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  You can see why some people become best selling authors, as the writing just flows as soon as you pick the book up, and the plot thickens gradually until you find you can't put the book down until you understand what is happening. This is one of those books where the ending is teased all the way through.  It's about a family of three half sisters whose father is a well known artist, and we are quickly told that the youngest daughter, Lauren, suffered some kind of major trauma, but have to wait for three hundred and fifty pages to find out what it is. It's a bit of a thriller as well as a Who Done It, and there are a few shady characters as well as an unsuitable woman as father's latest fiancé.  All the daughters have different mothers who have bought them up in their own houses, so there is a lot about each other that they really don't know.  They had spent time together as girls but Lauren was about nine before her father confessed to her existence and t...

  You really need to be sitting somewhere warm when you read this as it is set in Scandinavia, just north of the Arctic Circle, and the cold seems to creep from the pages all through your body. Elsa is a member of the Sami community who are Indigenous people making a living by herding reindeer.  At the start of the book she is only nine years old, and alone when she witnesses a local man poaching reindeer, and she sees him standing over the dead body of a calf she had been given to raise herself.  The man threatens to harm her if she says anything to anyone, and from then on she spends her days looking over her shoulder and living in fear of meeting him again. The book came about because the author wanted to capture the challenges that face the Sami in their everyday life, and how difficult it is to maintain their traditional methods of herding and to keep their culture alive.  As with Indigenous populations the world over, the Sami have become something of...

  Richard Osman is a very clever man and he has managed to create a murder mystery that initially seems very light weight, but is actually quite complex.  I ended up reading this book twice, because by the time I got to the end, I knew I hadn't paid anywhere near enough attention to the detail, and I didn't have all the threads neatly tied away.   Every chapter contains important details that help the reader understand the outcome, and to get the most out of the book you really have to read it carefully. The Thursday Murder Club is a small group of people who live in a retirement home, and as two of the members had previously been employed in detective work, they spent time going back over old unsolved cases trying to find the answers.  Over time more people got involved and the club pretty much formed itself. The members were happy enough with their old case files until they found themselves in the midst of an on-going police investigation into the murder of a ...

  This was a nice easy read, and came along in a timely manner, as I started the week a little under par and had to rest for a couple of days.  It's one of those books where you don't have to work too hard, but it's well written and interesting all the way through. As the title would suggest, its about a maid, and Molly works in a large hotel where her task is to bring the rooms back to a 'state of perfection' before the next set of guests arrive.  This kind of work is no hardship to Molly, as she loves everything to be as clean as it can be, and she is known to the manager as the most effective cleaner on the staff.  However, despite a grudging respect for her cleaning abilities, the other hotel staff are not all friendly toward Molly as she is not good with social skills and rarely picks up on the true meaning of what is going on around her. Unfortunately, the combination of her naivety and unequalled cleaning prowess makes her easy prey for some unscrupulous indi...

I suppose if I'm going to pick up a book with Granta written on the spine and a dead bird on the cover, then I ought to be prepared for something challenging, but this story is just weird.  I suspect I think it's weird because the whole thing just sailed right over my head, but generally speaking, I like to read for pleasure and there is not much of that to be found in here. It's one of those books that is not about just the story-line but has references that are used to hammer home a heavier point.  In this case, there are pointers towards anti-Semitism, which is a topic that is very much front and centre at the moment, but I'm not convinced the narrator of this story will have said anything to resolve that issue (well not to me anyway). We never know the narrators name, or where the book is set, apart from a mention of it being a northern territory cut off from most of the population.  The story tells of a woman who is the youngest of several children who has come ...

  Charles Ignatius Sancho was a real person who lived in the eighteenth century, and the author has taken the few details known about his life and turned them into a work of fiction.  According to the Preface, Sancho was 'a lucky African orphan, who despite being born in abject slavery, rose to become a leading light of the early abolitionist movement.' The content of the book comprises of Sancho's diary pages written for his son Billy, and he really did have an extraordinary life for a black person living in London at that time.  He became so well known that he had his portrait painted by Gainsborough, and in addition to his campaign for the abolition of slavery, he also composed and played music and had his writing published. He was married to Anne Osborne and they had eight children, although not all survived to adulthood.  Anne doesn't appear in the book until the second half, but their exchange of letters while she is attending to a sick relative on a sugar plan...

Imagine Hugh Grant wearing those big black spectacles that he wore in the film, The Gentlemen , then make him as angry and moody as Gordon Ramsey and as terminally selfish as Boris Johnson, and you might start to get a feel for the ageing artist Ray.  Ray is one of the London Arts crowd and, although he hasn't actually done much in way of art over the last few years, he considers himself to be a notable artist and he rules his family through his manipulative behaviour. His wife, Lucia, is also an artist (think Helena Bonham-Carter), who is actually quite successful in her own right, but she and her three adult children have been conditioned by Ray to see themselves as lesser beings, barely worthy of his attention. His daughter Leah is completely absorbed in Ray's constant needs and rages against her two siblings for never doing enough to help daddy.  As you read through the book, there will be plenty of times where the whole family dynamic will infuriate you, but never too the...