Plenty of Reading – No Writing

My time has been taken up with gardening, mostly emptying pots of spring bulbs and planting them back up for the summer, finishing off our guest suite which will be ready by the end of next week – with a little bit of luck – and reading.

The library have been sending me lots of books on Libby, plus a few I ordered.

Alice Quinn – The Alice Network – probably my favourite, though this was an audio book and I wasn’t quite convinced by the narrator. Based on a real WWI spy, the protagonist was a superb character, red in tooth and claw. Hugely brave, hugely damaged and living as a hermit almost thirty years later. Against her better judgement but also to settle a score, Eve helps a young American woman, Charlie, to find her missing French cousin amidst the aftermath of WW2. It has a dual time-line as we discover Eve’s story. The setting is mainly France. Aided by a Scottish chauffeur and a treasured car, Eve and Charlie find the answers – and they are horrific. I thoroughly enjoyed this revenge story, mainly because of Eve. A wonderful character.

Old God’s Time by Sebastian Barry He is one of my favourite authors. This is a dark, rather unnerving story about a retired policeman, Tom Kettle, seemingly living in poor circumstances. As the story progresses, we learn what has happened to his family and Tom, himself, is drowning in memories which sometimes confuses past and present. Maybe he has some early onset dementia or he struggles with day to day, surviving rather than living. He is asked to help with a cold case and while it seems at first to rouse him, it also brings back the horror of his and wife’s time at the mercy of cruel, sadistic nuns and priests. The nub of the story is child abuse and how, as a young detective, he was taught to ignore and sweep it under the carpet while, in fact, it ultimately destroyed his wife and family. A harrowing story but displaying Barry’s literary skills, so should not be missed.

The Collaboratory’s Daughter by Eve Glyn – set in Dubrovnik, this is a story of a woman in her sixties in search of the man who was her father. She hadn’t seen him since she was a baby and had been brought by a man she loved, but recently deceased in West Sussex. Her mother told Fran that her father was a hero, but as the story progresses, the evidence points Fran into thinking he was a Nazi collaborator. We see glimpses of the real man in his last days throughout the book, but with the help of a friend, Jadran, who lost his wife and daughter in a later war, Fran eventually finds the truth. This a very introspective book as Fran battles with grief and what she should now do, having lost her caring roll, but it is a satisfying and relatively easy read which had me in tears at the ending.

The Romantic by William Boyd – Another of my favourite authors. This was an epic story based on a real person whose life was a series of adventures which were almost unbelievable. He left notes hoping to write his own biography. i had to look him up, not really believing that there had been such a man. Cashell Greville Ross brought up by his “aunt” in Ireland, educated in Oxford (not the university), runs away and joins the army. A drummer boy at Waterloo, he is badly injured, and ends up next in Indian Army (East India Company) where he disobeys orders to murder prisoners and embarks on a tour of Europe, where he meets Byron and Shelley. See where this is going? No, the next decades are a tale of hope before disaster, of striving only to be let down by others, of surviving against the odds. It’s a truly remarkable tale. Boy at his best.