Rosemary Kaye is another one of our regular readers on Thursdays. Some of you might have read her letters from Scotland that she’s kindly allowed me to share here. I always love to read her comments about books. While some of them are readily available here in the States, some books are more easily found in Scotland. I like discovering new books through Rosemary’s notes. Her favorites list is lengthy, but I’m not going to cut it. I’m just going to share. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did! I know I laughed at her review of The Bookshop of Second Chances.

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My Favourite Reads in 2021

I’ve seen lots of these lists on social media, and I am an absolute sucker for all of them. I love nothing more than finding out what other people have been reading; I’m happy when I see we’ve both enjoyed the same book, I’m interested when they’ve read something that looks appealing – and sometimes I am just downright surprised that anyone could’ve liked such weird stuff…

But what I notice about so many of these lists is that a large proportion of them cover only very recently published volumes. I read few new books (though there have been some exceptions this year) and get many of my recommendations from fellow book bloggers who enjoy mid-20^th century fiction. So this list isn’t full of lots of brand new books, but I hope you’ll still find something worth reading. I decided to stick to fiction, though I will mention a few outstanding non-fiction reads at the end.

Still Life by Sarah Winman

Ulysses Temper is a British soldier in Italy in the closing months of the war. Assigned to a unit trying to recover works of art stolen by the Nazis, he has a chance encounter with Evelyn, an older art historian who loved pre-war Italy, and has come back to offer her help. Thus begins an unlikely friendship between two very different people – Ulysses is a straight man from the working class East End, Evelyn an upper-middle class gay woman.

After the war Ulysses returns to the Stoat & Parrot pub in Dalston, only to find that his wife Peg has fallen in love with an American soldier and given birth to a daughter, Alys. Peg wants a divorce. Ulysses has nowhere else to go, but then, as a result of a great act of kindness he performed for  someone in Italy, he receives an unexpected legacy and decides to return to Florence. Peg can’t look after Alys, so Ulysses agrees to take her – and a few of the pub regulars, including Claude the parrot – with him. Together they make a new life in Italy, and find many friends.

The years pass; Ulysses and Evelyn never forget, and although they keep just missing one other, they are eventually reunited. Ulysses himself is unforgettable – such a good, kind, thoughtful man – but every character is well rounded and convincing.  So much more happens in this wonderful story about found family, the meaning of home, and the many different ways in which lives can be lived, love can be expressed, and friendships treasured. Perfect.

A Book of Death and Fish by Ian Stephen

Lesa will laugh when she sees this book on my list, I complained about it so much when I first started reading it. But it is a book that grows on you, and by the end I felt truly enriched by the (fictional – but based on the author’s own experiences) life story of Peter MacAulay, a native Lewisman. Written partly in Hebridean dialect, with a bit of the Gaelic thrown in here and there for good measure, A Book of Death and Fish is something you have to be patient with. Stephen writes in a very impressionistic style, without explaining very much; at times the book feels like a Scottish version of Koyaanisqatsi. What it is though, isan observation of real life on a Hebridean island in the mid-20th century.

This is not a tourist’s book. Stephen does not shy away from the problems of life in an island community. Drugs, alcoholism, illness and death are all the same here as anywhere else – in fact some are worse. The difference is that here, just about everyone knows everyone else. They all went to school together.  Stephen interweaves the stories of his own and his friends’ families with international events. His family leaves the island and comes back; later he himself leaves to go to university in Aberdeen, he travels, becomes a Buddhist, gives that up, stays on a kibbutz, and eventually returns to Stornoway. Of course he does; it is in his blood.

Unsurprisingly, perhaps, the sea flows through every chapter of this book. Peter fishes, everyone he knows fishes – whether for, or as well as, the day job. He talks about fish, boats, swells and calms. And, as on all the islands, collective memory is dominated by shipwrecks and other losses at sea. Men overboard from small boats, huge trawlers smashed to smithereens on the rocks. His father, a weaver of the famous tweed, has not been to sea since almost losing his life in a shipwreck off Casablanca. Yet almost everyone else has a boat of some sort.

Writing in The Guardian, Kirsty Gunn called A Book of Death and Fish  ‘a strange, wriggling, hybrid of a thing….a glittering account of island life.’ I wouldn’t argue with that.

Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner

Laura is a well behaved spinster, living at Lady Place, the family’s country home, with her widowed father. When he dies, her family thinks something must be done about Laura. One of her brothers wants to move into Lady Place with his wife and children, so Laura (‘Aunt Lolly’) is packed off to live with her other brother and his family in London.

After twenty years of being used as an unpaid Nanny, companion and housekeeper, Laura has had enough. She hates London and, on a complete whim (or is it?) she decides to move to Great Mop, a village in the Chilterns about which she knows almost nothing. On finding that her brother has invested her inheritance so poorly that she no longer has enough money to buy a house, she settles for lodgings, and quickly makes friends with her landlady and some of the other villagers. She hears strange noises outside at night, but thinks little of it. She walks and walks among the beech trees, and is happy.

Until, that is, her annoying nephew Titus decides to move to the village. Laura does not want to be tied down. She does not want Titus to follow her on her walks. She does not want yet again to succumb to the duties expected of a woman.  Out walking one day, Laura meets a very unusual man. And now she discovers what is really going on in the village, and makes a decision about her future that will leave her free in a way that she could never have imagined (there is an oblique clue in the rest of the book’s title – Lolly Willowes: or The Loving Huntsman.)

It’s hard to believe that Lolly Willowes was written In 1926. Townsend Warner addresses the position of women (especially, at that time, unmarried women), while telling an unusual, empowering, and often very funny, story. Lolly Willowes is now justly seen as a feminist classic. It’s brilliant.

The Question of Max by Amanda Cross

This is the fifth Kate Fansler mystery, in which Kate finds herself involved in the estate of Cecily Hutchins, an English novelist who spent the latter part of her life in a remote house on the coast of Maine.  Hutchins’ literary executor is one of Kate’s academic colleagues, Max Reston, whose mother was one of Cecily’s close friends at Oxford. Max asks Kate to travel with him to Maine, as he has heard that someone has been skulking around the house, where all of Cecily’s papers are still in situ. When Kate insists on climbing down the path leading from the house to the sea, she finds the body of one of her own graduate students floating in a rock pool. Her reluctant (sort of!) investigations begin. They take her from New York to Oxford and back to Maine, and along the way Cross takes a scathing look at the way in which traditional academia (or perhaps it’s just British academia) treats women.

I love Kate; she is witty, well read, smart, rich, has a penthouse in Manhattan, and, of course, the totally delicious Reed for a husband. They spend a lot of time drinking dry martinis and having conversations full of literary allusions. I feel that something must have gone wrong somewhere; this should have been my life.

While The Question of Max isn’t, perhaps, my absolute favourite in the series (that would probably be No Word From Winifred), it’s close enough, and I read it this year.

I’ve now treated myself to all of the remaining Amanda Cross novels, and can confidently predict that 2022 will be my Year of Kate. Fansler that is, not Windsor…

The Dry by Jane Harper

I have had a copy of this on my shelf for some time, but I hadn’t opened it – partly, I think, because I imagined it was about people lost in the outback, dying of thirst. Needless to say, I was entirely wrong.

Kiewarra is a small, remote farming community. It has had no rain for years; both the land and the people are powder kegs; tempers are strained, ready to snap as quickly as the branches in the bone dry bush.

Aaron Falk, a policeman now based in Melbourne, returns to his birthplace for the funeral of his old schoolfriend. Luke has been found dead, a gun in his mouth; his wife and son’s bodies, also shot dead, are at the family home. Only the baby has been left unharmed. But Falk can’t believe this was a murder-suicide, and with the local policeman, Raco, (who also has his doubts) he begins to unravel the secrets of various local residents. But Falk and Luke had secrets of their own; twenty years earlier Falk and his father were forced out of town when people blamed him for the death of Ellie Deacon. Luke provided Falk with a false alibi for the day of Ellie’s death. Now Falk needs to address what really happened.

This is a brilliant depiction of a community on the edge. The plot is gripping, the setting equally so. Jane Harper gives a real insight into life in a small, isolated town under pressure, where the lack of rain creates situations that we can’t even imagine. A triple killing would be a shocking event anywhere, but when it happens somewhere like Kiewarra, where everyone knows everyone else, and most people know more than they want to say, the tension is palpable.

All of the characters in The Dry are convincing and three-dimensional, but I especially appreciated the way in which Raco is treated as Falk’s equal, a sensible, thoughtful, clever man, and not the cliched ‘uselss local bobby’ just waiting to be enlightened by the expert from the big city.

Nora Webster by Colm Toibin

In 1960s’ provincial Ireland, Nora’s husband Maurice has died suddenly, leaving Nora and their two children bereft. Nora is an intelligent and thoughtful woman, but there is a suggestion that Maurice had always managed the practicalities of family life. Now Nora has to work things out herself, while at the same time working out who she really is and how she wants the rest of her life to be. 

Colm Tolbin (whose other books include Brooklyn) is such a good writer. There is much we never learn about Nora, or Maurice – we hear Nora’s thoughts, but that’s exactly what they are – vague ideas that pass through her mind, not detailed explanations of the past, or indeed the present, because that is exactly how we do think. 

Nora tries to move on; she goes back to work at Gibneys, she rejoins a choir, she decides to sell the family’s holiday home. But for most of the book she cannot move on from Maurice. Why did he leave them alone (there is no suggestion that his death was deliberate)? What is she to do? Why isn’t he there to tell her? 

Although not everyone is sympathetic to her lot, her true friends do eventually come through for her, but again we realise this through the smallest of details, the fewest of words. Sometimes I felt as if I was in a kind of underworld, or a dream, with Nora.  It is not only the reader who doesn’t always know the answers – Nora is grappling for them herself.

Although this is a serious book, it still has (like life) some very funny moments. It’s not depressing, neither does it have an unconvincing romantic conclusion. We travel with Nora, and at the end of the book she has arrived at a new beginning of sorts – on her own.

South Riding by Winifred Holtby

In her preface to the 1988 edition of South Riding, the late Shirley Williams (daughter of Winifred Holtby’s close friend and literary executor, Vera Brittain) describes Holtby’s most famous book as; ‘the great epic of local government.’

Does that make you want to read it?

I imagine not, and this would be a terrible shame, as it is a wonderful novel, set in 1932 and first published in 1936, full of vivid, fascinating characters, dramatic events, wheelers, dealers, lovers and haters, all set against the backdrop of a country in flux, and in a landscape of cliffs and marshes, windswept wastes and busy towns – South Riding may not exist, but the location of this story is very firmly Holtby’s native Yorkshire.

And above all it is the story of Sarah Burton, a teacher returning home from London to take charge of the local girls’ high school; of Robert Carne, local farmer, horseman and councillor; of Midge, his strange and somewhat hysterical daughter; of Mrs Emma Beddows, the first female Alderman of South Riding; and of Lydia Holly, child of the Shacks, who wants more than fate has given her. 

And above even that, it is the story of a community, of change, and resistance to change, of suffering, resilience and hope. It is, as Marion Shaw points out in her introduction;

‘an enthralling narrative’

South Riding was adapted for TV in 1988 (Dorothy Tutin played Sarah) and again in 2010-11 (with Anna Maxwell Martin in the leading role.) I can’t believe I waited this long to read it; what a masterpiece from a writer who died at the young age of 37. And imagine what more she might have gone on to write, had she lived.

Meet Me at the Museum by Anne Youngson

Tina, a middle-aged farmer’s wife in England, writes a letter to the director of the Silkeborge museum in Denmark. Years ago the director had visited Tina’s school, where he had talked about the Iron Age Tollund Man. Tina and her best friend Bella had always planned that they would one day go to Denmark and see the exhibit.  Now, after the loss of her friend, Tina wants to know more about that mummified corpse.

The museum director has also died, but a curator called Anders replies. Both Tina and Anders have regrets; Tina was forced into early marriage by an unplanned pregnancy and has little in common with her husband; Anders’ troubled wife has recently died, and he finds it impossible to communicate with his adult children, and especially his daughter, now a new mother.

The entire story is told through the increasingly personal letters Tina and Anders write to one another; they talk of their daily lives, their homes, their families, their regrets. They discuss books, music and poetry. He encourages her to believe that change is still possible; she helps him to understand his daughter. 

Dear Anders

Whenever I pick raspberries, I go as carefully as possible down the row, looking for every ripe fruit. But however careful I am, when I turn round to go back the other way, I find fruit I had not seen… Another life, I thought, might be like a second pass down the row of raspberry canes; there would be good things I had not come across in my first life, but I suspect I would find much of the fruit was already in my basket.

This is such a beautifully written, gently touching story that it is hard to believe that this is the first novel, and I look forward to reading Youngson’s new book, The Narrowboat Summer, described by the publisher as;

‘a charming novel of second chances, about three women, one dog, and the narrowboat that brings them together’

The Snow and the Works on the Northern Line by Ruth Thomas

The title of this wonderful novel is so evocative that it would have drawn me in whatever it was about. It reminds me of winter days in London, days that are so unlike winter days in the country.  Slushy streets, long, disrupted journeys home. Shop windows full of Christmas displays that promise much and deliver little. 

Ruth Thomas’s heroine Sybil works at the Institute of Prehistorical Studies and lives with her boyfriend Simon. She is happy with her ordered life. Enter glamorous Helen, whom Sybil knows and loathes from her undergraduate days, when Helen – then studying for her doctorate – did all she could to prevent Sybil from getting more than a third in her degree. Helen has done well in academia. She is confident, self-promoting and superior – and now she is the new Head of Trustees at the museum. 

Soon Helen and the appalling Simon have become an item. Sybil is not only devastated but also sure that Helen is an academic fraud; she is determined to expose her. Wandering around London, taking poetry evening classes at Brixton Library, going home alone, Sybil gradually recovers from her grief…and makes progress with her plan to bring Helen down.

As in all my favourite novels, the things that make this book stand head and shoulders above many others are the details, the little glimpses into Sybil’s new, solitary life. The haikus she writes, her slightly irrational take on life (possibly caused by the head injury she suffers at the beginning of the book), her conversations with the institute’s receptionist Jane. Minor characters are well drawn and three-dimensional; Sybil’s sad and slightly mysterious boss Raglan, Fleur, the poetry group’s teacher, the other participants, most of them harbouring sadnesses of their own. But this novel is certainly not all bleak and depressing; there are some very funny scenes too.

Further Adventures of the Family From One End Street by Eve Garnett

I first read this trilogy as a child, and have read it several times since. This year I re-read Further Adventures and yes, it was still just as good as it had been. The children’s author Jacqueline Wilson (of Tracey Beaker fame) said that these books opened her eyes to the fact that stories could be about children like her, and indeed Garnett was the first British author to write about working class families.

The Ruggles live at No 1 One End Street in the fictional town of Otwell-on-the-Ouse (probably Lewes in Sussex.) Mr Ruggles is a dustman who dreams of owning a pig; Mrs Ruggles takes in washing (as did my own grandmother) and manages their brood of seven children. The books relate the day to day adventures of the various children, but in this one three of them are sent off to the country to convalesce after having the measles. Kate, who is in charge of the two little ones, is in seventh heaven to be staying at The Dewdrop Inn (a pub belonging to the sister of one of Mrs Ruggles’ friends), where she has her own bedroom for the very first time, and the children make many friends in the village. Meanwhile back in Otwell Kate’s older sister Lily Rose is asked to be a bridesmaid, so we are treated to the spectacle of a wedding, 1930s style, and to all the attendant financial strains this puts onto poor Mr Ruggles’ pig fund.

These are wonderful little books, and although they were written for children and are therefore perhaps a bit more positive and jolly than (for example) The Ragged Trousered Philanthropist and its like, Garnett never shies away from the realities of near-poverty in between-the-wars Britain, and  The Family From One End Street trilogy now provides a record of working class life at that time. Jacqueline Wilson chose the first volume as her ‘Book that made me’ for a Book Trust interview, and when I myself mentioned the Ruggles on twitter I was amazed – and delighted – to discover how many people remember them fondly.

Small Pleasures by Clare Chambers

This wonderful novel is set in South East London, where I grew up and where the author still lives. Although it opens in 1957, before I was born, the locations and the general feel of suburbia were instantly recognisable. 

Jean is a journalist writing for the local paper (in Petts Wood – the very place in which I spent my formative years!), and routinely fobbed off with the ‘domestic’ stories that the men don’t want to cover. She lives at home with her difficult and demanding mother (her younger sister having cleverly emigrated to Kenya with her coffee farming husband – again this is an echo of my own family history), and sees no way out of this frustrating, restricted life – for she is almost 40, which in 1957 probably felt more like 100 (viz Barbara Pym’s Excellent Women, in which Mildred sees herself as a spinster on the shelf at the age of thirty-two.)

When Gretchen Tilbury contacts the paper to tell them that her daughter was the result of a virgin birth, the job is automatically dumped on Jean, who sets out to meet the Tilbury family and to find out if Margaret Tilbury was indeed the product of an immaculate conception, or if Gretchen is in fact mad, or at least perpetrating a fraud to gain attention and some sort of fame.
Small Pleasures is a story that does not always go where you might expect it to. When she arrives at No 7 Burdett Road, Sidcup, Jean does not find a madwoman in residence; Gretchen is perfectly sane, very nice, and yet totally convinced of the truth of her story. Margaret is a friendly, if slightly odd, child. Soon all three of them are great friends, and Jean is often at their house. Gretchen’s husband Howard, a jeweller with a shop just off The Strand, is equally pleasant. He knows he is not Margaret’s father; Gretchen was pregnant when they met, and he accepted this. They are a happy little family.

As Jean delves deeper into the Gretchen’s past and the foundations of her story, she begins to work out just what might have happened all those years ago. But at the same time she starts to fall in love with Howard, and he with her. This may be her last chance for freedom and happiness, but at what cost? 

I loved this book for so many things; it is another gently told story, but with far more bleakness at its core than, for example, Still Life. All four of the main protagonists are well drawn characters whom the reader will have no trouble in liking; they all have a straightforward, sensible approach to life and are full of good intentions. The supporting cast is not ignored; every character is believable. The settings, both in place and time, are totally convincing (and at least one event actually happened.)

Small Pleasures was longlisted for the 2021 Women’s Prize for Fiction, and deservedly so.

In the Mountains by Elizabeth Von Arnim

I’ve read Elizabeth von Arnim’s The Enchanted April and Elizabeth and her German Garden. I have a copy of Father waiting for me on my shelves. But I had never before heard of In the Mountains.

At the end of the First World War a deeply bereaved Englishwoman flees to her summer home in the Swiss Alps. We never know her name, or the precise details of what has happened to her. She is torn apart by grief, and at first can do nothing but record her feelings in her journal, and lie in the fields watching the clouds pass by.  Her loyal caretaker Antoine and his new wife look after her with great kindness, and gradually she begins to return to ‘normal’ life and starts to wish she had more people to talk to.

Enter two widowed sisters, Kitty and Dolly, who turn up at her front door one day. They have been lodging in a hotel lower down in the valley for some time, but are finding it far too hot. The narrator invites them to stay with her. An air of mystery is introduced to the house; Kitty, the elder sister, is kind and good, but permanently worried about a secret of Dolly’s; Dolly is much more sociable and lively, and Kitty is terrified that the secret will be revealed. The narrator pretty soon works out what that secret is, but keeps her knowledge to herself so as not to upset Kitty. 

When the narrator’s lonely widowed uncle arrives at the house to encourage her to go home, he is enchanted with Dolly, and the reader is left hoping that the two of them will marry, and thus solve everyone’s problems.  This is another quiet, gentle story, and one that I very much enjoyed. 

The Bookshop of Second Chances by Jackie Fraser

I read about this on Lesa’s blog, and as my library for once had something she mentioned, I decided to give it a try. This kind of novel can be good or bad news for me; I am easily annoyed by ‘girl left tiny village birthplace for the bright lights of the city, vowing never to return…but, her heart broken by an evil cad, she goes home to the country/seaside where just by chance she’s been left a café/bakery/bookshop. There she comes across handsome man; they take an instant dislike to each other…..and we all know what happens next.

The Bookshop of Second Chances was taking even more chances with me, as most of it is set in Scotland, and when authors who’ve clearly never been north of Hampstead make it abundantly clear they have learnt what little they know about my adoptive home from a combination of Monarch of the Glen and Hamish McBeth, my patience soon wears thing.  

But there was something about the description of this novel that drew me in, and reader, I loved it.

Thea is 40+ (first good move by the author… at least her heroine has lived a little) and has been with her partner for 20 years. On Valentine’s Day she both loses her job and discovers that her husband (aka cad…) has been cheating on her with her best friend. It’s not long though, till she receives the usual letter – the one that apparently drops through every woman’s letter box apart from mine –  from a solicitor, telling her that a long lost uncle has died, leaving her his lodge house and his vast collection of rare books.

In more cynical mode, I would be yelling ‘How come these people never seem to have children of their own to leave things to?’ But I must have been in a good mood at the time, because I was ready to overlook this and travel with Thea to the small town of Baldochrie, where she plans to take stock, sort out the books, sell the house, and return to Sussex.

Although her uncle owned the lodge, the rest of the estate belongs to local laird Charles Maltravers. His elder brother Edward renounced the title and now lives in a flat above his bookshop in the town. Charles is charming, Edward is a grumpy misogynist, and the two brothers have hardly spoken to one another for some years.  Thea soon has a job in the bookshop (just like that…), decides to hang around for a bit longer, makes various friends in the area, and – need I tell you? – starts to break down Edward’s defences and find out just what did cause this rift between him and Charles.

So yes, The Bookshop of Second Chances is predictable, but I enjoyed the characters, minor and major, the setting and the fantasy that (i) someone would one day leave their book collection to me (because, of course, I have so many empty bookshelves…) (ii) I could work in a bookshop that – unlike all the independent bookshops I come across – was not permanently on the verge of bankruptcy….. Jackie Fraser writes well, and when I had a look at her website she really did seem like my kind of person.

As I say, I must have been in a strange mood that day…..

Honourable mentions to: The Bachelor Brothers’ Bed & Breakfast by Bill Richardson and Home From the Vinyl Café by Stuart McLean – two Canadian books that were re-reads for me, and just as good the second time around.

Non-fiction:

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Girl by John Quinn

A small collection in which various Irish writers talk about their childhoods – these were originally interviews for RTE (Irish radio) and so have a spontaneity about them that might have been lost if the authors had had time to organise their thoughts on paper. Every one of these women has a fascinating story to tell, from Molly Keane, who grew up in an affluent Anglo-Irish hunting, shooting, fishing family in the early part of the 20^th century, to Joan Lingard, who recalls shopping trips to the south, and how her mother used to sew Belfast shops’ labels into the new purchases and dust them with talcum powder to make them look old before re-crossing the border, in order to avoid the scrutiny of the Customs officers.

Wild Winter by John Burns

In which Burns planned to spend a winter seeking out the native Scottish animals to which he had hardly given a second glance on his hill walking expeditions.

A few weeks after he started out, the first lockdown descended. How he coped with this, and how he did eventually find some of those elusive species, go to make an excellent book – especially as he is so honest about all the things he gets wrong, the preconceptions he has to ditch, and the things he learns from the experts, and sometimes from the non-experts like himself. There is also an  interesting look at land management in the Highlands, the damage that traditional sporting estates have caused, and the radical new approaches being taken by some enlightened owners.

Writing at the Kitchen Table by Artemis Cooper

Artemis Cooper’s biography of Elizabeth David is a great read, and reveals what a complex, troubled, difficult, but also enlightened and passionate, woman David – who is credited, rightly or (in my opinion) wrongly, with revolutionising the eating habits of post war Britain-  really was.

I already have three books in mind for my best reads of 2022; in the meantime here’s to another year of our much-treasured Thursdays at Lesa’s.