A Book Blog 2025 by Books do Furnish a Room

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Eerie East Anglia edited by Edward Parnell

Another British Library Tales of the Weird collection, this time focussing on a particular area. In this instance East Anglia covers Norfolk, Suffolk and Essex. Also included are parts of Cambridgeshire and South Lincolnshire (the Fennish part).

There are seventeen stories in total. Two are by M R James, including one of his more famous stories “Oh, Whistle, and I’ll come to you, my lad”. There are also stories by R H Benson, E F Benson (brothers), E G Swain, Gerald Bullett, Ingulphus, H R Wakefield, F M Major, Marjorie Bowen, Frederick Cowles, R H Malden, Robert Aickman, John Gordon, Penelope Fitzgerald, Matthew Holness and Daisy Johnson. Some of the stories are quite recent and the Daisy Johnson story is from her collection Fen.

The topography of the area feeds into the stories. The flat, wet landscape of the fens and the Norfolk Broads. Isolated sand dunes and a certain bleakness. There’s a lot of history as well and one story has links to druidic influences. M R James’s influence is strong and the understatedness of both his pieces stand out. Generally these are fairly rural tales and some good ones are included. Apart from James, the stories by Bowen, Swain, Wakefield and Fitzgerald are also good. 

8 out of 10

Starting Medusa by E H Visiak

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We are not Numbers edited by Ahmed Alnaouq and Pam Bailey

This is a remarkable collection of brief pieces of writing by some of those caught up in the genocide in Gaza. The writings are from 2015, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 202, 2022, and 2023/2024, before and after October the 7^th. Some of the writers are now dead, probably more now than when it was published in early 2025. There are dedications to five of the dead in the front of the book.

There are short individual pieces and some poetry. The writers are all young, under thirty, many of them in their teens. They write about everyday life: education, family, friends, love, children; the usual stuff of everyday life. However lived under unusual circumstances and under constant threat. One of the editors Ahmed Alnaouq explains it:

"I was depressed, it was after the 2014 war, and I lost my brother. I was asked to write about him, and I saw writing as a way to pin down all my emotions. I also wanted to challenge the way the Western media writes about us."

Alnaouq also lost twenty one members of his family in 2023. This extract is from Ismail Abu-Aitah:

“The next thing I remember is waking up in Shifa hospital (Gaza City). Confused, I asked about Mom, Dad and the rest of my family. The doctors said they were ok, and the relief of knowing they were safe was all that mattered to me: I could handle my own pain.

Shrapnel had lacerated my entire body, and I had suffered a severe concussion. The doctors took X-rays, cleaned and stitched my wounds, and put me to bed for rest. Meanwhile, I briefly saw my third brother, Mahmood, who was also hospitalised for treatment. He was discharged quickly, but I stayed due to my head trauma.

At noon in the first full day in the hospital, a few of my friends visited. I was in tremendous pain and couldn’t move. Yet I was happy because I felt I had somehow taken a hit for my family, sparing their lives. But after a short while, one of my friends broke the news. Despite my uncles’ hesitancy to tell me they had decided that I deserved to know: an air strike which had targeted our neighbour’s house had badly damaged my own home and killed five of my family members: my mom Jamila, my dad Ibrahim, my two brothers Mohammed and Ahmed, and my four year old nephew Adham. Ten other family members were wounded. Everything went black.”

There are shafts of hope as well and some of those who write have left Gaza over the years for education and jobs.

There is an ordinariness of life and an extraordinariness of trying to live amidst death and destruction. Many of those who write have been moved up to a dozen times during the war.

These accounts have impact and are very moving. They shed light on the death, destruction and genocide being wreaked on Gaza at the moment. They have power because they show the very ordinary aspirations of Gazans in impossible circumstances.

10 out of 10

Starting Domination by Alice Roberts

 

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An Orchestra of Minorities by Chigozie Obioma

“He had joined many others ….all who have been chained and beaten, whose lands have been plundered, whose civilizations have been destroyed, who have been silenced, raped, shamed, killed. With all these people, he’d come to share a common fate, they were the minorities of this world whose only recourse was to join the universal orchestra in which all there was to do was cry and wail.”

This was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2019. Its author is Nigerian and I think the best way to explain the novel is in his words:

“An Orchestra of Minorities is a novel that is firmly rooted in Igbo cosmology, a complex system of beliefs and traditions that once guided – and in part still guides – my people. Since I’m situating a work of fiction in such a reality, curious readers might decide to research the cosmology, especially as it relates to the concept of the chi. I must therefore declare that, like Chinua Achebe in his essay on the chi from which one of this book’s epigraphs is drawn, “what I am attempting here is not to fill the gap but to draw attention to it in a manner appropriate to one whose primary love is literature and not religion, philosophy or linguistics””.

The structure is also loosely based on Homer’s Odyssey. Chinoso, a chicken farmer falls in love with Ndali when he sees her about to jump off a bridge and intervenes. The novel chronicles their ups and downs (mainly downs it must be said). It is narrated by Chinoso’s chi, who is at the same time writer and reader. Chinonso seems to be one of the most unlucky and naïve characters in literature and this isn’t an upbeat novel.

It's an old tale being retold in Igbo form and told rather well.

7 and a half out of 10

Starting No New Land by M G Vassanji

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Pilots and Soldiers of the Caribbean by Maureen Dickson

“There is little known of the fighting men and women of the Caribbean who left their own country (some at a very early age), to travel thousands of miles to join the services. Although their motives were varied, the bottom line was that they were fighting to keep democracy alive. Most were fighting for the mother country, for Britain.”

This is a brief history of those from the Caribbean who joined the British armed forces during the two world wars and up to the present. It also covers the Falklands, Iraq, Northern Island etc. One of its strengths are the numerous small biographies Dickson includes of the men and women themselves. It is particularly interesting because of the inclusion of women members of the services with their biographies. I had heard previously about a number of the men included: Walter Tull (one of the first black professional footballers), Errol Barrow (first Prime Minister of Barbados), Ulric Cross (later High Commissioner for Trinidad and Tobago), Cy Grant (POW in World War 2 and part of the planning for the Great Escape (yes, that one)), Sam King (First black Mayor of Southwark and one of the founders of the Notting Hill Carnival), Johnson Beharry (awarded a VC in Iraq, the first since 1982). I hadn’t heard of most of the servicewomen.

Dickson also outlines some interesting facts, which are important because of the increasingly febrile and dangerous rhetoric from the far right. This is pertinent particularly to Britain, but the far right seem to be an increasing menace globally at the moment. The Caribbean nations made significant financial contributions to the war effort in the 1940s, a fact not well known; Dickson outlines amounts. People in the Caribbean were encouraged to invest their savings in war bonds and many did. The British Army recruited in the Caribbean in the 1960s and 1970s, another fact that would not sit comfortably with current mood music from the right.

This is an interesting and useful addition to the literature in this area. Dickson, over a number of years, interviewed many of the men and women included here. She doesn’t shy away from the more difficult issues of racism and colonialism, but this is really about the men and women and their stories.

8 out of 10

Starting Pandora's Star by Peter Hamilton

 

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Medusa by E H Visiak

This is a 1929 novel that is still little known, published in the Tales of the Weird series. Visiak was a Milton scholar and this shows: the penultimate chapter is entitled Gorgonian horror, a phrase from Paradise Lost. Visiak also wrote poetry in opposition to World War One and was a conscientious objector.

It is essentially a nautical tale with odd goings on in the tropics. It is very well regarded in some circles. Karl Wagner when compiling collections of supernatural tales declared it one of the “13 best supernatural horror novels. Wagner, getting somewhat carried away also said:

“If David Lindsay had written Treasure Island in the throes of a peyote-induced religious experience … well if Coleridge had given Melville a hand on Moby Dick after a few pipes of opium …”

And also:

“John Milton may have popped round on his way home from an opium den to help {Visiak} revise the final draft.”

“the probable outcome of Herman Melville having written Treasure Island while tripping on LSD,” 

There’s more in that vein. Others have described it as a nightmare almost recollected.

There is a good deal of messing about on boats and going to sea to avoid difficult home circumstances. So far so Conrad. There is a long build up to the last few chapters where all the odd and hallucinogenic stuff happens. The style is archaic and it does feel like it could have been written a century earlier.

The story itself doesn’t quite live up to the rather grand billing above. The odd parts are suitably odd and do feel hallucinogenic rather than supernatural.

7 out of 10

Starting The Human Chord by Algernon Blackwood

 

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The Charthouse of Parma by Stendhal

“There's one convenience about absolute power, that it sanctifies everything in the eyes of the people.”

I read The Scarlett and the Black when I was in my teens (many years ago) and seem to remember enjoying it. It’s taken al most fifty years to get round to the next one! To be frank I wish I hadn’t bothered. I am aware that the novel’s list of admirers is a lengthy one (including Hemingway, Balzac, James and Proust, to name a few). There has been a film and several TV mini-series, not to mention an opera.

There is a positive, I thought it started quite well and the depiction of the Battle of Waterloo was quite effective. Stendhal depicts the fog of war quite well. It’s downhill from there though. The hero Fabrizio I found intensely annoying (that may, of course, be the point).

There are lots of romances and swooning women, plenty of intrigue at a political and court level, a good sprinkling of tyranny and a little Jacobinism, and of course there’s the Church and everything that goes with that, Add some brigands and actors, poisoning, imprisonment, daring escapes. There is also a surfeit of sentimentality, particularly towards the end:

“This beautiful thought, of 'dying close by that which one loves', expressed in a hundred different ways, was followed by a sonnet in which it was found that the soul, separated, after atrocious torments, from the frail body in which it dwelt for twenty-three years, and impelled by that instinct for happiness natural to all that has once existed, would not reascend to heaven to mingle with angelic choirs as soon as it was set free, and in the event of the awful judgment according it forgiveness for its sins, but, happier after death than it had been in life, it would go a few steps from the prison where it had lamented for so long, to be reunited with all that it had loved in the world. And thus, the sonnet's last line went. I shall have found my paradise on earth.”

 

There’s a good deal of melodrama and twisted plot turns. I do wonder if Stendhal was around today if he might have been writing daytime soap operas.

There are many who do appreciate this: maybe it’s just me!

4 out of 10

Starting The Story of my Life by George Sand

 

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Mistborn by Brandon Sanderson

“My behaviour is nonetheless, deplorable. Unfortunately, I'm quite prone to such bouts of deplorability--take for instance, my fondness for reading books at the dinner table.”

Now I have retired I have more time for reading nonsense and things I wouldn’t have bothered with when I had a more restricted time schedule. Hence another venture into fantasy. This time it’s Brandon Sanderson and the first of the Mistborn series. This is the first of many books set in this world, it is apparently called cosmere. There are always inevitable comparisons with Tolkien and yes there are some obvious similarities. The worldbuilding is pretty good and there is plenty of detail. I am not going to go into any outlines of the plot. There have been the usual board games and role-playing games. It hasn’t been filmed or televised yet.

It's well written and plotted, but does lack a little depth. There are lots of open questions and unexplained phenomena, presumably to draw the reader into the next volume. Some of the minor characters are a bit two-dimensional.

There is a massive spoiler ahead, this is at the very end of the novel:

“”Elend Venture” she said, standing up. “There is something I’ve been meaning to tell you for some time.” She paused, blinking away her tears. “You read too much, especially in the presence of ladies.”

He smiled, throwing back his chair and grabbing her in a firm embrace. Vin closed her eyes, simply feeling the warmth of being held.

And realized that was all she had ever really wanted.”

Really, you go through a whole novel of adventure and derring do only to decide that all you want is to be in the arms of some bloke. I was irritated. It’s probably just me.

6 out of 10 

Starting Greenteeth by Molly O'Neill

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No New Land  by M G Vassanji

M G Vassanji was born in Kenya and has lived in Tanzania and now resides in Canada. This is a diaspora novel. It starts following a family in Dar-es-Salaam in Tanzania and follows the family to Canada. The Lalani family are Asian in origin. Vassanji looks at how the characters lives are affected by migration. The title indicates the problem.

Despite being in a new land the characters try to live the same lives and with the same problems, not to mention racism, they discover the racism they encountered in Dar is still an issue in Canada. They encounter the usual problems of cultural alienation, problems of adjustment.

Vassanji employs stream of consciousness some of the time, especially with Nurdin Lalani, the head of the family, who struggles to find work commensurate with his status. The only member of the extended community who does make it is Jamal who is a lawyer! Vassanji explores the tension between assimilation and maintaining cultural identity.

There continue to be lessons that we need to be aware of today. The racism of the 80s and early 90s hasn’t gone away and is sharply in focus today, certainly in Britain.

This is brief, two hundred or so pages and tells a story that goes beyond just Canada. It could have been written about any western nation I suspect. The issues and debates are very similar and the solutions equally elusive.

7 out of 10#

Starting The Wasted Vigil by Nadeem Aslam

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The Rape of the Rose by Glynn Hughes

This is a sort of follow on from The Hawthorn Goddess as one of the main characters here (Mary) is the daughter of the protagonist of the first novel, Anne Wylde. It is though, a stand alone novel. It’s been on my shelves for about thirty years. I’m in a phase of trying to read books on my shelves that have been there too long, so I can move them on. The background is again the Luddite rebellions, this time in 1812, the year the Prime Minister Spencer Perceval was assassinated. The setting is the mill towns and moors of West Yorkshire.

This is the unpleasant underbelly of the Industrial Revolution with plenty of unrest and machine-breaking, zealous and brutal soldiery, the shadow of the workhouse, Methodism. The protagonist is Mor Greave who is a schoolteacher, Luddite and freethinker. There are two primary female characters. Mor’s wife Pheobe and Mary a prostitute (Anne Wylde’s daughter). The mill owners and overseers are suitably brutal and wicked. All of the characters are flawed. The brutality and abuse directed at the children is difficult to read, but I understand that this just reflects the brutality of the newly built factories and the demands of the new machines.

I think more could have been done to flesh out some of the political arguments of the time. I also had concerns about the way the two main female characters were portrayed: 'lady of the night' vs fundamentalist Christian.

This is a mixed bag, but the historical background is interesting, and Hughes does highlight the tensions that the upheavals of the industrial revolution created.

6 out of 10

Starting The Street Philosopher by Matthew Pamplin

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The Human Chord by Algernon Blackwood

More tales of the weird. A 1910 novella by Blackwood and the first of his novels I have read (I’ve read a few of his short stories). It’s helpful to consider what Blackwood meant to explore with his writing:

“My fundamental interest, I suppose, is signs and proofs of other powers that lie hidden in us all; the extension, in other words, of human faculty. So many of my stories, therefore, deal with extension of consciousness; speculative and imaginative treatment of possibilities outside our normal range of consciousness.... Also, all that happens in our universe is natural; under Law; but an extension of our so limited normal consciousness can reveal new, extra-ordinary powers etc., and the word "supernatural" seems the best word for treating these in fiction. I believe it possible for our consciousness to change and grow, and that with this change we may become aware of a new universe. A "change" in consciousness, in its type, I mean, is something more than a mere extension of what we already possess and know.”

That sets the background for this tale. It concerns Robert Spinrobin who is looking for some purpose (he is in his 20s) and he comes across and advert:

“WANTED, by Retired Clergyman, Secretarial Assistant with courage and imagination. Tenor voice and some knowledge of Hebrew essential; single; unworldly. Apply Philip Skale.”

The setting is a remote house in Wales. Skale is looking for 4 voices. He is bass, Spinrobin is tenor. His housekeeper Mrs Mawle is alto is alto and her niece Miriam is soprano (and also, predictably, the love interest). There are no other characters of any note. Skale has some rather esoteric ideas about sound and its nature and believes that certain combinations of sound can alter reality and reveal the true names of things. Skale has some big experiment in mind which might be potentially rather dangerous. It all seems a little far-fetched. This is a one idea novel based on the idea that the speaking of a name is in some way powerful:

“Sound,” he went on, the whole force of his great personality in the phrase, “was the primordial, creative energy. A sound can call a form into existence. Forms are the Sound-Figures of archetypal forces—the Word made Flesh.”

These ideas were promoted by Theosophy and Blackwood was a member of the Theosophical society, hence the interest.

The ending is a little predictable. It’s certainly rather odd and plays with concepts of knowing. Some of it is interesting, but there was a bit too much “Mills and Boon” romance stuff for me.

6 out of 10

Starting Halloweird: Classic stories of the season of Samhain edited by Johnny Mains

[lunababymoonchild]

Halloweird: Classic stories of the season of Samhain edited by Johnny Mains, have bought this, it looks delicious!

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It is good Luna

Greenteeth by Molly O'Neill

“That’s preachers for you. They care less about facts than about fear. That cursed parson probably didn’t even think I was really a witch, just a woman who was cleverer than he thought she should be.”

Another folklore based ramble based on the Jenny Greenteeth myths. Jenny Greenteeth (or many similar variations of the name), lives in rivers, lakes and pools snaring and capturing the unwary (especially the elderly and children). She is generally used to scare children away from water and its dangers. Many countries have similar myths: River Mumma (Jamaica), Bunyip (Australia), Kappa (Japan), Storm Hag (Lake Erie), Rusalka (Slavic Countries) and so on.

This is a quest novel involving Jenny Greenteeth, a goblin called Brackus and a human witch called Temperance Crump. The setting is I think, the seventeenth century. Jenny’s lake is near the village of Chipping Appleby. One day a local witch is thrown into her pond at the bidding of a new local parson. Various things ensue and Jenny and Temperance discover the parson is really the Erl King (another mythological figure) who is thoroughly evil. His power is beyond Jenny or Temperance and they set off on a quest to get help along with Brackus a goblin who is a travelling tradesman. Various adventures ensue and assorted fae creatures are encountered. We have unicorns (apparently, they live on the Isle of Skye and the wild hunt. It’s all pretty much escapist fantasy, but I sensed a bit of a state of the nation feel to it. There is a spreading and pervasive evil in the land and what is required to defeat it is cooperation and the working together of a group based on diversity and difference. Seems somehow relevant to the UK at the moment.

It reads easily and the first person narration works well. I enjoyed this and appreciated the underlying message. 

8 and a half out of 10

Starting Ghosts of Manhattan by George Mann

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Heartstone by C J Sansom

“Politics is like dice: the better the player, the worse the man.”

This is the fifth in the series of Shardlake novels set in the reign of Henry VIII. This time we are in 1545 and England is on the brink of war with France. The action moves between London, Portsmouth and rural Hampshire.

There are some recurring characters. Barak is still Shardlake’s sidekick. Sir Richard Rich is suitably villainous as ever and Guy the physician also continues to be a part of the story. The plot this time has a couple of focuses. The Court of Wards is one of them dealing with the wardship of orphaned children. The other is a continuation from a previous book and deals withy a resident of Bedlam.

As ever there are plenty of twists and turns. There are always some predictabilities. Shardlake inevitably gets threatened and taken captive. He is always in the middle of whatever historical event is going on. During the build up I thought to myself, surely he’s not going to stick the poor chap on the Mary Rose when it sinks? Well, wait and see!!

There is another interesting story line in the form of a transgender character and Sansom handles this pretty well without resorting to formulaic solutions.

Ideal comfort reading (for me anyway).

7 and a half out of 10

Starting Death under a little Sky by Stig Abell