Category: Reviews

The Unicorn Hunters by Katherine Arden

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This was one of my most anticipated new releases of the year, having loved first Katherine Arden’s Winternight trilogy and then her standalone novel, The Warm Hands of Ghosts. The Unicorn Hunters promised the same blend of history, fantasy and folklore and sounded just as fascinating.

The novel is set in 15th century Brittany, at that time an independent duchy. Following the death of Duke Francis II, his daughter, Anne, has succeeded him as Duchess of Brittany. She believes she will be able to govern Brittany well and had promised her father she would never allow it to be conquered, but naturally a land ruled by a young, unmarried woman quickly comes under threat from other, more powerful nations. Determined to avoid a union with France at all costs, Anne secretly marries Maximilian of Austria by proxy but as she waits for her new husband to join her in Brittany, Charles VIII of France and his forces draw closer to the duchy.

As a delaying tactic, Anne suggests a unicorn hunt in the enchanted forest of Brocéliande. She’s sure the king and his men will be unable to resist the temptation of capturing a magical beast – and according to legend, a unicorn can only be tamed by a virgin, which means Anne should be able to avoid being forced into marriage with Charles until Maximilian arrives and her secret can be revealed. No one is really expecting to see a unicorn – until one emerges from the trees and allows Anne to take a lock of its mane. With Anne under increasing pressure to agree to the French marriage, it seems there could be a way to save Brittany after all, but it will mean delving further into the world of magic.

I really enjoyed The Unicorn Hunters, although I found it a bit uneven. The first half is mainly concerned with the politics of Brittany and France, with only a few fantasy elements: the brief appearance of the unicorn, whom we don’t see again until later; the role of diviners who use dice, wine or beetles to spy on rival courts and coloured cloths to communicate what they’ve learned; and a man who stumbles out of the Lost Lands, a sinister realm that borders the forest of Brocéliande and is inhabited by korrigans (Breton fairies or spirits). I was reminded very much of Guy Gavriel Kay’s books, which are mostly set in thinly disguised worlds based on real countries and real historical periods and have subtle supernatural touches. In the second half of this novel, though, the fantasy elements become much stronger as Anne and her friends and enemies move in and out of the Lost Lands.

I liked Anne as a character, but I should point out that the Anne of Brittany in this book is not quite the same as the historical one and her story follows a different path, so be aware that you aren’t learning the ‘real history’ here. For example, the real Anne was eleven when she succeeded to the duchy, but Katherine Arden’s Anne is an adult. Other characters, such as Louis of Orléans and Anne’s sister Isabeau, have also had large parts of their stories altered – and Charles VIII’s sister, Anne of France, is renamed Marguerite to avoid confusion. Arden explains some of her choices in an author’s note at the end of the book, although I wonder whether it would have been more sensible to have just changed the names of all of the people and places, like Kay does, and set the book in an entirely alternate version of history.

Something I really loved about this book is the way so many aspects of Breton myth and legend are incorporated into the story: the mythical lost city of Kêr-Is, swallowed up by the sea in the Bay of Douarnenez; the presence of the korrigans and the anaon (spirits of the dead); the ancient forest of Brocéliande, associated with Merlin and the Arthurian legends; and of course, the unicorn – but unicorns obviously appear in the myths of other cultures as well. The real Anne of Brittany does actually have a connection with unicorns as it has been speculated that she commissioned the famous set of tapestries known as The Unicorn Tapestries, although this has never been proven.

I preferred the earlier sections of the book as I felt there was a definite shift in tone and pace in the second half, but I’m sure other readers will have the opposite preference depending on whether you like your fiction to be more grounded in history and politics or more fantasy-heavy. The Winternight books are still my favourites by Katherine Arden (start with The Bear and the Nightingale and read all three in order) but this was enjoyable as well and I’ll be looking out for her next book.

Thanks to Random House UK/Century for providing a copy of this book for review via NetGalley.

Book 3/20 of 20 Books of Summer

She Walks at Night by Seishi Yokomizo

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Translated by Jesse Kirkwood

I love Seishi Yokomizo’s Kosuke Kindaichi mystery series and have read all the books currently available in English from Pushkin Press, of which this is the eighth. Originally published in 1948, She Walks at Night has a slightly different feel from most of the others in the series and it’s one of my favourites so far.

The novel is narrated by Torata Yashiro, a struggling mystery writer, who is approached by a friend, Naoki Sengoku, to ask for his opinion on a series of strange incidents involving members of Naoki’s family. Like many people, Naoki thinks that because Torata writes mysteries he must also know how to solve them – but of course that’s not necessarily the case, and when Torata hears the story he’s just as confused as his friend.

It seems that Naoki’s father, once a servant of the wealthy Furugami family, has grown close to the widowed Lady Oryu since her husband’s death. In fact, Naoki believes that the relationship started earlier than that and Lady Oryu’s daughter, Yachiyo, is actually his father’s child and therefore his own half-sister. A family prophecy has stated that Yachiyo will marry a hunchback – and, surprisingly, there are two of these in the Furugami household. One is Morie, another half-brother of Yachiyo’s who developed rickets as a child; the other is Koichi Hachiya, an artist who has just become engaged to Yachiyo.

The reason for Naoki’s concern is that Yachiyo shot Hachiya in the leg at a nightclub the previous year and hasn’t given a satisfactory explanation for what she did. She has also been receiving anonymous letters warning her not to ‘walk at night’ – a reference to her habit of sleepwalking. Torata agrees to accompany Naoki to his family home to meet Yachiyo and see if he can provide any answers, but almost as soon as he arrives the mystery deepens when a dead body is found with the head removed. How can they track down the murderer when they can’t even be sure who the victim is?

You may be wondering where Kosuke Kindaichi comes into all of this. In some of the books, he’s there from the beginning, but in others we don’t see him until later on – this is one of the latter and our dishevelled, stammering private detective makes his appearance almost exactly halfway through the book. People often underestimate Kindaichi, as Torata and Naoki initially do here, but his talents are hidden beneath his unimpressive exterior and as soon as he begins to investigate, the mystery starts to unravel. However, I felt that things unfold too quickly and easily once Kindaichi arrives on the scene and with the whole story told from Torata’s perspective, we don’t really get to see how the detective reaches any of his conclusions. The final solution, when it’s revealed, is clever and surprising, though, and I certainly hadn’t guessed it (it had crossed my mind once or twice, but I’d quickly dismissed it).

Japanese crime novels tend to focus more on the plot than on the characters, but I’m finding that Yokomizo’s books have a better balance and there are several interesting characters here, as well as Kindaichi himself, including Naoki’s father, the drunken, sword-wielding Tetsunoshin, and the bitter, vengeful old family nurse, Okita. This book overall has many of the same elements as a typical country house mystery by authors like Agatha Christie or John Dickson Carr, with some Gothic touches such as sleepwalking, family curses and the murders being carried out with a legendary Muramasa sword.

Jesse Kirkwood is the latest of several translators who have worked on this series and although I’ve been happy with all of the translations, this one feels particularly smooth and easy to read. The use of a first person narrator also gives it a more intimate, personal feel than some of the other books (I think The Village of Eight Graves and The Honjin Murders are the only other ones written in the first person). If you’re new to the series, this could be a good place to start, but as they’re all separate mysteries you could really start anywhere. I’m already looking forward to the next one to be translated, The Queen Bee Mystery, coming next year!

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

Book 2/20 of 20 Books of Summer

The Inner Clock by Lynne Peeples

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I’m someone who often has trouble sleeping so when I came across Lynne Peeples’ book, The Inner Clock: Living in Sync with Our Circadian Rhythms, I decided to read it in the hope of getting some tips and advice. It turned out to be more of a science book than a self-help book, but I found it absolutely fascinating.

Lynne Peeples is a writer and journalist based in Seattle and goes to impressive lengths in order to carry out her research for this book. In the first chapter, she describes how she spent ten days in an underground bunker in Arkansas with no access to clocks or any natural light at all as part of an experiment to see if she could guess the time of day based only on her own body’s circadian rhythms. The circadian clock is the part of the brain that controls our sleep-wake cycle, hunger, metabolism, hormone production and other important functions; we also have other local clocks in almost every organ and tissue of the body and sometimes these clocks can get out of sync with each other which causes all sorts of problems. Peeples’ experiment helps her to understand the natural patterns of her own clocks and how they can be affected by light, food and drink, activity and other factors. This forms the basis of the rest of the book.

Peeples gives most attention to the effects of light, both natural and artificial – not just the amount of light we’re exposed to, but the type and quality of the light. The ‘bad’ kind of light, as we all know, is the blue light from phones and laptops, which is one of the reasons we’re told to limit their use before bedtime. However, we can counteract the effects of screens and artificial lights later in the day by making sure we get plenty of natural light throughout the day. Working in an office with windows is good for your circadian clock, but Peeples suggests that your distance from the window and even the angle of your desk can also make a big difference. Of course, sometimes a lack of daylight or exposure to too much artificial light is out of our control and there’s an interesting section where she discusses the inequalities experienced by people living in urban areas compared to rural ones.

If you’re looking for lots of practical advice on managing your circadian rhythms and improving your sleep, I think there are probably better books you could choose than this one. She does give some tips, based on things she herself discovered throughout her research, such as going for a walk in the morning rather than the evening, narrowing the window of time between your first meal of the day and your last, and waiting 90 minutes after waking before drinking tea or coffee. Most of the book, though, is spent exploring the science behind these things. I got bored at times, such as when she goes into a long discussion of photoreceptors in the eyes, but mostly it’s all very readable and often quite gripping. I was particularly fascinated to learn that fruit and vegetables have their own circadian clocks, even after being harvested, and storing them under bright lights can disturb their rhythms, affecting their nutritional value.

The main conclusion Peeples comes to is that not everyone’s circadian rhythm is the same and people’s internal clocks can run slightly differently (some of us are night owls and some are morning larks). We need to find routines and schedules that work for us, but unfortunately the way society is structured can make that difficult, particularly if you’re someone who struggles to wake up early in the morning. Peeples also looks at disruptions to these routines, such as jet lag, and considers evidence of sports teams performing better or worse depending on the direction in which they’ve had to travel through time zones.

The Inner Clock is a long book and contains a lot of information, but I’m sure most readers will find at least some of it useful and interesting, regardless of whether or not you have any problems with your sleep.

Murder at the Spirit Lounge by Jess Kidd

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This is the second book in Jess Kidd’s new 1950s mystery series, Nora Breen Investigates. I enjoyed the first one, Murder at Gulls Nest, but I thought this one was even better. It’s not essential to read them in order as they are completely separate mysteries, but you’ll have a better understanding of some of the characters and their relationships if you do.

In the previous book, former nun Nora Breen arrives in the English seaside town of Gore-on-Sea to investigate a friend’s disappearance. With that mystery now solved, she has decided to stay on at the Gulls Nest guest house for the winter so she can look for a job and build a new life for herself in the town. Soon, though, Nora finds herself caught up in another mystery – the murder of medium Doreen Chimes during a séance at her Gore-on-Sea ‘spirit lounge’. The séance had been attended by a small group of guests including Nora’s new friend, Detective Inspector Rideout, and there’s reason to believe that all of their lives could now be in danger.

With Rideout himself a possible target, along with the other séance attendees, he and Nora need to track down the murderer as quickly as possible. The only clue they have are the letters E.V.E. – part of a message Mrs Chimes was supposedly receiving from the spirit world at the moment of her death. Who is Eve and who was the message intended for? To find out, Nora will need to ask a lot of questions – and, fortunately, she’s just been offered a job as reporter for the Gore-on-Sea Herald, which gives her the perfect excuse to speak to people and hunt for information.

One of my favourite things about the first book was Nora’s relationship with Rideout and I was pleased to see it develop further in this book (although if you’re hoping for a great romance, I think there’s still a long way to go). Nora also has another suitor, the photographer Hosmer, so I suspect someone is going to be disappointed! There are plenty of other colourful characters as well, such as Irene, the Gulls Nest housekeeper, whose cooking leaves a lot to be desired, eight-year-old Dinah, who doesn’t speak but watches and listens, and even Father Conway, the seagull who taps at Nora’s bedroom window every morning.

The mystery is an interesting one and with this being the second book in the series, I felt that we got straight into the action more quickly than in the first book as less time needed to be spent introducing the main characters and setting the scene. I had my suspicions about the identity of the culprit early on and I was right, but there were still other things that I didn’t guess and I enjoyed watching Nora and Rideout carrying out their investigations. With Rideout’s life at risk, a lot of the detective work falls to Nora, much to his frustration! This also gives his assistant, Constable Griggs, a chance to get more involved and his help proves invaluable to Nora towards the end. Another important clue is provided by one of Doreen Chimes’ cats, whom Nora rescues from the medium’s house and brings home to Gulls Nest.

Overall, I found this an entertaining novel, slightly stronger than the first one. I love the 1950s seaside setting and will be looking out for more books in the series. First, though, I’m looking forward to reading Jess Kidd’s new standalone novel, Little Spark, which is being published in July.

Thanks to Faber and Faber Ltd for providing a copy of this book for review via NetGalley.

Gigi and The Cat by Colette – #ReadingtheMeow2026

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Translated by Roger Senhouse (Gigi) and Antonia White (The Cat).

I wasn’t sure what to read for this year’s Reading the Meow (a yearly cat-themed reading event hosted by Mallika), but then I came across this pair of stories by the French author Colette – Gigi, first published in 1933, and The Cat, which first appeared in 1944 as La Chatte. I’ve never read anything by Colette and have been intending to for a long time, so I thought this would be a good opportunity. Only the second story fits the Reading the Meow theme, but as this Vintage Classics edition includes both, I’m reviewing Gigi here as well.

I’ll start with The Cat, which is novella length and follows a young newly married couple, Alain and Camille. Alain, an only child, has grown up at the centre of his mother’s world and although he finds his new wife attractive, he doesn’t feel ready to leave behind the comforts of his family home to embark on a new life with her. This is frustrating for Camille, particularly after they move temporarily into a friend’s apartment and she discovers that Alain keeps sneaking back home to visit his mother and his beloved Russian Blue cat, Saha. Alain misses Saha so much that eventually she comes to live with them and from this point it becomes obvious that there’s only room for one female in Alain’s heart – and it’s not Camille! As the days go by, Camille grows more and more jealous of her husband’s cat until she finally decides that she needs to take action…

I found this a dark, unsettling story and although it’s also quite a simple one on the surface, there’s a lot of psychological depth. Camille and Alain are complete opposites in terms of personalities – Alain is quiet, sensitive and introverted, while Camille is lively and outgoing – and they begin to irritate each other as soon as they’re married. They have very different outlooks on life, with Camille being ambitious and forward-thinking and Alain struggling to move on and leave his childhood behind. Saha has been his companion for many years and is his last connection to the safety and security of his past, so Camille finds herself competing not just against the cat, but also everything the cat represents. I suspect she and Alain would have discovered their incompatibility anyway, but Saha’s presence makes it happen much more quickly!

Gigi is about half the length of The Cat and is a much lighter story. The title character, Gilberte (known as Gigi), is fifteen years old, that awkward age where you’re not quite an adult and not quite a child. Her mother is preoccupied with her career as a singer in a Parisian music hall and has left most of Gigi’s upbringing to her grandmother and Aunt Alicia, who are grooming her for life as a courtesan, like themselves. With Gigi’s mother, who works for a living, as a warning of what happens if a woman fails to find a wealthy man to support her, Gigi is being educated in all the skills her grandmother and aunt consider necessary for her future – dancing, table manners, rolling cigars and knowing the value of expensive jewels. The only man currently in Gigi’s life on whom she could try out these skills is family friend Gaston Lachaille. Grandmother and Alicia begin making plans for Gigi to become Gaston’s mistress, but it seems Gigi herself has other ideas!

Gigi is fun to read (if you ignore the morals of two older women pushing a fifteen-year-old girl into a relationship with a thirty-three-year-old man) and is a story about choosing your own way in life and doing what you want to do rather than what other people think you should do. It’s certainly a more uplifting story than The Cat, although I personally found The Cat more interesting and a perfect choice for Reading the Meow.

Have you read either of these stories? What else should I read by Colette?

~

Book 1/20 of 20 Books of Summer

The Witch’s Stone by Kirsty Ferry

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Jess Morgan is a genealogist and historical researcher who has returned to the area of Northumberland where she grew up to work on a new project looking into the history of a ruined chapel. There are plans to make it part of a Heritage Trail for tourists, so some interesting facts about the site are needed. Reacquainted with an old school friend, Nate, who is managing the project for the heritage group, Jess begins investigating the chapel’s past and discovers links with an ancient stone known as Isabel’s Stone – or the Witch’s Stone – and a woman called Eliza who is buried in the chapel graveyard.

A second thread of the novel is set in 1888 and follows Eliza, the twenty-two-year-old daughter of Lord and Lady Stratford of Stratford Chase. Eliza is recovering from an accident she suffered several months earlier which left her with damage to her spine and unable to remember what happened. All she knows is that Lucian Ashcombe, the man she loves, was somehow involved and was sent away, forbidden to see her again. But now Lucian has returned – and so has another man, Benedict Rochford, her intended husband. Can she trust either of them? If only her memories would come back!

Jess and Eliza are linked by a third woman: Isabel, the witch, whom it’s said can be summoned by running three times around her stone. I was interested to read at the end of the book that Kirsty Ferry was inspired by a brief record in an old book of a witch with an evil eye and a sinister cat who lived in a cottage near Brinkburn Abbey. Ferry’s portrayal of Isabel, the Brinkburn Witch, is much more sympathetic; she appears to the protagonists in times of need, tying the two storylines together. The two narratives merge further when Jess, who is staying in a room at Eliza’s old home, Stratford Chase, now converted into a hotel, begins to slip between past and present, and when Nate discovers an old hunting knife which seems to wield a strange power over him.

There are some supernatural elements, then, but they never completely dominate the novel; the focus is on the personal stories of the characters with Jess researching the history of the chapel and trying to rebuild her life after her recent divorce and Eliza struggling with her amnesia and looking for a way out of the marriage her parents and brother have planned for her. I was much more interested in Eliza’s story at first as it was where all the drama was taking place, but later in the book the two threads come together so well that it’s hard to separate one from the other. Not everyone in the story gets a happy ending, but that’s reality and I still found the final chapter very satisfying. I also loved the setting – not enough books are set in Northumberland! The fictional Stratford Chase and the ruined chapel are located in the Simonside Hills near Rothbury and the author describes the landscape beautifully.

This is the first Kirsty Ferry book I’ve read; she has written a large number of others and I’m not sure if any of them appeal to me, but I’ll certainly be looking out for The Snow Witch, due to be published later this year!

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

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.