Classics Club Spin #46: The Result

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The result of the latest Classics Club Spin has been revealed today.

The idea of the Spin was to list twenty books from my Classics Club list, number them 1 to 20, and the number announced by the Classics Club represents the book I have to read before 3rd January 2027. The number that has been selected is…

4

And this means the book I need to read is…

A Town Like Alice by Nevil Shute

Jean Paget is just twenty years old and working in Malaya when the Japanese invasion begins.

When she is captured she joins a group of other European women and children whom the Japanese force to march for miles through the jungle – an experience that leads to the deaths of many.

Due to her courageous spirit and ability to speak Malay, Jean takes on the role of leader of the sorry gaggle of prisoners and many end up owing their lives to her indomitable spirit. While on the march, the group run into some Australian prisoners, one of whom, Joe Harman, helps them steal some food, and is horrifically punished by the Japanese as a result.

After the war, Jean tracks Joe down in Australia and together they begin to dream of surmounting the past and transforming his one-horse outback town into a thriving community like Alice Springs…

~

This isn’t one I was particularly hoping for, but I’m still happy with it as I’ve been wanting to read more Nevil Shute since enjoying Pied Piper a few years ago.

Have you read this one? What did you think of it?

Nonfiction Journeys: Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes by Robert Louis Stevenson #NovNov26 #ReadingScotland26 #RLSDay

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This week’s Nonfiction November topic is Nonfiction Journeys, hosted by Frances of Volatile Rune, who has set the following challenge:

This week choose a book that reflects a journey for its author/protagonist or for the reader or both. This can be a physical journey, an emotional, psychological or spiritual journey or a combination of these. Any nonfiction title that leaves its author/protagonist and/or reader in a different place at the end from the start point is good for this challenge.

I’ve just finished reading a nonfiction book which fits this theme perfectly – and this seems the appropriate day to post my review, as today is RLS Day, an annual celebration of Robert Louis Stevenson’s life and work which takes place on the anniversary of his birth. It’s also a title from my current Classics Club list, it’s a short book so counts for Novellas in November (short nonfiction is allowed, as well as fiction), and Stevenson is a Scottish author which also makes it ideal for Reading Scotland Month!

Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes was published in 1879 and describes Stevenson’s twelve day journey through the Cévennes mountains in southern France. Stevenson was in his twenties at the time and still financially dependent on his parents, so planned the trip hoping to gather material for a book that would establish him as an author and enable him to earn his own living. He also wanted the money so he could pursue his relationship with Fanny Van de Grift Osbourne, an American woman of whom his parents disapproved (and who would later become his wife).

Stevenson undertakes the journey alone, with only a donkey for company. Her name is Modestine and he purchases her to carry his hiking equipment, which includes a very large and cumbersome sleeping bag. Modestine proves to be stubborn and temperamental, often walking very slowly, going round in circles or refusing to move at all, which is a constant source of frustration for Stevenson. Although he finds that by the end of the journey he’s sorry to part with her, there are times when he and others don’t treat her very well, so it’s worth being aware of that before you start.

As you would expect from a travel book, there are lots of descriptions of the beautiful scenery – the hills, rivers, forests, small villages and ruined castles – as he makes his way through the Cévennes. I’ve never been to that part of France but enjoyed looking up pictures online of the places Stevenson visits. Apparently you can recreate his journey by following the 140 mile footpath known as the Robert Louis Stevenson Trail, starting in Le Monastier-sur-Gazeille and ending in Saint-Jean-du-Gard.

Finding somewhere to sleep each night is one of the challenges Stevenson faces on his journey. In one of my favourite parts of the book, he describes camping outdoors in a glade surrounded by pine trees:

Night is a dead monotonous period under a roof; but in the open world it passes lightly, with its stars and dews and perfumes, and the hours are marked by changes in the face of Nature. What seems a kind of temporal death to people choked between walls and curtains, is only a light and living slumber to the man who sleeps afield.

Stevenson finds spending the night in the pine glade such a moving experience, he leaves some money behind the next day to thank the natural landscape for its hospitality. On other occasions, he stays overnight at a village inn and once at a Trappist monastery, Our Lady of the Snows. Religion forms an important part of the book – as well as the monastery chapters, Stevenson also passes through villages which are either Catholic or Protestant, and spends some time reflecting on the differences.

Stevenson wrote several other travel books. I would like to try some of them after finding this one so interesting!

Book 10/50 from my third Classics Club list.

The Puppet Maker of Prague by Eliza Graham

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One of the things I remember from my visit to Prague, more than twenty years ago now, is seeing so many places selling traditional Czech puppets, so I was drawn to this book as soon as I saw the title.

The novel follows the story of a family torn apart during the Nazi occupation of Prague, which begins in March 1939. Petr Doubek is the puppet maker of the title and has been making a name for himself in Prague with his clever, entertaining puppet shows featuring his own beautifully made marionettes. Since the Nazis marched into the Sudetenland the previous year, Petr’s shows have become increasingly satirical, mocking Hitler and his politics, something Petr greatly regrets when the rest of Czechoslovakia, including Prague, also falls under Nazi control. He flees to Poland, leaving behind his wife, three-year-old daughter Jana and nineteen-year-old stepdaughter, Elsa. When their mother makes the difficult decision to join her husband in exile, it is left to Elsa to raise her little sister alone in the occupied city.

In 2016, we meet Christa, an elderly woman who has found a princess marionette in the attic of her London home. Although Christa grew up in Germany, an antiques dealer tells her that the puppet appears to have Czech origins. Deciding to investigate further, her search leads her to Prague and the old Doubek puppetry workshop. But what is Christa’s connection with the Doubek family and why did the princess puppet end up in her attic?

The Puppet Maker of Prague is yet another dual timeline novel, which seem so popular these days. However, it’s an example of the format working very well, with both narratives forming an important part of the overall story. The present day timeline is directly linked to the historical one, without bringing in extra subplots or unnecessary characters. Obviously, though, most of the action takes place in the wartime sections of the novel – and I have to confess, I knew very little about what happened in Prague during the war, so I found these parts of the book particularly interesting. Lots of key events are covered, including the student protests of 1939, the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich (the senior Nazi in charge of Prague), the Nazi retaliation on the village of Lidice (Graham uses a fictional village in its place), and the eventual liberation of Prague in 1945.

Although there’s a romantic interest for Elsa, when she falls in love with a member of the Czechoslovak Resistance (ÚVOD), the most important relationship in the book is the one between the two sisters. As an older sister myself, I found myself identifying with Elsa as she tries her best to protect Jana and keep her safe. It’s a lot of responsibility, with their parents gone and the city under Nazi control, and some of the decisions Elsa makes are questionable, but there’s never any doubt that she’s doing what she thinks is the right thing to do.

This is a very emotional book – wartime stories often are, of course, but I found this one particularly moving and had tears in my eyes on more than one occasion (always a sign that the author has done a good job of getting me invested in the characters and the story). I’ll have to try more of Eliza Graham’s novels. She seems to have written a lot of them!

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

Classics Club Spin #46: My list

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It’s time for another Classics Club Spin! If you’re not sure what the Spins are, here’s a reminder:

The rules for Spin #46:

* List any twenty books you have left to read from your Classics Club list.
* Number them from 1 to 20.
* On Sunday 15th November the Classics Club will announce a number.
* This is the book you need to read by 3rd January 2027.

And here’s my list:

1. The Baron in the Trees by Italo Calvino
2. Brighton Rock by Graham Greene
3. The Old Curiosity Shop by Charles Dickens
4. A Town Like Alice by Nevil Shute
5. The Hand of Ethelberta by Thomas Hardy
6. The Dancing Bear by Frances Faviell
7. The Duke’s Children by Anthony Trollope
8. The War of the Worlds by HG Wells
9. Lord Tony’s Wife by Baroness Orczy
10. The Evil Genius by Wilkie Collins
11. The Moon and Sixpence by W Somerset Maugham
12. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
13. The Women’s War by Alexandre Dumas
14. Mary Barton by Elizabeth Gaskell
15. The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
16. A Harp in Lowndes Square by Rachel Ferguson
17. Little Dorrit by Charles Dickens
18. Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell
19. The Lantern Bearers by Rosemary Sutcliff
20. Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont by Elizabeth Taylor

~

I think winter is a good time for reading long Victorian novels, so I would like to get one of those, particularly either of the Dickens, but I would be happy with anything, really.

Which number do you think I should be hoping for on Sunday?

Great Granny Webster by Caroline Blackwood – #NovNov26

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My first book for this year’s Novellas in November is by an author I tried for the first time last year, when I read and enjoyed The Stepdaughter. I’d heard that Great Granny Webster, which was shortlisted for the 1977 Booker Prize, is considered her best book, so I was looking forward to reading it.

Great Granny Webster draws on Blackwood’s own memories and experiences and feels very like a memoir; in fact, the poet Philip Larkin, one of the Booker Prize judges, apparently voted against her, saying that the book was “autobiography, not fiction” – which I think was a bit unfair as I’m sure you could say the same about a lot of novels.

The book begins in 1947 with our fourteen-year-old narrator, who is recovering from surgery, being sent to stay with Great Granny Webster so she can benefit from the sea air. However, although Great Granny Webster lives only minutes away from Brighton with its beach and pier, the narrator experiences very little of the sea air because Great Granny Webster disapproves of it. In fact, she disapproves of everything. Her days are spent sitting upright on a hard chair in a dimly-lit drawing room drinking only water and doing nothing – apart from when she accompanies the narrator for a drive along the seafront in a chauffeur-driven black Rolls Royce with the window open just enough to let in a tiny breath of air. As the narrator observes, “I don’t think that I have ever since met a human being who smiled more rarely, who found less in life to amuse her”.

This visit to Great Granny Webster leaves the narrator curious about other members of her family, so she speaks to her Aunt Lavinia in the hope of finding out more. Lavinia, a glamorous, frivolous woman who lives only for pleasure and amusement, couldn’t be more different from Great Granny Webster. Beneath her fun-loving exterior, though, there’s a darkness and an emptiness leading to several suicide attempts. The narrator also listens to the memories of Tommy Redcliffe, an old friend of her father’s who had visited the family home, Dunmartin Hall, a crumbling estate in Northern Ireland. Tommy tells her about her grandmother (Great Granny’s daughter), a woman suffering from mental health problems who believes her children have been stolen by fairies and replaced with changelings.

This is not a book with a lot of plot; it feels more like a collection of anecdotes than a cohesive story. What it does very effectively, though, is show us how the three generations of this dysfunctional family are linked, with misery, mental illness and destruction being passed down from one woman to the next. All three women are interesting to read about, but it’s the cold, austere Great Granny Webster who is the strongest presence in this dark and unsettling book.

Here are some other novellas I’ve read and reviewed since last year’s Novellas in November:

Suspicion by Seichō Matsumoto
Travel Light by Naomi Mitchison
West by Carys Davies
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark
Letter to My Judge by Georges Simenon
The Cat by Colette

Six Degrees of Separation: From Benbecula to Ghostwritten

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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 in recognition of Novellas in November, we should start with a novella that’s on our reading list. I have chosen one that I’m planning to read this month: Benbecula by Graeme Macrae Burnet. It will be perfect for Reading Scotland Month as well. Here’s what it’s about:

On 9 July 1857, Angus MacPhee, a labourer from Liniclate on the island of Benbecula, murdered his father, mother and aunt. At trial in Inverness he was found to be criminally insane and confined in the Criminal Lunatic Department of Perth Prison.

Some years later, Angus’s older brother Malcolm recounts the events leading up to the murders while trying to keep a grip on his own sanity. Malcolm is living in isolation, ostracised by the community and haunted by this gruesome episode in his past.

From Graeme Macrae Burnet, the Booker-shortlisted author of His Bloody Project, comes a beguiling psychological novel set on a remote Scottish island. Based on a true story and drawing on the documentary evidence of the time, Burnet constructs a gripping narrative about madness, murder and the uncertain nature of the self.

Benbecula is an island in the Outer Hebrides. My first link is to another book set (at least partly) on a Hebridean island: Now We Shall Be Entirely Free by Andrew Miller (1). A wounded man returns home to England from the Peninsular War in 1809 and, after regaining his strength, travels to Scotland to finish his recuperation – followed by a soldier who believes he is guilty of a war crime. I thought this was a beautifully written novel.

My next book is written by an author who shares a surname with Andrew Miller. The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller (2) is a retelling of the Trojan War written from the perspective of Patroclus, Achilles’ best friend and lover. When I read this in 2012 it was the first Greek mythology book I’d read for years, so was something different for me. I’ve read a lot more of them since then!

Next, a simple link to another novel with the word ‘song’ in the title. The Long Song by Andrea Levy (3) is set on a Jamaican sugar plantation and is narrated by July, a young girl who is born into slavery. July lives through the Christmas Rebellion of 1831, the abolition of slavery in Jamaica and the changes that come afterwards and we see all of this through her eyes. I enjoyed this one but preferred Levy’s Small Island.

July is a month and so is May – John May, one of the two octogenarian detectives who work for the Peculiar Crimes Unit in Christopher Fowler’s Bryant and May series. White Corridor (4) was the last one I read and follows Arthur Bryant and John May as they try to solve a mystery while stranded in their car during a blizzard. I’m hoping to read the next book in the series soon.

From a book with white in the title to one with black. The Black Lake by Hella S. Haasse (5), is a 1948 novella about the unnamed son of a Dutch plantation owner in West Java who forms a childhood friendship with the son of his father’s estate manager, an Indonesian boy called Oeroeg. I read it in an English translation by Ina Rilke. If you’re still deciding what to read for Novellas in November, you may want to consider this one.

In Ghostwritten by Isabel Wolff (6), a ghostwriter is helping to write the memoirs of an elderly Dutch woman who grew up on a rubber plantation in Java and was sent to a Japanese internment camp there during the war. This was a fascinating book, although obviously disturbing to read about the conditions in the camps.

And that’s my chain for November! My links include the Hebrides, the name Miller, the word ‘song’, months for names, black and white and Java. Is there a connection between my last book and my first? Well, they are both set on islands and both have a one-word title.

In December we’ll be starting with Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan.

The Last Handmaid by Clare Whitfield

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I was drawn to this book for two reasons: first, it’s about Countess Erzsébet Báthory – I read about her in Sonia Velton’s The Nightingale’s Castle a few years ago and have been meaning to explore further – and also, I enjoyed Clare Whitfield’s previous novel, Poor Girls, and hoped this one would be just as good.

The Last Handmaid is set in the early 17th century and is narrated by Catalina, a young woman who finds herself alone in the world after losing first her mother and then Varga, the monk who raises her and whom she considers as close as an uncle. Rejecting Varga’s dying wish that she should become a nun and enter a convent, Catalina instead takes a job in the laundry of a castle belonging to Countess Erzsébet Báthory. No sooner has she begun to settle into her new position and make friends, her life is disrupted again when she plays a part in foiling an assassination attempt against the countess. This is the start of a close but uneasy relationship with the countess, who takes Catalina with her when she flees to Csejte Castle (now Čachtice Castle in Slovakia).

As you may know, Erzsébet Báthory – sometimes anglicised to Elizabeth Báthory – was allegedly a prolific Hungarian serial killer accused along with several of her servants of torturing and murdering hundreds of girls. She is also often said to have been an inspiration for the character of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, although there’s no direct evidence of this. In The Last Handmaid, we see Erzsébet through Catalina’s eyes, which can be frustrating at times as Catalina sees only what she wants to see and is determined that her beloved ‘Lady Erzie’ can do no wrong. It’s a good illustration of how easily people can be mistaken and how a vulnerable person who just wants to feel liked and valued can be manipulated and controlled, but still, it’s so obvious to the reader that the countess is a cruel, terrible woman that Catalina’s blindness becomes difficult to believe.

I found this book slightly different from The Nightingale’s Castle which portrayed Erzsébet more sympathetically and included some magical realism elements. This is a darker, more brutal novel and Whitfield doesn’t shy away from describing how the countess’s servants, Anna and Helena, beat and torture young women. The countess herself suffers from epilepsy, known as ‘the falling sickness’, and believes that drinking human blood is the cure. You can see where the comparisons with Dracula come from! It’s not a book for the squeamish or the faint-hearted, then. Even when Catalina begins a romantic relationship, it’s with the town executioner.

I enjoyed the book overall, apart from when I found myself losing patience with Catalina for continually making excuses for the countess and rejecting opportunities to escape and keep herself safe. I was interested to read in the author’s notes at the end of the book that she specifically chooses to write from the weakest, most vulnerable person’s perspective as they are the stories that most intrigue her. Now I need to find time to go back and read her first book, People of Abandoned Character.

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