I read six books in June.
No Life for a Lady by Hannah Dolby
I adored this book – it was the runner-up
in the Comedy Women in Print Award in 2021, for an unpublished novel.
It’s 1895. Violet, aged
28, lives with her father in Hastings who worries that she will never find a
husband. She is certain she doesn’t want to get married but what she does want
is to find out what happened to her mother who disappeared ten years earlier.
Very soon she regrets
employing a private detective as he seems to have his own agenda and she takes
matters into her own hands. One thing leads to another, and another – the
comedy comes when the reader catches on to situations of which Violet is
unaware, and to her innocence (as befits a respectable Victorian unmarried
woman) about the facts of life (and her curiosity on the subject).
Violet is delightful,
someone it would be great fun to be friends with. The era and the setting are
immersive and the resolution to the mystery unexpected.
Read this on Kindle but
will be purchasing a paperback too. I hope very much that we will hear more of Miss
Violet Hamilton.
Reader, I
Married Him edited by Tracy Chevalier
A book of twenty-one
commissioned short stories inspired by Jane Eyre and what fabulous collection
it is. The authors took the prompt and ran with it in all directions; they
include Tessa Hadley, Helen Dunmore, Jane Gardam, Elif Shafak, Evie Wyld,
Audrey Niffenberger and Lionel Shriver.
Two of my favourites
were: one where you gradually realise that the narrator is Wallis Simpson; and
a heart-breaking tale featuring Jane’s childhood friend Helen.
The Book
Lovers by Emily Henry
I’m not on TikTok but
am aware that Emily Henry is extremely successful as a result of being
recommended on it. I see from looking at her other titles that her thing is
romance with booky themes. This one, for example, has a relationship between an
editor and a literary agent, both of them hustling New Yorkers, who find
themselves in Sunshine Falls, North Carolina, very far from their comfort zone.
Well, what’s not to
like? There was great banter and some lovely writing. I will be reading more
Emily Henry.
(Bookshops/books and
romance are definitely ‘a thing’ at the moment; I read a book with the same
title in April.)
Three Junes by Julia Glass
An appropriate title to
read in June … a Christian Aid Book Sale purchase. The ‘three Junes’ span a
decade and purport to depict ‘the life and loves’ of a Scottish family, the
McLeods.
I didn’t think they
came across as particularly Scottish (whatever that means) and not much of the
story actually takes place in the family home in Dumfries & Galloway. The
characters are not given equal weight – most of it belongs to Fenno, gay, in
Manhattan during the Aids epidemic.
I’d like to have, for
example, seen Dennis, bad-boy turned award-winning chef and family man, up
close rather than through the eyes of others.
Strangely, the last ‘June’
focused on a hitherto unmet character, not a member of the family …. I wanted
to like this but it all seemed rather oblique.
Lost and Wanted by Nell Freudenberger
I read and really
enjoyed The Newlyweds by this author
and so recommended her new novel (which I hadn’t read at the time) to my book
group. Don’t know what they thought of it yet because I ended up not being able
to attend the meeting.
And I don’t know what I think of it … it was – unexpected. One
reviewer said it was ‘Middlemarch
meets Bridget Jones’ Diary‘. Were we
reading the same book?
Last month for the book
group we read Lessons in Chemistry –
this one could have been called Lessons in Physics. I don’t have the kind of
mind to understand black holes and the decaying universe but fortunately I know
someone who does and I shall be passing this on and asking for a explanation in
words of one syllable.
My Life
in Houses by Margaret Forster
Margaret Forster and
her husband Hunter Davies had the same beginnings, brought up in council houses
in Carlisle, and they met at school. Both were very clever and began, in their early
twenties, to make their livings as writers.
By the time they were
thirty they were earning so much (Margaret principally from her novel Georgy Girl which was made into a film)
that they had to go and live in Portugal for fourteen months to avoid the
Labour government’s punitive income tax.
Margaret (now sadly gone
to the big house in the sky) remembers her life through the houses she has
lived in, including the family home in Hampstead (bought for £5000 in 1962,
with a sitting tenant) and holiday homes (at different times) in Portugal and
the Lake District.
All financed from their
writing and good on them… not that I’m jealous or anything …