Tag Archives: book review

#BookReview ‘The Western Wind’ by Samantha Harvey #historical

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In 15th century Somerset, a village is isolated between high ground and a river. Various attempts to find funding and the skills to build a bridge have foundered, and with it the village’s hopes of prosperity. Then in the early hours of Shrove Saturday, the body of a villager is swept away by the river and everyone looks to the priest for answers. The Western Wind by Samantha Harvey is a contemplative, slow burn about John Reve, the priest, his care for the villagers of Oakham, and the persistent questions of his visiting rural dean about the death of Thomas Newman. Samantha HarveyThe story timeline is chopped up and told backwards, which adds to the mystery. The novel starts with the sighting of the body and the finding of a green shirt in the bulrushes. This is a sign, Reve says, that Newman’s soul has crossed into heaven. Only at the end, do we find out the truth of what really happened. The dean is a threat; we never know his name, and only at the end are we given a physical description of him. He suggests to Reve that as this is the season of confession, a pardon be issued to anyone confessing in the next three days. This, he hopes, will enable him to tell the archdeacon that the death was investigated and the village is full of church-going people who are faithful penitents. He tells Reve: ‘You’re the parish priest – your word weighs a hundred times a normal man’s, two hundred times a woman’s, three hundred times a child’s. Your word is a silver weight in the palm. Your word is worth trading money for. It would cut like a stone through water.’ But what is a parish to do if a priest fails in his office and then compounds that failure with lies; and worse, encourages a parishioner to lie. Everyone in the village is affected by what has happened. Reve has a privileged position, he listens to the confessions of all the villagers; he knows their secrets. But to whom does he tell his own secrets? Unsure of his actions and feeling threatened by the dean’s relentless questions, he asks God to send the western wind as a sign of approval and to blow away the spirits.
There are all sorts of themes going on here. The fine line between religion and superstition. The hypocrisy and lies of religion and its priests. The honesty and doggedness of the rural poor and their willingness to believe in symbols and spirits as well as God. It considers the practice of confession, that allows a person to sin in the knowledge that they will be blessed by the priest afterwards.
This is a careful, restrained novel – as fitting its contemplative clerical narrator – rich in descriptive detail. But at times I wishes it moved a little faster or was a little shorter. Told entirely from Reve’s point of view, it might perhaps have benefited from another voice. I also found the ending rather abrupt.

If you like this, try:-
‘Reservoir 13’ by John McGregor
‘Master of Shadows’ by Neil Oliver
‘Under a Pole Star’ by Stef Penney

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Great Opening Paragraph 107… ‘Such a Long Journey’ #amreading #FirstPara

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“The first light of morning barely illuminated the sky as Gustad Noble faced eastwards to offer his orisons to Ahura Mazda. The hour was approaching six, and up in the compound’s solitary tree the sparrows began to call. Gustad listened to their chirping every morning while reciting his kusti prayers. There was something reassuring about it. Always, the sparrows were first; the cawing of the crows came later.”
Rohinton Mistry From ‘Such a Long Journey’ by Rohinton Mistry 

Try one of these #FirstParas & discover a new author:-
‘The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn’ by Mark Twain
‘Illywhacker’ by Peter Carey
‘The Bell Jar’ by Sylvia Plath

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#Books #FirstPara SUCH A LONG JOURNEY by Rohinton Mistry via http://wp.me/p5gEM4-2xt @SandraDanby

#BookReview ‘Brightly Coloured Horses’ by Amanda Huggins @troutiemcfish #shortstories

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‘Twenty-seven very short human stories’ it says on the cover of Brightly Coloured Horses by Mandy Huggins. Many of them are competition winners. This is the first anthology by this Yorkshire writer, but these are not the stories of a beginner. She is a talented writer of the human state of mind who chooses every single word with care, and makes every single word work hard to convey its meaning. It has to in a flash fiction story; there is no space for indulgence on the part of the writer. Amanda HugginsWomen, and men, fall in love, out of love, they grieve for what they have lost or never had, their attraction is instant, fading or lustful opportunity, they feel cherished, desired or neglected. I’ve chosen three stories to discuss. Huggins is excellent on the many shades of the human relationship and the titular ‘Brightly Coloured Horses’ is a key example. Marielle and Hugh arrive in Paris for a romantic weekend. ‘The food was mediocre: the bread was yesterday’s and their omelettes were overcooked. She smiled, and said it was fine, and they both drank too much wine because they knew it wasn’t.’ Their disengagement with each other is familiar to anyone whose relationship has broken down. Marielle knows what is happening, wills it not to, wonders why they are in Paris and decides to make her own memories of the city.
My favourites in this collection were often the shortest. ‘Flight Path’ is barely 100 words but conjures up such a clear picture of a place and a moment in time. To describe it is to spoil its effect, so I won’t. It is the first story in the collection, quite rightly.
I chose ‘Kisses’ as my third story, based purely on its opening line: ‘Kevin Healey’s kisses tasted like dunked biscuits.’ Julie is in Tesco when she sees a man she last saw, and kissed, at a teenage Christmas party. Huggins explores the memory of lost teenage years, the yearning promise of something that never was, the hesitant wonder if it could be again.

Read my reviews of other work by Amanda Huggins:-
Novellas
ALL OUR SQUANDERED BEAUTY
CROSSING THE LINES
THE BLUE OF YOU
Short stories
AN UNFAMILIAR LANDSCAPE
EACH OF US A PETAL
SCRATCHED ENAMEL HEART
SEPARATED FROM THE SEA
Poetry
THE COLLECTIVE NOUNS FOR BIRDS

If you like this, try:-
‘The Story’ ed. by Victoria Hislop
‘All the Rage’ by AL Kennedy
‘Normal Rules Don’t Apply’ by Kate Atkinson

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#BookReview BRIGHTLY COLOURED HORSES by Amanda Huggins @troutiemcfish https://wp.me/p5gEM4-3lS via @SandraDanby

#BookReview ‘The Night Child’ by Anna Quinn #mystery

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The Night Child by Anna Quinn caught me by surprise and took off racing from the first page so that I read half the book at my first sitting. But it is not a thriller, it was simply that I didn’t want to stop reading. I confess to selecting the book on my Kindle having forgotten the book blurb; perhaps I should do that more often. Anna QuinnNora Brown teaches teenagers about Shakespeare and poetry; so she knows about the imagination, imagery and dreams. Then one day at work, floating in front of her she sees the face of a blue-eyed girl, a face without a body. Quinn writes about Nora’s fear, panic, guilt, shame, with an insight into the private mind and this made me believe Nora from page one. Seeking answers, she talks to a psychiatrist and so starts an unravelling of Nora’s past, a past buried so deep she had no idea of its existence. As the revelations pick up pace, she must deal with a damaged teenager at school, decide whether to confront her unfaithful husband Paul, and reassure her six-year-old daughter Fiona. Stress layered on top of stress, which makes the child’s face appear more often. Soon she hears the accompanying voice too.
Why have Nora’s difficulties started now? Is there a connection with Fiona, who has just celebrated her sixth birthday? Is the trigger to do with Nora’s own sixth birthday? At the root of it all, perhaps not surprisingly, is the death of her mother and the subsequent abandonment by her father. The only constant in her life is her younger brother James. Raised by their grandfather in Ireland, Irish myths and Catholic saints are woven throughout Nora’s story. The present day action takes place between Thanksgiving in November 1996 and February 1997.
This is the sort of book which makes you think ‘please not that’ and turn the page to see if you have guessed correctly. The subject is not new but Quinn approaches it from a fresh angle which shows how the impact of childhood unhappiness can be repressed only to reappear with a vengeance decades later. I liked Nora. She is not a victim. At first she is afraid she is going ‘crazy’. Her primal instinct is to protect her own child, she constantly reassures Fiona that she loves her ‘beyond the stars and back’. But as the memories begin to return thick and fast in her sessions with psychiatrist David, things also unravel at home as Paul accuses her of being ‘a zombie’. David reminds her that she is in control but to ‘be careful not to scare yourself’. Where will the memories lead her and will she be able to cope?
I really enjoyed this book. It came as a bolt out of the blue after having read a series of historical novels. It is a powerful and sensitive portrayal of emotional damage and a person’s capacity to face it and recover. This is a debut, but I would never have guessed, it is written with a steady hand and full heart. The juxtaposition of Quinn’s beautiful prose, and her subject matter, is startling.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE ABOUT THIS BOOK

If you like this, try:-
‘The Hoarder’ by Jess Kidd
‘The Crows of Beara’ by Julie Christine Johnson
‘Something to Hide’ by Deborah Moggach

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#BookReview THE NIGHT CHILD by Anna Quinn https://wp.me/p5gEM4-36G via @SandraDanby

#BookReview ‘Love Me Not’ by @mjarlidge #crimefiction

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Every book in the Helen Grace series by MJ Arlidge is fast-moving, but Love Me Not is the fastest of them all. The action happens, almost exclusively, in one day. It starts in the early morning when a commuter is shot on a rural road. Why kill a respectable wife and mother who has a socially-responsible job? As the day progresses there are more shootings around Southampton, each victim seems completely different from the others. Where is the pattern? MJ ArlidgeThis story is different in that the action is not focussed so much on Helen Grace and, with the exception of a few references to previous books, can be read as a standalone story. There is a gunman on the loose, shooting people at random. Or is it two gunmen? As the victims start to pile-up, a pattern begins to emerge. Will the police identify the shooters in time to stop another murder? Why are the killers staying so close to Southampton? The point-blank callousness of the murders is chilling. When the answers are found, they are unfortunately all too believable. The reader, unlike the police, knows the who but not the why and that’s what keeps the pages turning.
As always with this series, the hunt for a killer is underlain by tensions within the police team. Some of these tensions are caused by Helen herself, as always a challenging, flawed but dynamic character. It is good to see continuing characters such as Charlie Brooks and Emilia Garanita.
I read this in 24 hours.

Read my reviews other books in this series:-
EENY MEENY #1HELENGRACE
POP GOES THE WEASEL #2HELENGRACE
THE DOLL’S HOUSE #3HELENGRACE
LIAR LIAR #4HELENGRACE
LITTLE BOY BLUE #5HELENGRACE
HIDE AND SEEK #6HELENGRACE
DOWN TO THE WOODS #8 HELENGRACE

If you like this, try:-
‘Darktown’ by Thomas Mullen
‘Jellyfish’ by Lev D Lewis
‘A Mind to Murder’ by PD James

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview LOVE ME NOT by @mjarlidge http://wp.me/p5gEM4-2PL via @SandraDanby

#BookReview ‘The Heat of the Day’ by Elizabeth Bowen #WW2

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For readers, this novel is a definite case for remembering to ‘trust the author.’ The Heat of the Day by Elizabeth Bowen, published in 1949, is now recognised as a classic novel about the Second World War. Elizabeth BowenStella Rodney has relationships with two men, her lover Robert and Harrison, the man who suspects Robert of selling secrets to the enemy and sees this as a way of winning Stella’s love. This is not a spy novel, rather its threads and tentacles of story are woven as intricately as the lives of the three principal characters overlap with the bigger-scale events of war.
War is at the centre of it all, brooding over every minute, every decision, every pause. London, emptied of evacuees and people fleeing for safety, becomes a smaller place where strangers wish each other good luck in anticipation of that night’s bombing, where you awake in the morning and realize you are still alive. ‘Out of mists of morning charred by the smoke from ruins each day rose to a height of unmisty glitter; between the last sunset and first note of the siren the darkening glassy tenseness of evening was drawn fine. From the moment of waking you tasted the sweet autumn not less because of an acridity on the tongue and nostrils; and as the singed dust settled and smoke diluted you felt more and more called upon to observe the daytime as a pure and curious holiday from fear.’ On the whole though, the war is absent from the page. This is a story about people in extra-ordinary times.
The storyline is at times perplexing and vague and it is at those moments that I remembered to trust Elizabeth Bowen and enjoy to her language. This is the first of her novels I have read. Her stated interest was in the contrasts between life ‘with the lid on’ and what happens ‘when the lid comes off’. In The Heat of the Day, war causes the lid to be lifted. The theme of time runs throughout the novel. Daily life in London goes on but as if time is suspended from normality. Shackles have been removed and people behave differently, carelessness is common. It is in this vacuum that Stella, who lives in a rented furnished apartment with few things of her own, is given an ultimatum by Harrison. Louie, another displaced woman living in London waiting for her soldier husband who may or may not come home, appears in the first chapter as she listens to a band play in a park. Both women lie to the men in their lives, both have sex outside their monogamous relationships. Neither Robert or Harrison are as they seem. Harrison’s job is never explained, and Robert’s supposed treachery remains ill-defined.
This is a novel of shadows, appropriate as most of the novel happens at night during the blackout when the way is lit by torchlight and people blunder into furniture in darkened rooms. A very different read.

If you like this, try:-
‘The Slaves of Solitude’ by Patrick Hamilton
‘At Mrs Lippincote’s’ by Elizabeth Taylor
‘The Paying Guests’ by Sarah Waters

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#BookReview ‘Offshore’ by Penelope Fitzgerald #contemporary

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This is a slim, powerful novel about a small community of people living on houseboats on the River Thames at Battersea Reach in 1960s London. Anchored on the southern shore, next to the warehouses, brewery and rubbish disposal centre, they long to be positioned on the prosperous Chelsea shore opposite. In Offshore, Penelope Fitzgerald draws you into the world of Dreadnought, Grace, Maurice, Lord Jim and Rochester – those are the boats – and their occupants. Penelope FitzgeraldThey live in close, intimate proximity as the boats are tied to each other, only one is fastened to the wharf. Despite this, each person lives in an individual island of loneliness caused by marriage, poverty, sexuality, or just being different. Their lives are governed by tidal movement. ‘On every barge on the Reach a very faint ominous tap, no louder than the door of a cupboard shutting, would be followed by louder ones from every strake, timber and weatherboard, a fusillade of thunderous creaking, and even groans that seemed human. The crazy old vessels, riding high in the water without cargo, awaited their owner’s return.’
The people are inter-dependent but don’t know it until a crisis happens. The catalyst is Nenna, a young mother separated from her husband. She lives on Grace with her two children, Tilda and Martha, who run wild in the mud. One day, when they find antique painted tiles and sell them at an antiques shop on King’s Road, the two children seem more mature and capable than their mother. Nenna’s neighbours act as counsellors, offering marriage advice, boat help, and babysitting services. Richard, the de facto leader of the boat community, worries that his wife is bored and wants to retire to a house advertised in Country Life magazine. Meanwhile Willis, a struggling artist, who lives on Dreadnought, has a leak. This endangers his plan to sell the boat.
A beautifully-written thoughtful novel showing how very different people can rub along together.
Offshore won the Booker Prize in 1979, a year sandwiched between Iris Murdoch in 1978 for The Sea The Sea, and Rites of Passage by William Golding in 1980. Fitzgerald had been shortlisted the previous year for The Bookshop and would be again in 1988 with The Beginning of Spring. What a golden time that was. Penelope FitzgeraldMy paperback copy of Offshore [above] is an old Fourth Estate edition with a moody photo of the River Thames at dusk.

Read my review of THE BLUE FLOWER, also by Penelope Fitzgerald.

If you like this, try these other Booker-winning novelists:-
‘Life Class’ by Pat Barker [won the Booker in 1995 with ‘The Ghost Road’]
‘Mothering Sunday’ by Graham Swift [won the Booker in 1996 for ‘Last Orders’]
‘The Children Act’ by Ian McEwan [won the Booker in 1998 with ‘Amsterdam’]

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#BookReview OFFSHORE by Penelope Fitzgerald via @SandraDanby http://wp.me/p5gEM4-2n2

#BookReview ‘In the Midst of Winter’ by Isabel Allende #contemporary

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In the Midst of Winter by Isabel Allende is the story of three ordinary-looking people, people you would not glance at if you passed by them in the street, and their extra-ordinary lives. Each has faced loss and trauma, each feels isolated, lonely. Isabel AllendeLaced throughout this deceptive novel are themes of dislocation, grief, human trafficking and the courage to free oneself of these bonds. Set in modern-day Brooklyn and Guatemala, and 1970s Chile and Brazil, it is the story of people relocated thousands of miles away from family to new countries with strange languages and customs where against the odds they must begin a new life.
Richard, Lucia and Evelyn are thrown together in Brooklyn, New York, during a momentous snowstorm. Evelyn, a young illegal immigrant from Guatemala, borrows her employer’s car and in the storm crashes into Richard. Richard is in his sixties, a loner, aesthete and reformed alcoholic, he lives his life according to routine. But when the car crash upsets his rigid ordered life, he is forced to halt his almost OCD existence and do unpredictable, often rash, things. When Evelyn turns up on his doorstep, hours after the crash, he is unable to understand her Spanish and asks Lucia, university colleague and tenant of the basement flat of his freezing cold Brooklyn brownstone, to come upstairs and help him with the hysterical girl.
The reason for Evelyn’s hysteria becomes clear the next morning. What they choose to do next constitutes In the Midst of Winter. It is a road trip with a difference as the trio set off in convoy in two cars, into a snowstorm, with a task to complete. Their choice dominates the book and, though I found it well-meaning, it seemed emotional and impractical. The journey is the technique by which Allende tells their stories; each is an unburdening, a confession of their guilt, shame, offences and regrets. I lost myself in each of these stories and came back to the modern day strand with a clunk, as I remembered the choice these three people made. It feels surrealistic, as if their horrific ‘problem’ [the reason for the road trip] doesn’t exist. The writing is beautiful, particularly the description of snow, though the stories of abuse are harrowing.
Essentially Allende tells two stories – the accident; and the historical stories of Richard, Lucia and Evelyn. They start as strangers and by the end of the trip they have shared more than a car, their experience bonds them together and shows them a life different from their own. The snowstorm has a double effect. It acts as a vacuum in which the outside world has zero presence, in which these three strangers must react to their discovery and decide what action to take. Perhaps this explains their out-of-the-real-world decision. It also focuses a magnifying glass on each individual as they confess their story, sometimes for the first time, offering themselves up to the other two strangers for rejection or redemption. In the first half I got the backstories of Lucia and Evelyn confused, but as the story went on this became clearer.
This is an unusual story exploring how ordinary people are affected by legal and illegal immigration from South America to the United States, of gang violence, trafficking and exploitation, of the American immigration rules, and of the perils of living outside the law. Which is a lot to handle in one novel. But most of all, it is the story of three people and how they struggle to overcome the challenges which life presents to them, finding friendship at the end.

If you like this, try:-
‘Crow Blue’ by Adriana Lisboa
‘Something to Hide’ by Deborah Moggach
‘Summer House with Swimming Pool’ by Herman Kock

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#BookReview IN THE MIDST OF WINTER by Isabel Allende https://wp.me/p5gEM4-36C via @SandraDanby

#BookReview ‘The Heart’s Invisible Furies’ by @JohnBoyneBooks #historical #Ireland

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From the first sentence I was entranced. The Heart’s Invisible Furies by John Boyne starts with such an opening sentence, full of conflict, hypocrisy, resentment and hope, it made me want to gobble up the pages and not put the book down. I wasn’t disappointed. John BoyneThe Heart’s Invisible Furies is the life story of one man, Cyril Avery, but also of a country and its attitudes to sexuality. The story starts in Goleen, Ireland, in 1945; a country riven by loyalty to, and hatred of, the British, at the same time in thrall to its Catholic priests whose rules were hypocritical, illogical and cruel. Cyril narrates his story, starting with how his 16-year old mother was denounced in church by the family priest for being single and pregnant. She was thrown out of church and village by the priest and disowned by her family. On the train to Dublin she meets a teenager, Sean, also heading for the big city. Wanting to help someone so obviously alone, Sean offers to let Catherine stay at his digs until she finds lodging and a job. These first friends she make are some of the most important in her life, and re-appear at important times also in Cyril’s life. Catherine gives birth and, as she carefully arranged, her baby is taken by a nun and placed with a waiting adoptive family. We the readers therefore know the identity and story of Cyril’s birth mother from page one; he doesn’t. As he grows from quiet boy to quiet teenager, falling in love at the age of seven with Julian, Cyril begins to lead a life of lies and shame forced on him by Ireland’s attitude to homosexuality and his inability to be true to himself. Cyril negotiates the first 30 years of his life, trapped between lying in order to stay safe or being truthful and getting arrested. Then he finds himself at the marriage altar. What happens next changes his life in so many ways, ways in which don’t become fully apparent until the last third of the novel.
This could be a depressing novel. It isn’t. It is charming and funny, but can turn on a sixpence and make you gasp with anger, despair or sadness. The characterisation is masterful. I particularly enjoyed Cyril’s adoptive mother Maude Avery, a chain-smoking novelist who detests the growing popularity of her books; his adoptive father Charles Avery who starts off being an awful snob with a talent for unintentional insults; and Mrs Goggin, who runs the tearoom at the Irish parliament with a rod of iron.
I loved this book. Honest, sad, laugh-out-loud funny, touching, with paragraphs I just had to read out aloud to my husband. It is about being true to yourself, the need for honesty in relationships, and the power of love. My favourite book of the year so far.

Read the first paragraph of THE HEART’S INVISIBLE FURIES.

Read my reviews of these other novels by John Boyne:-
A HISTORY OF LONELINESS
A LADDER TO THE SKY
A TRAVELLER AT THE GATES OF WISDOM
ALL THE BROKEN PLACES
STAY WHERE YOU ARE & THEN LEAVE
WATER #1ELEMENTS
EARTH #2ELEMENTS

If you like this, try:-
‘A Little Life’ by Hanya Yanagihara
‘How to be Both’ by Ali Smith
‘Tipping the Velvet’ by Sarah Waters

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview THE HEART’S INVISIBLE FURIES by @JohnBoyneBooks https://wp.me/p5gEM4-3iJ via @SandraDanby

#BookReview ‘Blow Your House Down’ by Pat Barker #thriller

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The words that immediately come to mind after finishing Blow Your House Down by Pat Barker are negative: unflinching, bleak, dark and depressing. This is a dark story of the women preyed upon by a killer, women living on the edge, surviving by selling their bodies to men at a time when prostitutes are being murdered. But other words also came to mind as I dwelled on the book afterwards: friendship, community, solidarity, defiance, vulnerability, strength. Slim, I read it in one sitting on a rainy afternoon, this is a powerful, compelling read. It pulls you into the women’s stories, makes you feel at one with them. Pat BarkerBlow Your House Down is set in a Northern Town in the 1980s. The timing and setting draw inevitable links with the Yorkshire Ripper who preyed on prostitutes and lone women in the north and was arrested and convicted in 1981. Frightened but driven by the need for rent money or to feed their children, the women continue to walk the streets as the face of one of their own, Kath, the killer’s latest victim, looks down at them from a giant poster. The detail of their ordinary lives is described, starting with Brenda who settles her daughters in bed in preparation to going out with her friend Audrey. Their first call is the Palmerston, the pub where the women gather for a drink before going out onto the streets as a pair. There is a camaraderie, a spirit of just-get-on-with-it. We see some of Brenda’s back story, how she tried working at the nearby chicken factory where the women sing to cope with their grizzly job, how she has been let down by men and is trying to manage on her own.
Barker shows no sentimentality for the women, she describes their lives simply and allows the characters to elicit the reader’s sympathy. Like the chickens lined up on the production line, the women walk up and down the streets, trying to support each other by taking note of number plates. The police sit by, watching, using the women as bait to catch the killer. The men have no voice, they are portrayed as liars, weak and pathetic, except for one whose breath smells of the violet sweets he eats.
“You do a lot of walking in this job. More than you might think. In fact, when I get to the end of a busy Saturday night, it’s me feet that ache. There, that surprised you, didn’t it?” Part 3 starts with Jean, whose lover Carol, thought to have gone to London, has been identified as the latest victim. Jean sets out to entrap the killer. “I want to catch the bastard more than most.”
The language is unstinting and graphic, particularly of the sex scenes. The women’s dialogue is in the vernacular which makes them feel real. The tension rises as you wonder which woman will be killed next; each time a women gets into a car with a stranger you think ‘is it him?’ and this drives you to read on.
An accomplished novel published in 1984, it is difficult to appreciate this was only Barker’s second novel. Read it, you will not forget it.

For my reviews of other Pat Barker novels, click the title below:-
ANOTHER WORLD
DOUBLE VISION
LIFE CLASS #1LIFECLASS
TOBY’S ROOM #2LIFECLASS
NOONDAY #3LIFECLASS
THE SILENCE OF THE GIRLS
THE WOMEN OF TROY
UNION STREET

If you like this, try:-
‘The Fair Fight’ by Anna Freeman
‘The Taxidermist’s Daughter’ by Kate Mosse
‘The Killing Lessons’ by Saul Black

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#BookReview BLOW YOUR HOUSE DOWN by Pat Barker https://wp.me/p5gEM4-3e6 via @SandraDanby