Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh

review by Maryom

Eileen Dunlop lives a dull and dreary existence in a small town outside Boston. She dresses in her dead mother's clothes, has hardly any friends, works by day as a secretary at a boys' prison and, evenings and weekends, she looks after her alcoholic father, whose behaviour is becoming increasingly erratic and troublesome. She dreams of leaving and running away to the city but it doesn't seem likely that will happen.
Then, a new employee starts at the prison - Rebecca Saint John is glamorous and attractive, and everything dowdy Eileen would love to be. The two strike up an unlikely friendship but Rebecca's actions soon drag Eileen into more trouble than she could have imagined ...

Although this book is billed as a psychological thriller, I wouldn't personally describe it as such, as I didn't feel much tension or threat in the unfolding story line (but I've kept the tag). The story is told through the reminiscences of an elderly Eileen looking back on the events of the week leading up to Christmas 1964, so the reader knows early on that she has done something reprehensible which caused her to leave town in a hurry. There are plenty of hints about what it might be and the part that newcomer Rebecca plays in it but the actual act is kept secret till late, very late, in the novel, and nothing really remarkable happens before.

It's probably because of this lack of movement in the plot that I didn't like it, as the writing is good, and the atmosphere well conjured. I just didn't care about Eileen and her great secret. She certainly isn't a likeable character -  with her dreadful hygiene, morbid obsession with her deceased mother, and sexual hang-ups.

It's Booker shortlisted though, and I've seen good reviews on the web, so presumably someone liked it!

Maryom's review - 2.5 stars 
Publisher - Vintage
Genre - Adult fiction, psychological thriller

Other reviews - The Owl on the Bookshelf

Voices by Arnaldur Indridason

review by Maryom


"It is a few days before Christmas and a Reykjavik doorman and occasional Santa Claus, Gudlauger, has been found stabbed to death in his hotel room in a sexually compromising position. It soon becomes apparent that both staff and guests have something to hide, but it is the dead man who has the most shocking secret.

Detective Erlendur soon discovers that the placidly affluent appearance of the hotel covers a multitude of sins."


 Arnaldur Indridason is one of those highly acclaimed writers of Nordic Noir that I haven't really seemed to catch up on, so when this came up in a selection of 'Christmassy' reads at my Waterstones book club I voted for it - and having read it, I can see why he's earned his reputation.

Obviously finding the murderer takes centre stage but what I loved was that it was about 'more' than just crime. The discovering of the victim's past, of how he was pushed into a singing career by his ambitious father, ties in with other stories of less than ideal childhoods, focussing on the realtionships between children and parents. While Gudlauger was being singled out for special attention by his father, and striving to do his best to live up to his expectations, his sister was being relegated to 'second best', with little affection or notice going her way.
Meanwhile Erlendur's colleague, Elinborg, is awaiting the result of a case of child abuse. A father is suspected of causing severe injuries to his son, not once but on several occasions. Elinborg is not convinced by his pleas of innocence, but the case takes a very strange turn.
The case also brings back memories for Detective Erlendur; of the death of his younger brother in a heavy blizzard, and of the abandonment of his own children. He's carried the guilt of the first with him since then, but is only just, since being re-united with his now-adult children, beginning to feel how he might have failed them too. All these separate threads weave together to add an extra dimension to a whodunnit murder mystery involving nerdy record collectors and a family feud.
I'm not sure whether I'd say it was very 'Christmassy' in feel - it's set in the run-up to the holidays, and there's certainly a lot of mentions of Icelandic-jumper-wearing tourists celebrating in the hotel, and while his colleagues are wanting to be at home and preparing food and presents, Erlendur is not looking forward to a solitary Christmas, but at the same time, there's a feeling that life, and crime, goes on regardless of season.

Voices is Book 3 of the Reykjavik Murder Mysteries series, but I had no difficulty jumping in at this point. The only aspect that threw me at first was a slight confusion over names; Sigurdar Oli, I thought was female, Elinborg, male, and I never got the hang of Marion Briem - but I think that might have been deliberate on behalf of the author.

This is only the second Araldur Indridason novel that I've read, but I definitely I'll put him on 'read more of' list.




 Translated from the Icelandic by Bernard Scudder

Winner of the Crime Writers' Association Gold Dagger
Maryom's review - 5 stars
Publisher - Vintage
Genre - Adult crime fiction, Nordic Noir,

A Spool of Blue Thread by Anne Tyler

 review by Maryom

The story of the Whitshank family is inseparable from the story of their house. Built for a client by the curiously named family patriarch Junior in the 1930s, it was for him, an ideal house, one he yearned to own and at last, with a little manoeuvring, his wish came true. On his death, his only son Red moved in with his wife Abby and young family, and filled the house again with noise and bustle, but now those children have grown, married, left home and have children of their own.

It's a quiet book - the story really of a fairly average family, to whom nothing extreme happens, either good or bad, they just jog along as most of us do. Their comings and goings are probably of little interest to anyone outside the family, but within the family they're built up to great dramas. They have their secrets of course, and it turns out that the 'accepted' version of family history might not be quite true,


It's a rather simplistic thing to say but if you love Anne Tyler's books, you'll love it, if you find them a bit lacking in 'grit' then like me you'll be left wanting. I've read other books by Anne Tyler and found them pleasant enough but not, for me, anything special. Somehow, being short-listed for both the Bailey's Women's Fiction Prize and the Man Booker Prize, I'd expected a little more in some way from this; sadly it didn't live up to my hopes.

This is one of this year's Bailey's Prize shortlist which I'm working my way through rather slowly. Other reviews below
A God In Every Stone - Kamila Shamsie

Shortlisted for Bailey's Women's Fiction Prize
Shorlisted for Man Booker 2015
Richard and Judy Book Club pick

Maryom's review - 3.5 stars
Publisher - Vintage
Genre - Adult, Family saga

The Crime at Black Dudley by Margery Allingham

review by Maryom

 Wyatt Petrie is the owner of a remote country house in Suffolk. Although the place is normally occupied by his uncle, Colonel Coombe, Wyatt regularly throws house parties there. On this particular occasion a group of young people are gathered for the weekend, including
George Abbershaw, a police pathologist, ....and a curiously foolish young man named Albert Campion. After dinner on the first evening, talk turns to a family heirloom, the Black Dudley Dagger and the ritual associated with it, which over time has turned into a parlour game. Just the sort of thing for a country house party - but as you'd expect, the minute the lights go out, someone gets killed. This isn't a random, personal killing though and the visitors soon find themselves embroiled with an important underworld gang leader

The Crime at Black Dudley starts as a classic country house murder mystery but then moves on to more of an action adventure with lots of scuttling through secret passages, attempts to escape from locked rooms and even a car chase. Sadly it's age is showing a little with Bertie Wooster-style dialogue and an insistence that the women of the party are weaker and more terrified than the men - I was longing for one of them to cease the initiative and save the day, or even turn out to be the murderer, but it was a man's world in those days.

This book marks the first appearance of Albert Campion but he's more of a bit-player than the leading man - that role goes to George Abbershaw who, inspired by his love for Meggie Oliphant another of the house guests, steps out of his everyday rather pompous persona and becomes an all-action hero. Campion meanwhile comes over as rather enigmatic - at first sight he's a more than averagely foolish young man but suddenly he takes charge in a surprisingly competent way; I can definitely see why the publishers thought he was the character worth bringing back.


Maryom's review - 4 stars
Publisher - Vintage
Genre - Adult crime 

The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel by Deborah Moggach

review by Maryom

 Norman is becoming too much of a problem for retirement homes to cope with. Not because of any health issues, but because of his improper behaviour towards the nursing staff! When ALL the local homes refuse to take him, he's forced to move in with family; his daughter Pauline guiltily feels she should look after him but son-in-law Ravi just wants him out of the house! Along with a cousin from India he comes up with a plan - to open a retirement home in a former hotel in Bangalore; the cost would be lower than in Britain, the weather better and surely Norman's reputation couldn't have reached that far! Filled with enthusiasm they produce brochures and soon elderly British residents are filling the rooms and discovering a new way, and lease, of life.

This is one of a big stack of Deborah Moggach novels I won in a Hay Festival competition last year and the first I've got round to reading as part of my New Year reading plans  It was previously published as These Foolish Things, and re-named as a film tie-in, though I suspect the plot of the film and the book differ.

It's a delightful, wry comedy about a group of 70-somethings, growing old, not quite disgracefully but certainly not in the sedate style their children expect of them. All the 'old folks' are still full of life and not at all ready to be written off just yet! In India they feel like they can shake of their 'oldies' image and just be themselves - maybe a little slower moving around but that gives all the more chance to soak up new experiences. For some there's even the possibility of a new romance ...

While light-hearted, it did make me wonder about the way we think about 'old people', particularly the assumption that having reached a certain age they're too old to care about anything, that sitting in a retirement home, maybe glued to daytime TV, is enough for them - I can't imagine it would be for me!

Maryom's review - 4.5 stars
Publisher - Vintage
Genre - Adult Fiction,  comedy

Buy The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel from Amazon

Stoner by John Williams

review by Maryom

William Stoner enters the University of Missouri at nineteen to study agriculture. A seminar on English literature changes his life, and he never returns to work on his father's farm. Stoner becomes a teacher. He marries the wrong woman. His life is quiet, and after his death his colleagues remember him rarely. Yet with truthfulness, compassion and intense power, this novel uncovers a story of universal value. Stoner tells of the conflicts, defeats and victories of the human race that pass unrecorded by history, and reclaims the significance of an individual life. A reading experience like no other, itself a paean to the power of literature, it is a novel to be savoured.

Stoner is one of those old-fashioned 'cradle to grave' stories of a farm boy who leaves home for agricultural college, accidentally discovers the beauty of English literature and abandons farming for an academic career. Originally published in 1965, it's out again in a new edition from Vintage Books and being promoted on Twitter with the hashtag #weareallstonersnow - which is how I discovered it.

This turned out to be an oddly compelling read. I say 'oddly' because it isn't an all action thriller that you need to read through the night to find out if the hero saves the day, or a romantic weepie where you need to reach the happy ending, but a quiet tale of a scholar, his set-backs, both in private and academic life, and the constant joy he finds in his work. It's difficult to pin down what exactly the charm about the novel is; Stoner's life isn't one of blissful happiness or high achievement so it didn't really ought to fall into the 'feel-good' category but somehow it does. I think you really need to try this for yourself to discover its appeal.

Maryom's review - 4 stars
Publisher - Vintage
Genre - Adult Literary Fiction

 Buy Stoner: A Novel (Vintage Classics) from Amazon

All The Birds Singing by Evie Wyld

review by Maryom

Jake Whyte is the sole resident of an old farmhouse on an unnamed British island, a place of ceaseless rains and battering winds. It's just her, her untamed companion, Dog, and a flock of sheep. Which is how she wanted it to be. But something is coming for the sheep - every few nights it picks one off, leaves it in rags. It could be anything. There are foxes in the woods, a strange boy and a strange man, rumours of an obscure, formidable beast. And there is Jake's unknown past, perhaps breaking into the present, a story hidden thousands of miles away and years ago, in a landscape of different colour and sound, a story held in the scars that stripe her back.

All the birds singing is an amazing serendipitous find for me. I was scrolling through my Twitter feed and noticed someone RT Evie Wyld asking if anyone would like to review her book and including a link to the first chapter. I followed the link, read the chapter and knew I wanted to read more! Up to this point I had no idea who Evie Wyld was - then I started discovering she's won all sorts of awards and been included in the Granta Best of Young British Novelists List. So, obviously I'm late coming to the party. At least I'm here now.

All The Birds Singing is the story of Jake, an Australian woman, now keeping sheep on a wet and windswept British island. It soon becomes apparent that she's running or hiding from something in her past; that she's put as much distance between herself and those events as she possibly can. The enormity of them is gradually revealed through flashbacks, each of which take the reader back further in time to the moment that shaped her life.

Now, someone or something is attacking her sheep. Is it merely an animal or could it be someone stalking Jake herself? The answers aren't clear cut - a lot is left for the reader to decide for themselves; how much is real? how much imagined? In this respect, it's not an easy read; the reader must think things out for themselves instead of being presented with all the answers. I definitely felt that having reached the final revelation, a re-read would bring more things to light. I like this quality in a book; the feeling that not all of its secrets have been yielded up in the first read, that I can go back and discover more. It's easy to achieve by sheer volume - no one can remember and track every plot thread of War and Peace first time through; harder in a novel under 250 pages.

On the outside, Jake is a bit of a misfit - she hasn't made any effort to blend in with her neighbours, resents having to call on them for help and generally keeps herself very much to herself. Her inner world is tormented, always expecting her past to catch up with her, and never letting her guard down, making it difficult for her to trust people or interact with them on anything more than a superficial level. Letting someone inside this fence is Jake's first step on the way to redemption and self-forgiveness...

Maryom's review -  4.5 stars

Publisher - Jonathan Cape

Genre - adult fiction, literary fiction

Buy All the Birds, Singing from Amazon

I Am Forbidden by Anouk Markovits

review by Maryom

" I Am Forbidden is a powerful portrayal of family, faith and history which sweeps the reader across continents and generations, from pre-war Transylvania to present-day New York, via Paris and England. Immersive, beautiful, moving, it explores in devastating detail what happens when unwavering love, unyielding law and centuries of tradition collide."

Josef and Mila are both orphaned when their families are killed by Romanian Iron Guard during WW2. They find shelter and an adoptive family with the Sterns, members of an ultra-orthodox sect of Hasidic Jews saved from the Holocaust by an accident of geography and bureaucracy. The system of rules and restrictions that the Sterns live by form the backdrop to the story of these orphans and their own daughter Atara, as they grow to adulthood. Mila and Atara are the same age and the two become very close, but as they grow older their attitude towards the strict rules by which they live differs. Mila takes comfort from the rules and regulations governing her life; Atara fights them, always wanting to know and do things that are forbidden to women.

I'm not sure this is a book I'd have picked up at random from a bookstore or library shelf - but discovering something outside the norm is one of the wonderful things about reviewing books. It was a little difficult to get into the book at first but as the story unfolded I was drawn into it.
I Am Forbidden gives a fascinating glimpse into a culture so very far removed from my own that I can't believe I'd tolerate it for a minute - or that its adherents would tolerate me! It portrays a society in which women have an extraordinarily passive role and are expected merely to keep house and raise children - to never enquire too much about either the strictures and meaning of their own religion or of the happenings and ideas from the outside world. It isn't only women's actions that are controlled in this manner - there are rules surrounding everything from behaviour on the Sabbath to when sex is permitted.
At the heart of the novel is the clash between very intense religious beliefs and personal desires - and the devastating fallout it brings. I liked that attitudes didn't fall easily into for and against groups but were as numerous and individual as the characters concerned. Markovits manages to bring sympathy and understanding to both sides of the question.
A good read if you're looking for something different and thought-provoking.

Maryom's review - 4 stars
Publisher - Vintage
Genre - Adult Literary Fiction

Buy I Am Forbidden from Amazon

The Woman in Black by Susan Hill

review by Maryom

When I've commented on Twitter or Facebook that I haven't found such and such book particularly frightening, people always recommend The Woman in Black. My not-easily-freaked-out Teen certainly found the film scary. So I decided it was time to borrow the library's copy and read it as part of our Halloween week.

Arthur Kipps reminisces about the time when as a young solicitor, rising in his profession, he was sent to attend the funeral and sort out the affairs of a recently deceased client - for this it's necessary to spend some night in the deceased's house out on the lonely marshes in a house only accessible by causeway and cut-off  at high tide. Of course, none of the locals would do this - ever! - but Kipps is either braver or more foolhardy, so off he goes. Out there he encounters stranger things than he'd expected - things that will mar his life forever....

 So, how did I find The Woman in Black. Atmospheric? Yes - there are wonderful contrasting descriptions of the marshes under the winter sun and blanketed in fog. Very compelling? Certainly. A real page turner that I didn't want to put down. But scary? Not really, or at least not for me. The reader knows from the beginning that something very frightening happened and too often the narrator seems to say "Careful, there's a scary bit coming up". For some readers this may have added to the tension - in the way creepy music does on a film - but by preparing me for the horror it made it less scary.


Maryom's review -  4 stars
Publisher - Vintage Books  
Genre - ghost stories,

The Sense of An Ending by Julian Barnes

Good story. Shame about the characters.
 Review by Maryom

Tony Webster is in his sixties, now retired after an uneventful, unremarkable life - his career, marriage and even his divorce have been like mere ripples in his pond. His reminiscences take him back to his days in school sixth form when new boy Adrian joined his little clique. As they grow older, go their different ways to University, their friendship fades as may be expected.  It comes to an abrupt end though when Tony and his girlfriend, Veronica, split up and she almost immediately moves in with Adrian. Even this, possibly the most dramatic thing to happen in Tony's life, is looked back on with equanimity - until the day he receives a solicitor's letter - Veronica's mother has bequeathed him various items in her will. Making contact with Veronica, opens up these events and subjects them to new interpretations. 

I accidentally came across this book on the 'One Week Loan' rack in the library. It's one of those books I'd been meaning to read one day and as it had caught my eye - as a Booker Prize winner, an unread Julian Barnes novel and, most important for a 'one week loan' book, only 150 pages - I picked it up!
The Sense of an Ending is a fascinating tale of how we allow ourselves to re-write our past.
My reactions to this novel were rather mixed. The way the story unfolds pulled me in, in an almost thriller-type way. I soon realised that the past was not the bland emotionless place that Tony claimed it was and wanted to know what had really happened. Everything about it was great so far - unfortunately, and this is the big stumbling block, I couldn't bring myself to feel any sympathy for the people concerned. Tony - pompous, arrogant, all-round irritating - seems stuck in his sixth-form persona. What may be perhaps expected and excusable in the sixth-former is decidedly unlike-able in a man of 60. Veronica, although admittedly tainted by Tony's point of view, wasn't much better.  Maybe Barnes intended them to be unappealing - I wonder?

Maryom's review - 4 stars

Publisher - Vintage
Genre - Adult Literary Fiction