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Major Pettigrew's Last Stand - Helen Simonson
Major Ernest Pettigrew (Ret'd) is not interested in the frivolity of the modern world. Since his wife Nancy's death, he has tried to avoid the constant bother of nosy village women, his grasping, ambitious son, and the ever spreading suburbanization of the English countryside, preferring to lead a quiet life upholding the values that people have lived by for generations -respectability, duty, and a properly brewed cup of tea (very much not served in a polystyrene cup with teabag left in). But when his brother's death sparks an unexpected friendship with Mrs. Ali, the widowed village shopkeeper of Pakistani descent, the Major is drawn out of his regimented world and forced to confront the realities of life in the twenty-first century. Drawn together by a shared love of Literature and the loss of their respective spouses, the Major and Mrs. Ali soon find their friendship on the cusp of blossoming into something more. But although the Major was actually born in Lahore, and Mrs. Ali was born in Cambridge, village society insists on embracing him as the quintessential local and her as a permanent foreigner. The Major has always taken special pride in the village, but how will the chaotic recent events affect his relationship with the place he calls home? Written with sharp perception and a delightfully dry sense of humour, Major Pettigrew's Last Stand is a heart warming love story with a cast of unforgettable characters that questions how much one should sacrifice personal happiness for the obligations of family and tradition
Hothouse Flower - Linda Riley
This is a heart-rending page turner which sweeps from war-torn Europe to Thailand and back again ...As a child Julia Forrester spent many idyllic hours in the hothouse of Wharton Park estate, where her grandfather tended the exotic flowers. So when a family tragedy strikes, Julia returns to the tranquility of Wharton Park and its hothouse. Recently inherited by charismatic Kit Crawford, the estate is undergoing renovation. This leads to the discovery of an old diary, prompting the pair to seek out Julia's grandmother to learn the truth behind a love affair that almost destroyed Wharton Park. Julia is taken back to the 1940s where the fortunes of young couple Olivia and Harry Crawford will have terrible consequences on generations to come. For as war breaks out Olivia and Harry are cruelly separated...
This Perfect World - Suzanne Bugler
Laura Hamley is the woman who has everything: a loving and successful husband, two beautiful children, an expensive home and a set of equally fortunate friends. But Laura's perfect world is suddenly threatened when she receives an unwelcome phone call from Mrs Partridge, mother of Heddy - the girl Laura and her friends bullied mercilessly at school. Heddy has been hospitalized following a mental breakdown, and Mrs Partridge wants Laura's help to get her released. As Laura reluctantly gets drawn back into the past, she is forced to face the terrible consequences of her cruelty. But, as her secrets are revealed, so too is another even more devastating truth, and the perfect world Laura has so carefully constructed for herself begins to fall apart. "This Perfect World" is the debut novel from a brilliant dark new voice.
Room - Emma Donoghue
It's Jack's birthday, and he's excited about turning five. Jack lives with his Ma in Room, which has a locked door and a skylight, and measures 11 feet by 11 feet. He loves watching TV, and the cartoon characters he calls friends, but he knows that nothing he sees on screen is truly real - only him, Ma and the things in Room. Until the day Ma admits that there's a world outside ...Told in Jack's voice, "Room" is the story of a mother and son whose love lets them survive the impossible. Unsentimental and sometimes funny, devastating yet uplifting, "Room" is a novel like no other.
You're Next - Greg Hurwitz
RICHARD
Opening this book is like sticking your hand in a vice – once in, you’re gripped and you can’t get out. I read You’re Next in two straight sittings and finished it with a mixture of relief and regret. Relief that I was released at last; regret that there weren’t more chapters to come.
This is good old-fashioned thriller-writing at its best. Each chapter surges like a breaking wave into the next; there’s barely time to catch your breath. Mike Wingate is a builder turned property developer with a wife and young daughter. But on the day he pulls off his first really big deal - one that will set him up for life – he is targeted by two contract killers and is forced to go on the run with his family.
Why do these men want to liquidate Mike, his wife and child? Who is paying them to come after the Wingates? How can Mike protect himself and his family? And is the murderous chase in some way linked to his past: the fact he was inexplicably abandoned by his loving parents when he was a small boy, and has been unable to trace them since?
Help arrives in the shape of Shep, a career criminal Mike became blood brothers with in foster care. Shep can handle himself and knows how to live off the grid. But can he protect the Wingates and help Mike work out what’s going on? Hold your breath. No, seriously.
JUDY
I love this kind of fast-paced, real-time American fiction. You’re Next is a classic of the genre, quite preposterous on the one hand, weirdly believable on the other.
I really liked Shep. When he and Mike were growing up in a care home, Shep was mercilessly hounded and beaten up by older boys, but never, ever submitted to them. Even after the worst of beatings, he would stagger to his feet, refusing to stay down. Mike protected him and the two forged a bond that decades later is as strong as it was in boyhood. Now, Shep, a wanted felon, rides in like the cavalry to rescue his old friend. It’s all rather touching, actually.
Gregg Hurwitz’s plotting is impeccable. Every twist and turn of the story makes sense; the growing sense of bafflement over why the Wingates are being hunted down is suspended in chapter after chapter until, finally, the truth is revealed. Yes, it has everything to do with Mike’s abandonment as a child. Yes, it is all about stakes that are dizzyingly high. And yes, the evil intent that presses close on the terrified family’s heels has a cold logic to it. And the book closes with a satisfying snap of a jigsaw finally coming together.
Richly satisfying, incredibly exciting, tautly written. More please, Mr Hurwitz.
Trespass - Rose Tremain
JUDY
Anthony Verey is a successful antiques dealer in his sixties and has become deeply disillusioned with his shallow, glossy London life. His business, once right at the top of the antique market tree, is failing. He is conscious that his reputation and standing in his high society world is nosediving fast, and he simply cannot stand to lose the carefully-acquired burnish of success.
So, unmarried and with no children, gloomily aware that he is approaching old age, he decides to visit his older sister who lives in the Cevennes region of France. Veronica is a moderately successful landscape gardener there; her partner, Kitty, a mediocre painter with dreams of artistic glory.
Anthony decides to make a new start in France and falls in love with a beautiful old house which the owner has put up for sale. Here the story becomes very dark. For the owner – an alcoholic old farmer who has let his land go to rack and ruin – also has a sister; a proud and vengeful woman who is bitterly angry with her brother for wanting to sell their family’s historic home to make money (which he refuses to share with her).
What follows is a compelling murder mystery set in this ancient and mysterious part of France. Its themes of sibling love and hate, family dysfunction, ageing, and bitter envy, make it compulsive reading. Trespass is beautifully written with a terrific story and a wonderful sense of place.
RICHARD
This is a story about possession and how the need for it can corrupt and destroy. Anthony Verey’s whole life has been about possessing things. When he talks about ‘my beloveds’ he is not referring to people but to antiques he values so highly that he cannot bear to sell them. One reason his business is collapsing.
So when Anthony sees a beautiful farmhouse deep in the south-west French countryside, he is overwhelmed by desire to own it. He cannot know he is stepping into a family minefield. His negotiations with the drunken owner, Aramon, are observed with implacable hostility by the farmer’s sister, Audrun.
Audrun is a deep one, to be sure. One wonders if a lifetime spent in this lonely, isolated part of France has turned her mind; that and the horrendous abuse she suffered as a girl. When the mistral blows Audrun is taken with strange moods and fits: there’s something of the witch about her.
Verey, his sister and her lover Kitty stick out like sore thumbs. Locals resent the arrival of the rich English with the purchasing power to possess the best properties: the local mayor says it has to stop. There is a hint of menace in the air. Meanwhile Kitty is consumed by jealousy of her lover’s brother; she fears he will steal Veronica from her.
It is no surprise that murder should blossom like a dark flower out of all this suspicion, envy and hatred. The Cevennes forms the perfect backdrop to Rose Tremain’s story: brooding, remote, and despite its beauty, inherently unwelcoming.
The Postmistress - Sarah Blake
JUDY
Novels about the second world war have a tendency to leave me cold: Sarah Blake’s The Postmistress proved to be a glorious, shining exception; a mesmerising story of bravery, passion, and diabolical evil.
The story opens in 1940 and simultaneously traces the lives of three American women: Iris, postmistress of a small town at the tip of Cape Cod; Emma, the local doctor’s new wife, and Frankie, a glamorous radio reporter broadcasting bulletins to the US from London, now being heavily bombed nightly in the Nazi blitzkrieg.
As postmistress, almost everything affecting the lives of the people back in Franklin passes through Iris’s hands. She takes her responsibilities so seriously that now, aged 40, she remains unmarried and a virgin. But she is gradually drawn to an older man, Harry, who runs the town garage. Their gentle, tender romance unfolds against the heart-stopping backdrop of Frankie’s nightly live dispatches into their cosy homes, describing the hellish scenes in London.
Emma and her husband, Will, listen to them too, appalled at Frankie’s vivid portraits of suffering and death. Eventually the doctor decides he must go to London and do what he can to help. A devastated Emma cannot stop him.
Meanwhile Frankie is agitating to be sent to Nazi-occupied Europe – America is still neutral and its journalists can travel there – because she is convinced Hitler has moved beyond herding Jews into ghettos and has embarked on a covert policy of genocide. Her subsequent interviews with Jewish families fleeing the pogrom are among the most moving passages I can remember reading.
RICHARD
The contrast between comfortable, neutral America and war-torn Europe is powerfully described in The Postmistress, as is ‘radio gal’ Frankie’s determination to shake her listeners by the ears and drag her country into the fight. Author Sarah Blake pulls off a neat trick here: she has Frankie working as one of real-life American broadcaster Ed Murrow’s London news team (Murrow’s legendary live reports during the Blitz galvanised public opinion back home).
The sheer randomness of who survived and who perished under the remorseless German bombing is hauntingly described. ‘Turn left at a corner,’ Frankie reports, ‘and you live. Turn right, you die... and each morning, a person you’ve seen every day isn’t there anymore.’ Frankie also observes – but does not report – the heightened sexuality in survivors.
Set against this elemental human drama, the domestic scenes back in sleepy Cape Cod – it is winter, the tourists long gone – make a fascinating contrast, but even here there is a growing sense of menace. Harry tells Iris he is convinced Nazi U-boats are on their way to their little bay: no-one else believes him but Harry will be vindicated and tragedy follows.
The description of Frankie in occupied France has an unexpectedly surreal flavour. At this stage of the war Americans, papers permitting, were free to wander newly-conquered countries where Hitler’s red, white and black swastikas now fluttered. Frankie witnesses horrors the Nazi censors wouldn’t dream of allowing her to report. Her dispatches must be cunningly worded.
We absolutely loved this fine, richly atmospheric book from a debut author.
The Blasphemer - Nigel Farndale
RICHARD
How would any of us react in a moment of mortal danger? In a plane crash? In the heat and smoke of the battlefield? Would we be heroes, or cowards?
Nigel Farndale’s haunting novel goes to the heart of such questions and makes for an utterly compelling read. It tells the parallel stories of Andrew Kennedy, an unblooded young soldier about to go over the top in one of the deadliest battles of the First World War, and his great grandson, Daniel, about to face his own moment of truth in the present day.
In one of the most chilling descriptions of a plane crash I have ever read, we see Daniel make his fateful choice moments after impact, when he instinctively wrestles his fiancé aside so he can be first out of the wreckage. Seconds later, horrified, he goes back for her and rescues other survivors too, but he is haunted by his instinctive reflex to put himself first. So is she, and her love for him starts to flicker and die.
Meanwhile hints and clues from 1917 begin to whisper that Andrew Kennedy may not have been the war hero his descendants always assumed. And running alongside both men’s stories is a suggestion of the supernatural. Does the Kennedy clan have some kind of guardian angel watching over them?
Daniel, a staunch atheist, is gradually forced to question his lifelong certainties.
JUDY
This novel gripped me from start to finish. The impossible demands placed on young men like Andrew in the trenches of the Great War; the fight-or-flight reflex that overwhelms his great grandson after a terrifying plane crash: Nigel Farndale uses both as jumping off points for a story about faith, courage, cowardice and redemption.
And the possibilities of the infinite, too. An old photograph of Andrew with an unnamed comrade, taken just before the hellish battle of Passchendaele, may not be what it seems. Nor are the sightings of a strangely familiar, wide-eyed man that Daniel keeps glimpsing, usually just before and after moments of great peril. Following a freakishly lucky escape from a terrorist bombing in London, Daniel, the unbeliever, begins to wonder if his survival is anything to do with luck at all.
There are wonderful characters in this book. Daniel’s father, Philip, an ex-military man who hides his love for his son behind a rigid emotional froideur; the truly wicked Wetherby, a professor who poses as Daniel’s friend at the university they both teach at, but who is in fact a Judas plotting to betray him. Interestingly – and amusingly - Wetherby is the most devoutly religious figure in the whole story.
The Blasphemer is a powerful morality tale, with a tantalising nod to the possibility that angels may indeed move among us.
