Seven books, all good. I picked up The Sword in the Stone because Monty Don quotes a beautiful and moving passage from it in Nigel: My family and other dogs, (and I recalled Laura Freeman also mentioning it in her excellent The Reading Cure). Very much in the same vein as John Masefield's classics, it's funny, poignant, and shows very vividly TH White's deep relationship with the natural world. Shirley McKay's Fate and Fortune gets a little post here, and Helen Humphreys' The Evening Chorus is here. The two Persephones are Dorothy Whipple's High Wages and The Rector's Daughter by ..read more

"... and nobody could deny any longer that the autumn was definitely there. It was that rather sad time of year when for the first time for many months the fine old sun still blazes away in a cloudless sky, but does not warm you, and the hoar-frosts and the mists and the winds begin to stir their faint limbs at morning and evening, with the gossamer, as the sap of winter vigour remembers itself in the cold corpses which brave summer slew. The leaves were still on the trees, and still green, but it was the leaden green of ..read more

Monty Don writes beautifully, no matter the topic, and his deep love for dogs is well known; the two combine in Nigel: My family and other dogs in which the author wears his heart on his sleeve on every page. Sadly, the eponymous Nigel - the real star of Gardeners' World, many (including Monty) would say - no longer walks the paths of Longmeadow, tennis ball or two in mouth, but this book, published when he was still going strong, is a delightful portrait of him and of many of the other dogs with whom Monty has shared his life ..read more

Have you ever read a book you enjoyed so much that you wanted to go more or less straight on to the next in the series or another by that author, and then found that your reading took you far off that intended path? That is what happened to me with Hue & Cry, the first of Shirley McKay's Hew Cullen mysteries. I loved it, got two or three more in the series, and have only now picked up where I left off an astonishing nine years ago! Here's the post on Hue & Cry, and as for Fate & ..read more

Helen Humphreys' The Evening Chorus is set during and after the Second World War. It features just a handful of characters: prisoner of war James, finding solace in observing birds at his camp in Germany, his wife Rose, solitary and regretful in a cottage in the Ashdown Forest, Enid, James' sister, bombed out of her London flat and job, and Toby, Rose's lover, each one pivoting between hope and heartbreak. Humphreys' style is very spare, taut, and blunt; she is adept at letting the silences speak. This restraint makes this short book understated but powerful. ~~~~~ In addition to this ..read more

Something readers (and writers) in or near Edinburgh might enjoy: the Edinburgh Women's Fiction Festival, 6th and 7th October, 2023, full programme here ..read more

I've just been reading High Wages, Dorothy Whipple's second novel (1930) set in a Lancashire town before and after the First World War. It follows the fortunes of Jane Carter, a living-in shop girl in Chadwick's the haberdasher's, who with a clear head, a flair for the job, and a great deal of hard work, makes good for herself as fashions - and society - changes. As with Mrs. Whipple's other novels, the book's style is unfussy, marked by acute observation, a way with a telling detail, and a sympathetic understanding of human nature; it's a jolly good read! This ..read more

A Cotswold village in the 1950s, the May Day fair, a handful of characters populating this bucolic stage. Miss Read's Thrush Green is comfort reading: gentle, wise, attuned to the beauty of the natural world and to the cares, concerns, and joys of the human one. If you're looking for a 'nice' book, go no further. ~~~~~ For more about the author, her obituary is here, and her Desert Island Discs here ..read more

Thrillers don't often feature in my reading, but Lisa Jewell's new book None of this is true sounded too good to miss. While celebrating her birthday at a local pub, the well known podcaster Alix Summers meets fellow diner Josie Fair; it's Josie's birthday, too, and as the two women chat they discover that they were born on exactly the same day and in the same hospital. The 'birthday twins' bump into one another a few days later, and Josie suggests to Alix that she might be a good subject for a future podcast episode: she has an interesting backstory ..read more

A Bildungsroman in 700 pages, Maugham's most autobiographical novel - a classic tale of wrong turnings - will have you silently shouting 'No!' at the page at all too regular intervals in an effort to keep its main character Philip Carey from self-inflicted harm. An orphan brought up by his stultifying and remote uncle and aunt in a vicarage in coastal Kent, Philip leaves school to rattle around Europe, studying in Heidelberg and Paris, savouring life 'in the raw', but with an eye on an ideal future which is always just beyond his grasp. Back in London, and now a ..read more