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,...
Historical fiction
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...
After the war, soldiering on for freedom and a livelihood
Helen Simonson’s debut novel, Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand, was quite delightful. Her second, The Summer Before the War, had a charming cover but the novel itself did not live up to either its cover or Simonson’s first novel. Has she...
1/3 of a WWII story, but another 2/3 of tedium
A Town Like Alice drifted across my library page, and having heard it was Australian author Nevil Shute’s most famous book, I thought I should give it a shot. Structurally, the book is a clunker. It’s framed around a solicitor’s...
Women’s Words
Growing up in Oxford in the 1880s, Esme is a happy little girl although she has lost her mother young, because she is loved and looked after by her father and other kind friends. Her father’s work is assisting in...
An interrogative angle on the past*
It is always a pleasure to open a book by an accomplished, confident author, and Zadie Smith is one of those. Her first novel White Teeth was a rollicking tale about a Bangladeshi immigrant and his English friend, and her...
White mistresses and black slave
There are many books written about the relationship between white mistresses and black slaves, and this too is one such, but there is an added angle with the book addressing both racism and sexism almost equally – that the white...
1950s Irish charm
This is a novel which is as comforting to read as having a mug of hot tea and a chocolate digestive biscuit on a rainy day. In an age where so many novels are edgy, disquieting, challenging, clever, deliberately discomfiting,...
Aryan Babies
Historical fiction can be tricky. On the one hand, the author needs to aim for historical accuracy, including the less appealing social and cultural aspects of the time. On the other hand, the author might not want to associate himself...
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