At Hawthorn Time by Melissa Harrison

Here's where it all ends: a long, straight road between fields. Four-thirty on a May morning: the black fading to blue, dawn gathering somewhere below the treeline in the east. 

This is how Melissa Harrison's Costa Shortlisted novel At Hawthorn Time opens; from there the story moves back to the month before, as Spring comes to the countryside around the village of Lodeshill, and four people set out on courses which lead to this moment early one May morning.

I loved At Hawthorn Time when I first read it last year, and revisiting it before paperback publication I felt just the same.


Here's the full review - At Hawthorn Time -  and my summing up from it
 "At Hawthorn Time is a lovely, compelling read. While it doesn't share the brutality of Cynan Jones' The Dig, it has the same quality of depicting rural life intimately and seeing it clearly, without blinkers; of showing that it's not glossy and chocolate box pretty but a place of dirt, and that without it being a place of work it will become empty and sterile. 
There's also a little touch of the thriller about it. As the story brings us closer to discovering who was involved in the accident and why, it will have you turning the pages faster or wanting to sneakily check the ending - I'm not sure I'd advise it as, like the motorist whizzing along a country lane, you'll miss so much in the details."

Maryom's review - 5 stars 
Publisher - Bloomsbury Publishing 
Genre - adult literary fiction

A Place Called Winter by Patrick Gale - re-read

review by Maryom 

Beware - there are spoilers here. A Place Called Winter is a book that's now been talked about a lot in the press, on the radio, at book festivals etc, and it's been shortlisted for this year's Costa Best novel, so you may be more or less aware of the story outline. I don't believe anything I've said will spoil your enjoyment of the story but it's nice to approach a book for the first time with absolutely no idea of what will happen.

I'd already read this twice (!) before I published my first review back in March and was delighted to find it picked as one of my book club's reads so I had an excuse to read it again.
 It's about frontier life, about swapping complacent idleness for hard work, about a man, disgraced and victimised for his sexuality, coming to terms with his feelings, daring to believe that what he can feel for another man is love and that somewhere, right on the edges of society and civilisation, these two can find a way to be together.

When I first encountered this book, I was drawn to it by the romantic notion of frontier living, of being the first to turn the soil and create a home in the wilderness - possibly influenced by too much Little House on the Prairie - but it's the personal story of the book's protagonist Harry Cane that brings me back. It's set in the early twentieth century, and Harry is living a comfortable middle-class life, rather drifting along doing all the expected things like marrying and fathering a child, and even his secret affair with a male actor/speech therapist doesn't break him out of this complacent rut - until his brother-in-law finds out! Then to avoid scandal and imprisonment, Harry is compelled to leave the country; within the week, he's off to Canada, intent on securing a plot of land and turning farmer. This is something he's always rather dreamed of doing, but in a lazy, hazy, rose-tinted glasses kind of way and he would probably never have acted on his dreams if circumstances hadn't forced him.
After this third read, I still love it - the combination of sweeping breadth and small moments of intimacy, the contrast between Harry's 'first' sheltered life in Edwardian London and his second in the wilds of Saskatchewan. It's definitely a keeper!


Maryom's review - 5 stars
Publisher -  Tinder Press
Genre - Adult fiction, literary, historical, LGBT,

Spill, Simmer, Falter, Wither by Sara Baume

review by Maryom

When loner Ray finds One-Eye at the dog pound it's like the meeting of two lost souls. Both are misfits, viewed with suspicion by neighbours or dog-wardens, carrying with them an aura of 'otherness', and the potential for violence or danger. At first glance you'd trust neither of them.
 Raised in virtual isolation by a grief-stricken father, Ray's life has been warped from the beginning; he never mixed with children his own age, never had mates to hang out with or a girlfriend, never even had a job. His neighbours see him as a bit weird, and keep their distance. Now, he's 57, and following the death of his father is living alone for the first time - and just doesn't know how to carry on.
For his part, One-Eye isn't the sort of dog you'd pick for a family pet. Looking at the world lop-sidedly from his remaining eye, he has the battered beaten-up appearance of a fighter - but while his wild, ferocious traits have been encouraged and developed by his previous owner, he's also been on the receiving end of violence from both men and animals. Full of fear, it takes time for him to come to trust his new owner.
Gradually a bond forms between these two, but that streak of violence still lurks beneath the surface and events cause the pair to go on the run.

To get this clear from the start, this isn't a sweetly charming tale, not some sentimental mix of Marley and Me and The Shawshank Redemption, where man meets dog, they bond, and live happily ever after; both are too scarred by life for that. It is though a tale of both man and dog trying to recover from deep hurts, striving to put their pasts behind them and start again.
 One-Eye had my sympathy from the start. His fear of people spoke of an abused past, and I believe vicious dogs aren't born, but trained to be that way by man, and are then victimised when that 'training' emerges at an inappropriate time and place. Ray starts out as just a little odd; tolerated in the village where he grew up, eyed with suspicion but basically harmless; it was only as his secrets were revealed that I began to wonder if this view wasn't quite true.

From the moment Ray takes One-Eye home, he starts to talk to him; as One-Eye is introduced to the house where Ray has lived all his life, as they walk round the village or along the seafront, play football on a deserted beach, and as they drive away from the seaside through Ireland's countryside, Ray keeps up a rambling monologue, ostensibly aimed at One-Eye, describing all he sees, capturing the sights and sounds along the way, sharing secrets and gradually revealing the dark secret he hides. I started to feel that this was more about a dog giving a man a chance at redemption, than the other, more obvious, way round.

For a debut novel, I think this is just amazing.  Baume's writing enlisted my empathy for both of these outsiders, and had me hoping against hope that Ray and One-Eye would in some way be saved.

 Originally published in Eire by Tramp Press, this book came to my attention over summer via Irish book bloggers* singing its praises, and catching Sara Baume at Edinburgh Book Festival, hearing her read from it and speak about it, convinced me it was something I would love, so I'm delighted to see it now published in the UK by Windmill Books.

Longlisted - Guardian First Book Award 2015
Shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award 2015
Newcomer of the Year at the 2015 Irish Book Awards.

Maryom's review - 5 stars
Publisher - Windmill Books
Genre - adult fiction, literary, Guardian First Book Award,


* Bleach House Library review

A God in Ruins by Kate Atkinson

review by Maryom

In Life After Life, Kate Atkinson brought us a tale of one life, Ursula Todd's, lived over and over again till it was "right". In A God In Ruins, she brings us just one life-time, that of Ursula's brother Teddy with all its ups and downs, happy memories, devastating sadness, youth, old age ....

Working out the odds as a World War II bomber pilot, Teddy didn't rate his chances of making it through to see the peace - so he found it strange to be picking up the pieces of his life and starting to plan for the future. The war continues to cast its shadow over him though - to cope, he developed a deep layer of stoicism, almost a numbness, to keep himself plodding on, accepting whatever was thrown at him - from bombs and machine-gun fire to the dreadful things he himself did and  the random accidents that claimed the lives of friends. Scarred and numbed by his experiences and feeling a need to atone for his actions, Teddy decides his life will now be one of kindness, his own slight reparation for the horror of war, but those dreadful years are not shrugged off so easily and his relationships with wife, daughter and grandchildren are all affected.

Life After Life was a stunning, knock-me-for-six, sort of book and I'd wondered how on earth Kate Atkinson was going to follow it. Surely anything would seem tame by comparison, lacking in emotional clout? Well, the short answer is No! A God in Ruins is another absolute stunner.
Carefully and cleverly constructed, the story moves back and forth in time - to Teddy's childhood and his grandchildren's futures, sometimes revisiting events from a different angle - but always circling those formative, life-changing war-time years.
War novels seem to be rather the province of male authors - though why that should be I don't know - but Atkinson puts the reader there on Teddy's Halifax, dodging flak and enemy aircraft, experiencing the fear and adrenaline, the fragility of both life and aircraft; it's as good as anything I've read (and from childhood preferring my father's war novels to my mother's romantic fiction, I've read quite a few). There are certain incidents that sound a little familiar - for example from the film Memphis Belle - but something that surprised me was the occasional beauty of an air-raid seen from above - target indicators falling like red, gold and green fireworks or the twinkling lights of incendiaries - contrasting with the horror of killing those below.

There are subtle signs and hints throughout that the author is playing with the reader, indicators of what the eventual ending may be; the references to Life After Life, and the ever-present omniscient narrator who knows what will happen in the future well beyond the confines of this story, point towards the final twist. It's the sort of game that elsewhere, with different authors, I've objected to but this time I didn't mind at all - I'd been expecting the end, it felt 'right' and in many ways I'd have been disappointed if the story had ended in a more conventional way. As I read I felt completely immersed in the story - it doesn't matter at what level this is fiction - Teddy, his wife Nancy, daughter Viola, grandchildren Sunny and Bertie all felt completely real, all people I could care about and relate to.
The ending left me saddened and moved - an emotional roller-coaster seems a lazy description but that's exactly what this is.

Maryom's review - 5 stars

Publisher - Doubleday

Genre- adult, war, 

At Hawthorn Time by Melissa Harrison

Four-thirty on a May morning: the black fading to blue, dawn gathering somewhere below the treeline in the east.


review by Maryom

Early one Spring morning two cars collide on a country road near the small village of Lodeshill, the violence shattering the quiet; the ripped up grass bank, car wheels still spinning in the air, contents strewn across the road, three bodies lingering between life and death.

Over the previous month, four people have moved ever closer to this moment of impact;
Jack an itinerant farm worker, trying to escape the red-tape and bureaucracy of the modern world and live simply in the open air.
Middle-aged couple Howard and Kitty, recently moved to the country - dislocated from their normal life and finding their marriage gradually falling apart.
Local lad Jamie, lived in the village all his life, now looking for something beyond the mindless distribution centre work on offer and trying to find it in his souped-up, customised car.

At Hawthorn Time is a story of people trying to find themselves - not in any New Age vaguely spiritual sense, but in an everyday 'how and where do I fit in' way. We all have an idea, or ideal, of how the English countryside should be - sleepy villages where nothing has changed in hundreds of years, meadows with placidly grazing cows, ancient woodlands, life centred on the turning of the seasons. The reality of heavy farm machinery, migrant workers, the whole modern agricultural business or even cow-pat strewn roads doesn't quite fit that image we have. Into this gap between expectations and reality falls this story. Lodeshill is a place that's seen so much change in the last hundred years - machinery has taken over jobs once done by farm labourers, leaving villagers now seeking employment in the anonymous industrial units of the nearby town; farms are being sold off and housing built there; newcomers like Howard and Kitty have moved from the city in search of a rural idyll.

Jack is the most obvious misfit; an old-fashioned square peg that doesn't fit today's bureaucratic round hole. His way of life - wandering the ancient highways and byways of the countryside, in touch with his natural surroundings, living mainly off the land with little human contact - is opposed to modern ideas of land ownership, private property and trespassing. A quiet, dignified, harmless man, to outsiders he's seen as a threat - a vagrant, law-breaker and potential thief.

 Jamie has grown up in Lodeshill, firmly rooted in its paths and fields, more so than he realises. A generation or so ago he'd have become a farm worker, settled down into the rhythm of land and seasons and been content - now he's torn between the place he knows and the promise of the world beyond the village's boundaries.

Howard and Kitty are a couple in crisis, even if they're only vaguely aware of it as yet. Kitty was the driving force behind their move, but reality hasn't lived up to her country living dream and in a new home they seem to have forgotten how to speak to each other about anything beyond the most trivial everyday things. While Howard spends his days trapped in nostalgia for the past - his old haunts in London, the days before the children left home or tinkering with old radios - Kitty is out and about with her new hobby, photography. She's aware enough to know that what she captures is merely the picture postcard prettiness of the country, that somehow its real essence is eluding her - but she doesn't know how and why.
In their different ways they are all trying to find a place to belong, somewhere to which they can feel a connection, and as their stories unfold, heading for that fatal coming-together in four weeks time, so does Spring, bringing life and colour back to the countryside. I particularly loved the descriptions of flowers and blossom bursting back to life, of the country paths that Jack follows, the wildlife hiding just out of sight of the casual observer, but Harrison's close observations of both nature and people are a delight.

At Hawthorn Time is a lovely, compelling read. While it doesn't share the brutality of Cynan Jones' The Dig, it has the same quality of depicting rural life intimately and seeing it clearly, without blinkers; of showing that it's not glossy and chocolate box pretty but a place of dirt, and that without it being a place of work it will become empty and sterile.
There's also a little touch of the thriller about it. As the story brings us closer to discovering who was involved in the accident and why, it will have you turning the pages faster or wanting to sneakily check the ending - I'm not sure I'd advise it as, like the motorist whizzing along a country lane, you'll miss so much in the details.

Maryom's review - 5 stars
Publisher - Bloomsbury Publishing
Genre - adult literary fiction

A Place Called Winter by Patrick Gale

review by Maryom

Harry Cane is in a mental asylum, his memories damaged by overwhelming grief and the barbaric treatments common in the early twentieth century. Fortunately, before any lasting harm is done, he's transferred to another institution, liberal in outlook, idyllic in setting, where the doctor follows a quieter, progressive regime of encouraging patients to talk about their past and re-encounter the trauma that led to their incarceration ....
Harry was living a quiet, gentlemanly, suburban life in Edwardian England till an indiscretion brought it to an abrupt end. To cover up any possibility of scandal, he was forced to leave his wife and child, and strike out on his own - the further away the better being basically the sentiment of his brother-in-law. His imagination fired by the chance sighting of a display encouraging emigration to the newly-settled lands of the Canadian prairies, Harry found himself leaving his comfortable life behind and heading west... not quite in search of his fortune but certainly looking for a place to build a new life, to come to terms with himself and his newly awakened sexuality.

There's always something romantic about tales of taming the wild frontier, of striking out into unsettled lands, of being the first person to break the land and settle there - and this was what drew me to this story initially - but alongside the physical journey into the Canadian wilds is an emotional journey of self-discovery.  In England Harry was pretty much a drifter - the fortune amassed by his father gave him a soft, privileged lifestyle, never needing to work; he drifted into marriage and fatherhood, and drifted in the same way into an illicit relationship. As Harry leaves his well mannered, comfortable life behind, he starts to grow and change - he learns the value and satisfaction of hard work, of, at the end of each day, being able to look at what he's achieved, becomes more comfortable with who he is, and less open to exploitation.
A Place Called Winter is a quiet, mostly undramatic but immensely moving book, based loosely on events from the author's family history. The story is told mainly through Harry's reminiscences but they alternate with scenes from his present time in the asylum, so the reader is constantly reminded that this pleasant, well-mannered man has at some point broken and done something considered worthy of incarceration; as the tale unfolded and Harry found happiness in his new home and unorthodox relationship with fellow settlers, siblings Petra and Paul Slaymaker, I was all too aware that somewhere tragedy was waiting - always lurking in the background is the sinister figure of Troels Munck, who helps Harry get set up in Canada, who both fascinates and repels, and who you know is someday going to be demanding pay-back. I so wanted a happy ending for Harry, but felt it would be impossible.

A novel that's both epic, as it moves from urban London to Canadian frontier, and intimate, as Harry's personal emotional journey unfolds, I loved it when I first read it at the end of last year, and, having waited so long to review it, I decided to sneak in an extra read last week - it hadn't lost any of its appeal or ability to hold me, even though I knew how things would pan out; the mark to me of an excellent book!



Maryom's review - 5 stars
Publisher -  Tinder Press
Genre - Adult fiction, literary, historical, 

The Girl In The Red Coat by Kate Hamer

review by Maryom

8 year old Carmel and her divorced mother Beth form a tiny insular family; contact with Carmel's father is infrequent and erratic, and her mother and grandparents quarrelled long ago so Carmel never sees them. Being only the two of them makes Beth more watchful and careful than other mothers might be but Carmel is getting a little tired of this; she thinks she's old enough to be able to do things on her own with no need to constantly be holding her mum's hand like a small child. So in the crowds at a children's story-telling festival she takes the opportunity to slip away and hide under a table......  Engrossed in books and her imagination, Carmel loses track of time and when she eventually crawls back out her mum is nowhere to be seen. Then she's approached by an elderly man who claims to be her grandfather, come with the awful news that her mum has had an accident and been taken to hospital, and that for now Carmel should could home with him. Carmel is confused and upset, but something in the man's appearance makes her trust him, so she goes along without any fuss.....
 Meanwhile Beth is beside herself with worry. People are leaving, the festival grounds emptying and there is still no sign of Carmel. Panic rising, the organisers call in the police and Beth has to admit the dreadful fact that despite all her best efforts, Carmel has disappeared.

The Girl In The Red Coat taps into every parent's nightmare that one day their child will go missing. Unusually it doesn't follow the police investigation, with either the following up of a tenuous thread of clues that lead to a happy resolution, or the more chilling story-line that ends tragically in the hands of a serial-killer. Instead, the reader follows Carmel and Beth as in very different circumstances they try to adapt to their new lives. Told as it is in the first person from their alternating perspectives, the reader is there sharing the emotions of Beth and Carmel - the guilt and frantic searching of one, the bewilderment of the other.
Carmel of course is unaware that she's been abducted - she firmly believes that this man is her grandfather and that what she's been told about her mother's accident is true. So Carmel tries to adjust, to fit in with her new family and their plans for her. It was hinted at earlier but it now becomes apparent that Carmel is believed to have a special gift, and this is why she was taken. Her 'grandfather' has great plans for her, mainly of the sort that will involve his financial gain, and Carmel is bullied and manipulated into going along with them.
Meanwhile back home in Norfolk, her mum Beth tries to put her life back together. Never losing track of the number of days since Carmel went missing, never giving up hope, she searches frantically anywhere and everywhere, but gradually as the years pass, she makes peace with herself and starts to move on.

Although a crime has been committed this isn't so much the story of that crime but more one of how those involved cope afterwards, rather in the way that Celeste Ng's Everything I Never Told You or Carys Bray's A Song for Issy Bradley show families coping with tragedy. Here though there's still the hope that somehow, maybe, just maybe, Carmel and Beth can be re-united - and it's that flicker of hope that pulled me in, desperately wanting to know that all would turn out right in the end. Does it? well, read it and find out.



Maryom's review - 4 stars
Publisher - Faber and Faber
Genre -adult fiction, debut, crime,