Over the 15 years I had my Wordpress blog I wrote a fair few book reviews, most of which I’ve imported into my Substack archive, though I also reviewed for The Bookbag. Chances are you won’t have read them, and even if you did you may be in the mood now for a book you didn’t fancy then so I thought I’d collect a few together, with supplementary recommendations. I started with crime and thrillers set in the real world and followed up with some that weren’t. Here’s some reviews of assorted fiction that is neither crime nor SFF. And if you make it all the way to the end, there are links to a selection of my short fiction.
Comedic diversions
As is traditional, I’m starting with a Yorkshire-set novel. This time it’s lesbian rom-com The Split by Laura Kay, which is properly laugh-out-loud funny and populated with characters I can readily imagine, who work in schools, shops, a call-centre. Their fitness regimes are plausibly hopeless.
I read it in 2021 when my other half had finally persuaded me that romantic comedy films were actually quite a good thing, and I wondered if the written variety might be worth seeking out. We went to the Kobo website and I chose The Split because I’d seen the author talking about it, and he chose me The Cornish Cream Tea Bus by Cressida McLaughlin. Jobs in The Cornish Cream Tea Bus include marketing and investment banking, which might be part of the reason I didn’t get on with it quite as well, though if that doesn’t put you off then it’s probably worth a try. Even I got all the way to the end.
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by Anita Loos was on my To Read list because of the Backlisted podcast about it. I jotted down after listening that ‘apparently it’s quite PG Wodehouse’ and what with it being set, and indeed written, in the 1920s I was looking forward to reading it. I’m pretty sure I’ve seen the Marilyn Monroe film of the same name but I only have vague recollections of a long-distance boat trip.
While it has some laugh out loud moments and some flashes of great satire, this novel is not in shouting distance of the same league as PG Wodehouse. It’s written as a diary by dim-but-scheming gold-digger Lorelei, who has the ability to wrap any man around her little finger and make even the meanest English aristocrat dip into his wallet to procure her some expensive trinkets. I found her writing style tiresome after a while – beginning most sentences with ‘so’, and spelling the odd word wrong e.g. landguage.
Lorelei and her wise-cracking friend Dorothy leave New York for an adventure in Europe, financed by a gentleman of Lorelei’s acquaintance, naturally. A series of amusing escapades follow, and Lorelei somehow manages to get out of all the scrapes she gets herself into. Readable enough, short, and very much of its time. I think if you enjoy the Mapp and Lucia books by EF Benson (which I didn’t) you’ll enjoy it more than I did. There is a sequel, I believe, but I’ve never been tempted to seek it out.
The Tempest Tales by well-known crime author Walter Mosley (writer of the Easy Rawlins books, among others) was an unusual novella. A man is mistakenly killed by the police in Harlem and St Peter decides he’s not allowed into heaven. The man argues that he’s not a sinner, he’s only ever done the best he, as a black man on a low income in the place and time he lives, could do. There follows a loosely connected novella/story collection showing episodes in his life as he tries to persuade the angel that’s been sent back to earth with him, to let him into heaven. Humour, philosophy, and some good characters.
Kate Atkinson’s Emotionally Weird was an odd but great book that I raced through in 2018. The bulk of it is set at Dundee University in the 1970s and has more than a hint of Tom Sharpe about it — I used to love his farces set in higher education. However, this being Kate Atkinson there’s a big family mystery wrapping the whole thing up, which I think will particularly appeal if you enjoyed Behind the Scenes at the Museum.
Back to Yorkshire again for Stretching It by Mandy Sutter, about a young woman in West Yorkshire working her way through unsuitable candidates in the search for love. Jennifer Spendlove is 32, overweight, and lives with her elderly hypochondriac mother on the outskirts of Leeds. One of those gentle souls too nice for their own good, Jennifer gets taken advantage of regularly but instead of standing up for herself she seeks solace in snacks and the creation of papier mache sculptures.
In between the regular ferrying of her mum to the doctor and the hairdresser, Jennifer is trying to sneak off for a series of dates, the result of a lonely hearts ad in the local paper. Of course, finding a soulmate — or even a decent boyfriend — was never going to be that simple, but her loss is our gain as she perseveres through a queue of unsuitable men. And all this while the new regime of efficiency at the cash-strapped factory where she works overturns her everyday world.
I mostly read Stretching It during my commute on the train (this was back in 2013 when I did such gregarious things), and mildly embarrassed myself when the laughter wouldn't stay silent, or when tears prickled my eyes. It was a quick, easy read and I stayed up late to finish it, so it's fairly safe to say I was caught up in it. I cared enough about Jennifer to groan at bad decisions and gasp at jeopardy, and I even formed a grudging attachment to her self-centred mother Alicia.
On the whole the book is light and humorous so the two darker scenes later on particularly stand out and come as something of a shock; I actually felt bad for laughing at something that comes shortly after the second one. However, the mildly unsettled feeling soon passed and I enjoyed the rest of the novel, putting it aside with a warm glow.
Mandy’s latest book is also funny but this time not fiction. Ted the Shed is a collection based on the Reluctant Gardener blog she used to write about sharing an allotment with her dad. It’s out now, details on her website — yes, she is a friend of mine but my admiration for her writing came first so I’m not as biased as you think.
Darker takes
When I reviewed Ironopolis by Glen James Brown in 2021, I said ‘Imagine if one of the Angry Young Men of the 1960s had written a novel after getting really into dark folktales’. I still think that’s a good summary, but I will also say that if you enjoyed — or think you would enjoy after reading my review — Villager by Tom Cox, and a gritty urban Teesside setting doesn’t immediately turn you off, then you may well love Ironopolis as much as I did. Nonlinear, weird folklore, and rave rather than folk music — some readers of Villager will definitely go for this, it can’t just be me that’s the crossover audience.
Thanks to the TV series, everyone’s heard of Mick Herron’s tale of inept spies, Slow Horses, now. My dad chanced across the early novels in a charity shop before the pandemic and I finally read the first book in the series in 2021. I have tried to watch the first TV episode twice and didn’t make it all the way to the end, which suggests there’s something about the adaptation that makes it not quite like the book. I found Herron a good writer and a master of misdirection.
I was struggling to read for a while after the various lockdowns, and borrowed a few random fiction titles via the local library’s ebook service. Bunny by Mona Awad was about friendship, belonging and loneliness, at its heart. It involved a small group of young women studying creative writing at a prestigious American university, and the cliques and bitchiness and rivalry. But, it also had a weird layer of gothic fairytale (and some gory bits so bear that in mind if you’re squeamish like me). I loved it, and I’d never have read it if I’d read a review or run across it in a bookshop. Sometimes a bit of randomness is just what your reading list needs.
Historical settings
The Miniaturist by Jessie Burton is a 2014 novel set in 17th century Amsterdam, October 1686-January 1687, to be precise. As with many books, it had been on my To Read list for a couple of years by the time I got round to reading it in 2021. When I reviewed it at the time, I said ‘If you enjoyed Girl With a Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier you will love this, maybe Neal Stephenson's Baroque trilogy will have set you up to be well-disposed towards it too’.
Nella Oortman has come from the country to be the new teenage wife of a successful Amsterdam merchant twice her age. He buys her a dolls' house version of their own house as an amusing distraction from his perpetual absence on business. Nella finds a mysterious miniaturist to craft the furnishings she requires, as she tries to settle in with her new sister-in-law and the surprisingly forward servants.
The miniaturist and the cabinet house are the least satisfying elements of the story, to my mind. The essence of the book is bound up in the intrigue, the performative piety, and the things that are not as they seem. The hypocrisy of a society which is so puritanical and yet their fortunes rest on sugar (indulgence) and slavery. It was wonderful on detail and catering for all senses — the smells from the canal and the kitchen, the tastes of the food they're eating, as well as the usual sights and sounds. Including the occasional reminder that in the evening with only a couple of candles burning, there are lots of shadows for a young girl to jump at.
Even after reading the whole novel and re-reading the first few pages I still didn't quite understand the prologue and it didn't feel like it fit, to me. However, given the enormous success of this novel I'm probably in a minority. Or, given that I loved the novel anyway, maybe it doesn't matter.
Also in 2021 I started reading a collection of SJ Parris novellas starring (real-life proto-scientist and renegade monk) Giordano Bruno. I described the first as a Cadfael-Shardlake mash-up and suggested they would all appeal to fans of CJ Sansom’s Shardlake series or Hilary Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell series. But then I went on to explain why I couldn’t finish reading them.
In 2022 I read The Ladies Paradise by Emile Zola (Au Bonheur des Dames in the original French), first published in 1883 but set in the 1870s. I’d written it on my To Read list a few months earlier, but by the time I came to read it I couldn’t remember why. Once I got going I wondered if it had come up in an online discussion about Amazon, and other giants of retail.
The novel has a romantic tale at its core that sometimes seems a bit of an afterthought (it was apparently adapted for TV by the BBC about 10 years ago, as The Paradise). However, the main business of the book is the owner, the staff, and the running of the Parisian department store The Ladies Paradise, and the effect it has on the shops and shop-owners in the neighbourhood. As the business grows, it stops specialising in dress fabric and broadens its interest into lace, haberdashery, hosiery, even umbrellas and gloves – anything a woman of fashion (or her children) might want. Consequently the local shops, each with its own niche that has been replaced by a department in The Ladies Paradise, are closing down and leaving an impoverished neighbourhood and less choice.
There are arguments in the book about progress and modernisation, about the convenience and cheap prices for customers, about no small shop ‘deserving’ to stay – they need to adapt or die. All of this is so familiar, particularly in the realm of bookshops but also any small shops that have been struggling in the past couple of years as people speed up their move to online buying or stick to the big superstores rather than use several local shops.
It was fascinating in its detail of the day to day running of the department store, but when you read about the 35 clerks employed to work out sales commission (replaced by a spreadsheet or small database now?), the 350 messengers (replaced by phones and then email), the stable hands for the 145 horses for the delivery vans (done away with entirely), you realise that every phase of progress is the future until it isn’t. Books from today will no doubt be just as familiar-but-different to readers in 150 years, living through an era we can’t imagine.
I hope you’ve found a book or author to explore. Let me know in the comments or by replying to the email. Lastly, here’s some of my fiction for you to dip into, mirroring the categories above:
If you’re in the mood for comedy, I can offer you a short story called Silver-Topped Cane
Darker fairytale vibes from another short one, The Crows Remember, set in the Yorkshire Dales.
Is 1996 historical? Here’s Summer of ‘96 anyway.
But if we’re going to quibble on historicalness, would you like to listen to a two-hander play written and performed by me and Roz Fairclough? It’s set in West Yorkshire in the 1960s and is called Lavender Ink (and was an absolute blast to make. The recording is of us live on radio in 2018, by the way).
Enjoy!