SPECIAL FEATURE: Q&A with Sheena Wilkinson about her new novel MISS McVEY TAKES CHARGE

"I’m always keen to be historically accurate but of course Felicity, and to a lesser extent April, represent the more forward-thinking people of their time ..."

Miss McVey Takes Charge: Yorkshire,1936. April McVey is in charge of True Minds Marriage Bureau, trying to find happy futures for the lovelorn of Easterbridge, while the menace of fascism marches through the country.

After two years of matchmaking, she thinks she has seen it all. But when an old friend arrives from Ireland, with a broken heart that’s well beyond April’s experience, and then a young nun asks her to find a match for her lonely brother, the consequences are shattering.

And as political turmoil reaches their own community, will April have the courage to take charge and do the right thing?

Sheena answers questions from Linda Newbery.

Linda: First, congratulations! It's lovely to see this in print, with such an enticing cover. It'll be a treat for readers of Mrs Hart's Marriage Bureau, while for those who haven't yet read that, it'll surely send them to it. Did you already have a sequel in mind while you were finishing the first book?

Sheena: Yes and no! I wrote Mrs Hart’s Marriage Bureau as a standalone, but the acquiring editor at HarperCollins Ireland was very enthusiastic about its obvious series potential. Which got me thinking… So in my final edit I did drop in a few details I could pick up on for the sequel.

As it turned out, as is the way in publishing, that editor moved on and HarperCollins didn’t offer for the sequel next book because of what they termed ‘disappointing sales’ of Mrs Hart. But by then, encouraged by hundreds of reader reviews which asked for another story, I had written it! I couldn’t bear those readers not to get their sequel, and by then I had put a year’s hard work into it.

I had considered self-publishing but to be honest I was stalling, overwhelmed by what seemed the scariness of it, when Writers Review Publishing invited me on board. I was so thrilled! I was lucky enough to work with Michelle Griffin, the freelance editor who’d worked on Mrs Hart and so knew – and loved – the world, and with Niall McCormack, the illustrator who had designed four of my previous covers. He has a gorgeous style and a real understanding of the aesthetics of the period, and I adore what he’s done.

Linda: I like the way you show April and Felicity adjusting to their lives together - managing domestic and practical details as well as, in April's case, questioning Felicity's commitment. Did you find it tricky to strike the right balance between acceptance of same-sex relationships and giving a realistic impression of attitudes at that time?

Sheena: It was something to think very carefully about, but this is my seventh historical novel, albeit only my second for adults, so treading that line has become very natural. I’m always keen to be historically accurate but of course Felicity, and to a lesser extent April, represent the more forward-thinking people of their time. Because I have a range of characters it was easy enough to show a convincing spread of attitudes, not only about sexuality but about, for example, greyhound racing, which was a hugely-popular sport at the time, with some characters enjoying it without questioning the ethics, and others voicing the opinion that it’s cruel, which is more in keeping with modern sensibilities (and, I know, yours).

Linda: It's just as much Evelyn's story as April's, and this enables you to set some of the scenes in Lisnacashan, the town in northern Ireland where April grew up. When talking about the first book, you said that you'd chosen to set it in Yorkshire, rather than Ireland, to avoid some of the religious divisions that would hamper things in the marriage bureau, but did you immediately see a way to use those here?

Sheena: It's funny, but I never really thought about that until this question! The answer is that when you set anything in Northern Ireland, especially in the past, you simply can’t get away from engaging with religion. It’s just there in the ether and so it found its way into the book. It’s ironic, perhaps, that Protestant Irish Evelyn falls in love with a Catholic Englishman … I come from a mixed background myself which I think informs my outlook on life and my work and helps me to see things in a balanced way.

Linda: You've described the first book as 'feelgood feminism' which is just as apt here - romantic elements and will-they-won't-they combined with awareness of the growing threat of Fascism, which comes close to home in the form of meetings in Easterbridge, a march in nearby Leeds and violence towards some of your characters. There are phrases here that are all too relevant to the worrying surge of the far right in today's public life and politics, and in fact the current situation has worsened during the time you were writing and editing the book. Did you adapt what you were writing in the light of that?

Sheena: The book was a long time in the making, and it rested for a full year before the final edit in the spring of 2025. Even in that year, as you say, things grew much worse for women and other marginalised groups and we’ve seen a surge in far-right attitudes across the world. When Martha comments on the ‘nastiness’ in the atmosphere, I felt very sad that she could be commenting on Britain and other countries today. The best historical fiction should show us ourselves as well as our ancestors: I wish that Miss McVey Takes Charge wasn’t quite so relevant to today’s struggles, but I was grateful for the chance to explore the tension between the political and the personal, and the frustration of feeling up against what feels like an overwhelming tide of bigotry and hatred, in the relatively cosy world of Easterbridge.

Everyone knows about the Battle of Cable Street, which is mentioned at the end of the novel, but the Battle of Holbeck Moor in Leeds on 27th September 1936 is less famous. There was no way Felicity wouldn’t have attended that anti-fascist rally, so I always knew it would form an important part of the narrative. I’ve often written about real-life events but this is the first time I’ve put my fictional characters right in the thick of the action.

Linda: The story ends at a time when the threat of war in Europe is looming. Do you have any plans to continue the story of April and Felicity farther into the 30s or even into the war years?

Sheena: At present I don’t have any such plans. I’ve a novel nearly ready for submission which is set among the staff of a Belfast girls’ school in the 1920s, and my work in progress is a dual timeline set between 2024 and World War 2. So there are no immediate plans to go back to Easterbridge. Having said that, I love April and her friends and if I felt that there was a new story to tell – and, crucially, readers wanting it —I’d love to go back and tell it. And yes, Easterbridge at war would be the ideal focus. I can imagine the Colonel opening up his home to evacuees and the Mill running first aid classes.

As for the structure, I will always highlight the female perspective, but I like giving the men their say too. I love the challenge of writing from a male point of view, and both Fabian (in Mrs Hart’s Marriage Bureau) and Charlie (in Miss McVey Takes Charge) are the closest I have come to writing romantic heroes. I have to admit I fell in love with Charlie a bit so I hope readers do too!

Linda: The novel is cleverly plotted and moves on at quite a pace. Are you a detailed planner - did you plot each episode before you started writing? Were there any that grew out of the telling, and surprised you? Did any of the characters develop in ways you hadn't quite planned?

Sheena: I do plan, yes, and because of having three viewpoint characters I have to think about who’s best placed to carry the narrative at any given point. But that generally happens as the story unfolds rather than in advance. I always have a big notebook full of notes and planning but I don’t over-plan and I love to be surprised.

The first scene came to me in Shropshire in autumn 2023. I was walking in the woods and playing out the conversation between April and Margaret, who enlists the bureau’s help to find a wife for her brother, Charlie. I saw her as a handsome, but very plainly-dressed young girl, and then I thought, Good lord, she wants to be a nun! And that ushered in Charlie’s background and his faith – I hadn’t actually sat down and planned that, which seems odd now as it’s absolutely fundamental to the conflicts of the story. I love being open to that kind of thing; it makes the writing much more exciting.

Linda: Besides reading, are there other things you do to immerse yourself thoroughly in the social life of the 1930s - fashion, food, manners, idioms, etc?

Sheena: Oh yes! I have always been a geek about history and especially the kind that’s not too long ago. I read a lot of 1930s fiction, from Noel Streatfeild to Dorothy Whipple, and l love reading about the minutiae of daily life. I can get lost for hours on websites full of 1930s dress patterns and the like, and I love nothing better than a day at a museum, especially the kind with reconstructed houses, etc.

I was always very close to my granny, who was born in 1908 and lived until she was 96, and I loved hearing her stories about ‘the olden days’. She would have been a contemporary of the main characters and I’ve given April, Felicity and Evelyn some of her frocks, based on old photos of Gran and Aunt Annie and their chums on church outings and the like. Of course the snaps are all in black and white so I’ve had to guess at the colours. Isn’t that an ideal metaphor for what historical novelists try to do?

Linda: It absolutely is! Thanks, Sheena - I hope Miss McVey will continue to win the hearts of readers.

Miss McVey Takes Charge is published by Writers Review Publishing.

See also: Q&A with Sheena about Mrs Hart's Marriage Bureau

Also from Writers Review Publishing:

The Poet's Wife by Judith Allnatt

David: the Unauthorised Autobiography by Mary Hoffman

The One True Thing by Linda Newbery

DEATH OF AN ORDINARY MAN by Sarah Perry, reviewed by Adèle Geras

"The writing throughout is spare but not impoverished, elegant and dignified but also full of tiny touches of humour."

Sarah Perry is the author of four novels, including The Essex Serpent, which was adapted for television in 2022. She is the Chancellor of Essex University. Her work has been translated into 22 languages.

Adèle Geras (pictured) is one of the hosts of Writers Review. She has published more than 100 books for readers of all ages. Her latest novel, Dangerous Women, appeared under her pseudonym, Hope Adams. A second Hope Adams book will come out in 2026 from Penguin Michael Joseph. She lives in a suburb of Cambridge and her website is www. adelegerasbooks.com

Back in May, I read an advance proof copy of Sarah Perry’s memoir. Disclosure: Sarah is a very close friend of one of my daughters and I've met her several times.

I’m also a fan of her novels, especially The Essex Serpent. She’s a wonderful writer, whose work reminds me of one of her glorious coats: rich, brocaded, unafraid of display and always beautiful. Some aspects of her work echo Mae West’s dictum (with which I also agree) “Too much of a good thing can be wonderful!”

Because Sarah is often interviewed, many people know about her Strict Baptist upbringing and other aspects of her life. She’s written frankly and brilliantly about her health, her childlessness and her travels.

In this short book she has turned her gaze on Death. I’ve used a capital D because it is an important and meaningful word; one that stops us in our tracks and should be given proper respect.

I was knocked sideways when I read this book. There’s no other way of putting it. I have often thought about it since I first read it and I agree completely with the rave reviews it has received. It tells the story of the days between her beloved father in law’s diagnosis of cancer and his death only nine days later. The writing throughout is spare but not impoverished, elegant and dignified but also full of tiny touches of humour.

You might think that such a story would depress you, or upset you, but to the contrary I found great comfort in it. This is, I think, because the narrative conveys powerfully the love that seemed to infuse all the days while Sarah and Rob were taking care of David Perry as he was dying. Even with the pain, the complications attendant on dealing with the NHS and the pure sadness of a huge loss waiting to appear, we become aware that we are witnessing a process which is a part of life and bound up with being born, with existing in time. A line from T S Eliot came into my mind: In my end is my beginning. David Perry had a good life and a good death and now a book has been written which will endure and ensure he is forever remembered. May his memory be for a blessing.

Death of an Ordinary Man is published by Vintage.

Sarah Perry's The Essex Serpent is reviewed here by Linda Newbery.

Guest review by Graeme Fife: THE MIGHTY DEAD - WHY HOMER MATTERS by Adam Nicolson

 

"Nicolson, in this enthralling book, introduces Homer in a way entirely apt to the invention and broad sweep of the original."

Graeme Fife is a regular reviewer here. He has written many plays, stories, features and talks for radio, stage plays and articles for newspapers and magazines, and is a regular contributor to BBC Radio 4's From Our Own Correspondent. He's the author of a string of books - children's stories, biography, works of history and fiction. His novel of the French Revolution, No Common Assassin, tells the story of Charlotte Corday. His new novel, Memory's Ransom, a compelling wartime story, is published by Conrad Press.

*

ēmos d’ērigeneia phanē rhododaktulos eōs ... When rosy-fingered dawn, child of the morning, appeared in the east…

This, one of a number of lines repeated in the epic poems of Homer, resting places for the oral composer of the stories, I had by heart even before I read the Greek. In those poems I discovered a world recognised from childhood, peopled with heroes, monsters, deadly adventures, last-gasp escape from peril, in a strange landscape replete with all those elements which fired my burgeoning imagination, the signposts of curiosity which linger still.

Nicolson, in this enthralling book, introduces Homer in a way entirely apt to the invention and broad sweep of the original. Goethe, he says, ‘thought that had Europe considered Homer and not the books of the Bible as its holy scripture, the whole of history would have been different, and better’. The ancient Greeks would have agreed for Homer formed the guiding agency of their own moral nurture. Concur or not, this book will help you decide and it’s an issue worth pondering.

Here Nicolson explores the all-important context of the composition of the poems, not written down and thereby, to a degree, fixed for centuries after their appearance as stories embellished, changed, developed, passed on, in the same way as the Gaelic bards and those of the Balkans told their own sagas as a way of charging the imagination of their audience, giving them souvenir of a way of life and action long gone, which they might emulate and by which be inspired. A modern audience will protest, perhaps that this is an androcentric world where women pay a secondary role and the charge is valid. However, Homer’s women present a side of the female spirit which, albeit not of apparent influence on the central landscape of the poems, the battlefield, save in the guise of the goddesses who intervene on human affairs and failings, their heroic exploits, their brutal death, nevertheless underpins all they do and contend for.

Penelope, Odysseus’s wife, remains in the kingdom of Ithaca in the lord’s absence, in the Trojan expedition and thus obliged to preserve the kingdom against his eventual return. Beset by a mob of brawling suitors eager to bed her and claim lordship, she outwits them by guile and, in Nicolson’s emphasis, displays what Homer calls her euēgēsia ‘good command’, nicely glossed by Nicolson as ‘the inner citadel of virtue and value’. I needn’t rehearse the story of her tapestry, woven by day, unpicked by night, her redoubtable patience in the task imposed on her. One example, only, in Homer’s exploration of the indomitable strength of the so-called weaker sex: the wiles of the sorceress Circe, mellifluous Calypso, the cave-bound monster Scylla, and Charybdis, the whirlpool into which a boat may be sucked. Sirens, uttering their seductive calls to give up, surrender, and we see, through Homer’s rich invention, the contrarieties of the sexual balance of power, between men who wield sword and spear in the forum of blood and women who control by subtler means. The female of the species more deadly than the male…? What upset that has caused in the virile heart and mind. So listen up, you men. Homer speaks.

There is much in this book to entice and inform not only in how Homer weaves his magic but in the way that fiction, stories told at bedtime to children or grown-ups later, plant the nurture of our own discovery of how life veers, its vicissitudes; the courage to outface, the spirit to persist, as Odysseus, time and again, puts his hand to the tiller and sails on after yet another confrontation with what had seemed insuperable odds. Invoking ‘the ability to regard all aspects of human life’ and from that understanding keep on, never yielding.

The very allure of Nicolson’s account of what Homer means to us, as he has meant to those generations which, in Keats’s phrase, ‘have trod’, is underlined by the fact that he has sailed treacherous waters in a small boat and knows, dry-mouthed, the conflict of tide and current, of wind and squall, the danger of the ‘unharvested sea’, that briny desert where survival rests always on a gunwale’s edge. He has sat in a grove on Ithaca at night, reading the account of the return of Odysseus to his home - the Odyssey is one of a number of nostoi, voyages home, whence our ‘nostalgia’ - and the ensuing bloodbath of vengeance on those who would have raped his queen and usurped his place as king, sat there even as the nightingale sang its tearful – oiktista - song. Read how Nicolson brings to vivid colour the evening when Keats read the vibrant translation of Chapman. ‘Here at last…was the moment, when, cresting a rise, a new and deeper, ineffably broad landscape had opened in front of him.’

Horace referred to Homer when he speaks of the difficulties of writing, the challenges sometimes beyond us to surmount in words, despite the poems which Nicolson with penetrating insight investigates and honours. Horace wrote:

et idem

indignor quandoque bonus dormitat Homerus

[Ars Poetica 358-9]

‘And yet, I mustn’t be hard on myself when even good Homer nods off’.

I’ve made furniture and was thrilled by Nicolson’s loving account of how Odysseus fashioned the raft which might carry him to safety, every peg and joint, every shaping and fitting.

The Mighty Dead is published by William Collins

Guest review by Susan Elkin: DRAYTON AND MACKENZIE by Alexander Starritt

"Intelligent and compelling without ever resorting to shallow literary pretentiousness. I loved it – and wondered why on earth it wasn't on the Booker Prize longlist."

Susan Elkin taught English in secondary schools for 36 years, latterly developing a parallel career as a writer. Since 1990 she has written over 5000 articles for newspapers and magazines, English text books, how-to books for teachers, a book about careers in theatre and latterly four volumes of memoir: Please Miss We’re Boys (2019), The Alzheimer’s Diaries (2022), All Booked Up (2024) and This Writing Business (2025). Her first foray into fiction - Unheard Voices: Tales from the Margins of Literature -  is out now. Susan lives in South London.

It’s unusual to read a book which explores and celebrates male friendship with all its affectionate joshing, trust and respect. We’re so used to reading about male/female liaison in its many forms and/or about gay love that pure, loving friendship between two men is a refreshing change.

Alexander Starritt’s new novel, which is both moving and absorbing, gives us James Drayton and Roland Mackenzie who meet at Oxford and are very different. James is a focused, super-bright, high achiever who doesn’t always relate comfortably to other people. Roland has people skills, enjoys a good time and messes up his degree. So they hardly notice each other. Later they meet again, find a bond and start an innovative energy company – it has potential, perhaps, but of course investment is an issue and there are many setbacks. Some of the stumbling blocks are driven by phases of differing commitment and loyalty as the novel inches, via its dated sections, towards the Covid years. The complementary relationship between the two of them is like a love affair as they bicker, fall out and rediscover each other repeatedly. Rarely have I read a novel with stronger characterisation.

The minor characters are wonderful too. James’s long-suffering parents, with whom he lives most of the time, are a delight. Both are academics. They take in Roland as a quasi family member and Arthur’s therapeutic, culinary hobby saves the day on more than one occasion. Then there’s Eleni, a rich successful Greek they knew at university who can always be relied on for sensible advice. Alice goes out with James for a while but Roland is easier to be with and, somehow, the two men come round to accommodating the change in dynamic. Some of the characters are real too. It must have been fun to write Drayton and Mackenzie’s meeting with Elon Musk.

Is there a future in tidal energy or hydrolisers? I’m no scientist but Starritt, who has clearly researched it all pretty scrupulously, convinces me that there probably is although there are many heart-in-mouth moments at the beginning, not least when the diver descends to attach the first cable. Starritt is very good at tension and brilliant at naturalistic dialogue. He also excels at the agony of loss because, of course, life is messy – in novels as in reality.

The novel’s epilogue pitches us forward twenty years so we do actually find out how successful it eventually all was. And I cried. Drayton and Mackenzie – the book’s title is, of course, the name of the company – got under my skin in a way that no recent novel has done for a while. It’s intelligent and compelling without ever resorting to shallow literary pretentiousness. I loved it – and wondered why on earth it wasn't on the 2025 Booker Prize longlist.

Drayton and Mackenzie is published by Swift Press.

See also our Q&A with Susan about her reading memoir, All Booked Up.

Guest review by David Breakell: PRECIPICE by Robert Harris

 

"Historical fiction is not just a passport to the past. It can also give us a new perspective on our contemporary world: some things don’t really change."

David Breakell, formerly a lawyer in the City of London and now a writer of historical fiction, reviews the latest novel from a titan of the genre, Robert Harris. Earlier this year, David published The Alchemist of Genoa, a novel set in the late 16th century, earlier this year. He is currently working on the sequel. Find out more from his website. 

“The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.” L P Hartley’s famous opening line is about memory, the loss of innocence, moral decline. But it could be seen as an explanation for the allure of historical novels, a brand motto even. One writer with a much-stamped passport to that undiscovered country is Robert Harris. His novels cover the broadest sweep of history, from pre-imperial Rome to the present-day Vatican, from feudal England to fin-de-siècle Paris, all without a hint of jet lag.

This time, Harris takes on the much-visited summer of 1914 and finds something new to say. His microscope focuses on a few square yards of Political London and an odd-couple romance between the married 62-year-old Prime Minister, Herbert Asquith, and the young, unmarried, Venetia Stanley.

The affair, mostly conducted by letter and occasionally in the back of the PM’s limousine, proceeds decorously as befits the times, but is nevertheless shocking. Not only in terms of Asquith’s cavalier attitude to sharing state and military secrets with his lover, but also his sense of priorities considering what was in his ministerial red box at the time. These are the PM’s actual letters that Harris quotes from the archive – he recreates Venetia’s letters to the PM, because Asquith burnt them after resigning – and there are hundreds of them. Often, Asquith wrote to her three times a day. How on earth did he find the time?

Harris is a seasoned political observer so the context – Asquith scribbling his gushing love notes in Cabinet just as Churchill is explaining the details of the Gallipoli campaign or arguing with Kitchener – is expertly handled.

Equal prominence is given to Venetia’s side of the story. She is the daughter of an aristocratic, landed family but her perspective is thoroughly modern. We can admire her spirit but wonder at her judgment. Eventually, she realises that the affair must end and engineers it by fairly drastic means. If there is a doubt in this reader’s mind about Harris’ version of Venetia, it relates to her keeping the whole thing secret for so long, even from her closest family. Not so much the affair itself, but the state secrets she has become privy to. These feel like an intolerable burden, especially when her brothers and brothers-in-law are called up to serve and Venetia knows more – through Asquith’s indiscretions – about the military campaigns in which they’re participating than almost anyone in the country. Despite that, she shares none of this knowledge, resolutely protecting Asquith’s reputation.

To raise the stakes, Harris writes a parallel story. Detective Sergeant Paul Deemer, a Scotland Yard policeman seconded to the embryonic MI5, is on the hunt for German spies. Deemer is a bachelor whose modest background makes him an outsider in the officer-class security service. Half-way through the book, the two stories collide when Deemer starts to suspect that Asquith and Venetia are exchanging more than endearments. Deemer’s pursuit of them - pure detective work – propels the story at pace and, as importantly, gives us a moral character who points up the somewhat naïve antics of the PM. I was occasionally reminded of J B Priestley’s An Inspector Calls with its similar period milieu and its eyebrows raised at the self-indulgence of the privileged classes. But Deemer is no avenging angel like Inspector Goole. He passes no judgment, other than a legal one, on Asquith’s indiscretions and even feels uneasy about steaming open the lovers’ correspondence.

The world we left behind in 1914 is skilfully evoked. London, with its twelve postal services a day, a city where Downing Street is an unguarded backwater and a Prime Minister can walk into a large bookshop and not be recognised. But historical fiction is not just a passport to the past. It can also give us a new perspective on our contemporary world: in a novel where leaders are too powerful to prosecute, where the security services collude with media mag
nates, where politicians are playing footsie under the table – or just golf – while presiding over the fate of the world, it reminds us that some things don’t really change.

Precipice is published by Penguin.

See also David's review of Death at the Sign of the Rook by Kate Atkinson

David's novel The Alchemist of Genoa is published by Dower House Books - look out for a Q&A early next year. 

ALBION by Anna Hope, reviewed by Linda Newbery

 

"Combines typical ingredients of the big house novel and family saga with deep questions about individual responsibility, whether wrongs of the past can be righted, how we adapt to climate change and nature loss, and what kind of future we can shape."

Linda Newbery edits Writers Review. She is a writer, reviewer and active campaigner on animal and environmental issues. Her latest novel, published earlier this year, is The One True Thing. 

The big country house as a fictional setting has enduring appeal. Names come readily to mind: Downton Abbey, Brideshead, Manderley, Mansfield Park, Brandon Hall (see Graeme Fife's recent review of The Go-Between) and countless more, including the recent Saltburn. The house in Anna Hope's latest novel differs from these others in never being named, though it's certainly as grand as any of them - an eighteenth-century Greek Revivalist mansion standing in a thousand acres of Sussex pasture and woodland. The name we focus on isn't that of the house, but of the Albion Project - a ten-year rewilding project that certainly owes much to the influential and nearby Knepp Castle estate, obliquely referred to. As with the Knepp project, the ambition of owner Philip Ignatius Brooke and daughter Frannie is to extend beyond their own boundaries, creating a green corridor that will reach through Sussex and Kent countryside to the sea. 

Now Philip has died, and the novel's action takes place over five days in May during which the family reassembles for his funeral. Of his three children only Frannie, the eldest, still lives there, and is in the process of moving with her young daughter into the main house, while Philip's widow, Grace, will take over their cottage. Philip himself had inherited house and estate at just eighteen when both parents were killed in a car crash; he set up what became known as 'the English Woodstock', a festival known and fondly remembered as The Teddy Bears' Picnic. There he met his future wife, leading to a marriage from which she wishes she'd had the courage to escape. While she remained at home with the children,  he did escape - to New York, where he settled for years with another partner (and possibly another child?) before returning and zealously taking up the rewilding scheme.

Anna Hope loses no time in showing us the spiky relationships and resentments of the three grown-up children, Frannie, Isa and Milo. Frannie is named as heir in their father's will, to the disapproval of brother Milo; she in turn is impatient with Isa, who's barely been in contact; Milo, recovering from various kinds of addiction, plans an exclusive rural retreat in the grounds in which, bizarrely, he aims to convert the 1% who can afford it into benevolence that will benefit the whole of society. Frannie, faced with paying millions in inheritance tax, is desperate to find the money somehow, fretting as she tries to write her father's eulogy; Grace, relieved to exchange the house she hates for the cottage, has ambivalent feelings about her late husband and how she'll express them at his funeral. Isa, distancing herself from wealth and privilege, is a teacher in London, scornful of her sister's enterprise: "The shepherd's huts, the yurts, the caravan serving lattes to middle-aged white people while they sit on hay-bales and chatter about their Pilates teachers and their dogs. A theme park for solvent fifty-somethings, all of it about as wild as a fucking printed tea-towel." Meanwhile, seven-year-old Rowan is showing what her class teacher sees as a disturbing fascination with bodily decomposition after death.

Into this potent mix comes a young American PhD student, Clara, with a bombshell to drop. Most readers will see what's coming, but that doesn't lessen the impact when she chooses her moment to reveal the source of the estate's wealth. With mesmerising clarity, calmness and precision she compels the family to listen, making eloquent use of her encounter with Rowan playing with a box of shells.

What next? How will these descendants of Oliver Ignatius Brooke adjust to the knowledge of the vast injustices (more than one) that underpin their privilege?

I first came across this novel when it was dramatised as Radio 4's Book of the Week earlier this year. There, I thought the repercussions of Clara's revelation were disappointing, too glibly and swiftly dealt with, so I wanted to see how Anna Hope handles this in the novel. Even here, though, I'm not sure. There are various reconciliations: too many and still too quickly, because of the constraints of the five-day structure. Frannie is the one whose ending is left most open-ended and uncertain as she confronts difficult questions, both practical and ethical.

That reservation aside, I found Albion utterly compelling: it combines typical ingredients of the big house novel and family saga with deep questions about individual responsibility, whether - and how - wrongs of the past can be righted, how we adapt to climate change and nature loss, what kind of future we can attempt to shape and who will benefit. The pace is leisurely enough to draw us fully into the family's concerns, while never seeming slow; tensions crackle off the page while the depictions of the natural world are vivid and immediate, whether portraying the woodland in May extravagance, the brisk extermination of a pregnant mink or the dawn song of a nightingale. I hadn't read Anna Hope before, so this is a very impressive introduction.

Albion is published by Penguin.

See also Anna Hope's Expectation, reviewed by Claire Grint of Cogito Books, Hexham.

Linda Newbery's The One True Thing is published by Writers Review Publishing.

Guest review by Sarah LeFanu: UNDER THE NET by Iris Murdoch

 

"Her joy in thinking and observing, in the vagaries of the emotions, in the pleasures of friendship, and in the pursuit of love, are all vividly present in her very first, utterly delightful novel."

Photograph: Lindsey Fiddler

Sarah LeFanu is a biographer whose subjects include Rose Macaulay, Samora Machel, Mary Kingsley, Rudyard Kipling and Arthur Conan Doyle. She has published two memoirs that focus on the process of biographical writing: Dreaming of Rose: A Biographer’s Journal and Talking to the Dead: Travels of a Biographer. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

A quintessential Iris Murdoch novel would feature a group of highly intelligent people caught in a chain of unrequited love, struggling to find meaningfulness in the random events of chance, and thinking deeply. They often think about how to be good. For some readers The Sea, The Sea is the classic, for others The Bell, or The Black Prince, or A Severed Head. Murdoch published twenty-six novels, so there are many to choose from. My own current favourite is her very first, Under the Net, published in 1954. It is a high-spirited and frequently hilarious exploration of how to live and how to be good, in the form of an extended caper through the streets and spaces of the narrator’s ‘beloved London’ (with an intermezzo in Paris).

Chronically short of money, reliant on what he gets from translating not-very-good French novels and on the goodwill of others, narrator Jake Donoghue finds, at the opening of the novel, that he and his sidekick Finn have been thrown out of their current nesting-place and must find somewhere else to live.

Besides Finn, Jake’s friends and acquaintances include Hugo Belfounder whom he first meets at a cold-cure research establishment (for penniless Jake ‘an incredibly charitable arrangement’), who is a rich inventor, a thinker, and owner of a film studio; Dave Gellman, a lecturer in philosophy whose flat in Goldhawk Road offers a floor if not a bed for Jake and Finn; Lefty Todd, eccentric leader of the New Independent Socialist Party; folk singer Anna Quentin for whom Jake yearns, and her sister, would-be film star Sadie; enigmatic cat-loving Mrs Tinckham who runs a grubby ‘accommodation address’ newsagent off Charlotte Street. And Mister Mars, a canine film star kidnapped (amateurishly) by Jake and Finn, who becomes Jake’s loving accomplice.

Some of these people are met by accident; others are pursued for one reason or another. All form part of an intricate, shifting pattern, pattern rather than plot, for this is a story about chance, luck, misunderstandings, reversals, money that comes unexpectedly and vanishes just as fast. There is unrequited love (Hugo: ‘Jake, you’re a fool. You know anyone can love anyone, or prefer anyone to anyone’), but this is also a novel about friendship.

Under the Net is rich in observed detail. Jake and his friends move through a London that is not yet recovered from the depredations of war, a London of ruined churches and rosebay willowherb. They wander from Shepherd’s Bush to the Holborn Viaduct, from which they look down on Farringdon Street which ‘swept below us like a dried up river’, to City pubs and to the Bounty Belfounder film studio in south London. In the early hours of one morning three of them swim in the Thames when the tide is on the turn and the moon is ‘scattered in pieces’ upon the water.

In between his pondering on inevitability, on fate, on the astonishing fact that the not-very-good French novelist’s latest novel has just won the Prix Goncourt, Jake amiably shares his views and opinions with the reader, and somehow makes us willingly complicit in the most egregious situations. ‘If you have ever tried to sleep on the Victoria Embankment,’ he declares, ‘you will know that the chief difficulty is that the seats are divided in the middle.’ He leads us through a series of wild and comic set pieces (the kidnapping of Mister Mars, the pursuit of Anna through the Tuileries, the clash between Lefty Todd and right-wing agitators at the studio) to an extraordinarily intense climax, which takes place at night on a hospital ward when devastating truth is revealed, but revealed in whispers so as not to arouse the suspicions of the Sister on duty.

Iris Murdoch’s reputation took a trashing, soon after her death in 1999, from an unsavoury memoir published by her husband John Bayley which charted her decline into dementia. I am glad to say that that has been succeeded more recently by biographical and critical accounts that celebrate her wide-ranging interests: her appetite for philosophy, for literature and for love affairs. Her joy in thinking and observing, in the vagaries of the emotions, in the pleasures of friendship, and in the pursuit of love, are all vividly present in her very first, utterly delightful novel Under the Net.

Under the Net is published by Vintage Classics (Murdoch Series)

Dreaming of Rose - a Biographer's Journal by Sarah LeFanu is published by Handheld Classics.