Book reviews

The Man Who Died Seven Times by Yasuhiko Nishizawa

April 13, 2026

I saw The Man Who Died Seven Times by Yasuhiko Nishizawa at my library and leapt on it, thinking that I’d read a review or that someone had recommended the book to me, but I can’t find any notes to say where the recommendation came from. Time loop stories are my favourite genre at present and I enjoyed this one very much, so many thanks to whoever recommended or reviewed this book.

I was hooked from the beginning of the story, which was translated from Japanese by Jesse Kirkwood. Initially I struggled a little with the unfamiliarity of the Japanese character’s names but thanks to a family tree chart and the distinctive qualities of each character, that quickly became a non-issue.

The story began with a murder. The narrator, sixteen-year old Hisataro and his family were visiting his extremely wealthy grandfather for the family’s New Year celebrations when they found his grandfather dead in the attic, smashed over the head with a copper vase. Hisataro, his family and his grandfather’s staff were shocked, but despite his distress Hisataro noticed that one of his cousins’ appearance was different to the day before. This was significant, because in this time-loop story, Hisataro experienced certain days nine times in a row and while other characters re-experienced each repeat day without any changes or knowledge of the repetition, Hisataro realised what was going on and could change the outcome of conversations and events.

The cause of the murder was presumably money, since Hisataro’s grandfather rewrote his will every year in favour of a new person, usually one of his grandchildren but sometimes one of his staff. His warring children, Hisataro’s mother and aunt weren’t in the running for the money, although they fought bitterly about which of their children should inherit. Hisataro was the only grandchild who didn’t want to inherit his grandfather’s business, and he took it upon himself to find out who the murderer was with his advantage of being able to relive the day nine times.

With each repeating day Hisataro changed his behaviour to prevent the person he believed to be the murderer from taking action, only to find that his grandfather was killed by a different person each time. As the ninth repeat drew closer Hisataro was hopeful he had both solved and prevented the murder, but unlike previous loops, the repeating day seemed to have different rules to what he usually experienced.

The story-telling style was straightforward, but the words had a formality that was recognisably Japanese. The characters addressed each other formally and often used turns of phrase that pointed to the book having been written in a language other than English.

The premise and plot were clever, although I struggled with the romance between two of characters who were first-cousins, (acceptable in Japan but a taboo in Australia), and the emotional immaturity of Hisataro’s family was hard to take. Sure, families fight over money and inheritances, but a chapter-long pillow fight? Hmm. At least when the day of the pillow fight ‘reset’ Hisataro was the only person who remembered it.

Something I hadn’t expected but thoroughly enjoyed was the exposure to various Japanese customs and words. I found myself looking up the significance of adding ‘Chan’ to someone’s name and learned it’s an endearment often used for children or a sweetheart. I discovered that the variously-coloured chanchanko jackets that Hisataro’s grandfather forced his staff and family to wear during the family visits to him are a traditional padded sleeveless vest worn for longevity celebrations. I was not surprised to find that many of the male characters were at least slightly misogynistic, but was more surprised to discover that Hisataro’s underage sake drinking wasn’t frowned upon, although in fairness to some of these points, this book was published over thirty years ago and has only recently become available in English. Perhaps some of these behaviours have changed since then.

The Man Who Died Seven Times was fun and I’d recommend it to readers who enjoy time loop stories too.

Category:

Author, Book Review, Nishizawa - Yasuhiko

5 Comments

Tagged with:

On the Calculation of Volume 2 by Solvej Balle

April 10, 2026

I didn’t want to wait too long before reading On the Caluculation of Volume 2 by Solvej Balle after reading Volume 1 several months ago.

Volume 2 began with Tara Selter realising that time wasn’t magically going to jump into November 19 just because she had already lived through 365 repetitions of November 18.

On day 368 she woke up in Paris, having returned to the Hotel du Lison after spending most of the previous year in her home town. Tara visited her antiquarian friends again and repurchased a sestertius, an ancient Roman coin, just as she had on her very first November 18, before spending so long in Paris that she began to feel semi-transparent.

Tara then began travelling by train around France, listening in on other peoples conversations and enjoying casual interactions with other travelers. Next she visited her parents in Brussels, where she explained to them what had been happening to her, and convinced them to celebrate a pretend Christmas with her to give her the illusion that time was actually passing – I remain surprised at how easily Tara was able to convince Thomas in the first book and then her parents and sister in the second book that she was experiencing the same day over and over. I’m sure if I tried to explain to my loved ones that I was repeatedly reliving a single day they would tuck me into bed then sneak off to make an urgent call to a doctor, and yes, I’m aware that it’s irrational for me as a reader to accept the time-loop premise of the story without question, but am unable to accept that Tara’s husband, parents and sister believe her!

After celebrating Christmas with her family Tara felt that she needed to experience winter, as being stuck in an endless autumn had become unbearable to her. She left her parents to travel north, careful never to travel overnight or late in the day in case the vehicle she was travelling on reverted to its starting point when the reset happened, leaving her adrift or worse. For the same reason, Tara didn’t travel by air or overnight on a sea-going vessel.

For the remainder of the year, Tara followed the weather, creating an illusion of the seasons passing. She travelled to places that had snow, then visited south England to experience the milder weather that reminded her of spring. In England she saw lambs in the field, that added to the illusion, and ate spring onions and other green vegetables that reminded her of spring. When she was ready for summer, Tara travelled south to a holiday area where she wore sundresses, went out dancing and found an approximation of summer.

She didn’t phone or visit her husband, not even once.

At this point I was reminded me of something I think about when I see graffiti love hearts with names in them and ‘4 eva’ scrawled underneath. I don’t think teenagers (or adults) realise how very long eternity might last for. In Tara’s example, experiencing the same day with Thomas on repeat had not been challenging or enjoyable, and even making allowances for him not knowing what was going on until she explained it, they could not grow as a couple.

Eventually Tara went to Düsseldorf because there was a warm wind there and the place didn’t remind her of Thomas. Around about day 889, Tara found her sestertius in a forgotten pocket, and after thinking about the coin’s life became obsessed with Roman history, buying a laptop to research every possible aspect in the question of why the Roman Empire expansion had stopped. I enjoyed learning more about the Roman Empire than I’d previously known and found the reason that Tara discovered for the expansion to stop to be very interesting, too.

As in Volume 1, the writing in Volume 2 had a careful quality found in translated works. The narrator explored her ideas in great detail, sometimes repetitiously, much like actual thoughts – sometimes we can’t let them go until we’ve covered every possible angle. I like these introspective types of plots, but for those who like more action – I’m thinking of you, FictionFan – I don’t think this series will suit your tastes.

The story ended with a cliffhanger in Tara’s third or fourth year of repeating November 18. I remain intrigued by the idea and the story.

This book was originally written in Danish and translated by Barbara J Haveland.

On the Calculation of Volume 1 by Solvej Balle

Category:

Author, Balle - Solvej, Book Review

12 Comments

Tagged with:

Learning to Talk by Hilary Mantel

April 6, 2026

Hilary Mantel’s Learning to Talk was the author’s first collection of short stories. I wasn’t sure how I’d get along with them though; I love Mantel’s writing, especially her essays and think that her snark is entertaining, but that same snark can also feel horribly unkind.

The collection began with King Billy is a Gentleman, a story about a young fellow called Liam who grew up with a single mother. The lodger eventually became Liam’s mother’s partner even though unmarried or adulterous couples were looked down on, causing Liam to have to contend with judgmental neighbours whose children threw rocks and insults at him. The King Billy bit, which I’d never heard of, was a rhyme used by the Protestant children to cast aspersions on Catholics. The writing in this short story was so, so good, and even though my review will end up overly-long if I quote every bit of writing in this collection that thrills me, I can’t go past the sentence describing Liam’s teacher, who ‘carried a bulging tartan bag with her, and every morning deposited it, with a plump thud, on the floor by her desk, then in no time at all the shouting and hitting would begin.’ The ‘plump thud’ electrified me, I dropped my own handbag (a black canvas shoulder bag) on the floor just to hear the sound for myself.

Destroyed was a more personal story about a girl whose mother told her ‘there is no such thing as a substitute. Everything is intrinsically itself, and unlike any other thing.’ The girl believed everything her mother said, but later wondered why she was expected to call her stepfather ‘Dad.’

The intriguingly-named Curved is the Line of Beauty was a story about being lost, either physically or by being damned. The narrator’s greatest fear as a Catholic child in the 1950s was that she might die midpoint between her monthly confessions to the priest, which would cause her to go to hell if her sin was great enough. In what was becoming a theme, Curved is the Line of Beauty also featured a child narrator with a stepfather figure, although in this example, more scandalously than in previous stories, the narrator’s father still lived in the house along with Jack, his supplanter. Jack took the narrator, her two younger brothers and her mother to Birmingham to visit his friends, where she and the daughter of the other family get lost in a car wrecking yard. The anxiety from being lost was real, just as real as the narrator feeling lost in her own confusing family life.

I wondered if the title story, Learning to Talk, was autobiographical. After moving to a posh area the narrator, who wasn’t afraid of public speaking and liked to argue, was sent to elocution lessons because ‘people’ thought she might become a lawyer. This story had the snark I’d been waiting for. The narrator said of her elocution teacher, a Miss Webster, ‘She and the dog seemed alike: crushable, yappy, not very bright.’ In the end, the narrator suggested that her elocution lessons were a waste of time, deciding that after the age of seven a local accent was a permanent fixture.

Third Floor Rising told of the narrator’s first job at the department store where her mother worked. ‘Reek of armpits, rattling coughs: these were my colleagues. Life in the stores had destroyed them. They had chronic sniffles from the dust and bladder infections from the dirty lavatories. Their veins bulged through elastic stockings. They lived on £15 per week.’ Surprisingly, this story wasn’t a tragedy, although it might easily have been.

The main character in The Clean Slate was trying to get details about her family tree out of her secretive mother, as she reflected on her childhood fear of the drowned village where her ancestors had once lived. The woman’s irritation with her mother, who believed untrue things despite evidence to the contrary, rang true to me.

All of the stories in the collection had a strong sense of being autobiographical. The stories themselves might have been fiction, but the emotions, the fear, the anxiety, the confusion and the unhappiness were true in that the author must have felt them as a child or a teenager.

I read one story a day from the collection so as not to swamp myself, and thought that worked well. I’m thinking that the Wolf Hall trilogy might be the next book I read by Hilary Mantel, although I’m not ready to commit to a timeline.

Category:

Author, Book Review, Mantel - Hilary

16 Comments

Tagged with:

Six Degrees of Separation: The Correspondent by Virginia Evans

April 4, 2026

Today is the first Saturday of the month, which means it is time for Six Degrees of Separation, hosted by Kate from Books are My Favourite and Best.

April 2026’s link begins with The Correspondent by Virginia Evans.

The Goodreads blurb for The Correspondent says:

“Imagine, the letters one has sent out into the world, the letters received back in turn, are like the pieces of a magnificent puzzle. . . . Isn’t there something wonderful in that, to think that a story of one’s life is preserved in some way, that this very letter may one day mean something, even if it is a very small thing, to someone?”

Filled with knowledge that only comes from a life fully lived, The Correspondent is a gem of a novel about the power of finding solace in literature and connection with people we might never meet in person. It is about the hubris of youth and the wisdom of old age, and the mistakes and acts of kindness that occur during a lifetime.

Sybil Van Antwerp has throughout her life used letters to make sense of the world and her place in it. Most mornings, around half past ten, Sybil sits down to write letters—to her brother, to her best friend, to the president of the university who will not allow her to audit a class she desperately wants to take, to Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry to tell them what she thinks of their latest books, and to one person to whom she writes often yet never sends the letter.

Sybil expects her world to go on as it always has—a mother, grandmother, wife, divorcee, distinguished lawyer, she has lived a very full life. But when letters from someone in her past force her to examine one of the most painful periods of her life, she realizes that the letter she has been writing over the years needs to be read and that she cannot move forward until she finds it in her heart to offer forgiveness.

Sybil Van Antwerp’s life of letters might be “a very small thing,” but she also might be one of the most memorable characters you will ever read.

Kelly from Kelly’s Thoughts & Ramblings read and recommended The Correspondent recently, so it is on my list.

As the main character in The Correspondent wrote letters to the authors whose books she read, my first link is to Agatha Christie’s Cards on the Table, because her wonderful character Ariadne Oliver was an author who often received letters from her readers, usually telling her what they thought of her latest book and to her annoyance, pointing out details about her Finnish detective that she had gotten wrong!

My second link is to The Tightrope Men by Desmond Bagley, a Cold War spy novel that featured a Finnish scientist and engineer, Dr Meyrick. No doubt Desmond Bagley also received letters from readers pointing out details from his book about science, engineering, the Cold War and spies that he had gotten wrong, although if I had been writing a letter to him I would have said that while I enjoyed the first part of his story, the plot was too far-fetched for me to believe in.

My third link is to Ann Patchett’s State of Wonder, which also featured a scientist doing something amazing, in this case, working in the Amazonian jungle to create a new drug that would allow women to remain fertile their entire life. Unfortunately I don’t believe this idea is too far-fetched for some fool to try to make happen, but in my opinion meddling with nature to allow women to have children when they are old is a ridiculous idea.

My fourth link is to a story set in a different jungle, Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, which tells of a man called Marlow’s dangerous search for an ivory poacher who had gone missing in Africa. The greed of the characters and the companies they worked for was horrendous, and reading about their travels on a river steamer while being shot at with poisoned arrows was thrilling, the book wasn’t really to my taste.

My fifth link is to Jock Serong’s Cherrywood, a story set in Melbourne that revolved around an ill-fated paddle steamer built from cherrywood of dubious provenance, that was designed to carry passengers around Port Philip Bay. I wasn’t a fan of the magic realism elements of this story, preferring the more realistic components instead.

My final link is to Islands by Peggy Frew, a book that is set on Philip Island, located in Victoria’s Westernport Bay, (the next bay to the east of Port Philip Bay). Islands is the sad story of a fractured family who never recovered after a teenage daughter went missing. I’m a fan of Peggy Frew’s writing but have to space her books out so that I’m not overwhelmed by sadness.

So there you have it, for a change I’ve linked a selection of books without an overarching theme to make up April 2026’s chain. I’ve gone from fan letters to authors, Finnish characters, mad science, stories set in jungles, steam boats, to Victorian bays, and can’t see a link between the starting and finishing books in my chain.





Category:

Book Review, Six Degrees of Separation

33 Comments

Tagged with:

The Lilac Bus by Maeve Binchy

March 30, 2026

My copy of The Lilac Bus by Maeve Binchy is falling apart; the story has been a comfort read for me since I was a teenager. If I ever find a copy in an Op Shop with the same cover I’ll replace mine, but until then the pieces are staying on my bookshelves. I chose to read The Lilac Bus this time for Cathy at 746 Books twelfth annual Reading Ireland Month.

The Lilac Bus is a novella comprised of eight short chapters that each follow a different character. The characters travel three hours together every weekend from Dublin to their home town, Rathdoon on a lilac-coloured mini-bus, with the connections between the characters evolving as the story progresses. Each of the characters face a crisis or a turning point over the weekend.

The first chapter followed Nancy Morris, who was mean with money and ungenerous of spirit. Nancy had a well-paid job at a Dublin hospital but returned to Rathdoon every weekend to eat her mother out of house and home. When a drunken Mrs Ryan told Nancy baldly that her nickname was Miss Mean Morris, Nancy was shocked.

The subject of the next chapter was golden-girl Dee Burke, who was studying the law and having an affair with a married doctor who Nancy worked for at the hospital. Dee also had a rude awakening over the weekend when she realised that her lover had been lying to her about the strength of his marriage, the moral of the story being that a man who lies to his wife will also lie to his bit on the side.

Mikey Burns was a middle-aged bank porter who everyone avoided. He missed the mark with his tasteless jokes, and although his colleagues and fellow bus travellers could see that he had a good heart, he was often left out of things. Mikey returned to his family home in Rathdoon every weekend and was made welcome by his brother Billy, sister-in-law Mary and their children. Mary looked after Mikey and Billy’s father, who had dementia, with Mikey spelling her over the weekend. In Mikey’s chapter, changes to Billy and Mary’s circumstances forced him to take on responsibilities that I like to think would soon be the making of him.

Everyone on the bus, except for Nancy Morris, adored Judy Hickey. She had a past that was still talked about in Rathdoon; as a young married woman with two young children Judy had gotten in with a fast crowd before being busted for dealing drugs. Her husband subsequently left her and took their children to America, cutting off all contact and leaving her as a mother without children. The solution to Judy’s big dilemma of how she could prevent the health shop where she worked from going broke was unexpected.

The chapter about Kev Kennedy, an anxious and secretive young man who worked as a security guard, explained how he had accidentally got involved with a gang of professional thieves and had no idea how to extricate himself without being thrown into the River Liffey wearing concrete boots. Kev went home to his father and brothers in Rathdoon every weekend to minimise his unwanted involvement with crime.

Despite Rupert Green’s relatively privileged background, he had his problems, too. He felt disconnected from his elderly parents, and despite Judy’s encouragement, felt unable to talk to them about anything. Without going into spoiler territory, the issue discussed in Rupert’s chapter was probably a risk for the author considering the book was published in the 1980s.

Celia Ryan was a nurse who came home every weekend to help her alcoholic mother out behind the bar of the family hotel. Celia, who deserved better, needed to convince her mother that she had a problem with drinking. Celia’s brothers and sisters didn’t want to hear anything about the troubles concerning their mother and infuriatingly, they also assumed that Celia and their mother was raking in a small fortune from the pub.

The last chapter followed Tom, who owned and drove the bus. To use as many cliches as I can in a single sentence, Tom was rolling stone who wouldn’t allow himself to be pigeon-holed, with a bit of the dog in the manger about him when he mistakenly thought that the woman he liked was going to make a go of it with someone else, even though he’d never made a move on her himself.

It’s the characters that keeps me returning to this book. I love how interconnected they are, in the multitude of ways that happens in small towns. The story began with them all on the bus together, then they bumped into each other throughout the weekend, at the pub, at each other’s houses or in the street. Sometimes the connections were as slight as one character’s opinion of another when they chanced upon each other, other times they discussed the ins and outs of another character’s business or history with their own friends or relatives. As always, the author’s warm and inclusive voice made me feel as if I belonged, too.

The plots in The Lilac Bus aren’t as strong as in Maeve Binchy’s later novels and there are spelling errors and typos in my edition, but no matter, this story remains one of my favourites. 

Category:

Author, Binchy - Maeve

18 Comments

Tagged with:

The Sphinx Without a Secret by Oscar Wilde

March 27, 2026

I read The Spinx Without a Secret, a short story by Oscar Wilde for the twelfth annual Reading Ireland Month, hosted by Cathy at 746 Books.

The Spinx Without a Secret was narrated by a man who unexpectedly met a former schoolmate, Lord Murchison on the streets of Paris, of whom he said, ‘We used to say of him that he would be the best of fellows, if he did not always speak the truth.’

The narrator found his friend much changed in Paris from his cheerful former self, instead of his usual high-spirits, Gerald seemed ‘anxious and puzzled’. The narrator guessed that a woman was at the bottom of things and asked if his friend was married yet, only to be answered that Gerald didn’t understand women well enough yet for to marry. In a distinctive Wilde witticism, the narrator answered, ‘women are meant to be loved, not to be understood.’

Gerald then showed the narrator a photograph of a beautiful woman, one whose beauty appeared to be ‘moulded out of many mysteries,’ but declined to say any more about the affair until after he and the narrator had dined.

After dinner, Gerald went on to tell his story, He described how he had first glimped the woman in the photograph when she passed him by in a carriage. He was instantly intrigued by her face and air of mystery and after searching for her for many days finally met her at a social event. Gerald was smitten by the woman, whose name was Lady Alroy, and entranced by her secretive nature. Infatuated, he asked her to marry him and she accepted, but later he became maddened by the mysteries that surrounded her. The couple argued and Gerald left the city; on his return a month later, he learned that Lady Alroy had caught a chill at the opera and died.

The story ended with Gerald telling the narrator what he had learned about Lady Alroy since her death, and the narrator’s interpretation of her character.

This is a very short story, only four pages, but the engaging and descriptive plot and the fabulous dialogue, are recognisably Oscar Wilde’s writing.

The Sphinx Without a Secret can be read here.

In a moment too funny not to share with other readers, He Who Eats All of Our Leftovers and I were both due to visit the optometrist, and HWEAoOLs asked me if I’d be happy for him to make appointments at Oscar Wilde when we were next in Melbourne. “Sure,” I said, knowing that he meant Oscar Wylee Optometrists! 🙂

Category:

Author, Book Review, Wilde - Oscar

21 Comments

Tagged with:

The Drowning by Fiona Lowe

March 23, 2026

When my local library advertised they were hosting an author event with Fiona Lowe, whose most recent book is The Drowning, I booked Aunty G and myself in, then raced down the street at lunchtime to buy the book. The next day I heard an interview with Fiona Lowe on my local community radio station and thought she sounded bright and cheerful, and happy to be interviewed.

I found the story to be equally as interesting as the author’s radio interview had promised, a real page-turner. It began with a family tree and a prologue; the family tree was useful but I thought the prologue was redundant as the information contained in it was also covered in the story itself. This was a very small quibble, though.

The story itself began with CC driving down the coast to the beach shack she’d summered at as a child with her third cousins, excited to see James, Ollie, Lily and Felix together again as adults. Soon after her arrival, CC was excited to learn that she had been left a fifth share of the shack, along with her cousins, although James, now a lawyer, was reluctant to tell her the news. CC, however, was so happy to have been included in the family she could have cried with joy.

During the next few days though, resentments and family rivalries arose, as they always do when money is involved. James and Felix’s wives would much have preferred to holiday at Lorne, Torquay, or better yet, Portsea, with the who’s who of Melbournians in summer instead of at Kooramook, a fictional small town near Portland, more than four hours drive from Melbourne. Gretel and Bronte hated the asbestos-walled shack, the crappy old mish-mash of furniture, and the single bathroom that everyone had to share. Felix, an architect, wanted to replace the shack with a modern beach house with enormous plate glass windows, enough bedrooms for everyone and ensuite bathrooms, while James wanted to sell the place. Ollie and CC wanted everything to stay the same forever, and as for Lily, whose use of magic mushrooms and Ritalin for what was dangerously close to self-diagnosed ADHD was a problem, she wanted the impossible; peace and love and harmony within the family.

CC was about to take up residency at the nearby Portland hospital and asked for her cousins’ permission to stay at the shack for six months, but was not allowed. Instead, James introduced a booking system for each family member to book their time at the shack, and while Ollie, Lily and CC were happy to share their time with the others, James and Gretel, and Felix and Bronte wanted their own visits to be exclusive to their own families.

When CC received a legal notice from James saying that her share of the inheritance was being challenged, she was devastated. At that point, I would have walked away from all of them, but CC wanted to be in the family so desperately that she dug in and fought as hard as she could, with varying levels of support from her cousins.

Although the story included a drowning that might have been suicide, an accident or even a murder (to say which would be a spoiler) and a romance for CC with a local surfer/singer in a band/pharmacist, The Drowning was really a story about the shifting sands of family, constantly changing factions and the manipulations that go on beneath the surface. I didn’t entirely believe in some of the character’s attitudes after they found out something that I can’t explain here, since to say more would be a spoiler. I had a feeling about the big twist too and wasn’t surprised when the ending played out as I had expected.

I’ve visited Portland a handful of times so don’t know the area very well, but enjoyed the local references which are also common to my area of the coast. I’d never heard the acronym ‘PFM’ that the author used to describe the People From Melbourne who overrun coastal Victorian towns during holidays, but when I lived in Batemans Bay on the NSW South Coast during the 1980s and 90s visitors from Canberra were known as Yogis, because like Yogi Bear, they arrived in summer and took all of the best picnic spots. The local references to hospitals and roads and other locations rang true, though.

Despite my little quibbles I enjoyed this book very much and would be very happy to read other books by Fiona Lowe.

So, to the author event with Fiona Lowe at the library. Approximately fifty attendees attended and I think it would be fair to say that we all enjoyed the event very much. Librarian Leigh Higgins was a terrific host, and Fiona’s talk was practiced, professional and entertaining. She told the audience which local town Kooramook was based on – for anyone local, it starts with ‘N’, and explained how she had walked the streets of Portland to get the details around the town right. She talked about how she developed her plot and chose her characters, and how the story came together. Fiona has published one book per year for many years and her routine sounded absolutely grueling, and not at all like the stereotyped idea I had of a writer, merrily tapping away into a laptop in some quirky Melbourne coffee shop or other.

My purchase of The Drowing continues my New Year’s resolution for 2026 to buy a book by an Australian author during each month of this year (March). I purchased this book from Collins Booksellers in Warrnambool.

Category:

Australian author, Author, Lowe - Fiona

8 Comments

Tagged with:

A Fortunate Life by A.B. Facey

March 20, 2026

I was delighted to spin A Fortunate Life by A.B. Facey in the Classics Club spin # 43. This book is an Australian classic, the autobiography of a man born in Maidstone in Melbourne in 1894 who, despite growing up illiterate, wrote one of the most loved Australian books of all time.

As a young fellow, Albert Facey didn’t have a fortunate life at all. The first section began with the words, ‘Many people had little feeling or sympathy for those in need,’ which generally turned out to be the author’s experience throughout his childhood.

Born into extreme poverty, Albert’s father died when he was two, the youngest of seven children. At the time Albert’s two eldest brothers had been at the Western Australian goldfields with their father, and before long, his mother deserted him and his other brothers and sisters, leaving them in the care of the elderly grandparents to go to Western Australia too. After his grandfather died a few years later, his grandmother sold up what little she had and took the remaining children to Western Australia in the hopes of their mother taking on her children again, only to find she had remarried, was pregnant again and was unable or unwilling to take more than one of her daughters, most likely because her daughter would be useful to her. An Uncle took pity on the family and took in Albert, his grandmother and another sibling (another daughter had been left in Victoria to look after another uncle) at at his farm in Wickepin, about 200 kilometres south east of Perth.

It was a stretch for Albert’s uncle to feed the extra mouths so when he was about eight Albert was sent to live with an elderly lady as a farm worker, where was brutally mistreated by her family of criminals. After recovering from a horse-whipping that almost killed him Albert ran away, walking bare-footed over several nights to return to the farm and his beloved grandmother.

This part of the story was very hard reading. The author wrote matter of factly about his trials but they reminded me of stories where the hero cannot catch a break, where things just get worse and worse and worse. Unlike a novel, though, this was real.

Albert, now aged eleven, was hired out again to a poultry farmer, but after several months had not been paid or clothed as he had been promised, so he left there to work at another farm about five miles from the first. Albert worked there for a week before learning that again, he would not be paid, so he returned to his grandmother and uncle.

The people at the next place where Albert was sent to work were kinder and grew very fond of him. Their own son had died and they wanted to adopt Albert and send him to school, but when his mother, whom he barely knew, refused their offer the relationship soured.

Interspersed between the bigger details of Albert’s life were the daily happenings, stories of life on remote farms as they were being cleared of trees and growth to create farmland to grow wheat and support sheep or pigs or cattle, with many funny stories of mishaps. One time young Albert got stuck in a tree after being chased by a ferocious boar, and of course, this being Australia, there were terrifying tales of snakebites and horse thieves, and dingoes howling all night. Despite all of the hardships and injustices, Albert always saw the funny side of life and some of his stories were hilarious.

At the age of fourteen Albert went to Perth to live with his mother, where he quickly learned that he was expected to support himself financially by paying his mother and her husband board. Albert realised his mother was more interested in money than in him, so signed on for a six-month stint droving cattle over a thousand-kilometre route. He had plenty of adventures during this time too, including getting lost in the bush when the cattle stampeded during a thunderstorm and being saved by Aboriginals. His own bush skills, already good, continued to improve and he grew into the type of man who could turn his hand to anything.

During this time Albert taught himself to read and write, although he never attended school. Around the age of 18 he became a professional boxer with a travelling troupe, and was in Sydney when World War One broke out. Two of Albert’s brothers were killed at Gallipoli, and Albert himself was badly wounded there also and sent home to Australia. He wrote of war openly and in plain words, as he did all of his stories, describing horrors that I found almost to much to read.

While at Gallipoli Albert had received a pair of hand-knitted socks in a parcel sent by a member of the Bunbury Girl Guides from Western Australia. Albert asked the soldiers from Bunbury if they knew Evelyn Gibson, the girl who had knitted his socks and they said they did, that she was ‘a good-looker and very smart, and that she came from a well-liked and respected family.’ In an extraordinary coincidence Albert met Evelyn while he was recuperating in Perth and they started knocking about together, fell in love and married.

From then on, Albert was part of a ‘we.’ He and Evelyn lived in Perth for a few years where Albert worked on the trams, later moving to Wickepin where they took up land as part of the government’s soldier settlement scheme. They worked hard, but went through all of the ups and downs that still plague farmers, including droughts, the depression years and crop prices too low for anyone to make a living from. One of the worst ‘downs’ was a result of a silly mistake that caused their house to burn down, a common event of the time. Albert and Evelyn had seven children and were married for sixty years, and I admit that big, heaving gulps got the better of me when Albert told of his wife’s death.

I’ve delved a little into the author’s story and it seems as if some of his stories were exaggerated or improved on for publication, but Albert Facey’s voice as a storyteller was direct, humble and sincere. I could almost hear his voice telling me his story of his life, and thought that despite living what I would consider to be a very hard life indeed, that he thought his life was fortunate, was wonderful.

Reading about the author’s experiences of clearing land for farming purposes brought up mixed emotions for me, as my grandparents, great-grandparents and great-great grandparents must have worked just as physically hard and lived in similar rough conditions. I wish they had left more trees, bush and scrub, though, as do most of my generation! Albert wrote many times of his fear of Aboriginal people, which added to my unease about a question I wonder about but can never know the answer to, were any of my relatives personally responsible for the murders or driving away of Aboriginal people from their districts? There would have been a code of silence among the settlers responsible at the time, even if they weren’t involved they wouldn’t have told the authorities who was, and the stories didn’t get told to the next generation, at least not in my family if the did. I feel the guilt anyway, as I’ve said many times before, I’ve had a good life as a descendant of convicts.

My edition was illustrated by Robert Juniper, an Western Australian artist whose line drawings throughout and dusty, red-dirt cover reflected the story perfectly.

In a funny little side note, my copy contained a handwritten page of a diary from someone unknown to me – my copy of A Fortunate Life has been on my shelves for thirty years and I cannot remember who gave it to me, although it might possibly have been the writer of the diary – who was camping somewhere near Peterborough on the Great Ocean Road for a fortnight over the Christmas break during 1995/1996. During this time, their family visited the cheese factory at Timboon, went up in the plane from Peterborough and flew over the Bay of Islands then across to Port Campbell and back, and another day they walked to the Bay of Martyrs for a swim where one of the children almost stepped on a snake. During the two weeks they were on holidays they caught 64 crayfish. 64! They must have been just picking them up off of the ocean floor! The diary was a reminder for me of summers gone by, and I thought it was fitting that I found it written on a blank page at the back of my book.

A Fortunate Life was book twenty-eight of my second Classics Club challenge to read 50 classics before my challenge end date of September 22, 2028.

Category:

Australian author, Author, Book Review, Facey - AB

11 Comments

Tagged with:

A Long Way from Verona by Jane Gardam

March 16, 2026

I was excited to discover a copy of A Long Way from Verona by Jane Gardham in an Op Shop, after reading and loving her Old Filth books years ago (before blogging).

My understanding is that A Long Way from Verona was the author’s first novel and that it was written for teens. I found the story and writing style to be suitable for adult readers too.

In the first chapter the narrator, thirteen-year old Jessica Vye told the reader she was not normal, having had a violent experience at the age of nine – the experience turned out to be discovering that she wanted to be a writer. Chapter 2 began with another truth, that Jessica was not popular; in her own words, “Some people in fact do not really like me at all. In fact, if you really want to know quite a lot of people absolutely can’t stand me.” What Jessica couldn’t understand was why people began by liking her very much then went off of her. Jessica was also certain that she knew what other people were thinking, and that she always told the truth.

The story was set during the first year of World War Two, when Jessica and her schoolmates had gotten used to carrying gas masks around with them, along with their school satchels. Some of her fellow students were evacuees from London and she mentioned Polish refugees recently arriving in the area. The Yorkshire Spa town where her school was located was often bombed as it was on the ocean and close to the docks, but it was the Order marks that Jessica received from her teachers for misbehaving at school that troubled her most of all. One day, she received three Order marks, putting her at risk of being expelled.

Jessica had constant adventures, which included meeting a dangerous escaped Italian prisoner, falling instantly in love with a boy with the most beautiful blonde hair, arguing with her parents, getting over tonsillitis, and surviving an air raid bombing while on an excursion with Christian (the blonde boy) to look at the slums – Christian had discovered Communism and wanted to convince Jessica that all slums should be bulldozed.

I loved Jessica’s stubborn, independent, outspoken nature from the very beginning. She is a character made for readers to love, and I’m sure many of us would agree with her when she said, “I wish I read slower as a matter of fact because I can’t get books to last.”

Jane Gardham’s books are exactly the type of books that I wish lasted longer.

Category:

Author, Book Review, Gardham - Jane

15 Comments

Tagged with:

The Book of Forgotten Authors by Christopher Fowler

March 13, 2026

The Book of Forgotten Authors by Christopher Fowler has ninety-nine short chapters featuring once-popular authors who are either unheard of now or vastly less well-known than they were at their peak. At best, books by these authors can occasionally be found in Op Shops, at worst – good luck finding any of their works anywhere.

The first chapter featured Golden Age writer Margery Allingham. I’ve read Mr Campion and Others, a collection of short stories featuring Allingham’s gentleman detective, but I’ve seen many reviews of her books on WordPress and believe her books are now available again. Possibly Allingham has made a comeback since The Book of Forgotten Authors was published in 2017.

The star of the second chapter was Virginia Andrews, who wrote the wildly popular Flowers in the Attic series. In fact, I saw this book on the shelf of an Op Shop the morning I wrote this review! There can’t be too many voracious reader my age or older who didn’t read these way back when – and I freely admit, I was too young for these disturbing books when I read them! Were the stories any good or do they deserve to be forgotten? I don’t know, but there must have been something about them since I still remember their plots. Shock value, perhaps. I was interested to learn that after Virginia Andrews died someone else wrote another seventy or so books under her name, though.

Having read R. M. Ballantyne’s The Coral Island for The Classics Club last year, I was beginning to feel quite smug when I saw this author’s name, along with Emma Orczy, otherwise known as Baroness Orczy, who wrote The Scarlet Pimpernel. Then it hit me. Most of the books that readers read for The Classics Club aren’t wildly popular any more, and a big part of why we review classics is to bring good books by forgotten or unknown authors to the attention of other readers. If you’re not already linking your reviews to The Classics Club’s lists, I encourage you to do so!

Another chapter was on Margery Sharp, who although her books feature a wicked sense of humour, is best known now for creating The Rescuers after it became an animated Disney movie in 1977. The Nutmeg Tree was hilarious – good luck finding a copy, though. The Foolish Gentlewoman was a more serious book, which I thought very good also.

But then I got to Georgette Heyer – oh, say it isn’t so! I can’t bear the thought of her Regency romances being forgotten. Perhaps one of the following will tempt you; Sylvester, Bath Tangle, April Lady, Faros Daughter or Arabella. I have most of her books on my shelves and read and reread them.

The name Thomas Tryon also sounded familiar, but I couldn’t figure out why until Lady was mentioned. I loved Lady as a teenager and would be more than happy to read something else by this author (note to self, keep an eye out while browsing the shelves of Op Shops).

There was a chapter on Charles Dickens that included stories or books titled The Haunted House, Mugby Junction and The Battle of Life. Anyone? Anyone? No, I hadn’t heard of these either.

Or how about Eleanor Hibbert? I had no idea who she was until I learned that her pen names were Victoria Holt, Jean Plaidy, Philippa Carr and Kathleen Kellow!

I’ve only recently discovered Barbara Pym thanks to reviews on WordPress. I adored Crampton Hodnet and have another book by this author on my shelves. Her personal story was fascinating – she wrote her first book aged sixteen and her second at twenty-two but was unable to get either published until 1950, when she was almost forty. After having six books published she then fell out of favour again ten years later and lost her contract with her publisher. In 1977 Pym was named the most underrated novelist of the 20th century and overnight her books were re-published. She was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and discovered by American readers, but died two years later. I believe her books are now available again.

I was taken aback by the chapter on Peter Van Greenaway, an author I’d never heard of, after learning that his plots included one about a group of Vietnam veterans crash crashing a passenger plane into the Pentagon and a series of terrorist attacks on tall buildings in the USA. I am not at all tempted to find and read these books.

There were many, many authors who I hadn’t heard of. Quite a few of the featured authors had short stories used on Alfred Hitchcock Presents, including an author who wrote a version of The Birds thirty years before Daphne du Maurier’s story was published. I read the short story as part of a collection of suspense stories selected by Mary E MacEwen years ago and have been watching out for killer birds when I go our walking ever since!

I’ve added a few authors to my list, in the hopes of finding copies of their books. One of these is Australian author Patricia Carlon, whose books are described as ‘nerve-racking novels with strong Australian themes.’

The author added an interesting footnote to the chapter about Clifford Mills when he bought a second-hand copy of the children’s book Where the Rainbow Ends. He got a lovely surprise when the book arrived and he opened it up to see his own name written inside, aged seven.

I was also amused by a chapter on authors who should be forgotten. These included Edward Buller-Lytton who coined the phrase, ‘It was a dark and stormy night.’ I’m not convinced. Presumably he was the first one to write that particular phrase, in which case, good for him!

Category:

Author, Book Review, Fowler - Christopher

18 Comments

Tagged with:

The Homemade God by Rachel Joyce

March 9, 2026

I thought The Homemade God by Rachel Joyce was one of the best books she’d ever written while I was reading it, but several weeks after finishing reading the book I’m struggling to remember the characters and the story. Some books are like that. I wrote a rough draft for this review the day I finished reading, otherwise this review would have finished with this sentence.

Vic Kemp, a reasonably famous 76 year-old artist, arranged a family lunch at a trendy London noodle bar to tell his four middle-aged children he was marrying a fellow artist, a 27-year old woman called Bella-Mae whom he’d known for six weeks.

Instead of dragging their father off to have his mental capacities checked, Netta, Susan, Goose and Iris offered their father shocked congratulations. They were even more surprised several months later to learn via a text message that Vic had married Bella-Mae, since they’d expected the romance to fizzle out. The children were also somewhat suspicious of Bella-Mae’s true intentions since Vic was reasonably well-off.

In the same text Vic asked his children to join him and Bella-Mae for a summer holiday at the home he owned on an island on Lake Orta in Italy. The phone ran hot between the children as they agreed to ignore Vic’s text, until they received word six weeks later that their father had drowned in the lake, then they dropped everything to get there, to meet Bella-Mae and her slimy cousin Laszlo, search for a will and try to discover if Bella-Mae had anything to do with Vic’s death.

As they waited for the autopsy results they looked for the painting their father said he’d been working on, which he’d said would be his masterpiece. The children wanted the missing painting to secure Vic’s reputation as an artist, since his work to date had been popular but not particularly good or original.

I know it seems odd to continue calling siblings of this age ‘children’ but they really were, in that their charming, selfish, complicated father was still overly-important to each of them in entirely different ways, possibly as a result of their mother having died when they were very young. Netta wanted to impress Vic, to fight with him and boss him around, Susan wanted to be indispensable to him by taking care of his home and all of his needs, Iris wanted to remain the baby forever and Goose, poor Goose, wanted to be an artist. He had tried and failed, and had a mental breakdown in the process, after which he worked for his father in his studio, preparing canvases and cleaning brushes. The relationships between the siblings was fascinating, and watching cracks appear between them as they waited and waited and waited for their father’s autopsy results was like watching a train wreck in slow motion.

The story was slightly too long and it didn’t have the emotional pull that the Harold Fry books had for me, which was disappointing since I’ve come to expect a good cry when I read Rachel Joyce’s books. I felt as if I knew each of the characters quite well, but never got the chance to really like any of them.

Some of the twists I saw coming, and other twists that I expected didn’t arrive. I liked the very last twist at the end, though, because one of the children got their happy ending. I expect fans of Rachel Joyce will enjoy this book, and readers who know Lake Orta, will get a huge kick out of visiting the area via this story. I don’t expect I’ll ever go there myself, but it looks lovely.

Category:

Author, Book Review, Joyce - Rachel

22 Comments

Tagged with:

Six Degrees of Separation: Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte

March 7, 2026

Today is the first Saturday of the month, which means it is time for Six Degrees of Separation, hosted by Kate from Books are My Favourite and Best.

March 2026’s link begins with Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte.

The Goodreads blurb for Wuthering Heights says:

Emily Brontë’s only novel, a work of tremendous and far-reaching influence, the Penguin Classics edition of Wuthering Heights is the definitive edition of the text, edited with an introduction by Pauline Nestor. Lockwood, the new tenant of Thrushcross Grange, situated on the bleak Yorkshire moors, is forced to seek shelter one night at Wuthering Heights, the home of his landlord. There he discovers the history of the tempestuous events that took place years before; of the intense relationship between the gypsy foundling Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw; and how Catherine, forced to choose between passionate, tortured Heathcliff and gentle, well-bred Edgar Linton, surrendered to the expectations of her class. As Heathcliff’s bitterness and vengeance at his betrayal is visited upon the next generation, their innocent heirs must struggle to escape the legacy of the past.

I read Wuthering Heights as a teenager and hated it, because I’d been expecting a story about a grand, passionate romance. It wasn’t. When I re-read the book for the Classics Club thirty-odd years later, I realised the story was about revenge and the cycle of domestic violence. I didn’t expect to love the book as much as I did, with my only complaint being slight confusion from two characters called Catherine (mother and daughter Catherine Earnshaw Linton and Catherine Linton, plus Cathy senior’s ghost).

My first link is to An Abundance of Katherines by John Green, which might give you a clue to how I plan to connect the books in this chain! In this story the main character, a teenager called Colin, went out with 19 girls called Katherine. I found this a little hard to believe since Colin was not all that popular with girls, and also because Katherine is a fairly uncommon name, at least in my world. Despite the multitude of Katherines, the story made perfect sense and I was never confused about which Katherine Colin was talking about.

My second link is to One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. This story didn’t have a single Catherine or Katherine in it, however there was an abundance of male characters named either Jose Arcadio or Aureliano or variations of these names. To make matters worse, this was a multi-generational story and all of the characters with the same or similar names lived to be very old, so they were all alive at the same time. I was confused, but eventually realised that I was enjoying the story so much that I didn’t really care which character an incident was happening to.

My third link is to a play, The Crucible by Arthur Miller. The writing itself was excellent but I struggled to remember who was who because quite a few characters had names that started with ‘P’, and all the wives had ‘Goody’ in their names, short for ‘Good Wife.’ There was Goody Ann, Goody Elizabeth, Goody Rebecca and so on. I expect the story is easier to follow if watching it as a play because the audience can make a visual and aural connection to each character and their name.

My fourth link is to another play, The Importance of being Earnest by Oscar Wilde. The story has several characters who call themselves ‘Ernest.’ One ‘Ernest’ called himself that because the girl he liked told the world that she could only love a man called ‘Ernest’, while another chap called himself ‘Ernest’ because the pretty young thing he was wild about got his name wrong. The confusion is hilarious!

My fifth link is an outlier, in that Charles Dickens, arguably the best author of all time when it came to naming his characters, gave them unique names that characterise them at a glance. In Nicholas Nickleby, Madame Mantalini couldn’t have been anything other than a milliner and dressmaker, while her husband Alfred Mantalini was clearly a no-good, spendthrift, philanderer. The Cheeryble brothers were obviously good-hearted, loving philanthropists, and Sir Mulberry Hawk was a scoundrel. Newman Noggs was an unexpected hero and Wackford Squeers was an abusive, cruel bully.

My final link is to We All Want Impossible Things: A Novel by Catherine Newman, which I think connects back to Wuthering Heights because of the author’s name, ‘Catherine.’ I also chose this book to finish up with because I found the characters’ names to be troublesomely similar, Ash and Edi, and Jude, Jonah and Jules. Otherwise, I loved this story and laughed and cried my way through it. I’m yet to read Wreck and Sandwich, but they’re on the list.

So there you have it, a selection of books with confusingly named characters to make up March 2026’s chain.





Category:

Book Review, Six Degrees of Separation

24 Comments

Tagged with:

Heart the Lover by Lily King

March 2, 2026

I’d read several reviews of Heart the Lover by Lily King and wanted to read it for myself, even though I knew the narrator was a college student at the beginning of the story – I’m not ageist, but too much angst and attitude of younger characters in contemporary novels can be uninteresting to me. I needn’t have worried. The narrator owned her crap and told her story about life, love, friendships, choices, regrets and the one who got away – without any annoying melodrama.

The story was told in three sections, spanning thirty years of the narrator’s life and began with a dedication to an unknown person, someone she had clearly once loved dearly. Their story began in a fiction writing class they shared, with an assignment to write a contemporary version of Bacon’s essay ‘History of Life and Death.’ Hers was read aloud by the professor, causing two guys who sat at the front of the class to pay attention to her. One of them, Sam, asked her out and she accepted. Soon she and Sam, who she was wildly attracted to, were having an affair, although it was the other guy from her class, Yash, who she was better friends with.

When the narrator and Sam broke up acrimoniously, she took up with Yash.

Love triangles are always complicated but it was clear from the beginning, and ultimately heartbreaking, who it was that the narrator loved. A series of circumstances, miscommunications and difficult choices eventually caused the narrator and her ‘heart the lover’ to separate.

Sam and Yash had begun by calling the narrator Daisy because that was what they always nicknamed their dates, but they changed that to Jordan from F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby when they learned she was in college on a golf scholarship. I think Heart the Lover‘s cover is reminiscent of the original cover of The Great Gatsby, which used a painting called Celestial Eyes by Francis Cugat.

As a literature student, Jordan told her story articulately, almost conversationally sometimes, and always with grace. Her feelings rang true and I felt that everything she said or thought was valuable.

The book’s title was based on a card game, Sir Hincomb Funnibuster that the characters played as college students. Jordan later taught the game to her own children. I looked up the game but don’t think it exists. I wish it did.

Lily King has written six other books that I haven’t read yet, which is something to look forward to.

Category:

Author, King - Lily

10 Comments

Tagged with:

An Afternoon of Time by Don Charlwood

February 27, 2026

An Afternoon of Time: Tales of the Great Ocean Road and country Victoria by Don Charlwood completely charmed me.

The collection of short stories and tales based on the author’s experiences began with a foreword saying that after Australian publishers Angus & Robertson was sold to HarperCollins, authors had the opportunity to regain rights to their work. The author did this and since then An Afternoon of Time has been published by Burgewood Books, a family company set up by his daughter to publish his books. Looking through my bookshelves I realised I already have several of Charlwood’s other books on local shipwrecks, which I’ve read multiple times, plus a novel, All the Green Year, that I am yet to read.

The book began with a piece called Reflections that was written in the author’s 95th year (my edition is a re-release with two additional stories to the earlier editions), which tells of Charlwood’s childhood in Frankston during the Depression, and how he discovered he loved to write while working on a local history school project – it was his mother who suggested he interview elderly locals. After leaving school Charlwood worked for an auctioneer, but when he turned 18 he was no longer required since the young woman he trained up to replace him would be paid a lesser wage. The author then travelled to the Western District of Victoria where he worked for his aunt and uncle at Burnside, their property near Nareen, north-west of Hamilton.

My jaw hit the ground in Reflections when Charlwood said that his grandmother had been shipwrecked ‘on a reef near Cape Otway’ on the Schomberg‘s maiden voyage. I spent my childhood looking out to sea at the Schomberg reef, reading books about local shipwrecks and wishing that the sandbar that the old people talked about still reached the reef. On one extraordinary occasion I actually visited the reef with my aunt, uncle and cousins on my uncle’s rubber duck (an inflatable boat).

I had always understood the cause of the wreck to have been the captain’s inattention, since he was below deck playing cards with a lady who was not a lady until it was too late for the ship to avoid hitting the reef. It turns out the story I knew was incorrect. The captain was indeed playing cards with the author’s grandmother, but it seems she was in fact a lady (not titled, but ladylike).

The Schomberg reef is the speck around the middle of the following photo, almost on the horizon. When I was a child, a lot more of the rock was out of the water. I expect that the reef was even more prominent in 1855 when the ship was wrecked.

The remainder of the collection was a mixture of stories (fiction with a very strong connection to actual places) and tales of people and places the author knew. Some were set around the coast of the Great Ocean Road and others were set inland around a fictionalised version of Burnside.

Salmacis, London was a short story (fiction) set near Princetown on the Great Ocean Road, where a 90m tunnel was created at the base of Point Ronald in 1906 to manage the Gellibrand River bar. The tunnel has long-since been boarded up, but in this story, the teenage narrator and Marcia, the daughter of another family who were also camping at the beach that summer, clambered through the tunnel to see the Sow and Piglets (the original names for the Twelve Apostles rock formations. Muttonbird Island was the sow and the other eight rocks – there were never twelve – were called the piglets. At the time of writing this post, there are only seven stacks left). Marcia was already familiar with the tunnel, having dreamed of it, but when they travelled through to the beach the narrator also began to see Marcia as she was in her dream – no longer a teenage girl but a man who had worked at the nearby Glenample Station and come down to the beach to save shipwrecked sailors. I loved the blend of the real place with the fictional story of a shipwreck. The time-travel had an additional element of strangeness since the story (for a modern reader) was already set in the past, and the characters time-travelled even further back into the past.

Dunphy’s Hide was also fiction and set somewhere on the Great Ocean Road, or the Ocean Road, as it was known when these stories were written. In this story the narrator, an eleven-year old boy and his schoolmate, Dunphy, visited a blowhole known as Glover’s Drop, which I think is based on the real blowhole at the Loch Ard Gorge. To get to Glover’s Drop they pushed aside a large rock, crawled through a tunnel then climbed around a narrow ledge inside the blow hole itself, as waves churned madly below them and the sounds of these thundered and echoed. The narrator only just made it around the dangerous rock shelves and was too frightened to attempt the return journey, so Dunphy knocked him out and carried him back around the ledge as if he were a sack of potatoes.

The Pilgrimage Year was a story about a fictionalised version of the author’s grandmother returning to the Curdies River to view the reef where the Schomberg had been wrecked when she was a young woman. The narrator accompanied his grandmother, uncle and cousin as they travelled through the Otways, stopping along the way to view the Loch Ard Gorge, where the Loch Ard was wrecked with only two survivors. As they drove through the bush they talked about other ship wreck sites they passed, numbering how many people had died at each wreck. Once they arrived at the headland overlooking the beach and the reef where the Schomberg had been wrecked (see the photo above) the narrator’s grandmother asked what happened to the sandbar that used to stretch from the spit to the reef only to be told it had been washed out years ago. Later, his grandmother hinted at a love triangle that was exposed during the shipwreck that had fractured her relationship with her sister.

To the New Country was a tale of the author walking through the Otways to the sea at Apollo Bay and from there to the Cape Otway lighthouse, then on to a farm near Princetown, past the cemetery at the Loch Ard Gorge and on to Port Campbell and Peterborough, where a passing driver offered him a lift to Hamilton, where an employee of his uncle drove him the rest of the way to Burnside in a buggy. The author stayed there until World War Two, when he left to join a Bomber Command with the RAAF.

Percy the Rabbiter was more or less factual, a tale of a man and his beloved dogs, all of whom had the most extraordinary names. Adolphus Bannockburn Ree, Dr Willie Roper, Barney Boo and Bill Stickers were just some of the dogs who accompanied Percy on his rounds, catching and killing the rabbits that overran Burnside. Percy was an absolute character who lived a simple life; ‘when he was not working in the open air he was either eating gluttonously or was asleep. Bedtime was’ … ‘eight o’clock.’

The Match at Fyan’s Creek had me laughing out loud (in public!) as I ate my cheese and vegemite sandwich in the sun outside my town library during my lunch break. Somehow or other, the local postmistress wrangled Charlwood into playing in a cricket match with the local team against the Fyan’s Creek team, despite the author’s reluctance. Charlwood grew even more apprehensive when Percy (the rabbiter) reported that Fyan’s Creek had a new fast bowler, ‘a reg’lar killer they reckon. He injured darn near half the Glenelg Crossin’ team a few weeks back…’ Percy was playing, along with ‘Jack Henshaw the fencer, Mick Hogan the publican, Neil Austin-Smith who ran ten thousand sheep somewhere to the west, Roger McIntyre who had seduced a dozen girls within fifty miles, Nick, an Aboriginal with long arms and flexible wrists, Alan Knowles, the new schoolteacher, Barney Moore, a jackaroo from Triabunna and lastly there was Claude Shippard, the captain, and Greig, his fourteen year-old son’ (the Shippards were fourth-generation squatters). On arrival, they learned the new fast bowler had once bowled the great Bradman out! Someone killed a snake on the cricket ground during the match and hung it over the fence, and when it was Charlwood’s turn to bat he somehow hit a four before being saved by a fire in Ginty Steven’s house paddock – players and spectators alike raced there to put it out, saving the house but not the shed. When they got back to the ground it was Fyan’s Creek’s turn to bat. Rain eventually stopped play.

I appreciated that the author was respectful of Aboriginal people and didn’t shy away from admitting that white settlers had taken their lands and lives, something that I think was rare when these stories were written. On one sad occasion he referred to, ‘a past going back into the days of the vanished aborigines,’ and there were other examples of these sentiments throughout the book.

The Brothers O’Connor broke my heart. I was left with a lump in my throat, tears, the absolute works and I’m generally not a crier. Gerry O’Connor was a shearer, a bachelor in his fifties, while his younger brother Terence worked at the local forge. When Charlwood brought in a horse to be shod, Terence said he thought life was passing him by – he’d rarely been to Melbourne, and he felt reading about the greater world was making him feel unsatisfied. Terence compared himself unfavourably with Gerry, who he said was the most contented man he knew because he lived for his work. A chance remark by Charlwood set Terence on a new path – he married and set up a home with his bride. The author then told Gerry’s history; his father had died when he was fourteen so he set himself up as the man of the house, working to give his nine younger brothers and sisters a chance in life – which they all took and ran with. But, when Gerry fell ill and had nothing to live for, things took an unexpected and tragic turn.

Reception at Kerry Hills was the recounting of several tales Charlwood’s uncle told him – no doubt the names were changed to prevent anyone from recognising themselves! On this occasion Charlwood and Percy attended a wedding at the home of a shiftless family who had been living rent-free in one of Charlwood’s uncle’s properties for twenty years or more. The wedding went well and the guests sat down to a fine meal, although most of the guests wondered how the bride’s family would pay for it. They found out when the bride’s father began auctioning a piece of furniture that the local women had been coveting the whole of their own married lives!

While I think An Afternoon of Time would be of great interest to readers from Victoria’s Western District, I also think that the stories and tales will appeal to readers who enjoy Australian history, and those who like stories and tales of bygone days in general. The author included himself in most of the stories and wasn’t afraid to poke fun at himself as well as those around him, but I also felt as if he genuinely liked and cared for his friends and neighbours, even though he could see their faults.

My copy included photos taken by the author during his travels and time at Burnside, which add to my enjoyment. I especially liked seeing Percy and some of his dogs!

My purchase of An Afternoon of Time continues my New Year’s resolution for 2026 to buy a book by an Australian author during each month of this year (February). I purchased this book from Collins Booksellers in Warrnambool.

I’m also counting this book in Reading Independent Publisher’s month, hosted by Kaggsy of Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings.

Category:

Australian author, Author, Book Review, Charlwood - Don

11 Comments

Tagged with:

The Light Years by Elizabeth Jane Howard

February 23, 2026

The Light Years by Elizabeth Jane Howard, book #1 of the Cazalet Chronicles reads like a soap opera. Short scenes, an extended family of characters and lots going on left me unable to put the book down as the story skipped through the Cazalet family’s lives during the two years prior to World War Two.

The character list and the family tree in the front pages were invaluable as there was a cast of thousands, each person equally as important as any other.

William Cazalet, who was known as ‘the Brig’ had made his money in timber. He and his wife Kitty, aka ‘the Duchy,’ had three sons who were married with children of their own and one unmarried daughter, Rachel.

His sons Hugh and Edward worked in the family business, but Rupert, the youngest, was a school teacher who lived to paint. As a spinster, Rachel was much put-upon by the family although she was also much-loved, especially her many nieces and nephews, all of whom had their own distinct personalities and storylines.

The entire Cazalet family regularly holidayed together at a family property in Sussex called the Home Place, which allowed the children to play together, and the adults to come together to gossip, talk business, and play tennis or swim. I was amused by how few bathrooms the Home Place had and as a result, someone was always in the bath. The water was shared as it used to be when I was as a child – one person hopped out and the next person hopped in, with the grubbiest person getting in the bath last.

I was already a fan of Elizabeth Jane Howard’s works, but before I got to the halfway point of this novel I already knew that I didn’t want the story to end, even though there are another four books in the series. I adored most of the characters right up until when I didn’t – predatory behaviour by one of the men towards his teenage daughter left me feeling sick to the stomach. Up until then, I’d thought him a charmer and forgave him his affairs and flirtations, so this story line gave me a horrible jolt.

All of the characters were very human in that they had their good points and their bad points. I had my favourites, one of whom was the self-sacrificing Rachel, and I was also very fond of poor old Miss Milliment, who the children said had a face like an old toad. Miss Milliment was too old to work but too poor not to, an artistic nature and an extraordinarily good temper..

I felt sorry for Zoe, Rupert’s very young wife, who reminded me slightly of poor Emma from Madame Bovary. No doubt Zoe had expected something more glamorous than what she’d gotten when she married Rupert and became stepmother to his two children.

The social aspects of this book were absolutely fascinating. Money and class differences abounded, and anti-Semitism showed itself as an everyday part of life in England. Some of the storylines were trivial while others were enormous, but what I appreciated was that each was a big deal to the character involved.

And the food! As one character said, ‘If people had to spend all of every day getting enough food to eat like animals, they wouldn’t have time to make aeroplanes or bombs.’ In one scene, Mrs Cripps, the cook, spent an entire morning:

plucking and drawing two brace of pheasant for dinner; she also minced the remains of the sirloin of beef for cottage pie, made a Madeira cake, three dozen damson tartlets, two pints of egg custard, two rice puddings, two pints of batter for the kitchen lunch of Toad-in-the-Hole, two lemon meringue pies, and fifteen stuffed baked apples for the dining room lunch. She also oversaw the cooking of mountainous quantities of vegetables—the potatoes for the cottage pie, the cabbage to go with the Toad, the carrots, French beans, spinach and a pair of grotesque marrows.

The threat of war hung over everything with politics and current events of the time being discussed, and events such as gas masks being distributed and other preparations for war occurring. The story ended with Chamberlain’s peace in our time breaking out, which just like a soap opera left me frantic to know what happens in the next book, because we all know that wasn’t the case.

Category:

Author, Book Review, Howard - Elizabeth Jane

32 Comments

Tagged with:

Mary Bennet by Jennifer Paynter

February 20, 2026

In my experience Jane Austen fan-fiction can go either way. Sometimes it’s cringe-inducing crap and other times it’s an enjoyable look at someone else’s idea of what might have happened next in an Austen story. I’m happy to say that Jennifer Paynter’s Mary Bennet, or The Forgotten Sister as it is known in the UK was great fun and fell into the enjoyable category.

Mary Bennet uses Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice as framework to tell the story from Mary’s point of view but best of all it goes further, giving Mary, who was eclipsed in the original story by her prettier, more sparkling and most importantly, more socially intelligent sisters, a life and love story of her own, with the known events (such as Mr Bingley and co coming to Netherfield, Jane’s romance in three acts, Elizabeth and Mr Darcy’s love-hate relationship, Mr Wickham’s seduction of Lydia and the rest), occurring in the background of Mary’s story.

Mary’s story began long before Mr Bingley came to Netherfield; instead, as a child she watched on as a scandalous plight between the previous tenants of Netherfield imploded for all to see. Elizabeth, then a young teenager, was almost implicated in the mess, having become smitten with the man at the tip of the Netherfield love triangle.

Mary was also watching on from the background as Mr Bingley and Jane fell in love and were parted, and she realised long before Elizabeth did, that Elizabeth and Mr Darcy were attracted to each other. Mary also knew who Mr Wickham was meddling with in the village long before his true nature was revealed to the rest of the Bennet family.

Sometimes Mary’s version of events were funny but other times sad, since she was far more self-aware in this version than the original. She remained socially awkward, moralising and pendantic, without Lizzie’s wit or Jane’s beauty and goodness, and she was often left out of things since Jane and Lizzie were a pair and so were Lydia and Kitty. This story allowed the reader to understand and feel sympathy for Mary, and also hope she found the courage to pursue a romance of her own with Peter, a musician and gamekeeper.

As the son of Mary’s wet-nurse, Peter had known Mary since she was a baby. Mary and Peter fell in love soon after they met again as adults, but Peter’s lower status gave Mary and her family pause.

Although I appreciated Pride and Prejudice as the foundation for Mary Bennet, I actually preferred the sections where Mary’s own story took off in entirely different directions to the original. I expect that next time I read Pride and Prejudice I’ll look on Mary with much greater sympathy and far less irritation.

Category:

Author, Book Review, Jane Austen Fan Fiction, Paynter - Jennifer

23 Comments

Tagged with:

The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy

February 16, 2026

After deciding The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy would be my next read for The Classics Club, I cleaned house, did some crochet and read several other books. In other word I procrastinated, even though I’d happily cried my way through Tess of the d’Urbervilles and laughed through Far from the Madding Crowd.

When I finally ran out of excuses not to read The Mayor of Casterbridge, I fell straight into the story and stayed there quite happily until the very end.

Michael Henchard and his wife Susan married young. Several years later, disillusioned with each other and generally unhappy in their marriage, Henchard got drunk at a fair and sold Susan and their baby daughter Elizabeth-Jane to a sailor at an auction. Once he sobered up Henchard was sorry but couldn’t find his wife and daughter again, so vowed not to drink alcohol again for 21 years. He went on to Casterbridge and told people he was a widower, worked hard, got rich and by the time the present-day story began, had become the mayor.

After her sailor ‘husband’ died, Susan took to the road with her daughter to find her former husband. When they met again in Casterbridge Henchard wanted to atone for his past so arranged to remarry Susan without telling anyone that he’d previously sold her. Before his second marriage to Susan he broke off with Lucetta Templeman from Jersey, who he’d become intimate with and would have married if he’d been certain he was a widower.

The same day that Susan and Elizabeth-Jane arrived in Casterbridge, a young Scotsman called Donald Farfrae was also passing through town. Farfrae gave Henchard advice about what to do with wheat that had gone bad, and Henchard convinced him to stay in Casterbridge and become his foreman.

Susan died soon after remarrying Henchard, and on hearing the news Lucetta hot-footed it to Casterbridge with the intention of becoming the next Mrs Henchard, but after her aunt died she became a wealthy woman and after seeing a side of Henchard that she didn’t like, Lucetta fell in love with the handsome and affable Farfrae instead. Poor Elizabeth-Jane, who had hopes of Farfrae herself, was left out in the cold.

Elizabeth-Jane was much to be pitied, as Susan told Henchard on her deathbed that the girl was not his child, causing Henchard to withdraw his affection towards Elizabeth-Jane without telling her why.

When Henchard’s 21 years of abstinence from alcohol were up he started drinking again, and eventually lost everything as a result of his bad temper and foolish decisions, which weren’t helped by an occasional lack of generosity of spirit and his misplaced pride.

Like a see-saw, Farfrae’s fortunes rose as Henchard’s went down. Henchard was very human and an enormously frustrating character, because when he wasn’t behaving badly he could be extraordinarily thoughtful, kind and generous. The problem was though, as Lucetta discerned, no one ever knew which version of the man they were going to get. Henchard always regretted his sins but without fail went on to do the same things again or worse. I suppose there is a huge lesson in this story for those of us who are slow learners – we bring most of our problems on ourselves.

I was amused to recognise several characters from other books by Thomas Hardy in this story, who appeared as bit players or people in the crowd. Farmer Everdene and Farmer Boldwood from Far from the Madding Crowd were referenced and there might have been other characters who I missed – I was helped along by annotated notes at the back of the book, which were terrific.

The story was quite long, but there were plenty of twists and turns and I was well entertained. As always, Hardy’s descriptions of the characters made me feel as if I knew them and the settings quickly became familiar, too. By midway through the book I could have walked down the streets of Casterbridge and pointed out to a newcomer who lived where.

I’ve still got a number of Hardy’s books to read for the first time – hopefully by the next one I’ll remember that his books aren’t as serious as their covers make them out to be and open it up with happy expectation rather than trepidation.

The Mayor of Casterbridge was book twenty-seven of my second Classics Club challenge to read 50 classics before my challenge end date of September 22, 2028.

Category:

Author, Book Review, Classics Club, Hardy - Thomas

11 Comments

Tagged with:

The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart by Holly Ringland

February 13, 2026

The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart by Australian author Holly Ringland was recommended to me by a work mate who said it was her favourite book from last year.

The story began with a child dreaming of setting her father on fire in the hope that his demons would be destroyed so the best of him could rise again phoenix-style, like the Black Fire Orchid of Western Australia.

Alice lived her life on tenterhooks, socially isolated and terrorised by her angry, controlling father, as was her mother, who bore the brunt of his beatings. When she was nine, Alice’s parents died in a fire and Alice’s grandmother stepped in, taking her shocked, non-verbal granddaughter back with her to Thornfield, a flower farm. The flowers were put together in bouquets by the women who worked on the farm (who were known as the Flowers), to send messages to the recipients in the language of flowers. Each of the Flowers had demons of their own, and many had made the farm, a place of peace and solace, their permanent home.

June, Alice’s grandmother, had cut her son off years ago, realising that his temper would make him unworthy of inheriting the farm when the time came, but in doing so had condemned Alice and her mother to a life of anxiety, pain and torment. As Alice grew up June continued to keep these secrets from Alice, and since domestic violence and trouble caused by keeping secrets is circular and ongoing through generations, by the time Alice became an adult, she formed a relationship with a dangerous man of her own.

My edition had the most beautiful line-drawing illustrations of Australian flowers at the beginning of each chapter, along with the local name, Latin name and a description of each plant. I enjoyed these very much, far more than I enjoyed the actual story. My work mate is a keen gardener, so I expect this element added a lot to her enjoyment of the book.

Every single character was emotionally damaged in some way, and the story only hinted at the huge issues that each of the minor characters was facing. For me there was far too much going on.

I began to skim in the final third of the book but really should have given it up long before since the story wasn’t for me. I’ve read too much grief-lit of late and wished the steady stream of misery in this story was balanced by slightly more positivity and hope. I didn’t feel an emotional connection with Alice or June, which made me wonder if I had missed the point – the intention might have been to provide a contrast between the beautiful language of the flowers and the stilted emotions of the characters.

The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart is now an Australian miniseries. I suspect the story has been rewritten somewhat to expand on the minor character’s issues. The miniseries features some well-known Australian actors however I don’t see myself watching this.

Category:

Author, Ringland - Holly

15 Comments

Tagged with:

Retreat and other stories by Irwin Shaw

February 9, 2026

Retreat and other stories by Irwin Shaw is a collection of short stories by an author who I have never read. I’d heard of Shaw, Rich Man, Poor Man was a best seller, although long before my time. I had the mistaken idea that Shaw’s stories might be too dated and sexist for my taste – perhaps I confused him with Harold Robbins, who I think was popular around the same time.

The collection began with Retreat. As the German army prepared for retreat from a week before the liberation of Paris in World War Two, a German Major forced a conversation on a Jewish musician at a cafe. The German sought forgiveness, saying that the German Army were a separate entity to the Gestapo, but the Parisian was having none of it, stating that the German Army had enabled and facilitated the Gestapo.

The main character in Part in a Play was a middle-aged actor called Alexis who had steady work playing bit parts on stage, unlike his friend and flatmate, Philippe, who was always offered main roles. During World War Two Philippe made a moral decision not to work while Paris was occupied, and he convinced Alexis not to work, either. However, times got tough, money got short and when Alexis was offered the role of a lifetime he took it. Phillipe immediately cut Alexis out of his life, although as the war was drawing to an end Alexis did everything he could to redeem himself with his once dear friend.

The Veterans Reflect was set on the day peace was declared after World War Two and told two alternating stories. An American soldier who was recovering from being shot in the stomach during an air-fight reflected on war and his fellow men as he travelled home to Chicago by train, while in Germany, Hitler reflected that he could have won the war if the Russian winter hadn’t been so cold, and the Americans and Russians not entered the war.

In The House of Pain, a young playwright offended a well-known actress when he told her that the role he was proposing for her was as a ‘slatternly, tyrannical, scheming, harsh woman who ran a boarding house.’ I expect that no woman really wants to be seen like that, no matter how good the role being offered.

Does anyone remember what it was to be fourteen-year old and desperately in love with someone who loved someone else? Once experienced, never forgotten, right up to the fisticuffs between one heart-broken boy and another who didn’t care at all for the girl in the middle of the love triangle in Pattern of Love.

I Stand by Dempsey began with a conversation between two men as they left a fight at Madison Square Garden. Not surprisingly since this often happens after men have watched a boxing match, their discussion soon descended into a physical fight, with the bigger man eventually compelling the smaller man by way of physical force and humiliation to agree with his opinion. The saying ‘might versus right’ came to mind, although I don’t know which of the men’s opinions was correct and neither did they, since their argument was purely hypothetical.

The next story, Stop Pushing, Rocky described a ‘fixed’ fight. The boxer who was supposed to lose fought as if he thought he was supposed to win, while the boxer who was supposed to win had his work cut out for him to make his opponent look good even though he wanted to beat him to a pulp.

In The Deputy Sheriff, the titular character desperately wanted the department to send him from New Mexico to Hollywood to collect a criminal who had robbed a train box car of $9 worth of goods, but since the trip was going to cost $90 that the department didn’t have, he wasn’t going anywhere.

The Greek General was another crime story, this time of a man hired to burn down someone’s house. The job went wrong and the would-be arsonist was sent back under duress to try again.

The last story, Residents of Other Cities, circled back to war, although this time the story was set in Kiev in 1918. During World War One Kiev changed hands from the Bolsheviks to the Whites and back again many times, and when the Bosheviks held power Jewish people were safe, but when they didn’t, pogroms were the order of the day. This story followed a Jewish family through terrible, terrible times. The father prayed and lamented he had not taken his family to America when he had the chance, while the son he respected least stepped up and used his cunning and courage to try to keep the family safe.

The entire collection was very strong, and I thought all of the stories were well-written, thought-provoking and often surprising. Many of the story’s themes linked to the next story, sometimes quite subtly, and included war, theatre, boxing and crime. Residents of Other Cities left the biggest lump in my throat, although I would be hard pressed to choose a favourite. I can see Rich Man, Poor Man in my future.

Category:

Author, Book Review, Shaw - Irwin

8 Comments

Tagged with:

Six Degrees of Separation: Flashlight by Susan Choi

February 7, 2026

Today is the first Saturday of the month and the first Saturday of the year, which means it is time for Six Degrees of Separation, hosted by Kate from Books are My Favourite and Best.

February 2026’s link begins with Flashlight by Susan Choi.

The Goodreads blurb for Flashlight says:

A novel tracing a father’s disappearance across time, nations, and memory, from the author of Trust Exercise.

One summer night, Louisa and her father take a walk on the breakwater. Her father is carrying a flashlight. He cannot swim. Later, Louisa is found on the beach, soaked to the skin, barely alive. Her father is gone. She is ten years old.

Louisa is an only child of parents who have severed themselves from the past. Her father, Serk, is Korean, but was born and raised in Japan; he lost touch with his family when they bought into the promises of postwar Pyongyang and relocated to North Korea. Her American mother, Anne, is estranged from her Midwestern family after a reckless adventure in her youth. And then there is Tobias, Anne’s illegitimate son, whose reappearance in their lives will have astonishing consequences.

But now it is just Anne and Louisa, Louisa and Anne, adrift and facing the challenges of ordinary life in the wake of great loss. United, separated, and also repelled by their mutual grief, they attempt to move on. But they cannot escape the echoes of that night. What really happened to Louisa’s father?

Shifting perspectives across time and character and turning back again and again to that night by the sea, Flashlight chases the shock waves of one family’s catastrophe, even as they are swept up in the invisible currents of history.

A monumental new novel from the National Book Award winner Susan Choi, Flashlight spans decades and continents in a spellbinding, heartgripping investigation of family, loss, memory, and the ways in which we are shaped by what we cannot see.

I don’t know if I’ll read Flashlight or not. I hate the cover, which isn’t a fair reason to dismiss a book. There seems to be loads of books with this kind of cover art at the moment, so even though I don’t like it, the style must be both fashionable and appealing to many other readers. I thought about linking to books whose covers I dislike but dismissed the idea, then thought about linking to books with characters who have disappeared, but that happens so often in fiction that I couldn’t get excited about that as a theme, either. In the end I took the easy way out and went with books with yellow covers.

My first link is to The Librarianist by Patrick Dewitt, with a cover in a shade of yellow that I would describe as Aureolin, which in this application is on the yellow side of Chartreuse. The story-telling style in The Librarianist was charmingly off-kilter and I adored the main character, Bob Comet.

My second link is to On the Calculation of Volume 1 by Solvej Balle, with a cover that is predominantly a shade called Old Gold. I’ll be honest here and say that I hated the cover art and the colour for this book, which I find similar to the cover of Flashlight, this month’s starting book. Regardless of the cover not being to my taste though, I loved the story of On the Calculation of Volume 1, a time slip story of a woman stuck in an endless succession of November 18th. I will definitely read the following six books in this series to see if she ever escapes into the next day.

My third link is to Funny Girl by Jack Pearl, which was a tie-in to the film of the same name starring Barbra Streisand and the very handsome Omar Sharif. The story was based on the real life of Fanny Brice, an American comedienne and actor, who rose to fame as a Ziegfeld girl. Let’s go with a mix of Aureolin again, with a hint of Chartreuse and Titanium Yellow for the main colour on this cover.

My fourth link is to Infinite Splendours by Sofie Laguna, a book that left me feeling conflicted – I felt terribly sorry for the emotionally-stunted main character, but was also angry with him when he later became a perpetrator of the same kind of abuse he had been subjected to as a child. I adored the Southern Grampians setting in the Western District of Victoria and the descriptions of the main character’s art. I think the golden flowers on the light yellow background are lovely.

I’ve chosen Making it Up As I Go Along by Marian Keyes for my fifth link. This writer always makes me feel as if I’m one of the gang, whether I’m reading her fiction, cookbook, or in this case, a collection of funny and relatable observations about life. The main colour of this cover is also Aureolin – it’s such a ‘look at me’ colour I can see why it’s popular.

For my last link I’ve chosen Wake in Fright by Kenneth Cook, a nightmarish story of a school teacher’s experience in outback Australia during the 1960s. I think this cover suited the story perfectly; it’s a portion of a painting called Road with rocks by Australian artist Russell Drysdale, whose works I generally find to menacing.

So there you have it, a selection of books with yellow covers to make up February 2026’s chain. 50 Shades of Yellow, anyone? It doesn’t have the same ring as 50 Shades of Grey, a book that I’m unlikely to read since the subject matter doesn’t appeal. I can’t think what a book called 50 Shades of Yellow might be about anyway, unless it was a catalogue for a rose nursery.





Category:

Book Review, Six Degrees of Separation

23 Comments

Tagged with:

Classics Club Spin #43

February 5, 2026

It’s time for the Classics Club Spin #43.

The rules are simple, pick 20 books from your Classics Club list and number them 1 – 20, then post the list prior to Sunday 08 February, 2026.

Once the spin is spun, read the book that corresponds to the book # on your list, then review the winning book by Sunday March 29, 2026.

My books are as follows:

1. Maupassant de, Guy: The Best Short Stories

2. Facey, AB: A Fortunate Life

3. Huxley, Aldous: The Devils of Loudun

4. Bowen, Elizabeth: The Collected Stories of Elizabeth Bowen

5. O’Hara, Mary: My Friend Flicka

6. Franklin, Miles: The Diaries of Miles Franklin

7. Park, Ruth: The Harp in the South

8. Heyer, Georgette: The Black Moth

9. Richardson, Samuel: Clarissa

10. Butler, Samuel: The Way of All Flesh

11. O’Brian, Patrick: Master and Commander

12. Swift, Jonathon: Gulliver’s Travels

13. Thackeray, WM: The History of Henry Esmond Esq

14. Travers, P.L.: Mary Poppins

15. Twain, Mark: Tom Sawyer

16. Bronte, Charlotte: Jane Eyre

17. Chaucer: Selections from Chaucer

18. Defoe, Daniel: Moll Flanders

19. Wodehouse, PG: Carry on Jeeves

20. Dumas, Alexander: Celebrated Crimes – The Borgias

Category:

Classics Club

27 Comments

Old Babes in the Wood by Margaret Atwood

February 2, 2026

Old Babes in the Wood by Margaret Atwood is a collection of fifteen short stories, many featuring a couple who I think are fictional versions of the author and her late husband.

The first story, First Aid, introduced Nell and Tig on a day that Tig cut his hand and had to go to hospital, leaving blood all over the place for Nell to find when she got home and worry about. Many years later Nell and Tig attended a St John Ambulance First Aid training course so they could work as guest speakers a nature-tour cruise ship. As their instructor taught the class how to manage a variety of scenarios, from choking to drowning to traffic accident victims, Nell was reminded of life-threatening experiences from their own lives, such as the time a spark from their chimney set fire to the roof and Tig climbed into the ceiling space to put it out, or when their canoe was tipped over by a freak wave in the middle of a huge lake, as well as traffic accidents, chainsaw incidents and an encounter with a bear while hiking.

Two Scorched Men featured Tig and Nell again, this time with Nell narrating the story of two friends they knew long ago in France, then Morte de Smudgie, which was about Nell’s deep sense of loss following the death of her beloved cat, Smudgie.

The middle stories in the collection moved away from Nell and Tig.

My Evil Mother had a teenage narrator whose mother used her supernatural powers to get her daughter to dump an unsuitable boyfriend. The narrator’s mother said that while she liked Brian, the Universe didn’t, and that the Queen of Hearts said that if her daughter went anywhere in a car with Brian, he would die in a terrible accident, but if she dumped him, he would live. Brian grew up to be a drug dealer and was shot to death at a young age, so I suppose he lived a few extra years after being dumped. When the narrator became the mother of a teenage daughter herself, she used her own witch-like powers to stop her own daughter from going out running at night.

Have you ever wondered what Margaret Atwood and George Orwell might talk about if they used a medium to communicate? Well, wonder no more, because in The Dead Interview they discussed families and writing and Orwell’s wife and other writers and science and the environment.

Impatient Griselda made me laugh. The main character was an alien who got stuck babysitting a group of humans as they quarantined from a plague. While telling the humans a fairy tale, it transpired that the alien could not tell the difference between men and women, and was from a place that does not have a word for vegans and where entertainers were of low status. I don’t have a problem with vegans, how much entertainers are revered, or men, women and everyone in between, but there is a funny side to a lot of things that are taken very seriously and it tickled me to have these pointed out.

Two very old friends who had spent a lifetime niggling at each other starred in Bad Teeth. One of the women teased the other about an affair she had supposedly had many years ago with a man with bad teeth, even though the niggler knew perfectly well that the story wasn’t true since she had made it up herself.

Death by Clamshell was an odd story narrated by the ghost of Hypatia of Alexandria. She was a philosopher, mathematician and astronomer who was murdered by a mob of Christians, later becoming an icon for women’s rights. Her ghost wondered why paintings of her death depicted her as young and attractive when she was aged around 60 when she died.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the main character of Metempsychosis, who was a snail reincarnated as a woman with memories of her past life, wished that she was still a snail. This story made me wonder if we have the idea of reincarnation right, that is, if someone lives a good life they get to live their next life as a higher organism. A snail’s life sounded fabulous compared to being a human.

Airborne was the story of a group of elderly women, feminists who met regularly to fund raise for their goal to create an endowed chair for a young woman at a university. The women in this story reminded me of my grandmother‘s friends who met every Tuesday afternoon and cackled their way through conversations and afternoon tea. The only real difference was that my grandmother and her friends met for the joy of their friendships, rather than for a cause.

Tig and Nell returned in A Dusty Lunch. This story was told by Nell about her father-in-law, who was known in the family as the ‘Jolly Old Brigadier’ despite being tormented by PTSD.

The next story, Widows, was two versions of a letter written by Nell to someone called Stevie after Tig’s death. In the first letter Nell told Stevie how she was really doing without Tig, in the second, she wrote the letter that she thought Stevie would rather receive. Widows felt quite autobiographical to me.

The last story, Old Babes in the Wood, featured Nell and her sister Lizzie as they holidayed at the cottage in the woods they had helped their father to build many years ago. The story began with Nell wading into the cold water to rescue a favourite pair of pants that had blown off the dock, then wondering if she would be able to climb back up onto the bank. The cottage had no running water or power, was mice-infested, nothing was built to code and the list of repairs needed was immense.

Most of the story’s themes and styles differed, although the Nell and Tig stories followed the lives of these characters more or less chronologically. My favourite story was My Evil Mother, but I also liked the bittersweet essence of the later Nell and Tig stories.

Category:

Atwood - Margaret, Author, Book Review

8 Comments

Tagged with:

The Last Voyage of Mrs Henry Parker by Joanna Nell

January 30, 2026

The Last Voyage of Mrs Henry Parker by Joanna Nell is unashamedly the genre that some bookshops shelve under ‘women’s fiction.’

In this case though, I was pleasantly surprised to find the story had more depth than I’d expected.

The story followed an elderly woman, Evelyn Parker, or ‘Mrs Henry Parker’ as she insisted on introducing herself as she muddled her way through life on the Golden Sunset, a cruise ship home-porting out of Sydney.

It was clear that most of the staff on the ship knew Evelyn well and were fond of her, which suggested that she had lived aboard for a long time. Evelyn, however didn’t remember any of the staff, although sometimes she touched on the edges of her memories. She often muddled up the time, for example turning up to a formal dinner dressed to the nines only to discover it was breakfast time, and she got lost looking for venues on the ship that she would once have known like the back of her wrinkled hand. The most confusing thing of all for Evelyn was the whereabouts of her husband, Dr Henry Parker, who was a former ship’s doctor. Evelyn spent her days and nights roaming around the ship looking for her missing husband but when she asked staff directly where he was, their answers were ambiguous.

In some ways the story was quite repetitive, as Evelyn asked the same things of the same people over and over. Some young staff members couldn’t help but smirk at her questions although they turned away to compose themselves before she noticed. Other staff members showed that they were tired of her questions by the briefest of facial expressions, but still answered her questions politely and with kindness.

When Evelyn met Frank and Nola, fellow passengers on the current cruise and was befriended by them, she told them the story of meeting Henry in the 1950s as she sailed from England to Australia to become a nurse. Evelyn and Henry’s quirky personalities were well-suited to each other and she made the snap decision at the end of the cruise to marry Henry when he asked, fully aware of the pros and cons of the life he was offering her. The pros were that she would sail the world with him while he worked, the cons being that if they had children Evelyn would have to leave the ship to bring their children up alone for extended periods. Evelyn’s descriptions of her life with Henry at sea during these early years of their marriage were wonderful.

The repetition irritated me so I skimmed slightly, although I do understand that it was necessary to Evelyn’s story as a glimpse into how her mind worked. I found it surprising that Evelyn’s personality didn’t reflect the difficulties that she faced every day in the form of anger, although she occasionally expressed her frustrations.

The story’s resolution was unexpected. Without giving anything away, I’ll just say that I liked the ending and thought it was well-done. Now I’m dreaming of living on a ship myself, although since marrying a ship’s doctor is out of the question I expect I’d have to work in the galley washing dishes to be able to afford to!

Category:

Australian author, Author, Book Review, Nell - Joanna

23 Comments

Tagged with:

The Mushroom Tapes by Helen Garner, Chloe Hooper and Sarah Krasnostein

January 26, 2026

The Mushroom Tapes: Conversations on a triple murder trial by Helen Garner, Chloe Hooper and Sarah Krasnostein is a selection of conversations between the three Australian authors as they covered Erin Patterson’s trial for the murder of three of her family members and the attempted murder of another family member.

Beef Wellington, and indeed mushrooms, have been off the menu for most Australians since July 2023 when the news coverage of this story began.

Erin Patterson invited her parents-in-law, her husband’s aunt and uncle and her estranged husband to lunch to discuss a cancer diagnosis that she was later found to have fabricated. Patterson’s former husband did not attend the lunch. Her parents-in-law and her husband’s aunt died less than a week later, poisoned by death cap mushrooms included in the individually-prepared Beef Wellingtons, which Patterson served to her guests on grey plates. Patterson also ate Beef Wellington, albeit from an orange plate.

I decided Patterson was guilty of murder after watching a television interview of her as she was door-stepped outside her house by journalists several weeks after the deaths. She seemed insincere.

Four months later Patterson was arrested with the trial beginning in May 2025. She was also charged with four counts of the attempted murder of her former husband from previous occasions although these charges were later dropped.

Helen Garner, Chloe Hooper and Sarah Krasnostein initially started this project with the intention of creating a podcast about the trial. Eventually, the recordings of their conversations, which were made in Morwell after they had attended court, as they drove the two hours between Melbourne and Morwell and back again, and during phone calls between them as they discussed the trial became this book.

They commented on the demeanors of other interested attendees, who they designated as either stickybeaks or true crime afficiondos, other members of the media, both legal teams, the family of the victims, and of course, on Patterson, who sat behind them in the dock. They also discussed Patterson’s obvious intelligence and of the likelihood of her having mental disorders (said to be autism spectrum disorder, ADHD, anxiety and narcissistic personality disorder), her lack of friends other than people she communicated with online, her substantial inherited wealth, the layout and decor of her pantry and kitchen, and the breakdown of her marriage.

The authors also discussed the many holes in Patterson’s stories, from having lied about her health to get her in-laws to attend the lunch, to lying to Police and the Health Authorities about foraging the mushrooms, saying instead that she had bought dried mushrooms from an Asian supermarket somewhere in Melbourne. Patterson’s phone history showed she had searched the locations of where death cap mushrooms grew and that her phone had pinged in these areas at the time their sightings were recorded on naturalist websites.

Patterson also lied to Police about owning a food dehydrator, even though by the time of her Police interview they had CCTV footage of her disposing of the dehydrator at the tip. She lied about owning three phones then failed to hand them over to Police, later wiping her phone histories before handing them over. What I didn’t understand, though, was why the authors didn’t comment on Patterson wearing white Capri pants on a long drive she took the day after the lunch even though she said she was suffering from diarrhea. As any woman knows, there are days to wear white pants and days to wear dark pants. Diarrhea seems to me to be a day to stay home, or if you must go out, to wear dark pants and take a change of clothes with you. The authors did say though that blood and fecal tests showed no sign of poison in Patterson’s system.

I’ve previously read books by all of these authors, some of them novels, others essays or diaries. They seem like an odd trio, but the form for this book worked.

Each conversation clearly identified the speaker, although as the book continued I was able to identify who said what without being told. The three authors bounced ideas off of each other and shared their insights as they discussed the case. They explored coincidences and they agreed on a motive. They were sympathetic to the family and although they never discussed if they thought Patterson was guilty or not – perhaps these conversations were edited out. I had the feeling that they thought she was guilty.

What I didn’t like was the authors suggesting that the general public in the courthouse, locals or from out of town, were stickybeaks, or when they called people they had seen in the courthouse names, such as ‘the Real Housewives of Morwell’ and the like. I felt this was unnecessary and on the mean side, and as for being stickybeaks – pot-kettle-black! The whole of Australia, me included, watched and listened to this trial with great interest, as did the authors.

The book also felt rushed to me, insubstantial and slightly unsatisfying. I suspect that my lack of satisfaction is more to do with Patterson herself, though. I think what I want is the truth – to be precise, an admission of guilt. I don’t want her to say that she is sorry that she did it, because I don’t think she is or ever will be, although I suppose she is very sorry she was caught.

My purchase of The Mushroom Tapes: Conversations on a triple murder trial begins my New Year’s resolution for 2026 to buy a book by an Australian author during each month of this year (January). I purchased this book from Collins Booksellers in Warrnambool.

Category:

Australian author, Author, Garner - Helen, Hooper - Chloe, Krasnostein - Sarah

15 Comments

Tagged with:

People who Lunch: Essays on work, leisure & loose living by Sally Olds

January 23, 2026

People who Lunch: Essays on work, leisure & loose living is a collection of essays by Australian author Sally Olds.

Going into this, I thought about the people who I know who lunch. These days, it’s mostly elderly ladies who meet somewhere for the senior’s ‘special’ – a small plate with the roast of the day, baked vegies and gravy, the ever-popular fish and chips, or for those who are really craving the taste of their childhood, corned beef and mashed potato. Sometimes the senior’s meal includes dessert; usually a sticky date pudding with a dollop of cream, or a scoop or two of ice cream and strawberry topping that is somewhat hopefully described as a sundae.

When I worked in Melbourne, my colleagues and I used to bolt over the road from our office to a food court once a week where we’d scatter to buy our lunch – I usually got a burrito bowl from the Mexican outlet. The first one back would scout around to find a table for six or eight, depending on how many of us were there that day, then we’d scoff our lunch like mad to be back at our desks within the allotted time for our break. I don’t think we really counted as ‘people who lunch’ in the spirit of this book. Years ago, when I sold advertising for a small-town newspaper, I was often handed one of the office’s three cameras and told to take some photos of restaurant patrons on my way to or from one of my client’s businesses. I invariably took photos of lunching women who had what I thought of as ‘hairdresser hair’ – you could tell by the shade of their honeyed-blonde hair that they had the time and the money to sit in a hairdresser’s chair for hours to achieve a certain look. Those women were definitely ‘People who Lunch.’

The first essay in the collection, The Buffalo Club, focused on the Melbourne chapter of said Club. The author searched for information about the history of the club, including the reason for its existence and purpose, but found only the history of the Elizabeth Street building itself, which at one point housed a nightclub called Hugs and Kisses. During a visit to the Buffalo Club the author met a group of elderly men who seemed only to be there to eat, drink and chat amongst themselves. Although I enjoyed the Melbourne flavour of this essay, it was unsatisfying in that the author didn’t find any information of substance to impart about the Buffalo Club.

The next essay was intriguingly titled A Manifesto for Post-Work Polyamory and took the form of numbered points. As a side note, had I submitted a report with such long points in my previous workplace (the one where we ‘lunched’), my manager would have told me to tighten it up and simplify the title, since nobody would know what ‘polyamory’ or ‘post-work’ meant. Happily for me, though, Point #2 defined polyamory as ‘the practice of maintaining several romantic or intimate relationship relationships with the full knowledge and consent of all parties.’ Point #3 defined Post-Work politics as a ‘cluster of tactics to end humankind dependence on wage labour for survival.’ The definitions helped but what I still didn’t understand by the end of the essay, possibly because it was all too clever for me, was who in a Post-Work society does all of the crappy jobs that no one else wants to do? And why would anybody want to be polyamorous anyway? In my opinion life is complicated enough without juggling multiple ‘special’ relationships.

It got worse for me. For Discussion and Resolution positioned the author as postgraduate student on an Australian Government Research Training Program scholarship. It wasn’t long until this essay also launched into more arguments for Post-Work polyamory, with examples of polyamorous societies throughout history. Some thrived for a while then failed, some limped along, others appear to be ongoing and successful. Cleverly, the author also howled down a number of possible objections to a Polyamory Post-Work society that I, the reader, may have had. Despite her arguments, I wasn’t convinced that either scheme, separately or combined, is achievable for most people, and not just because the author described her first polyamorous relationship to have revealed her and her partner’s ‘capacity for insecurity, jealousy, and emotional miserliness.’ I’m a naysayer because none of the examples that I’ve ever seen in real life or the examples used in this book of people having multiple romantic partners at the same time ever seem to work out happily. My initial feeling is that if somebody wants to have sex with lots of different partners, then go right ahead but break up with your partner first. I might be wrong, but I think that if someone wants a polyamorous relationship they’re probably not facing up to what they actually want, which is to break up with their current partner.

The author then suggested that raising children in a polyamorous relationship would be shared between all of the participants in that relationship, freeing up everyone’s time for the relationship (along with the leisure time that is found by the Post-Work scheme). At this point I debated giving up on this whole book. The writing was good and the author made her points very well, even though I thought them ridiculous, but why in the name of a good night’s sleep would she think that anyone other than a biological parent would be up for this idea?

I’m selfish about my own leisure time. I love the idea that a Post-Work society would find me more leisure time, but adding additional significant people into my relationship mix would just use up any extra time I found. The same with my emotions; spreading them thinner by introducing more significant people would mean less value for everybody in my relationships. And as for Post-Work politics creating more time, I would argue that history shows that the introduction of time-saving household devices only ever leads to an increase in expectations of how clean our houses should actually be, and the same holds true for our working lives; faster, more efficient computers just means that our employers expect us to deal with more work.

Anyway, I decided not to finish this book. Even though the essays gave me much food for thought, I decided that the ideas presented were far too clever for me, and that I am most likely not the author’s ideal reader. As a result I spent the extra leisure time that I ‘found’ on a drive with He Who Eats All of Our Leftovers. We explored some new-to-us backroads, then sat on a beach and ate an ice-cream from Poco Artisan Gelato in Port Fairy. Bliss.

Category:

Australian author, Author, Book Review

11 Comments

Tagged with:

The Women by Kristin Hannah

January 19, 2026

Kelly from Kelly’s Thoughts & Ramblings recommended The Women by Kristin Hannah to me after I read Vietnam; a reporter’s war by Hugh Lunn last year, to get an American woman’s point of view of the Vietnam war.

I ended up reading The Women from start to finish on New Year’s Day, crying more times than I care to remember as I read.

The story began in California in 1966 when Frankie’s parents threw a party to say Bon Voyage to her brother Finley, who had just graduated from the Naval Academy and was leaving for Vietnam as a ship’s officer. Six months later, Frankie, whose parents expected her to marry well and have children, had just signed up as a registered nurse for the Army when two Navy officers knocked on her parent’s door to say that Finley had been killed in action in Vietnam, shot down in a helicopter.

Frankie was unable to get out of her commitment to the Army, and nor did she want to. After Basic Training, which didn’t prepare her in any possible way for what was to follow, she found herself on a plane to Vietnam, the only woman amongst 257 men. The story then dumped Frankie into hell, a make shift hospital in the middle of a war zone where she quickly recognised that her nursing skills were not good enough for what was required.

Overwhelmed, Frankie learned to nurse brain-damaged soldiers before being thrust into what was essentially a triage ward with two areas; one for patients who were expected to die from their injuries and where if there was time, someone might hold their hand during their final moments, and another for those who might or might not live but either way, needed urgent medical care. Before long Frankie was carrying out emergency operations and procedures that would ordinarily be carried out by a doctor at home.

When they were off duty, Frankie and her permanently exhausted fellow medical officers lived just as hard and fast as they did when they were working. They drank and danced and had affairs, although Frankie, whose morals would not allow her to compromise herself, resisted acting in what she believed was an unfair manner with the married doctor who she had fallen in love with. He was later killed, leaving Frankie devastated.

For two years, Frankie watched a great many people die, but she also helped many, many soldiers to live. Unbelievably, she signed up for a second tour and eventually fell in love again with her brother’s best friend, but suffered another heartbreak when he was killed in action. The friends Frankie made during this period were her friends for life.

The society that Frankie returned to didn’t recognise her courage or her work in Vietnam, and neither did her parents, despite her father’s obsession with the military men, who he saw as heroes, in their family tree. Frankie’s parents were actually embarrassed about what she had done, telling their friends she had been in Florence for an extended holiday instead of saying she was an Army nurse in Vietnam. She was also vilified by the general public for having been in Vietnam; spat at, abused and treated as if she were a criminal.

Frankie was vastly overqualified to work in a hospital as a nurse when she returned stateside.

The story spanned twenty years of Frankie’s life, and most of them were brutal. Every time I thought things couldn’t get worse for Frankie, they did. She suffered from nightmares, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and was gaslit by just about everyone, being told time and time again that there had been no women in Vietnam, all of which invalidated and disrespected her service. The vilification continued, also.

Some of the storylines were predictable, but this didn’t make them unnecessary to the story or out of place. Instead, I felt they probably reflected many Vietnam veterans’ life journeys, not just the women’s who were there.

I thought the Vietnam setting was very well done. I could easily imagine the heat and humidity, the stickiness of the green jungle, the mud and the rain and as for the constant fear, the idea of living on the edge and partying like there’s no tomorrow, and the horror of the war, and the injuries and the gore and the death, well, they all seemed real to me, too. Real enough that I couldn’t tell you the last time I cried so much when I was reading a book, and not only did I feel sad, but I also felt angry, frustrated and shocked.

I would highly recommend The Women to anyone interested in reading about this time and place from a different point of view. Kelly said she read the book with her book group, who I imagine had a very interesting discussion.

Category:

Author, Book Review, Hannah - Kristin

7 Comments

Tagged with:

The Classics Club 26 Questions in 2026

January 16, 2026

26 Questions in 2026: 

1. When did you join The Classics Club? How many titles have you read for the club so far? Share a link to your latest classics club list. The last book I read was #26 of my second Classics Club list, but because I’m hopeless at counting I accidently put 51 books onto my first list. So far I’ve read 77 books for The Classics Club and the link to my current list is here.

2. What classic are you planning to read next? Why? Is there a book first published in 1926 that you plan to read this year? I’m planning to read The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy next for no particular reason other than it’s been ages since I’ve read anything by Hardy. I don’t have any books on my current list from 1926, but do have The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie and These Old Shades by Georgette Heyer on my bookshelves, so maybe one of those.

3. Best book you’ve read so far with the club? Why? It’s impossible to choose just one book – I don’t think I could even narrow this down to a top twenty. There have been books that I’ve loved, books that were so-so and books I’ve disliked, but most of them have been memorable for some reason or other.

4. Classic author who has the most works on your club list? Or, classic author you’ve read the most works by? This is a dead-heat between Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Edith Wharton, Charlotte Bronte, Thomas Hardy and Henry James. Outside of The Classics Club, I’ve read and re-read books by Jane Austen, Agatha Christie, PG Wodehouse, Georgette Heyer and Daphne du Maurier.

5. If you could explore one author’s literary career from first publication to last — meaning you have never read this author and want to explore him or her by reading what s/he wrote in order of publication — who would you explore? Obviously this should be an author you haven’t yet read, since you can’t do this experiment on an author you’re already familiar with. 🙂 Or, which author’s work you are familiar with might it have been fun to approach this way? I’ve never read anything by Anthony Trollope, so theoretically I could read his works from go to whoa. However, I’ll probably start with The Warden since I have a copy on my bookshelves.

6. First classic you ever read? I can’t remember for certain, but it could have been Black Beauty, Little Women, What Katy Did, an abridged copy of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Charlotte’s Web (oh, how I cried over that book!), Anne of Green Gables, Pippi Longstocking, Heidi, just about anything that Enid Blyton wrote, or Aesop’s Fables.

7. Favorite children’s classic? I don’t think I could choose just one! Little Women, What Katy Did, Anne of Green Gables, or Heidi.

8. Which classic is your most memorable classic to date? Why? Jane Austen’s Persuasion because I’ve read it so many times. A more recent discovery is Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton, which hit me like a ton of bricks. I read it twice in a row on my first read, then read it for a third time recently. I can’t let go of the characters and their tragic story, and am fascinated by how different the story might look from the point of view of other characters in the novel.

9. Least favorite classic? Why? Collette’s Claudine books, since her character was nastier and more selfish than most other characters I can think of. I read two of the Claudine books, and would prefer not to read another.

10. Favourite movie or TV adaption of a classic? The 1995 BBC production of Pride and Prejudice is a favourite and not just because Colin Firth played Mr Darcy. I also loved the 2020 version of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca with Lily James and E.M. Forster’s A Room With a View starring Helena Bonham Carter.

11. Favorite biography about a classic author you’ve read, or the biography on a classic author you most want to read, if any? I recently enjoyed Kathryn Sutherland’s Jane Austen in 41 Objects, which looked at 41 items that Jane Austen had either owned, used, knew of or was associated with.

12. Favourite classic author in translation? Do you have a favorite classics translator? What do you look for in a classic translations? I haven’t read a great many authors in translation so probably should read more.

13. Do you have a favorite classic poet/poem, playwright/play? Why do you love it? It’s hard to go past Oscar Wilde’s plays because his writing is so, so funny. I always get the feeling he would be great fun to spend time with so long as you accepted that the minute you left him, he would be saying terrible (but hilarious because they were true) things about you to the next person. I’m also very fond of Banjo Paterson’s Mulga Bill’s Bicycle and occasionally read it aloud to myself or to anyone else who’s unfortunate enough to hear me. You can read the poem here.

14. Which classic character most reminds you of yourself? Which classic character do you most wish you could be like? I’m a bit of a Pollyanna, even though everyone knows how annoying us eternal optimists can be. I remember wanting to be just like Jo from Little Women or Anne from Anne of Green Gables, and later on I definitely saw myself as Elizabeth Bennet capturing Mr Darcy’s attention. But in actual fact, I think I’ve seen reflections of myself, good and bad, in the main characters of many, many books that I’ve read over my lifetime. As to who I wish I could be like, I think I’d rather be me than anyone else, so I can be whoever I like through my reading. Today a murderer, tomorrow a heroine, another time an astronaut or an historical figure from the past.

15. What is the oldest classic you have read or plan to read? Why? I’ve got a copy of Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, which was written around 1470, sitting in my bookshelves yet to be read. The oldest book I’ve read was Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, written in 1740. I didn’t find Pamela very interesting but noted in my review that readers from 600 years ago were probably quite invested in the main character’s sad story of being chased by a rake desperate to have her until she married him.

16. If a sudden announcement was made that 500 more pages had been discovered after the original “THE END” on a classic title you read and loved, which title would you be happiest to see continued? Is it cheating to wish instead that another 500 pages of Jane Austen’s final, unfinished novel, Sanditon could be discovered?

17. Favorite edition (or series) of a classic you own, or wished you owned, if any? I gave away my beloved copy of Pride and Prejudice when I was 18 or 19, after discovering that it was abridged! I’ve regretted it ever since. It was a Purnell Classics edition from 1976 and one day I hope to re-find my own lost copy again in an Op shop or a second hand book shop. If anyone finds it, my name is written on the inside cover in red texta.

18. Do you reread classics? Why, or why not? Yes, I reread classics over and over and over if I love them, although I haven’t reread many books in recent years. I recently realised that if I continue to read approximately 100 books per year, timesed by however many more years I might hope to live, the horrifying truth is that there are loads more books out there that I want to read than what I will actually read.

19. Has there been a classic title you simply could not finish? Two come to mind. Hopping in and out of each character’s head in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse did my own head in so that was a DNF, as was Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy by John le Carre for the terrible sin of boring me.

20. Has there been a classic title you expected to dislike and ended up loving? Heaps of them! There were so many authors and books I was afraid to try because I thought their works would be too hard for me to understand – Anton Chekhov, for example, and loads of books that I put off because they were sooo long – I’m talking about you, Charles Dickens, who never used one word when you could use five! Not having studied Shakespeare in school, I hadn’t expected to like Macbeth as much as I did, either.

21. List five fellow Classic Clubbers whose blogs you frequent. What makes you love their blogs? Again, just five? I follow loads of fabulous blogs and have made many lovely book-friends through blogging. I love their blogs for their opinions, their book recommendations and of course, the friendships that have grown over time. I don’t think I’m alone in saying that I joined The Classics Club after Fiction Fan’s encouragement, either.

22. If you’ve ever participated in a readalong on a classic, tell us about the experience? If you’ve participated in more than one, what’s the very best experience? the best title you’ve completed? a fond memory? a good friend made? I’ve never done a readalong but am a sucker for a Review-Along! I’ve done six so far and get a real thrill out of comparing notes with other readers while the book is fresh in all of our memories. I was terribly out of step with other readers in a recent Review-Along of Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary since I felt sorry for poor Madame B, who married a boring man who she was incompatible with in every way, but other readers detested her and couldn’t get past her shockingly selfish behaviour.

23. If you could appeal for a readalong with others for any classic title, which title would you name? Why? Um, something short? I’m usually happy to join in if I already have the book or can easily get hold of a copy.

24. What are you favourite bits about being a part of The Classics Club? I love being able to discuss books with people who have read them too. Generally people look at you as if you have two heads when you say you prefer to read than watch television, let alone owning up to preferring classics over currently fashionable story tropes.

25. What would like to see more of (or less of) on The Classics Club? I enjoy and appreciate the Classic Author Focus posts, which are often about authors I haven’t heard of and wouldn’t have heard of without the post. I also enjoy taking part in spins because they take the decision of what to read next out of my hands – this is right up there with someone else deciding what’s for dinner!

26. Question you wish was on this questionnaire? (Ask and answer it!) I’ve got two questions – I’ve been called ‘a bit extra’ before, it doesn’t bother me.

1. Do you wish that any classic novel had an alternate ending, and if so, how do you wish the story ended? I’d like to see the endings of certain stories changed to a happy ending instead of the endings they had that left me with great, hiccupping sobs – no titles for fear of spoilers.

2. What would be your desert island book? Jane Austen’s Persuasion.

Thank you, moderators. You do a wonderful job.

Category:

Author, Classics Club

20 Comments

Tagged with:

Redhead by the Side of the Road by Anne Tyler

January 12, 2026

Redhead by the Side of the Road by Anne Tyler left me wondering why I haven’t read more books by this author. It was good. And, better yet, it was a novella – a well-told story told in exactly the right amount of words. The other Anne Tyler book I’ve read, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant was good, too. When I reviewed it, I said almost the same thing; that I enjoyed the story and didn’t know why I hadn’t read more of her books. I think this was because the film of The Accidental Tourist was so sad that it put me off her stories. Like most readers, I’ve got to be in the right headspace to take on a sad story.

The main character of Redhead by the Side of the Road was Micah, an almost middle-aged man who found peace and comfort in routine. Micah mopped his floors on Mondays, Thursdays were for cleaning his kitchen and on Fridays he vacuumed. He saw his girlfriend Cass on set days, although Micah called Cass his ‘woman friend’, since Cass was in her late thirties and Micah was as particular about using the correct word as he was about everything else in his life. In his business, Tech Hermit, Micah solved his customer’s computer problems, which he generally found satisfying. He was also the super for his building, putting out the tenant’s rubbish bins on bin nights and making small repairs around the building.

A phone call from Cass saying that she thought she was about to be evicted from her apartment followed soon after by a visit by a young man who thought he might be his son turned Micah’s world upside down.

I was charmed by this book and by Micah. He was a good man who tried really, really hard, but he was so completely literal, so absolutely unable to read between the lines that unspoken conversations and questions passed over his head, frustrating Cass and Micah’s noisy, messy sisters and their noisy, messy families.

Redhead by the Side of the Road is a quiet story of an ordinary man’s life, but I found it to be very powerful. The writing was so clear, and the characterisation so good that I felt as if I knew Micah, Cass and the other characters, including the building tenants who continually left their cardboard boxes out on bin night without having already flattened them, of whom Micah’s opinion was, ‘Some people, they just didn’t have a clue.’

I absolutely have to read more of Anne Tyler’s books.

Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant by Anne Tyler

Category:

Author, Book Review, Tyler - Anne

21 Comments

Tagged with:

Trixie Belden – The Mystery of the Queen’s Necklace by Kathryn Kenny

January 9, 2026

I found a copy of the Trixie Belden book, The Mystery of the Queen’s Necklace by Kathryn Kenny in an Op Shop so decided to revisit my childhood for the bargain price of $1. For context, that’s 50p for those of you in the UK or 67 cents US.

I remembered some of the characters, including Trixie the girl-detective and her best friend Honey Wheeler. I also remembered Jim, Honey’s adopted brother, who, while it was never explicitly stated, Trixie seemed to have a bit of a crush on. I’d forgotten Trixie’s know-it-all older brother Mart and Miss Trask, Honey’s governess, even though she was the character I most related to this time around!

What I hadn’t remembered, or more likely hadn’t realised as a child, was just how annoying Trixie was. I’ll tell you about Trixie’s tiresome traits later.

The story began with Honey inheriting a necklace of diamonds and pearls, sapphires, emeralds and rubies, a piece so grand that only a Queen could have worn it. Although Honey’s parents had the necklace appraised and the stones were found to be fake, they took all of the characters previously mentioned to London to research the necklace’s history and Honey’s mother’s family tree, which made me wonder, did I really believe that this sort of thing actually happened to other girls when I was a child?

During their visit to London, the Bob-Whites, aka Trixie’s gang, visited the Tower of London, Madame Tussauds, the British Museum and the theatre, where they saw a Shakespearean play.

A pick-pocket tried to steal Honey’s handbag at Madame Tussauds, then Honey was saved by a charming Scotsman from being ran over by a bus at Piccadilly Circus, thus becoming one of the gang. Trixie was suspicious of Gordie McDuff and his motives right away, but you’ll have to read this book for yourself to learn if McDuff and his accent were genuine or if he only wanted to steal Honey’s necklace.

Trixie couldn’t understand why nobody in London seemed to like her and her friends, but I could. She was noisy in public places and often inconsiderate of other people, for example pausing at the entry to a train carriage while trying to decide where they were going, which prevented other commuters ability to get on and off the trains. To add to these sins, Trixie and the Bob-Whites flashed their cash around at a time when most Londoners were probably suffering financial constraints.

Trixie’s overly outgoing personality grated on me and the mystery was predictable, making me wish I’d left this Trixie Belden book behind. If I find a Nancy Drew book, however, I’ll probably give it a go for old time’s sake and hope to enjoy it better.

Category:

Author, Book Review, Kenny - Kathryn

14 Comments

Tagged with:

On the Calculation of Volume 1 by Solvej Balle

January 5, 2026

I wouldn’t have read On the Calculation of Volume 1 by Solvej Balle based on the cover art since I found it dull, but after seeing glowing reviews all over the place and realising that the story fits into the Groundhog Day genre or what I’ve since learned is known as a ‘time loop’, I reserved the book from my local library.

The story is narrated by Tara Selter, who is married to Thomas. They have a comfortable, happy life and run an antiquarian book business together. When Tara’s narration into her journal began, she was experiencing November 18 for the 122nd time, hiding out in the spare room of her and Thomas’ home and surreptitiously living her life around the routine Thomas consistently followed on this day.

Tara was in Paris for her first November 18. She’d travelled there by train on November 17 to stay at the Hotel di Lison. She woke up, had breakfast, visited other antiquarian book shops, called in at a friend’s shop, then returned later in the afternoon to spend the evening at the shop with her friend and his new girlfriend. She bought an ancient Roman coin for Thomas, and burned her hand on a heater. When she returned to the hotel late that evening Tara phoned Thomas and they told each other about their day.

When Tara woke up the next morning it was November 18 again. The newspaper from November 18 was on her table again at breakfast, and the guest at the next table dropped a piece of toast on the floor at the same time and in the same way they had on the previous day. Not surprisingly, Tara spent her day in disbelief, phoning Thomas to check the date, calling into shops to look at calendars and in a scattered fashion, reprising her movements from the previous day. When she visited her friend’s shop, Tara saw the coin that she had bought for Thomas back in the cabinet she had chosen it from, although some of the books she had purchased on her first November 18 remained in the hotel room with her.

In her next November 18 Tara returned home to Clairon, where Thomas was surprised to see her. Tara explained what was happening and Thomas believed her since she was able to prove to him that she had foreknowledge of certain events that had already occurred.

The next day, though, Thomas was surprised to see Tara when she brought breakfast into their bedroom, since in his mind, it was November 18 for the first time and he had expected Tara to still be in Paris. Thomas always accepted and believed Tara’s explanation of what was happening to her, based on the more and more minute details she could tell him, such as a bird chirping at a certain time. This played out again and again, until eventually, Tara became exhausted with the gap in between hers and Thomas’s realities, and began hiding in their spare bedroom, showering or cooking something for herself when Thomas was out of the house. Later, to give herself more freedom, Tara moved into a vacant house in another part of their town, going out only when she knew Thomas was reading or doing something at home, since his routine never changed.

Tara, who was 29 when the story began, continued to age. Her hair grew longer, and her burned hand healed. Food that she consumed disappeared from supermarket shelves forever.

By the time a year’s worth of November 18 had passed by, Tara had become very solitary, meditating on time and ideas as she sought a way to get back in step with time, to move onto November 19 with the rest of the world.

I found that the story required slow, carefully reading, and I used the spaces in between each paragraph to pause and think about what had gone before. This book was originally written in Danish and translated by Barbara J Haveland. I have a lot of questions and am very, very keen to read Volume 2 of what is to be a seven-book series.

Category:

Author, Balle - Solvej, Book Review

23 Comments

Tagged with:

Tag Cloud

Design a site like this with WordPress.com
Get started