another challenge: the intimacy and mundane fascination of writing a biography of someone whose name he doesn’t even know. All he has of this person, whom he christens ‘I’, are 148 of their diaries, stretching from the 1950s to the 1990s, which his friends Richard Grove and Dido Davies have discovered in a Cambridge skip. Tantalised by his subject’s anonymity, Masters sets out on a noble quest to give ‘I’ a voice at last and to find out what he can about this figure, whose very ordinary outward life hides an inner world full of passion, urgency, rage and thwarted ambition.

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The Sun King Rises (2005): Yves Jégo and Denis Lépée

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Yves Jégo and Denis Lépée at Vaux le Vicomte

★★

A tale of intrigue at the court of Louis XIV

It’s no surprise, surely, that I asked to review this book. With the promise of intrigue and danger at the court of the Sun King, I thought I was in line for a delectable swashbuckler, which would doubtless be all the more interesting for my recent wanderings around Versailles. If only I had read the back of the book first! Here I would have learned that the intrigue was less courtly than esoteric, and that the book focused on ‘a religious brotherhood, guardian of a centuries-old secret’. Da Vinci Code-shaped alarm bells would have started to ring. However, I didn’t see this and, in the end, this strange hybrid of a book – half channelling Dan Brown, half Dumas – simply ended up feeling rather limp, for all its earnest attempts at adventure.

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The Girl on the Train (2015): Paula Hawkins

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★★★★

Oh boy. This is that rare thing: a bestseller that actually does live up to its reputation. Whatever you do, don’t start reading it if you have anything to do in the near future. As a contemporary thriller, it’s not the kind of book I’d normally read – but there’s been so much talk about it recently and, with news of a film adaptation in the works, I thought I’d better read it before it can be spoiled for me. I never got round to reading Gone Girl, for example, and now that’s been so widely discussed that there seems little point in starting on it. But The Girl on the Train was all that I expected it to be and more, because I bought it without any real idea of what it was. It’s the kind of book you read with your heart in your mouth and the world around you strangely muted as if you’re submerged beneath the water.

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Tipping the Velvet (1998): Sarah Waters

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★★★★

One of the most mortifying moments of my teenage years – and there’s plenty of competition, believe me – was watching the BBC’s adaptation of Tipping the Velvet with my parents at the age of seventeen. I remember being utterly shocked (I had a very sheltered upbringing), although since it’s rated 15 it really can’t have been that scandalous. I’ve read two of Sarah Waters’s books since then, but I’d never quite had the courage to go back to this: her first and most celebrated novel. However, I found it in Oxfam yesterday, decided to give it a go at last, and have devoured it at high speed. Beautifully written, evocative, sexy and playfully transgressive, it deserves its status as a modern classic. I could claim I timed this post specifically to coincide with Pride, but that’s just a happy coincidence.

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The Improbability of Love (2015): Hannah Rothschild

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★★★

I’ve said before that my reaction to books is often affected by the context in which they’re read. Unfortunately Hannah Rothschild’s Improbability of Love will always be associated, for me, with the bleakness of my country’s vote to leave the EU. I can’t go into my feelings in depth here; I only hope that we find a way to mitigate the disastrous divisions in our society and to keep our relationship with Europe strong. In the meantime, we just have to keep our chins up and hope for the best. And so; back to the book.

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