Category: Fiction

Brat Farrar by Josephine Tey – #1949Club

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This week Karen of Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings and Simon of Stuck in a Book are hosting another of their clubs where we all read and write about books published in the same year. This time the chosen year is 1949, which seems to have been a particularly great year for literature – last week I posted a list of my previous 1949 reviews and there were eleven of them! I have some more reviews coming this week, starting with this one, Brat Farrar by Josephine Tey, which is also on my Classics Club list.

As a baby, Brat Farrar was abandoned on the steps of an orphanage on St Bartholomew’s Day (hence the name Brat, from Bartholomew or Bart). After spending some time in America working on a ranch, he returns as an adult to England where he is spotted by Alec Loding, an actor. Loding has mistaken Brat for Simon Ashby, a young man whose family he knows well. Simon’s twin brother, Patrick, went missing eight years earlier shortly after their parent’s deaths, and was believed to have drowned himself as his coat and a suicide note were found on a clifftop. Simon is now the sole heir to Latchetts, the family estate, and is due to inherit on his twenty-first birthday, which is almost here.

Brat allows himself to be persuaded to go to Latchetts and pretend to be Patrick Ashby so that he, as the elder twin will inherit everything. Loding coaches him on the family history, the layout of the house and everything else he needs to know to be able to successfully impersonate Patrick. I’m sure if I tried to do that, I would forget it all and get caught out immediately, but Brat does an amazing job and the Ashbys are completely fooled. Or are they?

I’ve been meaning to read this book for years, ever since I read The Ivy Tree by Mary Stewart, which has a very similar plot and even references Brat Farrar several times. My previous experience of Tey’s work has been mixed – I liked The Daughter of Time and found A Shilling for Candles boring – but I really enjoyed this one. I love a good impersonation story and even did a Top Ten Tuesday post on them a while ago! Tey is thought to have taken inspiration from the real life case of the Tichborne Claimant from the 1860s.

The really intriguing thing about this book is that even though we know from the start that Brat is a participant in a deliberate fraud and therefore a criminal, we find ourselves siding with him and rooting for him anyway. This is partly because Simon, the real Ashby heir, is so unlikeable, and partly because Brat, in contrast, is quiet, kind and thoughtful and his motives for going along with the impersonation scheme seem to be not so much for the money but more for the sense of belonging – and also the chance to work with the horses at Latchetts! Naturally, this leads to some internal conflict when he finds himself growing to like and care for the family he is deceiving.

This book does require some suspension of disbelief. I felt that the Ashbys and their friends and neighbours (apart from Simon, who is immediately sceptical) were very quick to accept that Patrick had returned from the dead and I found it unlikely that anyone could really carry on a deception like that for any length of time without making mistakes and giving themselves away. But apart from that – and the focus on horses, show jumping and racing, which I could have done without – this was an entertaining read and a great choice for 1949 Club!

This is also book 8/50 from my third Classics Club list.

The Well by Elizabeth Jolley

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Elizabeth Jolley is not an author I’ve ever come across before, but when I saw The Well on NetGalley I decided to give it a try. It sounded intriguing and suitably dark for the RIP XXI challenge. Originally published in 1986, the book has recently been reissued by Virago with a new introduction by Alice Slater. I saved the introduction until the end in case of spoilers, but it’s definitely worth going back and reading it.

The novel opens late at night with two women driving home from a party. One is Miss Hester Harper; the other is her adopted daughter, Katherine. As Katherine is almost ready to take her driving test, Hester allows her to get behind the wheel for practice. Due to a combination of inexperience and recklessness, Katherine hits an object on a bend in the road. Hester gets out to investigate and, although she doesn’t say exactly who or what the car has hit, the implication is that it’s a person. Acting impulsively and out of desperation, Hester urges Katherine to continue driving home so they can throw the body down the well in their yard and pretend nothing has happened.

Home for Hester and Katherine is a wheat and sheep farm in rural Western Australia. The two women have lived there alone since Hester inherited the farm from her father and because it’s so isolated, they are able to successfully dispose of the body without anyone knowing what they’ve done. Hester hopes they can put the incident behind them and move on, but Katherine is haunted by what happened and begins to spend more and more time alone at the well…

The drive home, the accident and the decision to hide the body all happen within the first ten pages of the book; we then go back to an earlier period in time with Hester remembering how the teenage, orphaned Katherine first came to live with her and how their relationship developed. We also get some glimpses of Hester’s childhood and her infatuation with her German governess, Hilde Herzfeld.

When we meet Hester as an adult in the book’s present day, it’s not stated exactly how old she is but she describes herself as middle-aged and of ‘advancing years’. Her feelings for the much younger Katherine seem to mirror her obsession with Hilde all those years ago. Her love for Katherine is intense and possessive, she’s jealous of Katherine’s friendship with a girl from the orphanage, and she’s afraid that Katherine will go away and leave her. It seems likely that she’s a lesbian, but like a lot of things in the book it’s left open to interpretation.

Later in the novel we return to the story of the body in the well and the atmosphere becomes darker as Katherine, consumed by guilt, begins to have fantasies about what is really down there. Although there were times in the first half of the book when I felt bored, I found the second half more gripping and quite unsettling. I was a bit disappointed by the ending, though, as it’s very abrupt and, again, difficult to interpret. The only other problem I had with the book was Katherine’s way of speaking, which feels unrealistic and unnatural; it’s partially explained by Hester’s observation that Katherine likes to mimic the American celebrities she admires, but I was still irritated by it!

The story has a timeless feel; I’m not sure if we’re told exactly when the story takes place – Katherine’s favourite actor is John Travolta, so it’s presumably set around the time it was published in the 1980s, but otherwise it could easily have been much earlier in the 20th century. Overall, despite my criticisms, I found The Well a fascinating and unusual novel.

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

Reviewed for RIPXXI hosted by @perilreaders

The Sea Sisters by Louise Douglas

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I’ve read several standalone novels by Louise Douglas and enjoyed them all, but haven’t tried any of the books in her detective series set in France until now. This is the fourth in the series so I hoped it wouldn’t matter that I hadn’t read the other three – and it didn’t, although there’s one ongoing storyline that would probably have meant more if I’d read the previous books.

Mila Shepherd works at Touissants Detective Agency in the Britanny coastal town of Morannez with her stepmother Ceci and their colleague, Carter Jackson. Mila came to France after the tragic deaths of her stepsister Sophie and her husband in a sailing accident and is looking after her orphaned niece, Ani, as well as taking Sophie’s place at the agency. Mila has discovered that Sophie was trying to contact her on the day of the accident and when she comes across a note left in Sophie’s kitchen – Call Mila. Tell her the truth. Ask her to help – she is filled with guilt, convinced that if she’d answered her phone that day she could have saved her stepsister.

Meanwhile, Mila, Ceci and Carter have an intriguing new case to investigate, which begins with a young woman, introducing herself as Nicole Stevenson, arriving at the detective agency. Nicole claims to have discovered that she is really Evie Albert, who disappeared from a festival in Morranez twenty-five years ago as a two-year-old child. The case was never solved at the time and Evie has never been found, so Mila and her colleagues agree to look into Nicole’s story. Their investigations take them to the Holywell Commune, a former convent which is now home to a group who are hostile to strangers and reluctant to answer any questions. But as Mila continues her search for proof of Nicole’s claim, she begins to find links to Sophie’s death. It seems the two separate mysteries are somehow connected, but how?

Although I haven’t read the previous novels, it seems that the storyline involving the deaths at sea of Sophie and her husband, Charlie, has been running throughout the whole series, presumably with a few more details emerging in each book. At the start of this one, Mila still doesn’t know what happened, why two experienced sailors went out in bad weather or why Sophie had been trying to speak to her. Maybe because I haven’t been following this story from the beginning, I found it less interesting than the Nicole/Evie one, which was fascinating. Is Nicole really Evie, kidnapped as a child and raised under a new name? Is she just so desperate to escape from her own past that she’s convinced herself she’s someone else? Is she deliberately lying for some unknown reason – or could there be another explanation for the whole thing?

I enjoyed the book overall, but it felt a bit longer than it really needed to be; for example, there’s an interlude in the middle where Mila goes home to England to visit her mother, which had no relevance to the rest of the story and did nothing to move the plot along at all. I also didn’t quite understand the tension in Mila’s relationship with Carter, who seemed like a good person – maybe that’s another thing that would have made more sense if I’d read the earlier books. I did love the setting; Louise Douglas is always so good at bringing a place to life and here she combines the beauty of the Brittany coast during a hot summer with more sinister undertones, as she describes the oppressive, cult-like atmosphere of the Holywell Commune or Mila’s discovery of a dolmen – one of the ancient stone tombs found in that part of France.

Both mysteries are brought to a satisfying conclusion by the end of the novel. I don’t know if there are plans for more books in this series, but I would like to go back and read the first three at some point and also still have some of the author’s other standalones to investigate.

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

The Rose and the Yew Tree by Mary Westmacott

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This month’s theme for the Read Christie 2026 challenge is ‘Best-Kept Secret’ and we’re focusing on the six novels Christie wrote under the pseudonym Mary Westmacott. I have already read three of them – Giant’s Bread, Unfinished Portrait and A Daughter’s a Daughter – so I decided to read The Rose and the Yew Tree next as it’s also on my lists for both the Classics Club and the 20 Books of Summer challenge.

The Rose and the Yew Tree is narrated by Hugh Norreys, who breaks off his engagement to Jennifer after being badly injured in a car accident. Confined to a wheelchair, Hugh moves to St Loo in Cornwall to live with his brother and sister-in-law, Robert and Teresa. His condition has left him feeling bitter and worthless and he secretly keeps a bottle of pills to hand in case he decides to end his life. However, he finds several things in St Loo to distract him from thoughts of suicide…

First of all, Hugh is introduced to Lady St Loo, widow of the seventh baron, along with her sister, sister-in-law and granddaughter Isabella. Hugh has never met anyone quite like the beautiful, strange Isabella; she has a calmness and poise he’s never encountered before and several characters in the book refer to her as a fairytale princess. But Hugh is not the only man drawn to Isabella; she also catches the eye of John Gabriel, the Tory party candidate for St Loo in the upcoming elections.

Gabriel is the son of a plumber and has done his best to work his way up the social ladder, but still feels a sense of inferiority around people of a higher class, although this is masked by his confident, charismatic exterior. He’s not a natural Tory – in fact, he doesn’t have any strong political views one way or the other – but he wants a career in politics and thinks he’ll have more chance of standing out than he would in the Labour party. Gabriel’s campaign plays a large part in the novel, as does his complex relationship with Isabella, whom he both desires and resents (the resentment because she belongs to the aristocracy he despises so much).

First published in 1948, the novel takes its title from the poem, Little Gidding by TS Eliot: “The moment of the rose and the moment of the yew-tree Are of equal duration.” I won’t explain the significance here, but you’ll understand it once you’ve read the book. Compared to the other Westmacott novels I’ve read, I found this one particularly complex – not necessarily the plot, which is quite straightforward, but in terms of the psychology and the underlying messages. It’s also much more than a simple romance (the Westmacotts are often described as romances, but I think that’s misleading).

I enjoyed the political element of the novel, set during the build to the 1945 General Election, which would result in a landslide Labour win over Winston Churchill’s Conservatives. What’s striking is how many of the characters get caught up in the election campaign without actually having any particular political allegiances – Hugh admits to not really understanding politics, Teresa claims the parties are all the same, Gabriel is just interested in the power and social standing a political career will give him, and Isabella only cares because it’s important to Gabriel. We also see how a candidate’s personal actions can affect their reputation with the public, for better or worse (such as rescuing a child or becoming involved with a married woman). Christie doesn’t often write about politics on a smaller scale like this – although several of her books deal with international espionage and intrigue – so I found it fascinating.

Of the four Westmacotts I’ve now read, I think this one and A Daughter’s a Daughter are the best, but I still have The Burden and Absent in the Spring to come!

Book 7/20 of 20 Books of Summer

This is also book 4/50 from my third Classics Club list.

Son of Nobody by Yann Martel

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Homer’s Iliad, the most famous account of the Trojan War, focuses on gods, heroes and great warriors – but what if there was another version, written from the perspective of the ordinary people, the ‘sons of nobody’? Yann Martel explores this idea in his new novel, the first I’ve read since Life of Pi, which I loved. I enjoyed this one as well; it’s an unusual and ambitious book, but it worked for me.

The novel is narrated by Harlow Donne, a Canadian academic whose area of interest is Greek epics. When he receives an offer to take part in a research project at Oxford University, he sees it as the opportunity of a lifetime and leaves his wife and daughter behind in Canada to travel to England alone and take up his new position. At Oxford, Harlow begins to study the Oxyrhynchus Papyri, a collection of ancient manuscripts, and comes across some fragments of what appears to be the story of a man called Psoas of Midea and an alternative account of the events of the Iliad. Psoas is not a god, a king or a hero – he’s a goatherd, a commoner, referred to in the fragments as the son of nobody. As Harlow continues to piece together and translate the fragments, a whole new epic begins to emerge, which he thinks of as the Psoad, and at the same time he becomes aware of parallels with his own life.

Each chapter of the novel begins with a section of the Psoad, which is written in verse, and is followed by Harlow’s footnotes in which he interprets what is being said and what we can learn from it. Sometimes, though, his footnotes go in a different direction and he talks about his personal life, his work at Magdalen College and his relationships with his wife, Gail, and their young daughter, Helen. Harlow sees himself as Agamemnon, King of Mycenae, who sacrificed his daughter, Iphigenia, to the gods in return for winds and then sailed off to the Trojan War for ten years, leaving his wife, Clytemnestra, behind. Like Agamemnon, Harlow has abandoned his own wife and child to go in pursuit of his own ‘Troy’, in other words his translation of the new Greek epic.

I wasn’t sure at first how I would feel about reading an imitation epic, but I think Martel does a great job of making it feel reasonably authentic, as if it could have existed even though we know it didn’t. The Psoad differs from the Iliad in many ways – for example, instead of the famous Trojan Horse there are elephants – and Harlow draws comparisons between the two in his footnotes (which I believe in the physical book version are printed across the bottom half of the page, separated by a line from the verse fragments in the top half, although you couldn’t see this formatting in the NetGalley version I read). I think you could still follow and enjoy the book with no prior knowledge of the Iliad or the Trojan War, but having at least some familiarity will help you to get more out of it.

Harlow’s personal story is also interesting as a portrayal of a man who becomes so obsessed with his work that he completely neglects his wife and daughter. I had a lot of sympathy for Gail, who can’t understand why her husband is putting a fictional story ahead of his family’s real needs and concerns. I liked Harlow less and less as the book went on, but was still moved by the traumatic events that happen in his life towards the end.

I’m sure Son of Nobody won’t be for everyone, but if it sounds at all appealing to you I would recommend giving it a try. I found it very impressive and completely different from the usual Greek retellings.

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

The Last Love Song by Lucinda Riley

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This is a reworking of one of Lucinda Riley’s early novels, originally published as Losing You in 1997 under the name Lucinda Edmonds. After Riley’s death in 2021, her son Harry Whittaker completed her unfinished novel, Atlas, then updated another of her early books, Hidden Beauty, as The Hidden Girl. It would be interesting to know exactly how much is Whittaker’s work, but without reading the originals it’s impossible to tell.

The Last Love Song begins in 1964 in the village of Ballymore on the coast of West Cork, Ireland. When sixteen-year-old Sorcha O’Donovan goes to see a local band with her friends from school, she has no idea that her life is about to change forever. Within months she is heading for London with the lead singer, Con Daly, having been disowned by her father, who disapproves of their relationship. After a period of struggling to make ends meet while Con looks for opportunities in London’s vibrant music scene, he finally achieves stardom with his new band, The Fishermen, and he and Sorcha become rich and famous almost overnight. Of course, this doesn’t necessarily bring happiness and when Helen McCarthy, a face from both their pasts, arrives back in their lives, everything starts to go wrong.

Two decades later, preparations are being made for a huge charity concert at Wembley Stadium. The Fishermen have agreed to reform for the event, but one member is missing – Con Daly, who disappeared seventeen years ago after suffering a personal tragedy. There’s only one person who may be able to find out what happened all those years earlier; the problem is, she’s in prison…

I enjoyed this book; it was much more than just the simple romance it seemed to be at first. Although I found Sorcha slightly bland, I thought Helen McCarthy was a great character and I veered between loving and hating her at various times throughout the book. Mostly I admired her for trying to get what she wanted out of life despite things not always going her way. There’s also a crime element to the story, which becomes stronger towards the end – my biggest criticism of the book is that this part of the plot is dropped for a long section in the middle – and although I easily guessed who the culprit was, I was kept in suspense wondering when and how they would finally be caught!

What I really loved about this book, though, is the portrayal of the 60s music scene. The novel takes us step by step through every stage of the Fishermens’ rise to fame, beginning with the formation of the band and choosing of the name, their first meeting with the man who would become their manager, and the difficulties they faced in getting signed to a record label. The complex and often tense relationships between the four band members are explored and it’s difficult not to think of the Beatles, with Con and Todd in the Lennon-McCartney positions as the band’s two main songwriters, Derek as an aspiring songwriter in his own right, struggling to make himself heard, and Ian as the happy-go-lucky drummer. If you enjoyed Taylor Jenkins Reid’s Daisy Jones and the Six, I think you’ll like the musical aspect of this novel, if nothing else!

I think there are one or two more Edmonds novels that haven’t been published yet, but I haven’t seen any news on whether Harry Whittaker will be reworking them as well. Of the books already available under the Riley name, I haven’t read Hothouse Flower or The Angel Tree yet, so still have those two to look forward to. I’ve also discovered that Harry has written his own book, Orlando, coming later this year.

Thanks to Pan Macmillan 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!