One month in already, how times flies! I've read the following:
1 Magpie - Elizabeth Day Themes of psychosis and Surrogacy quite good
2 Hanging Hill - (audio) Mo Hayder, started this last year, missing teenager found murdered, quite dark, glad when I finished it.
3. Unheard - Nicci French, Separated couplie's 3 year old daughter brings home dark and disturbing drawings after she has been staying with her father.
4 Anything Is Possible - Elizabeth Strout. Read "My name is Lucy Barton" last year and really liked it. In this book the writer returns to the fictional home town of the impoverished upbringing of LB to revisit some of the other residents who knew the Barton family, interlinked stories. LB herself returns from New York and her successful life as a writer for a chapter or two to visit her brother. Thoughtful book about small town America, similar to Ann Tyler.
5. Mrs England - Stacey Halls. Loved this book. Set in Edwardian England of 1904, it tells the story of Norland Nanny, Nurse Ruby May who takes up an appointment as Nanny to wealthy mill owners Mr and Mrs England's 4 children in rural Yorkshire. It becomes apparent that Mrs England, who initially appears detached is a troubled woman and Mr England is not all he seems. Has been described as bit Jane Eyre like, even with a slight touch of The Go Between at one point, although I think Stacey Halls has very much created her own story.
6 Frostquake - Non fiction by Juliet Nicolson Again really liked this book. The writer is the granddaughter of Vita Sackville West and she has chronicled the events of one of the worst winters on record including memories of growing up partly in London a partly at her grandparents' home of Sissinghurst, beautiful but freezing!
On Boxing Day 1962 it started to snow and didn't stop until April '63. Still being at junior school I have memories of being trussed up in mac, scarf on head, beret on top and wellies trudging to school through mounds of snow. However, most of what was going on in the world went right over my head. Being the same sort of age as the writer though. what did touch children of our age, was the meteoric rise of The Beatles and she includes much of that in this book.
She also covers the political landscape, the "clapped out" Harold MacMillan, she describes him as suffering from terminal tiredness, his close relationship with JFK, the Cuban missile crisis. The death of the much respected Labour leader, Hugh Gaitskill and the emergence of Harold Wilson. Inevitably the Profumo affair was covered in detail and the throwing of Christine Keiller under the bus.
Sylvia Plath's unhappy relationship with Ted Hughes and her eventual suicide, she was someone who I wasn't aware of until years later. Coming from the US her observations of how in Britain we didn't seem able to cope with extreme weather, imo was spot on, everything seems to pack up. Sadly there were a couple of really bad train collisions around this time that resulted in a number of deaths.
Culture wise, as well as The Beatles, London, Liverpool and England per se were also on the brink of becoming a place to be reckoned with on the world stage, after years of American domination. Mary Quant as a designer with a burgeoning following for her shop Bazaar in the King's Road was beginning to make a name for herself and gain momentum. sweeping away the stiff petticoats and hair of the late '50s and early '60s. As were London's new breed of photographers, David Bailey, Terry O'Neill. Rudolph Nureyev had recently defected and was performing with the Royal Ballet. By the mid 60s London had reached it's zenith as the place to be. I remember that time the best, I enjoyed reading this book because the memories I have of the years before that were vague.
