dittybox

  At the back of the book the author tells us that it took years to write this story and that should come as no surprise to anyone who reads it.  The level of detail and understanding of the history supporting three different generations of a family is remarkable, and you read it as if you were a ghost hovering on their shoulders. Sometimes the story drew me in so much that I almost wanted to find a way to communicate with the characters to warn them as something bad approached.  As the reader, we know some of the outcomes for the characters, because the story of the three generations is woven together, and we have 'seen' photographs and letters as they have been seen by later members of the family. Huge topics such as racism and unethical trading with the Nazi Party in Germany are covered in the telling of the story, and the author keeps the narrative true to each era that is covered.  The open racism against Jewish and black people in the earlier years of the twent...

Now that I have read all the Elizabeth Strout novels I could lay my hands on, I am really glad to have a good number of books by Anne Tyler still stretching out before me.  There is a real art to writing about daily family life, even though it is something we have all experienced.  An author with an eye for tiny details can bring a home to life and Anne Tyler has that skill in spades. Anyone who has been married for any length of time must have had days when they just pondered the possibility of just walking away one day without looking back, and this book is a story a wife and mother who did just that. Delia Grinstead had been married to Sam since she left high school, and they produced three children who were now all reaching the age when they were preparing to fly the nest and make lives of their own.  Delia's father was a family doctor when he employed Sam to come and work with him as a second doctor in his practice, and it wasn't long before Sam began to consider mar...

Last week we visited the National Trust property in Hinton Ampner and saw all sorts of decorations and ornaments made from a purplish stone that looked a little like spotty marble.  I asked the steward what it was called and he very kindly gave me a very detailed answer.  The stone is porphyry which comes from just one single mountain in Egypt, and it was very popular in Regency England for interior decoration.  The name is also linked to the medical condition porphyria which turns the urine of sufferers a reddish purple.  George III is thought to have suffered from this condition and it would also have been responsible for his episodes of 'madness'. Stay with me, I am getting to the point.  So, when I got home that evening I started this book, and by coincidence it was related to the inherited condition of porphyry and how it came into our royal family via the German House of Hanover. Set in the mid 18th century, it is also the time of the portrait artist Thoma...

This book was written as a kind of social experiment that the suthor says, 'almost became a game'.  She took a single protagonist and wrote two stories; one with the lead character as male and then another with the same life as a woman.  Both these stories run concurrently through the book in alternating chapters that take the character from birth to about thirty years old. It's a a good idea, and quite relevant these days when we hear so much more about gender fluidity, but I think the good idea somehow got in the way of the story.  I think I would have happily read either version as a book in its own right, but the constant changing from one to the other felt a little disruptive, even though having two stories is the whole point of the book. The core of the story is set in a small American town in Maine where a family owns a paper mill that provides employment for almost everyone else in the town.  As with most towns, there are residential areas that are occupied b...

This book is translated from Icelandic and has a distinct chill in the style of writing, but don't let that put you off as this is a very cleverly constructed story. Right from the outset you know that a young woman has been murdered and her body concealed in one of the volcanic fissures that are a feature of the landscape, but you don't know who is responsible for this crime. For her family, Isafold has simply disappeared, and after two weeks of silence, her sister Arora travels from England to try to discover what has happened to her. The two sisters are both half Icelandic so Arora is familiar with the country and knows who she can to speak to to get some leads.  The block of flats where Isafold lived with her boyfriend is home to a number of people who each have their reasons for staying out of the police investigation, preferring to keep quiet rather than share what they know. As the book progresses more characters come into the story, adding layers of complexity to the pl...

I was completely absorbed in this book and read through it quickly.  The larger part of the book is set in the period just before the Second World War, and tells the story of an upper middle class family who are a solid part of the establishment. Everything changes for Hugh and Phyllis Forrester when they return to England after years abroad and they move to Sussex to be near Phyllis's sisters.  One sister, Patricia, has married a very weathy man and they live in a substantial house; while the other sister, Nina, has married a man who is in business and runs a garage, so not really the kind of man her parents envisaged for her.  Hugh's social status falls somewhere in between, but the family are still very comfortably off and fit in easily with Patricia's circle of friends. Nina and her husband Eric have become very active in a political movement and they help organise local talks and summer camps to allow people to come and find out more for themselves.  As Phyllis ...

I can tell you with some confidence that you will not have read a book like this before.  It's a short book, best read in one sitting, that is quite original and very well done. You are probably thinking to yourself that you have read so many books that there is nothing new under the sun, but I am here to tell you that there is.  Here is the story of Caroline Margaret Brookes Whitaker (known as Kitty) through her engagement to William Wallingford III (known as Bucky).  They marry in 1926 and become a coveted pair at Fifth Avenue dinner parties and cocktail gatherings, and their lives appear to be perfect although they are concealing private grief. So nothing terribly out of the ordinary so far, but I haven't told you about the format of the book yet.  Each page carries no more than a paragraph of writing set out as though it was a catalogue entry for a high class art gallery.  Every entry carries a heading to give you a time and location and then the paragraph o...