Book review: Rush Oh! by Shirley Barrett

How entertaining can a novel about a whaling family in a tiny community in Australia be? The answer, I was pleasantly surprised to learn while reading Shirley Barrett's debut Rush Oh! is very.

Mary Davidson, the oldest daughter in a whaling family in New South Wales, chronicles the difficult whaling season of 1908. Drama, misadventure and first love all feature in Mary's telling, as do a pod of whales who align themselves with Mary's father and his crew of whale hunters.

First off, I didn't expect this novel to be funny, but it really is. It's full of little laughs, and that's all down to the wonderful protagonist. Mary's retelling of the season of 1908 is charming, her voice a little like a grown up Anne of Green Gables. Mary is slightly naive, and wonderfully forthright in most things. Her honesty about her family, about the people in her community, and about her feelings for John Beck, the newest recruit in her father's crew, is by turns poignant and hilarious, and always straightforward even when nothing else in her life is. Mary is an optimistic, lively, independent female, who very rarely lets life bring her down.

Book review: Pretty Is by Maggie Mitchell

Identity, memory, self-worth and desire - all are at the core of Maggie Mitchell's beguiling novel Pretty Is.

When Carly May and Lois were 12 years old they were kidnapped. Missing for two months, everyone presumed they were dead, until they were rescues. Now grown up, Carly May has changed her name and is pursuing an acting career, while Lois has written a book fictionalising what happened to the two girls during the time they were kidnapped. When Carly May is cast in the lead role of the film adaptation of Lois' book, the two women are brought back together again. What really happened to them when they were 12, how has it affected them, and is there still a threat to their lives?

In Carly May, known as Chloe in the present time, and Lois, Mitchell has created two complicated female characters who I spent the entire book trying to unpick, and who spent the two months they were kidnapped trying to unpick each other, and the years since then trying to both forget each other and make sense of each other. It's easy to think that it was just the kidnapping which affected Carly May and Lois so badly, impacting on the rest of their lives, but Mitchell shows through glimpses of their home life that the kidnapping only exacerbated the girls' feelings of otherness and exclusion, that feeling that maybe there was something special about them, and that's why they never fit in, and that's why they were chosen by their kidnapper.

Desmond Elliott Prize 2015

The Desmond Elliott Prize is awarded for new fiction, with the judges searching for a "novel which has a compelling narrative, arresting characters and which is both vividly written and confidently realised.".

This year's shortlist has definitely found novels with those qualities. On July 1 the £10,000 prize will be awarded to either Carys Bray for A Song for Issy Bradley, Claire Fuller for Our Endless Numbered Days or Emma Healey for Elizabeth is Missing.

All three books are absolutely brilliant, and I don't envy the judges picking a winner. If you haven't read them, here are my thoughts on each book (with a link to my full review in the title).

A Song for Issy Bradley by Carys Bray
Synopsis: A Mormon family has to deal with their grief after the loss of a child.
Bray has created a story about faith in family, about the bonds of love that bind people together, even after someone has died, about the ways in which humans are tested and the ways in which they survive. It's a story about grief that moved me to tears for a family that I loved and mourned with.

Our Endless Numbered Days by Claire Fuller
Synopsis: A young girl is taken to live in the forest by her survivalist father, and told that the rest of the world has ended.
Our Endless Numbered Days is so, so dark, but it was only as I approached the end that I realised just how dark the book is...the writing style almost reminds me of original fairytales, where princesses didn't live happily ever after.

Elizabeth is Missing by Emma Healey
Synopsis: As Maud, 82, gets increasingly worried about her friend, Elizabeth, who is missing, past and present collide.
It's stunningly written, and will give you palpitations, and it's worth every penny (and I believe there were a lot of them) that Viking stumped up for it.

Book review: A Song for Issy Bradley by Carys Bray

There is no word in the English language to describe a parent who has lost their child, no way to signify to someone in just one word that this is a person who is grieving, who is trying to come to terms with an unspeakable loss.

How we grieve, how a parent grieves, is at the centre of Carys Bray's wonderful debut novel A Song for Issy Bradley. When Issy Bradley dies, her strict Mormon family all deal in different ways. Issy's mum Claire is consumed by grief, taking to Issy's bed for weeks, unable to cope with her husband Ian's blind faith in his faith, which he has turned to more than ever to deal with Issy's death. Their oldest daughter Zippy finds her faith being challenged for the first time in her life, as she battles between her grief at losing Issy and her desire to be a typical teenage girl. Her brother Alma addresses the loss by continuing to push against the Mormon faith, but discovers that it may not be that easy. And youngest child Jacob is optimistic that Issy will come back, that a miracle will occur and his sister will return to him.

Faith, or the lack of it, is a preoccupation of A Song for Issy Bradley. Bray, who was brought up Mormon, left the church in her thirties, almost the opposite of Claire, who in the book we find out became a Mormon because of her relationship with Ian. Claire takes on the Mormon faith willingly, but still rails against it sometimes, finding it difficult to reconcile her needs for herself and her family with the demands placed on her by her faith. Claire is cynical, she gets offended, she wants to be selfish - all perfectly human traits but ones that don't always sit well with her faith. 

Book review: Asking for It by Louise O'Neill

I've never actually been the recipient of a real punch to the gut, but how I felt when I finished reading Louise O'Neill's Asking For It is how I imagine being whacked really hard in the stomach feels - you're left momentarily breathless, shocked, unable to process for a minute, and then the hurt piles in.

Beautiful, confident, 18 years old, Emma O'Donovan's life changes one night when she goes to a party. Waking up the next morning in front of her house, she doesn't remember what happened or how she got there. Her first clue is when she turns up at school to find herself mocked and shunned, and the reasons why become clear when Emma discovers a Facebook page which show photos of her with some of her small town's most popular boys. Emma's memory, her friends, her family - all want to believe their own story, and what happened that night is only the start of Emma's nightmare.

In Emma O'Neill has created a character who isn't particularly likeable, but who I always felt for, and whose side I was always on, unhesitatingly. Emma is kind of selfish, she uses her beauty to her gain, she takes advantage of friends, she steals, and she gives extremely bad advice, so bad that it actually means someone gets away with a crime and one of her friends is hurt physically and emotionally. Yet Emma is unflinchingly real, a typical 18-year-old who thinks the world is hers for the taking, and who believes she's destined for bigger and better things, and who acts as she does to fit a stereotype placed on her not just by her friends and the boys she knows, but also by her parents and her brother. 

Book review: In the Unlikely Event by Judy Blume

I don't think legend is too big a word to use when it comes to Judy Blume. The author is responsible for many of the books teenage girls (and probably some boys) grew up with, from my personal favourites Deenie and Here's to You, Rachel Robinson, through to Forever, much whispered about in school hallways.

Blume taught generations of teenage girls about growing up, but she has also turned her brand of insight to adult novels, of which In the Unlikely Event is her newest. It's not untrue to say that news of In the Unlikely Event's release was greeted with excitement by Blume's fans.

When Miri Ammerman was a 15-year-old living in Elizabeth, New Jersey, three planes fell from the sky within three months, leaving the town reeling. (It's worth saying here that three planes really did crash in Blume's hometown when she was growing up.) The crashes bring friends, families and strangers closer together, all trying to find a way to come to terms with the death that has come to their doorsteps.

In the Unlikely Event is classic Judy Blume - an intuitive look at the inner workings of teenage girls. Miri is in that period of her life where she's no longer a child and not yet an adult. But being confronted by so much death and danger means she has to grow up fast, and her family situation often sees her acting as the parent - Miri calls her mum Rusty and not mum, and Rusty is very much the antithesis of all the other mothers Miri knows.

The trauma of the multiple plane crashes looms large over the town of Elizabeth and they affect some residents more than others - Miri's best friend Natalie thinks a dead dancer from the first plane crash is speaking to her, Natalie's brother Steve finds himself unexpectedly grieving, while Miri's uncle Henry makes his name as a journalist on his coverage of the crashes, and Miri's boyfriend Mason becomes a hero to the town. Blume explores post traumatic stress disorder, eating disorders and more, which seem to be linked to the crashes in some ways, but in others are not. 

Because while this is a story about three plane crashes, it is just as much a novel about the day to day lives of the town's habitants. In between the crashes life goes on as normal, with affairs and secret relationships, squabbling families and schoolchildren who want to feel like they matter. There are teenagers trying to grow up, adults navigating life, and everyday problems rearing their ugly heads.

With so much death at the centre of the novel, In the Unlikely Event could easily leave you feeling despondent. But while it is a serious novel, it's also a novel about life, and the very thing that keeps us feeling alive - love. There is familial love, with Miri's unusual (for 1970s small-town New Jersey) family working together as a unit, and working as a contrast to Natalie's rather more conventional yet also more fractured family. And there is romantic love, with characters like Christina trying to find a way to balance her love life and her family life. And of course there is sex - Blume's characters use sex (with and without love involved) in a number of ways, but mainly to feel alive (even before the plane crash).

In the Unlikely Event is filled with tension and drama, and is a wonderful look at love, at how we respond to trauma, at becoming a grown up, and at living life to the fullest.

*In the Unlikely Event is out in the UK on June 4, 2015.

How I got this book: From the publisher, Picador. This did not affect my review.

Book review: Shotgun Lovesongs by Nickolas Butler

Sometimes you pick up a book that is so well written and so beautiful, reading it warms your heart. Shotgun Lovesongs by Nickolas Butler is definitely one of those books.

Henry, Lee, Kip and Ronny grew up together in small-town Wisconsin. They now lead very different lives, but their shared childhood keeps them bonded. The group all come together for a wedding, and rivalries surface, truths are told and friendships are put at risk.

Butler creates four layered characters, all of whom I absolutely loved for very different reasons. Together and apart, Henry, Lee, Kip and Ronny are sympathetic, likeable, full of depth and complicated in a way that male characters in books and television and film often aren't (at least in my experience).

Of course, while I loved all four characters, I definitely had a favourite - Lee. I think it was his vulnerability that really spoke to me, because even though he's a famous singer, travelling the world and revered by everyone, Lee, out of all of his friends, is the one who needs the most. He needs that connection to his hometown, he needs his friends, he needs love.

Shotgun Lovesongs is a wonderful love story between four friends. It's a great look at male friendship, and at the bonds that bind people together across years and many miles. It's tinged with nostalgia, of moments from a lifetime together. Reading Shotgun Lovesongs is a bit like sitting in a field on a warm summer evening - there's a slightly hazy edge to everything, and while there's a threat of a storm on the horizon, you feel welcomed and loved and safe. It might be a book just about friendship, but it's as addictive and all-consuming as any thriller or action film, and the stakes are much higher.

How I got this book: From the publisher, Picador. This did not affect my review.

Book review: The Help by Kathryn Stockett

It's rare that I see a film adaptation of a book before reading the original text, and rarer still that I think the film is as good as the book, but in the case of Kathryn Stockett's The Help, both things are true.

In Jackson, Mississippi in 1962, it seems like nothing is going to change anytime soon. Black maids Aibileen and Minny run the households they work in, bringing up their employers' children, cooking the food that feeds their employers' husbands, and getting absolutely no respect, love or kindness for what they do. Meanwhile, home from college, Skeeter wants to know why her favourite maid has disappeared, and wants to pursue her dream of becoming a journalist. When Skeeter comes up with an idea for a book, she needs to get Aibileen and Minny on board, and together the three of them reveal truths that have stayed behind the doors of Southern houses for a long time.

The Help is a story that touches on two huge issues - race and feminism. While the major milestones of the battle for civil rights are well known, Stockett chooses to focus on the everyday battles black people, particularly women, faced in a segregated society. We get a glimpse, albeit fictionalised, into the very real divide that existed in every aspect of life in Mississsippi in 1962. While Aibileen and Minny carry out the roles of mother, guardian and servant, they hold no power, constantly in fear of being sacked for the slightest perceived infringement.

Book review: Mrs Hemingway by Naomi Wood

Is talent, a gregarious personality and a way with words enough to make someone who is completely self-obsessed and occasionally violent attractive? I would say no, but Hadley, Fife, Martha and Mary - the four wives of Ernest Hemingway - might have had a slightly different answer.

In Mrs Hemingway, Naomi Wood paints a portrait of the four women who Hemingway married during his lifetime, although they were far from the only four women he had relationships with. Taking in Chicago in 1920, through a hazy, hot summer in the south of France in 1926, and visiting a number of locations and times before heading to autumn in Idaho in 1961, we meet fictionalised (although very well researched and based on reality) versions of Hadley, Fife, Martha and Mary before they know Hemingway, as they turn from lovers to wives, and as Ernest leaves them.

Wood's magic in Mrs Hemingway involves turning Fife, Martha and Mary - all of whom have affairs with Hemingway while he is married - into likeable characters. And Wood casts a further spell by making all four women sympathetic instead of pitiable. As a reader, I could so easily have spent the entire time I was reading wanting to shake all the women for being utterly stupid. Instead, thanks to Wood, I didn't think any of them were silly - they all deeply love Hemingway, in spite of clearly being able to see his faults. Each of them knows what they're getting when they get involved with him. Even Hadley, the first Mrs Hemingway, can see how her husband dazzles people.

Book review: Precocious by Joanna Barnard

We're all vultures of a sort, and there are few things that demonstrate our need to know everything and tear everything apart and form an opinion than news stories about teenagers having relationships with their teachers,

In Joanna Barnard's Precocious we join the teenager in the affair as an adult. Thirty years old, Fiona Palmer is married when she bumps into Henry Morgan, the man she had a relationship with when she was 14, again. Fiona still feels a pull towards Henry, even all these years later, and is willing to put everything on the line for him. But who is really in control of their relationship now? And who was in control when the pair first embarked on their affair? 

Review: The Art of Baking Blind by Sarah Vaughan

I can think of nothing more comforting than curling up with a hot chocolate, a thick slice of my favourite cake, and a good book.

So when I saw The Art of Baking Blind by Sarah Vaughan, my eyes lit up (and my stomach started rumbling) - a book about a baking competition? This caters to my great love of comfort reading, and my love/obsession with Great British Bake Off.

Eadens, an upmarket supermarket chain, is on the search for the next Kathryn Eaden. Kathryn's 1960s guide to baking is found in homes up and down the country, and the five bakers competing - Jenny, Claire, Mike, Vicki and Karen - are no exception. As they bake, they find their cakes and breads are not the only things they have to worry about perfecting

I was expecting The Art of Baking Blind to be a light, fluffy, sweet read, like a good Victoria sponge. I was completely surprised, however, to find that Vaughan has actually created something a lot deeper, and, at times, darker.

In the present we meet our five bakers both at home and in the competition venue. Matronly Jenny is finding it increasingly difficult to make her husband, who has taken up marathon running and seems to be turning increasingly more cruel, happy. Perfect Karen is clearly hiding some secrets behind her polished appearance. Vicki is struggling with being a stay at home mum. Single mum Claire is wondering how she'll measure up to everyone else, and Mike is bringing up his two children after the death of his wife. So far, so fairly typical - none of Vaughan's characters seem to have any problems you haven't seen before on the page or the screen. The inclusion of Mike seems to me to be to balance things out and include a token male (we don't spend enough time with him for me to really get to know or care about him), but apart from that, as The Art of Baking Blind progresses, I was pleasantly surprised to find that Vaughan has created complex characters whose problems aren't two dimensional, and who surprised me throughout.

Interspersed between the present day storyline is the tale of Kathleen Eaden, a seemingly perfect 1960s housewife. As she works on her baking book, which will become a classic, we find out that Kathleen is struggling to have children. Vaughan takes this into a much darker, more tragic direction than I expected. It makes difficult reading at times, but I found myself eager to get to the next stage of Kathleen's story. To be honest, I probably could have just read an entire book about Kathleen - I found her fascinating and liked and sympathised with her more than with anyone else in the book.

Wrapped as it is in a cover full of pastel colours and swirly white writing, it would be easy to dismiss The Art of Baking Blind as a frivolous book, but props go to Vaughan for creating something that has a lot of depth, and that will have you feeling emotionally wrung out in places. A slice of cake should help with that though.

How I got this: From the publisher, Hodder & Stoughton. This did not affect my review.

Review: Far From You by Tess Sharpe

Obsession - is it ever healthy for you, and if so, at what point does it become dangerous?

For Sophie in Tess Sharpe's Far From You, her obsession with finding out who caused her best friend's death is dangerous from the beginning, because Mina was murdered. Everyone believes it's because OxyContin-addicted Sophie was looking for a hit, and Mina was murdered by a drug dealer, but Sophie's clean, and she knows the truth.

As Sophie struggles to find out who killed Mina, she must also piece her life back together - get her parents to trust her again, get Mina's brother Trev to see her in a new light, and, most importantly of all, Sophie must learn to let go of Mina.

Far From You is a murder mystery brilliantly nestled in the centre of a book examining loyalty, love, friendship, guilt, and obsession. Sharpe takes us deeply into the world of a teenager who has suffered extensively - Sophie was in an almost-fatal car crash when she was 14, Mina's brother was driving - and then piles some more misery on her protagonist. The result is a story about human resilience.

Sharpe structures Far From You with chapters told chronologically in the present, as Sophie leaves rehab and tracks down Mina's killer, alternating with chapters told out of order from the past, covering the period after Sophie's car crash to the period just after Mina's death. Originally, I thought I wouldn't have much use for the chapters from the past, but they actually give a huge insight into not just Sophie, but also Sophie and Mina's friendship.

And goodness, is that friendship intense. It's built not just on two girls getting on, but also on shared experiences (Mina was also in the car crash that hurt Sophie), possibly a bit of guilt, and a bit of possessiveness and obsession. As we flit back and forth through the lives of the girls, we see the things that bind them together, and the things that could possibly pull them apart, and come to learn why Sophie feels it is on her to find Mina's killer.

Sophie is an interesting character. She's likeable in parts, and in other parts just barrels into the reader with her forcefulness, so you can't help but be swept along with her, and trust in her completely. She is, in some ways, acting towards the reader like Mina acted towards her. The times I didn't like Sophie as much were when I felt she was hurting Trev, because I absolutely loved Trev. He's a wonderfully sweet, vulnerable, secondary character, the complete opposite of Sophie. He's suffered as much as she has, just in different ways, and his love for Sophie is built on a bed of guilt.

In addition to being a character study, Far From You is a deft murder mystery which had me guessing until just before the big reveal, when the pieces clicked in my mind as they did in Sophie's. Sharpe weaves together two crimes and brings them to a satisfying conclusion, even as Sophie knows that finding Mina's murderer does not give her the immediate closure that's good for her.

Far From You is a very, very well-written YA book, which has depth of character and depth of emotion. It'll leave you feeling a bit like you've been through the wringer and will stay with you, but, like Sophie, you'll be able to take a deep breath at the end and start letting go.

How I got this book: From the publisher, Indigo. This did not affect my review.

Review: The Queen of the Tearling by Erika Johansen

As soon as The Queen of the Tearling arrived on my desk, beautifully wrapped in brown paper and string (thanks Bantam Press), I knew it was going to the top of my to-read list. 

And that was before I read that it was being turned into a film, with Emma Watson and Harry Potter producer David Heyman on board. It's fair to say, then, that this book had some expectations to meet.

Kelsea Glynn has grown up in the forest, her only contact her foster parents Barty and Carlin. She's always known she is the Queen of the Tearling kingdom, and at last, her dead mother's guards have come to collect her and take her to the Tearling to claim her throne.

But for Kelsea, learning to be a queen means earning the trust and respect of her guard, fighting off all those who want to kill her, and coming to terms with the reality that her mother, Elyssa, was far from a noble, philanthropic, strong queen.

The Queen of the Tearling's best point, and the one that has to be addressed first, is its protagonist. Kelsea is inspirational, frustrating, mature, childish, heartbroken - in other words, she's a really well formed, very realistic character (as much as a fictional queen of a fantasy world can be). She's idealistic, and as soon as she sees wrongdoing knows she must set it right, but she doesn't fully consider the consequences and lets her heart guide her. She's tough and a fighter, but still harbours a very female desire to be seen as beautiful as well as clever and brave (which is very honest, it's okay for feminists to want to be pretty). And she perseveres in the face of disappointment after disappointment, knowing she has a responsibility to her people.

One of the things I love most about Kelsea is that she has to prove herself. Often, heroes are mostly full formed when you meet them. Yes, they might have to overcome some adversity, but they almost always immediately display all the heroic characteristics needed to succeed. Kelsea is different. Johansen gives us a character who is far from a queen at the beginning of the novel, despite all the work Barty and Carlin have done with her, and over the course of the book thrusts her into situations where she is likely to fail, and up against people who would do her down, or who don't believe in her. It's up to Kelsea to work out what needs to be done, to toughen herself up, to know when to show compassion, and to battle through even when those closest to her are against her. And as she does that, she becomes more and more queenly, so that by the end of the novel, we as readers fully believe in her power.

The Queen of the Tearling is a character driven novel. As well as Kelsea, there are some brilliant secondary characters including Mace, her guard; the mysterious Fetch, a thief; and of course the enemy Queen of Mortmesne, and her Tearling "representative" Thorne. But alongside the character, a good fantasy needs a well-formed world, and I think Johansen mostly achieves this. The Tearling, Mortmesne and their surroundings are well described, and you can picture the forests and fields that Kelsea journeys through, as well as imagine the Tearling and its many different neighbourhoods. 

Where The Queen of the Tearling slightly falls down is on some of its mythology. This isn't just a fantasy, it's an alternative history (or future?) fantasy. America, Britain and the rest of earth existed, as did all mod cons like drugs, but then something happened and there was a Crossing, which resulted in the world of the novel. The Crossing isn't very well explained, and I'm hoping that Johansen comes to address this in future novels, and make clearer what happened. During the first novel, mentions of Britain and so on felt a little jarring, and took me out of my fantasy mindset for a moment.

However, that's my only complaint. Putting that to one side, The Queen of the Tearling is a wonderful novel. If Johansen carries on the way she does, the series is sure to be well deserving of the epic fantasy tag. And if Kelsea carries on the way she does, she'll become one of those characters in literature we all want to be.

How I got this book: From the publisher, Bantam Press. This did not affect my review.

Review: The Lemon Grove by Helen Walsh

Slinky, sensuous and sexy are just a few of the words used to describe Helen Walsh's The Lemon Grove, set in a hot summer week in a small town in Mallorca.

So now that the novel has come out in paperback (it was released in hardback in the dead of winter), and the weather is hot and humid, I figured it was the perfect time to read this book.

Every summer Jenn and her husband Greg holiday in Deia. This year, Jenn's stepdaughter Emma brings her boyfriend Nathan with her. Caught off-guard, Jenn finds herself attracted to Nathan, an attraction that could lead the whole family into chaos.

Let me say from the beginning that I was a little wary of reading this book, just because I wasn't sure how comfortable I would be reading about a middle-aged woman in lust with an 18-year-old boy, but The Lemon Grove is about so much more than forbidden attraction. Sure, there were a few scenes that made me cringe, but they were the ones where Jenn's attraction for Nathan went into overdrive, turning into obsession, and a dangerous obsession at that.

Jenn starts the novel as a rational human being, but ends it as a liar, a cheat and a thoroughly confused woman. Her attraction to Nathan also brings out all the long-suffering resentment she feels towards Greg - who she feels tries to mould her into something she's not - and towards Emma - who she feels gets everything her way. Jenn's relationship with the latter is particularly interesting, and for me any scenes between them, or where Jenn was thinking or talking about Emma, were the best of the book. That Jenn, a woman who has brought up Emma as her own, feels jealous of and resentful of her daughter is both taboo (as much as being attracted to an 18-year-old who is going out with your daughter) and, as we get glimpses of Greg, Jenn and Emma's family life, understandable at times.

Nathan, who elicits such lust in Jenn and such devotion in Emma, also manages to get Greg's hackles up, and I have to say, I'm with Greg on this. From the outside looking in, it's easy to see Nathan's faults, guess at his misdemeanours and assess just how much of a selfish brat he is (sorry to be so blunt). In one way, it's difficult to see why Jenn is so attracted to Nathan, but in another it's not - for Jenn he's escape and revenge wrapped up in one person, and he makes her feel that she is powerful and powerless, both of which she seems to thrive on, even if she's not enjoying it.

The thing that Walsh is the best at, in my opinion, is creating a sense of place. From the beginning of the novel I could feel the heat of Deia, picture the town and its surrounding mountain roads, and almost smell the sea. The setting wraps itself around the action of the novel, and soon becomes stifling for the characters, who find it difficult to live up to the beauty of their surroundings.

The novel builds to its finale in the same way the heat of the novel builds, slowly and in layers before breaking and cooling. I enjoyed the first ending to the book, but Walsh adds in a twist in the final few paragraphs, which I personally thought was unnecessary - I feel like so many novels I read nowadays with slightly unlikeable characters and slightly unreliable narrators like to add in that final "ta-da" moment, and sometimes it's not needed. I felt that was the case here, but it's only a small point, and a personal preference.

The Lemon Grove is worth reading for Walsh's descriptive talent alone, but it's also one of those novels that is perfect for summer.

How I got this book: From the publisher, Tinder Press. This did not affect my review.

Review: The Storms of War by Kate Williams

If Downton Abbey hasn't lived up to your expectations since the end of season one, then you need to pick up Kate Williams' The Storms of War, which is the novel that Downton would have been if it had more historical insight and research behind it and less of the over-the-top drama.

It is 1914, and Celia de Witt is a privileged 15-year-old living a charmed life with her English mother and German father. But when war breaks out, the family quickly falls apart - her brother Michael heads off to war, her sister Emmeline runs away to London, her father is betrayed by the country he has grown to consider his own, and her mother collapses in on herself. Celia is left to try and fend for and find herself in a world that is disintegrating around her by the minute.

From its brutal opening chapter, which recreates an image of the First World War we've all heard about and which never gets any less heartbreaking, to its surprise, shocking final pages, The Storms of War is a stunning novel recreating a time when Britain was turned upside down.

Williams is a historian and you can tell she knows her stuff, although she cleverly folds her research into the narrative of the book, never once taking the reader out of the story to inform them about a particular historical facet. Williams covers the class system (more on that in a bit), sexuality, women's rights, pacifism and industrial progress in a thorough and thoroughly absorbing way.

The characters within The Storms of War are all sympathetic and interesting, from the below-stairs household staff to the de Witts themselves. Celia is our eyes and ears into the pre-war world, as well as the horrors of France (along with Michael) and the changing face of London. As she travels from place to place, first just visiting her sister in the capital to then driving wounded soldiers to hospitals in France and then back to London and finally to her family's country estate, we see her change and grow.

But while change is afoot in many places in the novel, I found it fascinating that so much of the class system stayed in place during the First World War. Emmeline, who runs away from her family to London, is still snobbish at the thought of anyone of her class having a relationship with someone of the serving class, and even Michael, sweet, dear Michael, automatically snaps back into his role as someone of the upper class when he is afraid or uncertain. It is only Celia who wonders why class matters so much when the world is being destroyed around her, but as a reader, I could see that the class system was something that made sense to people when so many other things didn't.

The Storms of War is billed, on my proof at least, as Downton Abbey meets Atonement, which I thought was a tall order before I read it. I now firmly believe The Storms of War meets its billing, and have high hopes that its sequel will be equally absorbing, and told with the same respect for its time period and for its characters.

•The Storms of War is out on July 3, 2014.

How I got this book: From the publisher, Orion. This did not affect my review.

Perfect summer reads 2014

Summer - the sun is shining and you're looking for something to read on the beach/on the plane/in the park/in the garden. Here are my top summer reads, some out already, and some coming out in the next couple of months. Most importantly, all are perfect for the hot weather.

1. The Storms of War by Kate Williams
Billed as Downton Abbey meets Atonement, this First World War-set novel is the sweeping first book in a series that, if justice is to be served, will go on to do big things.
Out July 2.

2. Landline by Rainbow Rowell
Rainbow Rowell's second adult novel, Landline, has a tinge of nostalgia perfect for a hazy summer day. Through its ups and downs it'll sweep you away like a warm breeze.
Out July 31.

3. The Secret Place by Tana French
Intrigue, murder, and the vagaries of teenage girls - Tana French brings those ingredients and more together in The Secret Place, the most perfect crime novel I've read for some time. 
Out on August 28.

4. Dear Daughter by Elizabeth Little
If you like your news in short sharp snippets and you like you celebrity gossip with plenty of commentary, Dear Daughter by Elizabeth Little is the perfect book. Its narrator is full of snark, and its premise will have you guessing to the surprising end, so get your sunglasses and paparazzi face on.
Out on August 14.

5. The Fair Fight by Anna Freeman
Forget everything you know, or don't, about boxing and delve into Anna Freeman's The Fair Fight, a swashbuckling novel about female fighters, feminism and standing up for yourself.
Out on August 28.

6. Her by Harriet Lane 
Chilling enough to help keep you cool through the hot summer months, Harriet Lane's Her is addictive and filled with tension that builds and builds to a horrifying climax.
Out now.

7. Elizabeth is Missing by Emma Healey
Surprisingly, for a book with an 82-year-old protagonist, Emma Healey's Elizabeth is Missing will have you on the edge of your seat from the beginning.
Out now.

8. The Pink Suit by Nicole Mary Kelby
For fans of fashion, icons and history, The Pink Suit by Nicole Mary Kelby is a brilliant, easy-to-read novel about one of the most famous outfits in memory.
Out now.

Review: Elizabeth is Missing by Emma Healey

There are big books, and then there are books that are big before they're even released, and Emma Healey's Elizabeth is Missing is one of the latter.

Bought by Viking in a hotly contested auction (I met one of the unsuccessful bidders recently, who more than a year on is still sad they didn't win), I haven't heard one bad thing about Elizabeth is Missing from anyone who's read it.

Maud, 82, is getting forgetful. Living alone, the only people she regularly encounters are her carer, and her daughter, Helen. Even then, she sometimes forgets who they are, or what they're doing. And she always forgets that she's made herself a cup of tea, and is constantly puzzled about the rows of cold tea at the bottom of her stairs. Maud does know one thing though, and that is that her friend Elizabeth is missing. No one else will believe her, but Maud's investigations, written on countless pieces of paper, means she knows Elizabeth is definitely missing. But how will Maud find Elizabeth?

I wasn't sure at first how I'd warm to an 82-year-old narrator with whom I had nothing in common, but Healey has created Maud with such a wonderful voice that I found myself immediately drawn in. Maud is an unreliable narrator, but not a classic one - she's not unreliable because she's hiding things from other characters or from the reader, but because her brain is letting her down in some respects. Maud's repetition of things she's forgotten but we know could be annoying, but instead Healey uses that repetition to add layers to the novel, subtly building up the evidence which, if only we were clever enough, would help us to solve the mysteries within (all those objects, all those clues). Maud wants nothing more than to get to the truth, and her struggle to get there is both fascinating and sad. 

Talking of sad, I found my heart twisting slightly every time Maud's condition worsened. Healey injects some humour in to the novel, with Maud's obsession with tea and peaches, but Elizabeth is Missing is also a portrait of someone who is losing their memory, and of the ways in which that affects them and the people around them. For Maud, I felt sad because she so clearly was able to understand at times what was happening, and then at other times was so lost. For Helen, I was sad because she was losing her mother, while not physically losing her. At times, I was frustrated at Helen for not acting more to help her mother, but it's clear through the glimpses we get of her that Helen is finding it difficult to come to terms with the changes dementia has wrought in Maud, and when she does finally act it's with consequences that rapidly help solve the central conceits of the novel.

Obviously, the title of the novel shows the focus is on finding Elizabeth, but Healey weaves in a secondary narrative which is as intriguing, if not more, than that of the present day. While Maud is unable to remember parts of her day-to-day life in the present, she has a perfect memory of her younger years, and particularly of the time her sister Sukey went missing, never to be seen again. Here, Healey paints a picture of a post-war family, adjusting to life in peacetime, travelling the line between nostalgia and modernity, while also presenting a second mystery.

Maud may be the unreliable narrator, but with the missing Elizabeth and the missing Sukey, it is all the other characters who are untrustworthy. Wonderfully, Healey crafts her story in such a way that at one time or another I suspected that just about every major character was involved in one or other of the disappearances. While I did solve one mystery pretty much perfectly, the surprise twists in the last quarter of the book were things I never saw coming. They were so cleverly done, and fit so well, that had Healey been in the room while I was reading, I'd have given her a standing ovation.

Elizabeth is Missing has been nicknamed Gone Gran. As much as I love Gone Girl, which reinvented the unreliable narrator/domestic thriller genre, I think Elizabeth is Missing is a more sophisticated book, because it reinvents the genre again. It's stunningly written, and will give you palpitations, and it's worth every penny (and I believe there were a lot of them) that Viking stumped up for it.

How I got this book: From the publisher, Viking. This did not affect my review.

Review: The Silent Wife by A.S.A. Harrison

Oh, the domestic thriller. Once you've read Gone Girl, you've read them all, right? Wrong. Because A.S.A. Harrison's The Silent Wife offers up a whole new chilling and delicious take on the genre.

Jodi and Todd's marriage looks idyllic from the outside, but from the inside things could not be worse. As Jodi heads towards becoming a murderer, and Todd heads towards imminent death, Harrison explores how the couple got to the point they are at, with the run-up reaching surprisingly far back.

The Silent Wife is unusual in that you know how it's going to end from the very beginning - Todd will die, Jodi will kill him. Where in any other novel those actions would be the most exciting part of the novel, in The Silent Wife the best bit is the build up, and the reader's intimate view of the destruction of a relationship.

Jodi, despite being an insightful, clever, well put together (in all aspects of her life) woman (and Stepford Wife-esque person), actually lives in a dream world. I'd go so far as to say that most of the time she's delusional. It's interesting getting to a know a character who is so willfully ignorant of what is happening in front of her, even as she's acknowledging Todd's wrongdoing (although she never acknowledges her own stunted emotional growth).

And Todd's not much better. The phrase "having his cake and eating it" was invented for him. In fact, Todd is a more extreme, less funny, uglier, darker version of Roald Dahl's Bruce Bogtrotter - while Bruce ate one massive chocolate cake and got lauded for it, Todd keeps going, gorging on chocolate cake after chocolate cake and never expecting to get fat.

For two grown-ups, Jodi and Todd have all the emotional awareness of toddlers, made even more ironic by the fact that Jodi is a psychologist. Her job is to listen to people and help them, but even in that Jodi just skims the surface, like in so much of her life. After one bad experience with a client Jodi chooses to just see people with "easy" problems, and see them in her own home, surrounded by her own beautiful, very superficial life. Both Jodi and Todd place great importance on physical appearance (their own, others, their surroundings), yet another sign that they prefer not to delve into life's uglier layers - if they did, perhaps they wouldn't have got into the mess they did.

Harrison's book, however, does explore the layers of Jodi and Todd's lives, with interesting revelations. As we hear more about Jodi's past and her relationship with her family, it's clear there is something hidden very deep that is at least partly responsible for Jodi being the way she is today. And as we learn more about Todd's past, we wonder how Jodi could ever have fallen for him the first place, until we cycle back to Jodi's past, and then it's a vicious circle.

Vicious circles are core to The Silent Wife, in which many actions come back round to haunt people who don't learn from their mistakes, or who don't pay attention to them. "Ignorance is bliss", to use a second well-known phrase in one review, is something that Jodi (and Todd) like to live their lives by. In the end, it definitely doesn't work out for Todd, but for Jodi, it's more complicated. The journey to their separate final chapters will make your heart quicken and miss beats, but it's worth it to see two characters so unlikeable yet so addictive to read about get their comeuppance.

How I got this book: From the publisher, Headline. This did not affect my review.

Review: The Walk Home by Rachel Seiffert

I've been thinking a lot recently about the term "women's fiction" and what is meant by it - is it fiction where the protagonist is a woman, where the author is a woman, which deals with "female themes"? Why does such a term exist?

One publisher who tackles the term head-on and without mercy is Virago, which publishes great books by women, but which couldn't be classed as women's fiction, since the term is meaningless and would do Virago's selection of work down.

Coming to Virago's incredibly strong list (Virago is Maya Angelou's UK publisher) this year is Rachel Sieffert, a Man Booker-shortlisted author. I confess I'd not read her previous novels, The Dark Room and Afterwards, so I had few expectations or ideas about what I was getting.

In The Walk Home, set in Glasgow, "now or thereabouts", a young man called Stevie gets a job on a construction site a few miles down the road from his family, but none of them know he's back. In the early 1990s, Stevie's parents Graham and Lindsey meet and move to Glasgow to be close to Graham's parents.

The Walk Home is not a book where something happens, and then is resolved, and there is an ending, but it is a book about something happening, and the consequences of that. It's a book about how the past can haunt families, even without their consciously realising that the mistakes of the people before are what is damaging the present.

In the present, most of what we see of Stevie is through the eyes of Polish construction manager Jozef, an immigrant to Glasgow whose life is affected by his move to a strange country, his ties to his family and his struggle to fit in with the culture he's left behind, and the culture he's moved into. Jozef's story mirrors the story of Stevie's mum, Lindsey, who moved from Ireland for a better life, but finds that it catches her up in Glasgow in ways she never imagined.

We don't spend an awful lot of time with present-day Stevie, but we do spend a lot of time with Stevie as he grows up, and our relationship with him is built on what we know about his upbringing, which shaped him into the human being he is today. His relationships with his parents and grandparents are key to this, but so are the relationships of the people in his life to each other - they affect him just as deeply as those he is directly a part of.

The most fascinating character in The Walk Home is Graham's maternal uncle Eric, whose past life choices have affected the dynamic of his whole family. From his sister Brenda, to his nephew George, to Lindsey and then finally to Stevie, Eric acts as a warning, a threat and a comfort all in one.

Love is at the centre of The Walk Home - love between siblings, love between a husband and wife, and most importantly love between parents and their children. That last one is at the heart of what happens to and forms each character - starting from how the love between Eric and his father was not enough to sustain their relationship, going through to Brenda and Lindsey creating a mother-daughter love, to Stevie being abandoned by his mother despite his love for her.

The only thing I found awkward about The Walk Home was the Glaswegian accent used for the speech. Reading it, I found it very difficult to hear in my head, and it was only occasionally I could hear the right voice. Most of the time, I just gave up and read it as it would have been without the dialect.

Apart from that, The Walk Home was a moving read. Sieffert has captured a portrait of a family affected by love and loss perfectly, and despite how sad it is, I'm left with hope at the end of the novel that the walk home will be completed.

How I got this book: From the publisher, Virago. This did not affect my review.

Review: The Silkworm by Robert Galbraith

This time last year, hardly anyone knew who Robert Galbraith was. The Cuckoo's Calling was just another crime novel, and its sequel, The Silkworm, should have passed off in the same way.

But then it was leaked that Galbraith was in fact J.K. Rowling - yes, THAT J.K. Rowling - and the publication of The Silkworm became a huge event.

I was lucky enough to get my hands on an advance copy of The Silkworm (while I was still two thirds of the way through reading The Cuckoo's Calling) and read the book in just under five hours. Luckily it's pacy with good characters and a compelling storyline, so my speed read (conducted at work, on a train, at midnight at home, then on another train early in the morning) was relatively painless (I'll admit to being a little bleary-eyed at work afterwards).

The Silkworm is the second book featuring war veteran and private detective Cormoran Strike. Having successfully discovered the murderer of a model in The Cuckoo's Calling, Strike's fortunes have changed - he's got plenty of well-paying clients and is no longer sleeping on a camp bed in his office. When a tearful woman turns up at his office, Strike finds himself delving into the case of an author who has gone missing after writing an unpublished book skewering everyone he knows. And when that author, Owen Quine, is found brutally murdered, the case takes a darker and more dangerous turn.

Rowling is on fine form here, starting the novel with Strike meeting a sleazy tabloid reporter - in just a few pages Rowling makes clear her already well publicised feelings on the hacking scandal. It seems as though The Silkworm will follow the path its first chapter sets out, but instead Rowling chooses to focus on an industry much closer to home: publishing.

As he finds out more about Quine's novel (titled Bombyx Mori - silkworm in Latin), Strike finds himself caught up in the world of publishing. As someone who's been working in the publishing industry for around eight months, I loved every bit of Strike's inauguration into a world so foreign from those he has previously encountered. He meets an agent, an editor, the head of a publishing company, and numerous people lower down the totem pole. While there are no easily identifiable figures from the world of UK publishing (at least, I can't see any), it's clear Rowling has taken stereotypes of publishing folk and used them to form her characters. So we have an eccentric battleaxe of an agent whose office is a mess of books, an editor who is all about books and not business and has turned to drink, writers whose egos are huge and who need mollycoddling, and a managing director who is cold and thinks about the bottom line first. For all her examination of publishing though, Rowling best sums it up when Strike says: "They love their bloody lunches, book people." Why yes, Strike, we bloody do!

The mystery at the centre of The Silkworm is one that kept me guessing right until the very end, when Strike arranged a showdown with the murderer(s). It's clever, because there are only a certain number of people who could have killed Quine, so you have a narrow pool to guess from, but at any one time one of them could have done it, or none of them could have done it, or a few of them could have done it.

However good the murder mystery is, The Silkworm is mostly as good as it is because Strike is such a complex and likeable character. He's stubborn, and can be stupid and a bit clueless emotionally at times, but you can't help but want to read more about what he's thinking, and you can't help but be awed at how clever his mind is at joining together the dots.

The Silkworm is better than good when Strike is interacting with his assistant Robin. The pair's relationship has deepened since The Cuckoo's Calling, and they're on a much more even footing than they were in the first book. Both understand each other a lot more, and have fewer secrets. But as their relationship develops for the better, Robin's relationship with her fiance gets worse, which gives an interesting dynamic to the story. I like that this is a love triangle without being anything like a love triangle - the mutual respect and friendship between Strike and Robin are better than any cliched encounters.

A year ago (yes, I'm back where I started), no one could have suspected that Rowling could write one good crime novel. The Silkworm proves that she can't - she can write at least two good crime novels, and if she carries on in this vein, the Cormoran Strike series will be talked about with the same enthusiasm that her Harry Potter novels are talked about. And we'll be doing that talking over lunch.

•The Silkworm is released in the UK on June 19.

How I got this book: From the publisher, Sphere. This did not affect my review.