The Newer World by Sebastian Barry

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Sebastian Barry’s latest novel, The Newer World, is loosely connected to two of his earlier books, Days Without End and A Thousand Moons. If you’ve read those books you’ll remember the characters of John Cole, Thomas McNulty and Winona and all three appear again in this book. However, it’s not necessary to have read them first as this book works as a standalone and focuses on Tennyson Bouguereau, who was a secondary character in A Thousand Moons.

Tennyson and his twin sister Rosalee are born into slavery in 1840s Tennessee and later freed – although as Tennyson observes, “freed is not the same as free” and a lot is left to be desired in terms of equality and opportunities for people who were formerly enslaved. After the Civil War, Tennyson and Rosalee find themselves living on Lige Magan’s farm, the same place Irish soldier Thomas McNulty, his partner John and their adopted Lakota daughter, Winona, have ended up. The farm won’t be a safe haven for long, though, and eventually Tennyson is forced to flee, leaving Rosalee and their friends behind. Assisted by a kind-hearted lawyer, Tennyson makes his way to Nashville, where he attends a college and finds that he has a talent for singing. Joining a touring choir, he unexpectedly has the chance to visit England and on his return finds that he’s faced with making a decision that could change his life forever.

The novel is narrated by Tennyson himself, a brave decision by Sebastian Barry. His publishers had apparently advised against it due to cultural appropriation concerns, which is obviously a controversial topic, but I thought Tennyson’s narrative voice felt authentic and the themes of racism, prejudice and slavery were handled sensitively and sympathetically. Through Tennyson’s eyes, we see how even after the abolition of slavery he still has to deal with restrictions on his everyday life, such as when he is threatened with a fine for simply ‘walking without purpose’.

During his time at college in Nashville, Tennyson reads the Odyssey and afterwards begins to draw parallels between his own life and the journey of Odysseus who, like himself, is far from home. But Tennyson, however, has lost so much and so many of the people he loved that he’s not sure where home really is anymore: “I knew as I made my way home that there was no home. All the old things, my days in the world, even the eyes I had seen them with, were gone forever.”

Sebastian Barry’s books are always beautifully written and this one is no exception, although I’ve found that in general I seem to prefer his books set in Ireland rather than this sequence set in America. I suspect he may be returning to this world for a fourth novel, though, as several characters have decided to head for Alaska to start a new life. There would also be the option of telling Rosalee’s story, left behind on the farm during Tennyson’s long absence. Whatever he chooses to write next, I’ll be looking out for it.

Thanks to Faber and Faber Ltd for providing a copy of this book for review via NetGalley.

The Midnight Guests by Alex Hay

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It’s 1926 and London’s newest, grandest hotel is opening its doors for the first time. Owner Diana Gold is getting ready to welcome her first guests, who include some of the richest and most powerful people in the world – millionaires, bankers, royalty, film stars, politicians and gamblers. But she’s also expecting two guests who are not so welcome – two people who took her under their wing as a young woman and led her into a life of crime. Now Diana has found herself in their debt and they’re due to arrive at midnight to take what they are owed.

From that fateful opening night, we jump forward one hundred years to 2026 and meet Joe, an out-of-work historian who is staying at that same hotel, the Hotel Artemis, on its final night before it closes down. Joe’s grandmother, a former journalist, has recently died, leaving behind her uncompleted research into the mystery of two unidentified dead bodies found in the vaults of the hotel in 1929. Seeing a chance to earn some money, Joe has decided to continue his grandmother’s research and write about a book about it – but tonight is his final opportunity to investigate inside the hotel itself before it closes its doors again forever.

The novel is written from the perspectives of both Diana in 1926 and Joe in 2026, but there are also some chapters written from another character’s point of view – Cleo van der Meer, a young American woman who is one of the first guests at the Hotel Artemis. We don’t know at first how Cleo fits into the story, but everything becomes clear eventually! Although the plot is quite complex, it moves along at a fast pace and there are some clever twists, including a great one halfway through which I hadn’t seen coming at all. Hotels are always interesting settings, I think, and although the Artemis doesn’t really exist, I loved Alex Hay’s descriptions of it – he really captures the feel of what it may have been like to stay in a luxury hotel in the 1920s.

Like Hay’s previous two novels, The Housekeepers and The Queen of Fives, The Midnight Guests is unusual in that it focuses on the lives of criminals – people we would usually see as villains. Through the stories of Diana, her assistant Silas, and several of the other characters we see how easily people can drift into a life of crime and how difficult it can be for them to get out of it again. This is not a book to be taken too seriously, though, and is clearly intended to be fun and entertaining. It does all become quite far-fetched, particularly towards the end – with such a high body count that the remains found in the vault could be almost anyone’s! – but if you’ve read Hay’s other work you’ll have known what sort of book to expect anyway.

I don’t want to say too much more about this book as I don’t want to risk spoiling a story that relies so much on suspense and surprises. I enjoyed it and will be looking out for his next one.

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

The Agatha Christie Cure by Cathy Rentzenbrink

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If you’ve been following my blog for any length of time, you’ll have noticed that I read a lot of Agatha Christie books! In fact, I’ve now read most of her work and only have a few more novels and some short story collections left to read. It’s taken me many years to get this far, though, and I’ve been reading the books in a very haphazard way, picking them up in no particular order as I come across them or to fit the monthly themes for the Read Christie challenge. In The Agatha Christie Cure, Cathy Rentzenbrink describes her own journey through Christie’s work, which is much more structured than mine!

Rentzenbrink’s project begins at Christmas. She’s feeling tired and miserable – she and her husband, Erwyn, are considering separating; their son Matt is unhappy at school; and because of the Christmas holidays, Cathy has none of her usual work activities to keep herself occupied. Reading all of Agatha Christie’s books in the order they were published seems like the perfect distraction – a way to escape from real life for a while and also a fascinating opportunity to watch the 20th century unfold through Christie’s eyes. Deciding to start immediately, she gets into a warm bath, picks up The Mysterious Affair at Styles, and begins.

The Agatha Christie Cure incorporates a lot. There are discussions of Christie’s novels (usually quite brief but sometimes a whole chapter devoted to one book); other sections take the form of a memoir, with Rentzenbrink talking about her personal life, her family and her relationship with Christie; and we also learn a lot about Christie herself, drawing on her own autobiography, with a focus on her sudden disappearance for several days in December 1926. There’s a good balance between these three different elements of the book, with some crossover between them, for example when Cathy looks for parallels between her own life and Christie’s. I particularly enjoyed Rentzenbrink’s interactions with her son, Matt, discussing Christie’s books with him and sometimes reading or listening to them together. Despite his problems at school, Matt is an intelligent, observant boy and often picks up on details in the books that his mother has missed.

You may be wondering about spoilers. Unfortunately, I thought they were handled quite inconsistently throughout the book. In the chapter on The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, for example, Rentzenbrink provides a spoiler warning before going on to discuss the solution to the mystery, but later in the book she casually names the culprit from Roger Ackroyd again without repeating the spoiler warning. Because I’ve already read so much of Christie’s work, I mostly felt safe (although I skipped over the sections on the few books I still haven’t read, such as Elephants Can Remember and Curtain) but this could be more of a problem for readers who’ve read less Christie than I have.

I’ve often wished that I had tried to read Christie’s novels in order from the beginning as it sounds like such an interesting, rewarding approach to an author’s work. Not only can you watch the author grow and develop with each book, but when their work spans several decades, as Christie’s does, you can also look out for hints of social and cultural change and technological advancement. Of course, there can also be some disadvantages to reading in order – as Rentzenbrink discovers, most of Christie’s better books were written earlier in her career and the later ones tend to be weaker. Maybe my random approach is better after all, as it provides more variety and keeps things fresh.

I found The Agatha Christie Cure very enjoyable, but if you’re just beginning your own Christie journey (or haven’t started yet) then it would probably be wise to wait until you’ve read more of her books. Definitely read The Murder of Roger Ackroyd first!

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

Top Ten Tuesday: 10 Books I’ve read from independent publishers

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This week’s topic for Top Ten Tuesday (hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl) is: “Indie Freebie (This topic encompasses a lot: your favorite indie bookstores, indie books, indie authors, indie publishers/presses, indie books on your to-read list, indie authors I read before they became traditionally published, etc.)”

Here are ten books I’ve read that have all been published by different independent publishers. I enjoyed and can recommend all of these! I’ve linked to both my review and the publisher’s website.

1. Canongate Books – Restless Dolly Maunder by Kate Grenville

2. Fitzcarraldo Editions – The Tower by Thea Lenarduzzi

3. Fairlight Books – Woman in Blue by Douglas Bruton

4. Moonstone Press – The Undetective by Bruce Graeme

5. Dean Street Press – The Black Cabinet by Patricia Wentworth

6. Espresso Publishing – The Blind Woman of Sorrento by Francesco Mastriani

7. Boldwood Books – The Inn at Penglas Cove by Lauren Westwood

8. Pushkin Press – She Walks at Night by Seishi Yokomizo

9. British Library – Deadly Dolls: Midnight Tales of Uncanny Playthings

10. Faber & Faber – Uncle Paul by Celia Fremlin

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Have you read any of these books or anything else from these indie publishers?

Cold Sunset by William Boyd

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This is the third of William Boyd’s novels featuring travel writer turned spy Gabriel Dax. If you haven’t read the first two, Gabriel’s Moon and The Predicament, I highly recommend you do so as it will make this book much easier to follow – and they are both excellent books in their own right, so you won’t regret it.

Cold Sunset opens in 1964 with Gabriel in California where he has been instructed by MI6 to make contact with poet Francis Falkner who says he suspects his former Bletchley Park colleague, Angus Fairford, of passing information to the Russians during the war. As always, Gabriel feels uncomfortable with this kind of task and would prefer to spend his time in America researching his new book, but by now he’s so deeply entangled with his double life and the requests of his M16 handler Faith Green that he doesn’t know how to get out of it.

After returning to England (and dealing with the reappearance of a villain from the previous book who comes looking for revenge), Gabriel finds himself sent on yet another mission, this time to Russia to help exfiltrate Kit Caldwell, a triple agent who is trapped in Moscow. Gabriel has successfully managed to convince Russia’s KGB that he himself is a secret agent working for them but how much longer will he be able to keep up this pretence?

Since starting this series I’ve been particularly intrigued by Gabriel’s relationship with Faith Green. Her true motives have never been clear: Gabriel is infatuated with her, but does she really have feelings for him or is she just using him for her own purposes? I’ve never trusted her at all but Gabriel seems to trust her completely, which is quite frustrating! Even when slight doubts creep into his mind, he never acts on them. However, Boyd does a great job of keeping us wondering exactly what she’s up to and whether she’s really the person Gabriel thinks she is. I’d hoped for some answers to my questions in this book, as I believed it would be the last one – although now I’m not so sure.

Another thing I love about these books is the range of interesting locations Gabriel visits. The settings for the previous books included the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Guatemala and Berlin; in this one, he finally makes his long-awaited trip to Russia, where the novel’s most dramatic scenes take place, and there’s also a section set on a Greek island. Although Gabriel finds that his travel writing usually has to take second place to his spying, we do still hear a lot about the books he’s working on and they actually sound fascinating – I wish they were real! His current project is On the Beaten Track, which looks at famous tourist attractions from unusual perspectives, and his next book, The Job, will explore people in different countries working in the same three basic jobs.

As for William Boyd’s own next book, who knows? This has been marketed as a trilogy but it ended on a bit of a cliffhanger, with some key plot points still unresolved. Maybe we’re supposed to draw our own conclusions or maybe the door has been left open for more Gabriel Dax novels – if so I will definitely be reading them.

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

Six Degrees of Separation: From The Matchbox Girl to Ace, King, Knave

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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 Kate has said that we should start with either our book group’s current read or the book we’re currently reading. I’m not in a book group so it has to be the latter for me. I actually put this chain together in the last week of August (I like to prepare it in advance), so I used the book I was reading at that time, which was The Matchbox Girl by Alice Jolly.

The Matchbox Girl won this year’s Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction. It’s set in Nazi controlled Vienna and is narrated by Adelheid Brunner, a girl with autism who collects matchboxes.

I’m using collections as my first link. The Collector of Dying Breaths by MJ Rose (1) is set in the 16th century at the court of Catherine de’ Medici and follows a perfumer who believes he can capture a person’s dying breath in a bottle and use it to reanimate their soul. An interesting and unusual book, but it’s the sixth in a series and I think I really needed to have read the others first.

The author of my next book shares a name with the previous one: she’s Rose Tremain, whose novel Restoration (2) was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1989. It’s another historical novel, this time set at the court of Charles II, where physician Robert Merivel comes to the king’s attention after tending to his spaniels and later becomes embroiled in his love affairs. I enjoyed the book but preferred the sequel.

The winner of that same year’s Booker Prize was The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro (3). I loved this book, which is narrated by an elderly butler, Stevens, reminiscing about his career in the service of Lord Darlington of Darlington Hall. Stevens is played by Anthony Hopkins in the 1993 adaptation.

One of Hopkins’ earliest roles was Richard the Lionheart in The Lion in Winter. Katharine Hepburn won an Oscar for the same film for her portrayal of Richard’s mother, Eleanor of Aquitaine. Eleanor’s story has been told in many novels, including The Summer Queen by Elizabeth Chadwick (4), the first part of an excellent trilogy taking us through the whole of Eleanor’s life.

The Queen of Fives by Alex Hay (5) shares a word in the title – but this time, it’s not about a real queen. The ‘Queen of Fives’ is a title given to Quinn Le Blanc, the leader of a London network of con artists. This was an entertaining read and I’ve actually just finished Alex Hay’s new one, The Midnight Guests, which was also fun.

My final link is to another book with playing cards on the cover. Ace, King, Knave by Maria McCann (6) is also a similar sort of novel, with two young women becoming embroiled in a world of thieves, pickpockets, gamblers and grave robbers. I really enjoyed this book but had forgotten all about it until putting this chain together!

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And that’s my chain for September! My links have included: collectors, the name Rose, the 1989 Booker Prize, Anthony Hopkins, the word Queen and playing cards.

In October we’ll be starting with Life of M by Rachel Cusk.

The Heiress of Northanger Abbey by Nancy Bilyeau

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Although I like Jane Austen’s novels, I’ve never had much interest in reading any of the many sequels, prequels or retellings written by other authors. However, I’ve read and enjoyed all of Nancy Bilyeau’s other books, so was happy to give this one a chance. As the title suggests, it’s inspired by Northanger Abbey, not my favourite Austen novel (that would be Persuasion), but one that I found entertaining and amusing. Those of you who have read it will remember that the heroine, Catherine Morland, is obsessed with Gothic novels; The Heiress of Northanger Abbey pays tribute to this with plenty of Gothic touches of its own!

The novel opens twenty-two years after the events of Northanger Abbey. Catherine has settled into married life as the wife of clergyman Henry Tilney and they have two daughters, Phoebe and Susan. Seventeen-year-old Phoebe, the eldest, is away from home accompanying her uncle and aunt, Frederick and Aurelia Tilney, who have gone to Bath to take the healing waters. Catherine is aware that as Frederick and Aurelia have no children of their own, they are considering making Phoebe their heiress, which means she would eventually inherit Northanger Abbey. However, in the 19th century being an heiress can be dangerous – as Catherine herself discovered twenty-two years earlier when a misunderstanding made her the target of fortune hunters John and Isabella Thorpe.

Catherine’s sister-in-law Eleanor Granville has come to visit for a few days with her children and Catherine offers to read Phoebe’s latest letter from Bath to them. She’s horrified when Phoebe mentions that the Thorpes are in Bath and that John Thorpe has suggested Phoebe go out riding with his son, Jack. Have Isabella and John set their sights on Phoebe and her possible fortune this time? Leaving eleven-year-old Susan in Eleanor’s care, Catherine heads straight for Bath to investigate – but is she right to distrust the Thorpes or is she just letting her imagination run wild again?

I really enjoyed this book, despite my usual aversion to Austen sequels. If you’ve never read Northanger Abbey, I don’t think that would be a problem at all; Bilyeau doesn’t just assume that you’ve read it and provides enough background information to make it easy to follow what’s happening and to understand Catherine’s history with the Thorpes. The writing style and use of language aren’t exact imitations of Austen’s, but still feel appropriate for the time period and the book can easily be read as an entertaining novel in its own right.

I loved the way we are kept guessing, at least for a while, about whether Catherine is correct about the Thorpes and Phoebe really is the target of their schemes or whether Catherine is judging them based on their actions all those years ago rather than the people they are now. I had my opinion and was proved right, but the story could have gone in different directions and been just as interesting. My favourite thing about the book, though, was the way Bilyeau uses Gothic elements to create suspense and atmosphere: a beautiful heiress who is (possibly) in danger; a mysterious villain; a lonely house on the moors; noises at night; and plenty of discussion of various Gothic novels, particularly John Polidori’s The Vampyre, published the year before the book is set.

My favourite Nancy Bilyeau novels are still the Genevieve Planché thrillers (beginning with The Blue), but this one was also very enjoyable and I’m happy to recommend it, whether or not you’re an Austen fan.

Thanks to the author for providing a copy of this book for review.

I’m linking this to RIPXXI hosted by @perilreaders