Threads of Caring reviewed

Some books I enjoyed in 2021:

Susanna Stapleton The adventures of Maud West, Lady Detective

Stapleton tries to winnow fact from fiction and find out more about Maud West’s personal life – and mainly succeeds. It’s fascinating about what detectives got up to in the early decades of the twentieth century, too.

Deborah Levy Hot milk

A young woman and her mother are in Spain getting treatment for her mother’s illness. It’s about not knowing who you are or what you want to do with yourself, and the (sometimes) fraught relations between mothers and daughters.

Damon Galgut The promise

Three (white) siblings grow up in South Africa. It’s bleak but the writing is terrific. It won this year’s Booker Prize.

Nicola Upson An expert in murder

Upson uses the character of Josephine Tey (whose books I adore) as her ‘detective’ , which is a nice conceit. It’s set around a theatre where one of Tey’s plays is being produced and murders keep happening. There are more in the series – hoorah!

Andrew Nicoll The secret life and curious death of Miss Jean Milne

 Based on a real unsolved murder in Scotland and very well done. The characterisation is great and the ending was a complete surprise for me.

Patrick Modiano family record

Slightly connected short stories by the French writer (who is a Nobel Prize winner). They are about different parts of a family over a number of years, and reminded me of how oral history interviews are constructed by their narrators.

Christopher Brooke The Saxon and Norman kings

An old one that I found on my shelves. Utterly confusing – the names and relationships – but most interesting, and he did mention some women!

Noel Streatfeild Saplings

An adult novel about the effect of the Second World War on a middle-class English family, especially the children. She was very good at writing children. I didn’t love it but it was absorbing and offered a different take on that war.

James Rebank English Pastoral

A fine rant (and it is fine) about the iniquities of industrial farming and agriculture, and about rebuilding and maintaining a more traditional farming way of life. Rebank farms in northwest England, in the Lake District.

Sylvia Townsend Warner The corner that held them

I’m sneaking this one in because, although I didn’t finish it in 2021, I did start it then and I absolutely loved it. It’s set in a small convent in England in the mid-1300s and covers the relationships between the women, and theirs with their priest and the outside world. The details were perfect at showing how life was (might have been) in such a place, at such a time. The Penguin Classic edition I read has a fabulous blue cover of women dancing from Georges Barbier’s 1922 work, Les danses au clair de lune which I thought was perfect for the book.