The Lost Château by Dinah Jefferies

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Last year I read and enjoyed Dinah Jefferies’ The Greek House. The Lost Château is a sequel of sorts, but it’s not necessary to have read the previous book first.

Most of the novel is set in 1936 and follows one of the characters from The Greek House, Thirza Caruthers, who is now living with her Italian husband, Emilio Bellini, at Merchant’s House in Corfu with their five-year-old daughter Romi and Emilio’s two twin daughters from his first marriage, Lucia and Valentina. When nineteen-year-old Lucia becomes a supporter of Mussolini’s Fascist movement and runs away to Spain to get involved in the Civil War, Emilio insists on going after her to bring her home, much to Thirza’s horror. However, Thirza will be kept busy during Emilio’s absence, because her great-aunt Berenice has been in hospital and needs someone to care for her when she returns home.

Berenice lives in France, in an old château in the Dordogne, leading a solitary existence since the death of her daughter, Sophie, and the disappearance of her husband many years earlier. Accompanied by Valentina and Romi, Thirza goes to stay with Berenice, where she continues to worry about Emilio but finds distractions in trying to keep the crumbling, neglected château clean and tidy and in delving into the mystery of Berenice’s past. Why is Berenice so hostile and withdrawn? Who is the mysterious Géraldine who once lived in a cottage on the estate? And what really happened to Sophie all those years ago?

I’m counting The Lost Château towards Paris in July hosted by Emma of Words and Peace as most of the book is set in France, mainly in the Dordogne region near Sarlat-la-Canéda. As usual with Dinah Jefferies, everything is beautifully described from the 17th century stone château surrounded by forest to the cobbled streets and busy shops of Sarlat. We also briefly see Paris when Thirza and Valentina are invited to visit Jean-Paul, a widower whose mother is hoping to buy Berenice’s château. Thirza is immediately attracted to Jean-Paul and spends the whole book battling with her feelings for him, a storyline which annoyed me as Thirza claims to love her husband but makes no attempt to understand why he’s prepared to enter a dangerous warzone to rescue his daughter and accuses him of being selfish. Thirza herself was the one who seemed selfish to me – although to give her some credit, she does start to think differently about things by the end of the book.

Although I loved the French setting, Lucia’s story sounded fascinating and I was sorry that we only hear about it from a distance as news from Spain reaches Thirza. I would have liked some chapters from Lucia’s point of view to see the Spanish Civil War unfold at first hand and to understand what drives a vulnerable young woman towards radical politics. I suppose that would have made the book too long! We do, however, get some chapters from Berenice’s perspective, set several decades earlier when she first comes to live at the château as a young wife and mother. Berenice’s story is sad and shocking and explains why she has become the unhappy, prickly person we meet in the 1930s timeline.

This isn’t my favourite book by Dinah Jefferies but I did find it interesting. I wonder if there will be a third novel about these characters; the way this one ended made me think that there could be, as various family members are now positioned in different places around Europe with the outbreak of the Second World War approaching.

Thanks to HarperCollins for providing a copy of this book for review via NetGalley.

Book 6/20 of 20 Books of Summer

Top Ten Tuesday: Books with Summer in the title

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This week’s topic for Top Ten Tuesday (hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl) is: Book Titles That Include the Word “[insert word of your choice here]” (Pick a word and share ten book titles that include that word!)

Lots of possible choices here, but I’ve chosen the word ‘Summer’. These are all books that I’ve read and reviewed on my blog.

1. The Summer Queen by Elizabeth Chadwick – The first in a trilogy of historical novels telling the story of Eleanor of Aquitaine. I enjoyed all three books.

2. A Song for Summer by Eva Ibbotson – Not my favourite by Ibbotson but I still liked it. It follows the daughter of a suffragette who decides to become a housekeeper at a boarding school in Austria.

3. St Martin’s Summer by Rafael Sabatini – Sabatini’s novels are almost always a lot of fun and this one, set in early 17th century France, is no exception.

4. Arctic Summer by Damon Galgut – This is the only book I’ve read by Galgut and sadly I didn’t like it much at all. It’s a novel based on the life of the author E.M. Forster and focuses on his love affairs during his time in India and Egypt.

5. The Summer Tree by Guy Gavriel Kay – The first book in The Fionavar Tapestry, a fantasy trilogy published between 1984 and 1986. It’s very different from his later books, which feel much more like historical fiction.

6. Long Summer Day by RF Delderfield – The first in Delderfield’s A Horseman Riding By trilogy, a wonderful family saga set in a farming community in rural Devon during the first half of the 20th century.

7. Dark Summer in Bordeaux by Allan Massie – One of a quartet of dark, atmospheric crime novels set in Occupied France. I still haven’t read the final two.

8. The Summer Before the War by Helen Simonson – The war referred to in the title is the First World War and this moving novel follows the story of a young woman who starts a new job as a school Latin teacher in the summer of 1914.

9. The Last Summer by Judith Kinghorn – Also beginning with that same innocent summer of 1914, the novel shows us the effects the outbreak of war will have on society, class structure and the life of one seventeen-year-old girl.

10. The Year Without Summer by Guinevere Glasfurd – The stories of six people, some real and some fictional, whose lives were affected by the extreme weather that followed the eruption of Mount Tambora in 1816.

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Have you read any of these? Can you think of any other books with Summer in the title?

Six in Six: 2026 Edition

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Six in Six was the idea of Jo of The Book Jotter, who sadly stopped blogging in 2025, and is now hosted by Emma of Words and Peace. I’ve been taking part in this every year since it began (I was shocked when I looked back through my posts and discovered that Jo started it in 2012!) so I’m pleased a new host has picked it up.

Six in Six is a great way to look back on our reading over the first six months of the year. The idea is to choose six categories (there’s a list of suggestions on Emma’s blog, but participants can come up with new topics of their own if they prefer) and then try to fit six books or authors we’ve read from January-June into each category.

My attempt for 2026 is below – as you’ll see, some of these books could have fit more than one category, but I only wanted to use each book once.

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Six books in translation

The Blind Woman of Sorrento by Francesco Mastriani (Italian)
Embers by Sándor Márai (Hungarian)
Suspicion by Seichō Matsumoto (Japanese)
Gigi and The Cat by Colette (French)
Letter to My Judge by Georges Simenon (French)
The Final Problem by Arturo Pérez-Reverte (Spanish)

Six books involving a journey

West by Carys Davies
The Wandering Queen by Claire Heywood
Travel Light by Naomi Mitchison
Son of Nobody by Yann Martel
An Astronomer in Love by Antoine Laurain
The News from Dublin by Colm Tóibín

Six books with a mystery to solve

Murder at the Spirit Lounge by Jess Kidd
The Killer Question by Janice Hallett
Dead Men Don’t Ski by Patricia Moyes
Mrs McGinty’s Dead by Agatha Christie
Murder Like Clockwork by Nicola Whyte
A Deadly Episode by Anthony Horowitz

Six books set in countries other than my own

The House of Barbary by Isabelle Schuler (Switzerland)
A Far-flung Life by ML Stedman (Australia)
She Walks at Night by Seishi Yokomizo (Japan)
The Lost Orphans of Lyon by Helen Parusel (France)
Penitence by Kristin Koval (USA)
Brigid by Kim Curran (Ireland)

Six books with elements of fantasy or science fiction

The Unicorn Hunters by Katherine Arden
Vile Lady Villains by Danai Christopoulou
Trouble with Lichen by John Wyndham
A Remedy for Fate by MA Kuzniar
The Astral Library by Kate Quinn
All the Fear of the Fair edited by Edward Parnell

Six books by authors new to me this year

Room 706 by Ellie Levenson
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark
The Infamous Gilberts by Angela Tomaski
The Witch’s Stone by Kirsty Ferry
The House of Fallen Sisters by Louise Hare
The Three Witches by Elena Collins

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What do you think of my six sixes? Have you read any of these books? Did you enjoy your reading in the first six months of the year?

Six Degrees of Separation: From Yesteryear to Paris

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It’s the first Saturday of the month which means it’s time for another Six Degrees of Separation, hosted by Kate of Books are my Favourite and Best. The idea is that Kate chooses a book to use as a starting point and then we have to link it to six other books of our choice to form a chain. A book doesn’t have to be connected to all of the others on the list – only to the one next to it in the chain.

This month we’re starting with Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke. I haven’t read it, but here’s what it’s about:

Natalie lives a traditional lifestyle – and her followers are sick with envy. Her charming farmhouse on her working ranch is artfully cluttered, her husband is a handsome cowboy, her homemade sourdough boules are each more beautiful than the last. So what if there are nannies and producers and industrial-grade ovens behind the scenes? What her followers don’t know won’t hurt them.

Then, one morning, Natalie wakes up in a strange, horrible version of reality. Her home, her husband, her children—they’re all familiar, but something’s off. Is this a hoax? A reality show? A test from God? Natalie knows just two things for sure: this isn’t her perfect life, and she must escape, by any means possible.

I’m sure there are more creative directions I could have gone in for my first link, but as Yesteryear seems to involve an element of time travel, although apparently with a twist, I’m simply going to link to one of my favourite time travel novels, The House on the Strand by Daphne du Maurier (1). It’s set partly in 14th century Cornwall, but it wasn’t the historical storyline that interested me so much as the method of time travel itself – psychological via an experimental drug rather than physical – and the implications it has for the lives of our present day (1960s) characters.

Du Maurier is known for her strong affinity with Cornwall, where she lived for many years. Another author who has set several of her books in Cornwall is Jane Johnson – for example, The White Hare (2). This one is set in a fictional Cornish valley which is beautifully and vividly described. Johnson works the legend of the white hare into the novel – a legend which really is a part of Cornish forklore.

Hare Sitting Up by Michael Innes (3) shares a word in the title. It’s the eighteenth book in Innes’ Inspector John Appleby series – and you’ll be pleased to know it’s not necessary to have read the previous seventeen first! In this book, more of a thriller than a mystery, Appleby is investigating the disappearance of Professor Howard Juniper, a top government scientist who has been conducting secret research into biological warfare.

Juniper isn’t a very common name but The Cromarty Library Circle by Shona MacLean (4) features a Miss Juniper, an elderly governess with a dubious past who has taken two young women under her wing to help prepare them for their future lives. According to the author, she based the character on Elizabeth Bond, a real schoolmistress from Scotland’s Black Isle.

In MacLean’s novel, a group of people from the Black Isle town of Cromarty decide to start a circulating library. Another novel about libraries is The Paris Library by Janet Skeslien Charles (5) which tells the story of the American Library in Paris and the people who worked there during the Nazi occupation. There’s also a modern day storyline which I didn’t like very much, but the wartime parts were fascinating and it was good to see that the library staff found various ways to keep the library operating throughout the war.

As Emma of Words and Peace is hosting Paris in July this month, I thought it would be nice to stay with books set in Paris for my final link. Paris by Edward Rutherfurd (6) is an obvious choice as it takes us through the history of the city from the 13th century to the 20th, following six different fictional families through multiple generations. I’ve read and enjoyed all of Rutherfurd’s novels (they’re all written in a similar way) but this isn’t one of my favourites as I found the non-chronological structure confusing.

And that’s my chain for July. My links have included: time travel, Cornwall, hares, the name Juniper, libraries and Paris.

In August we’ll be starting with Land by Maggie O’Farrell.

This Dark Night by Deborah Lutz

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My favourite of the three Brontë sisters has always been Emily; although I love Charlotte’s Jane Eyre and Anne’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, I love Wuthering Heights more and I also find Emily herself the most interesting and intriguing person of the three. When I came across this new biography by Deborah Lutz, then, I knew I wanted to read it. I’ve read other books about the Brontës – mainly fictional ones such as Dark Quartet by Lynne Reid Banks and The Taste of Sorrow by Jude Morgan (see my Top Ten Tuesday post for a full list) – but I liked the idea of one with a specific focus on Emily.

The book takes us through Emily’s entire life, beginning with her birth in 1818, the fifth of six children. When Emily was three, her mother died, leaving the children to be raised by their aunt and their father, Patrick Brontë, an Irish clergyman. Growing up in a parsonage in Haworth, West Yorkshire, Emily and her younger sister Anne developed their writing skills with a series of poems and stories set in the imaginary world of Gondal. Although most of this material has been lost, some of Emily’s Gondal poems still exist and Lutz uses them to explore what they can tell us about Emily as a person and how they provided the foundation that led to the writing of Wuthering Heights.

Emily’s early life was marked by various tragedies – just a few years after her mother’s death, her two eldest sisters also died of tuberculosis, having fallen ill at Cowan Bridge School (the model for Lowood School in Jane Eyre). As Patrick was reluctant to let his three surviving daughters attend school after this, Charlotte, Emily and Anne were largely educated at home. Rarely mixing with people outside the family, Emily didn’t make friends easily and was seen as a quiet, reclusive, fiercely private person. As an adult, although she briefly worked as a teacher and studied in Brussels with Charlotte, Emily continued to spend most of her time at home, managing the household and caring for her father and brother, Branwell, who was descending into alcoholism, having failed in his attempts to establish a literary career of his own.

Emily died in December 1848 at the age of thirty, just three months after Branwell and five months before Anne, all probably of tuberculosis. Charlotte, the only sibling to marry, died seven years later from complications during a pregnancy. It’s thought that the insanitary conditions in the village of Haworth, including a water supply contaminated by the nearby graveyard may have contributed to the poor health of the Brontë family.

As Emily left so little of her own work and correspondence behind, most of what we know of her comes from letters written by Charlotte and her friend, Ellen Nussey. Because we don’t have much insight into what Emily herself may have been thinking or feeling, a lot of this biography is based on speculation – ‘Emily probably thought’ or ‘it’s possible that Emily felt’ – as well as a general overview of the world in which Emily lived and how things she saw or experienced may have influenced her character and work. It also seems that almost as much attention is given to Charlotte and Anne, although that’s understandable as the lives and careers of the three sisters are so closely connected.

Something that comes across strongly is how exceptionally talented Emily was. Obviously, her writing is discussed in detail: her poems including the Gondal poetry; Wuthering Heights, the difficulty she had in getting it published and the way it was reviewed at the time; and the second novel she was working on at the time of her death, which has sadly never been found. However, Emily was also an accomplished pianist and a gifted artist – some of her artwork is reproduced in the book, including her wonderful drawings of her dogs. Her achievements are particularly impressive when you remember that she spent very little time at school and was mostly self-educated.

Although I can’t say that I learned a lot from this book (maybe because, as I’ve mentioned, there’s simply not that much we can learn due to the limited information available), I did enjoy reading it. It doesn’t feel too academic and is an easy book to read. For those who want to dig deeper, there are notes, references and a bibliography at the end of the book, but otherwise I think this would probably be a good introduction to the lives of Emily and her siblings.

Thanks to Bloomsbury Continuum for providing a copy of this book for review via NetGalley.

Book 5/20 of 20 Books of Summer

My Commonplace Book: June 2026

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A selection of quotes and pictures to represent June’s reading:

commonplace book
noun
a book into which notable extracts from other works are copied for personal use.

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‘When you think about it, everyone’s life’s a prison – of days, sort of. The trick is to get comfortable in it, I reckon. Find your freedom inside whatever your prison is.’

A Far-flung Life by ML Stedman (2026)

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‘It wasn’t only a little she-cat I bought. It was the nobility of all cats, their infinite disinterestedness, their knowledge of how to live, their affinities with the highest type of humans.’

Gigi and The Cat by Colette (1933/1944)

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“The Unicorn Purifies Water”, part of The Unicorn Tapestries c.1495–1505 (public domain)

Anne said, “Common sense is an unkind master.”

The Unicorn Hunters by Katherine Arden (2026)

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Just as a novel must contain ideas, so must a painting. A novel devoid of thought was mere entertainment and a painting bereft of ideas no better than caricature.

She Walks at Night by Seishi Yokomizo (1948)

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The loss of the mother and sisters became internalized as a kind of empty space or wound that required filling with near-endless lands, people, and tall tales. The stories must go on forever and crowd out dark gaps. Charlotte wrote of herself, but this could be from Emily, too: “I’m just going to write because I cannot help it.”

This Dark Night by Deborah Lutz (2026)

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Favourite book read in June:

A Far-flung Life

Places visited in my June reading:

Australia, France, Japan, England, Brittany

Authors read for the first time in June:

Colette, Deborah Lutz

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Reading notes: June wasn’t a great reading month for me, for various reasons, and I’m already behind with 20 Books of Summer. I didn’t manage to read my Classics Club Spin book (The Persian Boy by Mary Renault) by the spin deadline either, although I’m more than halfway through and will finish it soon. The good thing is, I enjoyed everything I read, which is more important than the number of books, I think!

This month, Emma of Words and Peace is hosting Paris in July, a celebration of all things French! I have a review ready to post for that and hope to have time to read another suitable book as well. After missing the Read Christie challenge monthly read in June, I’m planning to join in again this month and read The Rose and the Yew Tree. Otherwise, I’ll be concentrating on my 20 Books of Summer list.

How was June for you? Do you have any plans for your July reading?

Top Ten Tuesday: More books releasing in the second half of 2026!

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This week’s topic for Top Ten Tuesday (hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl) is: “Most Anticipated Books Releasing in the Second Half of 2026”.

I have already put together a list of new historical fiction to look out for in the second half of this year, so a lot of my ‘most anticipated’ titles are on that list. I didn’t want to list any of the same books again, so here are another ten books being published between July and December that have caught my eye.

1. Crash by Belinda Bauer (30th July 2026) – I’ve only read a few of Bauer’s novels but enjoyed them all; I’m not sure if I like the sound of this particular book, a thriller involving planes, but I definitely want to read more of her work so could be tempted to try it.

2. The Curse of the Saltmarsh Girl by Clare Marchant (7th August 2026) – A dual timeline novel with the historical section set during the plague of 1665. I recently read Marchant’s The Alchemist’s Secret, which I enjoyed but haven’t reviewed yet.

3. The Salt King by Natasha Pulley (20th August 2026) – Described as an ‘end of world thriller’ about people turning into salt statues. I liked one of the two Pulley novels I’ve read but not the other, so I’ll be interested to see what I think of this one.

4. The Heiress of Northanger Abbey by Nancy Bilyeau (1st September 2026) – I usually stay away from Jane Austen sequels and prequels, but I’ve enjoyed all of Nancy Bilyeau’s other books, so I may have to read this one!

5. The Silent Appeal by Janice Hallett (3rd September 2026) – I’ve loved all of the Janice Hallett books I’ve read so far; the unusual style doesn’t work for everyone but it does for me. This will be the third in her Appeal mystery series.

6. The Strangers by Naomi Alderman (17th September 2026) – I haven’t read any of Alderman’s previous books, although I’ve heard a lot about them. This new novel, about the discovery of a strange new species, is the first one that has really sounded appealing to me.

7. The Scholars by MacKenzie Common (24th September 2026) – A murder mystery set in Oxford University. This is Common’s second novel and as I liked her first book, I’m looking forward to reading this one as well.

8. Murder on the Haunted Express by Emma Mason (22nd October 2026) – Just in time for Halloween, the second book in the Midge McGowan mystery series, set on an apparently haunted train. I hope it will be as entertaining as the first one, which I read last year. .

9. The Mortician by Sharon Bolton (5th November 2026) – I always look forward to a new Sharon Bolton book; I had mixed feelings about her last one, but this one about a young mortician caught between two rival gangs sounds more promising.

10. The Last Handmaid by Clare Whitfield (5th November 2026) – A Gothic novel about Countess Erzsébet Báthory, Hungarian noblewoman and alleged serial killer. I enjoyed Whitfield’s last novel but this sounds quite different.

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Are you interested in reading any of these? Which new releases are you hoping to read in the second half of the year?