Top Ten Tuesday: Characters named after flowers

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This week’s topic for Top Ten Tuesday (hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl) is: “May Flowers (This is a companion to the April Showers topic from last month. Interpret however you’d like: books with flowers on the cover, colorful covers, books set in springtime, books where flowers/plants are a common theme, titles with flower names in them, characters named after flowers, covers that are as pretty as flowers, books featuring gardens, etc.)”

There were lots of possible options this week! I’ve previously listed books with flowers in the titles, so this time I decided to go with characters named after flowers.

1. Lily by Rose Tremain is a dark novel about a young woman, Lily Mortimer, accused of murder in Victorian London.

2. Daisy Muir in A Pink Front Door by Stella Gibbons is one of those people who always finds herself trying to solve other people’s problems!

3. A Single Thread by Tracy Chevalier tells the story of Violet Speedwell, a single woman whose fiancé was killed in the First World War.

4. Heather Badcock is poisoned during a party in Agatha Christie’s The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side and it’s up to Miss Marple to find the murderer!

5. Murder at Gulls Nest by Jess Kidd is a 1950s seaside mystery and features a puppeteer, Professor Poppy, who runs a Punch and Judy show.

6. Not the name of a specific flower, but flowers in general – Flora is one of the two children (the other being her brother Miles) who appear in Henry James’ classic Gothic novella The Turn of the Screw.

7. The Doll Factory by Elizabeth Macneal has two characters with flowery names – Iris Whittle and her sister Rose, who both work at Mrs Salter’s Doll Emporium, painting faces on china dolls.

8. In The Key in the Lock by Beth Underdown, Ivy Boscawen is trying to come to terms with the death of her son in the trenches of the Western Front, bringing back memories of another boy who died under suspicious circumstances thirty years earlier.

9. I loved The Ghost Writer by John Harwood, about a man who discovers a collection of ghost stories written by his great-grandmother, Viola Hatherley. It seems to be out of print now, which is a shame.

10. One of my favourite books as a child, Watership Down by Richard Adams, features several rabbits named after flowers, including Dandelion and Bluebell.

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Have you read any of these books? Which other characters with flowery names can you think of?

Vile Lady Villains by Danai Christopoulou

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Literature is full of villains, many of them women. Sometimes they are based on real people and sometimes they are purely fictional. Sometimes their reputations for villainy are deserved and sometimes they’re not. But what would happen if two female villains from two very different works of literature crossed paths, got to know each other and worked together to write new endings to their stories? This is what Danai Christopoulou sets out to explore in Vile Lady Villains.

Our first lady villain is Lady Macbeth. We meet her after she and her husband have carried out their plot to murder King Duncan and she is trying to wash the blood from her hands. She asks the three witches for help and is given a potion to drink, but it doesn’t have the effect she hopes for – instead of removing her burden of guilt, it transports her to an endless corridor lined with doors. Drawn to one with a bloodstained handle to match her bloodstained hand, she opens it and finds herself in a room where another murder has just taken place…

Klytemnestra has just killed her husband, Agamemnon, and is standing over his dead body. The murder was revenge for the death of their daughter, Iphigenia, whom Agamemnon sacrificed in return for winds to sail to the Trojan War, and for bringing his concubine Cassandra home with him. Suddenly a door in the wall appears and a woman dressed in black stumbles onto the scene of the crime…

This is how Christopoulou brings together Lady Macbeth and Klytemnestra (spelled with a K in the book rather than the more common C), two women from different times and different worlds. Together they become lost in a realm of stories, pursued by a mysterious goddess known as the Shepherd, or the Mistress of the House of Books. The Shepherd holds the keys to reopen their doors, but the more time our two villains spend together the more they begin to question whether they really want to return to their own stories and if so, is there anything they can do to redeem themselves first?

This is a difficult book to classify – it’s fantasy and also metafiction; there’s an element of historical fiction where Lady Macbeth’s story intersects with the real woman who inspired her character, Gruoch; there’s Greek mythology with Klytemnestra’s storyline; and there’s a thread of romance running through the novel as well. To be honest, although I could tell from the blurb that this would be an unusual story, I wasn’t really prepared for quite how bizarre it actually was. I enjoyed the beginning and the end but felt lost for a while in the middle. Also, the two women are referred to throughout the book by nicknames they give each other: Lady Macbeth becomes Anassa (the ancient Greek word for queen) and Klytemnestra becomes Claret, a reference to the colour of blood. I found this unnecessarily confusing, although I understand the thinking behind the two women wanting to choose their own names rather than the ones given to them by their creators.

The book is beautifully written, if a bit too flowery at times, which is particularly impressive as Christopoulou explains in her acknowledgements the extra challenges she faced due to English not being her first language. She also gets around the problem of an Ancient Greek woman and an 11th century Scottish woman being able to understand each other by making it one of the rules of the realm of stories, under the control of the three witches (who appear to Claret as the Three Fates, or Moirai). I don’t think it’s essential to have any knowledge of either Shakespeare or mythology, but it certainly helps! This is a very imaginative book with a lot of layers and a lot going on; ultimately it was just a bit too strange for me, but I’m sure the right reader will love it.

Thanks to Michael Joseph, Penguin Random House for providing a copy of this book for review via NetGalley.

The Fourth Queen by Nicola Cornick

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The title of Nicola Cornick’s latest novel, The Fourth Queen, refers, as you may have guessed, to the fourth wife of Henry VIII – Anne of Cleves. However, although she does feature in the book, this is really the story of a fictional character, Marris North, the former prioress of Winterhill Priory, who loses her home and her position in 1539 due to the dissolution of the monasteries. When Marris falls in love with Sir William Sharington, the commissioner sent to oversee the closure of the priory, he finds new roles for Marris and her sisters at court in the household of the new Queen Anne (called Anna in the book). Sadly, Anna’s marriage is not a success and when she finds herself in trouble she approaches Marris for help in concealing a secret that could put them both in danger.

Like all the other Nicola Cornick novels I’ve read, this one also has a present day storyline and in this case it follows Jenna Bergin, a woman in her thirties who owns a bookshop in Wantage, not far from Winterhill Hall and the ruined priory. For as long as she can remember, Jenna has been able to remember a former life as Marris North, while her younger sister, Bree, also believes she is the reincarnation of Marris’s sister, Bridget. When Jenna learns that an archaeological dig is taking place at Winterhill, she becomes concerned that Anna’s secret is going to be uncovered after all these years – and she decides that she’ll do whatever it takes to stop that from happening.

I liked the portrayal of Anne of Cleves in this book; of all Henry VIII’s wives, she’s the one who tends to get the least attention, which is understandable as their marriage only lasted a few months before being annulled and was less dramatic than some of the others. She’s shown here as a kind-hearted, loyal, sensible woman who can also be naïve and unworldly at times. Her big secret is something that was rumoured at the time but there’s no evidence that it actually happened; if true, it could have changed history so it’s an interesting idea to explore in a novel. I also liked Marris but found her less convincing as a character as she seemed to adapt far too quickly to the loss of the priory and no longer being a nun. In case you’re wondering, Winterhill Priory never existed but is based on Lacock Abbey in Wiltshire, which really was dissolved in 1539 and bought by Sir William Sharington.

In the modern day, Jenna shares a lot of Marris’s character traits and her relationship with Bree mirrors the one between Marris and Bridget. I haven’t mentioned yet that there’s a third sister: Molly, or Rose as she was in her former life. Although Molly is aware of her reincarnation, she doesn’t embrace it the way her sisters do and when you see how her story plays out, both as her present and past self, it’s easy to understand why. There are one or two other characters who also existed in both timelines, but I won’t give any more details as I don’t want to spoil too much (although you’ll probably guess one of them almost as soon as they appear). If you’re someone who doesn’t believe in reincarnation, you’ll need to just suspend your disbelief here and not ask too many questions!

This isn’t one of my favourite Nicola Cornick books, but when you’ve read a lot of an author’s books (this is my eighth) it’s inevitable that you’ll like some more than others. I did enjoy it, particularly the historical sections, and will be looking out for her next one.

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

Dead Men Don’t Ski by Patricia Moyes

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This is the first in a series of mysteries published between 1959 and 1993 and featuring Inspector Henry Tibbett. I had never come across them, or their author Patricia Moyes, until now, but I really enjoyed this one and will definitely be looking for more.

Dead Men Don’t Ski begins with Henry Tibbett and his wife, Emmy, setting off on a skiing trip to Italy. It’s a much-needed holiday for the two of them, but Henry is also planning to mix business with pleasure. The hotel they’ll be staying at in Santa Chiara is suspected of being the centre of operations of a ring of drug smugglers and Henry has been asked by Scotland Yard to work with the local Italian police to find out who the culprits are. Of course, he doesn’t admit this to his fellow guests as he wants them to speak and act freely around him. These guests include a party of young English tourists – Jimmy, Roger and Caro; a retired military man, Colonel Buckfast and his wife; a beautiful Italian baroness and her possessive Austrian husband; and a German couple with their daughter and her prospective husband, as well as an assortment of hotel staff, skiing instructors and local residents.

At first, Henry and Emmy manage to blend in with everyone else, enjoying the scenery, attending skiing lessons and relaxing around the hotel. But when one of the guests boards the ski lift at the top of the mountain and is found dead by the time he reaches the bottom, Henry’s detective skills are needed to solve the crime and he will no longer be able to stay undercover.

This is an entertaining novel with a beautiful setting. Santa Chiara is described as a small village close to Chiusa near the border of Italy and Austria and drawing from the cultures of both countries. There are lovely descriptions of snow-covered peaks and valleys, pine trees and pink rock, Alpine houses with wooden balconies – and the Bella Vista Hotel perched high in the mountains. I was reminded of another ski resort mystery, Death in Kashmir by M.M. Kaye, although I thought that book was darker than this one.

I liked Henry Tibbett and it was also good to see so much of Emmy. Often the detective’s wife is kept very much in the background, maybe popping up now and then to make a cup of tea or answer the phone, but in this book Emmy is present from beginning to end. It would have been nice to see her play a bigger role in helping to actually solve the mystery, but maybe she will in one of the later books in the series. The other characters are also interesting; with such a mix of different nationalities you do need to be prepared for some slightly dated attitudes, but no worse than in most other books of this period. I was particularly drawn to Maria-Pia, the Baroness, and her cold, controlling husband Hermann, who turns out to have hidden depths.

As for the mystery itself, it’s a good one with plenty of suspects, although my heart sank when Spezzi, the Italian policeman working with Henry, draws up a detailed timetable of events, which is reproduced in the book. I find mysteries that focus on timings and alibis to be tedious and difficult to follow, so I was pleased that this book didn’t dwell too much on that after all – it was just part of Spezzi’s approach to crime solving and although his timetable did prove very useful, the interviews he and Henry conduct with the witnesses and suspects were just as important.

The first two books in this series are available now in attractive new editions from Farrago Books and with the next two advertised for publication later this year I hope that means they’ll be reissuing the whole series. I suspect it’s probably not essential to read them in order but I’m planning to try the second one, The Sunken Sailor, soon.

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

The Shapeshifter’s Daughter by Sally Magnusson

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I’ve read a lot of Greek mythology retellings but only one or two Norse ones, so I was curious about Sally Magnusson’s most recent novel, The Shapeshifter’s Daughter, described as a reimagining of the story of Hel of the Underworld. I’ve read all of Magnusson’s previous books and mostly enjoyed them; I hoped this would be another good one!

Hel is one of the three children of the Norse god Loki (the shapeshifter of the title) and Angrboda, a frost giant. She grows up in Utgard – a world on the peripheries of Asgard, home of the gods, and Mitgard, land of the humans – where she lives happily with her brother and sister, a wolf and a serpent, until Odin sends his gods to hunt them down and bring them to him. Hel finds herself sent by Odin to rule over the icy realm of Niflheim, where she welcomes the souls of the dead into the underworld – until one day she is drawn back to the surface by the memory of one of the dead she has guided.

Meanwhile, in the modern day, we meet Helen Firth, a woman in her fifties who has been diagnosed with terminal cancer. Helen has led a lonely, troubled life since the death of her father when she was a teenager. Believing that nobody cares about her, she decides to return to Orkney, her childhood home, so she can die on her own terms. However, she hadn’t expected to be reacquainted with an old friend, Thorfinn Coffin, who reminds her that maybe she’s not completely alone in the world after all.

Not only do our two main characters have similar names, their stories also mirror each other in several other ways and eventually begin to intersect. I couldn’t help thinking, though, that Helen’s story on its own would have been enough to form a compelling novel. Her life has clearly been a sad and isolated one, so I found her relationship with Thorfinn very moving, as well as bittersweet coming when she knows she only has a short time left to live. Magnusson writes quite sensitively on the topics of loneliness, bereavement and healing and I was completely drawn into Helen’s sections of the novel.

The Norse myth parts of the book were much harder for me to connect with. Hel, Loki and the others didn’t seem ‘real’ and I felt that I just watching their story unfold from a distance. I had similar feelings about A.S. Byatt’s Ragnarok (based on the same myths) and I remember in her author’s note Byatt said that characters in myths don’t have personalities the way characters in novels do – they only have attributes. Maybe that’s what Magnusson was trying to show here as well, but if so it didn’t really work for me and I would have been happy just to read a whole book about Helen and Thorfinn!

I’ll be interested to see what Sally Magnusson writes next, as her books so far have covered such a range of different subjects – although always with a Scottish or Nordic connection. And if you can recommend any good Norse myth retellings, I’d love to hear about them!

Six Degrees of Separation: From Wild Dark Shore to This Sweet Sickness

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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 Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy, which was longlisted for this year’s Women’s Prize for Fiction.

I haven’t read it but here’s what it’s about:

Dominic Salt and his three children are caretakers of Shearwater, a tiny weather-lashed island that is home to the world’s largest seed bank. As Shearwater risks being lost to rising sea levels, the island’s researchers have fled, and only the Salts remain.

Until, during the worst storm in living memory, a stranger washes ashore. The family nurse the woman, Rowan, back to strength, but it seems she isn’t telling the whole truth about why she’s there. And when Rowan stumbles upon sabotaged radios and a recently dug grave, she realises that she’s not the only one on the island with a secret.

A novel of breathtaking twists and dizzying beauty, Wild Dark Shore is about the impossible choices we make to protect the people we love.

My first thought was to link to a book set on an island, but I’m sure I’ve done that a few times before, so I went with a simple link to a book with Dark in the title instead. The Dark (1) is the fifth book in Sharon Bolton’s Lacey Flint series and begins with Lacey, who works for the Metropolitan Police Marine Unit, becoming caught up in a terrorist attack planned by a new group calling themselves MenMatter.

Another book that’s the fifth in a series is The Prime Minister by Anthony Trollope (2). It’s part of the Palliser series and in this book we see our old friend Plantagenet Palliser become Prime Minister at last while in another subplot, we follow lawyer’s daughter Emily Wharton who has fallen in love with the book’s villain, Ferdinand Lopez. I really need to pick up the final book in the series soon.

The next link is quite an obvious one – another novel about a Prime Minister – this time a real one! Precipice by Robert Harris (3) tells the story of Herbert Henry Asquith who was in power from 1908 to 1916. The book focuses on his relationship with the socialite Venetia Stanley and the way he handled the early stages of the First World War. It’s a fascinating novel from a political history point of view, although I didn’t find it as gripping as some of his other books.

Penitence by Kristin Koval (4) also has a one-word, nine-letter title beginning with P and ending with E. Set in a Colorado ski resort, it takes as its starting point the murder of a teenage boy by his own sister and goes on to explore the laws surrounding juvenile crimes, as well as raising questions about blame and forgiveness.

Another crime novel set in a ski resort is Dead Men Don’t Ski by Patricia Moyes (5). I’ve just finished reading this one so haven’t written a review yet. It was published in 1959 and is the first of many novels Moyes wrote featuring Inspector Henry Tibbett. In this one, Tibbett goes on a skiing trip to Italy with his wife and is drawn into solving the murder of a man who appears to have been shot dead on the ski lift. I enjoyed this book and will be reading more of them!

An author who shares a name with Patricia Moyes is Patricia Highsmith. I’ve only read two of her books and have used Strangers on a Train in a previous chain, so my link here is to This Sweet Sickness (6). This unsettling novel follows the double life of a man who refuses to accept that his relationship with the woman he loves is over.

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And that’s my chain for May! My links have included: the word Dark, fifth books in a series, Prime Ministers, one word titles beginning with P, ski resorts and authors called Patricia.

Next month we’ll be starting with a book by Austrian author Stefan Zweig – The Post-Office Girl

My Commonplace Book: April 2026

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

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

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But it was only in epic tragedies that gloom was unrelieved. In real life, tragedy and comedy were so intermingled that when one was most wretched ridiculous things happened to make one laugh in spite of oneself.

A Civil Contract by Georgette Heyer (1961)

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For that matter, why would anyone bother to read a mystery novel if they had any doubts about the man who was leading them to a solution? It’s a simple rule. Detectives have to be infallible. If not, readers will never trust them again.

A Deadly Episode by Anthony Horowitz (2026)

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Clytemnestra, by John Collier, 1882

‘Danger, yes, always,’ the goddess says. ‘Danger and doom and death, but also victory. It might be hard to tell the four apart, from where you stand. An ant caught on a thread cannot discern the loom’s grander design – yet it can change the pattern with its presence.’

Vile Lady Villains by Danai Christopoulou (2026)

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“One’s prime is elusive. You little girls, when you grow up, must be on the alert to recognise your prime at whatever time of your life it may occur. You must then live it to the full.”

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark (1961)

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The idea of the inexplicable meant nothing to them; they did not need it. So much that was inexplicable – for example, the phases of the moon – lay around them that they simply accepted it as part of their lives.

Tales from Watership Down by Richard Adams (1996)

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Pamela ‘Pixie’ Colman Smith from the October 1912 issue of The Craftsman magazine.

A surge of joy flows through me. I realise how much I’ve wanted someone else to know. Love feels real with a witness.

Pixie by Jill Dawson (2026)

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Only the tone of his voice had remained distinct and clear within her…and a voice is to the blind what artificial light is to other people: it is sufficient to detach in a certain manner the shadows and the reliefs of an individual’s soul.

The Blind Woman of Sorrento by Francesco Mastriani (1852)

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“I asked you to solve my problem for me,” said Maria-Pia, slowly. “That was a foolish thing to do. Nobody can solve problems for other people.”

Dead Men Don’t Ski by Patricia Moyes (1959)

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Human happiness is rarely in the best of circumstances without shadows, and an almost pure happiness can be a terror to itself.

The Black Prince by Iris Murdoch (1973)

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Favourite books read in April:

A Deadly Episode, The Blind Woman of Sorrento and Pixie

Authors read for the first time in April:

Muriel Spark, Danai Christopoulou, Francesco Mastriani, Patricia Moyes

Places visited in my April reading:

England, Scotland, US, Jamaica, Italy

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Reading notes: I started the month with two books for 1961 Club – I enjoyed the Heyer and although I didn’t love my first experience with Muriel Spark, I do intend to try more of her books. The rest of my April reading consisted of some NetGalley review copies, a lost Italian classic, a sequel to a childhood favourite and the Iris Murdoch novel I had started to read in March! In May (can you believe it’s May already?) I’ll be joining in with the Read Christie challenge which I’ve neglected for the last few months, but otherwise I don’t have many plans.

How was your April? What will you be reading in May?