Category: Reviews

Secrets of the Bees by Jane Johnson

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Ezra Curnow is almost eighty years old and has spent his whole life living in a little cottage on the Trengrose estate in Cornwall. It was home to his father and grandfather before him and Ezra can’t imagine living anywhere else. His cottage has no modern appliances or conveniences, not even a television, but Ezra doesn’t see the need; he spends most of his time outdoors with his cat and tame jackdaw, growing his own fruit and vegetables and tending to his bees in their hive.

Ezra’s peaceful life is shattered when Eliza Rosevear, mistress of Trengrose House, dies without leaving a will. The estate goes up for sale and is bought by Toby Hardman, a London businessman, who arrives with his wife Minty, an interior designer, and their teenage son, Dom. As soon as they move in, they begin converting part of the estate into a glamping site and looking for other ways to bring in tourists. Ezra is horrified, particularly when they remove the ancient Celtic cross that gives Trengrose its name. Worse still, it seems that the Hardmans also have their eye on Ezra’s cottage and with no official paperwork to prove that it’s his, he could be at risk of losing his home.

Secrets of the Bees is Jane Johnson’s latest novel and one of several, including The White Hare, that are set in her native Cornwall. Her love for the Cornish landscape, history, customs and people comes through strongly in her descriptive writing and in her creation of Ezra Curnow. Ezra represents tradition and a way of life that has almost disappeared; he has very little in terms of material possessions, but is happy and content. The Hardmans are the complete opposite – they represent change and progress, they have money, cars, technology, yet what they don’t have is happiness. Toby and Minty’s marriage is strained and lacking in trust, while Dom has been expelled from his expensive school for dealing drugs. Although Toby is the villain of the book and seems to be a lost cause, there’s still hope for Minty and Dom and we see them begin to improve and grow as people through their association with Ezra and the Cornish countryside. Dom even became one of my favourite characters, which I certainly hadn’t expected at first.

It’s very common, of course, for residents to object to new developments in their area, particularly ones that could damage the environment or cause noise and disruption, but Ezra takes his protests a step further. He comes up with some very inventive and amusing ways to throw the Hardmans’ plans into disarray, which adds some humour to a serious subject. Proving ownership of his cottage is much more difficult for him – there’s always been an understanding between the Rosevears and the Curnows but apparently nothing has been put in writing. It’s only when we are given some glimpses into the lives of Eliza Rosevear and her family – and into Ezra’s own past, including his National Service in Cyprus in the 1950s – that the truth about the Trengrose estate begins to emerge.

Although the book seemed slow at first and it took a while for things to really start moving, I gradually became completely immersed in the story. I could picture the setting so vividly and I loved everything Jane Johnson had to say about human beings and our relationship with the natural environment. I’ve enjoyed everything I’ve read by Johnson so far, whether set in Cornwall or in other parts of the world, historical or contemporary. I must find time to go back and read the remaining books of hers that I haven’t tried yet.

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

The Crying of the Wind: Ireland by Ithell Colquhoun

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Ithell Colquhoun was a completely new name for me when I spotted this book on NetGalley recently, but I know now that she was a prominent British surrealist painter in the 1930-40s, as well as an occultist, poet and author of both fiction and non-fiction. The Crying of the Wind, originally published in 1955, describes her travels around Ireland and her impressions of the people she meets and places she visits. It’s the first of three travel books she wrote, with a book on Cornwall following in 1957 and then one on Egypt which has never been published.

Colquhoun bases herself near the village of Lucan on the River Liffey, to the west of Dublin. In each chapter, she sets out on a walk or an excursion by car to visit different parts of Ireland, including Glendalough, Connemara and Cashel. The structure seems a bit haphazard, with no real order or pattern to the places she visits, and the book definitely has the feel of a personal journal rather than something you could use to plan out your own travels. It’s an interesting book, though, and I did enjoy reading it. The descriptive writing is beautiful at times, as you would expect from a book written by a painter; here she describes the approach to Connemara’s Twelve Bens mountain range:

Across miles of mulberrydark bogland we drove towards them, the tawny of king ferns lining the ditches that bordered the road. Air of a wonderful transparency arched above us, blue washed with white gold. I did not regret our slow pace, enforced by the pot-holes in the road, since I could watch the mountains from gradually shifting angles.

Although Colquhoun includes some anecdotes about her encounters with Irish people, the way they live and the conversations she has with them, the main focus of her writing is on the beauty of the natural environment and on places of historical interest such as old churches, holy wells and remains of ancient forts and towers. She often laments the rate of progress and its effect on the natural world; when walking in the countryside, she is very aware of the noise of traffic on busy roads nearby and the sights of new housing developments and factory chimneys altering the landscape forever.

With her interest in the occult, Colquhoun spends a lot of time discussing the myths, legends and folklore of each place she visits. She believes in ghosts, spirits and supernatural beings and accepts their existence in a very matter-of-fact way.

Their forms vary; a friend described one she had seen on some downs in Dorsetshire as being ‘the size of a haystack, opaque but fluid at the edges, moving very quickly’; another is sometimes seen like a tower racing over wide sands on the north coast of Cornwall. I have myself seen in Cornwall one like a massive pillar of unknown substance, with filaments stretched from the top seemingly to hold it to the ground like the guy-ropes of a tent.

The Crying of the Wind is an unusual travel book, then, and also a fascinating one. I’ll look forward to reading her Cornwall book, The Living Stones, which is also available in a new edition from Pushkin Press.

Thanks to Pushkin Press Classics for providing a copy of this book for review via NetGalley.

Written on the Dark by Guy Gavriel Kay

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It seems to me that most moments in a life can be called interludes: following something, preceding something. Carrying us forward, with our needs and nature and desires, as we move through our time. It also seems to me that it is foolish to try to comprehend all that happens to us, let alone understand the world.

This is a beautiful historical fantasy novel loosely inspired by the life of the poet François Villon. It takes us to a world that will be familiar to Kay readers – a world with two moons, one blue and one white, where the three main religions are Asharite, Jaddite and Kindath, corresponding to Islam, Christianity and Judaism – but where his most recent novels have been set in thinly disguised versions of Venice, Dubrovnik and Constantinople, this one takes place in Ferrieres, based on medieval France.

On a freezing cold night in the city of Orane, the young poet Thierry Villar steps out of the tavern in which he’s been staying to find that he is surrounded by armed horsemen. He’s convinced that he’s going to be arrested – desperate for money, Thierry had become embroiled in a plot to rob a sanctuary – but to his surprise, he is escorted through the streets to where a man lies dead, brutally stabbed. This is the Duke de Montereau, one of the most powerful noblemen in Ferrieres and the younger brother of King Roch, who is struggling to rule due to mental illness. In return for not arresting Thierry, the provost of Orane asks him to help discover who murdered the Duke by listening to gossip in the city’s shops and taverns.

If you know your French history, you may have guessed that King Roch is based on King Charles VI, nicknamed ‘the Mad’ due to his episodes of mental instability and a belief that he was made of glass. Montereau, then, is a fictional version of the King’s brother, the Duke of Orléans, who was assassinated in 1407. Other people and incidents in the novel can also be connected to real characters and events from the Hundred Years’ War, which adds an extra layer of interest to the story if you’re familiar with this period of history. If not, it doesn’t matter at all since, as all the names have been changed, the book can also be read as a work of pure fiction.

Written on the Dark is a shorter novel than is usual for Kay and feels more tightly plotted than his other recent books, with a stronger focus on the main character and fewer diversions into the stories of minor characters. This probably explains why I thought this book was more enjoyable than the last two or three. Although I know nothing about the real François Villon so can’t say how his story may correspond with Thierry Villar’s, I found Thierry a likeable character; he has his flaws and sometimes makes mistakes, but this just makes him feel more relatable and human. An overarching theme of the book (and of Kay’s work in general) is the idea that even people who are considered ordinary or insignificant can play a key role in important events and influence not only their own fate but the fates of many others.

The fantasy aspect of the novel is limited mainly to the alternate version of France and to a mysterious character known as Gauvard Colle who can communicate with the ‘half-world’. There are also some surprising twists where things like the Battle of Agincourt and the story of Joan of Arc don’t go in quite the direction you would expect! I loved this one and am looking forward to reading his earlier book inspired by medieval France, A Song for Arbonne, which is one of a small number of Kay novels I haven’t read yet.

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

The Sirens by Emilia Hart

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After enjoying Emilia Hart’s first novel, Weyward, in 2023, I’ve been looking forward to reading her new one, The Sirens. Weyward linked the stories of three women in different time periods through a family connection, a shared love of nature and a theme of witchcraft. The Sirens also has multiple timelines, but this time the characters are linked by water and the sea.

The novel begins in Australia in 2019 with student Lucy waking up from a sleepwalking episode with her hands around her ex-boyfriend’s neck. Ben is not entirely innocent – they broke up after he shared a nude photo of her with his friends – but she’s afraid he’ll report her for assault, so she packs her things and flees. Planning to take refuge with her sister Jess, an artist, Lucy heads for the town of Comber Bay, but on arrival she finds her sister’s house empty, as if it had been abandoned in a hurry. Lucy is concerned, but on learning that Jess did tell one of the neighbours that she would be going away for a while, she decides to wait in the house until she returns.

Comber Bay is a small town on the coast of New South Wales and has a sinister reputation; over a forty year period, eight men disappeared without trace, never to be seen again. Also, in 1982, a baby was found abandoned in a cave not far from Jess’s house. As she waits to hear from her sister, Lucy begins to uncover the truth behind these mysteries – but she becomes distracted by unsettling dreams of another pair of sisters who lived two centuries earlier.

Lucy’s present day story alternates with the story of those other two sisters, Mary and Eliza, who were found guilty of a crime in Ireland in 1800 and transported to Australia on a convict ship. Later in the book, Jess’s story also begins to unfold, mainly in the form of diary entries from the 1990s (the diary reads more like a novel, but I think we just have to suspend disbelief there). It takes a while for all of these threads to come together, but we eventually begin to see how cleverly they are connected. There are some surprising twists that I didn’t see coming, as well as some that I was able to guess before they were revealed. As ever, when a book has more than one timeline, I find that some are more compelling than others – and in this case, I particularly enjoyed Lucy’s story and the flashbacks to Jess’s teenage years. Mary and Eliza never fully came to life for me, so their adventures on board the Naiad didn’t interest me quite as much as I would have liked.

The title and cover of the book made me think there would be more siren/mermaid mythology incorporated into the story, but there’s only a little bit of that. There’s a lot of beautiful watery imagery, though, and water plays a big part in the novel in so many different ways. There’s Mary and Eliza’s sea voyage on the Naiad; the setting of Comber Bay, with its coastline, cliffs and caves; Jess’s paintings of ships; even the rare skin condition Lucy suffers from, aquagenic urticaria. It’s a book with lots of layers and things to think about. Having read two Emilia Hart books now, however, I do have a problem with her portrayal of men. Almost every male character in both books, with only a few exceptions, is either violent and abusive, a rapist or generally misogynistic or predatory. Obviously that’s true of some men, but I think it’s unrealistic that nearly every man who crosses paths with our female protagonists would be a terrible person. I think it should be possible to promote feminism and give women a voice without going too far in the other direction.

Apart from that, I did like the book and loved the eerie atmosphere Hart creates with Lucy alone in the abandoned Cliff House, uncovering the troubled history of Comber Bay’s past while being haunted by the cries of the women on the convict ship. It’s very similar to Weyward in some ways, but also different enough to be an interesting novel in its own right.

Thanks to The Borough Press for providing a copy of this book for review via NetGalley.

Traitor’s Legacy by S.J. Parris

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I know S.J. Parris’s Giordano Bruno historical thrillers, set in Elizabethan England, are very popular, but I’ve only read one of them – Sacrilege – and wasn’t particularly impressed. When I saw that she’d started to write a new series, of which Traitor’s Legacy is the first, I thought it would be a good opportunity to give her another try. As it turned out, this is actually a spin-off featuring some of the same characters (but not Bruno himself, although he is mentioned once or twice).

Traitor’s Legacy is set in the winter of 1598 and follows Sophia de Wolfe, formerly an agent of the Queen’s spymaster, Sir Francis Walsingham. Now Walsingham is dead and Secretary of State Robert Cecil has stepped into his role. It’s Cecil who summons Sophia when a girl’s body is found in the foundations of a building site with a scrap of paper tucked inside her clothing. The paper contains a message written in a cipher used by Sophia during her time as a spy, suggesting that someone is trying to link her to the murder. But who would want to do that and how could the secret cipher have fallen into anyone else’s hands?

The girl is quickly identified as Agnes Lovell, a wealthy heiress and a ward of the powerful nobleman Sir Thomas North, who had been planning to marry her to his son, Edmund. It’s possible that the murder could have been committed for political reasons – North had gained a reputation for corruption during a recent military campaign in Ireland – but there also seems to be a connection with the ambitious Earl of Essex, the Queen’s favourite courtier. However, things take a more personal turn for Sophia when suspicion falls on her own illegitimate son, Tobie. Sophia will do whatever it takes to clear his name, but this is made more difficult by the fact that Tobie himself has no idea that she is his mother!

Having only read one of the Giordano Bruno novels, I’m not sure how much we actually learn about Sophia in that series. I vaguely remember her from Sacrilege and presumably she’s in some of the other books as well. It’s definitely possible to follow what’s happening in this book without any prior knowledge, but I did feel there was a lot of backstory I wasn’t familiar with and had to pick up as I went along. I didn’t find Sophia entirely believable as a 16th century woman, but not wildly anachronistic either and she’s aware of the limitations placed on her by society. I liked her as a character and enjoyed following her investigations. She’s assisted by Anthony Munday, a playwright and another former spy, sometimes working together and sometimes separately which helps the story to move along.

Many of the characters in the book are people who really existed; I’ve already mentioned some of them, but we also meet others including Thomas Phelippes, Cecil’s cryptographer, and Frances Devereux, wife of the Earl of Essex. Through the character of Anthony Munday, the novel also touches on Elizabethan London’s theatrical world and the rival groups of actors, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men and the Admiral’s Men. There’s a lot going on, then, but the plot, although complex, is easy enough to follow and I gradually became gripped by it. I enjoyed this book and am looking forward to meeting Sophia and her friends again as the series progresses.

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

The Edinburgh Murders by Catriona McPherson

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This is the second book in Catriona McPherson’s new mystery series set in 1940s Edinburgh, but if you haven’t read the first one (In Place of Fear) it shouldn’t be a problem as both books also work as standalone novels. Those of you who have read In Place of Fear will remember that it introduced us to Helen Crowther, a welfare officer (formally a ‘medical almoner’) in the newly formed National Health Service. This second novel again follows Helen as she carries out her duties for the NHS and becomes embroiled in another mystery.

The novel opens with Helen taking a patient to the public bath house on Caledonian Crescent. As she helps the woman to wash herself, they become aware of a disturbance in one of the men’s cubicles. A man has been found boiled to death in a bath of scalding hot water – but how? Why would he continue to lie there as the water got hotter and hotter? And how could it have reached such a high temperature anyway? Even more worrying for Helen is the fact that she has spotted her father, Mack, at the baths, but when she speaks to him at home later, he tries to deny that he was there. As the bodies of more men are found around Edinburgh, all killed in equally unusual, gruesome ways, Helen becomes convinced that her father knows more about the deaths than he’s admitting to.

When I reviewed In Place of Fear, I mentioned that the mystery only formed a small part of the book, with more focus being on the historical element and the work of an almoner in the NHS. This book is the opposite – the mystery is much stronger, with the first murder discovered in the opening chapter and several more following soon after. The murders are carried out using imaginative methods and are obviously linked in some way, so Helen needs to decide exactly what the link is in order to identify the killer. It’s quite a dark book, but although the descriptions of the murders are unpleasant, they’re not too gory or graphic.

As with the first novel, there’s a great sense of time and place, bringing the atmosphere of Edinburgh’s Fountainbridge area to life. McPherson uses a lot of dialect and there’s a glossary at the front for those readers who need help with the Scottish words and phrases. I found that there was less time spent describing Helen’s welfare work, though, which was one of the things I thought was particularly interesting in the first novel. Still, I enjoyed meeting her again, as well as the other recurring characters such as the two doctors she works for and her younger sister, known as Teenie. There’s also the beginnings of a possible romance for Helen with her friend Billy, who works at the morgue and helps her investigate the mystery and I’ll look forward to seeing how this develops in the next book.

I still haven’t read any of Catriona McPherson’s other novels, although she seems to have written a lot of them! I should probably investigate while I’m waiting for a third Helen Crowther book.

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

Cleopatra by Natasha Solomons

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This is a novel about Cleopatra, as you’ll have already guessed from the title and cover! Beginning with a visit to Rome with her father – the first time Cleopatra, then thirteen, has ever left Egypt – and ending just after the death of Julius Caesar in 44 BC, it’s a retelling of the life of one of history’s most famous women.

Although I love history and historical fiction, Cleopatra is not one of the historical figures I have a particular interest in and I haven’t read a lot of factual information about her. This means I can’t really comment on the accuracy of the book or how the choices Solomons makes on what to cover or not cover compare with choices made by other authors. Purely as a work of fiction, I found it quite enjoyable, especially the parts of the book dealing with Cleopatra’s personal life – her friendship with her beloved servant, Charmian; the development of her relationship with Caesar; and the birth of her son, Caesarion (depicted here as Caesar’s child). Solomons also delves into the politics of the period, the shifting allegiances and power struggles and the changing dynamics between Egypt and Rome. I found some of this a bit difficult to follow and I think including dates at the start of the chapters may have helped me keep track of the passing of time.

The novel is narrated mainly by Cleopatra herself, which allows us a lot of insight into what she is like as a mother, lover, sister and friend. However, there are also some chapters narrated by another woman: Servilia, sister of Cato the Younger and a mistress of Caesar’s (as well as the mother of his eventual assassin, Brutus). There weren’t enough of these chapters for me to fully connect with Servilia on an emotional level, but seeing things from her point of view did provide a very different (and more negative) impression of Cleopatra. I can understand why Solomons chose Servilia, but it would have been interesting if she had also written from other perspectives such as Charmian’s or maybe one of Cleopatra’s brothers and sisters.

The novel ends soon after Caesar’s death, leaving a lot of Cleopatra’s story still untold – her relationship with Mark Antony and the events leading to her suicide, for example. I haven’t seen any indication that there’s going to be a sequel, but there would definitely be enough material for one. Maybe Natasha Solomons will move on to something else for her next book, though; her previous work has included a novel narrated by the Mona Lisa, a reimagining of Romeo and Juliet, and a saga about a wealthy banking family, so clearly she likes to write about a wide range of topics and characters!

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