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The Nine Tailors
The opening of The Nine Tailors, by Dorothy L Sayers, has to be one of the most atmospheric of any novel. Here we are in the wintry, bleak, isolated East Anglian fens with Lord Peter Wimsey: Coming a trifle too fast across the bridge, blinded by the bitter easterly snowstorm, he had overshot the road…
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Love and Secrets of a King and his Mistress
Sex, love, murder, revenge, betrayal, ambition and hidden secrets are key components of all good sagas about feuding families – and England’s Plantagenet Kings provide enough drama for an entire library of such books. So here’s a round-up of three, which I haven’t got round to writing about before now. All are set in the…
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Mother’s Day with Milly-Molly-Mandy
Well, it’s Mother’s Day, and I’ve had a bouquet of roses, some rose petal handcream, a beautiful bar of soap – and The Daughters also left messages on Facebook about two of their favourite childhood books, Joyce Lankester Brisley’s Milly-Molly-Mandy, and My Naughty Little Sister, by Dorothy Edwards, reminding me how I used to read…
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Molly Fox’s Birthday
Today is St Patrick’s Day, so it seems a good time to write about ‘Molly Fox’s Birthday’, by Irish writer Deirdre Madden. It’s a novel about friendship and family, memory and identity: it’s about who and what we are, how the past shapes our present, and how it affects the nature of creation, enabling writers…
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Twee Tale Failed to Charm
Still in Bloomsbury mode (I took out every book of their’s I could find in the library) I read Paul Gallico’s ‘Mrs Harris Goes to Paris’ and, quite frankly, as far as I’m concerned, she can stay there. Better still, she should never have gone in the first place. I did say I had a…
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The Book Trunk 