Victorian Horrors
Sarah Waters’ Gothic Fingersmith is set in Victorian England, and she does not spare the reader from the realities of the period. Beyond the wall lay Mr Ibbs’ sister, who was kept to her bed; she often woke ith the...
Historical fiction
Grey stones lapped by a freezing sea
Two major events were happening in Scotland in 1843: one religious, and one agricultural. On the religious front, a bitter schism erupted in the Church of Scotland, where evangelicals fiercely opposed control of the church by landowners split off to...
As long as grass grows or water runs
The title of this review is a reference to a message sent by President Andrew Jackson to the Choctaws and Chickasaw Indians in the 1830s indicating that, as a friend, he planned to move their people to the Trans-Mississippi West,...
Delicious drawing-room dialogue, but lacking in charm
Here is yet another example of a writer who produced a stunningly good debut novel (Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand), and whose 2nd (The Summer Before the War) and now 3rd novel have been somewhat disappointing subsequently. There are of course many...
Medical Injustice
““When I say to you that what happened to those girls was the greatest hurt in my life, I am speaking the God’s honest truth” (p141). These are the words of Dr Civil Townsend, in 2016 when she is already...
Personal and political in post-apartheid South Africa
I am coming to this book a quarter of a century after it won the Booker Prize in 1999. Heaven knows how many years this relatively slim volume has been in my boxes, carried around from house move to house...
Inferno of Exploitation
I was surprised to see emblazoned across the front cover, ‘The Uncensored Original Edition’, which has apparently been lost for over 80 years (the copy I had is published by Sharp Press in 2003); the original was first published in...
All The Single Ladies
There’s always been (and probably always will be) a housing crisis in New York, but in the early 1900s there was a very particular kind of problem: more women were working, and moving to the city for jobs and fun,...
In the Darkling Wood
I was expecting a book of some originality just from my initial browse, and I was not disappointed. This is an unusual read, beautifully crafted, which makes land and landscape the key protagonist. Our human protagonist is Lamentations Callat, sometimes...
A Life re-made…again and again
~ A History of Burning, by Janika Oza ~ Grand Central Publishing, 2023 He hadn’t seen his family in nearly fifty years. His mother was gone, his middle sister too. These sentences, about 100 pages into Janika Oza’s A History...
Suspense, stoicism and survival in wartime Britain: two novels by Pat Barker
~ Toby’s Room, by Pat Barker ~ Doubleday, 2012 ~ Noonday, by Pat Barker ~ Doubleday, 2016 It has been quite awhile since I read a Pat Barker novel, and I wonder why it has taken me so long to...
Coal Barger’s (Adopted) Daughter
Set in the 1820 or 1830s, in the Black Country (West Midlands of the UK, previously a coal mining region) this book is about ‘the noble art’ of fisticuffs, or pugilism, or as we know it today, boxing. Most unusually,...
A functionary in the Raj
In 1920, a young Englishman called Eric Blair sailed out to become a sahib in the Raj. He was stationed in Burma as a policeman, overseeing the Burmese and Indian ‘natives’ who worked in the teak forests and rubber plantations...
How strange a world that one’s equal must argue for one’s equality
I said these kinds of things were adventures; but he said he didn’t want no more adventures. Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain. Published 1884 So says Huck Finn during the raft journey down the Mississippi in a book that is...
Character studies of ladies and gentlemen, though not in Moscow
A full-length novel is very satisfying, but even short stories from such an accomplished author are too tempting to pass up. Amor Towles’ A Gentleman in Moscow and The Lincoln Highway were both lovely pieces of historical fiction. They have...
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