The Inn at Penglas Cove by Lauren Westwood

January 28, 20264 Comments

I loved this! Lauren Westwood is a new author for me, but before I was even halfway through this one I was looking to see which other books she had written and mentally adding them to my wishlist.

When Juno Cartwright discovers that her husband is cheating on her, she takes her two children – seventeen-year-old Bridget and her younger brother, Connor – and heads for Cornwall, where she has conveniently just inherited a cottage from a distant relative. At least, she thinks it’s a cottage…until they arrive at the Cross Keys, a crumbling old inn on the Cornish coast. Discovering that the inn is actually her inheritance, Juno intends to put it up for sale, but the longer she spends there the more she begins to feel at home. Connor is having fun exploring the cliffs, caves and beaches of Penglas Cove, but Bridget is disgusted with the whole situation – the inn has no internet connection, no showers, and she just wants to go back to London.

Two centuries earlier, in 1820, Bess Trevelyan arrived in Cornwall to marry Lord Robert Penhelion. It was an unhappy marriage and, according to legend, Bess had a lover – Penhelion’s brother, a sea captain – and had taken refuge in the Cross Keys Inn to wait for the return of his ship. When Penhelion learned of the affair, he paid the innkeeper, Old John Dog, to murder her. Juno is fascinated by this legend, particularly as she and Bridget seem to bear a striking resemblance to the portrait of Bess Trevelyan hanging on the wall in the inn. As Juno tries to find out more about Bess and her tragic story, it seems that history is beginning to repeat itself.

This is such an atmospheric novel! Penglas Cove and the Cross Keys Inn – complete with an adjoining smugglers’ museum and pirate cave with waxwork figures playing out the story of Bess Trevelyan – are so vividly described they feel like real places. In her author’s note, Westwood acknowledges Daphne du Maurier’s Jamaica Inn and Frenchman’s Creek and Winston Graham’s Poldark series, as well as her own visits to Cornwall, and you can see the influence of all of these on her writing.

I loved our narrator, Juno, but she also has a strong cast of supporting characters around her; my favourites were Cliff and Elspeth, two elderly people who run the museum and pirate cave and who become almost like family to Juno and her children. And then there’s Bess, whose story unfolds in the form of a dual narrative. We don’t spend as long with Bess as we do with Juno, but it’s long enough to get to know her and to discover that there’s more to her story than anyone in the present day knows. Both threads of the novel were fascinating and it was all so readable that I finished it in two days, which could have been less if I’d had nothing else to do!

Although smuggling and piracy are things we tend to associate with times gone by, they do of course still exist today and in the modern day storyline Westwood explores the forms smuggling and trafficking can take in the 21st century. This gives the novel more relevancy and a more serious tone, but I personally would have preferred just to focus on the Bess mystery and Juno’s efforts to renovate the inn and build a new life for herself and the children. Still, I found The Inn at Penglas Cove a very entertaining and enjoyable read and just need to decide which Lauren Westwood book I should read next.

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

The Land in Winter by Andrew Miller

January 26, 202618 Comments

Andrew Miller’s The Land in Winter had a lot of success last year, being shortlisted for the Booker Prize and winning the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction. It also appeared on a lot of people’s end of year ‘best of’ lists so I had high hopes for it, particularly as I’ve previously enjoyed two of his other books, Pure and Now We Shall Be Entirely Free.

The novel is set in the winter of 1963, one of the coldest winters on record in the UK. Beginning in late December 1962 and lasting until March, temperatures plummeted, blizzards blanketed most of the country in deep snow and rivers and lakes froze over. Against this backdrop, we see the stories of two married couples play out. Dr Eric Parry has recently moved to rural Somerset with his wife, Irene, who is pregnant. Eric is enjoying being a country doctor, but Irene is finding it hard to adapt; it’s so different from her life in London and she misses her sister, who has gone to live in America. Despite her pregnancy, she feels that she and Eric are growing apart – and she’s right to feel that way because, unknown to Irene, Eric is having an affair with one of his patients.

Bill and Rita Simmons, who live at a nearby farm, are also newly arrived in the countryside. To the disappointment of his wealthy father, who wanted him to join the family business, Bill has chosen to follow a very different path and become a dairy farmer. It’s proving to be more difficult than he expected, but he’s sure that with new ideas and investment, he’ll be able to turn things around. He just needs to convince the bank to lend him the money! His wife Rita, like Irene, is pregnant and, also like Irene, she feels lonely and out of place, so it’s probably not surprising that the two women quickly form a bond and a friendship begins to develop.

Apart from a long chapter in the middle of the book in which Irene hosts a Boxing Day party and several other key characters converge on the Parrys’ house, the main focus is on the two couples, their daily lives and the relationships between them. All four characters are believable and strongly drawn, but I think Rita is the one I found most interesting. Before marrying Bill, she had been a dancer in a Bristol nightclub, so the transition to life as a farmer’s wife in a small, quiet community is particularly difficult for her. She has started hearing voices in her head, a sign of her vulnerable, fragile mental state, but Bill isn’t able to give her the support she needs, feeling that he doesn’t truly know who his wife is and preferring to ignore her past.

Although I did enjoy following the stories of Eric and Irene, Rita and Bill, I felt that I was held at a distance for most of the book and never quite connected with the characters on an emotional level as much as I would have liked to. Maybe it was just me, or maybe it was a result of the bleak, frozen setting reflecting their troubled, isolated lives and the coldness of their marriages. Still, this is an impressive novel overall and despite not quite managing to love it I can see why it’s so highly regarded.

A Slow and Secret Poison by Carmella Lowkis

January 22, 20268 Comments

It’s 1925 and Vee Morgan is on her way to Harfold Manor in Wiltshire to take up the position of gardener. She knows she’s lucky to get the job; although she loves being outdoors and was a Land Girl on a farm during the war, she has no horticultural qualifications and no references, not to mention that women gardeners are not at all common and not exactly in high demand. After arriving at her new workplace, however, she learns that none of the local men wanted the job and are reluctant to come anywhere near Harfold Manor and its strange inhabitant, Lady Arabella Lascy.

Arabella, alone in the world apart from her estate manager and cousin, Maurice Reacher, believes she and her family have been cursed. First her parents died, then all four of her brothers, each within three years of the one before, leaving only Arabella to inherit the family estate. Now another three years have passed and Arabella is convinced that she will be the next victim. But are the Lascys really under a curse or is there a more human explanation for what has been happening?

A Slow and Secret Poison is the second novel by Carmella Lowkis; I had mixed feelings about her first, Spitting Gold, a retelling of a Charles Perrault fairy tale, but I found this one more enjoyable. Vee interested me from the beginning – she’s a very flawed heroine, as we discover as the story unfolds and secrets from her past come to light – but I liked her as a character and I thought her practical, no-nonsense personality provided a good counterpart to the reclusive, fanciful Arabella. I was intrigued to learn from the author’s note at the end of the book that the character of Arabella was inspired by Stephen Tennant, one of the Bright Young Things of the 1920s.

The book has a lot of Gothic elements: the crumbling old house and its eccentric owner, the supposed Lascy family curse, sightings of a mythical hare and, of course, the poisonings hinted at in the title. I was reminded very much of Laura Purcell’s books, although this one isn’t as dark as those. I did find some of the secrets and twists quite easy to predict and some parts of the plot felt a little bit implausible (particularly regarding property ownership, which becomes an important part of the story later on), but otherwise it was a quick, entertaining read.

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

Suspicion by Seichō Matsumoto

January 20, 202610 Comments

Translated by Jesse Kirkwood

For this year’s Japanese Literature Challenge (hosted by Meredith at Dolce Bellezza), I wanted to read something by an author who was new to me and decided on Suspicion by Seichō Matsumoto. It turned out to be an excellent choice!

Suspicion was originally published in Japanese in 1982 and is now available from Penguin Classics in a new English translation. It’s a short novella at 112 pages, but it’s satisfying and I didn’t feel that it needed to be any longer. Loosely based on a true crime, the plot revolves around the trial of Kumako Onizuka, a woman accused of murdering her husband. She had only been married to Shirakawa for a few months when their car plunged into the sea one rainy July evening. Onizuka, who later claimed to have been in the passenger seat, managed to escape, but Shirakawa was drowned.

The story is told mainly from the perspective of the journalist Akitani, who is covering the case for the Hokuriku Daily. Akitani believes Onizuka is guilty and has written several pieces for the newspaper making his opinion very clear. Onizuka has a shady background, having already committed two or three other crimes, and the fact that she took out a large insurance policy on her husband’s life just before his death makes the whole thing look even more suspicious. Akitani is convinced that it was Onizuka and not Shirakawa who drove the car into the sea and in his newspaper articles he draws attention to her past, her character and even her name, Oni, which is associated with demons in Japanese.

However, all the evidence against Onizuka is purely circumstantial and when her original lawyer steps down due to illness, the court appoints a new one, Takukichi Sahara, who believes he’ll be able to prove her innocence. Akitani is horrified – Onizuka has links with the Yakuza (Japan’s version of the Mafia) and if she’s freed she’s sure to want revenge on everyone who has spoken out against her.

This is such a fascinating book. On one level, it works as a detective novel, with Sahara doing the ‘detecting’, looking through the evidence, considering the witness statements and trying to determine what really happened that evening in July. Then there are all the other layers: the role of the media in influencing public opinion; the way preconceived ideas can lead us to make unfair assumptions; and how personal bias can make two people interpret a situation in completely different ways. The characters don’t have much depth – and we never even really ‘meet’ Onizuka, with our knowledge of her coming mainly from other characters’ conversations – but that didn’t bother me too much in such a short book with so many other things to interest me. There’s also a twist at the end, which leaves us to decide for ourselves what probably happened next!

I would like to read more of Matsumoto’s books. It seems that Tokyo Express is considered his masterpiece, but it’s described as a mystery revolving around train timetables and alibis and I’m not sure how I would get on with that. Should I try it or can anyone recommend another one?

The House of Barbary by Isabelle Schuler

January 19, 202615 Comments

A few years ago I read Isabelle Schuler’s debut novel, Lady MacBethad, which is set in 11th century Scotland and imagines the early life of Gruoch, the ‘real’ Lady Macbeth. Her second book, The House of Barbary, is set in a very different time and place – 17th century Switzerland – and this time it’s inspired by the Bluebeard fairy tale.

Our heroine is Beatrice Barbary, the only child of Jakob Barbary, one of the two mayors of Bern. Beatrice has never known her mother, who died when she was a baby, and has had an unusual upbringing, with her father encouraging her interest in natural science, keeping her away from other children and, now that she’s a young woman, preventing her from marrying. As a result, the people of Bern think she is strange and she has no friends her own age. When Jakob is killed, brutally murdered in his own home, Beatrice is determined to find out who is responsible and why, but as she begins to investigate she becomes aware of just how vulnerable and alone she is. The only person who may be able to help is Johann Schorr, an artist who lived with the Barbary family during Beatrice’s childhood, working on a portrait of Jakob; the problem is, for some reason, Beatrice has no memory of him at all.

Beatrice’s narrative alternates with Johann’s story, which is set more than a decade earlier during his time in the Barbary household. As a Catholic in a largely Protestant city, Johann is grateful for the support and patronage of Jakob Barbary and begins to consider him a friend. However, their friendship is tested when Johann makes a gruesome discovery in Jakob’s cellar and he must decide whether he can continue working for the man or whether he should get as far away as possible, even if it means sacrificing his career and leaving Beatrice, an innocent young child, in danger.

If you’re familiar with the Bluebeard folktale, you can probably guess what’s hidden in the cellar – and if you’re not, I won’t spoil things by telling you. It’s only a loose retelling of Bluebeard anyway and whether or not you know other versions of the story should make no difference to your enjoyment of this one. And did I enjoy it? Yes, I did, for the most part – but I felt that some of the developments in the second half of the book let it down. Beatrice, who has set out to investigate and avenge her father’s death, ends up doing things that I found disproportionate and difficult to justify, so that I lost most of the sympathy I’d had for her earlier on. The ending was not what I’d expected or hoped for either.

I’ve never been to Bern and loved the descriptions of the city, as it was in the 1650s, with its cobbled streets, sandstone arcades and famous bear pits. I’ve read very few books set in Switzerland and even less about 17th century Switzerland, so everything was new to me; it was interesting to read about the political system in place at that time, with Bern having two mayors at once – they would alternate each year, one ‘acting’ and one ‘sitting’ – and four powerful officials known as Venners, who would each oversee one district of the city. This political system is important to the story, with Beatrice’s father being one of the two mayors and all four Venners being part of his inner circle.

Schuler’s historical note at the end of the book was fascinating; I discovered that, although Beatrice is a fictional character, she’s based on the real life German entomologist and naturalist Maria Sibylla Merian, a woman I previously knew nothing about. It’s always good to learn something new!

I think the only other Bluebeard retellings I’ve read are two short stories: Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber and Nalo Hopkinson’s The Glass Bottle Trick. If you can recommend anything else, please let me know.

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

Penitence by Kristin Koval

January 15, 202615 Comments

Penitence is a beautifully written novel, tackling one of the darkest subjects imaginable: the murder of a teenage boy by his own younger sister.

It happens in the small town of Lodgepole, Colorado in 2016 and the murderer is thirteen-year-old Nora Sheehan, who calls the police herself to confess that she has just shot and killed her brother Nico. Before the incident, Nora had seemed depressed and withdrawn, which may or may not have been related to Nico, who was less than a year older, being diagnosed with Huntington’s disease. Huntington’s is a degenerative condition with no cure, so it’s possible that Nora may have thought she was helping her brother avoid a terrible fate – but is this true or is there another reason for what she did?

Martine Dumont, a seventy-two-year-old lawyer, is looking forward to her retirement when Nora’s parents, David and Angie Sheehan, ask her to take on one last case and defend their daughter. Martine accepts, but knows she is out of her depth and contacts her estranged son, Julian, whose speciality is criminal law. Julian has lived in New York for many years, but Angie was once his girlfriend, which makes the situation awkward. Although he agrees to return to Lodgepole and help with Nora’s case, being around Angie again brings back difficult memories for both of them.

When I first started to read, I was expecting this to be a crime novel, but that’s not really how I would describe it. The murder of Nico Sheehan is actually a relatively small part of the story; there’s never any doubt that Nora did it deliberately and it’s quite obvious why she did it, so there’s no mystery involved. We do get a lot of information on the laws surrounding the prosecution of child murderers, how they can sometimes be tried as adults rather than juveniles, and the sentences they can expect. We’re also given some insights into what life is like for Nora in the juvenile detention facility she is sent to while she’s awaiting trial.

The main focus of the novel, though, is on the topic of forgiveness and the various questions that arise from this. Why do we feel we have to assign blame when something tragic happens? How can we move on from this and find forgiveness for ourselves and others? How much penitence is enough? These things are explored not just through the story of Nico’s murder – in fact, I felt that relatively little time was spent on showing how David and Angie truly felt about one of their children killing the other – but also on the relationship between Julian and Angie and how it was affected by another tragedy decades earlier. This second storyline plays out in another timeline set in the 1990s/early 2000s and alternates with the Nora/Nico thread. However, I thought too many pages were devoted to this backstory and it made the whole book feel longer and slower than it really needed to be.

I did love the portrayal of Lodgepole, a small Colorado ski resort, and the way life there differed from Julian’s (and for a while, Angie’s) life in New York. An interesting setting, then, and an interesting subject – if only it had been more tightly plotted, it would have been an excellent book. I did like it, though, and found it quite thought-provoking. It’s Kristin Koval’s debut novel and I’ll be happy to read more.

Thanks to Simon & Schuster UK for providing a copy of this book for review via NetGalley.

The Token by Sharon Bolton

January 12, 202612 Comments

Sharon Bolton’s latest novel, The Token, begins with eight people on a yacht heading for the Scilly Isles. The skipper had promised it would be an uneventful crossing, with perfect sailing conditions, but his seven passengers are growing increasingly nervous as the wind strengthens and rain starts to fall. Soon they are caught in a storm, the boat is taking in water, the electronics have stopped working and two people have been swept overboard…

And that’s where we leave them, until much later in the book. First, we have to go back several weeks to find out why this group of people have come to be on this fateful journey in the first place. We learn that each of them has received an envelope containing a token and a letter stating that the billionaire Logan Quick is leaving them a share of his huge fortune. All they need to do is keep the token safe until they hear news of his death. However, none of the seven has ever heard of Logan Quick and none of them has any idea why they’ve been chosen.

The seven token recipients come from all walks of life and seem, at least at first, to have nothing in common. There’s Holly, a single mother trying to juggle her law career with caring for her son; Robin, a wedding planner in love with his latest client; Sabri, an ambulance driver whose family are struggling financially; Tara, an artist whose ex-husband just won’t leave her alone; Craig, a fire safety consultant who is sleeping with his best friend’s girlfriend; Cheryl, who cares for her spiteful, controlling mother and has no life of her own; and Tug, a former military man suffering from PTSD.

Seven people all with interesting stories to be told, but I felt that trying to tell all of them in one book was far too much! The perspective kept switching from one to the other throughout the novel, which quickly became overwhelming. I think five main characters at the most would have been enough; Holly, Cheryl and Tug were the ones I found the most engaging.

This is also not really the exciting, fast-paced sort of thriller I’ve come to expect from Sharon Bolton. It takes a very long time to develop the stories of all seven characters and to reach the point where they come together and board the yacht for the Scilly Isles. It was only the final 30% of the book that I found truly gripping and where we were treated to some of the big plot twists and surprises that Bolton readers know and love. That doesn’t mean I didn’t enjoy the rest of the book at all, but it did definitely have a different feel from some of the other Bolton novels I’ve read, being much more character driven than plot driven.

What I did find fascinating was the way the novel explores how different personalities react to the prospect of fame and fortune. The seven token recipients are all told to keep quiet and tell no one, yet some of them can’t resist and soon the whole thing has been made public and is being reported on the news. Each of them has to find a way to deal with the media attention and the difficulties of trying to keep the token safe from theft, while also trying to decide whether, despite the opportunities the inheritance would bring, they really want to become fabulously rich.

Not a personal favourite Bolton novel for me, then, but they can’t all be and I still felt more positive about this one than negative.

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