“The bride stood like a pillar of salt, rigid under layers of itchy petticoats. Sweat dripped down the hollow of her back and collected in pools under her arms staining the ivory silk. She edged closer to The Bedeken Room door, one ear pressed up against it.”

Book Review:

Review by Eleanor Bukowsky (APR 7, 2014)

In The Marrying of Chani Kaufman, Eve Harris discloses the secrets of a Chasidic community in Golders Green, London, focusing on the tribulations of three families: the Kaufmans, Levys, and Zilbermans. The Kaufmans have eight daughters, one of whom, nineteen-year-old Chani, is seeking an intelligent, animated, and good-natured husband. The Levys, a well-to-do couple, want only the best for their son, Baruch, and plan to settle for nothing less. The Zilbermans are facing a major crisis. Rabbi Zilberman’s wife, Rivka, is no longer a contented spouse, mother, and homemaker; she is restless, edgy, and depressed. Adding to the tension is the fact that one of her sons, Avromi, a university student, is acting strangely. He is secretive, stays out late, and avoids telling his family where he has been.

Harris goes back and forth in time, creating a well-rounded portrait of a community whose members prize tradition, virtue, and spirituality. If anyone deviates from prescribed standards of behavior–by dressing immodestly, showing too much interest in secular matters, or flouting religious law–he or she risks censure or, in some cases, ostracism. However, the author indicates that many Chasidim have a great deal to be grateful for: particularly the support of relatives, friends, and neighbors and the peace of mind that comes from knowing one’s place in the world.

The cast includes the young and not-so-young, the experienced and naïve, the affluent and those struggling to get by. We observe Chani Kaufman navigating the dating scene with anticipation as well as trepidation. We also meet Baruch Levy, a twenty-year-old who fears that he is not ready to shoulder the responsibilities that marriage entails. Manipulating the matchmaking strings is the smug and calculating Mrs. Gelbmann, a shadchan who relishes the inordinate amount of power that she wields. Readers’ hearts go out to Chani’s mother, a long-suffering matriarch who, at forty-five, has already borne eight daughters and is thoroughly burned out.

Ms. Harris is knowledgeable about the Hasidic lifestyle, and portrays her flawed and troubled characters with understanding, insight, and compassion. Her decision to relate events out of chronological order is initially bewildering. However, it allows us to stand back and consider complex situations from a variety of angles and viewpoints. The author presents the limited options available to young people like Chanie and Baruch. Should they adhere to the accepted laws and customs handed down by their parents or follow a different path that might be more to their liking? Chani wonders, “What was it like to roam freely in the world and not have to think about your every action and its spiritual consequence?” For men and women who find the constraints of a sheltered and choreographed existence limiting, the choice to remain strictly observant is a difficult one. The Marrying of Chani Kaufman is a provocative, enlightening, and engrossing book, written with skill and flair, in which the author explores universal themes that will resonate with anyone who has clashed with loved ones, suffered unbearable losses, and has had to make difficult, life-changing decisions.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 41 readers
PUBLISHER:	Grove Press, Black Cat (April 1, 2014)
REVIEWER:	Eleanor Bukowsky
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Eve Harris
EXTRAS:	Excerpt and an interview with the author
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Foreign Brides by Elena Lappin

Bibliography:

• The Marrying of Chani Kaufman (2013; April 2014 in US)

“The men crouch low, and with their gloved hands, as best they can, they clear the mud from the body.  But it is not a body, not really; it is only a heap of bones inside the remains of a uniform.  Nothing is left of the flesh, only a few black-brown remnants clinging to the side of the skull.”

Book Review:

Review by Roger Brunyate  (FEB 2, 2014)

One of the aspects of this impressive debut by Anna Hope that makes me raise my hat is the effectiveness with which she handles its secondary thread. In italics interspersing the main story a page or two at a time, are little vignettes as British officials exhume the body of an unidentified soldier from the battlefields of Northern France, prepare it for a new coffin, and take it with due solemnity to its final resting place in the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Westminster Abbey. The vignettes, and the story that they enfold, span a five-day period leading up to November 11, 1920, the second anniversary of the Armistice. The First World War is over, but what has become of the survivors?

Each of the vignettes contains an anonymous figure — from a soldier assisting with the disinterment to a war widow bringing her child to watch the procession — real and dimensioned enough for the reader to feel for them, even as the camera moves on. They are emblems of countless stories that might be developed in their millions all over the country, although Hope has chosen to focus on only three. Three women, all coping with loss, all seeking a way to move forward. There is Hettie, a dance hostess at the Hammersmith Palais, whose brother has returned sound in body but damaged in his mind; she is looking for her life to begin, but the normal patterns have all been disrupted. There is Ada, a mother in her forties, the loss of whose son Michael has caused an estrangement between her and her husband. Unlike other parents, they have no information about their son’s resting place; is it possible the Unknown Soldier might be Michael himself? And there is Evelyn, an upper-class girl who has tried to bury herself in a munitions factory and then in a government office after the death of her boyfriend; for five years now, she has not permitted herself to love, and hardly even to live.

Hope juggles the three stories freely in short episodes spread over the five days. She also sketches some connections between them. Evelyn’s brother, for instance, a captain in the army who has come back with his own problems, turns out to have connections with both Hettie and Ada’s son Michael. There were times, I admit, when I was conscious of almost a romance-novel artifice in the writing. But no sooner would I register this than something would come along that was truly fine. To give but one example, there is a scene when Ada goes to consult a medium to find out about Michael. Historically, it is apt; the First World War brought a huge revival of interest in spiritualism. But Ada’s meeting with the medium turns out to be something else entirely, totally human and deeply moving.

This is a novel that is perfectly titled. Wake, as in the wake of a ship, or turbulent aftermath of some great passing. Wake, as in the ritual for the dead. And Wake, as in to awaken from sleep and dreams. All perfectly realized in this deceptively unpretentious novel. As always, I thought of a number of other books while I was reading. I almost immediately put aside the obvious comparison to Jacqueline Winspear’s Maisie Dobbs series; Anna Hope has more penetrating ambitions. I certainly thought a lot about Sarah Waters’  The Night Watch, another rich exploration of the lives of women, this time in the shadow of the Second World War. But the comparison that increasingly stuck with me was of a different order entirely: to Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. And that is a high compliment.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 18 readers
PUBLISHER:	Random House (February 11, 2014)
REVIEWER:	Roger Brunyate
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Anna Hope
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Soldier’s Wife by Margaret Leroy

Bibliography:

• Wake (February 2013)

“The heat, the heat. It wakes Gretta just after dawn, propelling her from the bed and down the stairs. It inhabits the house like a guest who has outstayed his welcome: it lies along corridors, it circles around curtains, it lolls heavily on sofas and chairs. The air in the kitchen is like a solid entity filling the space, pushing Gretta down into the floor, against the side of the table.

Only she would choose to bake bread in such weather.”

Book Review:

Review by Roger Brunyate  (JAN 16, 2014)

Almost as though in reference to the title of her best novel, The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox (2006), Maggie O’Farrell’s new one begins with a disappearance. One morning in 1976, in the midst of a heatwave, retired bank manager Robert Riordan, after laying breakfast for his wife Gretta, leaves their North London house, draws some money from his bank, and does not return. Within a day, their three grown children have all returned home to help their mother handle the crisis: Michael Francis from his house a few miles away, where he lives with his wife and two young children; Monica from a farm in Gloucestershire, where she lives with her second husband and, at weekends, his two children; and Aoife**, the youngest, from New York, where she is single with a boyfriend. Thus O’Farrell lays the groundwork for a book about family dynamics, not only Gretta, the absent Robert, and their grown children, but also the individual situations of the offspring, who will each confront and largely resolve their own personal crises over the four-day span of the novel. At this level, it is an extraordinarily well-constructed and heart-warming read.

Michael Francis is a bored high-school history teacher, who has had to give up his dreams of getting a PhD and becoming a professor, a circumstance that has cast a shadow over his marriage to his wife, Claire. Monica has gone from a failed first marriage to wed an antique dealer in the country, but has never felt at home in his deliberately unmodernized farmhouse or with his two girls. Aoife, by far my favorite of the three, is a free spirit, brilliant but severely dyslexic, a disability that she manages to hide from the photographer for whom she works in New York, her boyfriend, and even her family. I did wonder why O’Farrell chose to set the novel in 1976, apart from the fact that there was a severe heatwave in that year. I now see that it marks a particular point in the timeline of sexual liberation, which one gathers happened later in devout Catholic families than elsewhere. The stories of all three children are punctuated by something to do with sex or pregnancy, and what one might call the old morality will become an important factor in understanding the lives of Gretta and Robert.

This is a lovely story with moments of real beauty in its final pages. But it shows instances of carelessness that I don’t normally associate with O’Farrell. Some of these are verbal, such as the odd use of “both” in the quotation below, or confused similes such as a surprise that “rears up in front of you, like a cliff-edge you weren’t aware of.” Some are matters of transparent narrative convenience, like a priest who hears the name Riordan (surely not uncommon in Ireland) and just happens to reveal an important part of the back-story. And my empathy with Aoife was undermined by glossed-over details like how she could have obtained an American visa at the drop of a hat without the ability to handle any of the relevant paperwork. The publisher calls this “a perfect summer read.” Sure it is — but Maggie O’Farrell is capable of a whole lot more and although you will likely enjoy this novel, first-time readers may want to start with Maggie O’Farrell’s backlist to see her at her more nuanced and innovative best.

**”Her mother is the only one who can properly pronounce her name. Her accent — still unmistakably Galway, after all these years — strikes the first syllable with a sound that is halfway between e and a, and the second with a mysterious blend of v and f. She drives the name precisely between both ‘Ava’ and ‘Eva’ and ‘Eve,’ passing all three but never colliding with them.”

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 120 readers
PUBLISHER:	Knopf (June 18, 2013)
REVIEWER:	Roger Brunyate
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Maggie O’Farrell
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox

Bibliography:

• After You’d Gone (2000)
• My Lover’s Lover (2002)
• The Distance Between Us (2004)
• The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox (2006)
• The Hand That First Held Mine (2010)
• Instructions for a Heat Wave (June 2013)

“The real meaning of retirement had come to him the first day. When it didn’t matter what time he got up, he could stay in bed all day. He didn’t, of course. Those first days, all his interest seemed petty, not worth doing. It seemed to him that he had read all the books he wanted to read, heard all the music he wanted to hear. He thought of closing his eyes and turning his face to the wall.”

Book Review:

Review by Eleanor Bukowsky  (SEP 25, 2011)

The brilliant and prolific Ruth Rendell continues to entertain us with her latest Inspector Wexford novel, The Vault. Although he is retired and has no official standing, Wexford, the former Chief Inspector of Kingsmarkham, is delighted when Detective Superintendent Thomas Ede asks for his advice concerning a puzzling case. The scene of the crime(s) is a two-hundred year old house in London, Orcadia Cottage. The current residents are Martin and Anne Rokeby, who bought the property for one and a half million pounds. One day, Martin decides to lift a manhole cover in the “paved yard at the back of the house,” curious to know what, if anything, is down there. Little does he realize that this deed would end up “wrecking his life for a long time to come.” It seems that some unknown person or persons had hidden four dead bodies, two male and two female, in this hole in the ground, along with forty thousand pounds worth of jewelry.

Ruth Rendell has always dug beneath the surface of her characters’ lives, and this time she reveals how retirement has, in some ways, diminished Wexford. Although he loves reading, long walks, listening to music, and spending time with his family, he misses being a detective. How could he be content when “it didn’t matter what time he got up?” Fortunately, Wexford’s affluent daughter offers her parents the use of a home in London, which they happily accept. Now that Wexford and Dora have places both in London and Kingsmarkham, they have more ways to keep themselves active and entertained.

The case of the four corpses proves to be just what the doctor ordered to make Wexford feel useful and involved. He examines the evidence, helps interview witnesses, studies the autopsy reports, and uses his superb instincts, experience, and impressive intellect to help solve what turns out to be a series of complex misdeeds and misadventures. Adding to the drama, another crime is committed that hits close to home, since the victim is Wexford’s daughter.

The author’s prose style is as crisp, fluid, and succinct as anyone writing today, and she creates a rich and realistic picture of life in urban and rural London. Her descriptive writing is precise and evocative. In addition, Rendell presents us with a fascinating and varied array of characters who are compassionate, altruistic, adulterous, desperate, vicious, and predatory. The mystery is challenging, even for someone as uniquely talented as Wexford. The Vault succeeds as a character study, family drama, police procedural, and whodunit. Ruth Rendell delivers the goods, as she has done so often during her long and legendary career.

Bibliography:

Inspector Wexford Mysteries:

• From Doon with Death (1964)
• A New Lease of Death (1967) (retitled: Sins of the Fathers)
• Wolf to the Slaughter (1967)
• The Best Man to Die (1969)
• A Guilty Thing Surprised (1970)
• No More Dying Then (1971)
• Murder Being Once Done (1972)
• Some Lie and Some Die (1973)
• Shake Hands Forever (1975)
• A Sleeping Life (1978)
• Put on the Cunning (1981) (a.k.a Death Notes)
• Speaker of Mandarin (1983)
• An Unkindness of Ravens (1985)
• The Veiled One (1988)
• Kissing the Gunner’s Daughter (1992)
• Simisola (1995)
• Road Rage (1997)
• Harm Done (November 1999)
• The Babes in the Wood (2003)
• End in Tears (July 2006)
• Not in the Flesh (2008)
• The Monster in the Box (2009)
• The Vault (2011)
• No Man’s Nightingale (November 2013)

Standalone Mysteries & Psychological Thrillers:

• To Fear a Painted Devil (1965)
• Vanity Dies Hard (1965)
• The Secret House of Death (1968)
• One Across, Two Down (1971)
• The Face of Trespass (1974)
• A Demon in My View (1976)
• A Judgement in Stone (1977)
• Make Death Love Me (1979)
• The Lake of Darkness (1980)
• Master of the Moor (1982)
• The Killing Doll (1984)
• The Tree of Hands (1984)
• Live Flesh (1986)
• Heartstones (1987)
• Talking to Strange Men (1987)
• The Bridesmaid (1989)
• Going Wrong (1990)
• The Crocodile Bird (1993)
• The Keys to the Street (1996)
• A Sight for Sore Eyes (1999)
• Adam and Eve and Pinch (2002)
• The Rottweiler (2004)
• Thirteen Steps Down (2005)
• The Water’s Lovely (2007)
• Portobello (2010)
• Tigerlily’s Orchids (2011)
• The St. Zita Society (2012)
• The Child’s Child (2012)

Collections:

• The Fallen Curtain and Other Stories (1976)
• Means of Evil (1979)
• The Fever Tree (1982)
• The Copper Peacock (1991)
• Blood Lines: Long and Short Stories (1996)
• Piranha to Scurfy: And Other Stories (2001)

Movies from books:

• Dead Lucky (The Lake of Darkness)
• An Affair of the Mind (1988)
• A Demon in My View (1992)
• Master of the Moor
• A Judgement in Stone
• La Ceremonie (1996) (A Judgement in Stone)
• Live Flesh (1998)

“Who’d chook a boy just to get his Chicken Joe’s?”

Book Review:

Review by Poornima Apte  (SEP 14, 2011)

Around ten years ago, a young Nigerian immigrant, 10-year-old Damilola Taylor, was beaten by boys barely older than him in Peckham, a district in South London. Damilola later bled to death. The incident sparked outrage in the United Kingdom and was subsequently pointed to as proof that the country’s youth had gone terribly astray.

The same incident seems to have also inspired a debut novel, Pigeon English, with 11-year-old Harri Opoku filling in for the voice of Damilola Taylor. As the book opens, Harri has recently emigrated from Ghana to London with his older sister and his mother. Dad and younger sister and the rest of the family are still in the native country and Harri is often brought back to his home country through extended phone calls exchanged between the two sides.

Like most children, Harri is not privy to the intricate goings-on in the lives around him. It’s a fact made worse by the displacement brought about by immigration. Harri must not just figure out the ways of the world, he must do so in a new place where the rules of the game are entirely unfamiliar. Even if life in the ghetto is painful and lived in extreme poverty, Harri finds plenty to keep him in good spirits. For one thing, he wants to try every kind of Haribo (candy) in the store close to him.

Even better he has struck a tentative friendship with a local boy, Dean. With Dean’s help, Harri is determined to solve a recent crime—one where a kid like himself is found brutally murdered in a struggle over a fast food meal. The devastating tragedy affects Harri deeply and he is determined (in a typical naïve and childish way) to find the killers. Unfortunately he gets too close to the real killers—people who might not appreciate interference from a bright-eyed curious kid.

Pigeon English is narrated through Harri’s voice so the English is broken and mixed in with special words whose meanings become apparent only after a few readings. “Bo-styles” for example, means very good while “Asweh” is the more readily understandable, “I swear.”

Harri’s musings and experiences can be funny at one moment and heartbreaking the next. Author Stephen Kelman has done a terrific job in capturing the boy’s voice. The problem with Pigeon English is that the same voice eventually becomes a distraction. It never becomes seamless enough so the reader can concentrate on what the boy is saying—you’re forever hung up on how he’s saying it. And of course there are times when he says too much: “I can make a fart like a woodpecker. Asweh, it’s true. The first time it happened was an accident. I was just walking along and I did one fart, but then it turned into lots of little farts all chasing it.” Did we really need to know that?

It was entirely a coincidence that I read this novel right around the time that the London riots made headline news around the world. As was reported by the New York Times and other news outlets, it was the youth who were the primary looters and criminals in these riots—an effect brought about by a “combination of economic despair, racial tension and thuggery.” The riots, the paper reported, “reflect the alienation and resentment of many young people in Britain.” Read at this particular moment in history, Pigeon English then seems much more than a fairly good read—it also comes across as an important one. One can’t help but wonder how much the timely relevance of its subject matter lead Pigeon English to be shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize this year.

“I made the choice, nobody forced me,” says Harri’s mother about the decision to move her kids to London from Ghana. “I did it for me, for these children. As long as I pay my debt they’re safe and sound. They grow up to reach further than I could ever carry them.” Pigeon English is a moving novel not just because it is a stark story about London’s ghettos, but because it reminds us that for many in the developing world, a move to this kind of a hell is actually a move up.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 24 readers
PUBLISHER:	Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 1 edition (July 19, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Poornima Apte
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Stephen Kelman
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Londonstani by Gautam Malkani

Bibliography:

• Pigeon English (July 2011)

“It was so different from the digs in glum Earl’s Court that I had taken when I first moved down here. The houses here were similar to those, early Victorian stucco turned almost black with dirt and soot, carved into guesthouses and cheap rooms to accommodate as many transients as possible. But there was an aura of dank melancholy that hung over the rooftops like a shroud there. It was full of pubs catering to a steady trade of dispossessed alcoholics, ancient prostitutes and hobbling war veterans with hollow, staring eyes. Here it was far, far different. A secret world where every doorway was hiding a new intrigue and different types of music pumped under every floorboard, from American jazz to Jamaican ska to Irish rebel songs.”

Book Review:

Review by Guy Savage  (FEB 19, 2011)

I’d heard of Jack the Ripper and the Yorkshire Ripper, but before I read British author Cathi Unsworth’s crime novel, Bad Penny Blues, I’d never heard of Jack the Stripper. Jack the Stripper was the name given to a serial killer who operated in London during the 60s. His victims were young women–6 in all–whose bodies were found in 1964 and 1965. The crimes–also known as the Hammersmith Murders or the Hammersmith Nudes were never solved, but they had some features in common. The women were prostitutes and they died from strangulation. Some had teeth missing and some of the bodies bore traces of industrial paint. The police eventually connected these 6 murders with two other similar, earlier crimes. They acknowledged that the total murder toll might stretch back to include an unsolved murder committed in 1959, and that a dead woman found in 1963 was possibly yet another victim of the same killer.

When serial killers hunt, kill, and then seem to disappear from the planet, questions are raised. These predators don’t reform, so where did they go?

Bad Penny Blues examines the crimes of Jack the Stripper in an unusual fashion. This is not a police procedural–instead the novel is the tale of a vast array of characters in London of the late 50s and 60s. The lives of these characters–along with the drama of love, marriage, friendship and affairs–take place against the backdrop of crime, murder, and evil unleashed in the seamy, secret side of London.

The story unfolds through the lives of its two main characters: Pete Bradley and Stella. The novel begins in 1959 with Bradley, a new Police Constable, on patrol with another young PC and their lazy, slovenly Sergeant. Pete, who’s keen and ambitious, spots what appears to be a “collection of bags” underneath a tree on the banks of the Thames. He insists on stopping and investigating. Instead of a pile of rubbish, he finds the half-naked body of young girl. There’s a discrepancy in the case that nags at Bradley, and as the years pass and Bradley is transferred to another division, he never forgets this unsolved crime.

The other main character is young designer, Stella. In 1959, she’s a newly wed, married to fellow student, artist Toby. They strike up a number of relationships, including a lasting, but strange friendship with the very beautiful Jenny–the daughter of one of London’s richest and most powerful men. To observers, Toby and Stella appear to have the ideal marriage, and the swinging 6os bring both Toby and Stella fame and success while happiness eludes them.

The lives of Pete Bradley and Stella run parallel through the events that take place. Pete, taking the advice of another policeman, learns to keep his mouth shut about some of the shadier things he experiences. In time, he marries and rises through the police force to make detective. Meanwhile Stella and Toby drift apart as they pursue their separate careers. Stella stands firm with her old friends, becoming a designer and opening a boutique. Toby, however, is swept up by his fame and begins drinking heavily. As the years go by, Stella intermittently experiences terrifying nightmares. These nightmares appear to be portals to the violent deaths of young women, and Stella relives the last terrifying moments of the murdered girls. In desperation, she turns to her Spiritualist past for answers from the dead.

Unsworth recreates an effective cultural and social history of the 60s through the lives of her numerous characters. Bradley and Stella live in a troubled London plagued by race riots, Moseley running for election (again), the Profumo Affair, and the landmark boxing match between Cassius Clay and Henry Cooper. This is a London of the have and the have-nots. The inviolable rich, decadent, and powerful live in their mansions while the girls from impoverished Northern towns flock to London by the thousands. The underground communities of artists and homosexuals straddle both worlds and hide some of the uglier secrets.

While Bad Penny Blues is most certainly a crime novel, it’s much meatier than typical entries from the genre. Some criticism of the book is directed towards the failure of the plot to effectively and convincingly bring the lives of the detective and Stella together. I don’t share that criticism; on the contrary, Unsworth knits together the main characters and the supernatural theme very well, and the sense of unease and imminent danger courses through the pages from the novel’s beginning until its conclusion. My biggest complaint is the sheer number of characters here: the victims, their pimps, the crims, the coppers, the hoity-toity crowd, the pals and the hangers-on. This is a panoramic view of vastly different lives, an ambitious novel with a huge cast of characters. Sometimes characters are mentioned but they don’t appear for huge chunks of the novel only to surface much later. A list of characters printed at the beginning would have helped tremendously. Bad Penny Blues is a haunting read, and in spite of its ambitious design which doesn’t always work, Unsworth does a credible job in reconstructing a unique, colourful time and place.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 6 readers
PUBLISHER:	Serpent’s Tail (August 17, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Guy Savage
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Cathi Unsworth
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Another novel based on an unsolved serial killer: Child 44 by Tom Rob Smith

Bibliography:

• The Not Knowing (2005; 2006 in US)
• The Singer (2007; 2009 in US)
• Bad Penny Blues (August 2010)

As Editor:

• London Noir edited by Cathi Unsworth (August 2006)

“Didn’t I know it the moment I saw you, before you’d ever given me the time of day. Long before you ever touched me, or even I heard your name spoken. Girls’ nonsense, I hear you saying. Never happens in life. Only in storybooks and songs. And the queerest thing of all is: I agree with my Tramper. I haven’t hide nor hair of reasons for what’s between us now. And if ever you wanted to quit your impatient girl truly, and our little story had to be stored away in a room that’s only sometimes remembered, that’s still a room I’d want, and I’d go there now and again, like some room in an old hotel on a seafront someplace where two sinners did something they shouldn’t. Do you mind what I am telling you? It is the God’s honest truth. Even if I never saw you or heard from you again, you’d already have been the miracle of my life.”

Book Review:

Review by Bonnie Brody  (FEB 1, 2011)

Ghost Light by Joseph O’Connor is a brilliant and complex book. It is one of the best books I have read in the last five years. The language is poetic and hallucinatory and this is a book where one can’t skip passages or lines. Every word is necessary and the whole is a gift put together with the greatest care and love.

The novel is about a grand love affair between Molly Allgood, an actress (stage name Maire O’Neill), and the playwright John Synge, most well-known for his play, Playboy of the Western World. The book starts out in 1952 on the streets of post-war London. Molly, 62 years old, is walking the cold blustery city and freezing. She lives in a hovel and drinks too much. She is hungry and cold, going from one sheltered spot to another and hallucinating from her hunger and her freezing. She is on her way to a BBC radio reading and on her way she remembers, in broken dream sequences, her relationship with John Synge.

Molly and John Synge had an affair and at the time of their affair she was eighteen years old and he was thirty-six. John was very ill, most likely with lymphoma but perhaps tuberculosis or some other lung disease. He had one neck surgery after another. He lived only two years after they met. They came from opposite sides of the tracks. Molly was an actress who was from a mixed marriage – protestant and catholic – and she worked with her mother in a drapery shop. John came from old money and was of protestant background. He had a symbiotic relationship with his mother which made his relationship with Molly doomed from the start as his mother would not permit him to bring Molly home and threatened to cut off his trust fund should he marry her.

The book goes back and forth in time from 1952 London to 1905 Dublin where Molly and John were involved in a theater group. John was the resident playwright for William Yeats and the Grand Dame of the theater was Lady Augusta Gregory. Molly was an actress in the theater troupe. In those days it was very risqué for women to act.

Molly and John had to keep their affair a secret because John was terribly afraid of anyone finding out about them. He and Molly met on trains and traveled to Wicklow together for a vacation but acted like they did not know one another in Dublin. The affair was tender and poignant. John was very ill and the marriage was doomed from the start, never to be realized. They remained engaged until John’s death. John called Molly his Pegeen, his Changeling girl.

We travel with Molly to the United States where she acted after John’s death. She recollects the plays she was in and the popularity she once had. She ended up marrying a philandering husband and had two children, a son who died during World War II and a daughter from whom she is semi-estranged because she can not get along with her son-in-law.

The novel contains imagined letters and real letters between the two lovers and hallucinatory memories from Molly’s desperate mind as she tries to stay alive despite the difficult circumstances she finds herself in. My favorite parts of the novel are when it travels to 1905 and the reader gets to participate in the acting troupe with the great Synge and Yeats.

Parts of this novel are true and other parts are fictional according to Mr. O’Connor. Mr. O’Connor grew up in Dublin near the Synge house and was fascinated by the playwright’s life. This novel is the outcome of his fascination. In some ways it reminded me of the poetic beauty of Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin. Sense of place is very important. This is a novel with grand scope and great beauty, one that will not be forgotten by any lover of literature.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 23 readers
PUBLISHER:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux (February 1, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Bonnie Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Joseph O’Connor
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of:The Star of the Sea

Bibliography:

• Cowboys and Indians (1991)
• True Believers: Stories (1993)
• Desperadoes (1993)
• The Salesman (1998)
• Inishowen (2000)
• Star of the Sea (2002)
• Redemption Falls (October 2007)
• Ghost Light (February 2011)

Other:

• Even the Olives are Bleeding: The Life and Times of Charles Donnelly (1993)
• The Secret World of the Irish Male : comic essays (1994)
• The Irish Male at Home and Abroad (1996)
• Sweet Liberty: Travels in Irish America (1996)
• Yeats is Dead: A Serial Novel by Fifteen Irish Writers for Amnesty International (editor) (2001)

“Yevgeny passed the violin back to me. I held the instrument up and studied it carefully from all sides. My fingers were trembling slightly, my heart fluttering. Il Cannone had been Paganini’s violin for nearly forty years. It was with him throughout his entire mature career, through all the triumphs as he set Italy, and then Europe, ablaze with his dazzling virtuosity. There was history in this violin. What tales it could tell, I thought, if it had a human voice, instead of just a musical one.”

Book Review:

Review by Terez Rose  (JAN 05, 2011)

Cremona, Italy. On the eve of an important performance, local luthier Gianni Castiglione is called on to examine Il Cannone, the violin once played by Niccolò Paganini, which would be played that night by competition winner Yevgeny Ivanov. A minor adjustment is made and at the recital both violin and musician perform flawlessly. The next day, however, a concert attendee, a French art dealer, is found dead in his Cremona hotel. Two items are noted among his possessions: a locked golden box and a torn corner of a music score from the night’s previous performance. Gianni’s police detective friend, Antonio Guastafeste, enlists his help and the two soon find themselves on an international chase, on the trail of not just a murderer but of a priceless historical treasure, one worth killing for.

Gianni, appearing in author Paul Adam’s well-received The Rainaldi Quartet (2007), is a warmly sympathetic character and a compelling, often philosophical narrator. All the characters are well developed, giving the story a depth and sense of humanity not always found in mysteries and thrillers. Classical music lore and historical detail spring to life, as do descriptions of Paris, London and the Italian countryside. A side plot in which Gianni befriends Yevgeny Ivanov is charming and effective and deepens the mystery—might Yevgeny or his overbearing stage mother be involved in the nefarious goings-on? The story offers the reader insight into the life of a young career musician, the grind of it, the competitions, the grueling performance schedule. As well, a romantic angle to the story helps flesh it out—Gianni’s developing relationship with Margherita Severini, his musings over his first wife who died several years earlier, both of which are presented with a warm, realistic touch.

Paganini’s Ghost is sure to appeal to the music history reader who normally doesn’t “do” mysteries, as well as providing a palatable dose of history to readers who tend to gloss over “those boring details” to get to the action. Adam has a great eye for detail, is economical with his words, uses humor sparingly, which makes it all the more entertaining and delightful when it does appear. Some passages are worth reading and rereading for their subtle artistry, such as the following, which I found myself reading aloud to anyone who would listen:

“He was a short, goatlike man with crooked, slightly buck teeth, a shock of untidy grey hair, and a covering of pale fluff on his chin that was too insubstantial to warrant the term beard. He gave the impression of good-natured affability, until you looked into his eyes. His eyes were cold and cloudy, like chips of frosted glass.”

No, this is not searing, literary fiction that will forever haunt you. It is not high stakes, high-octane thriller writing. It’s better: an engrossing, intelligent, satisfying page-turner I’d recommend to almost anyone, and a “you’ve got to read this” to music history or classical music fans. A great follow-up to The Rainaldi Quartet. This is book two in the series; here’s hoping we will see much more of Gianni and Guastafeste.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 9 readers
PUBLISHER:	Felony & Mayhem (December 16, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Terez Rose
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Paul Adam
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of:The Rainaldi Quartet

Bibliography:

• An Exceptional Corpse (1993)
• A Nasty Dose of Death (1994)
• Toxin (1995)
• Unholy Trinity (1999)
• Shadow Chasers (2000)
• Genesis II (2001)
• Flash Point (2003: March 2004 in US)
• Enemy Within (2005)
• Oracle Lake (July 2007)

Gianni Castiglione and Antonio Guastafeste series:

• The Rainaldi Quartet (2004;February 2006 in US) (Called Sleeper in the U.K.)
• Paganini’s Ghost (January 2010)

Max Cassidy Series:

• Escape from Shadow Island (February 2010)

“Our lord would have smoked if there’d been any tobacco about in the land of Galilee. He drank, didn’t he?”

Book Review:

Review by Guy Savage (NOV 04, 2010)

Prolific mystery writer Ruth Rendell’s work can be divided into two categories: the Inspector Wexford novels and her psychological novels. Portobello falls into the latter category and fans of Ruth Rendell know what to expect. The novel concentrates on the poisoned lives of a handful of characters who are connected to London’s Portobello Road, and these characters are as varied and colourful as the district itself. Rendell brings her characters together with her usual skill–although the heavy reliance on coincidence argues against the idea that London is, after all, a city of millions of people.

The novel’s first chapter offers a brief overview of the history of Portobello Road as well as a brief introduction to the Wren and Gibson families. A piece of post WWII good fortune allows the Wrens to move to the upscale Chepstow Villas while the Gibsons are doomed to the margins of society. The novel then bounds ahead several decades to the next generation. Gilbert Gibson, a repeat offender who’s now a middle-age sanctimonious, parsimonious member of the Church of the Children of Zebulun lives in a slum in a neighbourhood undergoing significant gentrification. He’s the “agony uncle” for the Zebulun magazine and offers exuberant moral and spiritual castigation to the sinners misguided enough to seek advice. On the other end of the social spectrum, fifty-year-old bachelor Eugene Wren owns a swanky art gallery, and his exquisite Chepstow Villas house is tastefully decorated with valuable antiques.

After a mugging, Eugene Wren discovers an envelope stuffed full of cash. He decides to place an ad in the paper asking the person who lost the money to call at his home and identify the precise sum. This act brings two very different young men into Eugene’s life–Lance, the terminally unemployed nephew of Gilbert Gibson, and Joel Roseman, a seriously disturbed man ejected from his wealthy home.

Rendell’s focus here is obsession, addictions and class differences. The have-nots such as Lance and his criminal pals are worlds apart from upper-middle-class Eugene Wren, but both sides of the economic divide fail to recognize the humanity in those more, or less, fortunate than themselves. Lance, for example, sees Eugene as “White Hair,” while Eugene sees Lance as “a non-descript sort of young man, all skin and bone, fairish, potato-faced but what did it matter?”

Eugene Wren is distracted by the contemplation of marriage to his long-term girlfriend Ella, a doctor, and so the meeting with Lance is just a minor aside. Lance, however, doesn’t forget the house and its contents. He stews over the high-end items he noted in the house and his obsession and resentment gradually grow:
”He was soon cursing the kind of people who don’t need to work until nine thirty or ten. What did that rich guy do for a living?”

Meanwhile Eugene experiences no small reluctance at the idea of total cohabitation, but this worry is superseded by his concern about his recent weight gain. To combat his spreading paunch, he begins buying diet sweets, and this minor habit rapidly morphs into a secret addiction. While Lance stews with class resentment, he’s under pressure to get quick cash, and Eugene struggles to hide his habit from a perceptive Ella. All the characters are set on an inevitable collision course.

The secret lives, obsessions and concerns of the various characters are relayed with almost savage delight but also with a faint whiff of condescension. While no one class of characters is treated better than another (Joel’s very wealthy family, for example, is quite appalling), the lower-class characters are portrayed in various shades of criminality–and inept criminals at that (at one point a chocolate cake is stolen and consumed). Fans of Rendell won’t be able to help themselves, and for its geographical focus, Portobello will recall Rendell’s novel The Rottweiler. Portobello, however, while malicious in tone is not Rendell’s darkest, and at this point, The Tree of Hands still reigns as Rendell’s masterpiece.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 39 readers
PUBLISHER:	Scribner (September 7, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Guy Savage
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Ruth Rendell
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide Guy Savage’s review of Tigerlily’s Orchids
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our reviews of some of Rendell’s outstanding stand-alone novels: 13 Steps Down Rottweiler Live Flesh The Keys to the Street  The Crocodile Bird Read a review of the first Insp. Wexford in this long series: From Doon with Death and more recent: The Vault Not in the Flesh The Monster in the Box Also, some of her books written as Barbara Vine

Bibliography:

Inspector Wexford Mysteries:

• From Doon with Death (1964)
• A New Lease of Death (1967) (retitled: Sins of the Fathers)
• Wolf to the Slaughter (1967)
• The Best Man to Die (1969)
• A Guilty Thing Surprised (1970)
• No More Dying Then (1971)
• Murder Being Once Done (1972)
• Some Lie and Some Die (1973)
• Shake Hands Forever (1975)
• A Sleeping Life (1978)
• Put on the Cunning (1981) (a.k.a Death Notes)
• Speaker of Mandarin (1983)
• An Unkindness of Ravens (1985)
• The Veiled One (1988)
• Kissing the Gunner’s Daughter (1992)
• Simisola (1995)
• Road Rage (1997)
• Harm Done (November 1999)
• The Babes in the Wood (2003)
• End in Tears (July 2006)
• Not in the Flesh (2008)
• The Vault (2011)
• No Man’s Nightingale (November 2013)

Standalone Mysteries & Psychological Thrillers:

• To Fear a Painted Devil (1965)
• Vanity Dies Hard (1965)
• The Secret House of Death (1968)
• One Across, Two Down (1971)
• The Face of Trespass (1974)
• A Demon in My View (1976)
• A Judgement in Stone (1977)
• Make Death Love Me (1979)
• The Lake of Darkness (1980)
• Master of the Moor (1982)
• The Killing Doll (1984)
• The Tree of Hands (1984)
• Live Flesh (1986)
• Heartstones (1987)
• Talking to Strange Men (1987)
• The Bridesmaid (1989)
• Going Wrong (1990)
• The Crocodile Bird (1993)
• The Keys to the Street (1996)
• A Sight for Sore Eyes (1999)
• Adam and Eve and Pinch (2002)
• The Rottweiler (2004)
• Thirteen Steps Down (2005)
• The Water’s Lovely (2007)
• Portobello (2010)
• Tigerlily’s Orchids (2011)
• The St. Zita Society (2012)
• The Child’s Child (2012)

Collections:

• The Fallen Curtain and Other Stories (1976)
• Means of Evil (1979)
• The Fever Tree (1982)
• The Copper Peacock (1991)
• Blood Lines: Long and Short Stories (1996)
• Piranha to Scurfy: And Other Stories (2001)

Movies from books:

• Dead Lucky (The Lake of Darkness)
• An Affair of the Mind (1988)
• A Demon in My View (1992)
• Master of the Moor
• A Judgement in Stone
• La Ceremonie (1996) (A Judgement in Stone)
• Live Flesh (1998)

“Georgie could see Mrs. Jordan only as a modern, working woman struggling with the demands of career, motherhood, and love affair, trying to do the right thing on all fronts…Georgie refused to question her own impulses about this character, this woman who loved her family but lived for the stage. How could she, when Mrs. Jordan’s struggle was also exactly her own?”

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtulman (JUL 22, 2010)

If you’ve got a hot work project with an overdue deadline, a soccer game that you simply must attend, or any “must do” commitments in the next couple of days, whatever you do, DON’T pick up this book. It will grip you, entice you, and place you under its spell. And in the end, it just may break your heart.

The book, narrated by Peter – a wannabe novelist turned businessman – focuses on his wife Georgie, a mother of three who has become unmoored with the day-to-day drudgeries of an ordinary life. A promotion to London puts a world of possibilities suddenly within reach. Peter ponders, “Shouldn’t I have told her…that everyone’s life had flat, ordinary parts? That growing older meant moving on, closing chapters in your life and opening new ones…”

But he senses Georgie’s boredom and is on her side when she reignites her acting career, taking on the prestigious one-woman role of the true-life preeminent 18th century comedic British stage actress Dora Jordan. As she throws herself in the role, she discovers that she and Dora – the long-time companion of the Duke of Clarence (later, William IV) and the mother of 10 of his children – have a natural affinity.

Gradually, Georgie “twins” herself to Dora, a kindred spirit whose struggle of motherhood versus career so mirrors her own. And, as any reader can guess from the title of the book, she enters into an affair with the elusive playwright, Piers Brighstone, that sets in motion a chain of events with tragic consequences.

There is much about this book that sets it apart from the “chick lit” designation it might have become in a lesser author’s hands. For one thing, there’s the strength of the writing; Nancy Woodruff never resorts to overwrought, obvious, or manipulative sentences. For another, these characters and their pain are achingly real with genuine insights. At one point, Peter reflects, “When I looked at Georgie I saw two different people, the one I loved and the one who had broken my heart, and I had no idea how to dispose of one without losing the other.”

But perhaps most compelling is the interspersed letters of Dora Jordan herself; in a preface the author claims to “remain faithful to both the facts of Mrs. Jordan’s life – insofar as they are known –and the warmth of her voice.” She admirably succeeds. As Georgie states, “Two hundred years later and it’s exactly the same thing.”

This is an unsparing look at a modern (and not-so-modern) marriage, a punishing glimpse into the costs of the decisions we make – yet it’s never preachy or moral. While I was reading My Wife’s Affair, I was totally enveloped into the world Nancy Woodruff created. The “new life rising from the ashes of Georgie’s unhappiness” is really about getting what you want…and still wanting more.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 19 readers
PUBLISHER:	Amy Einhorn Books/Putnam (April 15, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Nancy Woodruff
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Another take on the subject of adultery: The Narcissist’s Daughter by Craig Holden

Bibliography:

• Someone Else’s Child (2000)
• My Wife’s Affair (April 2010)