Tag Archives: books

#BookReview ‘The Gabriel Hounds’ by Mary Stewart #mystery #suspense

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A rollicking, sensuous tale set at a rundown Lebanese palace involving two cousins, an eccentric great-aunt, various chases and subterfuge, The Gabriel Hounds by Mary Stewart is a classic 20th century suspense romance. The hounds of the title are a legend saying that when the dogs run howling around the palace of Dar Ibrahim in the gloriously-named Adonis Valley, death is sure to follow. Mary Stewart Christy Mansel leaves her guided tour of Syria and Lebanon to visit the palace of her Great-Aunt Harriet. When she arrives at the beguiling, almost Gothic building, she finds a staff who are incommunicative and protective of their boss who prefers her solitude and will not receive visitors until dark. Waiting to hear if her relative will see her, Christy sets out to explore the passages, gardens, walls and secret places, trying to ignore the glares of the servants and avoid the saluki hounds she has been warned are guard dogs and aggressive to strangers.
The descriptions of Lebanon make the story come alive as do the stories of legends researched by the great-aunt’s assistant, John Lethman. Published in 1967, the story develops slowly compared with current publishing tastes but the settings are luscious and the pace picks up in the second half when the vague suspicions of Christy and her cousin Charles that all at Dar Ibrahim is not as it seems begin to feel real.
This is Beirut and the Lebanon pre-Civil War, pre-the kidnappings of John McCarthy and Brian Keenan, pre-Isis. In creating the character of Great-Aunt Harriet and Dar Ibrahim, Stewart acknowledges her debt to the real life of Lady Hester Stanhope, 19th century traveller and adventurer. ‘She finally seems to have believed in her own mystical destiny as Queen of the East who would one day ride crowned into Jerusalem at the side of the new Messiah.’
I read Mary Stewart as a teenager and remember my delight at the romantic, other-worldly stories in destinations so far from my own life. The Gabriel Hounds is definitely worth re-visiting.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE ABOUT THIS BOOK AT AMAZON

Click the title to read my reviews of other Mary Stewart novels:-
MY BROTHER MICHAEL
THE IVY TREE
THIS ROUGH MAGIC
THORNYHOLD
TOUCH NOT THE CAT

If you like this, try these:-
‘The Seventh Miss Hatfield’ by Anna Caltabiano
‘The Forgotten Sister’ by Nicola Cornick
‘The Silent Companions’ by Laura Purcell

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#BookReview ‘The Blue Afternoon’ by William Boyd #historical

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Having recently read and enjoyed Waiting for Sunrise by William Boyd, I checked to see how many of his books I have read. I’ve been a fan from the beginning and have read everything from the first, A Good Man in Africa in 1981 to Brazzaville Beach in 1990. Then there’s a gap between Brazzaville Beach and Any Human Heart in 2002. So, this year I plan to read the books in the intervening years. William Boyd First up is The Blue Afternoon. Published in 1993 and winner of the ‘Sunday Express Book of the Year’ and the ‘Los Angeles Book Prize for Fiction’, I had no idea of its subject. Boyd is like Rose Tremain, no book is like any other. Every one is an adventure.
The first part, set in Los Angeles in 1936,‪ suggests this is the story of a battle between two arguing architects. But it turns into something rather different. When Kay Fischer visits the site of her latest project, a perfectly proportioned house on a sloping site at 2265 Micheltorino, she notices an elderly man. Later at home, the same man pays her a visit and announces that he is her father. He asks for her help, to track down a person called Paton Bobby. He doesn’t explain why.
This is the story of Dr Salvador Carriscant’s life as a surgeon in Manila at the turn of the 20th century, a story also of murder, love, friendship and the building of an early flying machine. In 1902, Carriscant is a celebrated surgeon at the San Jeronimo hospital, a pioneer of the antiseptic methods of Joseph Lister. Meanwhile his anaesthetist, Pantaleon Quiroga, is building a flying machine in his nipa barn. Both are obsessives. When Carriscant falls in love, his obsession turns from surgery to Delphine Sieverance, the married object of his fantasies. This atmosphere of contentment and positivity is shattered when Paton Bobby, the local chief of police, asks Carriscant to attend the body of a murder victim. When the victim is identified as an American soldier, the case becomes political. The country is now ruled by the US after the recent Philippine-American war but guerrilla groups are active in rural areas. There is prejudice against the locals, suspicion of the Americans, poverty, ex-pat aristocracy and exploitation, but this is also a time of dynamic advances at the beginning of a new century.
Not Boyd’s best book but enjoyable none the less. There are slow passages where Boyd’s enthusiasm for the description of tiny details goes too far. In places I could have done with less technical information about architecture, surgery and the aerodynamics of flying. The story really gets going in the second, and largest section, set in Manila. The first and third parts in 1936 are almost irrelevant bookends and some of the final explanations stretch credibility.
But my, Boyd does write beautifully. ‘Inland, continents of dark plum-grey clouds were building, threatening the rain that João had promised, while out west, over the Atlantic, the afternoon sun shone with that silvery flinty brilliance you find over big oceans, light reflecting back from the huge expanse of shifting waters.’ And in an instant, I was sitting there too, a glass of cold, yellow wine in my hand.

My copy of The Blue Afternoon is a used, signed hardback, the Sinclair-Stevenson edition, with a rather lovely cover. William Boyd Here are my reviews of other books by William Boyd:-
ANY HUMAN HEART
LOVE IS BLIND
NAT TATE: AN AMERICAN ARTIST 1928-1960
ORDINARY THUNDERSTORMS
SWEET CARESS
THE DREAMS OF BETHANY MELLMOTH
TRIO
WAITING FOR SUNRISE
… and try the first paragraph of ARMADILLO.

If you like this, try these:-
‘Islands of Mercy’ by Rose Tremain
‘Barkskins’ by Annie Proulx
‘The Gustav Sonata’ by Rose Tremain

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#BookReview ‘Lamentation’ by CJ Sansom #Tudor #detective

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The Matthew Shardlake series by CJ Sansom is now my joint favourite series, along with Elizabeth Jane Howard’s Cazalet Chronicles. The two series could not be different but they have one key thing in common: both are densely textured with social history that enlivens the story of such well-drawn characters. CJ SansomLamentation is sixth in the Shardlake series, set at a critical time for the politics of England’s religion and for its ailing ruler, Henry VIII. The king is slowly dying. Surrounded by loyal courtiers who disguise the true reality of his incapacity from the public, a power battle is underway for the influence of the king’s heir, his eight-year-old son Edward. As always at this time, we see Protestant versus Catholic set against the background of recovery from war the previous year with France when the Mary Rose was sunk in battle at Portsmouth. Heretics are being burned, an amnesty of banned books is announced and the haters of reformers such as Queen Catherine Parr attempt to smear her reputation. When Shardlake is called to Whitehall Palace to meet the Queen’s uncle, Lord Parr, he can never have expected the mess the Queen has got herself into. She has written a religious pamphlet ‘Lamentation of a Sinner’ which, if it falls into the wrong hands might see her burnt at the stake. She has kept it secret, even from her quixotic husband who may burn her if she tells him or burn her if she keeps it hidden from him. She hesitates, thinking it safely locked in a chest. But the document has vanished. The Queen asks Shardlake to retrieve it and save her honour, and her life.
Shardlake’s trail takes him back and forth across London from royal palaces to printers in the backstreets and meeting houses for radicals. Unwilling to draw his assistant Jack Barack into danger, he enlists the help of his young pupil Nicolas Overton. And all the time, Shardlake can’t shake the feeling he is being watched. As well as seeking the ‘Lamentation’, Shardlake has other difficulties. An ongoing case representing Isabel Slanning in a probate battle with her brother is turning toxic, Matthew’s relationship with Doctor Guy Malton is awkward as religious differences – Guy is a Catholic, Matthew is no longer sure what he believes in – widen, and his new steward does his job but is not likeable. And all the time he is working for the Queen, Shardlake entertains wistful romantic thoughts.
There are fascinating glimpses of characters we know from history who are key in the post-Henry VIII world. Prince Edward. The Princesses Mary and Elizabeth. Lord Cecil. Which makes the next book in the series, Tombland, particularly enticing.
The stakes are the highest yet. Magnificent.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE ABOUT THIS BOOK AT AMAZON

And here are my reviews of other novels by CJ Sansom:-
DOMINION
DISSOLUTION #1SHARDLAKE
DARK FIRE #2SHARDLAKE
SOVEREIGN #3SHARDLAKE
REVELATION #4SHARDLAKE
HEARTSTONE #5SHARDLAKE

If you like this, try:-
‘Blackberry and Wild Rose’ by Sonia Velton
‘The Last Hours’ by Minette Walters
‘The Wonder’ by Emma Donoghue

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview LAMENTATION by CJ Sansom #Tudor #detective https://wp.me/p5gEM4-5qW via @SandraDanby

#BookReview ‘The Last Daughter’ by @NicolaCornick #historical

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A modern-day disappearance is combined with myths and a famous historical mystery, knit together in The Last Daughter by Nicola Cornick. Nicola CornickThis is a time-slip story involving true characters in history, a magical stone – the Lovell Lodestar – and the legend of The Mistletoe Bride. The latter is story of sorrow and grief attributed to many English mansions and stately homes in which a bridegroom and his bride, tired of dancing at their wedding, play hide and seek. She disappears and is never found until a skeleton is discovered many years later. It is eleven years since Caitlin Warren disappeared, presumed dead. Her twin sister Serena still struggles to move on from her loss, a feeling magnified by the lack of evidence and Serena’s worry that the cognitive amnesia she has suffered since that night may obscure the truth. When a skeleton is discovered during an archaeological dig at Minster Lovell, the country house where the sisters’ grandparents lived and where Caitlin disappeared, the memories come flooding back. Told in two timelines – Serena, present day; and Anne FitzHugh in the 15th century. Anne’s mother is from the powerful Neville family, a major power during the Wars of the Roses. Five-year old Anne is to be betrothed to eight-year-old Francis Lovell, best friend of Richard of Gloucester, younger brother to the Yorkist King Edward IV. History combines with myth when Anne is told the ghostly story of The Mistletoe Bride who disappears into a different place, a different time.
Serena returns to Minster Lovell Hall in Oxfordshire in an attempt to confront her hidden memories and to be interviewed by the police. There she encounters old friends and visits her grandfather Dick, now suffering from dementia. How can Serena in the 21st century be connected to Anne FitzHugh and what bearing could this have on Caitlin’s disappearance?
A complex story full of so many twists, mysteries and myths that I occasionally floundered. When I surrendered to the flow of the story and stopped worrying about a few gaps and implausible connections, the pages flew by. I finished it wondering if the story would be stronger with slightly less myth and more of Anne and Francis.

Read my review of these other novels by Nicola Cornick:-
THE FORGOTTEN SISTER
THE OTHER GWYN GIRL
THE WINTER GARDEN

If you like this, try:-
‘The Dream Weavers’ by Barbara Erskine’
‘The Almanack’ by Martine Bailey
‘The Cursed Wife’ by Pamela Hartshorne

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#BookReview THE LAST DAUGHTER by @NicolaCornick https://wp.me/p5gEM4-5ri via @SandraDanby

#BookReview ‘The Missing Sister’ by Lucinda Riley #romance

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Well, what I thought would be the final book, the seventh in the wonderful Seven Sisters series by Lucinda Riley, turns out not to be the last after all. The Missing Sister will be followed later this year by Atlas: The Story of Pa Salt. So, I finished this latest book with many questions remaining. This is an example of a family saga that you want to run and run. The publication of the eighth book sadly follows Lucinda Riley’s death in 2021, so the forthcoming eighth book will be based on Lucinda’s draft and completed by her son Harry Whittaker. Lucinda RileyThe seven sisters of the myth were Maia, Alcyone, Asterope, Celaeno, Taygete, Electra, and Merope. Their parents were Atlas, a Titan commanded by the god Zeus to hold up the earth, and Pleione, the mythical protectress of sailors. The Missing Sister is the story of Merope – Mary, or Merry, as she is called in the book – though it’s unclear whether she is lost, or simply ‘missing’ from the family because Pa Salt didn’t adopt her. The confusion over the first name adds to the twists in a book packed with twists and turns when the missing D’Aplièse sister is identified as either a mother and daughter, both called Mary. The pursuit begins with the announcement by the family lawyer that the missing sister is in New Zealand. Mary can be identified by the distinctive diamond and emerald ring she wears.
The story is told in various timelines. In the present day we hear the voices of recently-widowed Merry McDougal who leaves New Zealand on a Grand Tour around the world, of her daughter Mary-Kate left at home to run the prize-winning winery, and of the six D’Aplièse sisters who follow the clues. Plus two historical timelines – of Nuala Murphy, a farmer’s daughter in the West of Ireland in July 1920, a critical time in Irish independence; and of Mary O’Reilly starting in October 1955 in the Irish valley of Argideen.
Riley, herself Northern Irish, tells of a chapter in Irish history with a fascinating insight into the impact on a small rural community, the bravery, secrecy, divisions, the betrayals and deprivations. New to me was the ‘Cumann na mBan’, the Irish women’s volunteer movement, and its role not simply in feeding and clothing the fighting men but as couriers delivering not only messages but weapons. An inspiration to the Irish is Michael Collins, from Clonakilty in West Cork, close to where Riley sets her story. ‘The Big Fellow’ rose to be director of intelligence for the Irish Republican Army. Another real person appearing in the story is local Clogagh fighter Charlie Hurley.
My mind swirled with all the options. First of all, is Pa Salt really dead? If he’s alive, why lie to everyone and put them through so much grief? The concept of the adopted sisters raises multiple questions: who is this man, Pa Salt, who collected babies from around the world to care for them. And why does the story of Merope feel different from the others? So many new hints are dropped in this seventh novel, things that don’t add up. Most certainly this is a book to read having read the rest of the series – read as a standalone it will only disappoint.
I finished it with mixed feelings. It’s a long book [the hardcover is 816 pages] with scenes included that might have been shortened or deleted. I found the sisters’ determined pursuit of Mary at best eager but often selfish and inconsiderate. But the Irish sections are wonderful. It’s clear these were close to Riley’s heart which adds emotional depth and understanding. If you enjoy dual-timeline historical fiction combined with the globetrotting glamour of Penny Vincenzi, please pick up The Seven Sisters and start reading this series.

Read my reviews of some of the other novels in Lucinda Riley’s ‘Seven Sisters’ series:-
THE SEVEN SISTERS
THE STORM SISTER
THE SHADOW SISTER
THE PEARL SISTER
THE MOON SISTER
THE SUN SISTER

… plus my reviews of these standalone novels by Lucinda Riley:-
THE LOVE LETTER
THE GIRL ON THE CLIFF
THE BUTTERFLY ROOM

If you like this, try:-
‘The House on the Shore’ by Victoria Howard
‘Brooklyn’ by Colm Tóibín 
‘On a Night Like This’ by Barbara Freethy

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#BookReview THE MISSING SISTER by Lucinda Riley https://wp.me/p5gEM4-5qu via @SandraDanby

#BookReview ‘The Black Dress’ by Deborah Moggach #contemporary

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If you like unpredictable storylines with twist after twist try The Black Dress, the latest by Deborah Moggach. Like her last, The Carer, it is much darker and less humorous than the publisher’s blurb suggests. It is difficult to pin down to a genre owing to the numerous twists, it is part-crime, part-family drama, part-romance, part-humorous though I’d didn’t find it to be a laugh-out-loud story. Deborah Moggach.Pru is 69 when her husband walks out; shedding his wife and his possessions, he goes to a silent retreat in Rutland. Pru’s friend Azra says she should’ve fought to get him back. But as Pru remembers the last few years with Greg she starts to question the veracity of her memories and wonders what he’d really been thinking. Feeling alone, son Max lives in Canada and daughter Lucy in Iceland, Pru stays on in the family home in Muswell Hill, surrounded by smug couples leading exactly the sort of life she used to enjoy. Only Pam who lives opposite, nastily nicknamed Pritt-Stick-Pam by Pru and Greg as they mock what they see as Pam’s neediness, sees Pru is struggling and tries to help. As Greg moves to their cottage in Dorset and they agree a clean break, Pru spends more time with Azra, depending on her confident ballsy outlook on life. And then Pru gets the biggest shock [so far] of her life.
The black dress of the title introduces the next phase of the story. When Pru sees the dress, so not her, in the window of a charity shop she buys it and starts attending the funerals of strangers. What follows is a string of assignations until one day she meets Calvin in the dentist’s waiting room. Pru falls in love. To avoid plot spoilers I will simply say that nothing is what it seems in this story.
The Black Dress is about loneliness and friendship, exploitation and manipulation, the danger of not appreciating what you have and how lack of self-awareness and self-honesty will catch up with you in the end. Some of the plot twists made me gasp and want to read on, others seemed misplaced and unrealistic – because, although this is fiction, we still need it to be rooted in the real world. One word of warning in case, like me, you read fiction to escape the real world, part of the story takes place during Covid-19 lockdown.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE ABOUT THIS BOOK

Read my review of these other novels by Deborah Moggach:-
SOMETHING TO HIDE
THE CARER
TULIP FEVER

Read the first paragraph of THESE FOOLISH THINGS [now THE BEST EXOTIC MARIGOLD HOTEL] here.

If you like this, try:-
‘How to Belong’ by Sarah Franklin
‘The Hoarder’ by Jess Kidd
‘Mobile Library’ by David Whitehouse

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#BookReview THE BLACK DRESS by Deborah Moggach https://wp.me/p5gEM4-5pX via @SandraDanby

#BookReview ‘Oh William!’ by @LizStrout #contemporary

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What a gifted writer Elizabeth Strout is. Oh William! sees the return of Lucy Barton as she meets again her first husband, William, and reflects on love, loss, friendship and the fact that life can seem bewildering. Lucy’s voice is so real it seemed as if we were having a real conversation, face-to-face. Elizabeth StroutThis is the stream-of-consciousness story – complete with ums, ahs, meanderings and distractions – of a few months in Lucy’s life, after the death of her second husband David and when William’s latest wife, Estelle has just left him. Lucy and William were married for twenty years and have two daughters; that’s a lot of baggage. The connections that bind a married couple do not disappear after they are divorced, memories and experiences are inextricably linked. William, now 71, came home one day to find the flat looking odd, with gaps where things should be, and a note from his wife Estelle saying she had moved out. As he explains to Lucy, now a successful writer in her sixties, what has happened, she relives the moment she also left William, how she felt at the time and how she feels now. She calls him Pillie, he calls her Button. They spend more time together and their daughters ask if they are getting back together. In fact, they are investigating a family secret recently revealed when William is given the gift of an ancestry records service. As they travel back into the past of William and of his mother, Catherine Cole, Lucy recalls her own childhood, the neglect, the poverty, and considers how this shaped who she is today.
Strout has written a short, elegant story with hidden depths that draw you in. She explores the affections, regrets, irritations and resentments of a couple, once married, now sort-of friends. They are an everyman couple who loved each other, who were at times thoughtless, cruel, unforgiving and impatient but now show moments of heart-stopping fondness. Lucy recounts the road trip undertaken into William’s past except it is also a journey into her own past as the revelations of someone else’s secrets shed new insight into her own desperately sad childhood.
A novel about human flaws that shows how it’s almost impossible to know ourselves as others see us, as we can never thoroughly know someone else.
This is a companion novel to My Name is Lucy Barton, the first ever book by Strout I read, but each novel can be read independently.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE ABOUT THIS BOOK AT AMAZON

Read my reviews of these other books by Elizabeth Strout:-
AMY & ISABELLE
ANYTHING IS POSSIBLE
LUCY BY THE SEA
MY NAME IS LUCY BARTON
OLIVE KITTERIDGE
OLIVE, AGAIN

If you like this, try:-
‘Mum & Dad’ by Joanna Trollope
‘A Little Life’ by Hanya Yanagihara
‘In Another Life’ by Julie Christine Johnson

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview OH WILLLIAM! by @LizStrout https://wp.me/p5gEM4-5pB via @SandraDanby

#BookReview ‘Dead Lions’ by Mick Herron #spy #thriller

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No tuxedos, no superheroes, no gadgets. The Slough House spy thrillers by Mick Herron feature the spies who, having messed up, have been consigned to a dead-end department [in London, not Slough, but that’s the joke]. Dead Lions is second in the series. The title is taken from a kids’ party game, ‘You have to pretend to be dead. Lie still. Do nothing.’ Mick HerronWhen elderly retired streetwalker Dickie Bow, a spy good at following people on the street and discovering their secrets, turns up dead on a train near Oxford no-one takes much notice. Except Jackson Lamb, Slough House boss and pragmatist. The bloody-minded Lamb considers whether an old Soviet cold war tactic, planting sleeper agents in a foreign country to activate at a future date, is again being used. But who by, and why? What is there to gain? Herron populates his stories with many layers and in that they are John le Carré like. Le Carré had his own alcoholic, shambling agent in Alec Leamas and Jackson Lamb, like Leamas, is good at talking his way into unlikely places, places others would never expect to find answers. He also has a cynical sense of humour, rather like Len Deighton’s Harry Palmer.
While Lamb is checking up on Dickie Bow, his team of misfits at Slough House continue to do their day jobs – boring data input and administration, checking identity profiles, chained to their desks – not very well. It doesn’t take much to distract them. IT guy and social inadequate Roderick Ho has spotted a girl he fancies and is building an unflattering fake online profile for her boyfriend in the hope she will fall for Ho instead. Except Ho hasn’t spoken to her and doesn’t know he exists. Min Harper and Louisa Guy have been seconded by Spider Webb, a ‘suit’ from Regent’s Park MI5 headquarters, to do a security audit ahead of a meeting he has with a Russian oil billionaire at ‘The Needle’. Building survey, exits and entrances, surveillance, risks and threats. Basically, they have to write a report. Webb, who keeps the purpose of the meeting a secret, will handle the exciting stuff himself.
River Cartwright, visiting his former spy grandfather ‘the OB’, shares the news about Bow’s death. The OB recounts the story of Alexander Popov, a fake Russian who MI6 regarded as an invention to spread disinformation to the West. “If Moscow Centre said ‘Look at this’, the sensible thing was to look in the opposite direction,” says the OB. Lamb’s number two Catherine Standish, former alcoholic, avoids the temptation of the bottle by considering why a bald man on a rainy station platform would leave his hat on a train. Downstairs in a pokey office, Slough House’s two newest recruits Shirley Dander and Marcus Longridge, considered by the old lags as a spy for ‘Lady’ Di Taverner, irritate each other and resent their demotions. And so, the spies worry about being spied upon.
This is a wonderful smoke and mirrors story where nothing is at it seems. It starts with a death which the mainstream spies at the Park dismiss as irrelevant, but which Lamb’s band of rejects set out to solve. Herron’s plot mixes together the ambitious intelligence officers with the misguided and often not bright slow horses, so you won’t know who is on the right track.
Different. Wonderful. Difficult to put down.

Click the title to read my reviews of the other books in the Slough House series:-
SLOW HORSES #1SLOUGHHOUSE
REAL TIGERS #3SLOUGHHOUSE
SPOOK STREET #4SLOUGHHOUSE
LONDON RULES #5SLOUGHHOUSE
JOE COUNTRY #6SLOUGHHOUSE
SLOUGH HOUSE #7SLOUGHHOUSE
BAD ACTORS #8SLOUGHHOUSE

If you like this, try:-
‘Waiting for Sunrise’ by William Boyd
‘The Museum of Broken Promises’ by Elizabeth Buchan
‘The Secrets We Kept’ by Lara Prescott

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview DEAD LIONS by Mick Herron https://wp.me/p5gEM4-5oF via @SandraDanby

#BookReview ‘The Garden of Angels’ by David Hewson #WW2 #thriller

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David Hewson is a new author for me. The Garden of Angels is a combination of historical novel and World War Two thriller, written in a patient, multi-layered style which explores a moment in history through the lives of a small number of people. Hewson makes wartime Venice come alive in all its stench, beauty, cruelty, fear and starvation. David HewsonIt is 1943 and the locals are watching the news, following the Allies’ progress towards Rome, wondering how much longer they must wait to be free once more. Meanwhile the Germans search amongst the locals for partisans, traitors, communists. But most of all they search for Jews. A teenage boy, alone after his parents are killed in a bombing raid, must continue the business of the family firm, jacquard weavers of the most beautiful velvet. He must complete the commission his father won just before he died. He stays within the four walls of his home, whilst on the streets outside people are being killed. Until one day Paulo sees something that makes him determined to do something rather than stand by.
The story hinges on the modern-day relationship between a boy and his grandfather, encapsulated from page one as Nonno Paulo reads a bedtime story to five-year-old Nico. He reads from a true story from a history book and they discuss the nature of truth, the truth of death. Ten years later, in 1999 when Nonno Paulo is dying, he gives to Nico a series of letters telling the truth of his life in Venice in 1943 during the German occupation. No one knows Paulo’s real story.
In 1943, Venice is a closed city, tight-knit, full of secret spaces and places the Germans don’t know. It is both a place for hiding and a place for living under the eye of the Nazis and Black Brigades. Paolo shelters two partisans who are on the run. Brother and sister Vanni and Mika Artom are not hunted solely because they have killed Germans, but because they are Jews. Mika, unable to sit quietly by, finds a local resistance group and agrees to take part in a plot to murder a visiting VIP, Salvatore Bruno, a Jew who is betraying other Jews. Vanni, injured and hardly able to move, helps Paolo and his assistant Chiara to weave.
This is a powerful story that hooks you from the beginning and draws you in. I was still thinking about the book days after finishing it. It is not a regular war thriller though it has all the usual conventions. It is more about how we as humans act under extreme circumstances, what we do to survive, where we draw our red lines, when to stand aside and when to step in, how far we will go to win; surprisingly similar dilemmas for the occupiers and the occupied when all are ultimately ordinary people.

If you like this, try:-
‘A Beautiful Spy’ by Rachel Hore
‘The Heat of the Day’ by Elizabeth Bowen
‘Midnight in Europe’ by Alan Furst

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#BookReview THE GARDEN OF ANGELS by David Hewson https://wp.me/p5gEM4-5pi via @SandraDanby

#BookReview ‘The War Child’ by @RenitaDSilva #WW2 #historical

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Two women, two generations apart. In The War Child, Renita D‘Silva explores the connections between a mother and child, through danger and separation, self-sacrifice, unstoppable events and the pressures of modern life. Renita D‘SilvaD’Silva tells the dual timeline stories of Clara and Indira over many decades, setting the strength and promise of women across four decades against the twentieth century prejudices of chauvinism and racism. In London, 1940, teenager Clara is woken by her mother as their home is bombed. Her mother presses into Clara’s hand a necklace, a St Christopher’s medal, with the promise that it will always protect her. Orphaned, Clara is taken in by her aunt and begins helping at a local hospital treating injured soldiers. When nurses and doctors ignore a wounded Indian soldier because of the colour of his skin, Clara nurses him to health. When the war ends, she decides to fulfil a long-held promise to herself. Inspired by sitting on her father’s knee and listening to his stories of India, Clara takes a job as nurse companion to a delicate boy whose parents are re-locating to India. And there, she falls in love.
In India, 1995, 33-year old Indira is chairing a board meeting when she gets a message to ‘go to the hospital’. Fearing her young son is dying – he is in hospital for a minor surgical procedure – she finds her husband and son both well. The message refers to Indira’s father who has had a heart attack. Indira returns home to her parents, somewhere she hasn’t been much of late as she seeks to avoid their simplistic boring life, resenting their dissatisfaction with her life choices.
Sometimes raw and painful, always emotionally complex with surprising twists that make you gasp, The War Child is another brilliant book by my first-choice author for Indian historical romance. D’Silva is such a visual writer that India is a real place on the page, the colours and scents are both beautiful and challenging, her descriptions as full of contrasts as fresh guava sprinkled with chilli powder.

Read my reviews of these other novels by Renita D’Silva:-
A DAUGHTER’S COURAGE
A MOTHER’S SECRET
BENEATH AN INDIAN SKY
THE GIRL IN THE PAINTING
THE ORPHAN’S GIFT
THE SPICE MAKER’S SECRET

If you like this, try:-
‘The Tea Planter’s Wife’ by Dinah Jefferies
‘Call of the Curlew’ by Elizabeth Brooks
‘The Sapphire Widow’ by Dinah Jefferies

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview THE WAR CHILD by @RenitaDSilva https://wp.me/p5gEM4-5mW via @SandraDanby