Review: Vivien Horler One of the Good Guys, by Araminta Hall (Macmillan) One of the Good Guys starts deceptively simply. Cole has left London for a remote stretch of coast near Brighton (I didn’t know there were remote stretches of coast near Brighton) to outrun his pain. He has a new job as a wildlife ranger, which comes with a cottage. Cole is a bit of a loner, and this job suits him much better than his previous work in PR. Cole’s pain is caused by the collapse of his marriage to Mel who was, for six years, the one. They had met on a dating app, and knew immediately they had each found thei ..read more

Review: Vivien Horler The Woman at the Wheel, by Penny Haw (Sourcebooks) In 1896, just 10 years after the first horseless carriage was demonstrated in the streets of Mannheim, Germany, by inventor Carl Benz, South African crowds welcomed the automobile – a Benz Vilo – to our shores. The Velo, short for Velocipede, was a very different vehicle from the original Motorwagen which is depicted on the cover of this fictionalised piece of history. For one thing it had four wheels, rather than the Motorwagen’s three, and was more powerful, but it still used a type of tiller for steering rather than a ..read more

Review: Vivien Horler The Black Angels – The untold story of the nurses who helped cure tuberculosis, by Maria Smilios (Virago) During World War II my aunt, who was a munitions worker in her early 20s in Cornwall, contracted tuberculosis. She was sent to a sanatorium where she and several other women shared a three-walled ward – the fourth wall was open to the elements, all year round. Bed rest, fresh air and good food – as good as was available in wartime Britain – was the treatment, and after two years she was pronounced cured. Her fiancé had not hung around, so her engagement was over, and ..read more

Review: Beryl Eichenberger The Storm We Made, by Vanessa Chan (Hodder & Stoughton) In the writing of this debut novel The Storm We Made there is no doubt that Vanessa Chan was greatly influenced by her grandparents’ experiences in Malaysia between 1941 to 1945, when the country was occupied by the Japanese. She says: “In Malaysia our grandparents love us by not speaking. More specifically, they do not speak about… the period when the Japanese Imperial Army invaded Malaya, tossed the British colonisers out and turned a quiet nation into one that was at war with itself.”  Generally Mala ..read more

Review: Archie Henderson The Secret Hours, by Mick Herron (Baskerville) Mick Herron likes the private joke. In his latest novel, he has created a character who is said to be an heir to John le Carré –  “one of a long list”. Herron himself could not only be on that list, but near the top of it. The British spy writer has made his mark with a series of his Slow Horses, MI5 outcasts who are run by a dishevelled, objectionable but very smart Jackson Lamb. It is with Lamb that the Guardian has accurately summed up Herron as “something of a laureate of decrepitude”. But Herron can also do chic ..read more

Review: Beryl Eichenberger Under the Tamarind Tree, by Nigar Alam (Bedford Square) Nigar Alam’s debut novel Under the Tamarind Tree is a rich, graceful narrative spanning more than 50 years, highlighting the tragedies of partition, patriarchy and personal loss. I did not know much about the partition of India and how it came about so this was an entrée into a new culture – one that I enjoyed immensely. It is 1947 and nine-year-old Rozeena is fleeing with her family to Pakistan. The creation of this country from British India was, for the Muslim community, their chance to have a homeland and a ..read more

Review: Archie Henderson Working, by Robert  A Caro (Vintage) Robert Caro is 88 and readers are worried he won’t be around long enough to complete his monumental LBJ biographies. He has already written four, the last having been published in 2012. A fifth and final volume of the 36th US president, Lyndon Baines Johnson, is still in the works. He takes about 10 years to write a book, so the final one may be imminent. Five volumes of a US president who is now largely forgotten by many of us may seem like over-egging, but if you have the time and energy to read them all, I suspect the proof ..read more

Review: Vivien Horler Sisters Under the Rising Sun, by Heather Morris (Zaffre) My tears came at the line: “It’s time for you to have a break, Sister James, you’ve done your duty; your shift is over.” To which Nesta James replies to her friend and colleague Vivian Bullwinkel: “It’s been a bloody long shift, Bully, a bloody long one.” It had lasted three years and seven months, the time the members of the Australian Army Nursing Service were held as prisoners of war of the Japanese in Sumatra, ending on September 11, 1945. Heather Morris is the author of the best-selling The Tattooist of Auschwi ..read more

Review: Vivien Horler The Secret Life of John le Carré, by Adam Sisman (Profile Books) Most of us will never have biographies written of our lives, and just as well, judging from the tension and upset between John le Carré and his biographer Adam Sisman. John le Carré was published in 2015, and at least one reviewer complained there seemed to be a lot the reader was not being told. He was right, because it turned out Le Carré, whose real name was David Cornwell, had what he called “my own messy private life”, which he did not want made public. Although the biography was written with Le Carré’s ..read more

Review: Vivien Horler Killers of the Flower Moon – Oil, money, murder and the birth of the FBI, by David Grann (Simon& Schuster) While few people would condone murder, many might understand how it could be committed in the heat of the moment. But to plan and arrange a series of killings over a number of years, of people who were fond of you, with an eye on the main prize, seems particularly abhorrent. This is at the centre of an extraordinary tale of greed and utter ruthlessness affecting members of the Native American Osage people in Osage County, Oklahoma, in the early 1920s. The baddie ..read more