My Top 10 Books of 2016

I can hardly believe that another year is almost behind us. For me, it's a time of reflection on the joys and sorrows that 2016 has brought. It's also a time to reflect on my reading for the year and to try to whittle down the 64 books that I read this year to a mere ten - not an easy task as I read some exceptional books this year.

So, in no particular order, here are my top 10 (click on the book title to go straight to my review.)

Nemesis by Philip Roth - My first foray into reading Roth and he is certain to figure in my reading for 2017.

The Woman in Blue by Elly Griffiths - This could have been any of the Ruth Galloway series which I have thoroughly enjoyed reading this year.

A Song for Issy Bradley by Carys Bray - a debut novel who writes with insight and compassion.

The One in a Million Boy by Monica Wood - very different to anything else I have read this year and which I enjoyed enormously

The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah - this was my introduction to Kristin Hannah and a fantastic book.

The Girl in the Red Coat by Kate Hamer - A very touching and powerful read.

Colourless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage by Haruki Murakmi - I love Murakami's writing and this did not disappoint.

This Secret We're Keeping by Rebecca Done - A novel concerning a taboo affair and very thought provoking.

After the Last Dance by Sarra Manning - A most enjoyable story of life in the London blitz with a slightly different take on other books set during WWII.

The Messenger of Athens by Anne Zouroudi - I have really enjoyed reading the Greek Detective books this year and am anticipating reading more of them in 2017.

The Report by Jessica Francis Kane - A little publicised tragedy from WWII London.

Did you spot that there are 11 books? Sorry, but there was one I just could not leave out.

Thank you so much for following my blog throughout 2016. It means alot to me to know that you are sharing in my reading experience. Happy New Year and I wish you all peace and happiness in 2017.

The Great Christmas Knit Off by Alexandra Brown

Heartbroken after being jilted, Sybil has been saved from despair by her knitting obsession. But after perpetrating the cock-up of the century at work just weeks before Christmas, Sybil decides to make a hasty exit to the picturesque village of Tindledale.

There, Sybil discovers Hettie’s House of Haberdashery, an emporium dedicated to the world of knitting and needlecraft. But Hettie, the owner, is struggling to cope and now the shop is due for closure. But when Hettie decides that Sybil’s wacky Christmas jumpers are just the thing to add a bit of excitement to her window display, something miraculous starts to happen.

This was the perfect seasonal read for me as it combined two of my main interests in life – reading and knitting. It is a wonderfully heart warming story with lovely characters and a beautiful setting.

Ms Brown creates a snowy winter in an English village so perfectly that it made me want to up sticks and move there (with bag of knitting in tow obviously) and demonstrates that the author is extremely skilled in describing her picturesque setting.

I was captivated by this story and sat and read the book more or less in one sitting as it was so engaging.  I was completely caught up in Sybil’s story and raced through this book.

On a personal note I completely identified with Sybil’s love of knitwear. I, too, tend to notice whether a person garment is wearing a hand knitted item almost before I notice anything else about them. I wonder if this is a trait common among knitters?

This book also contains the knitting pattern for Sybil’s Lovely Little Christmas Pudding which I suspect I will be trying out at some point.

I am also very excited that this is the first in a series of books to be set in the fictional village of Tinderdale and I am certainly intending to read the second book, The Great Village Show.  I do not read many books of this genre but this novel has whetted my appetite for more. Does anyone have any suggestions?

ISBN:  978 0007597363

Publisher:  Harper

About the Author:

Alexandra Brown began her writing career as the City Girl columnist for The London Paper  - a satirical diary account of her time working in the corporate world of London. Alex wrote the weekly column for two years before giving it up to concentrate on writing novels. The Great Christmas Knit Off is Alex’s fourth book and is the first of a new series set in the fictional village of Tindledale, following the lives of all the characters there.

Alex lives in a real village near the south coast of England, with her husband, daughter and a very shiny black Labrador.

Nemesis by Philip Roth

It's the sweltering summer of 1944, and Newark is in the grip of a terrifying epidemic, threatening the children of the New Jersey city with maiming paralysis, life-long disability, even death.

Decent, athletic, twenty-three year old playground director Bucky Cantor is devoted to his charges and ashamed with himself because his weak eyes have excluded him from serving in the war alongside his contemporaries. As polio begins to ravage Bucky's playground - child by helpless child - Roth leads us through every emotion such a pestilence can breed: the fear, the panic, the anger, the bewilderment, the suffering and the pain.

This is an exceptionally good book and Roth's invention of Bucky Cantor is one of the best characters I have had the pleasure of reading.

For decades I have claimed that my favourite book is Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird as the characters of Atticus Finch and his daughter Scout left a lasting impression on me since I first read it at school when I was just thirteen. I have also re-read it on numerous occasions during the intervening decades. However, this book comes very close to knocking it off the pedestal from which I have held it for so long.

This is a very powerful book and contrasts the war raging across Europe to that of a localised war taking place in Newark as a polio epidemic sweeps through, claiming many lives in the process. The pace of the book is fairly slow but echoes the events taking place within the plot perfectly and at no point did I want things to hurry along.

Atmospherically, Roth creates a sense of being there. I could feel the heat being experienced that summer as I read this book through the tangible descriptions the author creates. He is succinct with his words and thus packs his writing with meaningful narrative.

Written with a gritty realism whilst at the same time demonstrating sensitivity, Roth has written an intelligent and powerful novel which will remain with me for a very long time.

ISBN:  978-0099542261

Publisher:  Vintage

About the Author:

Philip Milton Roth is an American novelist. He gained early literary fame with the 1959 collection Goodbye, Columbus (winner of 1960's National Book Award), cemented it with his 1969 bestseller Portnoy's Complaint, and has continued to write critically-acclaimed works, many of which feature his fictional alter ego, Nathan Zuckerman. The Zuckerman novels began with The Ghost Writer in 1979, and include American Pastoral (1997) (winner of the Pulitzer Prize). In May 2011, he won the Man Booker International Prize for lifetime achievement in fiction.

The Saint Zita Society by Ruth Rendell - #bookreview

Someone had told Dex that the Queen lived in Victoria. So did he, but she had a palace and he had one room in a street off Warwick Way. Still, he liked the idea that she was his neighbour...

***

The Blurb

When millionaire banker, Preston Still, kills his wife's lover by pushing him down the stairs, he looks to the family au-pair to help him dispose of the body.

But the au pair belongs to the Saint Zita Society, a self-formed group of drivers, nannies and gardeners, who are servants to the rich - and whose intentions are not entirely benign.

Accident, murder, illicit affairs, and a young man recently released from a hospital for the criminally insane come together with devastating consequences in Ruth Rendell's gripping crime novel.

My Review

When I was in my twenties I devoured everything that Ruth Rendell had to offer and, for no reason whatsoever, I haven't read any of her books in the intervening period. So, reading this novel was like being reacquainted with an old friend with whom I was able to just pick up from where we last left off.

There are a lot of characters in this book which would have been hard to keep track of if it had not been for the useful street map with a key to who lived in which house at the beginning of the book and which I referred to on several occasions whilst reading the first few chapters. As my reading progressed through this book and the characters were fleshed out this became less necessary.

It is the coming together of this contrasting cast of characters that Ms. Rendell always did so well. In this book she brings together characters from different classes and cultures and allows the reader to observe the way in which they interact with one another as the plot line develops. I think what this book does so well is to allow the reader to be the judge of whether the various characters dealt with the consequences of their actions appropriately.

I found this book thought provoking. Ms. Rendell never sugarcoats her characters, and therefore, they are not always terribly likeable. However, the plot is played out so intricately around the characters that they are very easy to engage with.

Reading this book has reawakened my admiration for this author and I am looking forward to reading and re-reading more of her work. Here, she wrote an excellent psychological thriller that will keep you turning the pages. Her death in 2015 remains a great loss to the crime fiction genre.

Book Details

ISBN:  978 0099571032

Publisher:  Arrow

Formats:  e-book, audio, hardback and paperback

No. of Pages:  337 (paperback)

Buy Links

Amazon UK

Amazon US

Waterstones

About the Author

Ruth Rendell was an exceptional crime writer, and will be remembered as a legend in her own lifetime. Her groundbreaking debut novel, From Doon With Death, was first published in 1964 and introduced the reader to her enduring and popular detective, Inspector Reginald Wexford, who went on to feature in twenty-four of her subsequent novels.

With worldwide sales of approximately 20 million copies, Rendell was a regular Sunday Times bestseller. Her sixty bestselling novels include police procedurals, some of which have been successfully adapted for TV, stand-alone psychological mysteries, and a third strand of crime novels under the pseudonym Barbara Vine. Very much abreast of her times, the Wexford books in particular often engaged with social or political issues close to her heart.

Rendell won numerous awards, including the Crime Writers’ Association Gold Dagger for 1976’s best crime novel with A Demon in My View, a Gold Dagger award for Live Flesh in 1986, and the Sunday Times Literary Award in 1990. In 2013 she was awarded the Crime Writers’ Association Cartier Diamond Dagger for sustained excellence in crime writing. In 1996 she was awarded the CBE and in 1997 became a Life Peer.

Ruth Rendell died in May 2015. Her final novel, Dark Corners, was published in October 2015.

You can read the Guardian's Obituary of Ruth Rendell here.

(author photo courtesy of https://www.britannica.com/biography/Ruth-Rendell)

(all opinions are my own)

This Secret We're Keeping by Rebecca Done

A pupil and a teacher. Is it ever right to break the rules?

Jessica Hart has never forgotten Matthew Landley. After all, he was her first love when she was fifteen years old. But he was also her school maths teacher, and their forbidden affair ended in scandal with his arrest and imprisonment.

Now, seventeen years later, Matthew returns to Norfolk, with a new identity, a long-term girlfriend and a young daughter, who know nothing of what happened before. Yet when he runs into Jessica, neither of them can ignore the emotional ties that bind them together. With so many secrets to keep hidden, how long can Jessica and Matthew avoid the dark mistakes of their past imploding in the present?

From debut author Rebecca Done, This Secret We're Keeping is a powerful and provocative novel about the ties which can keep us together - or tear us apart.

I liked this book very much in that it made me question myself on several occasions and I think it is a skilled fiction author that can make me, as a reader, deliberate over my feelings several days after I have finished the book. I suppose what I mean by this is that I was very engaged by the story of Jess and Matthew. I was very caught up in their relationship and hoping they would find a way. However, I had to continually keep reminding myself of the illegality and non appropriateness of their relationship and therefore, I should not be rooting for them. It is a very thought provoking read and one that I would recommend you read for yourself.

It was very well written and I enjoyed the dual narration. We hear Matthew's version of how their relationship developed in 1993 when he was still her teacher. Then we also have Jess' contemporary point of view. It flows seamlessly between the two periods and each enhanced the alternate narrative.

For a debut novelist this is a marvelous accomplishment. Ms Done has taken a taboo topic and built a really interesting story around it. I am looking forward to future work by this author.

ISBN:  9781405923941

Publisher :  Michael Joseph

About the Author:

Rebecca Done lives in Norwich. After studying Creative Writing at the Norwich School of Art & Design, she worked for several years as a magazine editor. Currently a copywriter, Rebecca is also a keen runner, fair-weather surfer and one-time marathon canoeist. This Secret We're Keeping is her first novel.

Her new novel, My Husband the Stranger, is due to be published in April 2017.

The Woman in Blue by Elly Griffiths

In the next Ruth Galloway mystery, a vision of the Virgin Mary foreshadows a string of cold-blooded murders, revealing a dark current of religious fanaticism in an old medieval town.

Known as England’s Nazareth, the medieval town of Little Walsingham is famous for religious apparitions. So when Ruth Galloway’s druid friend, Cathbad, sees a woman in a white dress and a dark blue cloak standing alone in the local cemetery one night, he takes her as a vision of the Virgin Mary. But then a woman wrapped in blue cloth is found dead the next day, and Ruth’s old friend Hilary, an Anglican priest, receives a series of hateful, threatening letters. Could these crimes be connected? When one of Hilary’s fellow female priests is murdered just before Little Walsingham’s annual Good Friday Passion Play, Ruth, Cathbad, and DCI Harry Nelson must team up to find the killer before he strikes again.

Elly Griffiths is fast becoming one of my favourite writers and I am loving her Ruth Galloway series. This is number eight in the series and I have hitherto read the previous seven. For those of you that have not already become acquainted with the series I thought I would let you know which order they come in (including a charming Christmas novella) along with links to those books that I have previously reviewed:

1.    The Crossing Places
2.    The Janus Stone
3.    The House at Sea's End
4.    A Room Full of Bones
4.5  Ruth's First Christmas Tree
5.    A Dying Fall
6.    The Outcast Dead
7.    The Ghost Fields
8.    The Woman in Blue
9.    The Chalk Pit

Personally, I like to read a series in order but these would standalone. However, the chronology of the devolpment of the relationships between the characters really comes to life when they are read it order.

What else can I say other than that I am thrilled that there is one more book in this series, The Chalk Pit, that I am still to read and I am fervently hoping that Ms Griffiths has many more of these books up her sleeve.

I highly recommend you giving this series a read if you enjoy a good thriller or have an interest in archaeology.

ISBN: 978-1848663371

Publisher: Quercus

About the author:

Elly Griffiths' Ruth Galloway novels take for their inspiration Elly's husband, who gave up a city job to train as an archaeologist, and her aunt who lives on the Norfolk coast and who filled her niece's head with the myths and legends of that area.

She has two children and lives near Brighton.

Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage by Haruki Murakami

Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage is the long-awaited new novel - a book that sold more than a million copies the first week it went on sale in Japan - from the award-winning, internationally best-selling author Haruki Murakami.

Here he gives us the remarkable story of Tsukuru Tazaki, a young man haunted by a great loss; of dreams and nightmares that have unintended consequences for the world around us; and of a journey into the past that is necessary to mend the present. It is a story of love, friendship, and heartbreak for the ages.

I find Murakami to be an intriguing author. He first came to my intention when I read the first volume of his trilogy, 1Q84, and this was very quickly followed with volume two and three. I had never read anything quite like it before and if you haven't read it then I highly recommend it.

I found this story equally fascinating. I love the way he uses language to create an aura around his characters. The language has a formality about it. The author clearly chooses his words very carefully and uses them to full effect. The novel has been translated from Japanese by Philip Gabriel who seems to have done an excellent job.

Tsukuru is a reserved and detached figure stemming from the deliberate isolation inflicted upon him when his group of very close friends unexpectedly isolate him from the group. No explanation is given him and reading his story I could feel his pain and loneliness.

I am fast becoming a fan of this very skilled and intelligent author and I am very keen to sample more of his excellent writing. I highly recommend this book as it makes for an interesting and impressive read.

ISBN:  978-0099590378

Publisher: Vintage



About the Author:

Since childhood, Murakami has been heavily influenced by Western culture, particularly Western music and literature. He grew up reading a range of works by American writers, such as Kurt Vonnegut and Richard Brautigan, and he is often distinguished from other Japanese writers by his Western influences.

Murakami studied drama at Waseda University in Tokyo, where he met his wife, Yoko. His first job was at a record store, which is where one of his main characters, Toru Watanabe in Norwegian Wood, works. Shortly before finishing his studies, Murakami opened the coffeehouse 'Peter Cat' which was a jazz bar in the evening in Kokubunji, Tokyo with his wife.

Many of his novels have themes and titles that invoke classical music, such as the three books making up The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle: The Thieving Magpie (after Rossini's opera),Bird as Prophet (after a piano piece by Robert Schumann usually known in English as The Prophet Bird), and The Bird-Catcher (a character in Mozart's opera The Magic Flute). Some of his novels take their titles from songs: Dance, Dance, Dance (after The Dells' song, although it is widely thought it was titled after the Beach Boys tune), Norwegian Wood(after The Beatles' song) and South of the Border, West of the Sun (the first part being the title of a song by Nat King Cole).