19 this year; 12 by men 7 by women, 4 with an SF/fantasy tinge (5 if you count Beloved,) 1 non-fiction, 1 fictionalised memoir. Not in any order; apart from of reading.

News of the Dead by James Robertson

The Gift of Rain by Tan Twan Eng

Tomorrow by Chris Beckett

Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

Landmarks by Robert McFarlane

Toby’s Room by Pat Barker

Independent People by Halldór Laxness

Confessions by Jaume Cabré

Sparks of Bright Matter by Leeanne O’Donnell

Navola by Paolo Bacigalupi

The Forty Rules of Love by Elif Shafak

Star of the Sea by Joseph O’Connor

Human Croquet by Kate Atkinson

Lizard Tails by Juan Marsé

Creatures of Passage by Morowa Yejidé

Xstabeth by David Keenan

Borges and Me by Jay Parini

Beloved by Toni Morrison (review to appear here soon.)

Mariner Books, 1998, 187 p

Here, we are in Moscow in 1913. Though educated in England, printer Frank Reid has spent most of his life in Russia, inheriting the business from his father, but that life is thrown into disarray when his wife Nellie ups and leaves leaving him with three children to cope with, Dolly, Ben and Annushka, and so he engages a young woman, Lisa Ivanovna, as a sort of nanny.

The details of life in pre-revolutionary Russia seem convincing, the sealing up of houses windows’ for the winter, the casual bribery (connected with a mention of the venality of Grigory Rasputin,) the petty regulations, the restrictions placed on the movement and employment of Russian citizens, the necessity to assuage the police and other relevant authorities. Some incidents are at times reminiscent of Doctor Zhivago, particularly the association between Lisa Ivanovna and Volodya Vasilich, the man who breaks into the printing shop one night and fires a gun at Frank, though the dynamic is reversed.

Reid’s interactions with others, his deputy Selwyn Osipych, whose main interest is in having his volume of poems published but who may have been involved with Nellie’s decision to flee, the print shop supervisor, Tvyordov, are both friendly and distanced. His daughter Dolly seems remarkably composed in the face of the situation – but adolescent girls often are.

However, Reid’s burgeoning attraction to Lisa Ivanovna is told to us rather than shown and so does not contain as much force as it might have.

Pedant’s corner:- “Jeyes’ fluid” (Jeyes’s?) “‘I don’t think so. She certainly didn’t say so?’” (isn’t a question,) “there was still barrel organs playing in the streets” (there were still,) benzine (a word used in other languages certainly but the British one is ‘petrol’. Petrol was used later in the phrase “This Russian petrol is very low on benzine.” Make of that what you will.) “Their breaths rose together as steam into the bitterly cold lamplit air” (I know people refer to it this way but steam is actually invisible, the misty you can see emanating from people’s outbreaths is actually water droplets, condensed steam/water vapour.)

Wordsworth Classics. (In The Years & Between the Acts.) 2012, 256 p, including x p Notes and a xix p Introduction to both books by Linden Peach. Between the Acts was first published in 1941.

This was Woolf’s last novel, published posthumously. A prefatory note by her husband said it was completed but not corrected nor revised, though he believes she would not have made any large alterations. I beg to differ.

Like The Years (with which it is combined in this edition) this is more straightforward than Woolf’s earlier novels To the Lighthouse and Mrs Dalloway. That doesn’t do much to recommend it though as what we are given here is a portrait of tiresome upper-middle class people doing and saying upper-middle class things but that could perhaps be borne were it not for the fact that the main part of the book is a struggle to get through as it contains a blow-by-blow account of a local pageant in all its lengthy tediousness.

In Linden Peach’s Introduction to Between the Acts he asserts that the novel is interrogating Englishness. If it does, it is only Englishness of a very narrow sort.

The text mentions an incidental character by describing him as “a Jew”, as if that said all there was to say about him.

Sensitivity note: as well as the gratuitous remark about “a Jew” we also encounter the phrases “worked like a nigger” and “white man’s burden.”

Pedant’s corner:- again the Notes explain references of which a British reader would be aware; Somerset House etc. Otherwise; “said Mrs Manresa ogling Candlish, as if he were a real man” (would be better punctuated as ‘said Mrs Manresa, ogling Candlish as if he were a ….’,) “it was a mellay” (usually spelled melé or mêlé,) “Mrs Rogers’ chin” (Mrs Rogers’s.) In the Notes: Sohrab and Rustum is said to be by Matthew Arnold. While he did write such a poem (and Woolf’s characters would undoubtedly have been familiar with it) the original story was in fact from Shanameh, (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shahnameh) an epic poem by the Persian  Ferdowsi (Abul-Qâsem Ferdowsi Tusi,) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferdowsi) Daladier is said to have been Prime Minister of France from 1838-1840 (it was 1938-40.) “Il Rissorgimento” (Risorgimento.)

These are in order of reading; 18 in total, 9 by women, 10 by men, 8 by Scots (italicised,) 4 translations, 1 SF/Fantasy. The links are to the reviews on here:-

Paradise Reclaimed by Halldór Laxness 

The Women of Troy by Pat Barker 

For the Good Times by David Keenan

The Infinities by John Banville

Wild Geese by Nan Shepherd  

Paper Cup by Karen Campbell

A Would-Be Saint by Robin Jenkins 

Master of the Crossroads by Madison Smartt Bell 

Beethoven’s Assassins by Andrew Crumey  (my review was published in ParSec 8 and will appear here in due course.)     

The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O’Farrell 

The Liar’s Dictionary by Eley Williams

Fishnet by Kirstin Innes 

The Gaze by Elif Shafak

Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age by Bohumil Hrabal

Utopia Avenue by David Mitchell 

O Caledonia by Elspeth Barker 

Cybele, with Bluebonnets by Charles L Harness

Of Love and Other Demons by Gabriel García Márquez

My present read (Luka and the Fire of Life by Salman Rushdie) may be an addition to this list (but then again it may not.)

Charlotte Brontë’s Years of Fame, Penguin, 1988, 238 p, plus i p Foreword and vi p Preface.

In this continuation of Charlotte Brontë’s story from Dark Quartet, she is in deep mourning for her late sisters and brother but left in effect to see to her father’s welfare on her own (except for the two servants.)

Her true identity has finally been unmasked though and on a visit to London she finds herself a celebrity but the unkinder reviews of Jane Eyre received distress her. In particular being brought up as the daughter of a cleric and steeped in that religion she is upset by the criticism that her book was unchristian. In Reid Banks’s account it was fellow writer and social theorist Harriet Martineau who explained to her people’s objections. Other literary luminaries of the time who pop up here include William Makepeace Thackeray, Harriet Martineau and Mrs Gaskell, the latter of whom she formed such a friendship with that she was entrusted to write Charlotte’s biography.

The main tension in the book, though, is her relationship with her father Patrick who acted very autocratically towards her and resented any time she spent away from him. (His main fear was that she would marry and thus fall prey to a then common fate, the rigours and dangers of child-bearing. How much of this is Reid Banks’s imagination or whether he was just being extremely selfish is moot.)

As told here a few men took Charlotte’s attention but none cast the same sort of spell on her as had her employer in Brussels, Constantin Héger. When Mr Nicholls, Patrick’s curate, expressed a romantic interest in her Patrick reacted violently and more or less banished him.

A commission to construct a book from her sister’s the papers brings her grief to the fore again but leads her to destroy the best of their remaining literary pieces, as being poems too personal to publish.

After the publication of Villette her writing ground to a halt, she had too much else on her mind and too much to do looking after her father.

It was her eventual marriage to Nicholls, after a promise never to leave her father reconciled him to the match, that would indeed prove disastrous as, despite perhaps thinking herself too old, she became pregnant and her body could not cope with the concomitant demands on it.

Attempting to fictionalise the lives of real people, especially ones about whom such a lot is known, can not be an easy endeavour. Reid Banks does it as well as can be expected.

Pedant’s corner:- has USian spellings throughout (color, honor, modelling, somber etc.) Otherwise; villain (villain – used later,) unperceivingness (unperceptiveness?)

275 p. In Four Great Cornish Novels, Gollancz, 1984. First published in 1938.

How does the modern reader review an eighty-five year-old book with a large cultural imprint and a story perhaps familiar from TV or film adaptations? And one on which anyone reading the review may already have formed their own opinions? This is the problem with Rebecca, a book I have come to very late. Is there anything new to say about it?

Its first line “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again” is of course iconic and astute (or would be to a reader coming to it with no foreknowledge.) The narrator clearly has an attraction to the place but no longer a connection to it. Yet it sets up a mystery. Why is that so? What happened that Manderley is no longer in her life? Why would it be so significant to her? Hence, we read on. I would argue, though, that the rest of that chapter, where we receive the second Mrs de Winter’s memories of its grounds, is a touch too overwritten.

The second chapter begins, “We can never go back again, that much is certain,” once more a promise of revelations to come and perhaps with a more widespread application. Yet such going back, recollections of lives lived from older – maybe wiser – perspectives, is a staple of literature. And so we have the second Mrs de Winter’s account of the early days of her relationship with her now husband, Maxim. Though Maxim de Winter tells her – and us – she has “a lovely and unusual name” we never learn it, which is a bit of a tease and also something of a copout by the author. But it does serve to underline the central thrust of the book. Rebecca, despite its title, is not really her story at all, nor even that of the second Mrs de Winter (except in the fragments we are shown,) but rather of that first wife’s effects on the other characters and of the influence, in an entirely unparanormal way, dead people can exert on the living from beyond the grave.

The mousy, diffident girl Maxim de Winter meets in Monte Carlo due to her paid companionship of Mrs van Hopper (a well-judged portrayal of such a snobby woman and her entitled, selfish behaviour – the blustering Jack Favell, Rebecca’s cousin, who towards the end threatens the promised happy ending, which is itself undone by Manderley’s destruction, is another well-drawn individual) cannot quite believe Maxim’s interest in her – especially since Rebecca’s glamour and allure are all that she hears about. This is perhaps a little disingenuous of du Maurier. Would even the most self-effacing young woman really believe that a man as wealthy as Maxim would marry her solely out of sympathy? And so soon after the death of a woman to whom he was supposedly devoted? That there wasn’t something about her that he found congenial and desirable? That she cannot realise that her difference from Rebecca is the point is much easier to understand. His witholding from her of that information is a mark against him but then without it there would have been no plot. But that leaves our narrator continually holding herself to a standard to which she cannot live up, prey to the machinations of the contemptuous and manipulative housekeeper Mrs Danvers whose devotion to Rebecca survives her mistress’s death. Then again the second Mrs de Winter is largely naïve and too taken up with her own insecurities to see any deeper picture before it is thrust on her.

People have been struck by similarities between Rebecca and Jane Eyre. Both bear characteristics of the Gothic novel, both are the memoirs of a young woman who falls under the spell of an older man with a big house. Yet the comparison is not exact. In Rebecca there is no barrier to marriage, the first Mrs de Winter is dead, in Jane Eyre, Mrs Rochester, the mad woman in the attic, is not – at least until the fire kills her and leaves Mr Rochester blind. However, in Rebecca it is arguable that the mad woman is actually in plain sight in the form of Mrs Danvers. And Jane would not have stood by Mr Rochester if she thought he had got rid of his wife.

No doubt it is due to the book being published in the 1930s but there is a curious lack of passion to the relationship between Maxim and his second wife. Maxim drops into his old habits as soon as he returns to Manderley, leaving his new wife to fend for herself through her long days. There is even a reference to Maxim’s bed being unslept in, their twin beds, then, a clear signal the couple does not sleep together. Love and sex being absent, of the three big novelistic concerns that leaves only death for Rebecca to dwell on.

Pedant’s corner:- Some 1930s usages (to-day, to-night, suit-case.) Otherwise; “reading Bradshaws” (Bradshaw’s,) some commas missing before pieces of direct speech, “lunch I suppose” “the passage was in the past tense” (lunch I supposed,) “Mrs Danvers’ dislike” (Danvers’s,) “the hood” (of a car. That would be the bonnet, then,) the line “pockets. He was staring straight in front of him. He is thinking about Rebecca,” is repeated two lines later and the line it replaces never appears. “‘He was not in a fit to state to undertake anything of the sort” (that first ‘to’ is superfluous.) “It means we had to go” (Again the passage was in past tense; ‘It meant we had to go’,) “Doctor Phillips’ car” (Phillips’s.) “Tired women with crying babies in pram and stared into windows” (is missing something between ‘pram’ and ‘and.’ Or the ‘and’ is superfluous.)

Tinder Press, 2022, 446 p.

In the novel’s first paragraph Lucrezia de’ Medici – married to Alfonso d’Este, Duke of Ferrara, for less than a year – realises that her husband intends to kill her. Forthcoming chapters relating her time at the retreat called Fortezza, near Bondeno, to which Alfonso has taken her, presumably for this sinister purpose, are in the same present tense as this one is. These are interspersed with past tense chapters unfolding the tale of her life up to that point as the third daughter of Cosimo I de’ Medici, Duke of Tuscany.

The second chapter begins, “In the years to come, Eleonora would come to bitterly regret the manner in which her fifth child was conceived.” This, of course, brings immediate echoes of Gabriel García Márquez.  Here, though, such a proleptic pronouncement is perhaps more justified since it is not about this story’s future but describing its past. Eleonora’s misgivings are of course borne out since Lucrezia grows up an unusual child, aloof from her siblings. She was drawn to a tigress brought to her father’s menagerie and touched its fur without consequence, she has a great skill in drawing and painting, most of which has to be hidden from those around her – especially her ultra-conventional husband. Her best paintings are only for her own satisfaction, later used as palimpsests for images more acceptable to the wider world.

Alfonso d’Este had originally been betrothed to Lucrezia’s elder sister, Maria, but she unfortunately died. The alliance between the houses of Tuscany and Ferrara then fell on Lucrezia’s shoulders – at the age of thirteen. In the novel Lucrezia is against this even at her marriage’s eve. At its first mooting, her nurse, Sofia, conspires to pretend that she is not yet child-bearing by concealing any evidence of menstruation. Such prevarications had to end of course and Lucrezia is finally wed – to a man she had seen only once before and who turns out to be cruel and vindictive, and since his dynasty rests on shaky foundations, interested only in the provision of an heir.

As a young ingénue, Lucrezia’s ignorance of the politics of the Ferrarese court is exacerbated by Alfonso’s secretiveness about them. His mother had turned Protestant and thus a source of considerable embarrassment, before she fled abroad. His sisters Elisabetta and Nunciata make some efforts to befriend Lucrezia but are in thrall to Alfonso as well as in his power. The example Alfonso makes of Elisabetta’s presumed lover and besmircher of her honour, Ercole Contrari, is gruesome but illuminative of character. And brings home to  Lucrezia her powerlessness in her new role.

The marriage portrait of the title (apart from the depiction the novel gives us of the marriage of Lucrezia and Alfonso) has been commissioned by Alfonso from the famed Il Bastianino, who sends his pupils Jacopo and Maurizzio to make preliminary sketches. Lucrezia saves Jacopo’s life by administering milk and honey when she comes upon him comatose in a corridor in the aftermath of a fit of some kind. An immediate connection forms between them. This fateful association provides the lever for the novel’s resolution (in which O’Farrell permits herself to embellish the historical record.)

To modern Western eyes the sacrifice of a young girl on the altar of political or family alliances for dynastic purposes is objectionable. However the practice was unquestioned in historical times and is even yet widespread in other parts of the world. Humans still have a lot of progress to make in the matter of recognising the worth of one half of the species. Then again power corrupts. To be a male underling during the Italian renaissance was also to be (relatively) powerless, as an incident between Alfonso’s right hand man, Baldassare, and a servant illustrates.

While not quite reaching the heights of O’Farrell’s previous novel Hamnet, this is good, readable stuff. She conjures up the society of renaissance Italy well and puts us into the mind of an idiosyncratic young girl not yet fully wise to the ways of her world and shows how it changes her.

Pedant’s corner:- “into narrow streets of the city” (into the narrow streets.) “All is not lost” (Not all is lost,) mink (Lucrezia thinks of this as a comparison to a stone marten in a painting. The European mink’s range did not include Italy but that does not necessarily exclude it from her knowledge,) Hercules’ (Hercules’s,) Zeus’ (Zeus’s.) “‘Did you mother not teach you…’” (your mother,) burglarising (I growled at this. The verb is burgle, not burglarise, the participle required here is burgling.)

A Story of Contemporary Life, Virago, 1974, 497 p, plus xiii p Introduction by Jenny Uglow. First published 1883.

Vernon’s bank is an institution in the town of Redborough. Its stability threatened once by the injudicious conduct – and subsequent flight – of the founder’s grandson, John Vernon, it was saved by the injection of cousin Catherine Vernon’s cash, as a result of which she is held in reverence. The never married Catherine dispenses largesse in the form of grace and favour houses to her relatives but has turned over the bank into the care of her nephews, Harry and Edward Vernon, the first of whom she considers almost as a son. He in turn sees her interest in him as unwarranted surveillance.

After the death of her husband, Mrs John Vernon has returned from abroad with their fourteen-year-old daughter Hester, who knows nothing of her father’s reprehensible conduct, to take up residence in what is referred to as the Vernonry. On their first meeting Hester and Catherine do not hit it off and the two remain more or less antipathetic for the rest of the book.

As the years go by Hester slowly integrates into the life of the town and strikes up a friendship with near neighbours Captain and Mrs Morgan, relatives of Catherine on the non-Vernon side. Their grandson Roland comes to visit and it looks as if he may be a romantic interest for Hester but the plot is to be a little more complicated. Harry and Edward Vernon’s married sister, Ellen Merridew, starts up a series of thé dansants, which are set to be the hub of Redborough’s social life. On Hester’s first attendance, her mother’s pearls (which her mother insisted she wear,) incite some comment. On a later visit to the Morgans, Roland’s sister, Emma, procures an invitation to these events and throws herself into the fray in her search for a husband.

Harry falls for Hester but she isn’t charmed, finding Edward more interesting, if also more annoying. The sustaining of her continuing ignorance of her father’s conduct throughout the book begins to seem unlikely the more things progress but it is tied up with the book’s main thrust as inevitably the bank is threatened once more, Edward succumbing to the excitement of speculative investments. The resolution, though, has at least one aspect not foreshadowed.

The above is only a brief summary – the whole thing is as wordy as to be expected of a Victorian novel – but there is at times a subtle feminism to Oliphant’s prose – there are strong women here and the men can be weak – though the subtlety is at one point betrayed by Catherine’s remark to Captain Morgan, “‘You are only a man, which is a great drawback, but it is not to be helped.’”

Oliphant’s novels are solid pieces of fiction though her prolificity means that perhaps they don’t reach the heights other Victorian authors did.

Pedant’s corner:- a few old usages – inuendo (innuendo,) dulness (dullness,) grumphy (grumpy,) vulgarer (more vulgar,) sha’n’t, secresy. Otherwise; missing commas before pieces of direct speech, “the Miss Vernon Ridgways” (the Misses Vernon Ridgway,) ditto the Miss Ridgways (Misses Ridgway) and “the Miss Bradleys” (Misses Bradley,) “‘a step further that I saw him’” (than I saw him,) wont (won’t,) “‘and she, was far more disposed” (no need for that comma,) “thé dansante” (dansant,) “getting under weigh” (it wasn’t a ship, ‘under way’.)

Penguin, 2017, 552 p. First published 2000.

I almost certainly would not have read this if the good lady had not borrowed it from the nearest public library. (We feel we have to patronise it as otherwise it may suffer the same fate of closure as our local one did a few years ago now.) She is on a project to read as many James Tait Black Memorial Prize winners as she can. White Teeth won it for 2000. I’m glad I did read it though as it’s very well written.

If you were unkind you could describe it as a family saga but at the same time it is more specific and broader than that. In addition it is peppered with living, breathing characters who appear overwhelmingly real to the reader, even in their contradictoriness.

The main relationship in the book is that between Englishman Archie Jones and Bangladeshi Samad Iqbal, who met in the latter stages of World War 2, when they manned a tank in the Balkans. After his immigration to Britain and arranged marriage to Alsana, Samad met up again with Archie and their friendship ensued. The novel starts with Archie, depressed on his divorce, flipping a coin to decide his fate and subsequently meeting Clara Bowden, daughter of the half-Jamaican and very religious Hortense. Archie and Clara soon marry and have a daughter, Irie. Samad and Alsana have twin boys, Magid and Millat, of around the same age as Irie, who in adolescence moons after Millat.

Samad claims descent from Mangal Pande, the man who fired the first shot in the Indian Mutiny (and was hanged for his pains.) Samad says Pande wasn’t the fool that he has been portrayed as, that Pande couldn’t have been drugged up, but instead sacrificed his life in the name of justice for India. Archie remains much more sceptical about the circumstances surrounding Pande’s actions.

Samad berates himself for failing to live up to his Muslim beliefs – in particular for an affair with his children’s music teacher Poppy Burt-Jones – and as a result packs Magid off to Bangladesh to ensure he is brought up in true Muslim correctness. Alsana doesn’t forgive him for this removal of one of her children and thereafter no longer speaks directly to him. This gives the narrative a touch of comedy as does her description of a near relative as Niece-of-Shame.

Samad’s stratagem fails, Millat has an attractive persona, women seem to find him irresistible, yet despite his many conquests, joins a fundamentalist Islam movement called Keepers of the Eternal and Victorious Islamic Nation (they are aware of the “unfortunate” acronym, KEVIN,) while in Bangladesh Magid becomes a rationalist and scientist.

The lives of Irie and Millat become entwined with the middle-class Chalfen family, who have a philosophy of questioning everything. Marcus is a genetics engineer and his wife Joyce is one of those people who is convinced she knows better than the people she is talking to what is happening to them and how they feel.

Teeth are mentioned infrequently. A (minor) character says, “When I was in the Congo, the only way I could identify the nigger was by the whiteness of his teeth, if you see what I mean. Horrid business. Dark as buggery it was. And they died because of it, you see?” Irie is ‘bitten’ by her mother’s false teeth one night when she knocks over her glass in the darkness.

The novel of course interrogates the immigrant experience. “‘Who would want to stay?” Samad says to Irie. “Cold, wet, miserable food, dreadful newspapers – who would want to stay? In a place where you are never welcomed, only tolerated. Like you are an animal finally house-trained. Who would want to stay? But you have made a devil’s pact … it drags you in and suddenly you are unsuitable to return, your children are unrecognizable, you belong nowhere.’”

Elsewhere he adds, “There is no one more English than the Indian, no one more Indian than the English. There are still young white men who are angry about that.” However, “The fears of the nationalist, scared of infection, penetration, miscegenation,” are “small fry, peanuts, compared to what the immigrant fears – dissolution, disappearance ….. In Jamaica it is even in the grammar: there is no choice of personal pronoun, no splits between me or you or they, there is only the pure homogenous I.” (Often spoken as ‘I and I.’)

There are also warnings, “When an Englishman wants to be generous, the first thing you ask is why, because there is always a reason,” and explanations, “It is not that he ….. doesn’t love her (oh, he loves her: just as the English loved India and Africa and Ireland; it is the love that is the problem, people treat their lovers badly.)”

The final scene in the book echoes back to the reason why Archie is forever flipping coins to make a decision and brought to my mind Sophie’s Choice, though Archie’s critical one had no potential devastating consequences for his immediate family.

Pedant’s corner:- curb (kerb.) “Wrapped around the room in a panoramic” (a panoramic what? Panoramic is an adjective it requires a noun to describe. ‘A panorama’ would have been okay,) “someone who, to put it simply, fucks their sisters” (either ‘someone who fucks his sisters’ or, ‘people/men who fuck their sisters’.) “‘Show’s how much you know’” (‘Shows how much,) collander (colander.) “’O’Connell’s’ said Samad” (missing comma; ‘O’Connell’s,’ said Samad,) dypsomaniac (dipsomaniac,) bannister (banister,) “the largest community of Earth, the animal kingdom, were oppressed, imprisoned and murdered on a daily basis” (the largest community … was oppressed… .) “Didn’t use to be” (Didn’t used to be.)

Penguin, 1978, 120 p. First published 1972.

Mary Hooligan has trouble sleeping. The usual remedies – counting sheep or apples, pills – have no effect. The novel is a rendering of her thoughts during one night of such sleeplessness, involving memories of her upbringing in Coose in Connemara, various odd encounters, sometimes scatological, and a multitude of sexual (mis)adventures.

Though I have read neither and so cannot comment, the narration apparently reflects Molly Bloom’s soliloquy from Ulysses and prefigures Eimear MacBride’s A Girl is a Half-formed Thing. I’ll take their word for it.

With its focus on one person’s life experience, the novel stands in contrast to O’Brien’s “Country Girls” trilogy. There is no doubting, however, the author’s technical skill as a writer nor her proficiency with words; the book is peppered with Latinate derivations, Irishisms and seeming neologisms (gaimbeaux?) but even so is easy enough to read. Fifty years on from first publication what is striking about the book is its brevity. Nevertheless it says what it needs to say. Economy is a welcome attribute in a writer.

Fair enough it’s only 120 pages worth, but also revealing is the cover price of the edition I read. 75p! Those were the days.

Pedant’s corner:- tête-a-têtes (têtes-a-tête?) “doh ray me fa” (doh re mi fa,) frequent omissions of commas before a piece of direct speech, sherbert (seven lines earlier was the correct ‘sherbet’, with sherbert again a further seven lines on,) jelley (of frog spawn; surely usually spelled ‘jelly’,) “the think I couldn’t endure” (the thing,) seemliness’ (seemliness’s,) she’s (‘she’d’ made more sense,) an opening quote mark that was never closed, Leuwenhoech (Leuwenhoek?) caprolites (coprolites.)