Harriet Devine's Blog

Heat Lightning

"Poor girl," he whispered. His face looked strange, as if for a long time she had not seen it, the deep eye sockets spaced wide, the strong spring of the nose, the lean cheeks with lines past the corners of the wide, mobile lips. Quite suddenly it changed, and she knew it in her fingertips, the feel of the forehead, fine skin over hard rounded skull, up to the v's in which dark hair grew over the temples. Geoffrey. Hand still shut in his, she moved slowly in the file past the casket. She felt his grasp quicken: he knew about death, its anger and its fear. 

There's nothing more exciting for readers like me than discovering a new and wonderful author. And Helen Hull is one such, at least if this novel is anything to go by. Published in 1932, this is a novel about love, about marriage, about parenting, about families -- but it's also about the melting pot of America, about social class, about morality and about belief. Quite a lot to encompass in a mere 327 pages, but Helen Hull does it with the utmost subtlety and skill. 

This is the story of Amy Norton who, at the start of the novel, has arrived in the small mid-western town where she grew up. It is high summer, and Amy has left  her home in New York City and her troubled marriage to pay a visit to her parents. But though Amy has been hoping for a period of peace and quiet to help her get her thoughts straight, she finds herself instead plunged into the midst of various serious family dramas. A reprobate cousin has made the maid pregant, another is having problems with her lesbian partner, an uncle is in severe financial difficulties, and an unexpected death flings the whole family into panic and overdrive.

Contemplating the problems of her own marriage, Amy looks hard at those of her relatives, finding numerous points of comparison -- what works, what doesn't, and why. A cousin has married a girl of German extraction, from a lower social class than his own, and the family looks down on her and her mother -- but the marriage works, and Amy can't help but admire the girl for her open enjoyment of her sexuality. Amy's brother has a French wife, whose alien status enables her to look on the family dramas with a clear and philosophical eye. In fact overall it seems to be the new Americans who are doing better than the old families -- Amy's uncle's financial disasters seem to be due to his wife's insistence in living way above their means.In the midst of all this, Amy's parents at least offer a safe haven of sorts. Her mother, in particular, has a quiet wisdom which, towards the end of the novel, she puts into words. Her two principles are, first, 'acting so I don't feel ashamed of myself, so I feel comfortable with myself', and second is 'People. Loving them. Not a general, vague love for everybody. But for your special ones'.

So as the week goes by, Amy comes to an important realisation:

If she could have patience, could watch these shifting scenes with sympathy enough, out of them would come the wisdom she needed. It would, far more potent than any Aristotelian tragedy, constitute a personal catharsis, a purging of herself of blindness and other faults of vision -- distortion, perhaps.

This passage is really the key to what goes on in this excellent novel. While her world seems to be deteriorating into chaos around her, Amy slowly comes to form her own code. Though conscious of how much she is hampered by her lack of any kind of religious belief, she practices a severe form of self examination, and gradually her thoughts and feelings become more settled and clear. Nowhere is this more evident than in the remarkable episode in which she finally learns what her absent husband has been doing, and is forced to confront the reality of her deepest fears. Rather than causing a split between the couple, or leading to bitterness and defeat, the revelation brings her to a deeper understanding of Geoffrey's feelings and a rigorous comparison with her own, which she sees to be not as different as she first believed. 

In her excellent review of the novel earlier this year, Rachel of Book Snob calls Helen Hull an American Dorothy Whipple. And yes, there's certainly some truth in that -- the domestic setting, the examination of unspoken thoughts and feelings. But think I'd rather call her an American Elizabeth Bowen, whose superb To the North was published in the same year as Heat Lightening. Bowen is notoriously challenging to read for the intensity of her prose and the subtlety of her observations of women's lives, and Hull seems to me to fall into that category. I am so glad I read this great novel and look forward to discovering more of Helen Hull in the future.

 

What I've been reading... and not reviewing (1)

I haven't reviewed anything for ages but that doesn't mean I've stopped reading. Life just took over and swamped me. But here I am again and here's some of what I've read lately. First up, Jesse Kellerman's latest novel, I'll Catch You. Well. I've long admired Kellerman junior, both of whose parents are distinguished crime writers, and in fact I think his books are even better than theirs. But anyone who starts this one expecting it to be like the earlier ones is in for a surprise. "This novel is, in a word, dreadful", writes one bemused blogger, who shall remain nameless. It's not, though, not at all. 

This is the story of Arthur Pfefferkorn, who teaches creative writing at a small college on the east coast of America. This is quite ironic, really, as Arthur himself is a failed novelist -- his one published work, a semi-autobiographical literary novel called Shade of the Colossus, sank without trace many years ago, and he has never succeeded in writing anything else.  His college friend Bill, however, whose literary abilities appeared to be pretty well zero, has become a hugely successful thriller writer, much to Arthur's chagrin. As the novel begins, however, he is reading in the paper that Bill is missing, presumed drowned, after an accident at sea. He rather unwillingly decides to go to the funeral, where he meets Bill's widow Carlotta, and soon, much to his surprise and delight, finds himself in bed with her. Carlotta has shown him Bill's writing room, and on the desk is Bill's last work, an incomplete manuscript. Before he leaves, Arthur manages to steal it, and soon, with its help, he too is a massively successful writer and making huge sums of money. But then he makes a terrifying discovery, and his life takes a most unexpected and frightening turn...

Really, this novel is a satire on the world of blockbusting thrillers, with many bizarre twists and turns into the bargain, but it also considers literary pretensions, literary success and its effects, friendship, parenthood, and more besides. Jesse Kellerman writes with great wit and intelligence and I loved the way he expresses some of the simplest things, such as Arthur's first impressions of Carlotta's magnificent Californian villa: A mosaic fountain burbled. Cut flowers stood erect in vases. A chess set awaited players. Chairs awaited buttocks. Portraits smiled, landscapes sprawled, statuary thrust. 

I see on Amazon that this novel has defeated most readers, and perhaps you would be one of them. But for me, though I admit to finding the central section a little too long, this was a really enjoyable and entertaining read. Recommended, but only to those who are willing to suspend disbelief and let themselves have a bit of fun.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Quiddity of Will Self

I sat on the Picadilly Line with Will Self's liver on my lap...

This novel was kindly sent to me by the publisher several weeks ago, and I started reading it at once. The only reason it's taken me so long to get around to reviewing it is that I wasn't sure if I was going to be able to do it justice. If I describe it as a postmodern extravaganza -- and surely someone somewhere has called it just that -- regular visitors here (if any there be) will see at once that it's not the sort of thing I usually read and review. But let's have a go anyway.

First of all, the title. I did not know what quiddity meant, and had to look it up, though if I hadn't bothered I'd have eventually found a definition some way into the novel. Here's what the OED has to say about it: 

• 1 the inherent nature or essence of someone or something.
  2 a distinctive feature; a peculiarity:his quirks and quiddities

OK -- both probably relevant here. Now how about Will Self? I knew he was a novelist of rather scary brilliance, but all I'd read by him was some of his journalism. Was this going to hamper my enjoyment of the novel? I can't possibly say, but probably if I had it might have added another layer to my enjoyment. Not that it needed any more layers, because I enjoyed it very much indeed.

But what's it about? I hear you say. Well, I can quote the blurb to give you some kind of idea:

The ghost of a beautiful young woman, Sylvie, hovers outside the window of Will Self's study. She is seeking to influence his latest novel, before she can rest in peace.

Sylvie was a member of the WSC -- a mysterious cult of charismatic writers who appear to worship Will Self. When Richard, a twenty-something wannabe, discovers Sylvie's dead body he gets sucked into their dark world of absinthe, cloaks, and bizarre initiation rites, slowly losing his sense of perspective on the strange events that encircle him. What is the true nature of the WSC? What did they do to Sylvie? And does Richard now face a similar fate?

Quite honestly, though, this is really only scratching the surface of the comic, multi-faceted, multi-narrated, metafictional, confusing and delightful plot. Five different narrators voice the novel's five parts -- or rather four, as Richard, who narrates Part One, returns in Part Three in the form of a diary he is writing in a Liverpool tower block, while he also writes a novel, watched avidly by numerous members of the general public. Sylvie narrates Part Two, after her own death. Part Four is narrated by Mia, and takes place in 2049, after the death of Will Self, who, we learn, finally managed to win the Booker Prize in his 80s. And Part Five is narrated by Sam Mills. But what Sam Mills is this, and how much relationship is there with the 'real' Sam Mills? Well, for a start, the Sam Mills who has put her name on the title page is female, and the Sam Mills in the novel is male. But the very name of the novelist hints at some kind of gender confusion, and there's reason to believe that it may not in fact be the real writer's real name. And, as Sam Mills wrote recently in a Guardian article, 

In symmetry with Will, I suffer from sex dysmorphia; I habitually feel like an angry young man trapped in the body of a female …

 Be that as it may, there does seem to be some autobiographical material in this section -- it is undoubtedly true, for example, that Sam Mills was, or is, a writer of young adult novels, a couple of which I've reviewed on here, and almost certainly this novel did take nine years to write and was turned down by several publishers. As for the letter purportedly written by Sam to Will Self, and the account of his reply -- well, who knows. And does it matter? I don't think so. In fact I know it doesn't. For this is a novel partly -- or largely? -- about writing, about words, about identity and its confusions.

And would you like this novel? You'd have to be prepared to let go of a great many preconceptions about how stories are meant to be told, and of the need to come out at the other end with some kind of satisfying conclusion or closure. There's lots and lots of sex, though not of the gratuitous variety -- it is, believe it or not, integral to the plot. The only thing I can think of that the novel resembles a little is a film called Being John Malkovitch, so if you ever saw that and liked it, you'd perhaps like this too. 

Anyway, I'm in no doubt that this is a novel of real brilliance. The Daily Mail, my least favorite newspaper of all time, wrote of 'glimpses of genius', and for once it's hard to disagree with them. 

Oh -- and as for that opening quote about the liver -- well, you'll just have to read the novel to see what that's all about.

Related articles

Sam Mills' top 10 fictional sex changes

The Frozen Shroud

Isn't this a lovely and evocative cover? If I saw this in a bookshop I'd pick it up just to see if the inside lived up to it. The Lake District is a part of England very dear to me, because I lived only an hour or so away from there for nearly twenty years. It was a great joy to be able to whizz up the motorway and spend the day wandering in a Wordsworthian sort of way among the lakes, rivers, mountains and waterfalls. Martin Edwards has cleverly chosen to set his latest series of crime novels in this lovely area, though he even more cleverly adapts the geographical location to suit his purposes, so that some bits of it are real and some invented. 

This is the latest in what I have only just realised is a series of six. I've read the other five and enjoyed them enormously so I was pleased to be able to get hold of this one courtesy of the kind publisher. But it's the first one I have read as an e-book, on my iPad. And this brings me to the reason why I mention the cover -- because the version I was sent didn't have any kind of cover at all, though probably that's because it came from NetGalley. But this way of reading -- very far from my preferred choice -- really brought it home to me why I so much love real books. I'm not saying I didn't enjoy it -- the plot, combining as all the novels in the series do, a cold case with a present day murder, is intriguing, and the relationship between Hannah, the cop, and Daniel, the academic historian, as always tantalisingly near consummation -- but I wanted to be able to hold a book in my hand, to muse over the cover, to flick back through the pages and check on things I might have missed. Oh yes I know you can flick away in Kindle too, but somehow it's just not the same. 

Sorry -- just a hobby horse of mine, and perhaps one I should dismount pretty sharpish. Anyway, the novel is atmospheric, the beautiful, though here often gloomy and threatening locations well evoked, the story of a series of very similar and somewhat gothic murders stretching over almost a century properly puzzling, and the characters, as always, attractive and believeable. If you haven't read this series, do give it a go -- though I'd advise starting at the beginning with The Coffin Trail, the first of the series, to get a real understanding of the history of the characters and their somewhat complicated relationship. A quick and enjoyable read, ideal for curling up with on a rainy day.

Women Reading

Group of young women reading in library of normal school, Washington, D.C.

This very evocative photo, which was found on here, comes with the following caption:

Late in the spring term of 1899, Frances Benjamin Johnston photographed these young women pursuing an education with the intention of becoming educators themselves. Johnston had been commissioned to make a photographic survey of Washington, D.C., schools to show the public what was meant by the new, “progressive” education. Her photographs were displayed at the Paris Exposition of 1900 and were also used to illustrate a series of publications titled The New Education Illustrated. I hope they all did well in their future careers.

The Carrier

I have been a huge fan of Sophie Hannah's novels from the beginning. In fact just a year ago I was raving about the one before this one, Kind of Cruel, which I thought was the best yet. So I was really excited to get hold of this, the most recently published. 

What Sophie Hannah does most wonderfully well is to set up situations at the beginning of her novels which appear to be utterly impossible and insoluble. And here, again, we have one such. A youngish businesswoman, Gaby Struthers, is stranded in Dusseldorf airport, and finds herself sharing a hotel room with a distressed and angry young woman called Lauren. It gradually transpires that Lauren is in a panic because she has come to Germany for the day without telling her abusive husband. But she also lets slip the fact that she is worried about someone she knows who has confessed to a murder but who is, in fact innocent. A bit of quick googling while Lauren is in the bathroom reveals to Gaby that the man concerned is Tim Brearly, with whom Gaby has been in love for many years, even though he is married to someone else -- in fact, to the woman who he is now accused of killing. What's more, Tim has confessed to the murder, but will not reveal his motive. Meanwhile Lauren disappears, leaving Gaby in a state of great confusion and anxiety. Did Lauren seek her out? What does she want with her? Why did Tim confess? Who really killed Francine?

Naturally all these and many other mysteries get solved in the end. And in addition there are various other developments in the novel, many of which concern DI Simon Waterhouse and his wife Charlie Zailer, whose strange marriage staggers on regardless. 

I must admit that I enjoyed this a bit less than the last one, partly because I found it hard to warm to any of the characters. Gaby was so relentlessly nasty to poor Lauren, who, despite being uneducated and helpless, certianly didn't deserve the stream of sarcasm she was subjected to. However, I suspect that this was a pointer to Gaby's own unhappiness, and she did warm somewhat to Lauren as the novel went on. Charlie, too, seemed incapable of much other than sharp comments and showed very little sympathy for anyone she encountered. Simon, of course, is always weird and shows no sign of changing. But I was still intrigued by the story and glad to follow it though its twists and turns. So, though it's not Sophie Hannah's best, I'm still recommending it as a highly readable psychological thriller. 

 

A Treacherous Likeness

I do like a good historical thriller (with the emphasis on good) and especially so if they have real historical figures appearing in them. Tricky to do, but fun if it works. So I was more than delighted when I was offered Lynn Shepherd's latest novel to review, since the historical figures in it are people about whom I already knew rather a lot. But as it turned out, that was a bit of a mixed blessing.

The people concerned here are the poet Percy Shelley, his wife Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, and her step sister Claire Clairmont. In fact when the novel begins, in 1850, Percy is long dead, and Mary is a sick elderly lady living with her son, the 'controversially ordinary' Sir Percy and his manipulative wife Jane, whose sole purpose in life is to sanitise the poet's posthumous reputation, a far from easy task. This is, indeed, the starting point for the novel. Jane Shelley is deeply anxious because Claire, for many years an exile from England, has reappeared in London. Jane fears that she holds documents that will show that the poet, far from the ineffectual angel she wishes him to appear, was actually immoral, untrustworthy, and verging on the unbalanced. To help her to retrieve the documents Jane calls in the detective Charles Maddox, who soon works out that there are other secrets to be uncovered which are at least equally damaging, and which involve his own family. Soon we are back in the years 1814 to 1816, as Charles looks hard at the existing evidence of the shenannigans of the Shelley entourage, uncovering disturbing indications of unexplained infant deaths and promptings to suicide. 

Lynn Shepherd was well qualified to write this novel, as she has a PhD in English Literature and has clearly used all her research skills here. Not only that, but she has brilliantly interwoven the real words of her characters -- Mary, Shelley and Claire -- with her own imagined dialogue, so that the people appear totally convincing. Also, all the mysteries that Charles sets out to solve are genuine and have puzzled Shelley scholars for generations. What was the true nature of Shelley's relationship with Claire? Whose was the baby Elena, adopted and then inexplicably dropped by the Shelleys in Italy? What happened in Wales in 1814 to terrify Shelley so much? and much more besides. I could not possibly fault all this, or indeed wholly disagree with her conclusions about Shelley's peculiar mental state. I've always had a very soft spot for Claire and thought she came out well here. But, though I've never really warmed to Mary, I can't say I've ever gone down the road that Shepherd takes us on -- enough said.

Many years ago I wrote a book about Mary Shelley's mother, the great feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, and did my fair share of puzzling over discrepancies in the historical accounts, one of which resulted in an article with the rather charming name 'A Meritorious Wife; or, Mrs Godwin and the Donkey'. You might think that this foreknowledge would have put me off the novel, and I see that Daisy Hay, author of the recent Young Romantics: The Shelleys, Byron and Other Tangled Lives, showed her displeasure with it in her Guardian review. But you know what? I took it all with a pinch of salt and thought it was really good fun. In fact my only real quibble was that by the end my head was rather spinning with all the revelations and complications that Charles uncovered. But maybe that's just me. 

I have not read Shepherd's other novels, but I am now keen to read Tom All Alone's, which uses the characters and seetings of one of my favorite novels of all time, Bleak House, as well as featuring the attractive detective who reappears here. Anyone else read either of these?

 

Dr Thorne

How Did He Do It?  is not the title of a novel by Anthony Trollope, though it could be (cf. Can You Forgive Her? Is He Popenjoy?, Did He Steal It?). No, it reflects my amazement at the astonishingly prolific output of a man who managed to hold down a highly responsible job while producing 47 novels, 12 volumes of short stories, 18 works of non-fiction and two plays. And not just any old novels, mind you -- although his reputation was a bit up and down at first, there's no doubt -- in my mind at least -- that he was one of the most important novelists of the nineteenth century. And in fact, one reason why he was looked at with a rather beady eye by some of his contemporaries was the very fact that he wrote so much and in such an organised way -- he paid his servant an extra £5 a year to wake him up with a cup of coffee at 5am so that he could write for three hours before he went to work. What's wrong with that, you may ask? Well, there was a view at the time that you had to wait for the Muse to strike you before you picked up your pen, so Trollope's method seemed a good deal too mundane. Also, he was not much liked for his most delightful way of suddenly addressing the reader, or, in more contemporary parlance, drawing attention to the act of writing:

But it will be too much, perhaps, to tell the reader what she wore as Beatrice's bridesmaid, seeing that a couple of pages, at least, must be devoted to her marriage dress, and seeing, also, that we have only a few pages left to finish everything...

I've read a few of Trollope's novels over the years, though only reviewed one on here, the not very well known Lady Anna. Dr Thorne is much better known, being the fourth of the so-called Barchester Novels, of which I have read the first three, though in pre-blogging days. The eponymous doctor is a middle-aged gentleman of modest means, who lives in the village of Greshamsbury. Twenty or so years before the story begins, he adopted the illegitimate baby daughter of his ne-er do well brother, who had been murdered by the brother of the village girl he made pregnant. The child's mother has married and gone to America, the brother has served his sentence and subsequently become stupendously rich, but the doctor and his beloved adopted Mary have gone on quietly with their lives in domestic peace and comfort. Mary has become very close to the daughters of the neighbouring squire Mr Gresham, with whom she has shared lessons throughout her teenage years. Now, as the novel begins, the Gresham's only son Frank has reached twenty-one, and the whole neighbourhood is sharing in the celebrations. As we soon learn, Frank and Mary have fallen in love, but from this seemingly innocent fact springs the whole convoluted and often nail-biting plot.

Money, social class and "blood". To these and their often complex interactions are owed the trials and tribulations of poor Mary and Frank. For Frank's father has managed to get himself into deep financial trouble, and that part of his estate that he has not sold is heavily mortgaged. Thus it is that, certainly as far as his mother and her aristocratic relations are concerned, Frank has but one duty -- to marry money. Mary has neither money nor that second prerequisite, "blood" (of the blue variety), and indeed her illegitimacy puts her beyond the pale. Of course, the immensely wealthy heiress who the family would like Frank to marry is the daughter of a tradesman, but her riches overrule what would otherwise be an absolute barrier.

As anyone who is familiar with Trollope will know, these are his common concerns. But that does not make this novel any less appealing. Trollope manages to satirise the worst excesses of the appalling aristocrats and the dreadfulness of their lawyers in a way which is both funny and horrifically convincing. But he also manages to create characters who have undoubted faults and yet make them surprisingly sympathetic. And then of course there is Mary, the most admirable heroine, intelligent and feisty as well as pretty, who suffers dreadfully through a great part of the novel but bears it with great courage, and dear, good-hearted, loyal Frank, and the delightful doctor himself, very human and not always right but always having at heart the best interests of those he loves. 

I am so happy to have rediscovered Trollope. After a rather worrying reading block earlier this year, it is exciting to find that there are more than forty unread novels to look forward to! I've started one already, and another is on its way, so keep a watch on here for more reviews soon. Any fellow Trollope fans out there? What's your favorite?

 

All the Beggars Riding

Clever Lucy Caldwell, who writes both plays and novels and manages to win prizes for both, has just published this, her third novel. I've read the other two, and reviewed the second, The Meeting Point, a couple of years ago. Both were impressive and enjoyable, but this one I found absolutely unputdownable -- I started it as soon as it popped into the mailbox and finished it by the next day.

This is the story of Lara Moorhouse, who also narrates the novel. A woman in her late thirties, not happy with her life, she is looking back to her childhood with a good deal of grief and anger. Until she was twelve, she had accepted the absences of her plastic surgeon father Patrick, who only visited the family in London once every couple of weeks since his job kept him in Belfast. Then a sudden revelation on a disastrous holiday in Spain made her understand the truth. Lara, her brother Alfie, and their mother Jane were Patrick's second family, his first being his legal wife and two children in Belfast. Somehow Patrick has succeeded in keeping this secret double life going, but, after he is killed in a helicopter crash, the truth comes out, and Jane and the children are forced to leave their comfortable flat and move to grubby and unattractive lodgings in the back streets of Fulham. Lara is furious and incomprehending about how her parents made their choices, but her attempt to get her dying mother to talk about it has failed completely. 

The novel, then, is about coming to terms with all this, something Lara has never been able to do. And she does it, in the end, by writing about it. In the early chapters we learn that, as part of her job as a carer, she has been attending, though not participating in, a creative writing class, and eventually she decides to write the story of it all from her mother's point of view. In doing so, though she realises that Perhaps it didn't happen like any of that at all. It probably didn't, she also feels some kind of reconciliation: I understand how it could have, now that I've tried it.

So, this is also a story about writing, its difficulties and its rewards. We see Lara's early struggles with how to structure her story:

I'm getting ahead of myself, I know, jumbling things up again. I do intend to come to things properly, in their own time, in at least approximately the right order. It's harder to tell a story, though, than you'd think. As I said earlier, lives aren't orderly, and nor is memory: the mind doesn't work like that. We make it so, when we narrate things -- setting them in straight lines and in context -- whereas in reality things are all mixed up, and you feel several things, even things that contradict each other, or that happened at separate times, or that aren't on the surface even related, all at once.

and it is only when she steps outside her attempts to make sense of her own life and puts herself into her fictional mother's fictional shoes that she's able to get a clear perspective. 

The whole premise of this story is one that I found particularly fascinating. We are quite used to reading of the pains and pleasures of being a mistress -- the jealousy, the loneliness, the self-deception, but also the excitement and the knowledge or at least the hope that you have something that the wife does not have. But when children enter the equation you are in a whole other ballgame. In fact this is a surprisingly common state of affairs, and pops up in the press fairly frequently. Lucy Caldwell was apparently inspired by a documentary about the architect Louis Khan, who actually had three families -- the film, My Architect: A Son's Journey, was made by one of his 'secret' children. All very interesting.

I interviewed Lucy Caldwell in 2011, so if you'd like to know more about her and her writing, you can find that here. But better yet, get yourself a copy of this novel and prepare for a really enjoyable read. 

"perfect for fans of..."

If there's one thing that really riles me when I find it on the cover of a book, it's a comment such as 'perfect for fans of [insert random name here]'. There are variations such as 'the next Steig Larsson' which appears in the publicity of just about any crime novel published anywhere north of Germany, but 'perfect for fans of...' suggests to me that there will be some kind of similarity between the present work and that of the named celebrity. So I was a little disquieted when I saw the formula on the cover of this one, kindly sent by the publisher, especially as it was attributed to a writer I admire a lot, Sam Mills, who seemingly thinks the novel would be perfect for fans of Sophie Hannah. Now I am a huge fan of Sophie Hannah, and have in fact just received a copy of her latest novel, so you'll be hearing more about her soon. But the thing for which I would say she is most celebrated is her ability to kick off her novels with the most extraordinary and apparently inexplicable scenario, which is then slowly unravelled throughout the rest of the book. And such is not the case with The Woman Before Me.

Now this is not to say there is anything wrong with this novel, which has won the CWA Debut Dagger Award and the Luke Bitmead Novel Award (of which I'd never heard, but never mind that), and has a great many five-star reviews on Amazon and elsewhere. I'm just riding a probably rather pathetic hobby horse here --  it's just that I think it doesn't do a writer any favours if you compare her to someone who she doesn't really resemble. But Ruth Dugdall clearly has done fine anyway, and this, her first novel, has been followed by two more, equally successful.

On her website Ruth says "my books explore the darker areas of himan behaviour and how long-held secrets can affect the present". Certainly that is a good description of what happens here. Rose Wilks, an unhappy and rather unattractive woman in her thirties, has served four years of a sentence for murdering a baby who died in a fire when she had been babysitting him. Ruth is up for parole, and being assessed by a young probabtion officer, Cate Austin, who is new to the job. The narrative shifts between Cate's story, present day, and Ruth's 'Black Book' in which she recounts her own past history and the events which have led up to her arrest and imprisonment. A sad story it is indeed, and of course, being the sort of novel this is, there's a twist on the last page which I  wasn't expecting (though I was expecting something). 

So, if this sounds like your sort of book, go for it!