The Not So New 2024 50 Books a Year - Thread 2

Book 88, The Smuggler`s Girl, by Jennie Felton. Enjoyable.

The Scarlet Papers by Matthew Richardson. This is the story of a woman double agent working for Britain and for the KGB.
It starts when she is in her 90s and goes back to the cold war in 1946 up to the present day.
I found this book both entertaining and very interesting as there are factual references to e.g Kim Philby who was a double agent at that time.

I really loved it Sparklefizz I have read some very good previous books by this writer, notably We Had It So Good and The Dark Circle, like other favourite authors she hasn't written that many. If you get hold of it, as always, do come back and let us know your thoughts.

I like the sound of that book TerriBull and will see if my library has got a copy. Thanks.... and thank you for starting this new thread.

25 The Story Of The Forest - Linda Grant

Linda Grant is a wonderful story teller and this book was no exception I found it completely absorbing. There were strands drawn from her own family history which she has included.

The book begins with a young pre pubescent Mina Mendel wandering into a forest just outside of her home in Riga, Latvia ostensibly to pick mushrooms. There she meets some loud young men who profess to be Bolseheviks waiting for the day when they can overthrow the Tsar. She is inspired by their passion, it's a meeting that stays with her throughout her life. Very soon after that Mina leaves the comfort of the relatively wealthy home of her grain merchant father's house to sail across the Atlantic to the US with her older brother. Left behind are her parents and 3 younger siblings. However, they get no further than Liverpool, her brother having made a hasty marriage with a woman he meets on board the ship and realising that they don't have the funds to make the onward journey. So it's the working class areas of Liverpool such as Penny Lane later to be eulogised by The Beatles, they are to remain. When the Great War breaks out followed by the seismic events such as the Russian Revolution that follow, their remaining family in Riga are swallowed into what became the Soviet Union. Meanwhile Mina and her brother on his return from the war with a comrade and suitor for Mina, eventually are to prosper and settle in the more affluent areas of suburban Liverpool. The book rolls on to the next generation who are anglicized but essentially Jewish to the core and as such still the butt of the intermittent prejudices they sought to escape, but not without flashes of dark Jewish humour. For example when they get a poison pen letter proclaiming how the writer "hates filthy Jews and they are not welcome" the matriarch Mina is heard to observe something along the lines "well at least the writer has exceptionally nice handwriting" As the book goes forward in time, there are glimpses of the remaining three siblings and how their lives pan out under the auspices of Soviet Russia and the WW2, where one sister and her family perish in Treblinka, contrasting their lives with the relative comforts of suburban England.

Mina's daughter, Paula decamps to London post war and with an acquired cut glass English accent becomes involved with a louche BBC announcer and then becomes employed in the burgeoning British film industry of the day before eventually returning to Liverpool to marry a local wheeler dealer from her community. The book takes the reader more or less into recent times, there is mention of the Iraq war. Mina lives to the ripe old age of 102 where her mind often wanders back to her early life in her native Latvia often commiserating that communist Russia didn't deliver the egalitarian society of her youthful idealism shared with the young men she met in the forest.

Not a particularly long book at 270 odd pages but Linda Grant's writing is wonderful, definitely one to join my other 5 star reads this year.

Book 21 Late In The Day by Tessa Hadley. I am not sure where the story is going and the characters are all a bit precious but I will persevere.

I seem to be very slow with my reading this year, but have just finished #18 The Patient by Tim Sullivan. This is a relatively new crime series, whose protagonist, DS George Cross, is on the autistic spectrum and is able to use this to his advantage as he is very dogged in his investigations and leaves no stone unturned. I can thoroughly recommend this author.

#40. The Family Remains by Lisa Jewell.

Book 26: The Body in the Dales by J.R. Ellis

#33 was Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng. I am sure many of you will have read it as I think it was quite big a couple of years ago.
Mia, a financially struggling artist, and her teenage daughter Pearl arrive in the town of Shaker Heights and move into an apartment owned by the Richardson family. There are 4 teenage Richardsons and the families lives quickly become very entangled. When friends of the Richardsons try to adopt a Chinese baby who was abandoned in the town, sides are taken and relationships are destroyed.
This had been on my shelves for a while as I wasn’t sure if I really wanted to read it, but it was very good, I really enjoyed it. 8/10

Urmstongran I agree, The Lost Man is very good.

Just finished reading Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens. I got through it after about three months! It’s a very long book and I thought I would never get to the end!! I felt I needed to tackle more Dickens (read Bleak House a few years ago) but I won’t be reading another any time soon. So wordy and complex. I’ve just started Howard’s End - E M Forster. Think it’s more up my street, and looking forward to something lighter.

I’ve just finished ‘The Lost Man’ by …. Name escapes me. Oh yes, Jane Harper. I really enjoyed it. Love books set in Australia don’t know why - I’ve never been and have no connections! Anyway it has kept me engrossed for which I’m grateful.

Now to choose my next book, always a pleasure deciding isn’t it?
Back tomorrow bookworms. 😊

Book 87, The Forget-me Not Summer, by Katie Flynn.

Book 86, Any Dream Will Do, by Debbie Macomber. A young, recently widowed priest meets a girl just released from prison. I don`t usually go for love stories, but the occasional one sometimes pleases.

34-Death of a Hussy-M.C.Beaton-A bit of a change, an amusing silly little murder mystery with Hamish Macbeth coming to the rescue again. A quick read for sitting in the garden over a weekend. Now for something serious-535pages of Ann Cleeves.

Book 20 I have just finished The Dream Daughter by Diane Chamberlain, one of my favourite American authors. It is a story about time travel. I usually avoid science fiction but this one is so well written that I couldn't put it down.

#22 Relight My Fire C K McDonnell. Number 4 in The Stranger Times series.
This was an audiobook narrated by Brendan McDonald. Some books are more enjoyable as audiobooks and this is one of them, the narrator was terrific.

Book 57 Her by Harriet Lane - a psychological thriller, I whizzed through this but was disappointed. I just wasn’t convinced by the main character’s motivation and the ending was very sudden.

#39. Lie Beside Me by Jack Cartwright.

My #32 was The Couple at Number 9 by Claire Douglas. A young couple have moved in gran’s house, she is now in a care home with dementia. They are having an extension built and 2 bodies are found under the patio in the back garden. The bodies have been there about 30 years, since the time when gran lived there. Who are they and what was gran’s involvement in their deaths?
This was a reasonable page turner, it had a good twist. I thought I’d read this author before, but I hadn’t, I was thinking of Claire Macintosh. 6/10

Sparkefizz thanks for the recommendation of Dirt Town, I’ve added it to my list.

TerriBull, I agree with your opinions on Tom Lake, another book, which in my opinion was very over rated.
It was okay, just a pleasant enough story, but certainly not one of my favourites.

Thank you TerriBull for getting us started again.
33-Stop Dead-Leigh Russell- A new author for me and I shall look for more of her books as I really enjoyed the style of this murder mystery. Detective Geraldine Steel has a big problem when a businessman is murdered and the police suspect the wife and her young lover.

Mayhem, a memoir by Sigrid Rausing. You may remember the shocking case of Hans Rausing who was stopped by police for a driving offence which led to a drugs raid on his multi million pound home, complete with a full staff, who were not allowed, however, to enter the private rooms. Police found the decomposing body of Eva Rausing hidden under the mattress with clothes and TVs piled on top and covered by a tarpaulin. This was a couple of months after she died of a heart failure due to drug abuse. Sigrid is Hans’ sister and she had to go through the court system to gain custody of their four children when Hans and Eva relapsed into drug addiction. It’s not a sensational read, but rather more meditative as Sigrid communicates the awful difficulties of living with addiction in the family. Even a family as unimaginably rich and privileged as this one.