“Here they were, wrecked together on the edge of Europe as on an island and she was learning to keep her thoughts to herself.” (The Spoilt City, Olivia Manning)

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It was a conversation with Marcie in the comments of Jacqui’s Levant Trilogy post which led to us doing a buddy read for all three volumes of Olivia Manning’s Balkan Trilogy this year. We started with The Great Fortune (1960) in June, and now onto the second instalment, The Spoilt City (1962).

It took me a while to get into The Great Fortune, but by the end I was whizzing through and couldn’t wait to start The Spoilt City. I’m clearly in the rhythm of Manning’s writing now because I sank right in and absolutely loved this second volume.

(What I decided I didn’t love was the omnibus edition I started with, so I’ve bought these Windmill Editions now and I’m much happier).

The city is Bucharest in 1940, and we follow still-fairly-recently married Guy and Harriet Pringle as the physical and social environment they are used to disintegrates around them.

“On the pavement the Guardist youths with their banners and pamphlets, were still trying to rouse revolt. Although a sense of revolt agitated the nerves like an electric storm that would not break, the city was lethargic, the palace dormant, its white blinds drawn down against the tedium of the afternoon.”

This volume is increasingly tense, the Nazi threat growing ever-closer. Guy is still teaching English at the university, but both students and the staff group are rapidly dwindling.

“With uncomplaining enthusiasm, Guy did much more than was expected of him; but he was not imposed upon. He did what he wanted to do and did it, Harriet believed, to keep reality at bay.”

Guy’s boss Inchcape is also determined to keep the Department open, even as dangers grow. This volume is more emotionally affecting than the first, I found this particularly true in a scene with the older single women of the department being forced to leave for their own safety, as well as Inchcape having to face his vulnerabilities to a shocking extent.

This forms the shifting and stressful background to the Pringles’ early marriage. Both Harriet and Guy have to acknowledge their profound differences in how they approach life and see things:

“It was probably significant that he was physically short-sighted. He could not recognise people until almost upon them. Their faces were like so many buns. good-natured buns, he would have said, but Harriet did not agree. She saw them in detail and did not like them any the better for it.”

“He saw her muddled and lost in anarchy and a childish mysticism.”

Guy’s belief in communism gives him more certainty, a grounding as the ground constantly shifts beneath them. Still, their marriage seems underpinned by a great deal of love for each other, although the reader is not privy to any declarations.

My favourite character Yakimov is still racketing around, trying to sell his beloved Hispano-Suiza car even as no-one has money for fuel. He is still living with the Pringles and Harriet despairs.

“If she wanted to get rid of him, she would have to pack his bags herself and lock him out. And if she did that, he would probably sit on the doorstep until Guy brought him back in again.”

Yaki behaves appallingly in the first part of the novel, before redeeming himself beautifully at the end, making his portrayal one of the most comedic, disturbing and complex in The Spoilt City. Apparently based on Julian Maclaren-Ross, I really should learn more about this Fitzrovian dandy poet. Anthony Powell based X Trapnel on him in A Dance to the Music of Time, and he certainly seems a character…

What struck me most in this volume, apart from the evocation of physically crumbling environs, was the ambivalence, or perhaps resignation, of most of the people Harriet interacts with. As long as they are safe and their lives continue in a way that works for them, they don’t seem to particularly care who is in charge. This made me realise the oppositional Second World War narratives I’ve taken for granted until now; I am used to films and books where people are firmly on the side of the Allies or the Axis powers, not indifferent between the two.

This is brought into sharp focus by Harriet’s English friend, Bella:

“Her skin apricot, her hair bleached by the sun, Bella was looking extremely handsome and seemed almost intoxicated by the night’s happenings.

‘How wonderful to have a strong man in power!’ she said. ‘Everyone is saying that Romania will regain her territory.’

‘What makes them think that?’

‘Because Antonescu is a real dictator. He knows how to deal with Hitler and Musso. He’s one of them. I don’t mind betting, within three months, this country will be on its feet again.’”

Later they meet again, Bella delighting in all she can buy as prices tumble, when they run into each other under a newly erected swastika flag:

“Elated by her rising fortune, she looked up and smiled at the flag and the clear pale sky beyond it. ‘I love this time of year,’ she said. ‘so delicious after the fug of summer. It makes one feel so alive.’

She seemed aglitter with life, almost dancing in her new green lizard skin shoes.”

Astonishingly, it is only Guy who overtly acknowledges what is behind the flag, the only one who says “I couldn’t stand it. I kept thinking of the concentration camps.”

Manning leaves spaces in her narrative so we assume Harriet is of a similar mind, although her primary worry is for the safety of Guy, vulnerable under the new regime because of his communist beliefs and willingness to teach Jewish students.

The Pringles are also at risk as they still have sweet Sacha Drucker in their flat, and early on we know they have been betrayed and are likely to be raided…

“Truth is a luxury. We can only afford it now and then.”

The Spoilt City is a novel which conveys the physical and human devastation wreaked by war for those not directly caught in conflict. It is deeply moving without being remotely sentimental, and feels entirely believable. I found myself completely caught up in the Pringles’ lives and even (shock horror!) warming to Guy. I’m impatient to read volume three, Friends and Heroes.

I wound up googling Hispano-Suiza cars as Yaki describes his so lovingly. I can’t drive and I’m entirely uninterested in cars, but even I can see this is a lovely machine:

Blog Tour: The Hotel Manager’s Guide to Murder by Erlendur Arason (transl. Quentin Bates)

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I’m delighted to be taking part in a blog tour today for a new-to-me author and publisher: The Hotel Manager’s Guide to Murder by Erlendur Arason (2025, transl. Quentin Bates 2025) from Blekverk Books.

I’m always a bit trepidatious with books described as Nordic Noir – how noir are we talking? I’m really not in the market for anything gruesome. But the title sets the tone of a darkly comic crime thriller, which I really enjoyed. Here is the publisher’s summary:

“Guests at one of Reykjavík’s smartest hotels never know what happens behind the scenes – including what brings a group of the city’s homeless to the Bristol Hotel every winter night while the rest of the world sleeps.

When overworked supervisor Torfi finds himself given an unexpected promotion that comes with a respectable pay rise, he takes it as a lucky break – until he’s told to make a murder victim disappear, and that he doesn’t have any choice. That’s when his life rapidly gets a lot more complicated.

What isn’t he being told? Torfi doesn’t know, but when police officers Haukur and Dagný start asking awkward questions, he needs to find answers – even though he knows only half of the story.

Longing desperately to go back to his old, boring life, Torfi finds himself desperately out of his depth as his family are threatened and his problems spiral far out of his control.”

Torfi’s troubles begin when he is fired:

“Her voice was like silk slowly tearing.

‘But…’ Torfi’s mouth had already been dry, but now it was parched. ‘I … I know everything.’”

What he means is, he knows the job inside out. But shifty manager Ásbjörn and steely HR Head Sigríður assume he means something else entirely, and promptly give him a promotion and financial sweetener.

“He explored his stomach with one hand. There was no sign of the old tension that had so often left him doubled up in pain, but there was a fizzing ache in his chest that was new. He took more deep breaths with his eyes shut tight, as he wondered yet again what he had got himself into.”

While Torfi is grateful for the money, taking some of the pressure off him and his partner Stjana’s blended family, he also knows he is way out of his depth. There is something of the Hitchcockian wrong man to Torfi, caught up in a sinister conspiracy he barely understands.

“He chewed a sweet roll studded with caraway seeds and thought over what had gone on overnight, still hardly daring to believe that he had really assisted in disposing of a corpse in the middle of the night – for what? To protect someone powerful in the hierarchy? Why had he done that? He glumly admitted to himself that he knew the answer perfectly well. He had no choice in the matter. He’d accepted the money without a qualm, and now he would be paying that particular debt for a long time to come.”

As Torfi tries to piece together what on earth is going on at the hotel, there is plenty of opportunity for Arason to satirise corporate culture, the financial demands of modern life, and the easy disregard for lives that are not protected by wealth or power.

“Torfi shook his head. He reflected that the more he got to know his colleagues at management level, the more he was astonished at how different their lives were to those of the staff whose wages were paid every Friday.”

These wider points are woven through without slowing down the story at all, and the pace is compelling without feeling relentless. The plot is just twisty enough without ever stretching credibility and I raced through to find out what on earth was going on at the hotel.

There was so much to enjoy in The Hotel Manager’s Guide to Murder, and I’m looking forward to the next two instalments in this trilogy set around Reykjavik. I hope we get an update on Torfi, there are a few loose ends I’m keen to know the outcome of…

Here are the rest of the stops on the tour, so do find out how other bloggers found The Hotel Manager’s Guide to Murder:

“It occurred to her that they were not, in fact, grown-up enough for the life they were living.” (Olivia Manning, The Great Fortune)

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It was JacquiWine’s enthusiasm for Olivia Manning’s Balkan Trilogy which caused me to add it to the TBR, and a conversation with Marcie in the comments of Jacqui’s Levant Trilogy post which led to me finally getting the first instalment read! I’m delighted that Marcie and I are doing a buddy read for all three volumes this year, starting with The Great Fortune (1960) in June.

I’d originally planned to get this read by good time starting in April, but life took over, then novellas, and I’ve ended up finishing it on 29 June – one day spare! It says something for Manning’s writing that even my terrible memory and total inability with names kept her pretty large cast of characters straight despite a gap of about 8 weeks or so…

Guy and Harriet Pringle are newly married. The book opens with their arrival in Bucharest, a new experience for Harriet, but Guy has been there a year, working for the British Council at the university. It is 1939 and the new war across Europe looms large.

“‘Who is that?’ Harriet whispered. ‘Does he know us?’

‘Everyone knows us. We are the English. We are at war.’

‘But who is he?’

‘lonescu, the Minister of Information. He’s always here.’

‘How odd to live in such a small capital!’

‘There are advantages. Whatever happens here, one is in the midst of it.’”

It’s a time of adjustment to a new life and each other, against a rapidly changing, unstable background. Harriet begins to realise they are not easily compatible, with Guy’s relentless sociability at odds with her need for intimacy:

“They had slipped into marriage as though there could be no other possibly resolution of such an encounter. Yet — supposing she had known him better? Supposing she had known him for a year and during that time observed him in all his other relationships? She would have hesitated, thinking the net of his affections too widespread to hold the weighty accompaniment of marriage.”

The characterisation of these two young people is complex. Although Guy is constantly in company, this is motivated by his communist beliefs and a general generosity of spirit, rather than any particular interest or warmth regarding individuals.

“Guy said: ‘He leads his life, as we all do. What do you care what he does?’

‘Naturally I’m interested.’

‘Why be interested in people’s private lives? What they are pleased to let us know should be enough for us.’

‘Well, I just am. You’re interested in ideas; I in people. If you were more interested in people, you might not like them so much.’

Guy did not reply. Harriet supposed he was reflecting on the logic of her statement, but when he spoke she realised he had not given it a thought.”

My experience of Guy was that he was one of the most irritating, infuriating characters I’ve ever come across. His generosity paradoxically made him entirely selfish, as he seemed to have no real consideration for Harriet at all. She isn’t particularly likeable either, often xenophobic and begrudging with people. But as their relationship matures, she is more forgiving than me, recognising “a husband made unreliable only by his abysmal kindness”.

Manning makes them both so real (apparently based on her and her husband) that it became of little consequence that I didn’t like them – I wanted to hear about their lives at this time. Guy does live by his ideals, so he is not a deliberately unkind person, just utterly oblivious. He has enough redeeming qualities for Harriet’s love to be understandable:

“We must help him, not because he’s a good person but because he needs help. You understand that.”

Through Guy, we meet a range of characters who have ended up in Bucharest at this particular moment. These include but are not limited to:

Sophie, a student Guy considering marrying in order for her to have a passport – in his usual way he is unconcerned regarding her being in love with him; Sacha is another of his students, part of an immensely rich family called the Druckers; Harriet makes friends with Bella, an English woman married to a Romanian, Nikko Niculescu; we meet staff at the university, and journalists at the English Bar. Manning handles her large cast deftly, and even the less prominent characters are sketched distinctly.

There is also my favourite character – in many ways equally irritating as Guy – Prince Yakimov, an Irish/Russian prince. Yakimov is perpetually sponging off his friends, promising an always due to arrive remittance, pleading with them to pity “poor Yaki”. He is preoccupied by fine food, and starving most of the time. His English is peppered with phrases that sound almost Wodehouseian. He is utterly ill-equipped to deal with life in any way whatsoever, and yet somehow he endures on his own terms:

“Had Yakimov been content to eat modestly, he could have existed from one remittance to the next, but he was not content. When his allowance arrived, he ate himself into a stupor, then, penniless again, returned, a beggar, to the English Bar. It was not that he despised simple food. He despised no food of any kind. When he could afford nothing more, he would go to the Dâmbovița and eat the peasant’s staple food, a mess of maize. But food, rich food, was an obsessive longing. He needed it as other men need drink, tobacco or drugs.”

The progress of the war is documented, but never heavy-handed. The characters stop by a publicly displayed map of Europe which shows the fall of Poland and the invasion of Denmark, Norway, and the Low Countries. Through the journalists in the English bar, the Battle of Dunkirk is relayed.

As the risk to Harriet and Guy grows, he responds surprisingly by becoming entirely wrapped up in producing a performance of Troilus and Cressida. I found this an intriguing choice by Manning. One of Shakespeare’s less well-known plays, it is tonally deeply odd. A tragedy but filled with unpleasant characters, a comedy but in bad taste a lot of the time. Harriet observes that everyone seems to be playing themselves. Yaki is commended for his portrayal of Pandarus, but Pandarus is a pimp. The play ends with that character wishing venereal disease on the audience – yuck. I love Shakespeare but Troilus and Cressida tests that assertion more than any other of his works.

It is a play about the Trojan war, so in a way it shows again how young and naïve so many of the characters are, play-acting while a very real war grows ever-more threatening. It also adds to the general sense of uncertainty, with very little to secure your knowledge or hope upon.

“Guy came hurrying in behind them. […] His size gave her an illusion of security — for it was, she was coming to believe, no more than an illusion. He was one of those harbours that prove to be too shallow: there was no getting into it. For him, personal relationships were incidental. His fulfilment came from the outside world.”

This volume ends in June 1940, and so as readers we know that these characters still have so much conflict to live through.

I’ve only scratched the surface of The Great Fortune, but this post is already far too long! It took me a while to get back into this novel, before something clicked and I whizzed through the remainder. I’m really looking forward to carrying on the story with The Spoilt City.  

In 1987, the BBC made both trilogies into a seven-part series, which seems a lot to squeeze in. I think I might give it a try, once I’ve finished reading them all…

If anyone would like to join us for this buddy read, please do! We’ll be posting in The Spoilt City in August and Friends and Heroes in October.

“I always write with the Caribbean in mind.” (Merle Collins)

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It feels somewhat inevitable that having been searching for my final read for Around the World in 80 Books, it turned out not to be tricky to source at all, but a book that had been languishing in the TBR  for a while. Angel by Merle Collins (1987) explores politically turbulent years in Grenada through the life of the young titular character.

It opens with Angel in her mother Doodsie’s arms, as workers strike and set fire to the plantations.

“The men held their cutlasses firmly. Held up on Doodsie’s shoulder, Angel clung round her mother’s neck. Mother and child kept their eyes riveted on the fire, Angel wide-eyed, Doodsie suddenly very afraid as she saw the De Lisle plantation houses enveloped in flames, a burning glow in the red and sky.

Just under the hill from the crowd, Ma Ettie sat down in her house and secured the folds of her headtie.”

The strikers follow union boss Leader (based on Eric Gairy). Angel’s father Allan has great faith, but Doodsie is more sceptical. She was my favourite character – some attitudes of her generation but a fiercely intelligent, independent- spirited, hard-working woman, who does not have an easy life. Allan comes and goes, providing little money as it is spread between his children with other women. Meanwhile Doodsie raises her family and tries to enable the choices she has been denied.

“Doodsie looked across at her daughter as she combed her fingers through the doll’s blonde hair. She wondered what Angel would grow up to be. One thing if I have anything to do with it, she not going to have my kind of life. She thought of Simon, sleeping quietly inside. He looked so hurt if you ever shouted at him, you just had to shut up after a while. Angel, on the other hand, looked as though she wanted to find out how long you could go on shouting for. She wouldn’t take no for an answer when she decided she wanted something.”

As Angel grows up she is intelligent but somewhat unmotivated, passing her exams except for West Indian history, which she finds dull and not as interesting as British history. It is at university in Jamaica where she starts to think politically, both on an international level and a personal level when she stops ironing her hair.

“She remembered always that day during her first year at school, when one of the nuns who took a deep interesting her welfare told her she should ask her mother to have her hair ironed or straightened so that it would look decent. Angel had held her head down, her hands had fingered her tie, she had muttered some answer of assent, then slithered along the wall of the corridor around the corner to the notice board. She stood staring up at it through her tears, feeling untidy and stupid, rolling and unrolling the grey tie around her neck.”

Angel heads back to Grenada after she gets her degree, to teach. Grenada achieves independence from Britain, and the family are still divided over Leader, whose portrait Allan has on the wall, before Angel smashes it. Her younger brother Rupert is part of the revolution which overthrows Leader (based on the New Jewel Movement).

“‘Civil war is blood, Rupert.’

‘Which side you on, Angel?’

‘I not on no blasted side. Side talk is war talk.’

‘That is rubbish. That opportunist nonsense could only mean you not on the side of the people. Why you don take a stan? The ting that frighten me about you is dat you able to support everybody. You always balancin! That is pure opportunism! Dammit to hell, Angel! Follow you mind! Come down on one side!’”

Much of the novel is written in patois and I found this evocative and powerful, and straightforward to follow although there is also a useful glossary at the end for non-speakers.

The story finishes with the dramatic events of the US invasion, before shifting to symbolic scenes in Doodsie’s backyard, and with Angel at the Delicia river. It is a fitting end to a book that expertly balances the story of a Grenadian family alongside major national events, never losing sight of either but showing how they are completely interwoven.

To end, a song quoted several times in the novel:

Title quote from an interview on Caribbean Literary Heritage.

“I love cats because I enjoy my home; and little by little, they become its visible soul.” (Jean Cocteau)

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Once again, I completely failed to read I Am a Cat for the fab event Reading the Meow 2026 hosted by Mallika at Literary Potpourri. It’s just such a whopper! Next year I’m going to make a start in March 😊

I decided I’d see if I could find something shorter in the TBR in order to take part, and was hunting about in golden age crime. Mallika had also suggested looking for a short story, and so checking In the Teeth of Evidence by Dorothy L Sayers (1939) came up trumps, because the final story in the collection is The Cyprian Cat. My cheesy 1980s edition even has some Big Cats on the cover:

It’s a very short tale, only 13 pages in my edition. It takes the form of a monologue, with a man in serious trouble for seemingly having shot at a cat (there’s no animal cruelty in the story, despite his horrible plans) and speaking to his K.C as silent interlocutor. It opens:

“It’s extraordinarily decent of you to come along and see me like this, Harringay. Believe me, I do appreciate it. It isn’t every busy K.C. who’d do as much for such a hopeless sort of client. I only wish I could spin you a more workable kind of story, but honestly, I can only tell you exactly what I told Peabody. Of course, I can see he doesn’t believe a word of it, and I don’t blame him. He thinks I ought to be able to make up a more plausible tale than that—and I suppose I could, but where’s the use?”

He and his old schoolfriend Merridew both seemed to be following the bachelor life, until Merridew marries a woman fifteen years younger than him. She has never left the Norfolk village in which she was raised, but about a year after the nuptials, they all arrange to meet in Somerset.

Describing the train journey down, we learn of the narrator’s extreme aversion to cats:

“I found a horrible feeling creeping over me that there was a cat in the compartment somewhere. I’m one of those wretched people who can’t stand cats. I don’t mean just that I prefer dogs—I mean that the presence of a cat in the same room with me makes me feel like nothing on earth. I can’t describe it, but I believe quite a lot of people are affected that way. Something to do with electricity, or so they tell me. I’ve read that very often the dislike is mutual, but it isn’t so with me. The brutes seem to find me abominably fascinating—make a bee-line for my legs every time. It’s a funny sort of complaint, and it doesn’t make me at all popular with dear old ladies.”

He passes the time staring at the attractive young lady opposite him, who of course turns out to be Merridew’s new wife. And so they spend time together as planned, the peaceable atmosphere only spoilt by the titular feline, and others, at night:

“Every night the garden seemed to be haunted by them—the Cyprian cat that I had seen the first night of my stay, and a little ginger one and a horrible stinking black Tom were especially tiresome, and one night there was a terrified white kitten that mewed for an hour on end under my window. I flung boots and books at my visitors till I was heartily weary, but they seemed determined to make the inn garden their rendezvous. The nuisance grew worse from night to night; on one occasion I counted fifteen of them, sitting on their hinder-ends in a circle, while the Cyprian cat danced her shadow-dance among them, working in and out like a weaver’s shuttle.”

Sayers builds an increasingly tense atmosphere of oppressive summer heat and the narrator being driven to distraction by the nighttime caterwauling.

But how did he end up shooting a gun? And why is what happened so implausible? Well, you can read the story online here. Sayers leaves plenty unexplained in this unnerving tale, although I know what I think happened… Lord Peter Wimsey would never believe it!

Review-along: Lady Audley’s Secret

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I really wanted to join in with the review-along for Lady Audley’s Secret by Mary Elizabeth Braddon (1862), as it’s a long-standing part of Mount TBR. Novellas a Day in May meant it was beyond me to post on 1 June, but here is my late entry!

The titular woman is introduced to the reader as a penniless but beautiful governess, Lucy Graham:

“Wherever she went she seemed to take joy and brightness with her. In the cottages of the poor her fair face shone like a sunbeam […] and when she tripped away, leaving nothing behind her (for her poor salary gave no scope to her benevolence), the old woman would burst out into senile raptures with her grace, beauty, and her kindliness, such as she never bestowed upon the vicar’s wife, who half fed and clothed her. For you see, Miss Lucy Graham was blessed with that magic power of fascination, by which a woman can charm with a word or intoxicate with a smile. Every one loved, admired, and praised her.”

Is it me or is there some sly humour there? This woman elbowing her way into the cottages of the poor, assuming that to bask in her presence is payment enough? I don’t think Braddon takes a humorous approach generally to this sensation story, but maybe there’s a bit happening…

Lucy catches the eye of Sir Michael Audley, windowed and stinking rich, so of course they are married. But here Lucy’s charms find their limit, with spiky step-daughter Alicia who is only a few years younger:

“She is a vain, frivolous, heartless little coquette,” said Alicia, addressing herself to her Newfoundland dog Caesar, who was the sole recipient of the young lady’s confidences; “she is a practiced and consummate flirt, Caesar; and not contented with setting her yellow ringlets and her silly giggle at half the men in Essex, she must needs make that stupid cousin of mine dance attendance upon her. I haven’t common patience with her.”

The stupid cousin is feckless Robert Audley:

“Sometimes, when the weather was very hot, and he had exhausted himself with the exertion of smoking his German pipe, and reading French novels, he would stroll into the Temple Gardens, and lying in some shady spot, pale and cool, with his shirt collar turned down and a blue silk handkerchief tied loosely about his neck, would tell grave benchers that he had knocked himself up with over work.”

However, when Robert’s friend George Talboys disappears on a visit to Audley Court, Robert can’t shake off his feeling that something is deeply amiss, and begins to investigate.

“The lazy bent of his mind, which prevented him from thinking of half a dozen things at a time, and not thinking thoroughly of any one of them, as is the manner of your more energetic people, made him remarkably clear-sighted upon any point to which he ever gave his serious attention.”

This pulls him into a convoluted tale, whereby George had abandoned his wife and baby to seek his fortune in Australia, fully expecting her to be patiently waiting after three and a half years in which he didn’t contact her once. On his return, George found his wife had died and his son was being raised by his father-in-law, a man who spends all his money on alcohol.

Robert soon realises that the new Lady Audley may be involved with George Talboys’ disappearance…shocker! The secret is quickly worked out by the reader and we watch as Robert tries to unravel her history and prove what has happened to his friend.

His investigation will see him uncover murder, arson, thefts, lies, manipulations, impersonations, conspiracies… well, it is a sensation novel after all!

The exploration of women’s roles in Lady Audley’s Secret is interesting. Lucy is constantly referred to as beautiful, doll-like, with a halo of golden curls. She revels in material wealth, but like a child.

“Her fragile figure, which she loved to dress in heavy velvets, and stiff, rustling silks, till she looked like a child tricked out for a masquerade, was as girlish as if she had just left the nursery. All her amusements were childish. She hated reading, or study of any kind, and loved society. Rather than be alone, she would admit Phoebe Marks into her confidence, and loll on one of the sofas in her luxurious dressing-room, discussing a new costume for some coming dinner-party; or sit chattering to the girl with her jewel-box beside her, upon the satin cushions, and Sir Michael’s presents spread out in her lap, while she counted and admired her treasures.”

But what is also made clear is that this love of money has grown from a background of poverty. Lucy knows what it is to be poor, and she never wants to be that way again. The way to ensure this, is to use her looks and marry for money. In Victorian society that is the best use of her resources.

Meanwhile Alicia enjoys being sporty and active, and is rubbish at running a household. She seems to spend a lot of time being furious, which seems borne of frustration that she doesn’t have a lot of options as to what to do with her sharp mind and talents, as well as Robert’s failure to realise she is in love with him.

There’s some anti-women rhetoric in the novel too, mainly from Robert, but this seemed a source of humour and I felt Braddon was more on the side of questioning the limited choices for women at the time. I also found among the sensation, a nudge towards compassion and moderation, particularly in the character of George’s father, the wonderfully named Harcourt Talboys:

“There were no shady nooks in his character into which one could creep for shelter from his hard daylight. He was all daylight. He looked at everything in the same broad glare of intellectual sunlight, and would see no softening shadows that might alter the sharp outlines of cruel facts, subduing them to beauty. I do not know if I express what I mean, when I say that there were no curves in his character—that his mind ran in straight lines, never diverging to the right or the left to round off their pitiless angles. With him right was right, and wrong was wrong. He had never in his merciless, conscientious life admitted the idea that circumstances might mitigate the blackness of wrong or weaken the force of right. He had cast off his only son because his only son had disobeyed him, and he was ready to cast off his only daughter at five minutes’ notice for the same reason.”

All in all I enjoyed Lady Audley’s Secret, but it was repetitive and overlong. This is a bit of an unfair criticism; like many Victorian ‘baggy monsters’ it was serialised and the repetition was to get readers up to speed/remind them of what had gone before. But reading it as a 376 page novel with teeny-tiny type meant I felt it could have easily stood to lose 100 pages.

However, it was also a ripping yarn, an interesting portrait of various aspects of Victorian society written in a readable style, had some lovely descriptions (if repeated too often) and some complex characterisation in Lady Audley. I’m so pleased the read-along meant I finally got to this one.

Here is Fiction Fan’s Review which also has the links to other bloggers who were much more organised than I am and posted on time!

Novella a Day in May 2026 – No.31

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I made it! I’m genuinely amazed! May has been a really busy, slightly chaotic month and I can’t believe I managed to sustain my daily novella reading and posting. I’ve enjoyed it so much, and a massive thank you to everyone who has liked and commented, and ignored grammatical errors and general waffle, as some of these posts were written when I was very tired 😊

Many of you will know Simon has also been doing his #BookaDayinMay project, so it feels very apt to be finishing with a book he reviewed this month which had me scurrying off to spend my bookshop.org vouchers. The Driveway Has Two Sides by Sara Marchant (2018), is published by the lovely Fairlight Moderns and it arrived just in time!  

The Driveway Has Two Sides follows the arrival of Delilah on an East Coast island. “The matriarchs” of the island are sceptical of this self-contained young woman.

“They were taciturn by nature, and the environment on the island required tact, discretion, and independence.”

They watch her clean out her house and start to reorganise her garden. Some of their questions are answered when Delilah changes out of her overalls into a dress, in order to greet a man the matriarchs judge as “too old for his long hair and overly blue denim jeans.”

This is Alan, Delilah’s married lover who is paying for everything. He’s entirely self-focussed and just likes Delilah as a pretty young thing to feed his ego, the same as his sports car:

“Delilah’s silence was one of Alan’s favourite things.”

Delilah doesn’t seem too bothered by this, as she views her relationships with older men as transactional. With Alan the material gains are obvious. With Ted, the sweet, kind, widowed Sherriff of the town, she wants his gardening know-how:

“She saw his gardening instinct win out over lust. She hugged her arms around her waist. She loved older men.”

There is a lot about gardening in this novella, which is a big win for me, I loved all the descriptions of garden plans and planting. But if you’re not into gardening don’t let that put you off, it’s not overwhelming!

“The shades and variations of green, highlighted by the specimen plants that were not green, looked more than natural. They looked supernatural. It was an Impressionist painting come to life. It was a masterpiece. Ted was an artist.”

We follow Delilah as she gets her physical house in order, while trying to work out how she is going to live. (Teeny criticism: there is talk of her ‘completing’ her garden. Any gardener knows you never complete your garden!)

“Later, during his trips by her house, Ted watched as she developed her kitchen garden in the front. He understood her reasoning; there was more room, more sun, a fence to use as garden bones. He still found it scandalous, yet also intriguing, he had to admit.”

The titular driveway is shared with her mysterious neighbour, someone even more contained than Delilah. He is attracted to her, as is seemingly every man in the book. Their relationship builds, and so in a sense the plot is who of three men Delilah will choose.

But that’s not a plot that particularly interests me, yet I enjoyed Driveway. I enjoyed it for its depiction of small-town life, its gentle humour and its humanity.

Unusually for me, I finished the short novel for once wishing it had been longer – I would have liked to have met Maisie Thompson, Delilah’s  “friend and sparring partner” who we only hear about (unless I’ve forgotten a brief portrait near the start) and I would have loved to have had more of Mrs Oakapple and her fellow matriarchs.  I also really wanted to know by the end what one of the characters did next.

The Driveway Has Two Sides is a gentle, quick read, especially recommended for those who like Katherine Heiny or Anne Tyler. I’m hoping Sara Marchant is going to be one of those authors who return to the same setting in further novels, so I can hear much more about the town and its sparky, kind residents.

Novella a Day in May 2026 – No.30

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I enjoy satire but I think it can be hard to sustain, becoming bitter and distancing. Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico (2022, transl. Sophie Hughes 2025) judged this just right – at only 115 pages it is quick and incisive.

Anna and Tom have emigrated from an unnamed southern European country to Berlin, drawn by its cool reputation and cheap housing (at that time). The novella opens with an interiors magazine style description of their home, all verdant plants, string lights, mason jars, marble pastry table, and on and on and on… an overwhelming piling up of what they own and how they’ve styled it.

The next chapter gives the reality of living in that space: the clutter, the cleaning, the dust, the constantly accumulating mugs and tissues:

“It wasn’t order they so desperately craved, but something deeper and more essential. […]

In itself, chaos could be joyful, creative; But in that context, it only seemed to signal impermanence.”

Therein lies the problem. Anna and Tom are millennials who have grown up with the internet from its early iterations, they are constantly online looking at images, and feel very insecure when they can’t curate their reality like an Instagram post.

“Anna and Tom spent much of their first year in Berlin carefully constructing this mythology. And it wasn’t personal to them; its value lay precisely in its universality…. it was the topic of countless lifestyle articles and documentaries, and circulated on the Facebook timelines and Instagram feeds of an entire generation.”

They remain entirely ignorant of Berlin beyond cool places to socialise, and Germany itself. Their work is carried out online, their friends are just like them. They don’t learn German, they use Google translate.

“It never occurred to them, for example, that the distinction between Alt- and Neu- buildings in property listings had been drawn by the Allied bombings.”

Telling the story in the third person is entirely right: Anna and Tom have no innate sense of self, no inner life. They don’t know who they are if they are not viewed externally. While Latronico relates this very much to a specific online generation:

“They lived a double life. There was the tangible reality around them, and there were the images, also all around them.”

I also felt it was long-established folly to believe that what you own is who you are. Apparently Perfection was inspired by Things: A Story of the Sixties by Georges Perec, which shows how this conflict between image and reality, consumerism in a search for meaning did not arrive with the internet!

Advertising, which is both implicit and explicit in Anna and Tom’s world, is constantly promoting the idea that worth as a human is determined by money spent. You are your sofa/kitchen/car… But then, advertising also encourages consumers to constantly find themselves wanting, because there is always more money to be made by selling more stuff:

“The collective upheaval of the 20th century was over and the vestiges had been translated into the language of individualism—that is, of consumerism. Freedom had turned into abundance.”

Of course Tom and Anna aren’t happy. Their reality will always be messy at the edges, unlike a cropped image. They are also entirely incapable of working out why they aren’t happy. Content, well-adjusted people won’t spend as much money chasing illusion, so these answers won’t be sold online.

In an attempt to find meaning, they are clicktivists. I felt this was where Latronico was most scathing, whereby they and everyone in their bubble tells themselves they are socially engaged and responsible, just so long as it doesn’t mean any real action needs to be taken in their own lives, which could inconvenience them in any way:

“They identified as feminists and spoke out against social injustices, which in practise meant they were willing to express outrage at instances of racism or sexism that took place in New York. […] in practise, their social commitment amounted to using Uber only if it was snowing and always leaving tips in cash. They didn’t eat tuna.”

But for the most part I didn’t think Latronico despised Anna and Tom, I thought he felt for them as they struggled against what is essentially existential despair, without any tools to manage this. They were baffled that where they lived, what they owned, where they ate, and the holidays they took weren’t working. How could this be, when all those things looked great in online posts?

Perfection is short and snappy. It manages to be pinpoint specific and universal. Another fascinating read from Fitzcarraldo Editions!

Novella a Day in May 2026 – No.29

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It was Kate’s review right at the end of 2024 which alerted me to Loved and Missed (2021), Susie Boyt’s seventh novel but my first time of reading her.

Loved and Missed is told primarily from the point of view of Ruth, whose daughter Eleanor is addicted to heroin.

“I sometimes thought what I minded most was that all the kindness had gone from her face. The way she had profaned her body.”

Set in a recognisable London, it’s not explicitly stated when the story is set but feels like the early noughties, with Eleanor born in the late 70s/early 80s.

Ruth is sad and self-blaming, but she’s also sparky, funny and resilient. When Eleanor’s baby Lily is born in need of morphine , it is Ruth who tires herself ragged at NICU. Eleanor and her boyfriend Ben are not presented as terrible people, just entirely incapable of taking care of themselves or anyone else.

I’m already making this sound much heavier than it is, so how is this for when Ruth realises she adores her granddaughter compared to other children?

“I sometimes found babies a bit cynical around the edges. Their been-here-before auras often registered as smug.”

Ruth decides to take on the care of Lily. How she engineers this is a move of breathtaking cynicism which Eleanor and Ben entirely live up to. It is presented matter-of-factly while being heartbreaking.

“Eleanor shrugged, which was often how she agreed with me anyway.”

Eleanor is filled with fury, which means Ruth steps on eggshells the whole time, terrified of alienating her further. As a reader I found Eleanor’s behaviour passive-aggressive, and aggressive, to an infuriating level, but Ruth’s deep love for her daughter and grandchild is palpable.

Over time, we see Lily grow into a teenager, repeatedly let down by her mother, unwaveringly loved and supported by Ruth.

“The world was Eleanor’s widow, I sometimes thought.”

Lily is old before her time, unsurprisingly. Meanwhile, her mother sinks further, as Ruth observes:

“She no longer looked at me with defiance and those jets of fury; There was a mild bewilderment to her and hardly any harshness at all. We were in a different phase. Her atmosphere was entirely sad.”

I adored Loved and Missed. It was so believable in presenting the singular focus of addiction without demonising Eleanor in any way, or attempting reductive explanations for why she is as she is. Ruth’s narrative does not let herself off the hook, even when she really could, and at the same time she has to approach life with love and humour to be present for Lily. The two of them laugh a lot.

It’s pacily written with so much wit, there were many sentences I marked – this post could easily have been a series of quotes.

It’s also got a brilliant character in Ruth’s best friend Jean, a pithy, clear-sighted, literature-loving, uncompromising powerhouse.

“’Sometimes in life,’ she said, ‘a really quite good book is what you need more than an excellent one.’ That scared me. It was so un-Jean.”

Loved and Missed is a testament to love, and the messy realities of love – how it is lived in an imperfect world by imperfect people, and how it is entirely fundamental. The novel is wholly devoid of sentiment but made me cry more than once, which given I was on an intercity train was not ideal! Highly recommended, and I’ll definitely be exploring Boyt’s other novels.

Novella a Day in May 2026 – No.28

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I really enjoyed Gaito Gazdanov’s The Buddha’s Return when I read it a few years ago, so I’m pleased to return to him with The Spectre of Alexander Wolf (1947-8, transl. Bryan Karetnyk 2013) published by Pushkin Press in one of their lovely smaller editions with French flaps.

It opens beguilingly:

“Of all my memories, of all my life’s in innumerable sensations, the most onerous was that of the single murder I had committed.”

This isn’t quite as it initially appears – the killing took place during the Russian Civil War. A man shoots the horse the narrator was riding, and in self-defence he shoots back. He then steals the other soldier’s white horse, later selling it and fleeing to Paris.

He is living in Paris and working as a journalist when he comes across a book of collected stories called I’ll Come Tomorrow by Alexander Wolf. Reading it, he is shaken by one of the stories, The Adventure of the Steppe in which the events above are described almost exactly.

As the book is written in English, when he is in London he visits Wolf’s publisher, who assures him:

“Mr Wolf is an Englishman; I’ve known him for many years and can vouch for that. What’s more, he’s never left England for more than two or three weeks at a time, which he spends mostly in France or Italy. He hasn’t travelled farther; I can say this with certainty.”

However, he is shaken on his return to France when he meets Voznesensky, a drunken acquaintance who has a copy of the book and claims to know the author. Voznesensky is incredulous at the thought of “Sasha Wolf, an Englishman!”

So who is Alexander Wolf? Was he the dead soldier? An Englishman who holidays in Italy? A Russian who lives in Paris?

Having set itself up as a possibly metaphysical detective story, the novel then takes a swerve into almost a completely different genre, detailing the narrator’s love affair with Yelena Nikolayevna.  She’s an enigmatic woman with a mysterious past (!) but gradually an intimacy begins to build, despite an “unnatural divide between the inner life and physical life that was so characteristic of her”.

The sudden shift is somewhat disconcerting but Spectre… remains very readable. Essentially the story is less about plot and more a consideration of where we look for meaning. The narrator channels his energy first into Wolf and then into Yelena, but ultimately he has to create his own meanings with his mortality a constant consideration:  

“I thought about how Wolf had become – and not so much Wolf personally as the very thought of him—the involuntary personification of everything dead and sad that existed in my life.”

By the ending, not everything is fully explained, although reader can piece events together. I think by leaving the plot unresolved, Gazdanov keeps Spectre…  as a philosophical consideration foremost, encouraging the reader to make their own meanings as the narrator needs to do.

I also think there is humour in it, I don’t think we’re supposed to take the narrator as seriously as he takes himself:

“Everything that my existence had comprised until now—regrets, dissatisfaction and a sense of the manifest futility of everything I did – began to seem very distant and alien to me, as though I was thinking of something that had taken place long ago.”

I realise I’ve been a bit vague, but Spectre… is an enigmatic and slippery book to both read and describe! It is an eloquent contemplation of its themes, so if you fancy those wrapped up in a few somewhat unresolved narratives then give it a try – I certainly enjoyed it a great deal.