Once Upon a River by Diane Setterfield - #BookReview

 

There was once an inn that sat peacefully on the bank of the Thames at Radcot, a long day's walk from the source. There were a great many inns along the upper reaches of the Thames at the time of this story and you could get drunk in all of them, but beyond the usual ale and cider, each one had some particular pleasure to offer. The Red Lion at Kelmscott was musical: bargemen played their fiddles in the evening and cheese-makers sang plaintively of lost love. Inglesham had the Green Dragon, a tobacco scented haven of contemplation. If you were a gambling man, the Stag at Eaton Hastings was the place for you, and if you preferred brawling, there was nowhere better than the Plough just outside Buscot. The Swan at Radcot had its own specialism. It was where you went for storytelling.

Some say the river drowned her... Some say it brought her back to life

On a dark midwinter's night in an ancient inn on the Thames, the regulars are entertaining themselves by telling stories when the door bursts open and in steps an injured stranger. In his arms is the drowned corpse of a child.

Hours later, the dead girl stirs, takes a breath and returns to life.

Is it a miracle?

Is it magic?

And who does the little girl belong to?

An exquisitely crafted historical mystery brimming with folklore, suspense and romance, as well as with the urgent scientific curiosity of the Victorian age.

***

From the very beginning of this book, I was enchanted by its dream-like prose. It had all the elements of a fairy tale for adults, and a continuous theme throughout the book is storytelling. Without doubt, the author skilfully constructs stories within the story, and it made for captivating reading.

Set during the latter half of the nineteenth century, the book oozes with atmosphere and the River Thames itself is a vital component of the story. Indeed, I think it is fair to say that the river is presented almost as a character in itself.

The pace of the novel echoes that of the river in that it meanders along in the same way. Generally speaking, it moves at a gentle flow but can easily change to a swifter pace if the weather dictates. This is so skilfully accomplished by the author.

There are some wonderful characters in this book. The photographer, Henry Daunt, is actually based on the real life, Henry Taunt. Ms. Setterfield has done a marvellous job of taking the bones of the real-life Mr. Taunt, and fleshing him out into the well rounded fictional character in the book.

Several characters are introduced at the outset of this novel, and I was a little confused at the beginning. Together with the fact that the three missing girls, Alice, Amelia and Ann, all begin with the same initial created some overlap in the mind of the reader between the three girls. It is well worth staying the course as any confusion soon dissolves into a marvellous story.

Running throughout the novel is the mystery and suspense surrounding the girl. Along with the beautiful writing, it is this aspect of the book that kept me turning the pages; keen to find out who she is and which family she belongs with.

I read the authors previous book some years ago. I remember I enjoyed it but can not remember any of the details. Having now read Once Upon a River and enjoyed it so much, I am extremely keen to return to The Thirteenth Tale to read it again.

ISBN:  978 1784163631

Publisher: Black Swan

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About the Author:

Born in rural Berkshire, Diane spent most of her childhood in the village of Theale. After schooldays at Theale Green, Diane studied French Literature at the University of Bristol. Her PhD was on autobiographical structures in André Gide’s early fiction. She taught English at the Institut Universitaire de Technologie and the Ecole nationale supérieure de Chimie, both in Mulhouse, France, and later lectured in French in the UK. She left academia in the late 1990s to pursue writing.

Diane now lives in Oxford by the Thames. When not writing she reads widely, and when not actually reading she is usually talking or thinking about reading. She is, she says, ‘a reader first, a writer second.’

(bio info from the authors website)

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*Disclosure: I only recommend books I would buy myself and all opinions expressed here are my own. This post contains an affiliate link from which I may earn a small commission.

Dark Things I Adore by Katie Latarri - #TuesdayTeaser

 Hello and welcome to this week's Tuesday Teaser. The place where we take a sneaky peek at a book that has caught my eye.

This week we have a brand new publication. Released today, Dark Things I Adore by Katie Lattari looks like an engrossing read.

Katie's debut novel, American Vaudeville, was published in 2016, and she has contributed to several short story anthologies. A native of Brooklyn, New York, Katie now lives in Bangor, Maine, with her husband Kevin, and their cat, Alex.

The Blurb

Three campfire secrets. Two witnesses. One dead in the trees. And the woman, thirty years later, bent on making the guilty finally pay.

1988. A group of outcasts gather at a small, prestigious arts camp nestled in the Maine woods. They're the painters: bright, hopeful, teeming with potential. But secrets and dark ambitions rise like smoke from a campfire, and the truths they tell will come back to haunt them in ways more deadly than they dreamed.

2018. Esteemed art professor Max Durant arrives at his protégé's remote home to view her graduate thesis collection. He knows Audra is beautiful and brilliant. He knows being invited into her private world is a rare gift. But he doesn't know that Audra has engineered every aspect of their weekend together. Every detail, every conversation. Audra has woven the perfect web.

Only Audra knows what happened that summer in 1988. Max's secret, and the dark things that followed. And even though it won't be easy, Audra knows someone must pay.

***

Prologue - Excellent Friends

Audra - Friday March 16th 2018

A smudged, barking pattern - male.

My vision is pulled back into focus by a voice, louder than the others, in the room behind the closed door. I blink the water stain on the ceiling into something with sharp, definite borders. It looks like a tree or hand, tendrils grasping outward. I'm lying on the old couch outside one of the institute's larger lecture halls, fingers laced beneath my head. The couch is ratty but comfortable, and because it's art school, it has panache, covered and saved by years and years' worth of weird little fabric patches and guerrilla embroidery jobs - furniture Frankensteined. The lecture hall across the way is a sixty-seater set aside for visiting speakers, conferences and large workshops. Right now, faculty from across departments and disciplines are gathered in there, having their second and final all-faculty meeting of the academic year. I'm out here because Max Durant is in there. My handsome professor. My dedicated mentor. Professor Durant told me before class this morning that I should wait for him after the meeting. He told me he wanted to see me. That we should talk. Maybe grab dinner. I let him know he could look for me when he got out.

A muffled scrape and shuffle rises behind the door; bags are being gathered, friendly chatter is breaking out. I look at my phone - it's almost six in the evening. They were supposed to be done by half past five. I push myself to sitting and look up and down the vacant hallway...

***

I wonder what she sees? I definitely want to read on and find out. How about you?

Library Loans - 11th September 2021

 This weeks visit to the library saw me perusing the biography and history sections, as well as a quick look along the fiction shelves.

If I was left to my own devices I would come out with armfuls of books but I restricted myself to just three this week.

Have you been to the library recently?

Written in History by Simon Sebag Montefiore

Written in History celebrates the great letters of world history, creative culture and personal life. Acclaimed historian Simon Sebag Montefiore selects over one hundred letters from ancient times to the twenty-first century: some are noble and inspiring, some despicable and unsettling; some are exquisite works of literature, others brutal, coarse and frankly outrageous; many are erotic, others heartbreaking. The writers vary from Elizabeth I, Rameses the Great and Leonard Cohen to Emmeline Pankhurst, Mandela, Stalin, Michelangelo, Suleiman the Magnificent and unknown people in extraordinary circumstances - from love letters to calls for liberation, declarations of war to reflections on death. In the colourful, accessible style of a master storyteller, Montefiore shows why these letters are essential reading: how they enlighten our past, enrich the way we live now - and illuminate tomorrow.

The Louder I Will Sing by Lee Lawrence

On 28th September 1985, Lee Lawrence's mother Cherry Groce was wrongly shot by police during a raid on her Brixton home. The bullet shattered her spine and she never walked again. In the chaos that followed, 11-year-old Lee watched in horror as the News falsely pronounced his mother dead. In Brixton, already a powder keg because of the deep racism that the community was experiencing, it was the spark needed to trigger two days of rioting that saw buildings brought down by petrol bombs, cars torched and shops looted.

But for Lee, it was a spark that lit a flame that would burn for the next 30 years as he fought to get the police to recognise their wrongdoing. His life had changed forever: he was now his mother's carer, he had seen first-hand the prejudice that existed in his country, and he was at the mercy of a society that was working against him. And yet that flame - for justice, for peace, for change - kept him going.

The Louder I Will Sing is a powerful, compelling and uplifting memoir about growing up in modern Britain as a young Black man. It's a story both of people and politics, of the underlying racism beneath many of our most important institutions, but also the positive power that hope, faith and love can bring in response.

Confessions of a Fallen Angel by Ronan O'Brien

Following a near-death experience as a child, a young boy becomes cursed with the ability to foresee the deaths of the people closest to him. These visions come to him in his dreams and, following a disastrous attempt to save a childhood friend from drowning, a set of terrifying events begins to unfold. As a young man, he finds redemption in the arms of Ashling, his beautiful wife. But then the visions return...

This is a story about one mans struggle to live an ordinary life in extraordinary circumstances; about love lost and found and the vast range of emotions that can be weathered by the human heart. This is a story where dreams come true but where dreams can turn into nightmares; a place where true love will prevail and where death is only the beginning.

Set in the fictional Dublin suburb of Rathgorman Confessions of a Fallen Angel is a truly remarkable debut novel that will grip you from the first line and surprise you to the last.

Painting Time by Maylis de Kerangal - Translated by Jessica Moore - #TuesdayTeaser

Hello and welcome to this weeks Tuesday Teaser. The place where we take a sneaky peek at the beginning of a book.

This weeks book is Painting Time by Maylis de Kerangal and is translated from French by Jessica Moore.

Maylis de Kerangal is the author of several books in French, including Naissance d’un pont, (published in English as Birth of a Bridge), which won of the Prix Franz Hessel and Prix Médicis in 2010; Réparer les vivants, which won the Grand Prix RTL-Lire and the Student Choice Novel of the Year from France Culture and Télérama and whose English translation, The Heart, was one of the Wall Street Journal’s Ten Best Fiction Works of 2016 and the winner of the 2017 Wellcome Book Prize; and Un chemin de tables, whose English translation, The Cook, was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice. She lives in Paris.

The Blurb

Behind the ornate doors of 30, rue du Métal in Brussels, twenty students begin their apprenticeship in the art of decorative painting - that art of tricksters and counterfeiters, where each knot in a plank of wood hides a secret and every vein in a slab of marble tells a story.

Among these students are Kate, Jonas and Paula Karst. Together, during a relentless year of study, they will learn the techniques of reproducing materials in paint, and the intensity of their experience - the long hours in the studio, the late nights, the conversations, arguments, parties, romances - will cement a friendship that lasts long after their formal studies end.

For Paula, her initiation into the art of trompe l'œil will take her back through time, from her own childhood memories, to the ancient formations of the materials whose depiction she strives to master. And from the institute in Brussels where her studies begin, to her work on the film sets of Cinecittà, and finally the prehistoric caves of Lascaux, her experiences will transcend art, gradually revealing something of her own inner world, and the secret, unreachable desires of her heart.

A coming-of-age novel like no other: an atmospheric and highly aesthetic portrayal of love, art and craftsmanship from the acclaimed author of Birth of a Bridge and Mend the Living.

***

Page 1

Paula Karst appears in the stairwell, she's going out tonight, you can tell straight away, a perceptible change in speed from the moment she closed the apartment door, her breath quicker, heartbeat stronger, long dark coat open over a white shirt, boots with three-inch heels, and no bag, everything in her pockets - phone, cigarettes, cash, all of it, the set of keys that keeps the beat as she walks (quiver of a snare) - and her hair bouncing on her shoulders, the staircase that spirals around her as she hurries down the flights, swirls all the way to the lobby, where, intercepted at the last second by the huge mirror, she pulls up short, leans in to fathom her walleyed irises, smudges the too-thick eyeshadow with a forefinger, pinches her pale cheeks, and presses her lips together to flood them with red (indifferent to the hidden flirtatiousness in her face, the divergent strabismus, subtle, but always more pronounced when evening falls). Before stepping out into the street she undoes another shirt button - no scarf even though it's January outside, winter, la bise noire, but she wants to show her skin, wants the breath of night wind against the base of her throat.

ISBN: 978 0857059864

Publisher: MacLehose Press

So what do you think? Are you feeling tempted to read this book?

(author bio info courtesy of Macmillan)

Come With Me by Nicola Viceconti - Translated by Laura Bennett - #BookReview

 

"Paris, 19th July 2015

They tricked us, Franco. They tricked us! They duped us with their ideology, their propaganda and their imaginary paradise of justice and liberty. They destroyed us. They wiped out our love, as if peoples' hearts were anything to do with them. You understood what they were like before I did. No soul and no conscience! That's what you said that time at the hospital. How could anyone be indifferent? The time to tell people has come. Please. You're someone who can, so do it for me too!"

Just a handful of words before Irina vanished into the darkness. She was thin, very thin, if it hadn't been for her unmistakable eyes, I wouldn't even have recognised her. It was very painful seeing her again. Her cheeks were dirty with earth and she had a large grey bruise across her forehead, which was more furrowed than I remembered.

The eighty-year-old Professor Franco Solfi, a disillusioned former communist, discovers a note in the pocket of an old coat from the love of his life, a Russian girl called Irina. He had believed that she was dead, but is now convinced that she is alive and crosses two continents in an attempt to find her.

***

This is such a wonderfully heart-warming novel. An elderly man who discovers that the love of his life is not dead, as he had believed and sets out to find her. I was immediately captivated by the premise.

It contains all the ingredients of a book that made me want to sit down quietly and read through from the first page to the last in one sitting. This was entirely possible as the book is only 170 pages long and it was a joyous way to spend a Sunday afternoon.

As the protagonist of the story crosses borders in his search for Irina, I thoroughly enjoyed meeting the cast of idiosyncratic characters that he met along the way. They were well portrayed, and each brought something to the novel.

It made for fascinating reading as we learn of the disillusion of communism as experienced by the main character. It was disturbing to learn of the control that had been exerted over Franco and Irina and which ultimately resulted in their separation.

Appropriately paced, the novel proceeded in a gentle manner and every word was carefully placed. It may be a short novel but there is plenty in it to hold the readers interest.

However, for me, the main theme of the story centred around the potential of a reunion between them. As ever, there are no spoilers in this review, but suffice to say that I found the concluding chapters to be extremely moving.

If any further books written by Mr Viceconti are translated into English I will definitely be reading them. I highly recommend this book, and I would love to hear your thoughts on it.

ISBN: 978 1916289536 

Publisher: Aspal Prime

About the Author:

Nicola Viceconti is a prize-winning, Italian writer, poet and sociologist, with a passion for history and the culture of Latin America with particular reference to the subject of human rights. Some of his novels were published simultaneously in Italy and Argentina and also distributed in Cuba and Chile. The Chamber of Deputies of the Province of Buenos Aires bestowed upon him the prestigious title of Visitant Ilustre (Honoured Guest) for his work in keeping alive the history of the Argentinian people through his novels portraying significant historical moments in contemporary culture and politics. 

He is the winner of numerous Italian literary prizes for his novels and poetry including for this novel, Come With Me.

Lily's Promise by Lily Ebert and Dov Forman - #BookReview

 

3rd July 2020 - North London

"Let's do something, Dov!"

My great-grandmother is restless. Ninety-six years old, Lily's used to spending her days in schools, talking to children about her experiences in Auschwitz, or campaigning at public events. She hates being stuck in her flat alone.

Pandemic lockdown rules have eased at last - at least for the time being. After too many shouted conversations through a window while we stood in the garden, my family can finally spend Sabbath with Lily again, as we always used to...

It's Friday night, and we're gathered in our bubble round the table. We're all so happy to be with each other again, lighting the Shabbat candles together, blessing the bread. Such a special evening. Lily's fully of energy.

When Holocaust survivor Lily Ebert was liberated in 1945, a Jewish-American soldier gave her a banknote on which he'd written 'Good luck and happiness'. And when her great-grandson, Dov, decided to use social media to track down the family of the GI, 96-year-old Lily found herself making headlines round the world. Lily had promised herself that if she survived Auschwitz she would tell everyone the truth about the camp. Now was her chance.

In Lily's Promise she writes movingly about her happy childhood in Hungary, the death of her mother and two youngest siblings on their arrival at Auschwitz in 1944 and her determination to keep her two other sisters safe. She describes the inhumanity of the camp and the small acts of defiance that gave her strength. From there she and her sisters became slave labour in a munitions factory, and then faced a death march that they barely survived.

Lily lost so much, but she built a new life for herself and her family, first in Israel and then in London. It wasn't easy; the pain of her past was always with her, but this extraordinary woman found the strength to speak out in the hope that such evil would never happen again.

***

I know it is not correct English to use the same word twice in a sentence but I hope you will forgive me in this instance because the word is so appropriate. Having read this book I am struck by two things; Lily Ebert is a remarkable woman and her great grandson, Dov Forman, is also a very remarkable young man.

I found the book to be completely compelling and I could not put it down. Lily's life story is both captivating and heart breaking. Beginning with her evocative descriptions of the Hungary of her childhood, the reader glimpses her strength of character that will ultimately lead to her survival in the death camps.

The atrocities that she both suffered and witnessed in Auschwitz do not make for comfortable reading. However, I admire Lily hugely for finding the courage she needed to tell her story. She made a promise to herself during her time in the camp: 

"... I promised myself I would tell the world what had happened. Not just to me, but to all the people who could not tell their stories. And on the day I made that promise, I thought the world would listen. I thought I could do it single-handedly. Perhaps I was a little optimistic. A little naive. But I really believed it."

Hers is a story that deserves to be told. The inhumanity of the death camps is something that should never be forgotten and relating her experiences came at personal cost to Lily. To be able to tell her story was painful in the extreme for her, and it was with help and support that she was able to talk about it later in her life.

What emerges in this book is an account of an incredible woman who witnessed the utter dehumanisation of ordinary people whilst in the Auschwitz-Birkanau concentration camp. Lily demonstrates enormous strength in the writing of this book.

Dedicating her life to the retelling of her story makes her an inspiration to us all. It would have been so understandable for Lily to go through life with bitterness and pessimism. Instead she embraces life with warmth, hope and genuine optimism.

The hype surrounding the release of this book is justly deserved. I feel privileged to have been able to read it and it will remain with me for a very long time.

ISBN: 978 1529073409

Publisher: Pan Macmillan

Format: Hardback, e-book and audio

No. of pages: 320 (hardback)

About the Authors:

Lily Ebert lives in London near her large and loving family, which includes thirty four great-grandchildren. She is a founder member of the Holocaust Survivors Centre and was awarded the British Empire Medal for services to Holocaust education. Lily's Promise is her powerful memoir.

Dov Forman is Lily's great-grandson. At the age of sixteen he was separated from her during the Covid pandemic for the first time, and became determined to record her story for posterity.

Books to Read in September 2021

 

September always feels like the end of summer to me. However, in my part of the country we've not had a great summer. Lots of rain and clouds with only short spells of sunshine. Who knows - we may have a late burst of summer but I'm not holding my breath.

What does please me hugely is that there are some really good books in the pipeline this month. Not only new releases but some older publications that have caught my eye too. I posted a list of my top ten new releases for September last week and which you can read by clicking here. 

What is top of your reading list at the moment? I'm always open to good suggestions so do let me know.

A Single Rose by Muriel Barbery

In the Shadow of the Queens by Alison Weir

Women of the Silk by Gail Tsukiyama

An American Marriage by Tayari Jones

The Lighthouse Witches by C.J. Cooke

The Last Days of Dogtown by Anita Diamant

The Peacock House by Kate Glanville

Rain Song by Alice J. Wisler

A Light on the Hill by Connilynn Cossette

The Seventh Cross by Anna Seghers

Us Three by Ruth Jones