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  I nearly didn't read this, as the first few pages seemed heavy, and I didn't feel in the mood for a book about a lonely old man who seems to have had enough of life.  I would certainly have read something else if I had another fiction book to hand, but I didn't, so I was almost forced to give it a go as I don't like to go a day without reading. As it turned out, it was heavy, and as with so many novels set in Ireland, there were plenty of instances of harm caused by the Catholic church that were covered up and ignored until people simply accepted that it was part of their lives.  Sometimes I wonder why the Catholic church was not drummed out of Ireland years ago after all the revelations of abuse that have come to light in recent years.  The institutions such as orphanages and laundries must have affected almost every member of the population in some form or another, and yet no one felt they had the power to stop it. Physical and sexual abuse of vulnerable chi...

  When I started reading the first book in this trilogy, Wolf Hall, I was a little nervous of Hilary Mantel and I wasn't sure that I was up to the task, but now I am a convert and I can't wait to get on to the third and last book. Set in the time of Henry VIII, this book covers the period of Henry's second marriage to Anne Boleyn as seen from the perspective of Oliver Cromwell.  Cromwell is getting older and he has become Master Secretary and the King's go-to man whenever there is anything difficult to be done.  Cromwell played a key role in fulfilling Henry's wish to have his first marriage annulled, and when Anne Boleyn failed to provide the much anticipated male heir, Cromwell is again asked to get Henry free from his marriage.  When the King divorced Katherine, his first wife, she was allowed to go and live out her years in relative obscurity, as she was not accused of any personal wrongdoing, but it is very different for Anne.  She is accused of adultary, i...

  Oh dear, I should never have read this straight off the back of Wolf Hall.  This book is such nonsense in comparison that I may not even have finished it if I had anything else to read. The writing is not so bad but the whole concept of using the  Brontë sisters as amateur detectives is a real stretch of the imagination that I felt exasperated with it right from the start.  In her defence, the author admits there is no evidence to suggest that the sisters did any such thing, but on the other hand, there is no evidence to say that they didn't. The mystery the dear sisters have to solve is the apparent bloody murder of a young bride in a neighbouring village.  Even though they have no right to get involved at all, they dash off to visit the house and insist on having a good snoop around to look for clues.  Over the course of the story, they lie to their father in order to get out of the house for days at a time and then help themselves to whatever private p...

  I have seen this book on numerous occasions when I have been in the library, but I have always passed on by and left it sitting on the shelf.  I was partly put off by the sheer size of it, but I also had a sneaking feeling that I would find it a little too high-brow for me and would struggle to get to the end. Maybe it was because I have recently had a run of historical novels, or maybe all the focus on King Charles' coronation has put me in the right frame of mind, but three weeks ago I finally found the courage to take it home.   It wasn't as difficult to read as I thought it might be, and I was very much helped by the list of characters thoughtfully provided at the start of the book.  There are a lot of people to get to grips with but Mantel is careful to jog the readers memory if someone suddenly crops up again after a gap of several hundred pages.  The book runs to exactly 650 sides of small print, so it is a bit of a project, but the research is so ...