The Country Schoolmaster by Kate Grenville

October 23, 20266 Comments

This book wasn’t what I was expecting at all. It was listed as fiction on NetGalley but feels much more like non-fiction, although I can understand why the author and publisher could be hesitant to describe it that way as there is a lot of imagination involved! Regardless of the label, I found it absolutely fascinating.

Kate Grenville begins by describing a visit she made to the NSW State Archives to research her mother’s life. During this visit she came across a file relating to Currabubula Public School and was immediately intrigued by a collection of letters written by or about the teacher Joseph Connor implying that he was abusive towards the children. Deciding to dig deeper, Grenville read all eighty-eight letters in the file, dating from the 1880s to 1890s, changing her mind back and forth about Connor with each new piece of information. Were the allegations against him true or was he the victim of a vendetta pursued by a group of parents for reasons of their own?

Stories floated up but then sank again. Characters came forward as one thing but on a second look turned into something else. Meanings took shape, then evaporated. My sympathies, like a school of fish, wheeled towards Joseph Connor. With the next letter, they gathered, regrouped, wheeled the other way.

Currabubula is a rural village in New South Wales where Kate Grenville’s grandmother, Sarah Catherine Maunder, grew up (her story is told in Restless Dolly Maunder). In 1884, Joseph Connor was appointed sole teacher of Currabubula Public School, responsible for up to seventy children at a time. The recent Public Instruction Act had made school attendance compulsory in NSW and teachers willing to go and work in small rural communities were in high demand. Grenville’s first impression of Connor, as she worked through the letters and other documents in the file, was of “a straightforward, honest fellow doing his guileless best”, a man trying to educate children in an overcrowded classroom, having to virtually beg for money from the Department of Public Instruction to purchase new chairs or get the toilets cleaned, while also dealing with the needs of his own rapidly growing family.

Some of the complaints against Connor seem malicious and spiteful, but others are more convincing. Grenville examines the complaints, along with the responses given by Connor and the School Inspector and the outcomes of inquiries and court hearings and tries to decide what was really going on. Was he really beating the children and punishing them excessively? Was it true that he was keeping livestock in the schoolyard where the children played? Was he being unfairly strict in enforcing the rules regarding non-attendance? With no evidence beyond the documents in the file, Grenville tries to read between the lines, studying the choice of words and phrases and filling in the gaps by imagining how the people involved may have felt.

Grenville doesn’t reach any real conclusions about Connor or any of the mysteries surrounding him – for example, the cause of a rift with his eldest daughter Bridie, also a teacher, is never revealed – but she encourages us to form our own opinions from the limited clues available. She explains in her author’s note that due to the assumptions she makes about Connor and the other residents of Currabubula and the possible theories she builds around them, she decided to change the names of Joseph Connor and the other key players in the story.

I think how much you enjoy this book will depend on whether you’re interested in historical research, archival information and interpreting sources. It won’t appeal to everyone, but for the right reader it’s a wonderful read. I loved it, partly for the glimpses into the history of education in Australia and the daily lives of people in a small village like Currabubula, and partly for the exploration of how stories can be made from a mixture of fact and fiction.

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

Murder on the Haunted Express by Emma Mason

October 22, 2026October 22, 202610 Comments

This is the second book in Emma Mason’s mystery series featuring retired police officer Midge McGowan. I enjoyed the first, Murder Most Haunted, with a few reservations, so was happy to give this one a try. You could definitely start with this one if you wanted to as it works as a standalone mystery, but reading in order will help you understand the backgrounds of the main characters and the relationships between them.

The novel begins with Midge’s friend, struggling pop star Rona, inviting her on a trip to the Scottish Highlands by steam train. Midge doesn’t really want to go, but accepts, thinking that at least it should be a relaxing break and a chance to do her embroidery. On arriving at the station, however, she finds that Rona, as usual, hasn’t been completely honest. The trip is actually part of a funeral procession, carrying the body of a recently deceased artist to his final resting place. Worse, the train itself has a tragic history and one of the carriages is said to be haunted – much to the delight of paranormal podcaster Noah, another friend who has joined them on the journey.

Before the train reaches its destination, a passenger is found dead in a locked carriage with no obvious cause of death. As the only detective on board, it naturally falls to Midge to investigate, but she’ll need to solve the mystery quickly before the killer strikes again. The suspects include a prisoner on temporary release to attend the funeral, accompanied by his prison guard, an undertaker responsible for the safe transport of the coffin, and a writer working on a biography of the dead artist. Is one of these people the murderer or could there be a more ghostly explanation?

First of all, I love the character of Midge McGowan; she feels so real and human. As a neurodivergent woman in her fifties with a bad knee she’s used to being ignored and underestimated and having spent most of her police career pushed into a backstage position in the property office, she’s an unlikely detective. But over the years Midge has learned to listen, observe and draw her own conclusions, skills that are invaluable when it comes to solving mysteries. She can be prickly at times – she likes her own space and to be allowed to do things in her own way – but her grief for the recent loss of her wife Bridie, who died of cancer, shows a more tender side of her personality. It’s good to see that the friendships with Rona and Noah formed in the previous book have continued although, as someone who hasn’t had many friends before, Midge isn’t always sure how to navigate those friendships.

My problem with the book was the same as with the first one: that apart from Midge, none of the other characters feel like real people and are a collection of stereotypes. Rona, for example, is the classic ‘pop star’ character – temperamental, entitled, in and out of rehab, obsessed with her appearance – and both she and Noah seem to be mainly in the book to provide some comedy. The same goes for the other characters who seem to have no personality beyond being an undertaker, a prisoner, an art curator etc. This isn’t a huge problem as these books are clearly intended to be funny and not taken too seriously (as you can tell from the titles) but I think they would definitely be improved by stronger characterisation.

The mystery is interesting, with some twists and turns, and I would never have guessed the solution! Trains are the perfect setting for locked room mysteries with all of the suspects and potential victims together in close confines, separated from the outside world until they arrive at a station. Despite Noah’s fascination with the ghost supposedly haunting the train, this is never really considered as a plausible theory by Midge, but it does provide some atmosphere.

Like the first book, this one was enjoyable enough to leave me looking forward to the next one. I’m assuming there will be more as this one ends with a new development in Midge’s life which should be interesting to explore.

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

Reviewed for RIPXXI hosted by @perilreaders

Some thoughts on Shakespeare’s Othello #ShakespeareRetold

October 20, 202611 Comments

I hinted earlier this year that I had a new project planned where I would be reading (or re-reading) some of Shakespeare’s plays and following them with modern retellings or books inspired by those plays. With that in mind, I included some Shakespeare on my current Classics Club list and I’ve decided to begin with a re-read of Othello. Although Othello is not one of my favourite plays, it’s a special one for me because it was the first I read for myself outside of the ones we read at school.

The play begins in Venice with the discovery that Othello, a general in the Venetian army, has secretly married Desdemona, the daughter of the senator Brabantio. His ensign, Iago, hates Othello because he has promoted another man, Cassio, to lieutenant rather than himself. With the help of Roderigo, a young Venetian gentleman who is in love with Desdemona, Iago vows to take his revenge. As the action moves to Cyprus, he does this by convincing Othello that Desdemona and Cassio are having an affair, using lots of psychological manipulation – and a carefully planted stolen handkerchief.

Rather than reading the play in a standalone edition, I read it in my RSC Shakespeare: Complete Works, a book I would recommend (apart from it being physically difficult to hold). It contains detailed introductions to each play, key facts, photographs from RSC stage productions and definitions/glossaries at the bottom of each page of text. The introduction to Othello helps to put the play into context, looking at Shakespeare’s main source for the play, the 1565 novella “Un Capitano Moro” (“A Moorish Captain”), by Giraldi Cinthio, and discussing how audiences at the time would have viewed a Moorish, or Muslim, character like Othello.

Othello has a relatively simple plot, which makes it easier to follow than some of his other plays (which doesn’t mean it has no depth, of course, but the complexities are in the psychology and in trying to understand Iago’s motivations rather than in following the story itself). The main themes are also quite obvious: jealousy – first Iago’s jealousy of Cassio, who gets the position he believes should have been his, and then Othello’s jealousy, which comes about through Iago’s manipulations; trust – both lack of trust and misplaced trust; racism and prejudice – does Othello have underlying insecurities due to his race and age that lead him to doubt Desdemona (a younger white woman) and fall for Iago’s lies so easily?

I also noticed how little humour there is in this play. There’s a brief appearance by a clown figure in Act III who delivers some puns and wordplay, but otherwise there’s not much light relief even in comparison to Shakespeare’s other tragedies. As ever, though, there are words and phrases from the play that have become part of everyday speech:

“I will wear my heart upon my sleeve”
“The green-eyed monster”
“One that loved not wisely but too well”
“A foregone conclusion”

There are probably more that I missed!

Retellings

I don’t think I’ve read any Othello retellings yet, although I’ve read books that reference it in some way. Farewell, the Tranquil Mind by RF Delderfield takes its title from a line from the play (“Farewell the tranquil mind! farewell content!”), while in Agatha Christie’s The Rose and the Yew Tree, which I read earlier this year, the narrator, Hugh, directly refers to Othello several times throughout the book and reflects on Iago and his motives.

I’ve just started to read Naomi Kelsey’s new novel Pale Mistress, which is about Bianca, a minor but important character in the play.

Here are some other books about or inspired by Othello. Have you read any of them? Do you know of any more?

New Boy by Tracy Chevalier
Chasing the Stars by Malorie Blackman
I, Iago by Nicole Galland
Desdemona by Toni Morrison
Iago by David Snodin
Dom Casmurro by Machado de Assis

Royal Witch by Philippa Gregory

October 19, 202616 Comments

It’s been years since I last read anything by Philippa Gregory, so I decided to try her latest novel, Royal Witch. It’s the story of Eleanor Cobham, Duchess of Gloucester, a woman who has appeared as a secondary character in other books I’ve read (including Gregory’s own The Lady of the Rivers), although this is the first one I’ve read that focuses on her specifically.

We first meet Eleanor in 1421 as a young woman of twenty arriving at Westminster Palace to become a lady-in-waiting to Jacqueline, Countess of Hainault. Jacqueline has taken refuge at the English court after being betrayed by members of her own family who have seized her lands. She is looking for help to regain them and marries Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, in the hope that he can provide the military support she needs in Hainault. Humphrey, however, is having problems in his own country – although he has been named Protector of England until his baby nephew, Henry VI, is old enough to rule, he faces opposition in government from his Beaufort rivals.

As the daughter of a minor nobleman, Eleanor arrives at court wanting nothing more than to marry well, but once she grows close to the strong and determined Jacqueline and sees what it’s possible for a woman to do, she starts to believe she should be aiming higher. She turns for help to Margery Jourdemayne, known as the Witch of Eye, but if it becomes known that Eleanor has been meddling in the dark arts, it could lead to her downfall rather than her glory.

I enjoyed Royal Witch; I love this period of history and it was good to see it through the eyes of a woman I haven’t read very much about. The events taking place in England are significant because they lead directly to the Wars of the Roses and the founding of the Tudor dynasty, but I also found Jacqueline interesting to read about – her campaign to reclaim her lands forms a big part of the first half of the novel and I kept thinking that maybe Gregory should have just written Jacqueline’s story instead of Eleanor’s! Eleanor’s own story doesn’t really start to gain momentum until halfway through the book when she sets her sights on the throne of England and begins to set her plans in motion.

Gregory often seems to enjoy making her heroines as unpleasant as possible (like Margaret Beaufort in The Red Queen); Eleanor is another example of this – she’s ambitious, vain, selfish and vindictive, with few, if any, redeeming qualities. Despite this, it’s impossible not to feel for her when she is rejected by the man she loves, Owen ap Maredudd, who chooses another woman over her, an incident which is the source of a lot of her anger and resentment in the second half of the novel. You may already know who Owen is and who he marries instead, but if not I’ll let you find out for yourself! As Eleanor plots revenge on Owen and his new lover, her outward actions become more cruel and her inner thoughts more bitter, which makes her both an entertaining narrator and quite a chilling one as well. Not even the young king is safe from her plots and machinations.

Margery Jourdemayne is another interesting character. She’s portrayed mainly as a herbalist and fortune teller who becomes caught up in Eleanor’s scheming, along with the astrologer Roger Bolingbroke, leading to accusations of witchcraft, treason and necromancy. This is the climax of the story which everything that comes before was building towards, but we have to wait a long time for it – and that’s my only real criticism of the novel; it often felt longer than it really needed to be and the earlier sections could probably have been condensed to improve the pacing. Otherwise I found this very enjoyable and I wish more authors would write about lesser known Plantagenet women rather than the Tudors!

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

Arabella by Georgette Heyer – #1949Club

October 16, 202623 Comments

This is my third and final book for this week’s 1949 Club, hosted by Simon of Stuck in a Book and Karen of Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings. Whichever year is chosen for the club, you can almost guarantee Georgette Heyer will have had a book published in that particular year – and 1949 is no exception.

The novel begins with Arabella Tallant, the eldest daughter of a Yorkshire vicar, being invited to London to stay with her godmother, Mrs Bridlington, for the season. On the way, her carriage breaks down and she seeks shelter at the nearest house, which turns out to be a hunting lodge belonging to Robert Beaumaris, one of the richest men in England. When she overhears Mr Beaumaris telling his friend that he doesn’t believe the carriage is really broken and he suspects Arabella of having her eye on his fortune, the offended Arabella impulsively decides to pretend that she’s already the heiress to a fortune of her own. She asks Beaumaris and his friend to keep this information to themselves, but when she arrives in London she’s horrified to find that the story of her great wealth is all over town…

I really enjoyed Arabella. It’s a relatively simple plot; where some of Heyer’s other books have elements of mystery or adventure or include real historical events, this one focuses mainly on the romance and although it’s easy to predict how it will end, the fun is in getting there! It helps that the hero and heroine are both so easy to like. Arabella is warm-hearted and compassionate and has been raised by her father to care about those less fortunate than herself. Beaumaris, despite his sophisticated, cynical exterior and the insensitive comment he makes during his first meeting with Arabella, also has a kind heart. He quickly sees through Arabella’s lie but instead of confronting her with it he waits for her to decide to tell him the truth herself.

Another thing that interested me (and which I found quite unusual for a Heyer novel) was the exploration of poverty and hardship, in contrast with the portrayal of upper-class Regency society. Arabella is moved by the plights of an abused climbing-boy (chimney sweep’s boy), a badly treated mongrel and a disreputable woman known as Leaky Peg, all of whom she foists – or tries to foist – onto Beaumaris, which provides most of the humour in the book! There’s also a subplot involving Arabella’s naïve, well-meaning but easily led younger brother, Bertram, who arrives in London and gets himself into trouble almost immediately. Bertram’s storyline is also quite predictable – there are a lot of similar younger brothers and cousins in Heyer’s novels! – but I didn’t mind that as I found him very endearing.

If you’re new to Heyer, I think this could be a good place to start: the story is easy to follow, the characters are charming and likeable, and it has a classic, sparkling Regency setting. It was also a great choice for my final 1949 Club book!

The Gamester by Rafael Sabatini – #1949Club

October 14, 202617 Comments

This is my second book for this week’s 1949 Club (hosted by Karen of Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings and Simon of Stuck in a Book). I’ve loved some of Rafael Sabatini’s other novels, so I was pleased to find that he had one published in 1949. Sabatini was born in Italy to an English mother and Italian father; he was an accomplished linguist and wrote all of his novels in English even though it was actually his sixth language!

The Gamester was Sabatini’s final book, published a year before his death. It’s set in the early 18th century and tells the story of the Scottish financier and economist John Law, the Laird of Lauriston. Many people today probably haven’t heard of Law, but he was hugely important and influential in his time, establishing France’s first central bank, the Banque Générale, which issued the country’s first paper money. He also founded the Mississippi Company to manage France’s colonial trade in America. The word ‘millionaire’ was first used to describe the company shareholders who made their fortunes in what was known as the Mississippi Bubble (before it burst in 1720). You can see how his legacy still lives on today, then.

In The Gamester, Sabatini follows John Law from the time of his arrival in France in 1715. Having escaped from prison in England, after being sentenced to death for killing a man in a duel, Law has been wandering Europe for many years, making his fortune through cards and dice. Hearing of the death of King Louis XIV of France and the establishment of the regency of Philippe d’Orléans, Law sees a chance to make himself useful to the new regime and heads straight for Paris. The novel then covers his role in founding the Banque Générale and the Mississippi Company, as well as his long-running rivalry with Count Antoine-Joseph of Horn (the villain of the book).

John Law undoubtedly led a fascinating and eventful life, but I didn’t enjoy this book as much as I’d hoped to. I think Sabatini is at his best when he’s writing about fictional characters and creating his own storylines (definitely read Scaramouche if you haven’t already!) and his books about real people feel a bit dry in comparison. Although he does take some liberties with the real John Law’s character, for example involving him more heavily than he really was in the foiling of the treasonous plot known as the Cellamare Conspiracy, in general I felt he was too constrained by historical fact to make the story feel truly exciting. This is the same problem I noted with The Minion, his novel about the Overbury Affair.

There were still plenty of things that I did enjoy about the book, particularly the parts dealing with the relationship between Law and his wife, Catherine, whom he considers bitter and shrewish. It’s obvious to the reader that there’s much more to Catherine than Law sees or appreciates, but sadly his family seem to be very low on his list of priorities – he and Catherine have children but we barely see them and aren’t even told their names. When his fortunes eventually change again and he does begin to understand what’s really important in life, we can only hope it’s not too late. It’s an interesting novel, then, with a lot going on, but the focus on money, gambling, banking and dealing in stocks and shares just didn’t really appeal to me. I’ll continue to work through his novels and hope that I get on better with the next one I try.

Top Ten Tuesday: Book Covers Featuring Autumnal Colours

October 13, 2026October 13, 202612 Comments

This week’s topic for Top Ten Tuesday (hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl) is: “Book Covers Featuring Autumnal Colors (submitted by Wordy Witterings).”

This was more difficult than I expected, but I’ve managed to find ten covers featuring shades of orange, gold, brown or dark red. These are all books I’ve read and I’ve provided links to my reviews.