The Fell by Sarah Moss

It's November 2020, and England is in lockdown (again). Nobody should be out and about unless on absolutely vital business or their permitted daily walk. For Kate and her son Mark things are worse as they are stuck in fourteen day quarantine after coming into contact with Covid. It could be a quiet peaceful time. An opportunity to catch up on all those things you've intended to do - start a sourdough, knit a sweater, write a novel about the pandemic - but Kate has had enough of being cooped up indoors. Even the garden is beginning to feel too constricted. And no one will notice if she slips away up onto the moor for a while, she thinks. But Kate's quick walk goes dreadfully wrong when she slips and injures herself.

At home, Mark grows increasingly worried by his mother's absence, and calling in mountain rescue seems, if possible, to make matters worse by acknowledging the severity of the situation. And meanwhile next door, Alice is trying to accustom herself to living alone since her husband died, feeling cut off from her family (zoom is no way to have dinner together!) but enjoying the luxury of a bed to herself.

Rather oddly I spent a lot of the first lockdown watching 'pandemic' films in which scientists race against time to save humanity, or reading the sort of book in which a small band of survivors struggle bravely on in a post-apocalyptic world, but The Fell is a different sort of 'pandemic' story - one that's more realistic, which tells of something much closer to home, of the feelings of fear, frustration and loneliness that many of us felt. 

Against this familiar backdrop of second (or was it third?) lockdown, the author weaves a story of a woman too restless to stay confined for a moment longer, her son taking life and his mother's presence for granted until the unthinkable happens, their elderly neighbour, lonely and cut off from family, and a man who gives his time freely to help those in trouble. The dullness of lockdown soon changes to tense drama when Kate slips and cannot make her own way home. Will she be found? Will she be 'found out' for breaking quarantine? Are fines applicable if you're lost on a hillside? 

Maybe not everyone is ready for a reminder of the dark days of last autumn when it felt like lockdown would become an ever-present part of our lives but I felt that I could relate to so many of the feelings experienced by the characters, and it was good to hear them voiced by others.

The Lamplighters by Emma Stonex

 Far out to sea off the Cornish coast, the Maiden lighthouse rises 50 metres above the waves; a tribute to Victorian engineering, and home to three men - principal keeper, Arthur Black, assistant keeper Bill Walker, and relative new-comer the supernumerary assistant Vince Bourne.

In December 1972 those men disappeared. The entrance door was bolted from the inside. The clocks stopped at quarter to nine. The table laid for two places. Investigators from Trident House can find no explanation for the event.

Twenty years later, Dan Sharp, a writer of maritime adventure novels, approaches the women left behind. Arthur's wife Helen has tried to accept that the men must have been washed out to sea by a freak wave - the most logical of the various explanations, she believes. Jenny, Bill's wife, refuses to believe any of the theories she's heard, insisting that somehow the men must still be alive. Younger than the other women, Vince's girlfriend Michelle is the only one who's tried to move on, marrying and having children with a man who'll never quite compare to Vince. Talking to Sharp brings back memories the women would rather forget, but maybe this way the past can eventually be laid to rest.

Inspired by the disappearance of three keepers from Scottish lighthouse in 1900, this stunning novel from Emma Stonex is a classic closed-room mystery, and an exploration of the lives of keepers and their wives -  love that keeps them together, the independent temperament needed by both, the strains that long separations put on a relationship. And on almost every page, there's the sea - shimmering on a summer's day, raging in storms, calm under a full moon - and the Maiden lighthouse, almost a character in herself, standing firm through the worst weather, forming a third party in any relationship, and through loneliness and monotony ultimately twisting the men's minds. 

It is a brilliant book, which had me engrossed from the first page! It has everything I want from a mystery - characters that feel like real people, lots of atmosphere, a satisfying ending, neither too prosaic nor too supernatural. 

The Maiden has cast her spell over me too. There's something quite extraordinary about a man-made structure standing alone at sea. A remote island has a certain fascination but with a tower lighthouse there's no surrounding ground - the tower sits solitary above the waves. I've seen them plenty of times off the coast but never really thought about them. Now Emma Stonex has really sparked something in me - a desire to run away to a lighthouse, to feel the waves crash over it and the building shake, but still but sheltered from the elements - that's excellent writing!

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Summerwater by Sarah Moss

At the end of a long single track road sits a holiday park, a small group of wooden chalets. With a lochside location surrounded by mountains it sounds like the perfect place to rest and relax, to get back in touch with nature and the simpler things in life, far away from normal everyday life. But the Scottish weather is proving a disappointment. The rain is constant. Getting out and about seems unappealing. There's little for the families on holiday at the park to do but stay indoors, and maybe watch the other holidaymakers. 
A wife tries to outrun her problems, children are forced outside to play by the water, teenagers would rather be anywhere else. A young couple think of what their future holds: an older one reminisce about the past. One family, though, is marked out as 'different'. They play music and party late at night. They don't have the proper 'serious' clothing and footwear. Maybe you aren't allowed to have fun while the rain continues to pour and ruin everyone else's holiday?

Over the course of a day, tempers start to unravel, tension rises, and, whether it's from children spotting another child who's easy to bully, or from the solitary guy camping nearby, there's a feeling of trouble brewing.

Sarah Moss has perfectly captured that claustrophobic mood of sitting hunkered inside out of the rain, day after day, in an area where all the attractions - walking, swimming, cycling - are outdoors, of longing to go out but being soaked after a few minutes, while inside wet clothes steam but never dry out, and the windows fog up from condensation. 
Following first one person, then another, we see the day unfold from different perspectives, and with each of them that uneasy tension builds. By close observation and dipping into their thoughts, at the end of the day/novel, these feel like people you know intimately, possibly better then their close families do. There's a certain similarity to Jon McGregor's If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things, with the emphasis being on people going about a fairly ordinary day, doing little of importance, while unknown to them tragedy is about to strike. 
And the ending ... well, that's one that will resonate for quite a while. DO NOT be tempted to skip ahead and see what happens. On a second or third reading you'll know how things work out; just once let the full shock hit you.


Maryom's review - 5 stars

Publisher - Picador

Genre - adult, literary, 

I Love You Too Much by Alicia Drake

review by Maryom

Thirteen year old Paul lives a protected life in the upmarket sixth arrondissement of Paris. His divorced parents have little time for him; his father busy with work and his obsessive fitness regime; his mother with her young wannabe rock star lover. Appearances and social achievement are what matter to the exclusion of all else. Paul is deemed by them to be a failure (not passing appropriate school entrance exams) and so he's left searching for affection elsewhere.
At school there's a new girl, Scarlett, challenging opinion and style in typical manic pixie way, and of course all the boys fancy her, including Paul. At first she only dates cool kids, but gradually a friendship builds between her and Paul. Will he find the unconditional love he craves with her?

This coming-of-age story brilliantly captures the chic but heartless and empty world in which Paul lives; success, or at least the appearance of it, matters more than happiness. I loved the writing style and found that in mood there was much to remind the reader of Francoise Sagan's Bonjour Tristesse. I was really enjoying it ... BUT ... and it was a big 'but' that alienated me ...  as the story progressed I became unsettled by seeming-homophobia on behalf of many of the characters. Some of it I could forgive as the violent reaction of a young teenager, especially considering the way in which he stumbles on the relationship, but no one took time out (ok, we've already established the heartless lack of care of his parents) to explain that there was nothing wrong with this relationship - that it was a valid expression of sexuality, rather than the immoral, degenerate behaviour Paul sees it as - and it left a sour taste which diminished an otherwise wonderful novel.

Publisher - Picador

Genre - adult/teen coming of age story 

Swimmer Among the Stars by Kanishk Tharoor

review by Maryom


I seem of late to be reading a lot of short story collections - possibly because I don't feel I have space in my personal life to commit to novel-length reads, so books like this that once might have got relegated to the TBR pile are getting more of a look-in.

Now, the obvious thing about short stories is that they're meant to be read as individual, stand-alone pieces, so it seems a little odd to say it took me a while to get 'into' this book. The first couple of stories - about the last speaker of a dying language, a city preparing to be invaded - left me 'hanging' in some way, but then, with an elephant's journey from India to Morocco, and the plight of UN ambassadors trapped on an orbiting space station while the world below them descends into chaos, I started to get a feel for the author's style and pace, and settled down to enjoy the collection.
My favourite section was The Mirrors of Iskandar - fourteen short pieces re-telling stories of Alexander the Great, with a mix of fantastical adventures and moral fables - but I also loved other stories - The Fall of an Eyelash, about the desperate hope of an exile to be reunited with her family, Icebreakers, the tragic yet almost farcical tale of 'rescue' ships stuck in Antarctic ice.

On the whole I'd describe the collection as whimsical, frequently tinged by sadness or loss. The author is someone new to me, and I'd certainly look out for future work.

Maryom's review - 4 stars

Publisher - Picador

Genre - adult, short stories

The Good People by Hannah Kent

review by Maryom

When first her daughter, then her husband, die within months of each other, Nora is left struggling to cope - she not only has to keep their fields worked and rent paid but also to care for her ill four year old grandson Micheal alone. Once he was a happy healthy little boy but since his mother died a few months ago he's thin and wasted, and has lost the ability to walk and talk. Nora hopes it's merely an illness that will pass with good food and care, but when she employs a maid Mary to help care for him, she immediately thinks the boy is possessed by a fairy spirit. Neither doctor nor priest can offer help, so in desperation Nora turns to the local healer Nance, an elderly woman knowledgeable in the use of herbs and the ways of the fairies, the "Good People", but just how far will the three women go in trying for a cure ...


The Good People is a story of belief, superstition and desperation set in a remote Irish village in the early 19th century, where people still totally accept that a curse has power, that people are stolen away by fairies, and a disabled child is actually a fairy changeling capable of casting the evil eye on a village, spoiling crops, making cattle run dry, hens stop laying. In this world a healer such as Nance has a place, treating ailments with the 'medicines' she has to hand - but the new village priest is forward looking and dismisses such beliefs as superstition, and, after a series of misfortunes striking those who've asked for her help, even the villagers are beginning to question her abilities.
It would be too easy to be smug and sophisticated, to laugh at the villagers' ignorance, but Kent avoids that. Instead she build a sympathetic, understanding picture of this community, entering fully into their mindset to which the meddling of the fairies is as obvious a fact as the sun rising each morning, while at the same time balancing the interpretation of Nora and Nance's actions - do they firmly believe they are doing their best for the boy, or are they deliberately, maliciously, harming him? I think that's one for the reader to decide.

The description of countryside is lyrical and atmospheric, the bend of the grass, the flow of the river making a beautiful setting for potentially dark deeds occurring in the half-light of dawn and dusk. The story itself moves inexorably towards its climax as this compelling psychological dram plays itself out, and Nance tries ever more extreme treatments to help the child.
And, in case you think it's all too far fetched, it is based on actual events...

Maryom's review - 5 stars

Publisher - Picador

Genre - adult, 

The Place That Didn't Exist by Mark Watson

review by Maryom

Landing an important charity account for Vortex, the ad agency he works for, has propelled Tim Callaghan into a whole new league. As part of the creative team, he's flown out to Dubai where the charity is based, to supervise the filming of an advert - and he's amazed by everything he encounters. The city is a holiday-maker's paradise, with bars, pools and shopping malls, and barely a need for a guest to lift a finger. It feels almost too good to be true - and it is. Then one of the film crew dies in mysterious circumstances ... could it have been an accidental overdose from a cocktail of drink and drugs, or something more sinister?

The Place That Didn't Exist is a mix of crime novel and social commentary, the story of a little man suddenly rocketed out of his league. While Tim wanders around marvelling at the fabulous place he's found himself in, to the rest of the film crew and the executives from the charity it's, if not 'normal', then at least something they've become accustomed to. But what others take for granted, Tim soon begins to question - the inequalities between the superficial glamour of the place and the hidden lives of the workers. Much like the oh-so-perfect-worlds dreamed up by advertising, it's all gloss and no substance.

It's an easy read of a book but one which points out the gulf between the lives of the super-rich visitors and those employed in creating the illusion. Various parallels are drawn between the artificiality of holiday destinations such as Dubai and the dream worlds fed to the public through advertising, but it's all done though humour and Tim's naivety, managing to deliver an entertaining but thought-provoking read.

Maryom's review - 4 stars

Publisher - Picador

Genre -adult,

What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours by Helen Oyeyemi

review by Maryom

What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours is a collection of stories revolving around love and libraries, gardens and diaries, and the keys that can unlock their secrets. The stories are loosely linked, with main characters from one popping up in a minor 'walk-on' role in another, and with the imagery shared by many of them, of hidden secrets and lost treasures.

Throughout there's a blurring of the boundary between real and unreal - some of the stories are very firmly set in the real world, others have a folk tale feel to them, or take flight into a world where puppets are as sentient as you and I. There's a city surrounded by marshlands filled with drowned bodies, one where the clocks have stopped and fixing them is considered an offence; a house where the doors won't stay closed unless locked by key, a twist on the story of Red Riding Hood.

Reading these stories is a bit like dipping in to a collection of fairy tales for adults - the first one even starts 'once upon a time' - and, as in fairy tales and fables, I felt that hidden beneath the story was a moral, but one I couldn't always find. The stories are definitely beautifully written but so much so that I found myself at times carried away by the words, and not grasping the meaning; I was half mesmerised, half perplexed. The collection has, though, whetted my appetite; I hadn't previously read anything by the author, but now I shall check out her previous work.

Maryom's review - 4 stars

Publisher - Picador

Genre -adult, short stories

The Guest Cat by Takashi Hiraide

review by Maryom 


A 30-something childless Japanese couple live quietly in the former guest-house to a large mansion-like property, till one day their life is intruded upon by a cat belonging to one of the neighbours. The cat, like all felines, has no sense of boundaries and belonging, and is happy to share its time between the two houses, eating, sleeping and generally making itself at home in both. Both husband and wife become quietly obsessed by the cat, watching her comings and goings, playing with her, and gradually it comes to fill a void that they didn't realise existed.

This was one of my book club reads, probably one I wouldn't have chosen for myself but reading is all about exploring new things as well as sticking to the familiar. I don't quite know what I was expecting - possibly a cross between Tom Cox's cat books, Talk To The Tail or Under The Paw, and John Grogan's Marley And Me - but this small volume wasn't at all like either of them.
 Narrated by the husband, the story tells how the cat turned up, how, despite not really being pet-lovers, they became enchanted by its ways, but as I read, I was unsure whether this considered itself as a novel or a memoir - it certainly reads very like the latter! - and somehow I just felt something was lacking. I often criticise stories that I feel are too much 'tell', and not enough 'show', and I think that was a big problem here; I could see how the cat came to feel like part of the couple's life, but I didn't feel for any of the characters. In part this may have been due to the translation, to American English, not British; some words jarred, and some of the phrasing and expressions seemed odd - so much so that at times I felt that I couldn't engage with the story. At other points, I wondered if the author had intended to be funny, but humour doesn't translate well, and I wasn't sure. 
It's an award-winner in Japan, and a best-seller in France and the US, so I think somehow, somewhere, I missed something. It just didn't grab me but I'm going to pass it on to my cat-loving neighbour and see how she feels.

Maryom's review - 2 stars

Publisher - Picador

Genre -adult, cats

Station Eleven by Emily StJohn Mandel

review by Maryom

One day, much like any other, with people going about their daily routine, the Georgia Flu hits. With a 99% mortality rate, survivors are few and far between and within weeks the world as we know it is only a memory.
Twenty years later, and the initial years of violence and horror have died down, leaving a fairly settled 'armed peace'. Through this setting. a group of performers known as The Travelling Symphony are travelling, taking music and Shakespeare to the scattered communities in the Great Lakes area. Meanwhile in a disused airport lounge, an elderly man has set up a Museum of Civilisation, a collection of curiosities, things that were once part of everyday life  - credit cards, mobile phones - but now seem meaningless.

Station Eleven is a dystopian post-apocalypse novel with a difference - not just about surviving the the initial catastrophe but about how society/civilisation, call it what you will, continues afterwards. The story weaves backwards and forwards from the years before the epidemic, the outbreak and chaos of it and twenty years after, following the intertwined lives of the main characters, all of whom have links back to famous Shakespearean actor Arthur Leander who died the night the epidemic broke; his wife Miranda, son Tyler, best friend Clark,  Kirsten, once a child actor and now part of The Symphony and an excellent knife-thrower and Jeevan the man who came to Arthur's aid as he collapsed on stage.
I think Station Eleven is a book that readers will see many different things in - to me, the motto "Survival is Insufficient", taken by the Symphony as a whole, and Kirsten personally, is the key to the novel. Borrowed from Star Trek Voyager's Seven of Nine, it encapsulates the idea that mere subsistence level living is not enough - that being able to explore one's own individuality, to create, through art, music or words, is key to being human. For the Symphony specifically its what defines them as people - when civilisation started to collapse around them, their musical instruments were the things they saved. Kirsten saves a paperweight for its beauty alone and no practical reason. To quote Chakotay from the same Voyager episode, "There's a difference between surviving and living", which for me sums up the feeling behind this novel.

It's not Shaun of the Dead or 28 Days Later but a deeper, philosophical look at a sudden break-down of society. There's a lot within it to appeal to geeks like me - with references to greek myths, Shakespeare and Star Trek; the latter being particularly relevant as it was never afraid to move beyond science fiction to wider questions of philosophy, morals and humanity in a similar way to Station Eleven itself.


Sadness permeates the book, not just for friends and family lost to the epidemic but for the disappearance of a whole way of life. Overall though the feeling is upbeat and positive, hopeful that people can re-build a world as good if not better than it was before.

I really enjoyed my first read-through and it feels like a book that hasn't revealed all its depths yet but will re-pay further reads with fresh discoveries to be made.

Maryom's review - 5 stars

Publisher - Picador

Genre - dystopian, post-apocalyptic, adult fiction


Other reviews; Curiosity Killed the Bookworm
 For Winter Nights 
Girl! Reporter

Mrs Hemingway by Naomi Wood

review by Maryom

Mrs Hemingway is the story of not one, not two, but the four wives of Ernest Hemingway. There's a slight problem with a biographical novel of this nature that at least some readers will know how everything ends but although I knew in a vague sort of way that there'd been more than one Mrs Hemingway, I didn't realise there'd been four - and other lovers as well! - so I was intrigued to discover what exactly so many woman saw in this man.
Spanning 35 years, the novel moves from a shabby Parisian apartment to the newly-discovered French Riviera, to the Hemingway villas in Key West and Cuba, to a cold Idaho autumn, and follows Hemingway from struggling writer still full of confidence and hope, through his most productive years to dried up middle-age riddled with self-doubt. He certainly comes across as a man who lived up to every macho, larger-than-life, hunting/shooting/fishing anecdote ever told about him, always wanting to be in the thick of the action from a shrapnel injury in the first world war to helping liberate Paris (particularly wine cellars) in the second. While he's there in spirit though on every page, this isn't really "Papa" Hemingway's story but that of his wives - Hadley, Fife, Martha and Mary. 
The book is spilt into four sections, one for each wife, and, starting unusually at the end of the relationship, charts its rise and fall in flashbacks. As fiction, it goes where mere biography often can't - into atmosphere and emotion. It's a very intimate book capturing the small details that make a reader feel 'there' in the scene and, throughout, the writing lured me on with the feeling of being an invisible spectator observing the characters' private moments.  I really felt I was 'there' - swimming in the Med with Hadley, seeing the streets of newly-liberated Paris with Martha and sharing Fife's loneliness in her exotic Key West garden, or Mary's despair.
Mrs Hemingway is a rather lovely book that brings these four women, and the man they all loved, to life on the page. I don't think it matters if you know everything there is to know or nothing at all about Hemingway, Naomi Woods has created a wonderful story that will appeal to all.

If, like me, you're now intrigued by Mrs Hemingway you can find out more, including photos, on naomiwood.com

Maryom's review - 5 stars

Publisher - Picador

Genre - fictionalised biography, Hemingway