Tag Archives: contemporary fiction

#BookReview ‘The Crows of Beara’ by Julie Christine Johnson #contemporary #romance

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The Crows of Beara by Julie Christine Johnson is a sensitive tale of two lost souls from opposite sides of the world who are in such pain they are unable to recognise a fresh chance for happiness. Annie Crowe, recovering addict and corporate PR specialist, flies from Seattle to Ireland to promote a new copper mine. When she meets Daniel Savage, an artist with a troubled past, both start to hear a mystical Gaelic voice whispering words of poetry. Julie Christine JohnsonThe west coast of Ireland is a bleak, beautiful, empty place. Jobs are thin on the ground so when a new copper mine is announced, the locals are divided: the economy, or nature. Annie arrives, determined to make a success of this last chance to get her career back on track. When she discovers the mine will endanger the nesting site of the Red-Billed Choughs, she must tell lies in the name of PR. She doesn’t expect it to make her acknowledge the lies she has been telling herself; about her failed marriage, her failing career, and her alcoholism.
Annie, flawed but vulnerable, is an easy character to like. Weighed down by her addiction and the knowledge she did shameful things she can’t remember, she moves forward step-by-step. You will her onwards. She soon falls in love with the beauty of Beara and the openness of the community. This causes a professional problem, how can she promote a copper mine which will damage this exquisite nature. As she wrestles with her conscience, she must also resist the temptation to pick up a glass of alcohol. In Annie and Daniel, Johnson has created two wounded characters who are not sorry for themselves, who face up to their pasts and their grief, who try to look forward. This is an uplifting story on so many levels.
As with In Another Life, Johnson’s debut novel, there is something mystical going on in The Crows of Beara. A skeleton of myth and legend underlies the Irish setting and runs throughout the story. The west coast of Ireland is certainly an extra character here; the descriptions of the Beara Peninsula, its mists, its cliffs, its Red-Billed Choughs [the crows of the title] are so beautifully written you will be getting out your hiking boots and googling hotel accommodation.

And here’s my review of IN ANOTHER LIFE, also by Julie Christine Johnson.

If you like this, try:-
‘Himself’ by Jess Kidd
‘The Little Red Chairs’ by Enda O’Brien
‘Nora Webster’ by Colm Tóibín

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#BookReview ‘The Distant Hours’ by Kate Morton #contemporary #romance #WW2

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If ever there was a novel in which a house plays the role of a character, this is it. The Distant Hours by Kate Morton is told in two strands, World War Two and the Nineties, involving the three Blythe sisters in Kent at Milderhurst Castle and a South London mother and daughter, Meredith and Edie. They all are connected by the war, the house, and the truth of what really happened when Juniper Blythe was abandoned by her lover in 1941. Kate Morton This is a brick of a book [678 pages], like Morton’s other novels. A little too long for me, the story meanders at times through past and present until it works towards the final mystery. What a mystery, an ingenious storyline and an unpredictable final twist. The story starts when a letter arrives for Edie’s mother, a letter lost for decades, a letter dating from wartime when Meredith was a schoolgirl evacuated to Kent. Edie is fascinated by her mother’s history, but her mother does not talk of it. They are not close, and Edie feels unable to press for information. So she sets off to investigate on her own.
At the centre of the story is the house, and what a house it is: beautiful, crumbling, representative of a time past. When Edie visits the castle in 1992 for the first time, she thinks: ‘Have you ever wondered what the stretch of time smells like? I can’t say I had, not before I set foot inside Milderhurst Castle, but I certainly know now. Mould and ammonia, a pinch of lavender and a fair whack of dust, the mass disintegration of very old sheets of paper. And there’s something else, too, something underlying it all, something verging on rotten or stewed but not. It took me a while to work out what that smell was, but I think I know now. It’s the past.’ Living there, Edie finds the three Blythe sisters, alone after the death of their father.
Morton writes brilliantly about the war years, conjuring up life at this vast castle and in the village of the same name. Running throughout is a mysterious, ghostly, spooky thread based on Raymond Blythe’s best-selling book The True History of the Mud Man. ‘The moat has begun to breathe. Deep, deep, mired in the mud, the buried man’s heart kicks wetly.’
Is the book set at Milderhurst Castle? Is the Mud Man based on a true story? The book is yet another connection between Edie and the castle, she loved it as a child after being given a library copy when ill by her mother. And so the concentric circles tighten.

And here’s my review of another novel by Kate Morton:-
THE CLOCKMAKER’S DAUGHTER

If you like this, try these books with atmospheric houses:-
‘A Sudden Light’ by Garth Stein
‘A Traveller at the Gates of Wisdom’ by John Boyne
‘The Other Eden’ by Sarah Bryant

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#BookReview ‘The Stars are Fire’ by Anita Shreve #contemporary

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I haven’t read anything by Anita Shreve for a very long time and I wonder why, because I thoroughly enjoyed The Stars are Fire. It is a fine example on how to write about someone experiencing difficult times, who is trapped and feels powerless, without being depressing. Anita Shreve It is 1947 and the summer heat is blazing. Then the heat turns to drought and the drought turns to wildfire. On the coast of Maine, Grace Holland, five months pregnant, without a car and at home with her two toddlers, must run as the fire threatens to engulf her village. Her husband Gene is with other men, making a fire break. Grace, with her best friend Rosie and her children, run from the fire, taking refuge overnight at the beach. The next morning, their houses are ash, their village is burned. They are homeless, penniless and, though Rosie’s husband returns, Gene doesn’t.
Grace must cope and in doing so she finds a new world opening up. A world which she had no idea existed. She becomes decisive and brave, she finds a home, a job and learns to drive. All of this validates her worth. With her mother, they fashion themselves a new life. But it is a life with a temporary feeling about it because Grace dare not think Gene is dead. Theirs was a difficult relationship, suffocating, Gene is an emotional bully. She revels in her new freedoms until one day everything she has built, the gains she have made, are lost. Her gamble backfires.
This is a woman’s story of its time, when men were the providers and expected their wives to fulfil their wifely duties. Grace and Gene married young because she was pregnant and this sets the tone for their marriage. His mother wanted better for Gene and has never welcomed Grace. Grace’s dissatisfaction with her claustrophobic life grows. Gene is a good provider but they have little emotional connection, and so Grace envies Rosie’s close and sensual relationship with her husband Tim.
Shreve’s writing style is simple and descriptive. Gene sometimes calls Grace ‘Dove’. “She has never been Gracie. Only Grace. And then Dove, with Gene. Grace doesn’t feel like a dove, and she’s sure she doesn’t look anything like a dove, but she knows there’s a sweetness in the nickname. She wonders if it means something that she doesn’t have a fond or funny name for her husband.” The story is told, however, from Grace’s viewpoint. Gene’s thoughts are left unsaid.

If you like this, try:-
‘We Are Water’ by Wally Lamb
‘The Photographer’s Wife’ by Suzanne Joinson
‘Did You Ever Have a Family’ by Bill Clegg

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#BookReview ‘Reservoir 13’ by Jon McGregor #contemporary

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Reservoir 13 by Jon McGregor is a thoughtful, intelligent telling of what happens to a village when a person goes missing. Told after the event, it brings a new angle of understanding to the post-event trauma of those on the outer circles of tragedy. Jon McGregorA girl goes missing in a village surrounded by moors, caves and reservoirs. ‘The girl’s name was Rebecca, or Becky, or Bex.’ At no point do we hear the viewpoint of the girl, her parents, or the investigating police. Slowly the story unfolds as we are told the life of the village through the years after it happened by an omniscient narrator, disconnected from the action.
I loved the way McGregor recounts the daily comings and goings of the village, the farmers, the vicar, the schoolchildren. The rhythm of life and nature is mesmeric, the message is ‘life goes on’. Love affairs start and end, babies are born as are lots of sheep, cows are milked, allotments tended. The village sits within the natural world of peaks, woods and rivers and, sometimes only in a single sentence, we are told of the hatching of butterflies, the unfurling of new leaves, the water running beneath the bridge. The writing style is sparse and all the more beautiful for that. The action switches from one person’s life to the next, sometimes in a simple factual sentence such as ‘this happened’. But as the action moves from one local to another, the story is slowly, painstakingly pieced together of a village which struggles to leave behind the mystery of what happened to Rebecca/Becky/Bex.
At the beginning I was unsure how the story would unfold: murder, missing person, runaway teenager, abduction? It is this not knowing which casts a shadow over everyone in the village.

Read my review of LEAN FALL STAND, also by Jon McGregor.

If you like this, try:-
‘Smash All the Windows’ by Jane Davis
‘Himself’ by Jess Kidd
‘The Museum of You’ by Carys Bray

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#BookReview ‘The Perfect Affair’ by @ClaireDyer1 #romance #contemporary

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This is a deceptive read. It is a meandering tale of two love affairs – one today, one in the Sixties – which unfolds slowly, step-by-step, as these things do in life. The Perfect Affair by Claire Dyer is about love, how it appears and grows, and how it fades. Claire DyerRose has divided her house into two flats, she lives upstairs and rents the downstairs space to Myles, a writer of detective novels. Rose’s regular visitor, Eve, is like the grand-daughter she never had, and is a connection to Rose’s past. In the Sixties, Rose shared a house with Eve’s grandmother Verity. One day Eve and Myles meet. There is a spark of attraction which shocks them both and makes each examine the state of their own marriage. As they come to terms with what this means, Rose watches from afar. In love and seeking the perfect love affair, Rose remembers when she fell in love in the Sixties. Finally a decision must be made.
Dyer writes with a gentle hand, small details showing her understanding of the emotions involved. After meeting Eve for the first time, Myles is disorientated: ‘He’d been OK when he’d left home earlier but now he feels mostly unsettled, as though a fault line has positioned itself under his feet and he knows it’s there and it knows it’s there too.’ Alongside the sense of inevitability, danger lurks. An emotional novel, skilfully written.

Click the title to read my review of Dyer’s novel THE LAST DAY and her poetry anthology YIELD.

If you like this, try:-
‘Please Release Me’ by Rhoda Baxter
‘A Mother’s Secret’ By Renita D’Silva
‘One Step Too Far’ by Tina Seskis

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#BookReview ‘We Are Water’ by Wally Lamb @WallyLambAuthor #contemporary

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We Are Water by American author Wally Lamb is the examination of a family riven by differences, tragedy and horrors, how they first avoid then finally admit the truths and shame, in order to face the future. It is a story about looking forwards, not back. Wally LambI loved the storyline set-up in the Prologue, elderly artist and curator Gualtiero Agnello recalls the discovery of a self-taught artist, Josephus Jones, a poor black man in the Sixties with a raw untapped gift. But then as the story develops, Jones is not centre stage. The focus is on Annie Oh, another untutored artist discovered by Agnello, who lived in the same house where Jones lived in a shed out back and where he died in a well. Murder or accident, it is never proven.
Via the Oh family, Lamb explores the imbalance of family life, its events and consequences. When she is small. Annie loses her mother in a flood which devastates the town of Three Rivers in Connecticut. This flood is based on a real-life event though the town is fictional. Growing up, Annie is subjected to abuse which remains unspecified for a long time. The reader comes to realise she was abused, but not how or why. Annie’s husband Orion knows only that she had a difficult childhood. As a psychology professor, he suspects a tough childhood but backs-off challenging her about it.
Raising her three children – Ariane, Andrew and Marissa – Annie is a strict mom who occasionally hits her son, but never her daughters. In an escape from motherhood she starts to make art in the basement of the house, using materials foraged from refuse. When a New York art agent sees her work, this is the catalyst for change. Annie leaves Orion and falls in love with her agent, Viveca. This action puts the focus on all the fissures within the Oh family and raises various issues they have denied and hidden. Andrew finds God, Marissa is a jobbing actress and an alcoholic, Ariane conceives by artificial insemination. When they gather for the wedding of Annie and Viveca, a sequence of events brings the past to life again and the secrets and horror come crashing back.
Lamb’s focus on family reminds me of the novels of Anne Tyler and Jane Smiley, although of course he is a man writing a woman’s point of view. Once I got over my disappointment at not reading more about Josephus Jones I enjoyed this, at times difficult, novel.

If you like this, try:-
‘Did You Ever Have a Family’ by Bill Clegg
‘A Little Life’ by Hanya Yanagihara
‘If I Knew You Were This Beautiful, I Never Would Have Let You Go’ by Judy Chicurel

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#BookReview ‘Vinegar Girl’ by Anne Tyler #Shakespeare #contemporary

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I love Anne Tyler’s writing. It is so simple and under-stated. She lets you slip so easily into the head and the world of her characters. This is her re-working of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew. Generally I dislike these artificial re-writes, but I made an exception for Tyler. After this, I may try some of the others. Anne Tyler Kate is a pre-school teaching assistant and housekeeper for her distracted scientist father and teenage sister. She is dissatisfied with her life, can never seem to get things right, but doesn’t know how to change things. Admonished by her headmistress for being too frank with her young charges, she is not in the best of moods when her father introduces her to his lab assistant, Pytor. He seems a lumbering foreigner and Kate does not understand her father’s eagerness that they meet. Pytor has a problem, his work visa is about to expire and he must leave the country. Kate’s father is frantic, he simply cannot lose his irreplaceable assistant or his research project into autoimmune disorders will fail when it is so near success. What happens next is predictable except Tyler turns Shakespeare’s tale of Katherina and Petruchio into a modern tale about tolerance and freedom, without the overtones of ‘man tames untameable woman’.

Read my reviews of these other books by Anne Tyler:-
A SPOOL OF BLUE THREAD
CLOCK DANCE
FRENCH BRAID
LADDER OF YEARS
REDHEAD BY THE SIDE OF THE ROAD
THREE DAYS IN JUNE

And read the #FirstPara of:-
DINNER AT THE HOMESICK RESTAURANT 
BACK WHEN WE WERE GROWN UPS 

If you like this, try:-
‘Some Luck’ by Jane Smiley
‘Housekeeping’ by Marilynne Robinson
‘My Name is Lucy Barton’ by Elizabeth Strout

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#BookReview ‘Foxlowe’ by Eleanor Wasserberg #contemporary

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‘It’s hard to resist the pull of the shoal.’ Foxlowe is a strange, sinister book by Eleanor Wasserberg about the group dynamic of adults who should know better, experienced and observed by children who learn from this parenting and either accept or rebel. If they rebel, they have the Bad inside them. Eleanor WasserbergThis is not an easy read, not so much because of the story but I found the writing style obscure. The narrator is Green, a girl who grows up as part of the Family, a cult, living in a house called Foxlowe on a deserted moor. They share everything, their way of life is steeped in the land and ley lines. They have everything they will ever need at Foxlowe, there is no need to become a Leaver. Green knows no other life, has nothing with which to compare it.
For the first 15% [I read on Kindle] I struggled with a lack of clarity, an avalanche of seemingly unconnected facts. For example, ‘The Scattering is something we learned from the Time of Crisis. Remember that the Bad had come inside the walls.’ Characters have before and after names, which added to my confusion. It seemed like an alternative world, given the double sunset at Summer Solstice, and I couldn’t help comparing it with the opening technique of dystopian novels which got me straight away. The first page of The Hunger Games, for example, which starts with an intensely personal moment which lets you into the strange world in which it is set.
Once I reached 20% of Foxlowe, I was skipping the vague bits and the lack of dialogue punctuation – a pet hate of mine – and so turned the pages quicker. It is the story of a commune, the Family, where the outside world is excluded by means of myth, abuse and scare stories. Gradually I pieced the facts together. Despite my original confusion, it is not an alternative world; they have a car and drive to the supermarket. Some are painters or craftsmen who earn money, others grow vegetables and raise animals. This then is a conscious decision on the part of the adults to be there. The children are either born there, or more sinister, appear to be stolen from outside. This is the story of Green, a girl of undefined age, and that of Blue, who arrives at Foxlowe as a babe in arms. The arrival of Blue, and a man called Kai who remembers Foxlowe in earlier times, changes everything.
There are three parts, the second told by the adult Jess/Green, sandwiched between two Green childhood sections. The third part and Epilogue are truly dark and disturbing, with the sense of inherited abuse.

If you like this, try:-
‘Crow Blue’ by Adriana Lisboa
‘A History of Loneliness’ by John Boyne
‘The Quarry’ by Iain Banks

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#BookReview ‘The Language of Others’ by Clare Morrall #contemporary

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A young girl who prefers to be alone, who lacks the social skills to have friends, who marries young and rapidly becomes a mother. The Language of Others by Clare Morrall is the intense story of Jessica Fontaine who longs for the air in her house to be hers alone, who manages a difficult marriage and worries about how she is raising her son. Clare MorrallThis is a story of a lifetime of self-discover and self-acceptance. This description may make the book sound as if nothing happens but it does and, as in any Clare Morrall, subtlety is layered on subtlety. Jessica grows up at Audlands, a country house which is decaying around the family. Her father was a successful chocolate manufacturer and the house a symbol of his success. As he grows older and the company fails, so does the house. Jessica and her sister Harriet grow up side-by-side, loving the house, the dirt and cobwebs, but not really knowing or understanding each other. Only when Jessica discovers the piano does she find freedom.
This is a novel about Asperger’s and the autism spectrum and one woman’s acceptance of her own emotional issues and how they impact and intertwine with the emotional issues of her unpredictable husband Andrew and quiet solitary child Joel. As she grows older, through music and with a supportive friend, Jessica learns the tools to make life easier. ‘Pretence gives you room to get around obstacles without touching them, the space to observe that there are other sides to people, not just the abrasive, challenging attitude that you can’t cope with. You have to view people from new angles, see where the light falls, discover which edges have been worn down and softened with time. Otherwise you get so caught up in the negatives you can’t see anything else.’
There is a lot of wisdom in this book, insights in how to behave – and not behave – within relationships, and how to be forgiving of others.

Click the title to read my reviews of these other novels by Clare Morrall:-
AFTER THE BOMBING
NATURAL FLIGHTS OF THE HUMAN MIND
THE LAST OF THE GREENWOODS
THE MAN WHO DISAPPEARED
THE ROUNDABOUT MAN

Read the #FirstPara of ASTONISHING SPLASHES OF COLOUR .

If you like this, try:-
‘The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty’ by Sebastian Barry
‘The Last Runaway’ by Tracy Chevalier
‘Girl Runner’ by Carrie Snyder

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#BookReview ‘My Name is Lucy Barton’ by Elizabeth Strout @LizStrout #contemporary

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My Name is Lucy Barton is a gem of a little novel by Elizabeth Strout. I read it in one sitting on a winter’s afternoon, drawn into the life of Lucy Barton. Lucy looks back, ostensibly telling the story of her nine-week stay in hospital and an unexpected visit by her mother, when in fact she tells the story of her life. Mothers and daughters, no two relationships are alike and no woman can make assumptions about another’s experience as either mother or daughter. Stranded in her hospital bed, Lucy remembers her childhood and tries to make sense of it. Elizabeth StroutEconomically [208 pages] and beautifully written, this is the first of Elizabeth Strout’s novels I have read. I have of course heard of Olive Kitteridge but did not realize it is a Pulitzer winner, and so have the treat awaiting me. Strout writes about the everday, the ordinary, the normal [and not-so-normal] and sees the truth behind what is and isn’t said.
Lucy is a kind of everywoman. Through her Strout examines the mother-daughter relationship with an acute eye which will make you examine your own relationships. Lucy tells the story of her hospital visit and her mother’s appearance with the benefit of hindsight, looking back at her childhood, her daughters and female friendships. Sometimes she is baffled, other times she joins the dots and makes acute observations while her mother remembers their life in extreme poverty. There are hints to things in the past which are never confirmed, this is a book as much about what is not said as about what is. In revisiting her childhood, trying, and mostly failing, to get her mother to talk about it, Lucy learns that although your upbringing shapes who you are, that shaping continues throughout your life.
I thought about this book for days afterwards.

Read my reviews of these other books by Elizabeth Strout:-
AMY & ISABELLE
ANYTHING IS POSSIBLE
LUCY BY THE SEA
OH WILLIAM!
OLIVE KITTERIDGE
OLIVE, AGAIN
TELL ME EVERYTHING

If you like this, try:-
‘The Language of Others’ by Clare Morrall
‘A Spool of Blue Thread’ by Anne Tyler
‘How to Belong’ by Sarah Franklin

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#BookReview MY NAME IS LUCY BARTON by Elizabeth Strout @LizStrout http://wp.me/p5gEM4-1SL via @SandraDanby