I loved Rose Tremain’s book, The Colour, which I read years ago and so when this one was 99p on kindle I bought it.
Lily is different from the books I’ve been reading of late – no magical realism or urban fantasy here – this is in some ways a very simple and straightforward novel set in Victorian England. Lily is a foundling – a baby abandoned in a park and rescued by a young police constable who watches over her from afar for most of her life.
The orphanage where he takes her sends babies to be fostered by families in the country until they’re six when they are returned to be taught ‘good Christian ways’ and a suitable trade.
Lily was happy with her foster family, which only made the transition back to the cruel and abusive treatment of the children’s home harder, but Lily is strong and feisty and survives, but at what cost?
I thought the book was beautiful – I really enjoyed reading it and read it quickly.
This is my sixth Claire North novel of the summer, and unlike the previous one, The End of The Day, which was my favourite so far, this one was probably my least favourite. It’s actually sometimes sold as three novellas (annoyingly, Amazon keeps trying to tempt me into buy them as similar to what I’ve been reading when they are what I’ve been reading!) all set at different periods in history but all revolving around the mysterious Gameshouse.
The first part, The Serpent, is set in seventeenth century Venice. In the Gameshouse, people gamble money, or maybe a number of years of their life, or their sense of taste or whatever, and the games they play involve real people and politics or even war. A woman whose husband has gambled away all their money is offered the chance to play to win the chance to make her own life.
The second part, The Thief is one that I liked the most. A man agrees to a game of hide and seek which will cost him his memory if he loses. It is set in Thailand in the 1930s and I enjoyed the ingenuity of the man travelling through rural and cityscapes evading capture.
The final part, The Master, set in contemporary time, has a player taking on the gamesmaster to win control over the gameshouse. He says his motive is to shut down the games house because he is troubled how it ‘plays dice with people’s lives’ and wars and deaths are nothing and any number of real people are easily sacrificed by players trying to win the games. There was a huge death toll in this story, and although I get that this is the point, both in this fictional gameshouse, and as an allegory holding up a mirror to real life where the decisions of world leaders can send men to war, or take away people’s livelihood without any personal cost in their own power games, I still found it a disturbing and uncomfortable read.
So, while I can appreciate the clever social commentary and once again by Claire North, unique storytelling, I didn’t so much enjoy reading this one.
This is my fifth Claire North novel of the summer, and my favourite so far. In fact I would say it’s my new stand out favourite audiobook after Aperigon. I loved the narrator who really, I think, captures the spirit of the different characters and the narrative as well as doing an impressive array of accents!
The story follows Charlie, who applies for and gets the job of Harbinger of Death. As a rookie, he’s not really sure what he is doing, and is so sweet and calm and endearing stumbling along trying to always do the right thing. Poor Charlie travels the world, and meets the best and worst of people, but always honours their lives and acknowledges their importance. He is kidnapped, beaten and tortured, and held at gunpoint many times, but he only grows in wisdom and introspection, while still staying sweet and earnest.
As an audiobook, listening to the many soliloquies had me gripped and enraptured as Charlie, or the people he meets talk through their thoughts on life and the world: very thought provoking, but never boring or preachy.
I’ve had a really bad back of late, which seems to be my autoimmune arthritis flaring up in my sacroiliac joint, and my physiotherapist suggested I take up swimming. So I joined a gym with a pool and found swimming length quite boring until I thought of listening to audiobooks in the pool.
This book was included with my Audible account, and is the first book I put onto my waterproof mp3 player to listen to while swimming.
It tells the story of Wavy, born to an addict/schizophrenic mother and abusive criminal father and the very deep friendship/love affair she forms with a man who sometimes works for her father. It’s a difficult listen at times, because the relationship is very inappropriate, and yet kind of pure and good against the setting of the other things going on in Wavy’s life.
I found it quite mesmerising, maybe because swimming is so mindless that all my attention went to listening, and I really rooted for Wavy and Kellen to be happy and prevail against all the obstacles set in their way.
This was my book group read for over the Summer, and I chose to listen to the audiobook. I’ll admit that it took me a wee while to get into the book, and the early chapters had me annoyed at how beautiful the main character, Elizabeth Zott had to be and thought her relationship with Calvin was just another rom com thing. I was wrong.
Elizabeth Zott is a beautiful, extremely intelligent, plain spoken (probably on the autism spectrum. although this is not blatantly spelled out) woman trying to be taken seriously as a scientist in 1960s America.
She faces huge obstacles from her work being mocked and also stolen by her less intelligent male colleagues to being shamed and judged when she is sexually abused with the attitude of ‘well, what do you expect if you insist on putting yourself in a man’s place’.
The story is told from different points of view, including sections narrated by the dog ‘Six-Thirty’ who would probably be the most intelligent dog ever in the history of dogs, but who is wise and very likable!
I ended up really liking the book – even going on really long walks just so I could enjoy listening to the audiobook as I went!
At times the characters were a little caricatured – the baddies were super bad and the goodies were super good, but I think that only added to the charm, or fairy tale aspects of the story, and in fact it seems that in real life some people really are ‘super bad’ or ‘super good’.
(As an interesting aside, my hubby and I were talking about this very thing recently – he thinks that the existence of really wicked people proves the existence of supernatural angelic and demonic forces, but I disagreed. My argument is that if behavioural traits exist on a normal bell curve, then you would expect outliers at either end (ie a few people who are really good or really bad). It’s like probability. If something happens a million times, then we shouldn’t be surprised by a really rare ‘million to one’ thing happening one of those times – it doesn’t mean it’s a miracle, it’s just chance.) Anyway – back to the book…
Even though what women faced in this book was extreme , and we’ve come a long way from there, the misogyny still resonates unfortunately in today’s world and Elizabeth’s character is very relatable. I also loved her neighbour, a strong older woman and I liked how they drew support from each other.
The story had sadness and joy and humour and I think it’s a great book (I liked the narrator too!).
This is the fourth in my summer of Claire North novels, and another doozy! Once again, Claire North takes an interesting sci-fi/magical realism what-if and builds a world around it. In Touch, there are people who left there own bodies at the moment of some traumatic death and ‘jumped’ into the body of someone else. Now all they need to do is touch someone to jump into them (although it seems that they are able to touch people without jumping – they have to touch and want to jump). There essence (soul? being?) is now effectively immortal because they can just keep jumping into new bodies.
As is usual with Claire North novels, this premise is explored with great intelligence and wisdom – all sides of the ethics and rights and wrongs of this jumping are explored. These people have to take over other bodies in order to live, but the bodies they inhabit have no memory of being controlled – so if it’s for a moment, they might think they just lost concentration, and if it’s for longer, they ‘wake up’ with amnesia for the time they were inhabited.
The act of taking a body is a violation, but necessary for life. Then there are practical issues – what if the body has an allergy or illness? If you spend their money is that theft? but then how can you have money without stealing? If you want to settle down, get married, have a family, you are doing all of that in someone else’s body – stealing their life.
The main character in Touch is being chased by someone trying to kill her/him , so there is an exciting thriller element (if you like that kind of thing – I usually don’t, but since it’s Claire North, I’ll go with it).
I really loved the first book in this series – what I mostly loved was the sweet quirky nature of the nerdy main character, and the wry humour. I have loved the series less as it’s gone along. This is book four, and I liked it okay, and I will probably buy the next one when it comes out, even thought I actually found this one a bit flat and a bit of a slog to get through.
I think this book must have been on sale at Audible, and when I saw it I bought it thinking of Susan Hill’s spooky ghost stories and not realising that this is actually the first in a series of police detective murder mystery books.
Well, just as well I didn’t realise this, as it might have put me off buying, and I would have missed a great listen. I was gripped by this audiobook – I felt drawn into the characters and intrigued by the case and I was genuinely shocked by one or two of the twists.
I’m looking out for the next in the series being on sale.
This is my third Claire North book, and one thing that I liked about it is how different it is from each of the other Claire Norths I’ve read. It’s a dystopian novel set in a not too distant future where capitalism has gone crazy and monetary value is given way more weight than human rights. The hero, Theo, works in an office assigning fees as punishments against crimes – to the rich, these fees are worth it and crimes, even murders are just transactions that they pay for with little thought. For the poor, the fines are so cripplingly expensive that many have to sell themselves to indentured servitude to pay them.
When Theo discovers he may be a father, and that his ‘daughter’ is enslaved he realises the devastating effect of his work on real people and sets out to rescue the child and even try to take down the system while he’s at it.
The writing style of this book is really interesting (some might say, ‘arty’). I have mixed feelings about it, because I did get a bit confused at times, (although everything came together and made sense to me by the end) but on the other hand I really liked it.
The characters’ thoughts and speech often trail out mid sentence, so where we are used to reading neat complete sentences, instead we get beginnings and snippets and jumbled phrases, and while this maybe takes more effort from the reader to parse and understand, is it not more true to life? I have often thought fiction is too neat – people make speeches or think profound essays that I don’t come out with off the top of my head, so why should they? So I think, well done, Claire North – good for you.
This is the second in my Claire North binge, and another great book. Similar in plot in many ways to Life after Life by Kate Atkinson, which I enjoyed reading, and I loved the TV adaptation of. In both novels, the main character is reborn every time they die to re-live the same life over again, with subtle (or not so subtle) changes. In the Kate Atkinson novel, the character doesn’t remember reliving other then a sense of foreboding causing her to avoid things that have killed her in the past, but Harry August remembers every instant of each of his growing number of lives. As is the style of Claire North, some ‘what-if’ magical realism possibility is explored in really thoughtful and interesting ways . It askes the questions: if this thing really happened to a real person how would it affect them? How would they live, what would they do? The questions are addressed and answered in ways that make sense, while still being gripping and moving – I can very much empathise with the character, and imagine myself in the role – what would I do?
I’m so happy I have discovered this writer and I’m getting so much joy from reading her books.
Sarah Wray Writer 