If I Could Be With You by M.W. Arnold - #bookspotlight #blogtour

I am so pleased to be shining the spotlight on this book today. If I Could Be With You by M.W. Arnold is a story of strong female friendship set during World War Two.

The Blurb

May 1944, it's the build-up to D-Day, for which the girls of the Air Transport Auxiliary Mystery Club are busy delivering the aircraft sorely needed, and the search goes on for a Nazi spy, who has information which cannot be allowed to get into the enemies hands.

For one of the girls, her husband in badly burned after his Mosquito is shot down, bringing the war closer to home than it's ever been before.

With danger at every corner, the girls unbreakable bond is put to the test like never before. Through it all, they stand firm, taking all the war can throw at them, before daring it to try again.

Book Details

Publisher: Wild Rose Press

Formats:  e-book

No. of Pages:  341

Series:  Book 7 in the Broken Wings series

Purchase Links

Amazon UK

Amazon US

About the Author

Mick is a hopeless romantic who was born in England and spent fifteen years roaming around the world in the pay of the late HM Queen Elizabeth II in the Royal Air Force, before putting down roots and realising how much he missed the travel. This, he’s replaced somewhat with his writing, including reviewing books and supporting fellow saga and romance authors in promoting their novels.

He’s the proud keeper of two Romanian Were-Cats bent on world domination, is mad on the music of the Beach Boys, and enjoys the theatre and humouring his Manchester United-supporting wife. (Please don't mention this last to her!)

You can also find Mick at:

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My Other Blog Posts Featuring This Author

Time Waits for No One

(media courtesy of Rachel's Random Resources)

(all opinions are my own)

Leaving Everything Most Loved by Jacqueline Winspear - #BookReview - Maisie Dobbs #10

"Maisie Dobbs manoeuvred her MG 14/28 Tourer into a place outside the bell-shaped frontage of the grand country house. She turned off the engine but remained seated. She needed time to consider her reason for coming to this place before she relinquished the security of her motor car and made her way towards the heavy oak door."

London, 1933. Two months after Usha Pramal is found murdered in a South London canal, her brother turns to Maisie Dobbs to find the truth about her death, as Scotland Yard have failed to conduct a proper investigation.

Before her murder, Usha was staying at an ayah's hostel, a refuge for Indian women whose British employers had turned them out. But nothing is as it seems and soon another Indian woman is killed before she can speak out. As Maisie is pulled deeper into an unfamiliar yet alluring subculture, her investigation becomes clouded by the unfinished business of a previous case. And at the same time her lover, James Compton, gives her an ultimatum she cannot ignore.

***

I really like the Maisie Dobbs books and this is number ten in the series. Of course, for those of you who follow my blog regularly, you will already know that I have read them all in order, as my anally retentive mind insists upon it. However, I have not reviewed them all but my reviews of Maisie Dobbs, (#1) Pardonable Lies, (#3) and Messenger of Truth (#4) can all be accessed by clicking on the title links. Although it is not entirely neccessary to read them in order I really do recommend starting with, Maisie Dobbs, the first in the series as it provides so much information of Maisie's background.

I have become rather fond of Maisie over the years. She is a bit like having a friend who I am continually drawn back to but who can be a little irritating at times. She has a tendency towards arrogance, and will sometimes bulldoze herself over the feelings of others. However, I still find her a charming and captivating character.

In this particular novel, Ms. Winspear takes up the themes of prejudice, immigration and love and combines them into one delightful story. There are ample twists and turns that are appropriately placed and paced throughout the book.

To date there are fifteen books in this series so I have at least five more to look forward to.

ISBN: 978 0749014599

Publisher: Allison & Busby

About the author:

Jacqueline Winspear was born and raised in the county of Kent, England. Following higher education at the University of London’s Institute of Education, Jacqueline worked in academic publishing, in higher education and in marketing communications in the UK.

She emigrated to the United States in 1990, and while working in business and as a personal / professional coach, Jacqueline embarked upon a life-long dream to be a writer.

A regular contributor to journals covering international education, Jacqueline has published articles in women's magazines and has also recorded her essays for KQED radio in San Francisco. She currently divides her time between Ojai and the San Francisco Bay Area and is a regular visitor to the United Kingdom and Europe.

Jacqueline is the author of the New York Times bestsellers A Lesson in Secrets, The Mapping of Love and Death, Among the Mad, and An Incomplete Revenge, and other nationally bestselling Maisie Dobbs novels. She has won numerous awards for her work, including the Agatha, Alex,and Macavity awards for the first book in the series, Maisie Dobbs, which was also nominated for the Edgar Award for best novel and was a New York Times Notable Book.

Diary of the Fall by Michel Laub - Translated by Margaret Jull Costa #BookReview

"My grandfather didn't like to talk about the past, which is not so very surprising given its nature; the fact that he was a Jew, had arrived in Brazil on one of those jam-packed ships, as one of the cattle for whom history appears to have ended when they were twenty, or thirty, or forty or whatever, and for whom all that's left is a kind of memory that comes and goes and that can turn out to be an even worse prison than the one they were in."

A schoolboy prank goes horribly wrong, and a thirteen-year-old boy is left injured. Years later, one of the classmates relives the episode, as he tries to come to terms with his demons.

Diary of the Fall is the story of three generations: a man examining the mistakes of his past, and his struggle for forgiveness; a father with Alzheimer's, for whom recording every memory has become an obsession; and a grandfather who survived Auschwitz, filling notebook after notebook with the false memories of someone desperate to forget.

Beautiful and brave, Michel Laub's novel asks the most basic - and yet most complex - questions about history and identity, exploring what stories we choose to tell about ourselves and how we become the people we are.

***

The writing in this book is beautiful. By that, I do not mean it is pretty and flowery, but that it is a collection of short, succinct, spare chapters that convey emotion and meaning. It was very moving and each word was meticulously placed and really mattered.

It was hugely thought provoking and engaged me from start to finish. If I had to sum up it's theme in one word I would say that it is about guilt and how a childhood prank can affect the life of both parties involved, well into adulthood.

However, it is about so much more than that. Each section is divided into the story of a grandfather, his son and his grandson and it tackles the generational impact of the Holocaust. However, it is not a book about the Holocaust per se. In fact, there are no descriptions of the grandfather's time in Auschwitz but it's shadow hangs over the theme of the book.

Written in the first person narrative of the grandson, the book has an immediacy despite it largely being about events of the past. It tells a relevant and purposeful story and is very well worth reading.

This book is a significant addition to the Jewish fiction canon and I highly recommend it. 

ISBN: 978 1846557323

Publisher: Harvill Secker

About the Author:

Michel Laub was born in Porto Alegre and currently lives in Sao Paulo. He is a writer and journalist, and was named one of Granta's twenty 'Best of Young Brazilian Novelists'. Diary of the Fall is his fifth novel, and is the first to be translated into English. It has received the Brasilia Award and the Bravo! Bradesco Prize.

About the Translator:

Margaret Jull Costa has been a literary translator for nearly thirty years and has translated novels and short stories by such writers as Eca de Queiroz, Fernando Pessoa, Jose Saramago, Javier Marias, Bernardo Atxaga, Diogo Mainardi and Albrto Barrera Tyszka.

She has won various prizes for her work, most recently the 2012 Calouste Gulbenkian Prize, with Teolinda Gersao's The Word Tree, for which she was also runner-up with her version of Antonio Lobo Antunes' The Land at the End of the World.

Magpie Lane by Lucy Atkins - #BookReview

"They are waiting for an answer. What do they want me to say? Perhaps they think I am a stalker, targeting the president of an Oxford College on his early morning jog. I have an urge to laugh which is inappropriate. There is nothing funny about this, nothing whatsoever. Felicity is missing. The whole country is looking for her."

When the eight year old daughter of an Oxford College Master vanishes in the middle of the night, police turn to the Scottish nanny, Dee, for answers.

As Dee looks back over her time in the Master's Lodging - an eerie and ancient house - a picture of a high achieving but dysfunctional family emerges: Nick, the fiercely intelligent and powerful father; his beautiful Danish wife Mariah, pregnant with their child; and the lost little girl, Felicity, almost mute, seeing ghosts, grieving her dead mother.

But is Dee telling the whole story? Is her growing friendship with the eccentric house historian, Linklater, any cause for concern? And most of all, why was Felicity silent?

Roaming through Oxford's secret passages and hidden graveyards, Magpie Lane, explores the true meaning of family - and what it is to be denied one.

This fabulous book ended up being a quick read for me as I could not put it down and sprinted through it to get to the books conclusion. Mostly told retrospectively during a police interview, the narrative goes back and forth with the recollections of the main character, Dee, coupled with the immediacy of the interview.

The characters were excellently portrayed.  Nick and Mariah were difficult to like and this opinion did not change throughout the book. Equally, both Felicity and Dee were engaging characters and I suspect most readers will love Felicity for her innocence and vulnerability. The main character, Dee, had a combination of strength and weakness and as the book progressed I did come to wonder how reliable she was as a narrator.

The house itself felt as though it was a character as the Masters Lodging is a focal point of the novel and much of the story is linked to the house. The author did a brilliant job of making the house come alive as she did with Oxford itself. Highly atmospheric I felt completely immersed in the setting of this novel.

It is a sensitive, eerie and excellently written novel and I can hardly wait to read another book by Ms. Atkins. Have you read any of her other books? I would love to hear about them. 

Keep safe and well through these difficult days my friends. Thank goodness we have our books to keep us company while we are isolated and socially distanced. 

ISBN: 978 1786485571

Publisher: Quercus

About the Author:

Lucy Atkins is an award winning author, feature journalist and Sunday Times book critic. She has written for newspapers including The #Guardian, The Times, The Sunday Times and The Telegraph as well as many UK magazines. She teaches on the Masters in Creative Writing at Oxford University and lives in Oxford.

Some of her other books are, The Missing Ones, The Night Visitor and The Other Child.

Brilliant Careers - The Virago Book of 20th Century Fiction

I picked up this little beauty in a second hand bookshop for the princely cost of £1.00.

My husband and I (apologies if I sound like the Queen) were having a few days away in beautiful Herefordshire which is in the southwest of the England. Short of a tornado we experienced every kind of weather. We had snow, rain, wind, sunshine and the flooding in that part of the country was very bad. The roads were clear but there were flooded fields for as far as the eye can see.

Anyway, during one of our days there I came across this book. It is edited by Ali Smith, Kasia Boddy and Sarah Wood. It highlights one Virago publication for each year of the twentieth century; starting in 1901 with My Brilliant Career by Miles Franklin and finishes in the year 2000 with From Midrash on Happiness by Grace Paley. Each featured book tells us about the author alongside an extract which was chosen to represent chronologically an extract from each year of the twentieth century.

I would dearly love to read every novel that is detailed in this book - a huge undertaking amongst all the other books that I would like to read. To that end I have purchased a copy of the 1901 book My Brilliant Career by Miles Franklin - what better place to start then at the beginning. Realistically, I shall probably only read some of them and of those books I will be posting a review.

Unfortunately, it seems this book is currently out of print but there are second hand copies available. Or if you would like to see a list of the titles of the novels that are featured in this book then please let me know.

Keep well, keep safe and happy reading.