I loved listening to this novel! Siobhán McSweeney’s narrations is as fabulous as you would expect from such a comic genius actor, and the plot was pure nostalgic cosy mystery a la Agatha Christie without the outdated attitudes.
I’m a big fan of Jess Kidd and her previous books have been more magical realism (one of my favourite genres) but I do like a cosy mystery as well, so this was a winner for me. It follows ex Nun, Nora, who leaves the cloistered life because her young friend has gone missing and nobody else is bothering to investigate what happened. I like Nora, a middle aged woman who is navigating life on the ‘outside’ as well as battling past emotional demons, and also flirting a bit with the police man with the film star looks (a bit of a cliché, but I find I don’t mind it because I want Nora to experience nice things). I’m excited for the next books in the series!
This was a fun if somewhat confusing sci-fi thriller. It starts by introducing lots of different characters, and I did get a bit lost wondering who was who and how they connected up.
**SPOILERS**
So all the characters got the same flight, from France to America, on which there was some quite severe turbulence which they passed through and landed and then got on with their lives, in a slightly better way than before (thinking, well, I survived that near death experience, I should do better with my life now).
But – three months later the same flight with the same passengers comes in to land after being blown off course by severe turbulence. As far as they are concerned, they took off from France a few hours ago, even though three months have passed, and they (or duplicates of them) landed and have been living (or in some cases, dying) since then.
What the heck!
So, the government keeps them all locked up while they try to figure out what was going on, but eventually have to let them go, and all kinds of questions arise – did God do this? Which are the ‘real’ passengers? Are any of them real? Is anything real? The winning theory seemed to be the simulation hypothesis, which is that everything we consider as real, including ourselves, is actually just a simulation (ie computer programme) made by aliens, or future humans.
Then when a third iteration of the same flight of passengers appears in the sky, and the American government decide to blow it to smithereens, the book ends abruptly with the implication being that by making this decision, they have effectively ended the life of the simulation and therefore destroyed the whole world as we know it.
Yikes.
As I said at the start of the review, it was kind of fun and thought provoking (if a little confusing) and made me go and look up the simulation hypothesis, which is considered by some at least as a viable explanation of life and stuff, but I just can’t bring myself to believe it could possibly be true (in the same way I have researched the multiverse -ie lots of parallel universes theories, which seem to make sense in terms of maths and physics, but which I can’t make myself believe are actually real).
Oh my goodness, I thought this book was just fabulous! It was my book group read for March and by far my favourite book group title and audiobook title for some time. The narrator (Stephen Hogan) deserves a special mention because he was so good. Partly because his lovely soft Irish voice is very easy on the ears (even when he read the copyright notice at the end it sounded like poetry!) and also largely just the brilliant interpretation of the words written into meaning – I couldn’t fault him.
The book is both a captivatingly readable story and a richly layered metaphor – from the first chapter, where the irritable complaining Englishman is ferried by coracle to the remote Irish language speaking island where the book is mainly set felt like classical literature – I was almost screaming ‘don’t pay the ferryman’ as the journey felt like a passage to the afterlife! And I laughed out loud when the Englishman tried to get the sailors to sing as they rowed, because his guide book has told him they did that, and that was the only reason he chose to travel that way, and their response was to flat refuse and tell him he needed to get a better guide book!
The characters on the small island are given flesh and feeling as we get to know them as well as the Frenchman who visits every year to work on his PhD thesis about the erosion of the Irish language over time due to the historic English colonisation of Ireland.
The narrative is interspersed with news reports of Northern Ireland troubles atrocities – policemen shot, soldiers blown up, as well as people just caught up in bombs and shooting by being at the wrong place at the wrong time and so forth and we realise that the old lady matriarch of the island listens to the news on her radio because they sometimes discuss the stories around the kitchen table.
The Englishman is an artist who always reproduces old classic paintings, or his interpretation of them at least, one island inhabitant described him (not to his face) as a magpie – ‘it’s in his nature to steal, he doesn’t even see that he’s doing it’ (paraphrased, from memory).
A teenaged boy does odd jobs for the Englishman and becomes enamoured with the idea of becoming an artist himself, and after very reluctantly allowing him to try some sketches and then paintings, the English man sees that the boy has real talent and originality. Now the book reminded me of Mozart and Salieri – the older mentor being horrified that his young upstart apprentice’s gift far outstrips his own.
The Frenchman hates the Englishman, and as we learn his backstory, we see that his mother was Algerian and his French father was a soldier in the French Colonised Algeria when he met her and they had a child, but when he brought her back to France with him he bullied and abused her and tried to force her to fit in and abandon her Algerian Muslim heritage and become more like a French woman.
All the threads – the Englishman’s casual theft of ideas and culture, the Northern Irish troubles and the Frenchman’s backstory all illustrate the long ranging effect of colonisation – of one nation (or more than one) believing that they are better than another and entitled to take what they want.
The Englishman’s relationship with the young wannabe artist perfectly illustrates this – he shamelessly exploits the young man but when he gives him the smallest crumb of assistance he expects grovelling gratitude. When they discussed the mistreatment of the Irish by the English the Englishman genuinely still seems to believe that the ‘Empire’ helped the poor savages more than abused them and they should be grateful.
The ending was poignantly predictable but no less powerful for it. Very good book.
Hmmm, not sure what to make of this book. Normally I love a time travel book, but this seemed to be dipping its toes into all kinds of different genres without giving any one enough heft.
The premise is that a time travel machine is discovered and for some reason the titular ‘ministry of time’ decide to pull a handful of people from different points in history and keep them in a big house for a while to see what would happen.
There could have been a lot of fun/interest out of what these historical figures thought of modern sensibilities and technologies, and this is touched on but not nearly as much as I feel it should have been. A lot of the book seems to be based around the slow burn romance of the main protagonist, an unnamed contemporary time person with the arctic explorer that it is her role to mind.
Quite far into the book it suddenly becomes a thriller, with future baddies chasing and killing people. I can’t even remember how it ended now, and it’s only 12 days since I finished reading it. I didn’t totally hate it, but didn’t love it either.
I liked the beginning of this book – I thought the premise was interesting and the set up was good, and I liked the very end of the book and how it was wrapped up, but I found the journey from start to finish to be a bit of a slog. To be fair, it is kind of a on-the-run thriller with fighting and car chases and shooting etc which is never something that I enjoy.
So, the interesting premise was that the main character, Logan, was the son of a brilliant geneticist, who engineered vectors to populate crop genomes with a view to ending world hunger and poverty, but accidentally caused a global famine which shattered the world’s economy and had the opposite of its intended effect by actually worsening world hunger. Logan’s mother died in a car accident (possibly suicide) and logan now works for the authority that regulates and polices now outlawed genetic research.
The following is a bit SPOILERY
Logan is involved in an explosion when following up a lead on an illegal genetics lab, and after recovering in hospital starts to notice changes in himself – he gets cleverer, in lots of ways – perfect recall, fast thinking, intuitive etc, as well as super strong and super fit and healthy and it turns out his genome has been hacked and improved in thousands of different ways.
He is locked up to be studied but is broken out of a very secure facility by what turns out to be his estranged sister who has also been genetically upgraded.
So then follows all the boring chase stuff. The interesting parts were that the person who made all this genetic upgrade stuff, wants to seed these upgrades to the whole world with the thinking being that humans are making such a mess of our planet between climate change and war etc that if only everyone was cleverer they would maybe not destroy themselves.
Logan and his sister disagree – she thinks giving the upgrade to the whole world is a good thing, even thought they realises that about 13% of people who get it will die horribly of a prion condition like mad cow disease.
Logan reasons that if his sister who has this super intelligence is willing to sacrifice so many people for ‘the greater good’ then that removes what makes humanity worth saving – our empathy and collective feeling, and he comes up with what I thought was a nice neat solution.
This is a very surreal book and I struggled to really get into it at first, although it grew on me until I was actually quite taken with it, thinking about the plot and characters when not reading it and looking forward to getting back.
It reminds me somewhat of another book by a Japanese author: Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled (I was trying to reach the title/author of the book in my memory which I knew it reminded me of and my vague google search threw up some interesting new reading ideas before I found the title I was looking for!) in it’s dream like quality where the reader is never quite sure what is real or even what is reality and whether that even matters.
The main character, now a middle aged man, reminisces about his first love, a girl who he met when they were both finalists in a school creative writing award ceremony in Tokyo. They lived in different towns, but he would travel by bus to visit her and they had a sweet shy relationship. She told him that she never felt truly real in this world and how she imagined (or believed) that she was purely a shadow and her real self lived in another place. Together they fleshed out their ideas of this ‘place’ as a walled city with a library and some homes and a river and the only life apart from humans being unicorns.
He lost touch with the girl who abruptly stopped communicating with him until years later when he found himself waking up outside the walled city and having to separate from his shadow in order to enter and live there.
It gets weirder. He manages to leave the city and goes and works in a library in a small town where he makes friends with the ghost of and old man and a selectively mute (probably autistic) boy. Whether these both represent parts of himself, and whether the city was real and the real world was just a dream or shadow is not clear.
A very strange but beautiful and thought provoking novel.
It’s quite a long time since I read the previous books in the Jackson Brodie series by Kate Atkinson and I didn’t really remember much about them, but that didn’t matter as this book stands alone as a really enjoyable whodunnit.
Set in a small village and revolving around folks in the ‘big house’ as well as the local vicar it had a nice nostalgic ‘Agatha Christie’ vibe but without the old fashioned inappropriate attitudes, added to by the fact that a murder mystery weekend was going on at the stately home at the same time as actual crimes including murder which was quite jolly.
It was a very fun read/listen and I look forward to the next instalment.
I’m always super excited when a new Grady Hendrix book comes out – not only are they fine examples of the horror genre, but Hendrix just writes such beautiful and complex female characters.
In this case, the book is set in a 1970s American home for unwed mothers. Most of the mothers are teenagers, sent there by their horrified and embarrassed parents who make up some story to explain their absence until they come back in a few months and carry on as if nothing had happened. The girls are not allowed to keep their babies, being fed endless propaganda about why it is the best thing to give them up for adoption as if they had a choice, which in fact they don’t. One girl in the home, Holly, was only about 11 and had been abused by her church pastor, which nobody would believe her about let alone help her. The main character, Neva, bonds with the travelling librarian that visits the home who gives her a book on witchcraft.
The main horror of the book though was not the supernatural stuff (although that was part of it) but the terrible way these girls were treated by the adults with all the power and seemingly no empathy or kindness towards the plight of these ‘wayward’ girls.
Neva tries to use her new powers to help Holly to escape from being sent back to the abusive environment that caused her condition, but it’s not easy and she doesn’t know who, if anyone she can trust or rely on.
It was a very thought provoking book and quite sad (and occasionally funny).
Our Lady of Mysterious Ailments: Edinburgh Nights, Book 2 (Audiobook)
The Mystery at Dunvegan Castle (Edinburgh Nights Book 3)
The Legacy of Arniston House Audiobook – T. L. Huchu (Author), Kimberly Mandindo (Narrator) – 13.03.25
I have been devouring this urban fantasy series, alternating between kindle books and audiobooks (literally just by which is the cheaper way of buying them!).
Set in Edinburgh (well, duh!) the series follows Ropa Moyo, a Scottish teenager of African heritage who lives with her gran and little sister in a caravan in a slum in a post ‘catastrophe’ Scotland where hardship is commonplace.
Ropa (like the little boy in the sixth sense) can see and communicate with dead people, and she makes a living passing messages on from the recently deceased to their grieving relatives. In the first book Ropa turns supernatural private detective after agreeing to help a dead mother who is terribly worried about her missing living son. A chance encounter with an old school friend introduces Ropa to a magical library and whole society of magical practitioners, who see that she has hidden magical potential, and take her on as an intern.
The series just gets better and better (in my opinion). The first time I listened to the audiobook (book two) I wasn’t sure what to make of the narrator – her accent is really nice and she fits the character of Ropa very well, but she has an odd way of parsing sentences often not the way I feel they should sound – putting the emphasis in the wrong place or putting in unnecessary pauses, which annoyed me at first, but then when I read book three on kindle I missed her and her’s was the voice in my head, so I was happy to get back to her in audiobook form in book four (I will definitely buy the fifth and final instalment as an audiobook!)
I just finished listening to book four (The Legacy of Arniston House) and I was totally gripped – I don’t know if it’s just because I’ve got to know Ropa after three previous books, or because this one is more personal to her and her family, but I was very moved by the things that were happening to her. Also book four gives more backstory (which was hinted at in the previous books) to Ropa’s family history which was interesting and thought provoking – not just goodies and baddies, but good people making bad decisions or mistakes or just difficult decisions where their is no clear right answer.
The ending was very exciting, and left a real cliff hanger so I now can’t wait for the next book (which says its the final book in the series, which is sad because I love the series, but good that they are not just stretching it out but have a resolution planned) – I hope T. L. Huchu writes more books though because I love these!
This is an unusual book, which I very much enjoyed reading. Several families of ‘book eaters’ live in secluded communities around the UK (and maybe the world?). They look human, but are not – they are not even sure themselves what their origins are, whether they were left by an alien species, or genetically engineered or the product of something magical is not know. Basically, they eat books – like literally, their food is pages of text and when they die they turn instantly into inky dust.
They are a little like the Amish because they keep separate from the world and are outdated in their outlook as well as their ways – the society is very rigid and misogynistic and our main character, Devon, is a woman book eater who grew up in one of the main families. As is tradition, girls are married off to a different family where they must produce a child, and then leave the child and move on to another arranged marriage as long as they are fertile.
Devon is horribly upset when she has to leave her daughter, but when her second child is not only a boy, but a ‘mind eater’ things get worse.
Mind eaters don’t eat books but get their sustenance by sucking out other people’s brains. Devon has to run away and although she loves her son, she is horrified by what she has to do to keep him alive and is desperately trying to get hold of the treatment made by one of the rival families that stops mind eaters from having to eat minds.
I loved the different twist on the zombie/vampire genre and I thought the writing and characterisation was very good. I can’t wait for the sequel/next in series to be published!
Sarah Wray Writer 