France

It's been too long since I did a catch up! I probably wouldn't have bothered with The Wedding People by Alison Espach which is described as Romance by the publisher if it hadn't been for the Guardian saying it was a book to read in 2025. Yes, there is romance but basically it's a whip-smart social comedy and very funny in places. Phoebe arrives at a luxury hotel intending to spend her last evening looking at the view, eating oysters and drinking champagne before ending it and finds out she's the only guest in the place not there for a week long wedding. Without meaning to she gets involved with the bride and the rest of the party and everything gets busy. Clever, well written and charming. Long Island by Colm Toibin is a follow up to Brooklyn which I absolutely loved. It's 1976 and Eillis, is in a marital crisis and goes back to Ireland with her two children for her mother's 80th birthday while her husband decides what to do. And there's still a lot of unfinished business from when she made her sudden return to the States 20 years before. As ever Toibin's writing is sublime and Eilis is a fascinating character but this book lacks some of the punch of Brooklyn, possibly because it's revisiting some of the same ground. Even so it's still one of the best books I've read this year.

To be honest I find this series dull and I love Vera and Jimmy Perez.

I read this about 20 year ago and remember it as being long and a bit of a slog. Ian Pears is much admired for his historical fiction and I'm not sure why, there are loads of authors who are better than him in the ability to draw you into a different time and a different mind set, above all are better story tellers.

Glad to hear it!

This doesn't sound any better than his first book which I gave up on eventually. But I would probably have gone on reading if there had been uncertainty about puppies!

This isn't a quick read! It's a slim book about the rituals and creatures of wintertime , particularly those associated with Christmas, and while it's fascinating the author is a little po-faced!

If you have Audible Plus (titles you can listen to for free) included in your subscription I strongly recommend The Wolf Den by Elodie Harper. It's about a brothel in Pompei and has both a great storyline and a pitch perfect narrator in Antonia Beamish. Audible Plus can be quite difficult to find good books on but there are gems among the dross. A lot of books are up there for a limited time (you'll usually see a note) so the trick is to download it before. They don't then take the download back!

Just starting The Dead of Winter by Sally Clegg.

For me Liane Moriaty hasn't written a really good book since the compulsive Big Little Lies, but oh boy is she back on form with Here One Moment. On a flight from Hobert to Sydney an elderly woman stands up and predicts the age and kind of death for everyone on the plane. A psychic or a nutjob? Then the deaths start. The story arc follows the woman and what took her to that place and several on board as they either ignore her prediction or try to change fate. It's full of twists that keep you guessing all the way to the final page and isn't predictable. Thoroughly enjoyable and highly recommended.

The second one sounds like it could be one of Jane Fallon's.

I agree. It's rare to find a book with a genuinely unputdownable ending, that was ne of them.

There's a lot of girls of my generation who first fell in love with historical fiction by reading Katherine by Anya Seton. Gosh that was a wonderful book and one I'd never go back to in case it fell short of my memories.

Two distinctly curate's eggs here. I had high hopes of High Vaultage by Chris Sugden which is apparently the novelisation of a very successful podcast he has ben running. It's a steam-punk world where Even Greater London stretches over the whole of the south of England, Queen Victoria is largely machine due to repairs done to moving parts after repeated assassination attempts and Clara Entwhistle and former Inspector Fleet (former because he was shot, declared dead and then repaired and it's going to take years to get his death revoked) are trying to get their detective agency going. This looked great fun, it won the Wodehouse prize and Chris Sugden has been compared to both Terry Pratchett and Douglas Adams. Sadly he isn't anywhere near either. Parts of the book were funny, but not funny enough and the non-funny bits dragged. It became an utter slog. The Wicked Boy by Kate Summerscale was a lot better and the good bits far outweighed the slow parts. In June 1895 Robert and Nattie Coobles, brothers aged 13 and 11, told their neighbours their mother had gone to Liverpool to look after a sick relative and went to Lords to watch cricket. Their father was at sea and the boys asked a family acquaintance to stay with them for the time being. Then people started noticing the smell... There isn't much mystery about the murder itself, not about who did it though the details of what really happened probably differ from the official line. The descriptions of police procedure, trials, the way the law operated, the behaviour of the press, the startlingly humane regime at Broadmoor were fascinating, the problem is that Kate Summerscale is in love with her own research and can't resist displaying it. For instance there's far too much detail about the cricket match and how many runs were made etc but the biggest problem was with Robert Coombes' later life which wasn't particularly relevant. Yes, as a boy he committed a heinous crime for whatever reason but he wasn't the first one to reform and a couple of chapters would have covered his afterlife, instead it stretched to over 60 pages. So brilliant on parts, saggy in others but still very interesting.

The BBC 4 part adaptation of Gill Hornby's novel about Cassandra Austen has just started. It launches in May in the US. I thoroughly enjoyed the book when it came out (far more than The Other Bennet Sister which came out at the same time and which, being somewhat melodramatic, overshadowed this quieter book). Based on one episode this is back to what the Beeb does really well, polished drama, impeccable performances, no fancy tricks, stylish and very watchable. If you didn't catch last night's episode, look for it. You're in for a treat.

I got it discounted on Kobo! I hope you like it better than me.

I was disappointed by The Ministry of Time, everything about it sounded so good yet though it was OK it didn't grab me in the way I was expecting.

Here you are! Onyx Storm by Rebecca Yarros is the third in a series of five, I reckon just about every reader on the planet has heard of these books and has an opinion on them, whether they've read them or not. If you don't like fantasy, don't like dragons, this definitely won't be for you but I love both, accept the love interest and slide over the sex scenes which really are too much for me (and quite a lot of other people too)) I think this book holds up really well, it always difficult to keep up the momentum in the middle of a series but imo she manages it particularly with developing the characters of the dragons. There are a lot of characters to keep track of and the list of who was who in Violet's squad, their dragons and their signet (magic ability ) did come in very useful. Pacing was good and the ending was excellent (even though a lot of people on Goodreads claimed they didn't understand it. Can't think why.) All in all a thoroughly good read - my only quibble is the introduction of a new character who had been playing an important role right in the last few pages who had never been mentioned before. Incidentally there's a lot of stuff going around about the book being printed with missing pages, that it should have 544 and the story ends on 527. The book is fine there are 527 printed pages and the other 17 are endpapers, title pages, acknowledgements etc.

The Two Deaths of Ruth Lyle by Nick Louth sounded so promising, a 66 year old woman is found murdered in the same way , in the same spot and with what looks like the same murder weapon as a 16 year old girl who was killed 50 years ago. What more they share the same name, the same birthday, the same fillings in their teeth... That was about as good as it got. The writing was totally pedestrian and pedantic, the author doesn't seem to like Devon very much as there's a lot about how run down the towns are and as for the police - the men seem to be mentally set back in the 70's with a degree of sexism and racism that I'm certain doesn't exist even in rural backwaters and a female detective who tells the new Muslim programmer (who goes by the unlikely name of Primrose) that her husband married her for 'there' and cups both breasts in her hands. <The denouement both relied too heavily on co-incidence and a chapter long confession from the murderer. No I didn't enjoy it and I won't be reading this author again.

Wow! Those are so pretty.

I'm not a Royalist or an anti-Royalist either, I'm just not particularly interested in them most of the time and wouldn't have bothered with A Voyage Around the Queen by Craig Brown if it hadn't been given to my husband for Christmas which he passed on with a "Worth reading" comment. This is not your usual biography, there are over 100 chapters ad very few of them are about the Queen directly, instead her life is told in a series of vignettes, ranging from a saccharine "biography" of a four year old Princess Elizabeth, the story of the corgies including a full family tree from the Queen's first one, to dreams people have about her, President Ceausescu's state visit (she called him "that horrid man"), her love of racing, being painted by Rolf Harris and Lucien Freud and what she really thought of the royal yacht Britannia. And far more. What really surprised me was discovering that she believed that her obligation to her people came from God, I thought that particular notion had gone out of fashion with Charles I in 1649. In some sections she comes over as thoroughly dislikeable, then comes a section written from a different perspective where she's kind and intuitive and opinion changes again. Craig Brown is a satirist and can be very funny, and by and large keeps his opinions to himself though it's obvious he has little time for Prince Harry. His section on the death of the Queen and the public reaction to it was unexpectedly moving because there was no hyperbole or mawkishness. All in all it was definitely worth reading.

My nail lady is called Gwladys - but she's French so it's permissable!

Thanks for the first good laugh of the day, Hux!

I'm not sure what sort of books you mean.

I read Tai Pan when I lived in Hong Kong and enjoyed it hugely. Anna Karenina was a book club read a few years ago and enjoyment had a lot to do with which translation our book was. There were big differences in style, some very literal and following Russian sentence structure where feasible, others more loose - and those were just the English translations. So it's worth reading a few pages before you buy or borrow. Be warned there's a lot of description of haymaking and farming in general.

Cold as Hell by Lilja Sigurdardottir was touted as the latest big thing in Icelandic noir. Orora, half Icelandic, half Scottish, living in Scotland goes to Iceland to search for her estranged sister who has disappeared, enlisting the help of a police detective on holiday who just happens to be her sort of uncle (was married to a relation). The scene setting and descriptions of Iceland are wonderful, the story line which lacks tension less so. It may be the translator, he's a crime novelist in his own right and I read one of his books ages ago and found it uninspiring. I doubt I'll read any more in this series. Anne Griffin's When All Is Said about an elderly man sitting alone at a hotel bar and toasting the five people who meant most to him in his life was one of those wonderful, quiet books where not a lot happens but you still can't stop reading and finish with a true sense of having been taken to another place. I've had The Island of Longing, her most recent novel, for some time but didn't feel like starting it in case it was a disappointment. It wasn't. The subject is on the face of it hardly uplifting, nearly eight years ago Rosie's 17 year old daughter disappeared from outside their house and Rosie cannot move on and accept that Saiorce is probably dead. Her obsession with looking for her has nearly destroyed her marriage and she's had a breakdown. Rosie agrees to go to the small island where she grew up in the West of Ireland for the summer to help her father run the ferry to the mainland and gradually she changes. It sounds gloomy but it absolutely isn't, I loved it. A Case of Mice and Murder by Sally Smith is a fairly run of the mill crime story. It's 1901 and the Lord Chief Justice has been found murdered in the Inner Temple in London. The police are only allowed to enter the Temple by invitation and for discretion's sake it's decided that a barrister should investigate the death, Sir Gabriel Ward, who found the body. It's a nice enough tale but ultimately unmemorable .