The Wandering Queen by Claire Heywood

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Dido, Queen of Carthage, also known as Elissa, is a character who has always interested me, particularly since I had the chance to visit Carthage myself during a trip to Tunisia in 2004. The most famous depiction of Dido is obviously in Virgil’s epic poem, the Aeneid, but in this new retelling, Claire Heywood brings her to the forefront of the story and gives her a voice of her own.

The Wandering Queen begins in Tyre with the young Elissa being summoned by her father, the King of Tyre, who believes he is dying and is composing his will. Elissa has a close relationship with her father, who has instilled in her the qualities he considers important in a future queen – fairness, honesty and a desire to see justice done. His son, Pygmalion, Elissa’s half-brother, is still just a young child, so the king decrees that Elissa and Pygmalion will succeed him as joint rulers. Not everyone at court is pleased about that, however, and when the king dies and the will is read, Elissa is shocked to find that her name is not even mentioned – a new will has been forged and Pygmalion will rule alone.

At first, Elissa tries to guide her brother, but the influence of the men around him is too strong. As the years go by and both Elissa and her husband Zakarbaal find themselves targets of Pygmalion’s cruelty, Elissa decides that the only option left open to her is to flee Tyre altogether and start a new life somewhere else. The story of her time in Tyre alternates throughout the novel with the story of the older Elissa, now known as Dido, as she settles in Carthage and encounters a Trojan called Aeneas whose ship has been blown off course by a storm…

This is the first book I’ve read by Claire Heywood and I was very impressed. It’s well written and Heywood made me really care about the characters and connect with them on a personal level, something that doesn’t always happen when I read mythology retellings. I also liked the way she keeps this a very human story, not introducing supernatural elements or having gods and goddesses intervening and controlling Dido’s fate. It reminded me of Babylonia by Costanza Casati, which is written in a similar way and which I also enjoyed.

I think I would have preferred a chronological format, but having said that, the way the two storylines were intertwined worked well, with the use of Dido’s two names helping to distinguish between the young Elissa and the queen she would become. The portrayal of Aeneas is fair and balanced; he is shown as having some good qualities, which explains why Dido falls in love with him, but there are also signs from the beginning that their romance is probably doomed (such as Aeneas’s account of abandoning his wife, Creusa, during the fall of Troy, his growing sense of pride causing him to become increasingly dissatisfied with taking second place to Dido in the hierarchy of Carthage, and his talk of wanting to visit Italy).

There are two different endings to Dido’s story suggested by the two main sources, Virgil and Justinus, but the way Claire Heywood chooses to end her story here is not quite the same as either of those. I won’t say any more about that as I wouldn’t want to spoil it! In her author’s note, Heywood also explains some of the other choices she made in the book, including using the name Zakarbaal for Elissa’s husband rather than the usual Sychaeus or Acerbus and moving the setting back to the Late Bronze Age to make the timelines work.

I really enjoyed The Wandering Queen and will have to look for Claire Heywood’s previous two books. Also, if anyone can recommend any other retellings of Dido’s story, I would love to hear about them.

Thanks to Hodder & Stoughton for providing a copy of this book for review via NetGalley.

The Final Problem by Arturo Pérez-Reverte – #ReadIndies

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Translated by Frances Riddle

It’s June 1960 and actor Ormond Basil has found himself trapped on the small island of Utakos, near Corfu. He has been invited to join a film director on his yacht to discuss a new project, but stormy weather means they are unable to leave the island until conditions improve. Luckily, there’s a hotel on Utakos where they and a small group of other guests and staff can take shelter until the storm has passed. However, there are no police on the island, so when one of the guests, British tourist Edith Manders, is found dead under suspicious circumstances, it’s up to the others to investigate until help can arrive.

Because Ormond Basil famously played the part of Sherlock Holmes on screen many times, he’s nominated to lead the investigation. No matter how much he explains that he’s only an actor and not really the great detective, everyone else insists that he must know more about solving mysteries than they do. And despite his protests, he does seem to know what he’s doing. With one of the other guests, Spanish crime author Paco Foxá, as his Watson, Basil begins to look for clues and question the suspects – but can he find the killer before another death takes place?

You may have guessed that Ormond Basil is closely based on the real life actor Basil Rathbone, who is for many people the quintessential Sherlock Holmes. I’ve talked before about not liking the current trend for using real people as detectives, but this is slightly different as the character is semi-fictional which gives Pérez-Reverte more scope to have him say and do things that the real Basil may not have done. He’s so obviously supposed to be Basil Rathbone, though, that it seems a bit pointless to pretend that he’s not. Either just calling him Rathbone or creating a completely fictional character would have worked better for me.

The novel is well plotted and the locked room mystery has a solution which is clever without being overly complex. With only a small number of suspects due to the setting, I thought I had guessed who the murderer was, but I was wrong and there was a nice twist towards the end that I hadn’t seen coming. For all Basil’s insistence that he’s not the real Sherlock Holmes, he does turn out to be an excellent detective, with powers of observation and deduction almost as good as the character he played for all those years!

However, I felt that there was far too much name-dropping of other famous actors and directors Basil had worked with, and too many long discussions between Basil and Foxá on the subject of Sherlock Holmes, in which both of them quote constantly from the books and adaptations. This all became a bit tedious and detracted from the mystery. I had a similar problem with the other Pérez-Reverte novel I’ve read, The Dumas Club, in which we’re bombarded with references to Alexandre Dumas’ books, so maybe this is just the way he writes.

I’m not sure if The Final Problem is going to be left as a standalone or if it’s intended as the start of a series; I don’t know if I would want to read any further adventures for Ormond Basil, but I did enjoy this one overall because of the interesting murder mystery. This edition of the novel is available from Atlantic Books, translated into English from the original Spanish by Frances Riddle. As Atlantic Books is an independent publisher, I’m counting this towards Read Indies, hosted this month by Karen of Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings.

Top Ten Tuesday: Books for Armchair Travellers

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This week’s topic for Top Ten Tuesday (hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl) is: “Books for Armchair Travellers”

There are lots of ways I could have approached this topic, but the ten books I’ve chosen are set in places that I’ve never visited and probably never will. It was nice to have the opportunity to ‘see’ them through the pages of these books!

1. The Memory of Love by Aminatta Forna (Sierra Leone)

2. The English Girl by Katherine Webb (Oman)

3. Little Black Lies by Sharon Bolton (The Falkland Islands)

4. The Missing Sister by Dinah Jefferies (Myanmar)

5. The Gabriel Hounds by Mary Stewart (Syria and Lebanon)

6. The Predicament by William Boyd (Multiple locations including Guatemala)

7. And the Mountains Echoed by Khaled Hosseini (Afghanistan)

8. Death in Zanzibar by M.M. Kaye (Zanzibar)

9. Islands of Mercy by Rose Tremain (Borneo)

10. Scales of Gold by Dorothy Dunnett (Multiple locations including Mali and The Gambia)

~

Have you read any of these? And have you been to any of these places or, like me, are you only likely to visit them from your armchair?

Some thoughts on Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights (2026)

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I hadn’t intended to go and see Emerald Fennell’s new Wuthering Heights adaptation as I’d been put off by the trailer and the early reviews being almost universally negative, but I wasn’t doing much else yesterday and made a last minute decision to go, in the hope that it wouldn’t be as bad as it sounded!

Wuthering Heights is one of my favourite books and I’m under no misconceptions about it being a ‘romantic love story’, no matter how much the book and various film versions may have been marketed that way. I first read it when I was thirteen and I wasn’t particularly interested in reading romance novels at that age anyway, so I loved it for the dark, twisted, passionate Gothic novel it is. To me, it’s the perfect book and I would probably be critical of any adaptation that’s not completely faithful. I tried to go in with an open mind, although I knew it would be difficult.

There’s been a lot of criticism of the casting of Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff, due to him not being the ‘dark-skinned gypsy’ Emily Brontë describes (we don’t know exactly what his racial background is, but the general consensus is that he’s not white like Elordi). Interestingly, Fennell has cast Asian actors in the roles of Edgar Linton and Nelly Dean, taking away the whole idea of Heathcliff being looked down upon because of his skin colour. As for Edgar’s sister, Isabella, she’s reduced to a comedy character in this version, with a silly, childish voice (and there’s a strong implication that she’s actually enjoying the abuse she receives from Heathcliff). The biggest problem with the casting, though, at least for me personally, was 35-year-old Margot Robbie playing Cathy, a brown-haired teenager in the book. She was completely wrong for the part, with her age, her blonde hair and bright red dresses, all of which kept breaking any immersion in the story that I was starting to feel.

As usual, the whole second half of the book is missed out (so no younger Catherine, Linton Heathcliff or Hareton Earnshaw), eliminating some of the novel’s important themes and subplots. I don’t understand why it’s apparently so difficult to adapt the whole book – yes, there would have to be flashbacks, a framing story, shifting timelines etc, but surely that’s not impossible to deal with? In this version, there’s also no Mr Lockwood, which means we don’t get the famous ghost scene – and most inexplicably, no Hindley Earnshaw. Instead, the characteristics of Hindley and his (and Cathy’s) father, old Mr Earnshaw, are combined into one character, played wonderfully by Martin Clunes, who does a great job and is the star of the show, in my opinion! Leaving out Hindley, though, removes the whole storyline involving his rivalry with Heathcliff and later, Heathcliff’s scheme to take revenge.

Despite everything I’ve said, this wasn’t a bad way to pass a few hours on a cold, wet Sunday afternoon and I’m sure other people were probably enjoying it more than I was. The film does at least look great – beautiful cinematography, dramatic Yorkshire Dales scenery and dark and brooding interior sets. If you’ve seen it, let me know what you thought. I’m particularly curious to know whether it worked better for people who’ve never read the book or don’t love the book as much as I do.

The Killer Question by Janice Hallett

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I love Janice Hallett; her books have an unusual style and format that I know doesn’t work for everyone, but it does for me and I’ve enjoyed all of her adult novels so far. The Killer Question is another good one, this time with a plot revolving around one of the staples of British culture: the pub quiz.

Mal and Sue Eastwood have recently become landlords of a country pub called The Case is Altered (the name refers to a new piece of evidence that emerges in court and could change the outcome of a case). The pub is in a lonely location at the end of a road that leads nowhere and previous landlords have struggled to attract customers, but the Eastwoods are sure they can make a success of it. One of their plans is to start hosting a weekly quiz – Mal loves trivia and is looking forward to compiling his own sets of questions.

Mal’s Monday night quizzes prove popular and soon several teams are coming back week after week to join in. Some of them just see it as a chance to have fun with their friends, but others are much more competitive. Then, one night, a new team arrives, calling themselves The Shadow Knights, and they win the quiz with an almost perfect score. They win again the next week and the next, until Mal becomes convinced that they must be cheating – if only he could find a way to prove it. But soon Mal and Sue will have bigger things to worry about, because a man’s body has been pulled from the nearby river and the police have come to question them…

Like Hallett’s previous novels, this one is written entirely in the form of texts, emails, WhatsApp messages, transcriptions of conversations and other forms of media. Having read other reviews, this definitely seems to be something people either love or hate, and as her books are all written in the same way I think trying one or two of them should be enough to give you an idea of whether her style is for you or not. Personally I find it very clever, because only getting to know the characters through what they choose to reveal of themselves in a text or an email allows for all sorts of surprising twists and revelations. And the twists come one after another throughout the second half of this book, none of which I saw coming in advance!

Although there is a subplot set several years earlier, involving a kidnapping and a police investigation known as Operation Honeyguide, I found this book less complex than some of Hallett’s others so it could be a good place for new readers to start. I also loved the quiz element of the story, seeing how seriously some of the teams take their performances and the lengths they go to in their efforts to win. The arrival of the mysterious Shadow Knights causes a lot of disruption, with some of the existing players becoming angry and determined to beat them. There’s also a lot of humour; I particularly liked the WhatsApp group formed by Mal, Sue and the other local pub landlords, where they share one-star reviews posted by disgruntled customers!

I certainly won’t be giving this book a one-star review as I thought it was excellent – maybe slightly too long, but the format made it a quicker read than it would otherwise have been. I’m looking forward to her next book, The Silent Appeal, coming later this year.

The Tower by Thea Lenarduzzi – #ReadIndies

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This month Karen of Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings is hosting #ReadIndies, celebrating books from independent publishers. I’ve never read anything published by Fitzcarraldo Editions before, so this seemed a good opportunity to read one of their books.

The Tower is a difficult book to describe. It’s not quite fiction, but it doesn’t feel like non-fiction either. It’s a memoir but it’s also an essay and an ode to the power of storytelling. The book follows an author known only as ‘T.’ – presumably Thea Lenarduzzi herself – as she becomes obsessed with the story of a young woman, Annie, who developed tuberculosis in the early 20th century and, according to local legend, was locked away by her father in a tower specially built on the family estate. After living there in isolation for several years, she is said to have died from the disease and although the house has since been demolished, the tower still remains.

T. becomes completely fixated on Annie and her tragic life, determined to find out everything she can about her illness, her imprisonment and her death. She spends a lot of time researching the history of TB, its symptoms and the various treatments, also looking at the lives of famous sufferers such as the author Katherine Mansfield. She visits the now abandoned tower, speaks to historians and archivists and listens to tales told by local residents. All of this is covered in the first two sections of the book and I found most of it fascinating. T. goes off on a lot of lengthy tangents and meanders from one subject to another, but in general Annie’s story was very compelling…

Until, suddenly, we discover that everything we – and T. – thought we knew about Annie may not necessarily be completely accurate after all. In the third section of the book, Lenarduzzi switches from writing in the third person to the first person and becomes herself again, instead of a character known as T. This final section takes the form of a long discussion of storytelling, raising lots of intriguing questions. What is a story and who chooses how it should be told? What is it that draws us to certain stories and not others? As Lenarduzzi explains:

Perhaps for now I should simply say that we don’t always tell the story we want to tell. We can’t always choose our place in it, nor how it ends, or even if it does. That, reader, is the stuff of fiction.

The Tower, then, wasn’t quite what I expected, but it’s a book that surprised me several times and left me with a lot to think about at the end! Thea Lenarduzzi has written another book, Dandelions, inspired by her family history, which sounds equally interesting.

The House of Fallen Sisters by Louise Hare

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Louise Hare has written several historical novels set in various periods, but this is the first one I’ve read. I’ll probably be looking for her others as I enjoyed this one – it has an interesting setting and an engaging heroine and it explores a little-known episode from British history.

It’s December 1765 and Sukey Maynard is running away from home – home being Mrs Macauley’s brothel in Covent Garden. It used to be her mother’s place of work, until she died when Sukey was very young, and since then Sukey has been cared for by Mrs Macauley and her family. Now that she’s fourteen, her virginity is about to be auctioned off to the highest bidder and she’s decided to flee rather than stay and go through with it. Before she gets very far, she encounters a young man who has been badly beaten and wounded, and she helps him reach a doctor, who agrees to treat him. However, this delay means that Sukey finds herself captured and taken back to Mrs Macauley.

The rest of the novel follows Sukey after she returns to the brothel and prepares to face whatever life has in store for her. At first her position is better than she expected as she catches the eye of a wealthy client whom she hopes will become her ‘keeper’, but what will she do if he changes his mind? The lives of Sukey and the other girls in Mrs Macauley’s establishment are difficult, uncertain and often unpleasant, but Hare shows us how even in the bleakest of circumstances, small acts of friendship and kindness can make a big difference. Although Sukey makes some enemies, she also makes some good friends and I enjoyed watching her various relationships develop.

There’s a mystery element to the story, which unfolds as young women begin to go missing, both from Mrs Macauley’s house and from the surrounding area, thought to have been lured away by a mysterious figure known only as the Piper. We find out what’s happening to the women earlier than I expected, but this allows Hare to take the story in some interesting directions as Sukey and her friends look for revenge.

Another subplot revolves around Jonathan Strong, the young man Sukey rescues after he is beaten almost to death. Strong really existed and his story is a fascinating one as he was a slave whose owner brought him to London from Barbados and he became the subject of an important legal case regarding slavery and the abolitionist movement in Britain. Sukey herself is mixed race, which gives her an added interest in his fate, and she and her friends try to help Jonathan in any way they can throughout the book. William Sharp, the doctor who treats him, and his brother Granville Sharp are also real people. This is the first time I’ve read a novel in which the Sharps and Jonathan Strong appear, so I found that aspect of the story fascinating.

Although I’ve read other novels about women in Sukey’s position (I highly recommend Michel Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White and Elodie Harper’s The Wolf Den), the addition of the Jonathan Strong storyline made this one well worth reading as well. The book is published in the UK tomorrow, 12th February.

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