Category: Books

Frenchman’s Creek (1941): Daphne du Maurier

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★★★★

I haven’t read that many of Daphne du Maurier’s books, and in fact hadn’t read any at all until I borrowed Rebecca and Jamaica Inn from the library a couple of years ago. Both captivated me (although The House on the Strand, which I borrowed next, left me rather cold) and I decided to track down Frenchman’s Creek to complement them. I could have predicted that I would love it. Featuring pirates, cavaliers, disguise, adventure and a good dose of old-fashioned romance, it was a self-indulgent joy to read and has entered the Idle Woman Swashbuckling Hall of Fame.

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Red Seas Under Red Skies (2007): Scott Lynch

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★★★★½

The Gentleman Bastards: Book II

A debut novel like The Lies of Locke Lamora sets an uncomfortably high standard for its sequel to follow. It was witty, complex and gritty, while still managing to be warm and engaging, and it was one of the most unexpectedly enjoyable books I’ve read this year. I half-dreaded picking up Red Seas Under Red Skies; but I needn’t have worried. Lynch has done it again. To be precise, he’s managed to come up with something even more fun and extravagant than the first book.

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The Lions of Al-Rassan (1995): Guy Gavriel Kay

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★★★★★

There are some books which leave you sitting in silence after you’ve finished them, staring into space. This is one of them. You may remember that I’ve mentioned it before: it’s one of my favourites; and so, when I heard that Helen was planning to read it for the first time, I asked if she would mind me re-reading it along with her. It hasn’t lost any of its impact. Poignant and powerful, it’s a sweeping medieval epic, tempered with nostalgia for two lost worlds: a glorious civilisation already on its deathbed; and a utopia of religious tolerance, which perhaps only ever existed in the imagination.

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The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry (2012): Rachel Joyce

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★★★★

A couple of months ago, Isi invited me to be part of the jury for her English Review Competition and the winning entry was a review of this book by Ale. I hadn’t read The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry at the time and Ale whetted my appetite so much that I decided to buy it. And so, during a business trip to Amsterdam this week (where I renewed my acquaintance with Gerard Bicker at the Rijksmuseum), I decided it was time to rectify the omission.

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Temeraire (2006): Naomi Novik

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★★★★

Temeraire: Book I

You know, it’s amazing how many different ways you can say, ‘Hornblower with dragons’. You can say it rather dismissively, as I did before actually reading the book, or you can say it with great excitement and added exclamation marks, as I did on finishing it. This was one of those cases where I’d made assumptions about a book beforehand – only to enjoy it much, much more than I’d expected to.

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Fludd (1989): Hilary Mantel

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★★★½

As I started this book, I had troubling flashbacks to my GCSE studies of Hard Times. The village of Fetherhoughton, where the action of Fludd takes place, has grown up around the cotton mill industry and a grimmer, bleaker, more relentlessly depressing place would be hard to find. Founded in the smoke and soot of the Industrial Revolution, the village has managed to avoid all the benefits of modernity and, in the 1950s, maintains a kind of moorland isolation.

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Captain Fracasse (1863): Théophile Gautier

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★★½

Ladies and gentlemen, it’s time for the random swashbuckler of the week! I had never heard of this book, which was recommended automatically to me by LibraryThing, but since the Kindle version was free, I couldn’t resist. It turns out that Captain Fracasse was Gautier’s third full-length novel, published in 1863, nine years before his death. It’s a romantic romp through a picturesque vision of 17th-century France, following a troupe of commedia dell’ arte actors travelling from Gascony to Paris, with a poverty-stricken young nobleman in their midst.

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The Pendragon Legend (1934): Antal Szerb

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★★★

The Hungarian Antal Szerb is probably best known to most of us for Journey by Moonlight (which I began earlier in the year and need to come back to), but The Pendragon Legend is his first novel, written after he’d spent a year studying in England in 1929-30. It’s an adventurous parody of the kind of Gothic thrillers popular at the time; but, for me, it never quite managed to transcend its sources and become a satisfying story in its own right. I felt it had the enthusiastic and uneven feel of a writer trying to find his feet.

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The Lies of Locke Lamora (2006): Scott Lynch

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★★★★

The Gentleman Bastards: Book I

I must begin by saying that the rather fabulous cover you see here is not the cover of the edition I’ve borrowed from the library, which is instead one of the standardised bright yellow books in the Gollancz 50 series. Although the title had caught my attention on previous visits – alluringly alliterative, it tumbles off the tongue very nicely – the blank yellow cover had never quite drawn me in. This time, however, I caved in. And thank God I did. Needless to say, if the library copy had had the cover you see here, I’d have got round to reading this several months ago. I’m just not the kind of girl who can resist shadowy figures with tricorn hats and swords, against semi-fantastical Venetian backdrops.

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Restoration (1989): Rose Tremain

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★★★★

I’ve wanted to get my hands on this ever since reading Music and Silence several years ago and it has definitely been worth the wait. Tremain has just published a sequel to Restoration, titled Merivel: A Man of His Time, so I thought I’d better catch up before everyone starts telling me how wonderful it is. I don’t know her work that well – Music and Silence and Restoration are her only novels that I’ve read to date – but in both cases I’ve been struck by her shrewdness, her poise and her sheer skill as a writer.

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