pamelad keeps on reading in 2024

Hi everyone. I'm Pam, a retired secondary and tertiary Science teacher, living in Melbourne. The pandemic was an excuse to spend most of the day reading, so my goal this year is to read fewer books and go out more. Another goal is to read some of the long, worthy books in my library.

January

1. Becoming Kirrali Lewis by Jane Harrison
2. Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata
3. Twilight by Frank Danby
4. The Shuttle by Frances Hodgson Burnett
5. The Visitors by Jane Harrison
6. Dragonwyck by Anya Seton
7. The House of Doors by Tan Twan Eng
8. Cassandra at the Wedding by Dorothy Baker
9. The Casuarina Tree by Somerset Maugham
10. The King's General by Daphne du Maurier
11. The Secret of the Lost Pearls by Darcie Wilde

February

12. Medical Downfall of the Tudors by Sylvia Barbara Soberton
13. Curriculum Vitae by Muriel Spark
14. Love and Virtue by Diana Reid
15. Kirkland Revels by Victoria Holt
16. Abomination by Ashley Goldberg
17. Miss Morton and the English House Party Murder by Catherine Lloyd
18. Miss Morton and the Spirits of the Underworld by Catherine Lloyd
19. A Curious Beginning by Deanna Raybourn
20. A Journey from this World to the Next by Henry Fielding
21. Tension by E. M. Delafield

Films

Dragonwyck
Barbary Coast
Jamaica Inn
Perfect Understanding
Pygmalion

March

22. We by Yevgeny Zamyatin
23. The Secret of the Lady's Maid by Darcie Wilde
24. The Heart's Invisible Furies by John Boyne
25. What Angels Fear by C. S. Harris
26. The Green Road by Anne Enright
27. The Appeal by Janice Hallett
28. The Cuckoo's Child by Marjorie Eccles
29. Spring Garden by Tomoka Shibasaki
30. Foster by Claire Keegan

April

31. The Weather at Tregulla by Stella Gibbons
32. Deception aka If I Were You by Joan Aiken
33. Castle Barebane by Joan Aiken
34. Madam by Mrs Oliphant
35. My Phantoms by Gwendoline Riley
36. The Art of Love aka Villa on the Riviera by Elizabeth Edmondson
37. The Frozen Lake by Elizabeth Edmonston
38. Study for Obedience by Sarah Bernstein
39. Best in Class: Essential Wisdom from Real Student Writing by Tim Clancy
40. A Reputation Dies by Alice Chetwynd Ley
41. Factory Girls by Michelle Gallen
42. Voyage of Innocence by Elizabeth Edmonson

Films

Piccadilly (silent starring Anna May Wong)
The Quiet Girl (based on Foster)

May

43. Strange Weather in Tokyo by Hiromi Kawakami
44. Lady of Mallow by Dorothy Eden
45. Ravenscroft by Dorothy Eden
46. The Judgement of Eve by May Sinclair
47. Darkwater by Dorothy Eden
48. What Feasts at Night by T. Kingfisher
49. Winterwood by Dorothy Eden
50. Another Man's Murder by Mignon G. Eberhart
51. The Cases of Susan Dare by Mignon G. Eberhart
52. The American Heiress by Dorothy Eden
53. Whistle for the Crows by Dorothy Eden
54. William: An Englishman by Cicely Hamilton
55. Speak to Me of Love by Dorothy Eden
56. The Enormous Room by E. E. Cummings
57. The Chinaman by Friedrich Glauser
58. Bel Lamington by D. E. Stevenson
59. The Innocents by Margery Sharp
60. The Devil's Flute Murders by Seishi Yokomizo
61. The Weeping Ash by Joan Aiken
62. Death on Gokumon Island by Seishi Yokomizo
63. The Devil in the Flesh by Raymond Radiguet

June

64. All Our Yesterdays by Natalia Ginzburg
65. Under the Net by Iris Murdoch
66. Jamaica Inn by Daphne Du Maurier
67. Fever by Friedrich Glauser
68. A Very Private School by Charles Spencer
69. Impact of Evidence: A Welsh Borders Mystery by Carol Carnac
70. Dom Casmurro by Machado de Assis
71. The Mysterious Mr Badman by W. F. Harvey
72. Someone from the Past by Margot Bennett

July

73. Zazie in the Metro by Raymond Queneau
74. Murder after Christmas by Rupert Latimer
75. Solito by Javier Zamora
76. The Theft of the Iron Dogs by E C R Lorac
77. The Deadly Travellers by Dorothy Eden
78. Lamb to the Slaughter by Dorothy Eden
79. Bride by Candlelight by Dorothy Eden
80. Bridge of Fear by Dorothy Eden

August

81. Guy Deverell by Sheridan LeFanu
82. Cat's Prey by Dorothy Eden
83. Voices in the Evening by Natalia Ginzburg
84. All Systems Red: the Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells
85. Sagittarius by Natalia Ginzburg
86. Whatever by Michel Houellebecq
87. Mona in the Promised Land by Gish Jen
88. The Maid by Nita Prose
89. The Christmas Appeal by Janice Hallett
90. Case in the Clinic by E. C. R. Lorac

September

91. Shrines of Gaiety by Kate Atkinson
92. Night Fall by Joan Aiken
93. Vintage 1954 by Antoine Laurain
94. The Castaways by Elin Hildebrand
95. The Last Anniversary by Liane Moriarty

October

96. The Last Word by Elly Griffiths
97. Meet Mr Mulliner by P. G. Wodehouse
98. Merivel: a man of his time by Rose Tremain
99. Absolutely & Forever by Rose Tremain
100. Travellers in the Third Reich by Julia Boyle
101. Safe Passage by Ida Cook
102. Bleeding Heart Yard by Elly Griffths
103. Three Wishes by Liane Moriarty
104. The Road to the City by Natalia Ginzburg
105. The Body in the Bunker by Herbert Adams
106. The Judas Kiss by Herbert Adams

November

107. Sixpenny Holding by Margaret Scutt
108. The Secret Countess a.k.a A Countess Below Stairs by Eva Ibbotson
109. Nothing Like Blood by Leo Bruce
110. The Fifth Man by Manning Coles
111. The Mystery of Mrs Blencarrow by Margaret Oliphant

December

112. Case Without a Corpse by Leo Bruce
113. The Vegetarian by Han Kang
114. The Village of Eight Graves by Seishi Yokomizo
115. Small Bomb at Dimperley by Lissa Evans
116. Death at the Durbar by Arjun Raj Gaind
117. The Real Bridgerton by Catherine Curzon
118. The Blue Santo Murder Mystery by Margaret Armstrong
119. Greygallows by Barbara Michaels
120. The Pride of the Peacock by Victoria Holt
121. Waiting for Willa by Dorothy Eden
122. The Girl from Paris by Joan Aiken
123. The Editor's Wife by Clare Chambers

1. Becoming Kirrali Lewis by Jane Harrison

I borrowed this from the library without realising that it was a YA book, but decided to read it anyway. Harrison is an Australian indigenous writer and this is a coming of age novel, set in 1985 with flashbacks to the sixties. Kirrali Lewis was adopted and brought up in a small country town in Victoria where she was the only Aboriginal person. She's never met another indigenous person, or encountered any overt racism, but that changes on her first day at Melbourne University, where she is enrolled to study law.

Over the course of the book Kirrali becomes involved in the Aboriginal community, starts to explore her heritage and traces her birth parents. The content is interesting, but it's more a sequence of teachable moments than a work of literature. I could see it as a set text at about year nine.

One of my aunts had the same ambition to read less after the first couple pandemic years, though at the start I think she enjoyed giving in to her desire to read all day. Looking forward to seeing your reads again!

2. Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata

The first part of Snow Country was published in 1935, but Kawabata continued to add and revise, with the final version being published in 1948. The introduction by the translator, Edward Seidensticker, is informative and well worth reading.

Shimamura is a married man from Tokyo, travelling to a hot spring in the snow country to rekindle a romance with a young geisha, Komako. He is a wealthy dilettante, a useless and superficial man. She is generous and passionate, with an aura of innocence despite her profession, but a hot springs geisha is little better than a prostitute and she is already of the road to decay. She has fallen in love with Shimamura, despite knowing that the love of a geisha for a client is futile. A theme of decay runs through the book, with the seedy surroundings of the hot springs and the poverty of the nearby villages contrasting with the majesty of the mountains. The lives of the geisha are almost feudal, a remnant of traditional Japan that cannot survive.

Kawabata's descriptions are poetic and cinematic, starting with Shimamura's night train journey into the snow country. He is fascinated by a young woman whose face is a reflection in the window, through which Shimamura watches the landscape move by. Initially I was impatient with what I saw as digressions that interrupted the narrative, but realised that you can't read quickly as though this is a straightforward story, and have to stop and picture the scenes that unfold.

>10 pamelad: Great review, I've been afraid to tackle this one with all the digressions and pacing. I'll be sure to slow down and enjoy the scenes when I eventually get to this one.

Hi Pam.
Thanks for setting up the group again this year.
I am looking forward to reading your reviews, and will be interested to see how many fewer book you read this year.

>1 pamelad: I can't seem to set my list up correctly. don't know what I did wrong last year, but this year I'm listed as 100 books. You were able to help me last year, could you bail me out again and change it to Janice reads??? I promise to do better next year. Thanks in advance. And if you can't, that's OK. I do know which is my list.

>11 stretch: Thank you. I've read The Sound of the Mountain and Thousand Cranes as well, and Snow Country was the least straightforward. But worth reading, so I hope you enjoy it.

>12 Eyejaybee: Hi James. I've resumed some pre-pandemic out of the house activities and even caught a plane to Queensland, so am on the way to breaking the sit on the couch and read habit.

>13 jbegab: Done!

The atmosphere of Snow Country was so fantastic, but I think in some way has made it hard for me to want to tackle anything else by Kawabata.

>14 pamelad: Thank you.

>15 mabith: It was hard to read because it was so bleak. I'm thinking of reading The Old Capital, which labfs just reviewed here.

I'm still full time working, and with the pandemic I read less, because less commuting. (My workmates all think I'm a bit strange that I actually like the occasional commute! :)

I think reading too much is a good problem to have! I've been trying to get back to some more pre-pandemic things as well, more along the lines of theatre and concerts and movies than travel, but I'm hoping for a nice big adventure overseas next summer. I'd better get my passport renewed!!

3. Twilight by Frank Danby

Frank Danby is the nom de plume of Julia Frankau, who wrote mainly of the London Jewish community. Her books were popular, and even scandalous, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This is her last book, written in 1916 when she was dying of consumption.

"Twilight" is my swan song. I shall never write another novel. A year ago I fell into a consumption chiefly treated by morphia. I knew my De Quincey pretty well; perhaps this gave me this idea of writing my dreams. "Twilight" was written between 11 and 1 at night, after the second and before the third half-grain injection of morphia. Perhaps it is morbid; perhaps, being a genuine personal experience, it is only interesting. All my life has been happy, successful; the end has become hard and unexpected. Night and day I wish it were over, but it lags.

The only thing that vexes me in dying is the thought that my book was not brought out in time for me to read the notices. The extraordinary fluctuations of the effects of the drug seem to absorb my consciousness. I cannot write it, though I had projected an essay called "Drug Dreams." I have twitchings in my hands which prohibit holding a pen or pencil. I am told these are entirely due to morphia and omnipom. I have never been able to dictate essays or stories; thought has always seemed to flow through the pen.

To my dear American public, good-bye.

The successful novelist, Jane Vevaseur, has escaped London for a rented house on the outskirts of a small seaside village. She is suffering from neuritis and has been nursed lovingly by her sister, but wants to get away from all the care and attention and have some independence. The house she rents, Carbies, is where another writer, Margaret Capel, died twelve years earlier, and the doctor her sister sends to call, Peter Kennedy, was in love with Mrs Capel. Margaret had fallen in love with her publisher, Gabriel Stanton, but was egotistical enough to simultaneously encourage and repel Kennedy when Stanton was not about. She was waiting for her decree nisi after a gruelling and humiliating court battle with a husband she loathed. Jane has uncovered Margaret's letters and diary and is writing a book about her. She talks with the dead Margaret late at night after taking opium. Margaret's story takes over the book and Jane makes only brief appearances as the narrator.

I was fascinated by this character-driven book and recommend it.

>1 pamelad: how did I miss this thread?

Starred.

>18 wookiebender: I hope the OS adventure goes ahead and enjoy the films, concerts and theatre in 2024. A friend and I cancelled our first ever trip to England in 2020, and plan to get there next year.

>20 fuzzi: Welcome!

4. The Shuttle by Frances Hodgson Burnett

The Shuttle is the ship carrying passengers between New York and London, and its also the tool that weaves the connection between America and England. From New York, American heiresses travel to England to find titled husbands. From England, men with noble names, debts and impoverished estates seek wives with the money to support them in lives of aristocratic leisure. One such parasite is Sir Nigel Anstruthers, who marries Rosy, the sweet, naive and not very bright eldest daughter of Reuben S. Vanderpoel, a multi-millionaire. Once Sir Nigel has Rosy in England, he cuts the ties between his wife and her family and makes her life a misery. Twelve years later Betty, Rosy's younger sister, who is a much stronger character than Rosy, and vastly more intelligent, sets off to find her sister.

The hero is Mount Dunstan, an impoverished earl who cannot declare his love fro Betty because he has nothing to offer her. He owns a magnificent, crumbling estate, but his forebears left him no funds to maintain it. His father and elder brother were so notoriously dissolute that they had to flee overseas to avoid retribution for a crime that is never specified. They died there, and Mount Dunstan has never been accepted by society because he is assumed to be just as dissolute.

I enjoyed this leisurely read, but at times found it too slow and too melodramatic, with a section of waffle in the middle where the hero and heroine are pining for a love that can never be. But overall, it's an interesting depiction of the times with lots of detail about the legal rights of married women regarding marital violence, divorce, inheritance and the custody of children, and a realistic, but not graphic, depiction of a marriage to a violent and controlling husband and its effects on the wife.

5. The Visitors by Jane Harrison

This novel began as an idea more than a decade and a half ago. Its first iteration was as a play, "The Visitors", which was developed during a 2011 writing residency at the Indigenous studies Centre at Monash University, on Wurundjeri country.....The play was workshopped at the 2013 Yellamundie Festival on Gadigal country, which .........allowed me to connect with representatives from the local community............

The novel was written on Wadawurrung country, where I live. This book is a reimagining of the events of late January 1788 from the First Nations' perspective, but many of the details were drawn from accounts by members of the first fleet and historical accounts of the first contact.

Lawrence, who is nineteen and will be a man when he completes the last stages of his initiation, is the first to see the ships on the horizon. The Messengers are sent to the neighbouring mobs, and a meeting of the Elders is called. They travel to Warrane, on the Bay, where Gary, a senior Warrane Elder, chairs the meeting. This is a strange blending of the historical and contemporary: the Elders are dressed in suits and ties, to mark the dignity of the occasion; Lawrence and the Elders have English names that were common in the thirties and forties; the meeting is run along the lines of the awful meetings we're familiar with from our own jobs. The purpose of the meeting is to decide what to do about the ships. Should the Elders welcome these people to the country according to tradition, or should they declare war?

Interspersed through the action are descriptions of the country, and descriptions of of Aboriginal culture and practices. It's well worth reading.

6. Dragonwyck by Anya Seton

Miranda Wells believes she is destined for a more than a life of hard work as the wife of a small farmer, so when a distant cousin offers her a position as a governess, she manages to persuade her stern, religious father to let her take it up. Nicholas Van Ryn, her cousin, and his mansion, Dragonwyck, exceed Miranda's fiction-fed fantasies and she settles into a life of luxury. However, while Nicholas is considerate, his wife Johanna is determined to keep Miranda in her place. Johanna is a sad disappointment to Nicholas: she's lethargic and greedy, she's carrying a lot of weight and, most importantly, instead of producing an heir, she gave birth to an uninteresting daughter. The young, thoughtless Miranda adopts Nicholas's point of view and feels sorry that such a dynamic, attractive man should have such a dud of a wife.

Seton throws us plenty of hints about Van Ryn's true character, so when Miranda falls in love with him we're worried for her. With good reason!

I love a good Gothic, and really enjoyed Dragonwyck, which was set in Connecticut and New York in the 1840s. While I'm familiar with the time period in Australia and Britain, I knew little about 1840s America. Seton provides quite a lot of historical information about the issues of the time.

I borrowed the book from the Internet Archive.

7. The House of Doors by Tan Twan Eng

In 1921 Somerset Maugham is in Penang, staying with his old university friend Robert, a well-known, successful lawyer, and Robert's much younger wife Lesley. Maugham is accompanied by Gerald, his secretary and lover, having left his demanding wife in London. His is just one of the adulterous, unhappy marriages in the book. Lesley is trying to trace Sun Yat Sen, and the implication is that she had an affair with him in 1910, when he spent time in Penang raising money and support for a revolution in China. The story switches between 1910 and 1921, and occasionally to South Africa in the forties, where Robert and Lesley had moved on Robert's retirement.

Maugham is writing the short stories that will end up in The Casuarina Tree. He is notorious for writing about real people who have shared their stories with him, so thinly disguised that they are easily recognisable, so when Lesley shares her own story with Maugham she is prepared to be disowned by the British community in Malaya. Another story Lesley tells Maugham is of her friend, Ethel Proudlock, who shot her lover. This real case is the basis of Maugham's play and story The Letter, which was subsequently made into the Bette Davis film.

There's a lot going on in this book, perhaps too much. The themes include Sun Yat Sen's revolution; the British laws against homosexuality and their impact on people's lives; the Ethel Proudfoot murder trial; the prejudice of the British towards the Chinese and other races. I liked the writing style which was straightforward, perhaps after the style of Somerset Maugham, and the book held my attention all the way through.

>25 pamelad: Thanks for your review Pam. I have this book and a couple of others by this author, and I also like Maugham's writing style based on my reading of The Painted Veil a couple of years ago. So I'm raising this up my TBR list.

Thanks for the help with the pictures.

>27 swimmergirl1: No worries. Glad it worked.

8. Cassandra at the Wedding by Dorothy Baker

Cassandra and Judith are identical twins. Judith is getting married but Cassandra knows that her sister is making a mistake and is ignoring her destiny, which is to be tied forever to Cassandra. The twins are special people with no need for others, Cassandra believes, so she makes a mercy dash to her family's Californian citrus farm to stop the wedding.

The first section of this short book is written from Cassandra's perspective. Since Judith left their shared apartment in San Francisco to move to New York, Cassandra has stopped eating in favour of drinking and is taking an assortment of pills. She is seeing an analyst and contemplating jumping from the Golden Gate Bridge. Cassandra is a highly intelligent, neurotic, self-absorbed mess but she's not bleak; she's erudite and entertaining.

The second section is Judith's and we see how skewed Cassandra's perspective is. Though devoted to her twin, Judith has no intention of spending her life with Cassandra. Her fiance, whose name Cassandra persists in forgetting, is a newly-qualified doctor, and it's just as well.

The other members of the family are the girls' father, a hard-drinking ex-philosophy professor who ignores the mundane details of daily life, and their grandmother, an affectionate, conventional woman who is doing her best to fill the gap left by the death two years ago of the twins' much-loved, eccentric mother.

I enjoyed this idiosyncratic, entertaining book. It was first published in 1962.

9. The Casuarina Tree by Somerset Maugham

In The House of Doors Maugham is writing the short stories that will be eventually published in this volume. I started with The Letter, the last story in the collection, because it is about the Ethel Proudfoot case, then went back to the beginning. Apart form the story P&), which had a gleam of hope, these are gloomy stories about British colonists in Asia. Some of them take wives from the local population; some become alcoholics; some go to ludicrous lengths to maintain British standards in jungle outposts. The postscript castigates the British community for assuming that the characters in these stories are real people.

I like Maugham's writing and am engaged by his descriptions of travel in the Asia of the twenties, and his character studies of the people he meets, but he seems to dislike almost everyone, which becomes wearing after a while.

>26 john257hopper: Tan Twan Eng takes a kinder view than Somerset Maugham does!

>29 pamelad: Thanks Pam, I have this one too, so these may be next two reads over my current book :).

10. The King's General by Daphne du Maurier

This historical romance is set during the British Civil War, about which I knew little more than this quote from 1066 and All That:

With the ascension of Charles I to the throne we come at last to the Central Period of English History (not to be confused with the Middle Ages, of course), consisting in the utterly memorable Struggle between the Cavaliers (Wrong but Wromantic) and the Roundheads (Right but Repulsive).

The book begins with the crippled narrator, Honor Harris, reflecting on the war and on her love affair with Richard Grenvile, the King's General. Honor lives with her brother Robin, who is just as sad and disappointed as she is, on the charity of Jonathon Rashleigh, her brother-in-law. Du Maurier painstakingly researched the Civil War, so the historical background is authentic, and many of the characters are real people, including Honor, Richard and Jonathon. But perhaps only their names are real, because du Maurier has imagined their actions, thoughts and motivations as though they are her contemporaries. She is writing during WWII, which may explain the gloom and hopelessness of the book. I found it a difficult read, not because it was badly written, because it isn't, but because of the unrelenting misery. Because Honor is so resigned to unhappiness she makes a dull narrator. And because the romance between Richard and Honor was doomed almost from the start, it's hard to care about it.

There are gothic elements in that the bulk of the book is set at Menabilly, the centuries-old house still owned in du Maurier's day by the Rashleigh family. She based the Manderley of Rebecca on Menabilly. The house has hidden passages and a secret room, which are integral to the plot. As already mentioned, there's a central romance as well, but I wouldn't classify the book as a gothic romance. It's mainly an historical novel, and I thought that the historical and romantic themes did not marry well.

Pros: I learned a lot about aspects of the Civil War, particularly in Cornwall.
Cons: It's long and miserable, and the characters don't come to life.

>31 pamelad: I love Daphne du Maurier but haven't read this yet. Not sure if I will yet, though, given your view of its atmosphere.

>32 john257hopper: I might have been unfair. It's about a war that was lost, so the gloom is understandable.

11. The Secret of the Lost Pearls by Darcie Wilde

A light, trivial and entertaining read.

Rosalind Thorne, who since her father's desertion has been supporting herself as a useful woman. She takes on all sorts of tasks, from training newcomers to manage in society to solving murders. An old school friend, Bethany Douglas, has employed her to investigate the theft of an extremely valuable and unusual pearl necklace. Once staying with the Douglas family, Rosalind becomes aware that the theft of the pearls is just one of the disasters confronting the Douglases.

Rosalind's romance with Adam Harkness, the Bow street runner, is moving along slowly. Adam, who is becoming disgusted by political interference and corruption that affect his work, helps Rosalind solve the crime. Crimes, actually, because they snowball.

My predictions for this series:
1. Adam will leave the Bow Street Runners and become a private investigator.
2. Rosalind and Adam will work together as private investigators.
3. After much angst, because she has never wanted to marry, Rosalind will marry Adam.

>33 pamelad: sounds good fun!

https://www.librarything.com/topic/357752

People here are discussing films on Kanopy.

I've been watching a few oldies:

Dragonwyck 1946
Barbary Coast 1935
Jamaica Inn 1939

>35 pamelad: I recently rewatched an old B&W favorite, The Big Sleep with Bogart and Bacall. I understood the plot better after reading the book, but it's not necessary to appreciate this film noir.

>36 fuzzi: It would be well worth another view, so I'll look for it. I've read the book, but not for ages, so it could be time for a re-read.

I just watched Perfect Understanding, 1933 with Gloria Swanson as a naive young woman (!) newly wed to Laurence Olivier. It seemed so promising, but was a disappointment. Lifeless.

The other three I mentioned >35 pamelad: were entertaining and worth a look.The picture quality is good but the sound isn't of the same standard, so I turned the captions on for Barbary coast and Jamaica Inn. Vincent Price speaks very clearly!

>37 pamelad: Vincent Price plays out of character in another favorite noir film of mine, Laura.

>38 fuzzi: Laura is another film I'll keep an eye out for. I've read the book and seen the film, but it has been years.

I've just watched Pygmalion with Lesley Howard and Wendy Hiller (1938). It sticks to George Bernard Shaw's play much more closely than does My Fair Lady, is funnier, and is not a romance. No sane woman would want to marry the Henry Higgins portrayed by Lesley Howard. Just to make that completely clear, here is Shaw's essay on "What Happened Afterwards."

12. Medical Downfall of the Tudors by Sylvia Barbara Soberton

I am familiar only with snippets of British history, few of them gained from primary or secondary education. We hopped around from country to country and century to century until, if you wanted to study science, you had to drop History altogether. I found the Medical Downfall of the Tudors to be both interesting and informative, but I wonder what anyone who was more familiar with British history would make of it.

Lots of irregular menstrual cycles, stillborn babies, infant deaths. Henry VIII was quite possibly passing along something that caused the still births. Not much evidence though. Mainly speculation, except on how hazardous he was to wives. Brutal people, the Tudors.

And add to your grim list Mary's phantom pregnancies. I studied The Tudors all the way through high school and university. It took you just one book to sum them all up, "brutal."

13. Curriculum Vitae by Muriel Spark

Half of this short autobiography is taken up with Spark's reminiscences of her childhood and the rest skates through the years up to her first novel, published when she was forty. She spends much of the second half paying back the men who disappointed her. I think that, if you want to continue to enjoy Spark's books, the less you know the better.

14. Love and Virtue by Diana Reid

Michaela and Eve are first year students, living at Foundation College and attending lectures at Sydney University. Michaela's father died when she was a child and her mother has supported them ever since, so there isn't a lot of money to spare and Michaela, who is from Canberra, is grateful to have won a scholarship to Foundation, which pays her accommodation and board. Eve, in the room next door, also has a scholarship but its value to her is the prestige, because she's certainly not short of cash. Most of the other characters come from backgrounds like Eve's: expensive private schools, family mansions on the harbour, magnificent beach houses, holidays in Europe. The girls live at Foundation and the boys live at St Thomas's. (Less privileged students live at home with their parents and do not feature in this story, which is a problem to me.) They're away from the scrutiny of their parents and are doing a lot of socialising, drinking and sex. It's the combination of booze, sex and naivete that causes the drama that ensues, helped along by the misogynistic culture of the men's colleges and private schools, and the competitive drinking of O Week. (Orientation Week for first-years - lots of social activities involving vast quantities of alcohol.)

Michaela is initially madly impressed by Eve, who is two years older and always the centre of attention, and she thinks they have a close friendship so she confides in her, which could be a mistake. Is Eve the caring person she makes herself out to be?

Overall, this is a pretty good book with a few iffy bits including an affair between Michaela and a philosophy lecturer. The relationship doesn't ring true. The central theme is the issue of consent, which is seen quite differently by Michaela and Eve. Michaela is trying to puzzle things out. Unlike Eve, she accepts that making mistakes is part of being human.

15. Kirkland Revels by Victoria Holt

Catherine's young husband, Gabriel, dies only a week after their return to his home, Kirkland Revels. The family thinks it's suicide, but Catherine doesn't believe it. Gabriel had been dreading his return home, and his fear was linked to the ruined Kirkland Abbey, not far from Kirkland Revels.

This is a classic Gothic: a spectre in monks robes, a family history of suicides, hidden passages, a strange aunt, a mad mother, an untrustworthy mother-in-law, multiple men with motives for getting rid of Gabriel, the heir. Catherine is in danger and doesn't know who she can trust. Safer to trust no one!

Victoria Holt writes a good gothic. I enjoyed this one.

>44 pamelad: I haven't read any of her (Victoria Holt) books in a long time. Thanks for the reminder. I know I used to enjoy them.

16. Abomination by Ashley Goldberg

Told in alternating chapters from the perspectives of Ezra, a non-observant Jew, and his school-friend Yonatan, who is frum (strictly follows religious observances). They last met twenty years ago at Ezra's Bar Mitzvah. Up until then they had been close, but Rabbi Hirsch from the yeshiva both boys attended had been accused of molesting his primary school students, so Ezra's father had withdrawn Ezra from the school. Yonatan and his family were far more enmeshed in the Orthodox community where his father was an important and well-respected rabbi, and the community closed ranks. Hirsch's superiors spirited him out of the country so that he would not have to stand trial.

Yonatan is now a rabbi, married to the daughter of a highly regarded Talmudic scholar. He believed that, as much as possible, a Yehudi should live as their European ancestors did. On Shabbat, a fur-trimmed shtreimel on your head, your feet stockinged and a long black bekishe hanging past your knees. Ezra is a lawyer, working for a government department, where he subjugates his own values in order to implement the policies of a government he does not agree with.

It has been twenty years since Hirsch was accused of child abuse, but he has finally been extradited from Israel and is back in Melbourne to stand trial. Avraham Kliger, the brother of one of the victims, took the case to the police, and has spent years campaigning for Hirsch's prosecution. As a result he and his family were banished from the community. Yonatan is now questioning his beliefs and Ezra is falling apart. They meet again at a rally organised by Kliger.

This was really interesting, with lots of information about Orthodox Jewish beliefs and practices. The author drew on the reports from the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, which was set up by Julia Gillard's Labor Government as a result of the activism of people like Manny Waks, Kliger's real-life counterpart. Waks, who was abused by two members of staff at the Melbourne Yeshiva Centre, was once a member of the Chabad-Lubavitch Orthodox Jewish Hasidic community in Melbourne. He and his family were ostracised for making the abuse public.

Abomination won the Debut Fiction Award at the 72nd National Jewish Book Awards, a US award. It's quite a Melbourne book though, set in inner-city Carlton and the south-eastern suburbs where the Hasidic community lives.

Melbourne's eruv, one of the largest in the world thanks to urban sprawl, was ''built'' in 1997, enclosing St Kilda East and Caulfield within a continuous wire boundary. Later it was expanded to include Bentleigh, Carnegie and Moorabbin. The Council of Orthodox Synagogues is responsible for maintaining the eruv, and it is funded by a levy on synagogue members. https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/cable-loop-lets-melbournes-orthodox-...

>45 jbegab: I've read a few Victoria Holts lately and have enjoyed them all. I've borrowed some of the out-of-print ones from The Open Library. Enjoy!

17. Miss Morton and the English House Party Murder and 18. Miss Morton and the Spirits of the Underworld by Catherine Lloyd

The first two books in a new series.

Miss Morton and the English House Party Murder

Miss Morton is actually Lady Caroline, but she doesn't use her title because she earns her own living as a companion. Her employer is the wealthy factory owner, Mrs Frogerton, who has employed Caroline to launch the well-dowered, beautiful Dorothy Frogerton into the ton. Caroline's aunt, Lady Eleanor, has invited her niece to a house party, and under sufferance has invited the Frogertons too. But something is very wrong at Lady Eleanor's home: the butler is missing and there is a suspicion that some of Lady Eleanor's guests are implicated in his disappearance. Then a body is discovered. Mrs Frogerton and Caroline investigate.

Mrs Frogerton, Caroline and Dorothy are the ongoing series characters. Another is the local doctor, the brusque and overly honest Doctor Harris. I predict that he and Caroline will fall in love but they are nowhere near it yet. I enjoyed the book, although as a mystery it is a bit of a mess.

Miss Morton and the Spirits of the Underworld

Mrs Frogerton has become interested in spiritualism and is attending seances run by Madame Lavinia. Concerned that her employer is donating too much money, Caroline attends a seance to see for herself. She invites Dr Harris as a back-up. Madame Lavinia reveals knowledge that leads Dr Harris to believe she could be a blackmailer, so he and Caroline return the next day, only to find Madame Lavinia dead. Again, Mrs Frogerton and Caroline investigate. Mrs Frogerton is an entertaining character, and so is her strong-minded daughter Dotty, but Caroline is a bit bland. Perhaps she will improve as the series goes on.

Once again, I enjoyed the book but the mystery was sub-par.

19. A Curious Beginning by Deanna Raybourn

The first book in the Veronica Speedwell Victorian mystery series. Veronica owes a debt to Barbara Michaels' Amelia Peabody - the forthright personality, the competence, the adventurousness, the odd, practical clothing. Unlike Amelia, she's aggressively charmless and not at all a woman of Victorian times. She has been brought up by two elderly women who moved around a lot, and has always believed that she was a foundling, but on the death of her remaining guardian she becomes the centre of a nefarious plot and is in danger of kidnapping and possible murder. A kind Teutonic baron saves her from a kidnapping attempt and delivers her to his trusted friend Stoker, a man with a desperate past and many secrets that will be revealed over the series.

I didn't like this much because it consisted of a series of exciting but irrelevant events. Why do travel with a circus run by a resentful Siamese twin? Seems to be a lot of risk for not much reward, and doesn't add anything to the plot. Couldn't the author come up with a more likely mystery father than the Prince of Wales? I just groaned.

Raybourn has written another series, Lady Julia Grey. I'll give it a try in the hope that it's better than this one.

This book is available in KoboPlus.

According to this article in the Conversation it's the centenary of Yevgeny Zamatin's We.

I'm contemplating reading it again, because it's a very good book. Here's my review from 2011.

We by Yevegeny Zamyatin

I don't read a lot of science fiction, but this one is a classic. Like Doctor Zhivago it was banned in Russia, smuggled out, and published in Europe.

Zamyatin's book is a dystopian satire of life in Russia after the revolution. It is set 600 years in the future, in the land of One State, where the citizens are happy because they have no freedom. Where there is no freedom there is no crime. People live and work in glass buildings. There is no envy because everyone is equal, a cell in the collective organism of the One State.

The narrator is D-503, a mathematician and the builder of the Integral. His life is mathematically predictable, and therefore happy, until he meets I-303, falls in love and discovers the remnants of a soul. Can they escape the repression of the One state?

Zamyatin's book was the precursor of Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four. It was first published in 1921, in the early years of the revolution. It is well worth reading, and not just because it is the first satire on totalitarianism. Zamyatin has a sense of humour and a lightness of touch. Apparently he had synaesthesia, so the book is swamped in colour, odour and texture. He eliminates unnecessary words by recruiting old words for new functions. When you read that a functionary's eyes "javelined", you know just what Zamyatin means.

Highly recommended 4.5*

>50 pamelad: Good call. I read it about 16 years ago so could do with a re-read.

It was banned in the USSR in 1921, but smuggled out and first published in the West in 1924, hence the centenary of it as a translated and openly published work.

>51 john257hopper: I've started, and am appreciating it even more.

20. A Journey from this World to the Next by Henry Fielding

A man has just died and his spirit is in transit, making its way to the final judgement. On its way it meets spirits going the other way, back to earth to live a better life so that they can be accepted into heaven next time. One of them is Julian the Apostate, who has been sent back numerous times and lived many lives and another is Anne Boleyn. They tell their stories.

Fielding was a magistrate, known for compassion and incorruptibility. His satire wittily describes politics and corruption through history. It's incomplete and meandering, but in parts it is very funny.

It was published in 1749.

21. Tension by E. M. Delafield 1920

I enjoyed this short, character-driven novel. The main character Edna, Lady Rossiter, is a snobbish, malicious, self-satisfied monster who delights in being the centre of attention. Her husband, Sir Julian, treats her with sardonic disdain. He is one of the directors of a commercial and technical college that has been set up to help working people advance themselves, and has just employed a young woman, Pauline Marchmont, as the Lady Superintendent. Edna has heard of Miss Marchmont, has judged her harshly, and wants her gone.

Edna is an appalling woman, and her machinations are both fascinating and horrifying. As she creates misery and havoc, she deludes herself that she's acting for the best. The other characters, even the minor ones, are also well-drawn.

Most of E. M. Delafield's husbands, including Sir Julian, are disappointing. People in her books marry people they don't much like because that's all there is to do, or because they refuse to look beneath the surface. So many of Delafield's married couples dislike one another. Sir Julian is disgusted by his wife's behaviour but does nothing to stop her.

22. We by Yevgeny Zamyatin

2024 is the 100th anniversary of the publication of We, which was completed in 1921, smuggled out of Russia and first published in English. On this second reading the imagery made even more of an impression than it did the first time, with the hard straight lines and the cold blueness and transparency of the One State contrasting with the colourful chaos of the Ancient House and the world outside the walls. I thought of the assembly lines of the Charlie Chaplin film, Modern Times and the futuristic city of Fritz Lang's Metropolis because We isn't just a satire of totalitarianism, it's about industrialisation. Henry Ford's factories had adopted the principles of Taylorism, a system of scientific management, and his were the principles underlying the One State. Zamyatin took them further, by eradicating or minimising any human quality that did not directly contribute to the efficiency of the system.

George Orwell based 1984 on We. Orwell's review from 1946, manages to denigrate both We and Brave New World. It reminds me of the literary backbiting in Yellowface and does not give either book enough credit.

This Guardian article 1984 thoughtcrime? Does it matter that George Orwell pinched the plot? concludes that if Nineteen Eighty-Four had never existed, it is extremely doubtful Zamyatin's book would have come to fill the unique place Orwell's work now occupies. This may be true, but once again gives too little credit to We, without which 1984 might not have existed. More than two decades after Zamyatin's ground-breaking and prophetic book, after Stalin's purges and the Holocaust, Orwell built Brave New World on the foundation of We.

>54 pamelad: Interesting review, and your slightly different conclusions from mine.

I think you made a typo in "George Orwell based Brave New World on We", i.e.not based 1984 on We:)

>55 john257hopper: Thanks John. I often confuse the two books.

23. The Secret of the Lady's Maid by Darcie Wilde

The seventh book in the Rosalind Thorne series. Rosalind and her maid Amelia are out shopping when they come across a young woman, Cate Levitton, who appears to be known to Amelia. Cate collapses and Rosalind later finds out that she has been poisoned. Through Cate, Rosalind is drawn into the investigation of another poisoning, and a murder. Meanwhile, Adam Harkness, Bow street Runner and who is in love with Cate but far too poor to marry her, is caught up in a case of treason and because he is an honest man, his career, and perhaps even his life, is in danger.

The book took a long time to get going, with too many plot threads entwining, and too many characters. Rosalind is becoming annoying, and the romance with Adam looks like it will be drifting along forever.

24. The Heart's Invisible Furies by John Boyne

In 1945, during mass, the priest of a tiny Irish village berates Catherine Goggins, a sixteen-year-old pregnant girl, and banishes her immediately. On the bus to Dublin she makes a friend, a young gay man who is escaping a similar prejudiced, violent, priest-dominated place. There's nothing subtle about Boyne's book. Ireland in the forties is a fearful place, dominated by brutal, violent priests who enforce their own prejudices. People who don't follow the Church's rules deserve their punishment.

(Homosexuality was decriminalised in 1993, divorce did not become legal until 1995, and on International Women's Day there will be a vote on changing the a woman's place is in the home clause in the constitution.)

The main character is Cyril Avery, Catherine's son. As the adopted son of Charles Avery and his wife Maude, a well-regarded writer, Cyril is "not a real Avery". When Cyril is seven and Charles is being prosecuted for tax evasion, Cyril meets Julian, the son of Charles' solicitor Max Woodhead, and falls in love.

Initially I was enjoying the book, which really romps along, but I lost interest in Cyril when he married Julian's sister Elizabeth then deserted her at the reception. The book became a collection of episodes, and I felt that Cyril was a pawn being moved by the author through a series of events, many of them tragic. Too many of the characters were so much larger than life that they came across as caricatures, and there were too many coincidences. I remained entertained by the story, but became disengaged from the characters and thought "What's Boyne going to make happen to Cyril next?"

25. What Angels Fear by C. S. Harris is the first book in the Sebastian St Cyr series. Sebastian, Viscount Devlin, is the youngest son (or is he?) of the Earl of Hendon, and since the deaths of his two older brothers, is now the heir. He was an intelligence officer in the Napoleonic Wars, and has nightmares about the carnage. The Tory government is determined to continue the war, while the Whigs would negotiate an end to it. With the Duke of York about to become Regent, the Tories and the Whigs are competing for his favour. When a young actress is found murdered, Julian is accused because his conviction and execution would benefit the Tories. He escapes arrest and goes into hiding, determined to find the real murder and clear his name.

I enjoyed this. Lots of historical detail, some interesting characters, and a page-turner of a plot. I'm not a fan of gore, so I could have done without the bloodthirsty psychopathic killer and thought that necrophilia was a bridge too far, but I'm looking forward to reading the next book in the series.

26. The Green Road by Anne Enright

The Madigan family is dominated by Rosaleen, a selfish and manipulative woman. Three of her four children escape, one to the US, one to Africa and the third to Dublin. The responsible eldest daughter remains near home and tries to look after her demanding and ungrateful mother. When Rosaleen announces that she is going to sell the family home her four children return for one last Christmas celebration. Dan is the "spoiled priest", Emmet an international aid worker, Hanna a struggling, alcoholic actress with a baby, and Constance the responsible daughter who is married with two children and looks after her mother.

It's a character study of a family: the disappointed Rosaleen and the four children who have not attained the success that Rosaleen expected of them.

Not much happens, and it's not a happy book, but I liked the writing and the character studies and would recommend The Green Road.

27. The Appeal by Janice Hallett

Someone has been murdered and someone is in jail for the crime, but we don't know who and neither do the two articled clerks who are wading through piles of emails and text messages because their boss, the barrister who prosecuted the case, now thinks that the wrong person has been convicted.

A two-year-old girl, Poppy, has been diagnosed with cancer and her grandfather, Martin Hayward, has been told that an expensive experimental drug is the best hope for her survival. He is the wealthiest man in the community, top of the social scale, and the director and manager of the local theatre group. All the protagonists are connected to the theatre group, which is preparing to put on the play All My Sons. They become involved in a quest to raise 250,000 pounds for Poppy's treatment.

As the clerks read through the emails and texts, they begin to doubt that the fund is above board but can't be sure who is involved in the fraud. The murder occurs towards the end of the book, and there are plenty of suspects.

I was drawn in by The Appeal and had to keep reading. It's not really fair play, because the barrister dribbles out information to his clerks late in the book. For example, it's ridiculous that the clerks aren't told who has been convicted of the murder. But I put those irritations aside and enjoyed the book.

28. The Cuckoo's Child by Marjorie Eccles

Marjorie Eccles was born in 1926. Her most recent book was published in 2021, which is a good effort indeed! The Cuckoo's Child was published in 2011, which makes her about 85 at the time.

The Cuckoo's Child is an historical mystery set mainly in Yorkshire in 1909. Laura, who has been doing volunteer work at a women's settlement house, is at a loose end when she has to stop so is happy to take on the job of organising the library of a mill-owner, Ainsley Beaumont. The other members of the household are Beaumont's twin grandchildren, Una and Gideon, and their mother, Amelia. The twin's father died in a terrible fire twenty years ago and is rarely mentioned. There is a big secret about the fire. Laura is an orphan, and she's beginning to wonder whether she has a connection to Ainsley Beaumont.

There's a big cast of characters, so there are plenty of suspects when a body is found in a mill pond. I enjoyed this tidy mystery.

29. Spring Garden by Tomoka Shibasaki Akutagawa Prize

A gentle, melancholy novella. Taro is divorced, isolated from his family and bored by his job. His apartment building is about to be demolished, to be replaced by one bigger and more modern, and he is one of the few remaining tenants. He runs across another tenant, Nishi, as she is climbing up to a balcony to get a better view of a nearby house. The blue house, built in the sixties, is featured in a book, Spring Garden, and Nishi has been fascinated by it for years. She and Taro become friends and he is drawn into her interest in the blue house.

It's hard to say what this novella is about. It's more a mood, a narrative of time passing. The blue house seems to stand as symbol of individuality and longevity. It, adn the friendship with Nishi, begin to rouse Taro from his apathy.

30. Foster by Claire Keegan

This is a re-read for our book club. We all liked Small Things Like These, and Foster is even shorter. I enjoyed it again, and followed up with the film, The Quiet Girl, which is based on the book. (For people in Australia, it's on SBS on Demand but is leaving in a fortnight.)

>62 pamelad: I did a double take when I saw your post about Foster, because I just read the same book today! I actually preferred Small Things like These, but not by much. Have your read any more of her work?

>63 scunliffe: Just these two so far, but I have So Late in the Day on my Kindle ready to go. I also preferred Small Things Like These, perhaps because it was more outward and hopeful than Foster.

31. The Weather at Tregulla by Stella Gibbons

Una's mother has just died and her father is grief-stricken and drinking too much. He's never been particularly fond of the intense and demanding Una, who desperately wants to get out of the tiny Cornish town of Tregulla and go to London to become an actress. There's not enough money, and Una is losing hope, so she's excited to meet the Bohemian siblings Emmaline and Terrence. Una falls in love with Terrence, an artist, but he can't be bothered.

Meanwhile, Una's childhood friend Barnabus, the elder son of the village's wealthiest and longest-established best family, has fallen in love with Emmaline. Hugo, Barnabus's younger brother, who is recovering from a serious a serious car crash, is suffering not just from his injuries but from unrequited love for Una.

Gibbons clearly loves the Cornish countryside, and these unsuitable love affairs play out over a beautiful Cornish summer. She has sympathy for her flawed, well-rounded middle-class characters, but none for Terrence's and Emmaline's villainous working-class friends, who don't know how to behave.

I enjoyed the book, which was first published in 1962. Like many British books of that time and earlier it's steeped in class-consciousness, which I judge harshly but am interested in all the same. This is the era of the working-class novel - Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, Room at the Top - and from he evidence of The Weather at Tregulla, Stella Gibbons is uneasy.

32. Deception aka If I Were You by Joan Aiken

I started Deception thinking it was an historical romance, but while it's historical, it's not a romance. Alvey and Louisa are students at a girls' school. They're identical in appearance, but quite different in character and have never been friends. Louisa has been sent to school to get her out of the way because she desperately wants to be a missionary and has been nagging her parents to death. On top of that, she's an unpleasant person and, as Avery is to discover, no one in her family likes her. Avery is alone in the world. Her aunt in America sent her to England, where her parents came from, to get an education so she could make her own living, but has since died, and Alvey has been teaching at the school. When Louisa's parents call for her to return home, she persuades Alvey to take her place so that she, Louisa, can travel to India to become a missionary. This is all very hard to swallow, but best to do it and move on because there's a lot of book to go.

Avey settles in with Louisa's family and loves it there, despite the remarkable number of tragedies and disasters that befall the family. She's such a help that everyone except for Louisa's parents, who have little interest in their children, realises that she's not Louisa.

This was a light and entertaining read, but a bit too long and slow for my taste. It has touches of Gothic, a bit of mystery, and hints of romance.

33. Castle Barebane by Joan Aiken

I liked this gothic melodrama for Aiken's writing style, her sardonic observations of the New York upper crust, and the appealing heroine.

It begins in New York, where Valla, a journalist, is engaged to Bennett. She's beginning to realise that she doesn't fit into his milieu and will never be welcomed by his family, so when her half-brother, Nils, asks her to go to England to take care of his children for a short time, she agrees. When she gets to England Valla finds her brother and his wife missing and their house for let. She finds the children in desperate straits and applies to their great aunts for help. They send Valla and the two children to stay in a dilapidated Scottish Castle looked after by a grumpy old woman.

There are a lot of plot threads, and some of them are ludicrous. Valla's brother Nils is an evil man, and his closest friend is even worse. There's a Jack the Ripper clone on the loose, the Beast of Bermondsey. Jannie, the younger child behaves very oddly. The old lady in the castle has a mysterious, tragic history. There's a helpful doctor who never wants to marry, and a gout-ridden magazine editor who is taken with Valla. Towards the end of the book it seems that Aiken has lost patience with her people and her plot. The threads converge and there's a mass killing: shootings, stabbings, drownings, toppling from a cliff, a whole boat-crew being sucked into quicksand.

Castle Barebane was a mess, but I enjoyed it.

34. Madam by Mrs Oliphant

Grace Trevanian's husband married her in Europe when she was in desperate circumstances and treated her despicably for most of their marriage. Despite his ill-treatment Grace nursed the querulous invalid devotedly, but days from his demise the vicious old man re-wrote his will to punish her further. I won't say how, because that would destroy the suspense.

Rosalind is Grace's stepdaughter, and calls her mother because Grace is the only mother Rosalind has ever known. She is loyal to Grace despite wicked rumours, most of them perpetrated by the family nurse who brought up Rosalind and her four half-brothers and sisters. The nurse has tried to poison the younger children's minds against their mother, and has carried malicious stories to Grace's husband.

Somewhere I read that this was Margaret Oliphant's favourite of her books. It has less humour than the Carlingford series because Grace is such a tragic figure, and so ill-treated, but there is some in the sketches of the minor characters, particularly Aunt Sophy. I was very much engaged because I had to find out what would happen to Grace and Rosalind.

I enjoy the women writers of the 19th Century, and have read most of the Brontes, Elliot and Gaskell, but only a couple of Oliphant's ghostly stories.
You have given me the push I need to read more of her work, and think I will undertake the Chronicles of Carlingford. Thanks!

I have never read anything by Margaret Oliphant, I must try something.

>69 scunliffe:, >70 john257hopper: As in The Barchester Chronicles, the Anglican Church is central to the Chronicles of Carlingford and, like Trollope, Margaret Oliphant describes her characters with affection and humour. My favourite Carlingford book is Miss Marjoribanks.

Happy reading!

35. My Phantoms by Gwendoline Riley

Helen, known as Hen, divorced her children's father, an awful man who insisted on painful access visits with his two daughters, Bridget and Michelle. She had married because that's what everyone did in the seventies and she wanted to be normal. Bridget narrates the sad history of her relationship with her mother, whom Bridget castigates as performing normality and refusing to engage with life. But as the book goes on, Bridget's own problems begin to appear.

My Phantoms describes the characters of these two women with wit and subtlety, but I was pleased that it was short because I found it so very depressing.

36. The Art of Love aka Villa on the Riviera by Elizabeth Edmondson

It's hard to classify this book because there's no central murder, which makes it not quite a crime novel, and the romance is too much in the background to call the book a romance. It's quite leisurely, so there's not a lot of suspense, but it did remind me a little of Mary Stewart's romantic suspense novels. It's definitely historical fiction, because it's set in the thirties.

The heroine, Polly Smith, is engaged to Roger, a pompous doctor who doesn't listen to her and likes to tell her what to do. She's an artist but Roger expects that she will give it up when she marries. They're planning on an overseas honeymoon, so Polly needs to get a passport, but at Somerset House she finds that there is no birth certificate in her name, and the woman who Polly thought was her mother reluctantly tells Polly that she is adopted. Polly ends up having a holiday in the Riviera, staying with Oliver, a gay man who moves in the same artistic circles she does, who has become a good friend.

The romantic interest is Max, who works for Special Branch and also met Polly through her work as an artist. He is investigating the villain to whom his sister is engaged. The plot involves art forgery, a missing husband, and a plot to destabilise the political system of the western world.

This is not literature. I enjoyed it, so much so that I've started another, The Frozen Lake.

37. The Frozen Lake by Elizabeth Edmonston

It's 1936 and the lake near the homes of the Richardson and the Grindley families has frozen solid for the first time in sixteen years. Family members return after many years' absence, as does a young man who was there as a boy and experienced something awful that has lodged in his sub-conscious ever since. Family secrets are uncovered.

There's a bit of romance, a few mysteries, British Fascists, an evil grandmother and her evil, dead son, a Jewish refugee, a woman in disguise, a great-aunt in purple, a banished divorcee. You can see the resolutions of the plot threads from a mile away, which isn't a problem to me because I'm looking for a happy ending and don't want a lot of suspense on the way.

A pleasant, cosy read. I enjoyed it.

38. Study for Obedience by Sarah Bernstein was shortlisted for the 2023 Booker Prize, and Bernstein is on Granta's list of Best British novelists.

This short book appears to be about survivors' guilt. The narrator is the youngest child of a large family and has been brought up to serve the needs of her siblings, so when her oldest brother is abandoned by his wife and children (not surprisingly when you read his expectations of them) he calls on the narrator to come to his remote northern village to look after him. He has bought and restored the house where generations of his family once lived before being banished, and seems to be respected by the local community. The narrator, however, arouses suspicion, and the locals blame her for the deaths of animals and the blighting of crops.

The book is experimental in that it has long, run-on sentences (not a problem to me) and no plot (huge problem!) I think she might be poisoning her brother, but that sounds like a plot, so she probably isn't.

39. Best in Class: Essential Wisdom from Real Student Writing by Tim Clancy

Over his teaching career, Clancy, collected samples of entertaining writing from his students' English essays and book reports. This very short, amusing book was a Kindle bargain.

40. A Reputation Dies by Alice Chetwynd Ley

Ley, A British author, wrote competent steamless romances modelled on Georgette Heyer's, but in this book, the first in the Rutherford Trilogy, she's dipped her toe into crime. There's blackmail and a murder, investigated by Justin Rutherford, his niece Andrea, and a Bow Street runner who used to be Captain Rutherford's sergeant.

A workmanlike attempt, it's free in KindleUnlimited.

41. Factory Girls by Michelle Gallen

It's 1994 in Northern Ireland and no one really believes in the Peace Process. Maeve and her two friends are waiting for the A-level results that will determine whether they can escape their embattled town for university elsewhere. In the meantime they take jobs in a shirt factory run by Handy Andy, an Englishman who drives a Jag. Any young female factory worker who accepts a lift home from Andy could get more than she bargains for.

The factory is unusual in that the workforce is integrated. The book really brought home to me how little contact there was between Catholics and Protestants, at least in this town. Maeve has no time for sectarian violence, but she really does loathe Protestants.

Factory Girls won an award for comic writing, but the comedy is so very black. The people in this town are without hope: their only option is to get away.

Worth reading. I've read other books about the Troubles written from the Catholic perspective - Milkman, Trespasses - all by women and blackly humorous, but never one from a Protestant.

Yes I have. Troubles by J G Farrell. Another book I've read about the Troubles is We Always Treat Women Too Well by Raymond Queneau.

I rather enjoyed Farrell's Troubles, about the troubles caused by being part of the Anglo Irish presence, well south of Ulster at earlier times.
Have you read the other two books in what I think is called his Empire series?

>78 scunliffe: I've read all three books in the Empire series, Troubles at least twice, and The Siege of Krishnapur is one of my favourite books.

Another book about the Anglo Irish presence is Henry Green's Loving. I've also read The Irish R. M. by Somerville & Ross, and The Straight and Narrow Path by Honor Tracy, but found them annoyingly patronising: upper-middle class Anglo-Irish people writing about people like themselves, with wily Irish peasants in the background. Not Henry Green though - he is better than that.

And in my case The Siege of Krishnapur was the least favorite in the Empire series, with Troubles the best. Not a significant difference of opinion, what is more important is that we have both read all three, and no doubt wish that Farrell had not died prematurely, swept out to sea off an Irish rock.
I had thought of mentioning Loving, not least because I just finished Living. Of that particular series I think Loving is the best.
I have not read The Irish R.M or The Straight and Narrow Path, and judging by your comments I will leave them undisturbed and unread.

>80 scunliffe: I thought I'd put my review of Party Going on the book page, but it disappeared so I've had another try and have now posted reviews of Living and Loving as well. I was so impressed by all three books that I went on to read every book Henry Green wrote. Living was the hardest to get into because of the absence of articles, but it repaid the effort.

42. Voyage of Innocence by Elizabeth Edmonson

Lately I've read a few books by Edmondson. They're light, engaging reads written with an innocuous, grammatical style. You know what I mean by innocuous - you're not forever tripping up against grating word choices, grammatical errors and obvious anachronisms, or having to re-read sentences in order to make sense of them. There's enough drama and mystery to keep you interested, and you know that the main character will end up OK. Unfortunately, Voyage of Innocence wasn't up to scratch. It started at the end, with the main character, Vee, apparently having fallen overboard from a ship that has just left Port Said. Obviously that can't be true, so we go back a few days and get inside Vee's head to follow her thoughts about a horde of people we've never heard about and her guilt at betraying them. Then we go back to the beginning again and fill in the gaps.

I found the book far too confusing, because it took me until half-way through to sort out who all the characters were. The main characters are three young women: Vee, who embraces communism; Claudia, who is an enthusiastic fascist; and Lally, who is American and the voice of reason. There's a lot of political drama going on, and Edmonson is far too superficial a writer to make sense of it. I don't read many books about WWII for just this reason: most of them are trite and exploitative. Usually I stick to books written at the time, or soon after, by people who lived through what they were writing about.

43. Strange Weather in Tokyo by Hiromi Kawakami won the Tanizaki Prize and was shortlisted for the Independent foreign Fiction Prize and the Man Asian Literature Prize.

Tsukiko works in an office and spends many evenings in a neighbourhood bar, where she comes across her old Japanese teacher. Despite the difference in their ages - Tsukiko is about forty and the man she calls Sensei has a son in his fifties, so must be in his seventies - they understand one another and enjoy each other's company. Initially they don't arrange to meet, but run into one another fortuitously.

The book consists of discrete incidents that could almost stand alone. A constant theme is food, which is described in appreciative detail and marks the changing seasons. The changing weather also contributes to the sense of time passing, which is ominous because Sensei is so much older than Tsukiko that their time together can only be short.

This short, strange book melds melancholy with humour. I enjoyed it. I also liked the translation.

44. Lady of Mallow by Dorothy Eden was first published in 1960, the same year as Victoria Holt's Mistress of Mellyn, perhaps to cash in on Mellyn's popularity. Eden isn't as engaging a writer as Holt, but I enjoyed Mallow and will read more of Eden's books, mainly because they're available free on KoboPlus. This was an utterly undemanding read.

Sarah Mildmay is engaged to the heir of Mallow. He's the cousin of the original heir, Blane, who ran away to sea at sixteen and had been presumed dead. A man appears, accompanied by a wife and a son who closely resembles a portrait of Blane as a child, and claims the estate. Sarah goes undercover as a governess to collect evidence that the claimant is a fraud.

The plot didn't hang together all that well, but I was entertained.

45. Ravenscroft by Dorothy Eden

On the death of their father, a doctor, Bella and Lally come to London to live with their father's cousin and to seek employment. But their relative has moved away and they are taken in by an elderly lady, Aunt Aggie. It doesn't take long for them to realise that the old lady is not what she seems, and that they are trapped. Luckily the grief-stricken Guy Raven, who is searching for a meaning in life after the death of his young wife and newly-born son, is passing in the street with his old friend Doctor Bushey and hears Bella's cries for help.

Aunt Aggie and her evil son Noah are determined to take their revenge on Guy, Bella and Lally.

Dorothy Eden was born in New Zealand and moved to London as an adult. Ravenscroft was first published in 1964. I do enjoy a vintage Gothic, so am pleased to find a selection of Eden's books in KoboPlus and have already started a third, Darkwater.

46. The Judgement of Eve by May Sinclair

Aggie takes her time to choose a husband and her final choice comes down to two men. She marries Arnold because with him she believes she will have an intellectual life, but eight pregnancies in as many years destroy her health and leave her with no time for anything other than domestic labour. The once supportive Arnold shows himself to be selfish and petulant.

Aggie's younger sister marries John, the man Aggie refused. He would have been a better choice.

May Sinclair was a suffragist whose youth was spent caring for four dying brothers. Her views of marriage and the choices open to women, as evidenced by this novella, were bleak. It's well worth reading, but it's depressing.

47. Darkwater by Dorothy Eden

Fanny Davenport's parents died when she was a small child and she has lived at Darkwater, in Dartmoor, ever since with her guardian, whom she calls Uncle Edgar, and his family. As a poor relation, and much more beautiful than the daughter of the house, she is resented and exploited, treated almost like an upper servant. Fanny's cousin George was injured during the Crimean War and has gone off his rocker, but his family can't see how dangerous he is.

When her uncle's younger brother dies in China, he leaves his two children to the guardianship of Uncle Edgar, and Fanny us sent to pick them up from the port. They're accompanied by a Chinese servant and, unexpectedly, by a young man called Adam Marsh who Fanny believes to be the man from the shipping company. Adam Marsh reappears at Darkwater, where he might be keeping an eye on the children and Fanny, or perhaps not. Is he a villain?

There's a murder, an escaped prisoner, the eerie surroundings of the moors, a haunted room, a trapped bird that portends death, and Fanny's impending 21st birthday, when she's being pressured to make a will. What does she own? All the ingredients of a good Gothic.

48. What Feasts at Night by T. Kingfisher

Alex Easton, the sworn soldier from What Moves the Dead is back in her homeland, Gallacia, with her friend and colleague Angus, and Miss Potter the mycologist. Alex and Angus have arrived at Alex's hunting lodge only to find that the caretaker is dead, apparently killed by a morai who sits on a victim's chest and steals their breath. They need to get the lodge in order for Miss Potter's funghi-hunting visit, but the presence of the morai makes it hard to find a housekeeper, so they have to employ the fractious Widow Botezatu, who has the benefit of being highly entertaining. Everyone is entertaining: it's a very funny book.

Alex's position as a sworn soldier reminds me of the sworn virgins of Albania, Last of the Burrnesha, who take a vow of celibacy and live as men. I'm amused by the way Kingfisher addresses the pronoun problem: there's a range of them and priests, for example, get their own. Alex uses var.

The funghi in What Moves the Dead were a bit more special than the morai in this book, but it's a good sequel and I enjoyed it.

49. Winterwood by Dorothy Eden

The heroine, Lavinia Hurst, has a desperate past - her brother is in jail for manslaughter - and has been compelled to take a position as a companion to her horrible cousin. They're in Venice, where she befriends a young girl, Flora, in a wheelchair, and despite her better judgement, agrees to become her carer and return to England with the girl's family.

There's a dying aunt with a fortune to leave, a shady cousin who wants to marry Lavinia, Flora's mad mother and badly-behaved little brother, and Flora's worried father. Lavinia falls in love with the worried father despite there being no future with him, and would do anything to keep her past secret.

Another good Gothic.

50. Another Man's Murder by Mignon G. Eberhart

Cayce Clary left home at 19, driven away by the judge, his dead father's step-brother. He's returned at the judge's request only to become a suspect in the man's murder. The judge has plenty of enemies, but his nephew is out to implicate Cayce.

Nice and short. Unusual in that the main character is a man, rather than an intellectually-challenged female orphan.

51. The Cases of Susan Dare by Mignon G. Eberhart

Susan Dare is a mystery writer who dabbles in crime-solving. This short story collection contains six of Susan's cases. I'm not really a fan of short crime stories because the characters appear, kill someone and disappear before you get to know them, but like most of Eberhart's books this was atmospheric.

52. The American Heiress by Dorothy Eden

Hetty is the illegitimate half-sister of Clemency Jervis, and looks just like her. She's Clemency's maid, and when Clemency becomes engaged to a debt-ridden earl who is in desperate need of her dowry, Hetty accompanies Clemency and her mother to England for the wedding. War has broken out between Britain and Germany, so sea voyages are no longer safe, but Clemency and her mother ignore warnings and set off on the Lusitania. The ship is torpedoed off the coast of Ireland and few passengers survive. Hetty is one of them.

Another enjoyable Gothic, but it's probably time for a break.

53. Whistle for the Crows by Dorothy Eden

Cathleen's husband and young daughter were killed in a car crash, so six months later she takes a job in Ireland to make a new start. She's employed as a secretary to Matilda O'Riordan, who is writing a history of her family, which currently consists of her nephews Rory and Liam, and their bed-ridden mother. The eldest brother, Shamus, died three years previously in an apparent accident. His mother witnessed it, had a stroke and has been unable to communicate ever since. The property has passed to Rory who is determined to restore the estate's profitability, so there is little spare cash.

A mystery surrounds Shamus's death, and there are rumours that he had a secret wife. Cathleen, who can hear a baby crying at night, puts herself in danger.

I enjoyed this one too. It's vintage, not historical, and was first published in 1962.

54. William: An Englishman by Cicely Hamilton 1919

William was an insignificant man, ruled by his mother, with no will of his own. He was employed as a clerk in a firm where he made no impression, but his life changed when his mother died. Under the influence of a colleague he took up causes and became immersed in the anti-war and labour movements. At this stage of the book Hamilton is so condescending to William and his fellow activists whom she denigrates as thoughtless, closed-minded and petty, that I assumed she held conservative political views herself and was contemptuous of anyone who thought differently, but the opposite is true and she changed her anti-militaristic views when was broke out and she realised what was happening in Europe. William is also forced to reconsider.

I found this short book to be a bit heavy-handed, but extremely interesting, and would recommend it.

55. Speak to Me of Love by Dorothy Eden

Dumpy, plain Beatrice Bonnington falls in love with the decorative but useless William Overton and his house. Beatrice's father owns the profitable Bonnington's Emporium, which Beatrice will inherit, so she is wealthy enough to tempt the impecunious William. She is optimistic that William will eventually fall in love with her.

This sad and dreary book covers three generations of Beatrice's family and the fortunes of Bonnington's Emporium, beginning during Victoria's reign and ending with the Great Depression.

Despite its title, I wouldn't categorise this as a romance. Perhaps a family saga?

56. The Enormous Room by E. E. Cummings

In 1917, before the US had entered WWI, E. E.Cummings travelled to France to become an ambulance driver. On the ship he met William Slater Brown, also bound for the ambulance service, and the they became close friends. Once in the ambulance service, with prejudiced, insular American superiors who loathed the French, and mistrusted the two young American men for choosing to associate with them, Brown and Cummings were assigned to cleaning duties. Both men were pacifists, and Brown wrote scathing, anti-militarist letters home, denigrating the French Government. He was arrested for treason, and so was Cummings, whose loyalty to his friend prevented him from saying the words (I hate all Germans) that would set him free. The two Americans ended up incarcerated in a jail for people accused of crimes but not convicted. Sixty men lived together in one huge room, half-starved, in primitive unhygienic conditions, at the mercy of irrational guards, insane fellow-prisoners and a vicious prison governor.

Some of the prisoners were jailed for petty crimes, some were pimps, others were violent, but the majority had done nothing criminal at all and had been picked up on suspicion because they were citizens of neutral countries. Letters to their embassies were confiscated, so no one knew where they were. Cummings' father back in the US was desperately trying to trace his son, who at one stage was reported dead, and the book begins with his letters.

The Enormous Room is a fictionalised memoir, written at the instigation of Cummings' father and first published in 1922. These days, in its depiction of people victimised by cruel irrational forces, it's seen as a precursor to Catch-22 and Mash, and that's what makes it interesting. Most of The Enormous Room is dedicated to descriptions of Cummings' fellow prisoners, in particular those he admired and who made a lasting impression on him, so rather than there being a strong narrative the book is episodic. The language is unusual: sometimes it's striking and conveys the narrator's impressions brilliantly, but sometimes it obscures the narrator's meaning. Probably in the context of the time, Cummings wasn't racist, but some of his language and descriptions couldn't be used today.

A worthwhile read. Recommended.

57. The Chinaman by Friedrich Glauser

Sergeant Studer is riding his motorbike back to Bern and has almost run out of petrol, so he stops at an out of the way inn. There he meets a man with a long drooping moustache that reminds Studer of a Chinese man. The "Chinaman" tells Studer that he expects to be murdered, which Studer writes off as paranoia, but four months later Studer is called in to investigate the man's death. The local doctor is trying to pass the death of as a suicide, but that's clearly impossible.

It took me a while to sort out who all the characters were, and their relationships to one another. The head of an agricultural college is involved, and the manager of the poorhouse, as well as the dead man's brother-in-law. All three are present at the inn the first time Studer meets the victim.

The Chinaman was first published in 1938. It's not as striking as In Matto's Realm but I enjoyed it because of Sergeant Studer, an honest and compassionate man who is surrounded by hypocrisy and corruption.

58. Bel Lamington by D. E. Stevenson

Bel is an orphan, brought up by her aunt after her parents died tragically in an accident. On the death of her aunt Bel has just enough money to pay for secretarial training, and now she's living in a flat in London, working as a secretary in an exporting business. She's very sorry for herself, having to work for a living, and I had no sympathy at all! There's another minor character who gave up a promising career as a portrait painter and now paints as little more than a hobby, because she chose love and family in a remote farm in Scotland. But she's blissfully happy. Stevenson is the anti-feminist and she does not like women working! Fortunately her characters are wealthy enough, or are supported by men wealthy enough, not to have to!

Bel Lamington is a drip. Fortunately it's a short book.

>98 pamelad: Your review of the book not only made me laugh, it makes me want to read it.

>99 jbegab: You have been warned!

59. The Innocents by Margery Sharp

Cecilia is a beautiful young woman who runs a dress shop and has refused all her local suitors because she wants to get away from her East Anglian village. When a wealthy American visits, she snaps him up and returns with him to the United States. Five years later she and her husband return, bringing with them their three-year-old daughter, Antoinette. Because the child is distressed by travelling, they leave her with the narrator temporarily while they make a trip to Europe, but while they are there the war breaks out and they have to return immediately to the US, leaving their daughter behind with the book's unnamed narrator, a sixtyish spinster.

The little girl is shy, easily frightened, and unable to talk. The local doctor diagnoses her as retarded (we would say now that she had an intellectual disability, but the book was written more than fifty years ago), not autistic. She's never going to be able to read and write, or carry on a conversation, but she flourishes with the narrator, although she never gets over her fear of strangers and new places.

After the war the widowed Cecilia returns, determined to take her daughter back to the US and get the medical profession to fix her up with speech therapy and psychological treatment.

I'm a big fan of Margery Sharp, but had put off reading The Innocents because it might have been sentimental. I should have known better. Sharp is her usual witty, astringent, open-minded self, and I enjoyed the book.

60. The Devil's Flute Murders by Seishi Yokomizo is set in 1947 and was first published in Japanese in about 1951. There are 77 books in the Kosuke Kindaichi series, with only five currently available in English. (The sixth, The Little Sparrow Murders, is coming soon.)

The book was particularly interesting for its depiction of post-war Japan: there are food shortages; transport is unreliable; the power goes off every day; enormous numbers of buildings have been destroyed in bombings and subsequent fires. The family at the centre of the story once belonged to the nobility, which has recently been abolished. Viscount Tsubaki has disappeared and is thought to have committed suicide because he has discovered a terrible family shame. He leaves behind his inbred, hysterical wife who believes she can see her dead husband. Her daughter, Mineko, employs Detective Kindaichi to investigate her father's disappearance.

The other characters are the wife's evil brother and his wife and son; an elderly Count, uncle to Tsubaki's wife and her brother; a mysterious young man who is thought to be the son of Tsubaki's old school friend; the wife's devoted servant; another servant; the Count's young mistress. There is also a horde of minor characters, most of whose names start with "O" or "K" so it's hard to keep track.

The narration is highly melodramatic and beset by similes. Initially I found it distracting, but after a while the excessiveness became part of the book's charm. The plot is extraordinarily complicated, with many strands and a central locked-room mystery.

An entertaining read.

61. I've just trudged through over 500 pages of Joan Aiken's The Weeping Ash, which is a dog's breakfast.There's a touch of romance, a bit of gothic, a lot of adventure, a smidge of mysticism, a few murders and a couple of rapes.

Sixteen-year-old Fanny has just married a disgusting old man, Captain Paget, who probably murdered his first wife. He has three daughters, two of whom are older than Fanny, all of them resentful. Fanny is virtually trapped in the house. So far, so Gothic.

Sixteen-year-old Scylla is living in India with her elderly guardian and her twin brother Cal when there's a palace coup, so it's unsafe to stay. The twins are related to Captain Paget, and to his cousin Juliana. Juliana is travelling with her diplomat husband so has invited Captain Paget and his family to live in her house while she is away. She has also invited Scylla and Cal, who escape their Indian home with the aid of Colonel Campbell, a friend of the maharajah. To evade their murderous pursuers, the twins, their guardian, a newly-born baby, and Campbell and his servant, follow a dangerous and circuitous route across India and various fictional Stans on their way to Baghdad where they can catch a ship to England.

Cal's a poet, and his mystical poems seem to foreshadow the future. The party stays for a while with a mystic in a holy cave and meets a wise old woman who can foretell the future. The trip takes close to a year, and I thought it was never going to end. The Indian chapters alternate with Fanny's English chapters, which have a bit of the supernatural too. There's a gardener who sees ghosts, and Fanny has a couple of other-worldly experiences.

I wouldn't really recommend The Weeping Ash. It's too long, with too many disasters, too many villains, and too much violence. I really could have done without the supernatural element, and I don't want to read another word about camels.

If you talk about a dog's breakfast here in the States, you will get blank looks as people wonder what the dog's first meal of the day has to do with anything.
It makes me very happy to see this metaphor in proper use. It's been a long time.

>103 scunliffe: Australian and British English seem to be siblings, but US English is probably a cousin. I'm delighted that the dog's breakfast made you happy.

62. Death on Gokumon Island by Seishi Yokomizo is set in Japan in 1946 and that's what makes it interesting. Most of the young and middle-aged men had been drafted into the armed services and had been out of touch with their families for years, so no one knew whether they were dead or alive. The survivors are now returning from combat zones. The world-famous detective, Kosuke Kindaichi, has returned from New Guinea, where he befriended the heir to a powerful fishing family on Gokumon Island. The heir dies on the way back to Japan, and with his dying breath exhorts Kindaichi to hasten to Gokumon Island to prevent the deaths of his three younger sisters. The inhabitants of Gokumon Island are descended from criminals and other undesirables, and are notorious for their lawlessness.

Yokomizo's Kosuke Kindaichi books are intricately plotted "impossible crimes". The other books in the series are mainly locked room mysteries, but this one depends on timetables. Characters behave bizarrely in order to accommodate the extraordinarily artificial plot, in which murders are set up to parody Haiku.

As a mystery Death on Gokumon Island is sub-par, but the book is worth reading for its picture of post-war Japan.

63. The Devil in the Flesh by Raymond Radiguet

Radiguet's novella created a scandal when it was first published in 1923. It is set in the last year of WWI, when the unnamed narrator is having an affair with a woman whose husband is at the front. The lovers are young: she is nineteen and he is only sixteen. They're heedless and selfish, and despite being older, the young woman is dominated by her younger lover. And it does seem, from this fascinating yet repulsive analysis of the wax and wane of his emotions, that the young man's goal is dominance and control. He is obnoxiously self-centred, and careless of his lover's fate.

Radiguet himself had a similar affair when he was fourteen, and he wrote the book when he was seventeen. By twenty he was dead, and most of avant-garde Paris mourned at his funeral.

Here is a review from The Guardian, which places the book in its time, and suggests why it made such an impact. It also mentions Christopher Moncrieff's translation, in which the word "whom" is absent. I noticed a similar grammatical quirk, the use of "her" where I'd expect "she" in constructs like "It was her who...", and also noticed the modern use of "like" where I would expect "as". I wonder whether these are artistic choices, and whether the translator sees correct grammar as pedantry. I'd be surprised if there were similar choices in the original French. Otherwise, the translation flows well.

The Devil in the Flesh was a surprise. I'm glad I read it.

I'd been expecting something like Joris-Karl Huysman's Against the Grain, and was much relieved.

>106 pamelad: seems interesting, will check this out.

64. All Our Yesterdays by Natalia Ginzburg

In 1939, people in Italy didn't know whether their country would join the war or, if it did, which side it would be on. Ginzburg's characters are anti-Fascists, as she was herself, and are devastated when Italy joins the Axis powers. In secret they wish for Mussolini's downfall and applaud every military defeat. Most of the book is told from the point of view of Anna, the youngest daughter in a middle-class household. Her father is writing a memoir of his life as a socialist; her older brother, along with the young man across the street and a one-time admirer of Anna's older sister, is clandestinely distributing anti-Fascist literature; Anna herself fantasises about heroically fighting for the Socialist cause.

The first half of the book is set in Turin, where Anna is surrounded by family and friends, though mainly ignored by them. In the second half she has married and is living in a poor village in Southern Italy. Anna's much older husband is an important man in the village because he looks after the local people, called in the book "contadini" and intercedes for them with the authorities. Most of the villagers are apolitical, do not support the war, and want to get on with their lives, but the Germans are removing young men for slave labour, the Italian Fascists are conscripting them into the army, and the Germans are carrying out reprisals and murdering people. Jews keep arriving in the village, banished from the big cities, and the contadini try to protect them from the Nazis.

Natalia Ginzburg accompanied her husband Leone into exile in a a village in Abruzzo. Leone Ginzburg was eventually arrested for anti-Fascist activities and died in prison under torture. Natalia Ginzburg has experienced everything she is writing about. Her style is spare and unadorned, and she writes of tragic events with lightness and an apparent detachment, which magnify the impact. Her characters are flawed and real, and she treats them with compassion and tolerance.

All Our Yesterdays is a wonderful book. I recommend it highly.

All our Yesterdays has been teetering on the edge of my reading list for quite a while. It is a dynamic list, titles come and titles go to make room for new ones. I guess Ginzburg can now feel secure.

>106 pamelad: I hope you like it. It's a piece of history now, as is The Enormous Room. I've lumped them together because they're set in France during WWI and written by young men. Both are available in KoboPlus.

>109 scunliffe: You could put Family Sayings and Happiness, As Such on the Natalia Ginzburg list as well. I'm a fan.

65. Under the Net by Iris Murdoch

Jack Donaghue scrapes a living writing articles and doing a bit of translating, but spends most of his time racketing around having a good time. He has been living rent-free with Madge, but she has taken up with entrepreneurial and marginally criminal Sammy, who wants Jack gone immediately, so in the search for free accommodation Jack searches out a woman from his past, Anna. Through Anna he re-connects with Sadie, Anna's sister and a successful film actress, hard as nails. These people from his past remind Jack of a once-close friend, the eccentric entrepreneur Hugo Bellfounder. Most of the book is an alcohol-fuelled search for Hugo, with Jack falling into comic disasters along the way. And Because this is Iris Murdoch there's a lot of philosophising going on, but it adds a bit of leavening and doesn't get in the way.

Murdoch's first published novel is an entertaining comic romp.

66. Jamaica Inn by Daphne Du Maurier

I read this for our book group. It's a re-read, so I already knew the big twist was coming, but I enjoyed it all the same. It's an overwrought Gothic, with violent and murderous, yet common-place villains who are manipulated by someone unspeakably evil.

On the death of her mother, Mary Yellen travels to the Jamaica Inn to live with mother's sister, Patience. But Patience is a wreck of a woman, beaten into near-imbecility by her wolfish, seven-foot tall husband Joss Merlyn, the keeper of the Jamaica Inn. Coaches speed past the Jamaica Inn, and the driver of the coach carrying Mary had tried to persuade her not to go there. Mary soon realises that dastardly deeds are afoot: the mysterious comings and goings of carts in the inn yard; the mob of drunk and violent men who appear when the carts do; the murder of a man who'd tried to leave the mob. But it's not until Joss Merlyn becomes garrulous after a days' long drinking binge that Mary understands just how evil these men are, and what they do. Mary is no victim - she's tough and capable, and won't be cowed.

I'll be interested to hear what our book club members think. I enjoyed the book a second time (or perhaps the third?) but found it very dark, and, as I said, overwrought.

67. Fever by Friedrich Glauser

Glauser's Sergeant Studer books are unusual in their strange imagery and bursts of dreamlike confusion and I became lost in Fever, the last book in the series. There's a confusion of identities, with many of the characters having similar names and pseudonyms. Even Studer uses a false identity. There's a mysterious corporal who can predict the future, an elderly barefoot priest, a missing stockbroker, a geologist who may or may not be dead, and might have been a murderer, and a young woman whose cryptic communications and sudden unexpected appearances create even more confusion. The corporal, who is probably someone else altogether, is in the French Foreign Legion, so Studer's unofficial investigation takes him to Morocco.

The book was first published in 1935, and the undercurrents of political corruption, mistrust, and the fear of the coming war add to the nightmarish atmosphere. As a crime novel Fever is deeply flawed, but as a record of the times it's worth reading.

68. A Very Private School by Charles Spencer

At eight years' old Charles Spencer was sent off to the boarding school, Maidwell Hall. His father and mother had divorced and there had been a vicious custody battle which his father had won, but even had his family been intact Charles would have been sent away, because that's what aristocratic parents did. Once their children were disposed of, parents had little contact during term times so they had no idea that their little boys were being brutalised by sadists. They must have managed to ignore the scars their boys brought home.

Spencer, the brother of Princess Diana, wrote this memoir of his preparatory school days as a catharsis. He contacted many of his schoolmates and shared reminiscences. Few of the boys told their parents about their experiences at the time, and those who did were disbelieved. The poor little boys thought that the brutality they were subjected to was normal, and part of their parents' plan for them. This could have been partly true, because little boys were sent away to become tough and self-reliant so they could take their places in the ruling class, but the parents ignored the existence of men who beat children for enjoyment.

This was an impulse buy on BookBub. I'm fascinated by the awfulness of Boris Johnson, particularly his callous behaviour during the pandemic, so was interested in the book's insights into the British ruling class.

69. Impact of Evidence: A Welsh Borders Mystery by Carol Carnac

Carol Carnac and E. C. R. Lorac are pseudonyms of Caroline Rivett, who wrote eighty or so crime novels from 1931 to 1959. Many of the E. C. R. Lorac novels have been re-published as British Library Crime Classics, but this is only the second Carol Carnac I've come across. It's available in Kindle Unlimited as is the other, Crossed Skis.

The action takes place in a remote part of England near the Welsh border. Two cars collide on a dangerous road, and end up in a river. One of the drivers dies, but the other survives. When two young men from a local farm investigate the wrecks, they find an unexpected body. Accompanied by a neighbour, the older of the two braves appalling weather to hike cross-country to report the apparent accident to the local magistrate. The small community is isolated by floods, and snow storms have brought down the phone lines, but with the assistance of the army, the magistrate manages to communicate with the police. The local inspector meets with an apparent accident, so Inspector Rivers of the Metropolitan police is called in.

One farming family is local to the area, but all the other inhabitants have moved there because they have secrets, which are slowly revealed. Is someone holding a secret that is a motive for murder?

There's a lot of weather in Impact of Evidence and, as in the author's other books, a real sense of place. The mystery is pedestrian, but engaging enough.

70. Dom Casmurro by Machado de Assis

First published in 1899, this is a surprisingly modern book. Bento Santiago, now in his fifties and given the nickname Don Casmurro because he has become morose and standoffish, is writing his memoirs. Having lost a child, his mother promised God that she would dedicate Benhito to the church, and the first part of the book is taken up with the boy's attempts to avoid the seminary. His mother's household consists of a her brother, female cousin, and a priest, Jose Dias. Benhito's closest friend is the girl next door, Capitu, and when he hears Jose Dias telling Dona Gloria, Benhito's mother, that the boy and girl are becoming dangerously close, Benhito falls in love with Capitu and is possessive and mistrustful from the start.

The narration is grandiose and comical, because Bento sees himself as a tragic Shakespearean hero, and because he is oblivious to what is actually going on around him.

The book is written with many short chapters and is quite experimental for 1899. It's metafiction, with the narrator referring to the book's structure and his authorial decisions. It's discursive, with the narrator going off on comical literary and philosophical tangents. I enjoyed it very much and recommend it highly.

Dom Casmurro is in plenty of lists including Guardian 1000 and 1001 Books. I found it in the Great Books site under Brazil.

I read the Daunt Books edition translated by Helen Caldwell. The translation flows well. There's an interesting introduction by Elizabeth Hardwick which I'd recommend postponing until you've read the book.

The Greatest Books is a website containing lists of the Greatest Books of All Time, and listings by country. The man who produced it has an algorithm of which he is very proud, which he has used to aggregate results from 350 lists.

I don't think I'd put my faith in his lists, but they're a good source of books we might not be aware of, particularly from other countries.

71. The Mysterious Mr Badman by W. F. Harvey

First published in 1934, this is the author's only full-length crime novel. Mr Athelstan Digby has taken rooms above a bookshop in the village of Keldstone where he is visiting his nephew, John Pickering, a doctor who is thinking of buying a local medical practice. Digby volunteers to mind the shop one afternoon so that his landlords, an elderly couple, can attend a funeral. Three different people come into the shop looking for the same rare book, The Life and Death of Mr. Badman. One of them ends up murdered.

The book turns up soon after the last enquiry, and in it Digby finds a letter that could leave an important person open to blackmail. He appropriates the book and stores it in his rooms, but the next day while he is out investigating, it is purloined by the vicar. Digby, his nephew and a young woman who is the step-daughter of the potential blackmail victim join forces to investigate.

Digby is an appealing character. He's an elderly blanket manufacturer, capable and benevolent. I'm pleased that he is against capital punishment. I liked the book for its humour, but as a mystery it's a bit of a mess. Lots of loose ends and too many characters.

It's a British Library Crime Classic and is available in Kindle Unlimited.

>116 pamelad:
I have read The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cabras and The Alienist collections. Dom Casmurro is sitting on my shelves waiting patiently to be read.
De Assis was definitely an innovative stylist

>119 scunliffe: I have The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas on the Ereader ready to go, because I was so impressed by Dom Casmurro.

Another 19th century Portuguese surprise was Eca de Queiros, whose The Crime of Father Amaro I plan to follow up with The Maias.

I downloaded The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas from KoboPlus and was disappointed that it wasn't nearly as funny as Dom Casmurro, when I came across this:

Yet I didn't conceal from friends the monetary benefits arising from marketing such a broadly impactful invention. The tin-eared translator is Americo Lucena Lage. I'll have to find a better one.

>120 pamelad: Father Amaro and his crime are now tucked into my Kindle. Thanks, looks interesting.

>122 scunliffe: Avoid the Nan Flanagan translation at all costs! Margaret Jull Costa's is the one to go with.

72. Someone from the Past by Margot Bennett

I liked this 1958 British crime novel for its well-drawn characters. Nancy and Sarah met at Diagonal Press where, when the book starts, they still work. They are both capable, intelligent young women, and they have good jobs there. Neither Sarah nor Nancy had much of an education: they're both orphaned and from families with no money and no care. But Sarah is beautiful, and men fall in love with her. When Sarah is killed, the man Nancy is in love with is implicated, and Nancy desperately tries to cover his tracks and find the real murderer.

The plot is a mess and the ending put me off, but this was an interesting read, mainly because of the two female characters. The men are a quartet of Mr Wrongs.

Someone from the Past is available in KindleUnlimited.

73. Zazie in the Metro by Raymond Queneau

Zazie's mother killed her father with an axe but was found not guilty because he was attempting to molest Zazie at the time. Now the mother wants a weekend away to pursue a young an, so she has sent Zazie to stay with her uncle Gabriel. She's a handful - a cynical, world-weary girl in her early teens. Her biggest wish is to travel on the metro, but the workers are on strike and it's closed.

This is a very funny book. Zazie and Gabriel have a wild weekend in Paris accompanied by a cast of ridiculous characters, including a parrot whose favourite phrase is "Talk, Talk. That's all you can do." The language is exuberant and playful, with phrases scrunched up into long, phonetically spelled words and literary references (few of which I picked up on because I'm not that erudite and this is Paris, 1959). Zazie's conversation is littered with obscenities and shocks her companions, but they're almost as foul-mouthed as she is.

I'll probably read this again because I enjoyed it but missed a lot. Barbara White's translation seems to capture Queneau's wordplay but contains a few Britishisms which seem out of place (but might not be, depending on the original French), so anyone who's annoyed by that sort of thing might need to wait for Zazie in the Subway.

>123 pamelad: thanks for the advice

74. Murder after Christmas by Rupert Latimer

A British Library Crime Classic from 1944, and the writer's only crime novel. Arch humour, a confusing and artificial plot, a huge cast of characters. This vintage crime novel was readable but annoying. The plot hinged on people behaving in unlikely ways, and I was quite put off by their lightheartedness in the face of the murder of rich Uncle Willy.

75. Solito by Javier Zamora

Javier's parents escaped El Salvador and crossed illegally into the US, leaving him with his mother's family. His father left when he was one, for reasons connected with the civil war, which Javier doesn't full understand, and his mother left when he was five. He's now nine and his parents have paid a coyote to take him to the US. This is the story of his journey, which stretched from the expected two weeks into a harrowing nine, for seven of which none of Javier's relatives knew whether he was alive. Had he not been helped by three of the other illegals, a mother and her adolescent daughter and a young man who thought of Javier as a little brother, he would not have survived. Although Javier is vague about it, probably because his temporary family sheltered him from the knowledge, it seems that many of their companions died crossing the Sonoma Desert. It's a harrowing read because you're right there with them.

Highly recommended.

Thank you scunliffe, whose review is here.

76. The Theft of the Iron Dogs by E C R Lorac

First published in 1946, this British Library Crime Classic is set in Lancashire. As usual with Lorac's books there's a real sense of place, and Lorac clearly loves the farming country of Lancashire. Inspector MacDonald and his off-sider Reeves really, really appreciate the plentiful fresh food and Lorac describes their meals in unusual detail for a crime novel! I've noticed this before in her books. I think rationing extended into the fifties. It must have been awful!

The plot involves clothing coupon fraud. The book is interesting for its time and setting, but as a mystery it's nothing special.

I am glad it worked for you

It did extend into the 50's. I was deprived of sweets as a child but far far more fortunate than most of the people who lived in continental Europe.

77. The Deadly Travellers by Dorothy Eden

Kate Tempest works as a commercial artist and supplements her income by doing casual jobs for an agency. She has been employed to pick up a little girl, Francesca, in Rome and take her to London, with a side-trip to the Eiffel Tower. The little girl goes missing, and even though Kate's employer says Francesca is safe, Kate is determined to see her in person to make sure.

Kate's a dip-stick who trusts the wrong men. The book started well, but by the end the plot was all over the place.

78. Lamb to the Slaughter by Dorothy Eden

There are two glaciers on the west coast of New Zealand's South Island: Fox Glacier and Franz Josef Glacier. There are tourist villages near the glaciers, and the nearest town is Hokitika. I'm not sure which of the two glaciers this book is set near, possibly Franz Josef because it has the bigger village. In 1953 when this book was written there was only one hotel. One of the main characters guides tourists across the glacier and another drives the public bus to and from Hokitika.

Alice Ashton has been invited by her friend Camilla, a friend from school who is the local primary school teacher, to stay at her decrepit cottage, but when Alice arrives Camilla isn't there, the milk has gone off, and the cat is hungry. Camilla is notorious for her romantic entanglements and it seems that she is dangling three men: Felix Dodsworth, ex-actor, ex-theatrical director, ex-flame of Alice's, current bus driver; Dundas Hill, glacier guide and hoarder of small exquisite things; Dalton Thorpe, a rich man with a strange sister. Which of them is responsible for Camilla's disappearance? Alice becomes engaged to a suspect for no good reason that I can see.

I liked this for its New Zealand setting. Alice is an idiot.

I've borrowed Dorothy Eden's Sinister Weddings from KoboPlus. It's a collection of three romantic suspense/gothic novels: Bride by Candlelight, Bridge of Fear and Cat's Prey. I've read the first two and am having a break before reading the third. These heroines could save themselves a lot of trouble if they were to stop marrying men they barely know!

79. Bride by Candlelight by Dorothy Eden

Julia met Paul in London during the war when he came to visit Julia's great uncle. Paul's grandmother was the great love of the great uncle's life, but she married someone else and moved to New Zealand. Years later Julia receives a love letter from Paul, and with her great uncle's encouragement decides to move to New Zealand and marry him! Paul is changed. He's no longer the sweet, naive young man Julia knew, and is is surrounded by beautiful young women. The grandmother is senile, but perhaps not as far gone as she seems, and believes that Paul's dead brother Harry is in the house. The conclusion is obvious from the start and the only mystery is "how can Julia be such an idiot?"

Once again I liked the New Zealand setting, a sheep farm in the Canterbury high country. The nearest significant town is Timaru, on the east coast of the South Island. The book was first published in 1953.

80. Bridge of Fear by Dorothy Eden

It's the Sydney Harbour Bridge! Quite a feat, setting a Gothic novel in Sydney in spring. Abbey has arrived from London to marry Luke, but he's not the carefree young man she remembers. She's stuck in their new house (on the harbour! This is where rich people live.) all day, waiting for Luke to get home. Luke bought a block of land from the owners of the big house up the hill, so his house is overlooked and there is little privacy. There's a swagman (wrong term, but that's what Eden uses) living in a boat nearby, and he's also keeping an eye on the house. Luke seems far too close to his neighbour Lola, and drives her to and from work every day so that she doesn't have to make a tedious ferry trip. (I wish! It might be time for a trip to Sydney and a ride on the Manly Ferry.)

There's a convoluted plot involving a pink lipstick and a missing cosmetics company. The protagonists include a grumpy man in a wheelchair, his long-suffering wife, her sister Lola and Lola's eight-year-old daughter, and the mother of the women. They all live in the big house.

I don't think kookaburras and the Sydney Harbour Bridge are menacing, and nor are sunny spring days on Sydney Harbour, so I couldn't take Abbey seriously. But at least things happen in Bridge of Fear, unlike Bride by Candlelight. The book was first published in 1961, when the construction of the Sydney Opera House had barely begun.

81. Guy Deverell by Sheridan LeFanu

Having read Uncle Silas and Carmilla, I was expecting a big reveal where one of the characters turned out to be a vampire, and was definitely suspicious of the pale man who looked exactly like someone who'd died in a duel twenty years before. But instead of one big climax there are a lot of smaller ones. There's the theft of a property deed that resulted in the duel, an eerie green room that might be haunted and a housekeeper who knows its mystery, a faithless wife, a doomed romance, two people with false names, too many house guests to keep track of... Overseeing all is the congenial hypocrite, Sir Jekyl (a name that sounds like jackal, appropriately).

I enjoyed the book, but when I reached the end I thought, like Peggy Lee, "is that all there is?"

82. Cat's Prey by Dorothy Eden

Cat's Prey is the third book in Dorothy Eden's Sinister Weddings, a collection of three romantic suspense/gothic novels. It's set in Christchurch, where the heroine's cousin is living. He is on the point of marrying a woman who does not inspire trust, and who seems to be more devoted to the cousin's money than his person. He's inherited a few thousand pounds from an aunt, as has the heroine who has come from England to visit.

The action takes place in a house on a cliff, buffeted by winds and haunted by the screams of seagulls. What is the source of the mysterious light on the third floor? What is the real source of the screams? Who is the pale man who appears to be stalking the heroine?

The plot was full of holes and the characters behaved oddly, but I enjoyed this fifties gothic.

Dorothy Eden was born in New Zealand.

83. Voices in the Evening by Natalia Ginzburg

Elsa's mother is worried that at 29 Elsa isn't married, but she doesn't stop talking long enough to listen to anything Elsa says. The mother is comically self-absorbed, a gossip and a hypochondriac, and leavens this sad novella with humour. The young people are haunted by WWII and decades of Fascism and seem trapped in their little village, surrounded by the people they've known since childhood. Village life revolves around the wealthy DiFrancisci family, which owns the textile mill.

Nearly everyone, including most of the members of the DiFrancisci family, is a Socialist. They disdain the Fascist thugs but are at risk, and people are killed. But Ginzburg doesn't dwell. Her tone is factual, detached and unemotional, but the unembellished details accumulate to show the devastating impact of Fascism and WWII on the lives of a generation of Italians.

Everyone needs to read at least one book by Natalia Ginzburg.

84. All Systems Red: the Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells

The murderbot is part human, part machine and is supposed to be completely controlled by its employers, but it has hacked into its command module and is making its own decisions. It has been hired out to an organisation that is surveying a distant planet, and its job is to protect its humans. (I've just had to go back an change he/his to it, because I've been thinking of the murderbot as a person, but it's genderless and not a they.)

This novella was confusing, but entertaining, and I really liked the murderbot. I plan to read at least one more book in the series. This one won a Hugo and is available in KindleUnlimited.

85. Sagittarius by Natalia Ginzburg

A woman moves from her small village to a nearby city in search of culture and congenial companions, accompanied by her younger daughter her daughter's husband Chaim, a young relative, and her maid. Her other daughter, the narrator, shares a flat with a friend in the same city. The mother befriends a woman she meets in a hair salon, and together they plan to open an art gallery and perhaps a dress shop as well.

This little tragedy is driven by the character of the mother: a restless, foolish and domineering woman. Ginzburg's writing is, as always, wonderful and the mother is so realistically monstrous that I'm glad this book was a novella. Just the right length.

86. Whatever by Michel Houellebecq

Houellebecq's narrator is leading a meaningless life. His job is pointless; it's two years since he split up with the woman he used to love (she was ruined by psychoanalysis); he has no friends and is scathingly observant about the people he knows. Those unexpected observations of people and society are what make the book so funny, despite its depressing theme. It doesn't hang together well, but it's philosophical, original, thought-provoking and short. I enjoyed it.

87. Mona in the Promised Land by Gish Jen

This twenty-seven-year-old paperback has been sitting on my shelf since 2010, when I read Typical American and went searching for Gish Jen's other books. Its small print and browning pages made it a challenge to read but it was well worth the effort because it's short, cheerful, humorous, intelligent and thought-provoking.

Mona Chang is the daughter of Chinese immigrants Ralph and Helen whose story was told in Typical American. They run a successful pancake restaurant and have made enough money to move their family to the wealthy suburb of Scarshill, New York, which has a big Jewish population. Mona is the favourite, even though her older sister Callie strives harder to meet Helen's demands and is the good Chinese daughter Helen says she wants. Mona is more outgoing, cheerful and amusing than the serious, studious Callie.

Mona's story begins in 1968 when she is in middle-school. Her best friend is Barbara Gugelstein, and all her other friends are Jewish. Mona spends so much time at the temple and is so impressed by young Rabbi Horowitz that she decides to convert to Judaism, which doesn't bother her parents too much because they're already Catholic for pragmatic reasons on top of being being Buddhist.

There are no WASPs in this book, just Jewish, Chinese and Black people. As well as being about Mona's passage from adolescence to adulthood, it's about multiculturalism, prejudice and class differences. Mona and her Jewish friends are naive, well-meaning do-gooders, while Mona's parents are insular and only trust other Chinese people. None of this is heavy-handed. It's witty, amusing and open-minded. You can't help liking Mona and her friends, even when they're acting like self-absorbed idiots.

Highly recommended.

>138 pamelad: I was finally able to get one of her books from my library. Voices in the Evening. I will start it soon.

>141 jbegab: I hope you enjoy it, but even if you don't, it's short!

88. The Maid by Nita Prose

I quite enjoyed this twee, sentimental crime novel. The heroine is neurodiverse in a way that fits the plot, but doesn't seem real. It's all a bit too cute for me, but it's a light-hearted easy read. Massively over-hyped.

89. The Christmas Appeal by Janice Hallett

The sequel to The Appeal is also a collection of emails, texts and WhatsApp messages. A retired KC has sent them to his former law students to use in solving a crime. Once again the suspects are members of an amateur dramatic group, The Fairview Players. They're putting on a pantomime of Jack in the Beanstalk. Amusing and satirical, particularly about the political machinations within the drama group. It's a quick, entertaining read.

90. Case in the Clinic by E. C. R. Lorac

It's an osteopathic clinic where most of the patients are elderly men. The exception is Falkland, an architect in his fifties whose painful leg injury hasn't responded to conventional medical treatment. After a conversation with a fellow-patient who witnessed the sudden death of a local clergy-man and believes it was murder, Falkland starts investigating. Other deaths occur, and Inspector MacDonald is called in.

The plot was all over the place, so there wasn't a lot of suspense and I didn't care too much about who did it. Ordinary but readable.

91. Shrines of Gaiety by Kate Atkinson

Atkinson's version of 1926 London is a corrupt and sordid place. DCI John Frobisher is determined to get rid of the corrupt police who are hand-in-glove with Nellie Coker, owner of a network of successful nightclubs. Frobisher is also investigating a spate of murders - adolescent girls whose bodies have been recovered from the Thames - and crosses paths with Gwendolyn Kelling, former librarian and WWI battle-field nurse, who is searching for two fourteen-year-old girls, Freda and Florence, who have run away from home to go on the stage.

There's a big cast of characters and Atkinson deals with most of them superficially. By the end of the book she seems to have lost interest in them altogether so she rounds off each story in a paragraph or two and kills off quite a few people. There are numerous mentions of Harold Arlen's The Green Hat, a best-selling roman-a-clef first published in 1924.

I read the 400 plus pages of Shrines of Gaiety expecting that it would have a point, but it didn't, so I thought it was a waste of time. On top of that, it was depressing.

92. Night Fall by Joan Aiken

This YA novella won an Edgar Alan Poe Award in 1974. It's a sort-of Gothic, sort-of Romantic Suspense. The heroine's parents divorced when she was five, and she lived with her mother, but on her mother's death she returned to live with her father, a dreary old misery. Fortunately, she made friends with the boy and girl next door, and now that she's an adult she's engaged to her old friend. But as the wedding gets closer she's stricken with nightmares, which she's had since childhood but never with this frequency. Something happened in Cornwall, so she escapes her self-absorbed fiance and sets off to solve the mystery.

I enjoyed this light, undemanding read. Joan Aiken tells a good story.

93. Vintage 1954 by Antoine Laurain

I read this one for our book group, which is coming up soon. It's a short time-travel novel, with four characters who share a special bottle of wine being transported back to the year of its vintage, 1954. At the time of the grape harvest the vigneron had reported seeing a flying saucer, and not long after had disappeared with his dog, so we suspect that he could be pottering around in 1954 as well.

This was not my sort of thing at all, being a twee sentimental fantasy with a too-obvious moral. I must think of some constructive things to say about it for the book club.

94. The Castaways by Elin Hildebrand

This was a bargain buy from Kobo, $A1.99. The Castaways reminded me a little of Liane Moriarty's books because it has a similar structure: there's an apparent crime, but we don't find out what happened until the end of the book; it's about four interconnected families and there are lots of domestic details; each chapter is told from the point of view of one character (in the third person, not the first, fortunately). It's missing the humour of Moriarty's books, and the characters are two-dimensional in comparison, but it was good enough and I wanted to know shat happened.

The Castaways is set on Nantucket. One of the couples has just died in a boating accident. Was it an accident, or was it murder?

95. The Last Anniversary by Liane Moriarty

First published in 2005, this is Moriarty's second book, and she hadn't quite hit her stride. As in her later books there is a mystery that is explained in the last chapter, and the story is told from multiple viewpoints.

In 1932, two teenage girls who live on a small island in the Hawkesbury River (inspired by Dangar Island), visit an isolated cottage to find it deserted except for a smiling baby. The kettle is almost boiled and there's a marble cake cooling on a rack, but the baby's parents have disappeared, never to be seen again. The girls, Rose and Connie, bring up the baby whom they name Enigma.

In the present day, Connie has just died and has left her house on the island to Sophie, the ex-girlfriend of Enigma's grandson Thomas. Sophie is thirty-nine and really wants to have children, so she's looking for the right man. The other important characters are children and grand-children of Enigma: Grace, who has just had a baby and isn't doing well; Margie, who is unhappily married to a man with a nasty tongue; Rose, who knows what really happened in 1932.

This was a silly book with an unrealistic plot, but I enjoyed it. It was a Kindle bargain.

96. The Last Word by Elly Griffiths

Harbinder Kaur is in London, and is mostly peripheral to the plot of The Last Word the fourth book in the Harbinder Kaur series. Natalka and Edwin have set up a detective agency, with Benedict assisting when he can spare the time from his beach-side coffee shack. Edwin is a dapper, eighty-four-year-old gay man who used to work for the BBC; Natalka is a capable, tough-minded, beautiful Ukrainian woman who runs a care agency; Benedict used to be a monk, but left the order when he realised that a cloistered, celibate life was not for him.

Edwin and Natalka are investigating the suspect death of an author: her daughters have accused the woman's much younger husband of murdering her. A friend of Benedict's, a priest, asks Benedict to look into the death of a vicar who wrote romances under a female pseudonym. Both victims attended a writers' retreat, and as Natalka, Edwin and Benedict investigate further, they uncover more suspicious author deaths.

The Last Word is cosier than the Ruth Galloway books, with a very unlikely plot, but I liked the characters and the humour. I've missed the third book in the series so have no idea how Harbinder ended up in London, and have missed a big slab of Ukrainian story-line, but I've just bought the third book to fill in the gaps.

The touchstone led to The Rasputin File by Edvard Radzinsky (Why?) so I've fixed it.

97. Meet Mr Mulliner by P. G. Wodehouse

Mr Mulliner is the raconteur of the Angler's Rest, a short, stout, comfortable man of middle age....I would have bought oil stock from him without a tremor. Of an evening in the bar parlour he regales his listeners with tales of his relatives.

These were very silly, comic stories. I loved them.

98. Merivel: a man of his time by Rose Tremain was shortlisted for the 2013 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction. It's the sequel to Restoration, first published in 1989, so there were 24 years between the two books. Merivel is set fifteen years after the end of Restoration and the physician Sir Robert Merivel is fifty-six. King Charles II, Merivel's friend and mentor, is nearing the end of his reign and in declining health. Merivel's rambunctiousness has always been punctuated with fits of melancholy, which are now exacerbated by his awareness of his own mortality. He's looking for distraction so he travels to France in the hope of being appointed to the court of Louis XIV.

Merivel is a wonderful character. He's not a always a good man, being impulsive, selfish and thoughtless, but he's three-dimensional, alive and sympathetic. I preferred Restoration because Merivel is melancholy in comparison, but the decline towards old age is Merivel's theme, so the melancholy is fitting.

I'm pleased to have re-discovered Rose Tremain so have borrowed Absolutely & Forever which is longlisted for the 2024 Walter Scott prize.

99. Absolutely & Forever by Rose Tremain was longlisted for the 2024 Walter Scott Prize.

Fifteen-year-old Marianne is besotted with Simon, who is three years older and studying for his Oxford entrance exam. He deflowers her in the back seat of his powder-blue Mini Minor, and she knows that she will love him absolutely and forever. Simon doesn't get into Oxford, so his shamed parents pack him off to the Sorbonne. Marianne exists between letters and fantasises about their future together, to the detriment of her present. And that's the way she continues: failing her exams; making no effort in a secretarial course; sleeping with men she doesn't much like; marrying a childhood friend she doesn't love. Rose Tremain has sympathy for her annoying heroine, but I had none. Even so, I like Tremain's writing, the book is short, and I'd made a guess that I wanted to verify, so I kept reading and was entertained.

Rose Tremain was born in 1943, so in 1959 when the book begins she was the same age as Marianne. Like Marianne she lived in Berkshire and went to boarding-school, so she knows the people she writes about. Like Merivel, Absolutely & Forever is melancholy, although it ends on a note of hope.

100. Travellers in the Third Reich by Julia Boyd

In 1939 the Thomas Cook company was still running cheap package tours to Germany: the exchange rate was good, the scenery and mediaeval villages were beautiful, and the locals were friendly. People went to enjoy themselves so most of them managed to ignore the violence, the militarism, the lack of freedom and, worst of all, the treatment of the Jewish population. This blindness was shared by many other travellers: academics; British aristocrats; politicians; recent school leavers sent by their parents to learn the language and to experience German culture; young people stopping off on their European travels; women marrying German husbands. Boyle has quoted from memoirs, newspaper articles, and private letters to gather travellers' impressions of Hitler's Germany. There is a great deal of anti-Semitism, particularly intense from British aristocrats and politicians, many of whom are Nazi sympathisers.

An interesting and worthwhile read.

101. Safe Passage by Ida Cook

Ida and her sister Louise were mentioned in Travellers in the Third Reich. Louise, the elder, was a civil service clerk and Ida had taken a risk to leave her job, also in the civil service, to work on a magazine. Under the name Mary Burchell, Ida had begun as successful career as a writer of romantic fiction, so she had money to spare. Ida and Louise were mad-keen opera goers and had become friends with some famous performers, two of whom introduced the sisters to a Jewish music lecturer who made clear to them the perilous situation of the Jews in Germany and its occupied countries. The sisters helped the woman and her family escape to Britain, and went on to help many other Jews settle in Britain.

The parts of the book describing how the sisters got people away are the most interesting. Ida Cook doesn't dwell on the fear and danger, and touches lightly on the devastation of failing to save some of the people she tries to help, so she comes across as relentlessly positive. But she took those risks and saved those people, so she can tell her story however she wants. There's an awful lot about opera.

A quick, easy read. It's uplifting to read about good people.

>154 pamelad: I have this book, better move it up my TBR list!

>154 pamelad: Congratulations on making it to 100, with so much time in hand.

>157 Eyejaybee: Thank you!

102. Bleeding Heart Yard by Elly Griffths

Harbinder Kaur has been promoted to and is in charge of a team of detectives. She's in London, sharing a flat with two other women. She's attracted to one of them, but doesn't want to say anything in case her friend isn't interested. (London must be an extraordinarily expensive place to live, if women in their thirties, with OK jobs, have to share accommodation.) Cassie, a member of Harbinder's team, is at a school reunion when one of her old schoolmates is found murdered. A student died on the last day of exams, twenty years ago, and Cassie thinks that both murders are linked.

An entertaining mystery with touches of humour. Not too cosy, but not at all gruesome.

103. Three Wishes by Liane Moriarty

The Kettle sisters are triplets, two identical and one fraternal. They're celebrating their thirty-fourth birthday when the recently divorced Cat stabs her pregnant sister Gemma in the stomach with a cocktail fork then trips and knocks herself unconscious on the edge of the table. The third sister, Lyn the orderly one, manages the crisis.

The book tells the sisters' stories in a series of episodes. Light-hearted, humorous domestic drama. I enjoyed it.

104. The Road to the City by Natalia Ginzburg

First published in 1944 under a false name, this is Natalia Ginzburg's first book, a novella about a passive, unobservant young woman who doesn't realise how important her cousin Nini is to her, and she to him. Everyone is doomed. It's very sad.

105. The Body in the Bunker by Herbert Adams

First published in 1935, this British crime novel goes on a bit too much about golf, but is otherwise a good read. The villain is a nasty piece of work, so when his body is found in the bunker, no one is too upset. Unfortunately suspicion falls on the innocent, the police are misled, and a young barrister has to find the real culprit.

The main drawback of the book is that it's edited by Rafat Allam for the Al-Mashreq eBookstore. There's no editor's note to say what's been edited or why, so I'm blaming the minor mistakes, clumsiness and misspellings on the editor e.g. flowery potatoes instead of floury, an intrusive use of "like", Americanised spelling. But it's available free with KoboPlus, so I'm prepared to forgive.

106. The Judas Kiss by Herbert Adams was mentioned in Jacques Barzun's Catalogue of Crime. It was first published in 1955, twenty years after The Body in the Bunker, and is heavily moralistic. Many of the women in the book have lived with men outside the sanctity of marriage, which is just wrong and leads to the children of these unions having reduced moral sensibility! Adams was eighty or so when he wrote the book.

I found the moralising quaint, so it added to the entertainment of this classic British crime novel. A wealthy widower returns from France with a wife the same age as his oldest son. His four children are horrified and, two deaths later, are suspects in a murder.

>158 pamelad: Sadly London is indeed a very expensive place to live, and I know that a lot of my younger colleagues have to share their accommodation, despite having what would appear to be good jobs.

107. Sixpenny Holding by Margaret Scutt

First published in 2018 but written much earlier (the author lived from 1905 to 1988 and this book seems to be set in the fifties), this is a gentle, cosy crime story. Marian has spent years looking after her invalid mother, and in her forties, after her mother's death, she buys a primitive cottage at the edge of a small village. she wants to become a writer, but her writing time is drastically reduced when she has to take in her four-year-old niece. There's a little bit of mystery involving an escaped convict and another man who is making her neighbour's life a misery. but at no time does it seem that things will turn out badly.

A pleasant, soothing read. A Kindle bargain.

>161 Eyejaybee: I've just Googled flats to rent in London. They seem to cost about twice as much as something similar in Melbourne. Housing is expensive here, but London prices are stratospheric.

108. The Secret Countess a.k.a A Countess Below Stairs by Eva Ibbotson

This YA historical romance was a finalist for the Nestlé Smarties Book Prize. Anna escaped to England from revolutionary Russia with her mother and younger brother. The family entrusted their jewels to their wet nurse but she disappeared, leaving the family dependent on their English governess. Anna finds work as a maid so that she can contribute to her family's support.

This being a YA novel, the good people were very, very good and the bad people were very, very bad. Anna and her employer Rupert, a penurious earl, fall in love, but he's betrothed to the evil Muriel who is a devoted follower of the eugenicist, Dr Lightfoot, who is not even a real doctor.

I enjoyed The Secret Countess for its charm and humour.

109. Nothing Like Blood by Leo Bruce

Helena Gort, an old friend of Carolus Deene's mother, persuades Deene to investigate two suspicious deaths at the guesthouse where she has been staying. This entertaining, humorous mystery was recommended in A Catalogue of Crime by Jaques Barzun.

110. The Fifth Man by Manning Coles

Five men in a German prison camp are offered the chance of returning to England to become spies for the Germans. They accept because they want to get back to England, with no intention of working for the Germans. One of the men, a major, disappears in Berlin, and this is his story. At the beginning I was drawn in because I thought the narrative was going somewhere, but it was a collection of episodes that described how the missing major evaded capture. I wanted him to survive, so kept on reading to make sure, but the plot meandered around without a focus.

The Fifth Man was first published in 1946. It's the sixth book in the Tommy Hambledon series.

111. The Mystery of Mrs Blencarrow by Margaret Oliphant

Mrs Blencarrow is a widow in her early forties, a self-possessed, capable woman who is the well-loved mother of five children. She's such a paragon that one of her neighbours, a vicious shrew, would like nothing more than to destroy Mrs Blencarrow's reputation.

This novella was first published in 1990. It's an interesting snippet of country society and its rigid class structure. As usual with Mrs Oliphant, the characters are well-drawn and believable.

112. Case Without a Corpse by Leo Bruce

Young Rogers enters the public bar, announces to Sergeant Beef that he is a murderer, then dies by ingesting cyanide. Who's dead? Is it the suspicious Mr Fairfax who has been hanging around this small country town pretending to be fishing? Is it Rogers' discarded girlfriend? Perhaps it's Sawyer, an unhappy husband? Beef reports the case to Scotland Yard because it's odd and he thinks they ought to know, but the Yard is disdainful and tells Beef to get on with it. Eventually though, the briskly capable Stute arrives to take over.

Case Without a Corpse was recommended in A Catalogue of Crime. It's the second Sergeant Beef mystery, and like the first, Case for Three Detectives, is entertaining and funny. First published in 1937, it satirises the conventions of the Golden Age Detective novel.

I enjoyed it, but despite Sergeant Beef is extremely annoying. Deliberately so.

113. The Vegetarian by Han Kang

Yeong-hye stops eating meat because her dreams are drenched in blood. Her violent father and her husband, Mr Cheung who relates the first section of this three-part story, try to force her to do what they want but Yeong-kye would rather die than eat meat.

In the second section Yeon-hye is seen through the eyes of her brother-in-law, a video artist who has been obsessed with her ever since he was told that she has a birth mark, a Mongolian mark that is often found on children but rarely on adults.

In-hye, the older sister of Yeon-hye, narrates the third and last section and in trying to see her sister's point of view, realises how little autonomy she herself has.

Yeon-hye is seen only from the perspective of others, except for her dreams, which intersperse Mr Cheung's narrative. The three male chracters are all awful, and the two women have little control over their lives. The book is steeped in misery and gloom, but since it's short the bleakness is manageable. The Vegetarian is fascinating and strange.

>169 pamelad: I've read both Human Acts and The Vegetarian, and some pretentious version of myself had some sort of epiphany on a Shakespearean level about Human Acts LOL-- but I couldn't quite get there with The Vegetarian. I think I still have both books on my shelves somewhere waiting for me to get inspired and return to them!

>170 Tanya-dogearedcopy: You made me laugh. The Vegetarian was epiphany-free, but I now have expectations for Human Acts.

114. The Village of Eight Graves by Seishi Yokomizo

This plot has everything! There are secret caves, a lost treasure, a missing psychopath who murdered at least 32 people with a machete, numerous poisonings, a newly-discovered heir, and a romance. The story is narrated by Tatsuya, son of the unwilling mistress of Yozo, the head of the wealthy Tajimi family. Twenty-six years ago Yozo went berserk, killed many innocent villages and disappeared. When Tatsuya is found, the killings begin again, but this time the victims are poisoned.

Exuberantly entertaining and quite mad.

115. Small Bomb at Dimperley by Lissa Evans

Valentine Vere-Thissett is a disappointment to his mother, but when her favourite son is finally declared dead after being missing-in-action for two years, Valentine succeeds to the baronetcy and inherits Dimberley, the family's decrepit estate. During the war Dimberley was a home for pregnant women who had been evacuated from London during the blitz. Zena Baxter has stayed on with her daughter Allison as the secretary of Valentine's Uncle Alaric, who is writing a long, tedious history of Dimberley and the Thissetts.

Small Bomb at Dimperley is charming, funny and cheerful. I bought it to celebrate my 18th LT Anniversary. Excellent choice. I hope the next is as enjoyable.

116. Death at the Durbar by Arjun Raj Gaind

The 1911 Delhi Durbar was held to celebrate the coronation of George V, and was the first durbar to be attended by royalty. It was a huge display of Britain's wealth and power. The maharajahs of India attended because they had to publicly support the Raj or be deposed by the British. The descriptions of the durbar, the machinations of the maharajas, and the snippets of Indian history are the most interesting aspects of the book.

A dancing girl, who had been purchased as a gift for the king, is found murdered just two days before the king's arrival. The Viceroy asks Sikander Singh, the Maharajah of Rajpore, to investigate. There's a huge cast of suspects, which is hard to keep track of, particularly since the suspect maharajas are all known by multiple names. At least one maharajah is a psychopath and most of the others have motives, so the plot consists of Sikander interviewing multiple maharajahs and using his intuition to decide whether or not they are guilty.

The plot's a mess and the writing is riddled with cliches, but the story is interesting because of the historical context.

117. The Real Bridgerton by Catherine Curzon

Snippets of Georgian scandals. Entertaining enough to read for free from KoboPlus, but there's not much to it.

118. The Blue Santo Murder Mystery by Margaret Armstrong

First published in 1941, this mystery is now part of the Lost Crime Classics series. It is set in the American west, still a wild and remote place. Most of the characters are tourists who are staying at an up-market hotel. One of the guests, a rich and ruthless businesswoman, is murdered. Was it revenge? Was it her philandering husband? Was she killed for the $80,000 pearls she always wore? (In 1941 that must have been a fortune.)

A pedestrian mystery, but atmospheric.

119. Greygallows by Barbara Michaels

A classic gothic romantic mystery, Greygallows has all the requirements: an orphaned heiress; a handsome vicar; a wicked aunt; an isolated mansion on the moors; an aristocratic, unknowable husband with a terrible reputation; a rumoured ghost; a beautiful woman who avoids the heroine.

A predictable story done well. Just what I felt like reading.

120. The Pride of the Peacock by Victoria Holt

I'm in a Gothic frame of mind so I enjoyed this one even though it has many faults.

Jessica is the misfit of the Clavering family, decades younger than her sister Miriam and brother Gerald. The Claverings have come down in the world and have had to sell the family mansion to a one-legged opal miner. Miriam, Gerald and their father are browbeaten by the angry, domineering Mrs Clavering but Jessica is a free spirit. She makes friends with the miner, and spends the second half of the book living in a mining town north of Sydney.

The problems with the story are: there's fabulous opal that brings misery to all who own it; a town is named Fancy; it's hard to sympathise with Jessica's fear of her husband, so there's not a lot of Gothic romance tension; Aboriginal people are stereotyped; the plot is so very unlikely.

121. Waiting for Willa by Dorothy Eden

Grace Asherton receives a letter from her cousin Willa, who has been working as a secretary for the British Embassy in Stockholm. It contains a secret code that tells Grace that Willa is afraid and needs help, so she rushes to Stockholm, only to find that Willa is missing. Willa's diary names four men, any of whom might be implicated in Willa's disappearance. One of them is Polson, a university lecturer who lives in the attic. Grace decides to trust him, but should she? She is looking for Gustav, Willa's lover. It's a false name, so Gustav might be Polson, or Willa's boss at the embassy, or the sea captain upstairs, or an elderly Baron whose beautiful wife ignores him. Can Grace find Willa before it's too late? Is Grace in danger?

I enjoyed this short, tidy romantic suspense.

122. The Girl from Paris by Joan Aiken is the third and last book in the Paget family trilogy. It's labelled a romance but, as I've come to expect from Aiken, the romance is perfunctory and not the main point of the book. I'd say that the theme is the corrupting influence of money.

Ella Paget is working as a teacher in a Brussels boarding school when her godmother swoops in and removes her to Paris, where Ella will be teaching the small daughter of a Comte, whose wife wants nothing to do with him. Ella's godmother wants Ella to befriend the wife and fix the marriage. A scandal erupts, and Ella moves back to England to look after her miserly father and small half-sister, Vicky. Vicki's other half-sibling is Benedict Masham, the younger brother of an earl and son of Ella's father's second wife.

Like the previous book in the series, The Weeping Ash, The Girl from Paris is a meandering tale with an abrupt ending. Once again I got the impression that Aiken killed off a few characters because she was sick of them and wanted to finish the book! That said, I was entertained and had to keep reading. Four people died in the final chapter. I was really annoyed!

123. The Editor's Wife by Clare Chambers

I looked up similar writers to Lissa Evans and found Clare Chambers so I thought I'd give her a try. Perhaps this wasn't the best book to start with, because I found the characters dreary and unsympathetic, so I had little interest in what happened to them. Liking the characters isn't a prerequisite for liking a book if it has something to say, but this one didn't. The writing was fine, so Clare Chambers is probably worth another try.

Glad I've finished it.