I loved this book.

Neema Shah draws the reader into a fascinating tale set in 1970s Uganda. In Kololo Hill, we encounter an Asian family who run a shop, and get to know them as the pressure mounts for Asians to leave the country. Shah writes a very modern novel, looking at themes which resonate today.

The family, father Motichand, mother Jaya, sons Pran and Vijay, and Prans new wife Asha are faced with many dilemmas. Family servant December, although Ugandan, is from the wrong tribe, and the family ends up sheltering him from the soldiers who may, at any time, raid their shop or attack them in their home. And their plan to leave is complicated by the fact that although Jaya, Asha and Vijay have British passports, the others do not.

The second part of the book follows Jaya, Asha and Vijay to the UK. We see life through their eyes as they are first sent to Army barracks with other refugees, then as they try to build a new life in North London and bring the whole family back together. I was engrossed in the challenges of their new life, and the end of the book came far too soon.

Well worth a read.

The Searcher is another gripping book from Tana French which had me hooked from start to finish.

Ex cop Cal Hooper moves to a remote Irish village after his divorce, hoping to get away from everything. Instead he finds himself sucked into local life when a teenager enlists his help to track down their missing brother.
Nothing it quite what it seems in the village, and even the friendly locals aren’t telling Cal everything. His own code won’t let him drop the investigation even when it becomes darker, even when he is put in danger.

Well worth reading to uncover all the secrets.

Summerwater is a beautiful book, perfect for August when we are trying to holiday despite the pandemic.
Section by section, Sarah Moss tells the story of the different people who are all staying in a holiday village somewhere in Scottish woodland.
Each section gives an insight into the person’s story, btu it also tells us about the site as a whole, and the world around. Packed with subtle detail, it draws you in, circling back as you view life in the same place from different perspectives, as everyone portayed grows more irritated by the noisy partying family, the outsiders.
A compelling read right to the end which smacked me in the face with the unexpected climax.

I enjoy reading real life experiences from different professionals – they usually give a great insight into aspects of life that I don’t normally see, and Nick Pettigrew’s Anti-Social is no exception.
Pettigrew gives a fascinating perspective on the ‘secret life’ of the anti social behaviour officer. We go through a year in his life, following various cases. He takes us alongside him into flats where neighbours have complained about noise, parties, drugs and more. Together with the month by month analysis of his working life, we also begin to understand the toll this type of work takes on the officer himself.
Nick Pettigrew has a wry sense of humour, honed over years of working with challenging members of society in a setting where budgets are shrinking and teams are perpetually understaffed. I would have liked to have been drawn further into some of the exchanges that take place in each chapter – with more direct speech rather than description – but that’s a minor complaint. This is a compelling book which kept me reading right through to the end where we find out what happens to some of Pettigrew’s longer term clients, and to Nick himself.

Night Falls, Still Missing by Helen Callaghan
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I was gripped from the start with Night Falls, Still Missing. Studious Fiona, a Cambridge professor of metalurgy, is on her way to the Orkney islands. Her chaotic friend Madison has called her asking for help – but she hasn’t explained why. When Fiona arrives, Madison is missing.

Night Falls, Still Missing, follows Fiona as she meets charismatic Iris, sexy Jack, disgruntled Becky and cautious Callum, the rest of the team on the archeological dig where Mdison had been working. Add in Madison’s stalker ex-boyfriend, plus her wealthy mother with chronic health problems and brother Hugo who is living beyond his means, and you have a cast of suspects: how can Fiona know who to trust?

Over the course of a few days, Helen unravels more and more as she learns about what the dig is uncovering. The traces she finds just raise her concerns about what has happened to Madison.

The book is well written and plotted, and Helen Callaghan kept me guessing right until the last few chapters just what had happened to Madison, who might have kidnapped or killed her, whether we would find her dead or alive.

View all my reviews

For a good read on a winter evening, I can recommend Miss Treadway & the Field of Stars, a mystery set in 1960s London. I picked this up because I’ve enjoyed William Shaw’s detective stories set in the same period. The period detail isn’t so intense at the start of the book, but it forms a background to a mystery that gently unravels:

Soho, 1965. In a tiny two-bed flat above a Turkish café on Neal Street lives Anna Treadway, a young dresser at the Galaxy Theatre. When the American actress Iolanthe Green disappears after an evening’s performance at the Galaxy, the newspapers are wild with speculation about her fate. But as the news grows old and the case grows colder, it seems Anna is the only person left determined to find out the truth. Her search for the missing actress will take her into an England she did not know existed: an England of jazz clubs and prison cells, backstreet doctors and seaside ghost towns, where her carefully calibrated existence will be upended by violence but also, perhaps, by love. For in order to uncover Iolanthe’s secrets, Anna is going to have to face up to a few of her own…

What I liked best about this book was how it looked at identity, in particular the identity of those who live in London but aren’t from England. The missing actress Iolanthe is American Irish, or is she? And who is Yolanda Green? We learn more about her identity as the story unfolds. The detective in charge of her case, Brennan hayes, who also goes by Barnaby, is of Irish origin but hides it in order to progress in the police force. The café owner, Ottmar is an exiled Turkish Cypriot, who left his dreams of being a poet behind when he fled. He wrangles with life in London and what it is doing to his family, in particularly his sixteen year old daughter Samira. Then there’s Aloysius, a young black accountant from Jamaica who aspires to be middle class and English.

“‘I have a dirty secret, Anna … I want a house, Anna Treadway. I want a garden. With rose bushes in it. I want two children in school uniform coming in at four o’clock to do a jigsaw on the living-room carpet. I want roast beef on Sundays, crumpets at the weekend. A ticket once a year to watch the Proms.'”

And Anna, quiet Anna who has no life outside her work as a theatre dresser, well, Anna’s identity gradually reveals itself as the book progresses.

Miranda Emmerson’s writing really comes into its own in paragraphs like this, where Ottmar describes his cafe:

“The Alabora, with its turquoise walls and sunset coloured chairs, its silver-framed mirrors and red and gold embroidered bunting was a vision from a dream he had; but it was a dream of his childhood. It was a dream of visiting his uncle in Istanbul and sitting in the coffee shops watching the men smoking and playing chess.”

She does a great job of conveying the wishes and dreams of the different characters, even those that they can’t say out loud. And, like with all good stories, in the end the characters find their own resolutions, if not in quite the way they might have thought.

Miss Treadway & the Field of Stars is out on 12 January and costs around £12.99 hardback, £7.99 Kindle.

I’ve been reading. Not writing really, because the kids have finished school and we’ve been to Cambridge, and stayed on a barge on the Suffolk coast and, actually, I spent most of June trying to get ahead with work. So, no writing, but I have pledged to read a book a day on any of the free days we have this summer. The kids have reached an age where they occupy themselves for a while, and I think there are plus points of backing off and letting them get on with it.

Inspired by Maddy’s books from her bedside table, this is a little about the books I’ve read in the last couple of weeks. There is some sort of theme – health, medicine, science, told through people’s stories – though I picked the books very much at random. One was a gift, another was sent to me for review, the third I ordered after reading about it online, and the fourth was one I pinched from my daughter as I had run out of reading material when we were on the boat!

The first book is The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Kloot. I didn’t know anything about the subject, but I was interested because the book aims to draw out a personal story from science, the story of Henrietta Lacks whose cells were the first to be successfully grown in a lab. The cells which originated from a cancerous growth on Lacks’s cervix continued to grow successfully. They have been used on an ongoing basis for medical trials and tests ever since they were first cultured in the fifties.

Rebecca Kloot is a science writer and was a student when she first delved into Henrietta’s untold story. Medicine has a habit of anonymizing its subjects to protect them, but in this book Kloot tries to uncover a more about the woman behind the cells. It is clear from the book that being poor and black in the fifties meant that families like the Lacks family were wary of doctors, and well aware of stories of people being used in medical tests without their knowledge or against their will. And in some ways, that applies to Henrietta. She didn’t know that her cells were going to be taken and used in the way they were – and it seems that the doctor had no idea just how the cells would succeed and grow either.

Henrietta died soon after her cells were taken, and her family had no idea what had happened, although snippets emerged over the years as researchers contacted them, leaving them with a feeling of unease and fear. Rebecca Kloot made a commitment to uncover as much of the story as she could, and she developed a relationship with Henrietta’s daughter Deborah. The book is a dense read which took me a couple of weeks. Kloot does a good job of covering as much of the history of the family, of Henrietta herself, and also puts this into the context of in vitro cell research as it developed in the latter half of the twentieth century. I think it is important that people’s stories are told, and though out the book you can really feel Deborah’s passion to find out about her mother. By the end of the book, though, Deborah has died. Henrietta Lacks died in 1951. Incredibly, her cells are still being used in research today. They live on, and so does Kloot’s story.

The second book is Baby X, by Rebecca Ann Smith. I’ll be writing more about this later in a review for the Contemporary Small Press Blog, but to sum up, this book looks at a near future where a baby is growing in an artificial womb. It personalises the science by telling the story through the voice of three women – Alex, the lead researcher, Karen, the ‘mother’ of Baby X, and Dolly, an assistant in the lab. (Dolly – wasn’t that the name of the first cloned sheep?) I write ‘mother’ in quotes, because Baby X has been created with a donor egg, and is growing in a lab. Issues of parenthood, of motherhood are raised by this book. I read it all through in a day, and I wondered if it was going to be a little slow, but I was gripped within the first few chapters. Smith unravels a complex story in a clear manner, and succeeds at taking us back and forth in the time line, from conception to present day to future investigation into the project. There is a mystery to unravel, and one action that appears to be the crime, while in fact another crime has taken place that is gradually exposed through the book. There is always a challenge in melding science and story: the science must underpin the story unobtrusively. I probably have a greater interest in the science and medical part of the story than most people, but I’d say that Smith has the balance right. She has created a gripping story, in a world that isn’t too far from our own.

I stumbled across Will & I, by Clay Byars in an article, How Clay Byars battled paralysis to finish his memoir. Despite the tabloid style title, the premise interested me – a first person story, Clay writes of his experiences since having a stroke aged twenty, one that should have killed him. The stroke occurred as a result of surgery to deal with a problem with one of Clay’s arm, which arose after a car accident.  The book is written in a gentle style, mixing snippets of Clay’s current life with his past experiences. It has taken him around fifteen years to write, perhaps unsurprising considering the traumatic nature of what it addresses.

I’m always interested in people telling their own stories of how they have fought back: remarkably Clay lives with his dogs on a remote farm, despite still having issues with walking and limited use of both arms.  The other aspect of this book which is indicated by the title, is that Clay has a twin, Will. I would have liked to know a little more about their relationship – Will is a fairly shadowy figure for much of the book, but maybe it’s right that Clay can only write his view. As indicated in the LitHub article, there are elements that resonate with Paul Kalanithi’s When Breath Becomes Air, but of course there are differences: put harshly, Kalanithi died, Byars has survived. Both, though, give us a chance to see life through someone else’s eyes, in a way that makes us appreciate the value of what we have.

My final book is the one I borrowed from my daughter. I’m sure you’ve been there – on holiday, time to relax, but you’ve read all your books. I borrowed Extraordinary Means by Robyn Schneider. In the near future (as per Baby X), a new strain of TB emerges, one which is resistant to all known treatments. In a throwback to the last century, those with the condition are sent off to live in communities where they can’t infect others while they recover – or die. The book tells the story of teenager Lane who is sent to Latham House. He makes new friends, and in facing death decides to truly make the most of his life. As YA books go, this is fairly standard: boy meets girl, with the quirk of everyone having a potentially life threatening illness. We even get the stats: four out of five kids leave Latham cured. Which of Lane’s new friends – Nick, Sadie, Marina and Charlie – will get to go home, and will life ever be the same if they do? The plot was good enough to keep me reading, but I think again, as with Baby X and The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks it’s the way that the science was dealt with that makes this book worth recommending. There is a great end section with an accurate history of the development of treatments for TB which I imagine 90% of teen readers will skip! It also details how Schneider, a bioethicist, came to write the book- she came up with the idea while sitting in a Cinema of Contagion class!

So, there are a number of threads that tie these books together. Science through personal experience, fact or fiction, is one strand that links them. Another, though, is that they are all books that I would like to have written, all books that speak to what I am writing. Clay Byars is brave enough to take his personal experience and write into it. Robyn Schneider and Rebecca Ann Smith both create fiction from fact, and while Rebecca Kloot remains on the side of non fiction, it is creative non fiction that tells someone’s story. Looking at the books as a whole inspires me to keep writing and researching in the hope that at some point someone will be gripped by the story I have written too.

I’ve just finished reading Dear Amy, a chilling psychological thriller. This is the blurb: “Margot Lewis is the agony aunt for The Cambridge Examiner. Her advice column, Dear Amy, gets all kinds of letters – but none like the one she’s just received:

‘Dear Amy,
I don’t know where I am. I’ve been kidnapped and am being held prisoner by a strange man. I’m afraid he’ll kill me.
Please help me soon,
Bethan Avery’

Bethan Avery has been missing for years. This is surely some cruel hoax. But, as more letters arrive, they contain information that was never made public.”

In the novel we follow Margot as she gets sucked into a nightmare, driven by the kidnap of Katie, one of the pupils at the school where she works (alongside her part time gig as agony aunt.) If you’re a writer, you’ll know the term ‘unreliable narrator’, and it becomes clear as you read the book that Margot the teacher and competent agony aunt isn’t the person you first think. He husband has had an affair and left her: from the very start we can see that she is emotionally vulnerable, but more of the secrets of her past emerge page by page. Margot’s story is inextricably intertwined with the letters she is receiving, and with the missing girl.

As the book progresses, so does Margot’s divorce: there’s a confrontation with her husband’s lover too. And we learn more about why Margot is taking medication, why she has been sectioned to a local psychiatric hospital in the past. The more Margot unravels, though, the closer she gets to finding out why Bethan Avery is writing to her after being missing for twenty years, and how this might help her save Katie.

I read most of the book on a train journey to and from London, and was sufficiently interested to wangle a free hour to finish it off the next day. It is gripping and scary: perhaps not one for bedtime reading for the nervous. The plot twists and turns are coherent and well planned. At almost every point of reveal you have the ‘ah’ moment where you realise how everything you read on the previous pages links in. There is a growing new relationship for Margot, which is nice in the sense of wrapping up all the ends, but the book works just fine without the ‘ideal new man’ aspect!

Dear Amy is released on 16 June and costs £7.99 on Kindle and around £12 hardback at time of writing.

Disclosure: I received the eBook of Dear Amy free of charge via Netgalley.

Sophie is facing a rare cancer at the age of twenty one. In The Girl with Nine Wigs, a diary written with European openness and hard hitting humour, she shares the journey she didn’t expect to take.
No eyelashes, no hair on her head, Sophie seizes the challenges of cancer treatment, adopting new personae with each new wig. She picks green feather eyelashes to wear with Platina, the wig that says, ‘Yes, indeed, I’m wearing a wig.’

“time could take away my weddings and divorces, my children and corrective underwear.”

No amount of dressing up takes away from the scary knowledge that every twinge, every headache could be a new tumour. Sophie writes honestly about the changes to her body, like the first hair loss – her pubes – and how this impacts on the life of a 21 year old student. She writes about her first time clubbing after five months in hospital, about meeting new guys, and dates and sex when she has to wonder whether her wig will come off.

Sophie has some great friends, some from ‘before cancer’, some who she meets as part of her new experience. She has a supportive family, who have just gone through the challenge of her mother’s breast cancer. She has humour and perspective on her side as she writes, but throughout all the positives her very real battle comes out.

Every person’s story is unique, every person with cancer has a different experience, but in The Girl With the Nine Wigs Sophie Van Der Stap has truly written something unusual and well worth reading. You can also hear Sophie’s story … and meet some of the wigs … in her TEDx talk. The Girl with Nine Wigs: A Memoir  costs around £8.99 in paperback or £2.99 on Kindle at time of writing.