50 Books a Year - The 2025 Challenge

Book 17 A Death in Vienna by Daniel Silva 8/10

Art restorer and trained Israeli spy, Gabriel Allon, is sent to Vienna to discover the truth behind a bombing which killed an old friend. While there he encounters something that turns his world upside down. Each fact he discovers only leads to more questions. Finally a picture begins to emerge - a portrait of evil stretching back to WW2 and thousands of lives and into his own personal nightmares.

It has been very interesting reading the Daniel Allon series and learning more about the Holocaust and the post-war efforts to bring Nazis to justice. This is fiction but based on fact.

23 Falling Angels - Tracy Chevalier

I was a little disappointed with this book at first, given that I really loved Tracy Chevalier's, A Single Thread. I felt the first 100 pages meandered too much in setting the scene. The time is the Edwardian period, Queen Victoria has just died and two young girls Lavinia Waterhouse and Maud Coleman meet in Highgate Cemetery when they are visiting respective family graves and there is borne a friendship out of their mutual fascination of the angels and urns that decorate mausoleum type graves. An uneasy friendship develops between the two families when the Waterhouses move house, fairly adjacent to the more upmarket Colemans. Initially, Kitty Coleman, Maud's mother, is quite sniffy about the burgeoning friendship between the girls, but that is not to last. Her preoccupation with an exra marital affair closely followed by an all consuming passion for the Women's Suffrage Movement are distractions that bring consequences for both families which will eventually destroy the girls' loyalties to each other. There is an interesting cast of secondary characters, Simon a young apprenticed grave digger who befriends the girls and Jenny The Coleman's house maid who is also asked to contribute to The Suffragette Movement but she perceives that not only do the women immersed in the movement have no understanding of how poverty impacts working class women, neither will it do anything to advance their position. Class being one of the elements of the book along with the emergence of a new society, with the more traditional Gertrude, Lavinia's mother, looking backwards to reign of the old Queen as a golden age, contrasting with Kitty's desire for change. I enjoyed it more when it got going, quite good.

Book 33, Betrayal, by Lesley Pearse. I enjoyed this very much.

#16 was The Whole Town’s Talking by Fannie Flagg.
Elmwood Springs, Missouri is a small town originally settled by Swedish immigrants Lordor Nordstrom and his mail order bride Katrina, in the 1870s. A beautiful final “resting place” is created, Still Meadows, but it turns out that it’s anything but still. And now the whole town’s talking.
I loved the beginning of this book, the early years of the town and the lives of the settlers, it’s told in Fannie Flagg’s wonderful down to earth style. Once it got into the goings on at Still Meadows and the years rolled forward to the present day, it didn’t hold my interest. There were too many characters and too many relationships to remember and I lost interest in the story. I did make it to the end though. 6/10

No 5. The Way of All Flesh by Ambrose Parry. This is a medical murder mystery set in Victorian Edinburgh. I didn’t guess the ending but then I never do, and I enjoyed it immensely. There are two sequels. Ambrose Parry is in fact a husband & wife pairing.

Book 32, Verity, by Colleen Hoover. Not a very long book, but quite a good read, with a good twist at the end.

17. Telling Tales, Ann Cleeves

I think this is the second Vera book, and it’s also the second one I’ve read. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed both, which surprised me as I didn’t take to the TV series. As usual, Miss Impatient here saw one episode I wasn’t impressed by and stopped there - I may try it again now, but I’d have a lot of catching up to do!

In the meantime I’ve downloaded the next book in the series.

23-British Isles a Natural History-BBC &Alan Titchmarsh
A lovely coffee table book that I've glanced at a few times, but this time I sat and read it all. Very informative and beautiful pictures.

24-Flying Angels-Danielle Steel
A compelling and inspirational story of women of courage in WW2. They were the trained nurses who volunteered for the army medivac corps; joined a team to fly on dangerous missions to the Front to bring back wounded soldiers.

Me too I love her books, particularly since she's started writing crime.

I am actually a Lisa Jewell fan, obviously I misfired buying this one.

#27. Murder On The Marlow Belle by Robert Thorogood.

Nonny

TerriBull -I read Lady's Maid a long time ago and really loved it. She also wrote a biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning which I enjoyed. She is an author I miss.

Yes I agree she was such a good writer I do miss her too, I know she wrote a biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. She also wrote an excellent biography of Daphne du Maurier which is well worth reading.

Hellogirl, Lisa Jewell didn't really start off as a crime writer, The House We Grew Up In, definitely wasn't a crime book, as you say it was an insight into "hoarding" I thought it was good. I'd say her earlier books were more about family relationships. Of late she's turned to the crime genre.

22 The House of Stairs - Barbara Vine

Vintage Barbara Vine one of the earlier books the writer known as Ruth Rendell wrote under her other pen name.

Elizabeth, who narrates the book, is told just after her 14th birthday, that her mother has died of the debilitating Huntingdon's disease, for which there is no cure and lives the rest of her life in a state of fear knowing that she has a 50% chance of inheriting that faulty gene. Central to her formative years after her mother's death, is her mother's cousin's wife Cosette, who becomes a surrogate mother figure to Elizabeth. The story is related to two time frames. The book opens in the 1980s when Elizabeth by chance sees a former friend and house mate from a distance in the street. Bell who she knew from an earlier time, on rekindling their relationship, leaves Elizabeth with a feeling of disquiet. In the interim Bell has been in prison for murder. The book then rewinds to the 1960s. when recently widowed Cosette has inherited a fortune on the death of her husband and decides to change her straight laced and conventional existence moving from her stockbroker enclave opting to buy a tall house with over 100 stairs and rooms off on umpteen floors, in the more edgy Notting Hill as the heady 1960s are coming to a close. Cosette is to fall in love with a much younger man who is introduced to her by Bell and part of the milieu that have recently come into her orbit, many to prove to be young freeloading hangers on as her house proves to be an ideal place to crash. One of the more permanent people in her life is Elizabeth who on becoming an adult is also to take up residence with Cosette, Bell it seems is a cold and calculating character with an ambiguous back story and one of the people who come and go whilst living at the house of the title. The book is a slow preamble to the fact that a murder had been committed during the main characters time of communal living and what lead up to it is revealed very slowly and only becomes fully transparent right at the very end. I like revisiting Barbara Vine's books I always thought she was quite unique as a psychological crime writer.

And I’ve got book no.7 lined up. It’s due for release on 25th March so I’ve bought it on my Kindle and it will be delivered on that date.
It’s “The Rest of Our Lives” by Ben Markovits.

I’ve chosen “Where You Once Belonged” by Kent Haruf as my book no. 6.
Recommended by a friend, set in small town Colorado. I enjoy books set in such locations. (‘Home’ comes to mind).

Hellogirl, that was the first Lisa Jewell I ever read, I quite enjoyed it, I suppose I didn’t know what to expect, I’ve read quite a few now.

Sorry, that was book 31.

The House we Grew up in, by Lisa Jewell. I was expecting a thriller, so was a bit disappointed in this one, it was mainly a story of a hoarder. I kept on reading, waiting for something to happen, just to liven things up a bit.

Parsley3

I am half way through Here One Moment by Lianne Moriarty one of my favourite authors. It's quite brilliant.

Loved it. I read it last year.

Book 13: The Picasso Scam by Stuart Pawson .
Book 14: The Seeker by S G MacLean- This book compared favourably with C.J. Sansome's "Shardlake" books .S.G. MacLean's "Seeker" book is the first of a set of books set in the Cromwellian times with MacLean's titular hero, Damian Seeker, aka "The Seeker", a captain in Cromwell's guards and a man to be feared. In this the first book of this series, sensing a miscarriage of justice The Seeker investigates the murder of a fellow soldier . Seeker navigates his way through 17th London

TerriBull -I read Lady's Maid a long time ago and really loved it. She also wrote a biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning which I enjoyed. She is an author I miss.

I am half way through Here One Moment by Lianne Moriarty one of my favourite authors. It's quite brilliant.

#13 was Absolution by Alice McDermott.
Tricia is a shy newlywed, married to a rising attorney on loan to navy intelligence. Charlene is a practiced corporate spouse and mother of three, a beauty and a bully. In Saigon in 1963, the two women form a wary alliance as they balance the era’s mandate to be “helpmeets” to their ambitious husbands with their own inchoate impulse to “do good” for the people of Vietnam.
I was really interested to read about this era from the point of view of the women, but the book didn’t really engage me. I didn’t enjoy it as much as The Ninth Hour. 7/10

#14 *The Postscript Murders by Elly Griffiths’. Wonderful, it was a bit like The Thursday Murder Club written by Elly Griffiths. There are 3 others in this Harbinger Kaur series, I will have to read the other 3. 8/10.

#15 The Whalebone Theatre by Joanna Quinn
This is a story about 3 children from a dysfunctional aristocratic family who grow up running wild on the Dorset coast. As they grow to young adulthood, WWII descends and affects every aspect of their lives, taking them into roles and places they could not have imagined.
A gripping 550 pages, I loved it. 9/10

Just read The Ritual 😲 thought it was brilliant, scary but a real page turner and very well written.A small group of old friends , middle aged men from the UK decide to go on a hiking and camping holiday in Norway and end up in a forest, a very unfriendly and otherworldly experience.This book is now a film or will be a film very shortly.It’s a nail biter not for the fainthearted.Sorry I can’t give the author as I lent it to a friend to read.