WILD DARK SHORE by Charlotte McConaghy, reviewed by Linda Newbery

 

"One of my books of the year - completely gripping, moving, expertly-paced, with characters that grow on the reader."

Linda Newbery edits Writers Review. Having published widely for young readers, with titles including the Costa category winner Set in Stone, she is now writing adult fiction. Her most recent novel, The One True Thing, was one of the launch titles for Writers Review Publishing last April; it will be followed by The Hide this autumn. 

This is one of my books of the year - completely gripping, moving, expertly-paced, with characters that grow on the reader, and the effects of climate change on landscape and wildlife at its core.

The setting is a remote island, Shearwater, based on Macquarie Island between Tasmania and Antarctica. A research team has been forced to abandon its project because of rising sea levels; central to this work is a subterranean seedbank designed to last far into the future, but now threatened with flooding. Various disasters, slowly revealed, have left the Salt family - father Dom, teenagers Raff and Fen and nine-year-old Orly - as the sole inhabitants of an old lighthouse until a shipwreck survivor, Rowan, is rescued from the sea. Deliberate sabotage of the communication equipment has left the islanders unable to summon help from the mainland; they can only wait for the evacuation ship to arrive in six weeks' time.

At first it's uncertain that Rowan will survive. Nursed by the family, she does, but both she and they are hiding secrets. Why did she set out for the island? What is Dominic hiding in the underground vault? How did his wife die, and what has disturbed Fen so much that she can't sleep indoors?

The seedbank gives a focus on all that's threatened and is a powerful metaphor for the intensive crop farming we already depend on. Time and space make it impossible to save all the seeds - but which should be prioritised? Those already known to be food crops? Those that are fire-resistant? Those whose qualities are as yet unknown? Rowan sees the terrible dilemma this poses: "how to let go of plants and trees and flowers and shrubs, how to let go of the most exquisite, the most unusual, how to let biodiversity die in favour of what humans can eat. Not only do I feel this weight, I see the future laid out before me. A vast stretch of crops and nothing else, nothing wild or natural, and even these neatly planted rows threatened on all sides by flame and flood. All of earth, a wasteland."

There are plenty of thrills, twists and revelations, but what made this such a compelling book for me is its focus on landscape, weather and climate adaptation.  The black sands where the seals breed, watched over by Fen, are disappearing under rising tides; Rowan has experienced the devastating loss by fire of a house and land she had come to love. But there are glorious moments too, including an episode where these characters achieve the seemingly-impossible rescue of a beached humpbacked whale and her calf.

Strong characterisation and a range of viewpoints bring us close to each character in turn: to Dom, who cares passionately for his children and believes himself to be haunted by his dead wife; to the teenagers, who've known little else but solitary island life; to nine-year-old Orly, drawn to Rowan as a substitute mother; to Rowan herself, who at first sees the future only as bleak: 'everything will be drowned, burned or starved' as the climate becomes increasingly inhospitable. Later, through her involvement with the family, she (with the reader) begins to see possibilities for them all when they leave Shearwater. But nothing is certain in this dangerous, changing world. The sinuous plot keeps us hooked to the end of this story with heart and soul as well as thrills. 

Wild Dark Shore is published by Canongate.

More cli-fi:

Q&A with Jane Rogers about her short story collection, Fire-Ready

Q&A with Alison Layland about After the Clearances

Riverflow by Alison Layland

The High House by Jessie Greengrass

The Overstory by Richard Powers, reviewed by Tracey Mathias

Guest review by Nicki Thornton: THE IMPOSSIBLE THING by Belinda Bauer

 

"The Impossible Thing is more than just a perfectly plotted thriller, it’s a masterpiece of storytelling."

Nicki Thornton is a bestselling children’s author who has recently published her first crime novel for adults. Little Bookshop of Murders is about Keera Munroe, who tries to escape her shady past by opening a bookshop in an idyllic village. But when Keera argues with a customer who then dies in mysterious circumstances, she’s forced not only to try to find out what really happened, but to confront the fact that even the loveliest places can be hiding the darkest secrets.

Little Bookshop of Murders is inspired by Nicki's twenty years of working in and with bookshops – perfect places for solving crime!

The Impossible Thing was my favourite read of 2025. Many of my favourite writers are those who use crime fiction to comment on times past and present and Belinda Bauer is one of the best, writing with so much humanity and dealing with big and tricky subjects with a nice line in humour as well as a mystery plot.

A break-in in the present day plunges two unlikely heroes into the historical, unexpectedly murky, obsessive, and very lucrative world of oology, or egg collecting.

I was delighted to see that one of the unlikely heroes is the return of one of my favourites of her previous characters, Patrick. Belinda Bauer won the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year with Rubbernecker, another absolute cracker of a story and one I’m always recommending, where a young autistic man, Patrick, signs up for an anatomy class examining a corpse to determine cause of death. Smart but socially inept, Patrick suspects murder. I was thrilled to see Patrick featuring again.

Told in a dual-timeline, The Impossible Thing starts in the 1920s when egg-collecting was both legal and huge. Obsessed and fanatical rival collectors were in desperate competition to have a rare egg to show-off.

The historical timeline doesn’t focus so much on the collectors, but on a group of Yorkshire farmers discovering they have new source of wealth – in all the nests beneath their cliff-top farms. One family is desperate to be part of this new business of egg-collecting, but they have a farm atop a totally inaccessible cliff.

Tiny, brave and always hungry, Celie Sheppard risks her life going over a cliff no one else will dare. She discovers a near mythical red egg, the Impossible Thing. Celie’s bravery changes the fortune of her entire family and everyone connected to her.

A greedy collector knows a red egg is going to be laid every year, and over time will form into an incredible collection, because a nesting guillemot will return to the same cliff nest every year. Each mother lays eggs with distinctive markings so they know which egg is theirs. Of course, if they're collected, none will ever hatch. Every year each chick will be killed. I particularly love that Belinda Bauer weaves the consequences for the birds into her narrative and shows how birds are also innocent victims of greed and ego.

From the wild cliffs to stuffy gentlemen’s clubs in London to council estates, protected woodland nests and the hidden back rooms of a natural history museum, the story loops between the timelines and what happened to those rarest of rare eggs. Patrick and his friend are unwittingly drawn into the now underground, present-day world of egg collecting and all its hidden dangers.

Belinda Bauer triumphantly weaves both timelines together. Crime, mystery, family drama, romance, tragedy, characters you wish you could stay with and the consequences of wildlife trafficking, all is delivered in an enthralling way as the dots are connected as things get increasingly thrilling. I did not want the book to end.

The Impossible Thing is more than just a perfectly plotted thriller, it’s a masterpiece of storytelling. I’m really hoping it will win a lot of awards this year. I encourage everyone to seek out and read it.

The Impossible Thing is published by Bantam.

Nicki Thornton's Little Bookshop of Murders is published by Chimneys Publishing.

A VOICE IN THE NIGHT by Simon Mason, reviewed by Adèle Geras

" ... a nuanced rivalry which veers from irritation to anger to wonderfully complicated friendship which neither man would actually describe as such, but which is nevertheless real and touching."

Adèle Geras has written many books for children and young adults and seven novels for adults, the latest of which (under the pseudonym Hope Adams) is Dangerous Women, published by Michael Joseph. She lives in Cambridge.

For anyone who does not know him, Simon Mason is, as well as a wonderful writer, a friend of this blog. He was our special guest recently and we are fans of his work.

On one level, Mason might be said to write quite a traditional sort of crime story. His Wilkins and Wilkins series (I'm calling them that. I haven't seen them described so in newspapers) contains two cops, contrasted in many ways, solving crimes in a particular area. There are the accustomed wisecracks, of course, but in addition this pair share both a surname and initials. They started work on the same day but the differences between them couldn't be greater. Of course, these lead to much comedy along the way but also create a nuanced rivalry which veers from irritation to anger to wonderfully complicated friendship which neither man would actually describe as such, but which is nevertheless real and touching. On the cover of A Voice in the Night, Mick Herron calls them "crime fiction's most entertaining double act in decades" and he's right.

Ray Wilkins is very handsome, Black, sharply dressed and a graduate. Ryan Wilkins is skinny as a rake, wears dreadful clothes (a lime green puffa jacket features in this book) and comes from a decaying estate. His father was abusive. His late wife died of a drug overdose. He's no beauty but has a fine line in repartee and huge charm, at least for me. He's what would definitely be called "poor white trash" in the USA. But he has a superb instinct for people, and can deal with them in a way most other policemen cannot. He lives with his sister, Jade, who works at the Co-op. Most importantly of all, he's father to little Ryan who is easily the most wonderful toddler I can remember in recent fiction. The relationship between father and son is what lifts these novels up out of the general run of crime books. It's movingly described and often provides another dimension to whatever is going on in the police action.

This novel is the fourth in the series. I am a believer in starting series with Book 1, but it's not strictly necessary. What you miss starting with Book 4 is the history: what's gone on between Ryan and his son, between Ryan and Ray, between Ryan and his police chiefs, between the police and a nice assortment of low-life living and committing crime around Oxford. My advice: you ought to buy all four books at once ...

This one is terrific. The body of a linguistics professor is found still dressed in his pyjamas, dripping wet and lying on the lawn in front of a hotel. There's also been a security guard stabbed to death during an armed robbery. On top of all that, there's a new female officer in charge of things at the station and charged with clearing up these matters. DCS Wainwright is much more than she at first appears, and very interesting.

Meanwhile, back home, Jade and little Ryan are threatened by a gang whom Ryan has met before. Michael, the chief young yobbo, is superbly described. Even villains in Mason's book are portrayed in a three-dimensional way.

Just over half way through the book, something happens that was like a sledgehammer to the heart. I'm not saying another word. But be assured, in the end we reach a solution. Mason even manages to pull off that wonderful trick of a surprise as the last thing we read ... a rare event in fiction. I hope lots of people get to know Ray and Ryan before the inevitable TV adaptation, because (and I am not sure why I've left this till the end) one of the glories of these novels is the way they're written. Oxford and the countryside around it come subtly to life and every sentence is elegant and perfectly judged. Mason's prose is not show-offish or mannered but simply elegant and suited in every way to the story he's telling.

A Voice in the Night is published by riverrun.

Simon Mason's feature for our 8th birthday last July: on the crime fiction of Peter Temple.

EIGHTH BIRTHDAY SPECIAL FEATURE: guest Simon Mason on THE BROKEN SHORE and TRUTH by Peter Temple

"As rich, grim and sprawling as Dostoevsky, taking in multitudes, a swarming cast of characters, murder, politics, money and horror ..."

Simon Mason is a writer of fiction. At first he wrote books for adults, then books for children, which grew up at roughly the same rate as his own children, and now he is back writing books for adults again.

His latest books are crime thrillers featuring a mismatched pair of detectives in Oxford. The first, A Killing in November (shortlisted for the Golden Dagger) was a Sunday Times crime book of the month, and so was the second, The Broken Afternoon. The third, Lost and Never Found, was long-listed for the Theakston’s Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year Award. 

He has pursued a parallel career as a publisher. From 2012 to 2018 he was Managing Director of the children’s publisher, David Fickling Books, where he worked with many wonderful writers, including Philip Pullman, whose book of essays Daemon Voices (2016), he edited.

Arriving on the scene late (he was fifty when his first book was published), Peter Temple was instantly a writer of thoroughly expert literary thrillers, stylish, intelligent, humorous and dark. Words were important to him, his sprightly, stylish prose reminiscent of Chandler, but funnier (‘Gerry gave me the look chefs reserve for three-day-old fish’). The real world was important too; a former journalist, he knew how things work – newspapers, information-gathering agencies, politics – and also how the past lives in the present: ‘the past had suckers, it attached itself to everything.’ His characters, like those of Dickens, are vivid animations, distinguished by the marks of their individuality; his speciality was in damaged men. Scene-setting is always vivid and deeply felt, in particular of Temple’s adored-abhorred Melbourne, with its industrial lots, big-business office complexes, weatherboard slums and gated mansions. And all these literary virtues combine in his two last, loosely connected novels, The Broken Shore (2005) and Truth (2009), which outgrew his chosen genre.

The Broken Shore won the CWA Gold Dagger but is altogether meatier and more highly wrought than the average crime novel, a study in evil, a hard look at Australia and a moving portrait of a damaged, somehow-surviving man.

Melbourne detective Joe Cashin has been shunted to undemanding duties in remote Cromarty, his hometown, as he convalesces from a near-fatal attack which killed his partner. He would like to be free to pursue the Quixotic renovation of his old family farm, to walk his dogs, to reflect on what Cromarty has become – a coastal town half dead industry, half new holiday homes – but the local ‘squire’, last bastion of Cromarty’s former industrial wealth, is found murdered in his mansion, apparently killed for his watch, which, a few days later, a couple of Aboriginal kids are caught trying to sell. It seems a straightforward case. It isn’t.

Temple’s love of language is evident in the urgent, evocative writing which strips away inessentials. What’s left are shrewd, concentrated descriptions (‘wicked-eyed gulls’, ‘the beach tightly muscled’) and bursts of dialogue which capture the sounds, moods and evasions of taciturn Australian men who live in danger. Australia itself is a broken shore, a blasted heath of ruins, a desolate place for desolate characters. Damage has been done by the violence of hardscrabble poverty, privileged wealth and deep-rooted racism. Where is the soul of Australia now? In Cashin? In Dove, Cashin’s down-trodden Aboriginal partner? Or in Dave the Swaggie, a ‘ghost’, an ‘alien’ (‘did Dave ever have an earthly identity?). Story-lines, as likely to be personal as investigative, spiral outwards and continue to proliferate even at the end. Though its virtues are literary, its plot grips like a thriller. Its immediate focus is crime but its deeper enquiry is into human nature. It asks Who are we now, and by what appalling path did we get here?

Truth is as rich, grim and sprawling as Dostoevsky, taking in multitudes, a swarming cast of characters, murder, politics, money and horror. It all happens around Stephen Villani, Head of Homicide in Melbourne, that ‘ghostly’ city of foul deeds. After a cameo role in The Broken Shore, Villani here takes centre stage, conducting investigations into two separate murders, separating acrimoniously from his wife, having a lust-charged affair with an eye-catching television journalist, trying to find his runaway daughter, worrying that a certain event in his past is going to return to destroy him. He flirts recklessly with danger, not only in his violent encounters on the street but in the swanky living rooms of politicians courting him for higher office, and in his childhood home in the hills, where his ex-combat father is refusing to evacuate in the face of rapidly spreading fires.

It is, among other things, a novel of memories, Villani conjuring up a city built of his own experiences, reflecting on what it has all meant, struggling to recall things buried too deep, things that lie ‘just beyond the breakers, in the deep water, in the dark, slippery, moving kelp of the mind.’ His project is to understand – or at least to get into view the unintelligible: ‘There was a meaning here. There was something speaking to them and they did not know the language.’ Temple’s own language is extraordinary: demotic, urgent, elusive, it demands concentration and delivers constant shocks of the new. He avoids explanation like the plague. He loves to ramify, can’t resist an extra layer, a wounding complication. Huge numbers of people appear and disappear, many of them suspect, and the investigation leads not towards their crimes but into their lives. It progresses crabwise, slow and opaque. In retrospect the solutions are simple, we have simply been hustled past them onto other fascinating things. It is an extraordinary achievement.

The Broken Shore and Truth are published by Riverrun.

See also Linda Newbery's review of Daemon Voices by Philip Pullman

RIVERFLOW by Alison Layland, reviewed by Linda Newbery

 

"It’s rare and refreshing to read a novel set in the here and now that has climate issues so firmly at its core."

This novel was a welcome surprise that came to me via a roundabout route. It began when I attended a Society of Authors ‘at home’ event – a workshop hosted by Lauren James, author of The Loneliest Girl in the Universe and Green Rising, and founder of the Climate Fiction Writers League. The focus of the session was how to bring climate concerns into fiction set in the present day – not necessarily foregrounding the various issues, but rather weaving in details as part of the daily lives and concerns of the characters.

I find it irritating to read fiction set in the present day that makes no reference to the climate emergency – especially when characters are taking flights here and there, driving big cars and eating steak in restaurants. It’s almost as if there’s a parallel world to ours with no looming crisis and with no need to change and adapt. It seems, both in young adult and adult fiction, that climate awareness is largely limited to ‘cli-fi’ – fiction usually set in the future, often involving fantasy. (An honourable exception to this is Eleanor Catton’s Birnam Wood – see our summer round-up.)

After the workshop I joined the Climate Fiction Writers League and was invited by Lauren to write a conversation piece with another author. This author turned out to be Alison Layland, whose novel, Riverflow, was published in 2019. As I haven’t yet published adult fiction with an environmental theme (working on it) Alison is to read my non-fiction title, This Book is Cruelty Free – Animals and Us. (For anyone who doesn’t yet acknowledge the link between animal agriculture and the climate crisis, please read the book, or for a more comprehensive overview, Philip Lymbery’s Sixty Harvests Left.) 

Knowing nothing of Alison Layland or her work, I found myself immediately drawn to her characters, setting and plot. Riverflow is set in a small Shropshire village, Foxover, close to which Bede and Erin, a couple in their thirties, have lived off-grid on a smallholding for many years. Until eighteen months ago they shared Alderleat with Bede’s uncle Joe, until he drowned in the surging river, leaving Bede unable to accept that his death was accidental.

The frictions and rivalries of a rural community are convincingly depicted. Bede and Erin, former activists, clash with local landowner Philip Northcote who’s developing a fracking site. Bede, clever at mechanics and problem-solving, is an idealist, probably on the autism spectrum and at times infuriating to live with; to some villagers he’s known as Eco, a nice demonstration of the ease with which people can pigeonhole and ‘other’ an outlier, avoiding the inconvenience of acknowledging that his views are both valid and necessary. He and Elin are devoted to each other, but with the unavoidable sticking-point that Elin wants children whereas Bede thinks it would be irresponsible to bring a child into this threatened world. Elin, too, tries to steer a calm course through village conflicts while Bede can never curb a sarcastic or angry response when challenged.

Partly through snippets of the journal Joe kept hidden, we’re drawn into the backstory of Bede’s upbringing. Never knowing who his father was, he was brought up by his mother until her death, when her brother Joe took him in. But Joe had secrets of which Bede is unaware and which begin to threaten the self-contained life he and Elin have built at Alderleat. The plot centres on a series of incidents involving Philip Northcote, his widowed mother Marjorie with whom Joe had a close relationship, and attractive newcomer Silvan, Northcote’s gamekeeper, who befriends Bede and Elin. Bede is apparently being framed for acts of minor sabotage – releasing pheasants reared for shooting, scratching the side of Northcote’s Bentley – and then for a far more serious crime. The revelation of who's behind this malice is cleverly constructed, with several clues hidden in plain sight.

What makes Riverflow so appealing is the deft and delicate portrayal of the shifting relationship between Bede and Erin, alongside the details of daily life which are always underpinned by environmental aspirations and what it’s practical to achieve. It’s rare and refreshing to read a novel set in the here and now that has climate issues so firmly at its core.

Riverflow is published by Honno Press. The conversation piece between Alison and myself is now online here. 

Guest review by Rachel Ward: THE SECOND STRANGER by Martin Griffin

 

"If you are looking for a page-turning thriller to get lost in, then look no further."

Rachel Ward writes adult crime and thrillers. Her first psychological thriller, Safe With You, was published in 2022, and her second, The Girl Who Vanished, will be out in May. She also writes a cosy crime series, The Supermarket Mysteries, the first of which, The Missing Checkout Girl Mystery regularly features in the cosy crime charts. She is currently working on the fourth book in the series. Rachel lives in Bath, and posts daily photos on Twitter from her early morning walks, as well as occasional paintings. Find her on Twitter: @RachelWardbooks

The tagline ‘One Detective. One Murderer. But which is which?’ neatly sums up the book, except there is so much more going on.

The setting is a country house hotel in the Scottish Highlands with extensive grounds, which Remie Yorke is getting ready to close for the end of the season and leave for good. On her last night, Storm Ezra hits, the snow piles up and the phone lines go down. An injured man knocks at the door, claiming to be a police officer, PC Don Gaines, who was transporting a prisoner from a nearby prison when the vehicle was in an accident. Remie lets him in, but while he is doing security checks of the building, a second stranger appears. His name, apparently, is Don Gaines.

The idea of guests and staff vacating a hotel at the end of the season, ensuring that a large building is almost empty was very atmospheric and a good set up. Add in a fearsome snowstorm and a stranger turning up and I was hooked. By the time I got to the second stranger, I was agog.

I listened to the audiobook, ably narrated by Tamsin Kennard, while I was painting. It kept me thoroughly entertained for several sessions. This book has all the key elements you need including a remote location cut off from the outside world, a small cast of characters who you can’t trust further than you can throw them, a protagonist with a troubled past, and twists and turns aplenty.

If you are looking for a page-turning thriller to get lost in, then look no further. I can’t wait to see what Griffin writes next.

The Second Stranger is published by Sphere.

Guest review by Rachel Ward: THE POSTSCRIPT MURDERS by Elly Griffiths

 

"A light-hearted read in the vein of Richard Osman’s The Thursday Murder Club or S.J.Bennett’s The Windsor Knot."

Rachel Ward has written five thrillers for young adults, the first of which, Numbers, was shortlisted for the Waterstones Children's Book Prize. Her novels for adults, The Cost of Living, Dead Stock and Expiry Date (Sandstone Press) are cosy crime stories set in and around a supermarket. Rachel lives in Bath where she also paints and takes photographs. Twitter: @RachelWardbooks Facebook: Rachel Ward Art

When ninety-year-old Peggy Smith is found dead in her armchair by the window in a care home by the sea, her death is put down to natural causes, but her carer, Natalka, suspects foul play. For Peggy was a ‘murder consultant’ who plotted deaths for authors and had told Natalka that someone was following her. Natalka investigates, helped by Peggy’s friends, eighty-year-old former BBC Radio 3 presenter, Edwin, and ex-monk turned coffee barista, Benedict, and also local police detective D.S. Harbinder Kaur. The case takes them through the murky world of publishing and to further deaths before the truth is finally revealed.

This is a light-hearted read in the vein of Richard Osman’s The Thursday Murder Club or S. J. Bennett’s The Windsor Knot. The action keeps coming with surprising twists and turns. For this reader, there are rather delicious references to the crime-writing world. What marks this book out from others in the cosy crime genre is the fine and complex characterisation. Griffiths makes you really care about Natalka, Edwin, Benedict and Harbinder. We learn about their, in some cases unusual, backgrounds and history and enjoy their friendships developing. The plot may stretch credibility a little (which I didn’t mind at all) but the relationships between the main characters are utterly believable.

This is the second book to feature D.S. Harbinder Kaur. I don’t think it matters that I am coming to them out of sequence and I’m looking forward to reading the first one, The Stranger Diaries.

The Postscript Murders is published by Quercus.

Rachel Ward's Ant and Bea books are reviewed here by Savita Kalhan.

The Windsor Knot  by S J Bennett is reviewed here by Penny Dolan.

BILLY SUMMERS by Stephen King, reviewed by Celia Rees

 

"From the very first page a brooding sense of foreboding underlies the whole story like a constant drumbeat..."

Celia Rees is a leading writer for young adults with an international reputation. Her titles include Witch Child (shortlisted for the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize), Sorceress (shortlisted for the Whitbread - now Costa - Children's Book Award), Pirates!, Sovay and Glass Town Wars. The chance discovery of an old family cookery book has now taken her writing in a new and different direction. In 2020 her first novel for adults, Miss Graham's Cold War Cookbook, was published by Harper Collins, and is now in paperback as Miss Graham's War.

Twitter: @CeliaRees Instagram: @celiarees1

Billy Summers is a good man doing a bad job. That is not to say he's doing a job badly - he's superb at it - the best in the business - it's just that his job is to kill people. He's a hired gun, a professional killer, the old fashioned word for it is 'assassin'. A brilliant sniper with ice cold nerves, he learnt his trade in Iraq.  A master of disguise, his  planning is meticulous. He has all the angles covered and gets away, clean and free, time after time. 

He's choosy about the jobs he takes, as a salve to his conscious he only kills really bad people, but his chosen area of work brings him into contact with very bad people indeed. The guys who hire him are likely to be worse than his targets, but that doesn't bother Billy. He has that covered as well. Or thinks he does, until it comes to one last job. 

Billy is not in it just for the money. His motivation is more complex. He approaches each kill like a game of multidimensional chess and takes satisfaction from a job well done and the salty excitement of getting away with it. He has a deeper reason: his targets have done terrible things but will evade any kind of punishment, unless Billy dishes it out to them. So he can be seen was some kind of exterminating angel, in his eyes, anyway.

But Billy's not getting any younger and he's tired of living on nerves and adrenalin this one last hit will provide him with more than enough to be home and free. He wants a shot at normal life, of happiness and King offers a glimpse of what that might be, but Billy has a bad feeling about this assignment right from the start, a creeping feeling that the luck that has held for so long is about to run out. He has always relied on sixth sense and intuition but now he brushes that aside to get this one last job done. In a Stephen King novel this is NEVER a good thing to do... 

Billy Summers has few traces of the supernatural, apart from a fleeting nod to The Shining, but from the very first page a brooding sense of foreboding underlies the whole story like a constant drumbeat, growing in intensity as the novel progresses and things, indeed, start to go wrong. 

Stephen King is a master story teller. He builds tension like nobody else can. He is brilliantly good at inviting and trapping the reader's sympathy for his flawed and faceted characters which, of course, ramps up the tension even more. When he's not doing that, he is giving the reader quick snapshots of modern America. He has written a great many books across many different genre but there is a consistency in his writing, he knows exactly what he is doing and in line with his other titles, Billy Summers is a very good read. 

Billy Summers is published by Hodder and Stoughton.

Celia's Miss Graham's War is published by Harper Collins.

Guest review by Jane Thynne: TINKER, TAILOR, SOLDIER, SPY by John le Carré

 

"The more I read this novel, the more I have appreciated its artistry."

Jane Thynne is the author of the Clara Vine novels, a spy series featuring an Anglo-German actress in Nazi Germany. She has also written The Words I Never Wrote, and other standalones. Her latest novel is Widowland (Quercus, June 10th). It is an alternative history dystopia set in 1953 - coronation year, but not the coronation of Queen Elizabeth. An Alliance between Germany and Britain had produced a society based on caste, where women are divided into a rigorous hierarchy. The heroine, Rose Ransom, is tasked with editing the classic texts of English literature to eliminate any portrayals of women as independent, powerful, subversive.

Widowland is written under the pen-name C.J Carey.

Jane has worked as a journalist at the BBC and on a number of Fleet Street newspapers.

I came to John le Carré very late, but having discovered his masterpiece I will never tire of it. Anyone who writes about closed societies and inner sanctums will recognise his insight into how power works. His dialogue perfectly captures class and attitude, and his slang is stunningly inventive - ‘scalphunters’, ‘moles’ and ‘babysitters’ were all his coinings. In every way, he is a writer perfectly matched to his subject; the profound machinery of his labyrinthine plots mirrors precisely the deep machinations of his spies.

The more I read this novel, the more I have appreciated its artistry. Take, for example, the use of the school subplot, which subtly adumbrates the action of the entire novel. The novel opens obliquely, in a minor boarding school, Thursgoods – an environment that le Carré, as a former teacher, knew well, and which like the Intelligence services and Whitehall, is an intensely male setting, filled with jargon and unwritten rules. Jim Prideaux, an MI6 agent hiding out as a supply teacher, has been hired, and we see his arrival through the eyes of Bill Roache, a lonely new boy. Roache is ‘a natural watcher’ – an embryonic spy, whose name will be echoed later in the form of Bill Haydon, the charismatic villain of the narrative. In an apparently random episode, Jim’s lesson is disrupted by an owl smoked out from the chimney, which Jim kills expertly and is discovered ‘still folded, neatly dead’.

Here we have, foreshadowed, elements of the plot – of the watcher Bill Haydon, who will be neatly executed by Jim Prideaux. And the strange inclusion of an owl is no co-incidence. Later in the story we encounter a Russian spy called ‘Lapin, the rabbit’. And the entire story revolves around the discovery of the ‘Mole’. Owl, Rabbit, Mole. What is le Carré suggesting in his use of these classic figures from children’s literature? That the child is father to the man? Or that the multi-layered plot can be peeled and peeled, right back to youth, and the juvenile friendship of Bill Haydon and Jim Prideaux.

Aside from plotting, le Carré’s genius lies in his ability to characterise with a few deft strokes, often merely the use of slang that is never explained and so draws the reader in as intimates of his secret world.

His women barely exist, of course. But I love the melancholy watchfulness of Smiley, and the silky smoothness of Bill Haydon, who was modelled on Kim Philby. Yet it is le Carré's dingy, post-Imperial Britain that is his greatest creation. His themes of love and betrayal are played out in an England that is shabby and rainswept. Stunningly rendered, with the bitter lyricism of a betrayed lover, he captures perfectly the atmosphere of dashed expectations and second rate-ness in a country which had been trained to rule the world.

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy is published by Penguin.   

FOURTH ANNIVERSARY: a special Q&A with Celia Rees about her new novel, MISS GRAHAM'S COLD WAR COOKBOOK

"There is a definite magic in that first moment when the ideas begin to swarm together ..."

Celia Rees is a leading writer for Young Adults with an international reputation. Her titles include Witch Child (shortlisted for the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize), Sorceress (shortlisted for the Whitbread - now Costa - Children's Book Award), Pirates!, Sovay and Glass Town Wars. The chance discovery of an old family cookery book has now taken her writing in a new and different direction. In 2012, she began researching and writing her first novel for adults, Miss Graham's Cold War Cookbook, out now. Here she answers questions from Adèle Geras and Linda Newbery. 
Twitter: @CeliaRees Instagram: @celiarees1

Linda: The idea of using recipes to conceal coded messages is such a clever one, used to brilliant effect throughout. How did you think of it?

Celia: I found a battered old cookery book among my mother's effects and was both intrigued and moved by the handwritten recipes that I found inside. I recognised my mother's writing, my aunt's and what I took to be my grandmother's but I'd never seen the book before. It was pre-war and must have belonged to my grandmother, then passed to my aunt and on to my mother who must have kept it when my aunt died. I'd been executor for both my aunt and my mother and had found no letters. These recipes were the only written connection between these women. There was something I wanted to write about in that but I didn't know what it could be. Years later, I was in the Imperial War Museum with my daughter. We discovered that the British Zone in Post War Germany had been a hotbed of spying. My aunt had been there. Could she have been a spy? On the surface, the idea was ridiculous. My respectable, Head Mistress maiden aunt a spy? But then again, it was perfectly possible. She had led a bit of a hidden life... If she was a spy, how would she pass on messages? I thought of the handwritten recipes passing between women. The two ideas connected and I knew I had a book.

Adèle: Apart from the personal link of the recipe book, can you identify what it was that drew you to the story of some of the things that went on both before and more especially after the War? It's not a subject I've seen written about before.

Celia: I began to research Germany in the immediate post war period and was shocked by the utter chaos: the widespread physical destruction, the lack of even the most basic foodstuffs and the millions of displaced persons there from all over Europe. The Germans call midnight on 8th May, 1945, 'Stunde Null' - Zero Hour. In and amongst all this, there were Nazi fugitives hiding in plain sight. They were being hunted but not always to be brought to justice. The Allies were looking for useful Nazis even before the war ended, not just rocket scientists like Wernher von Braun, but others, too. Anyone who might be useful because the world was turning, the Cold War starting and Germany was the country where the erstwhile Allies met. I found this intensely interesting. By one of those chance things, on a visit to the Jewish Museum in Paris, I saw a chilling group photograph of doctors and nurses lined up outside a hospital, a mental facility, part of the Euthanasia Project which was devoted to systematically killing patients deemed 'a life unworthy of life'. I knew almost nothing about this and found it deeply shocking and I thought it should be more widely known.

Linda: How did you find the confidence to write about this period and these settings, with so much complexity involving the different factions, protocols and motives? What was the most difficult thing to find out?

Celia: I did a lot of reading and didn't start writing until I felt I was in command of at least the basic facts and knew where to go if I needed to know more. The most difficult things to find out were the details of the day to day lives of the people living and working in Germany. There are plenty of books about various aspects of Post War Germany but not many which tell you how much the butter ration was or how a billet was organised. I had to go to the Imperial War Museum and read the letters and diaries of women working for the Control Commission. The food was difficult, too: finding menus, dishes, recipes. I'd set myself a bit of a challenge with that!

Adèle: This novel is what's known as multilayered. Several time frames, quite a few different narratives going on at the same time. Did this give you any particular problems? Did you go through various versions before arriving at the ideal order?

Celia: I didn't have a problem with the framing device, that was always set. If I had a problem, it wasn't so much with the order of events but the order of telling, especially the flashbacks, which couldn't be jettisoned because they carried vital backstory that the reader needed to know. The trick is to know where to put them, then weave them into the thought patterns of the close third person narration in a way that seems entirely natural and doesn't disrupt the main narrative thrust. That took a bit of working. For a while I had a reader who didn't like flashbacks and that made things difficult!

Adèle: One of the things I most love about this book (and indeed about all your writing!) is the care and love you give to things like descriptions of clothes and settings. Did you have to fight editors about keeping this detail intact? In my experience, they sometimes want to cut a lot of that.

Celia: We share that, Adèle. I love all those details. There was a brilliant exhibition at the Imperial War Museum, Fashion on the Ration and a great book to go with it by Julie Summers and that was a huge help. It's strange how things like that pop up just when you need them. I like researching clothes and makeup. It's fun and I can spent all afternoon on the internet chasing down the right hairstyle or shade and make of lipstick, but these kinds of details help to accurately evoke the period. Clothes, hairstyles, makeup, jewellery, accessories are important in other ways, too. They tell you a lot about the woman wearing them and at a time when so much was rationed, where and how she acquired them tells you what is going on at street level. I didn't have too much trouble from my editors. Luckily, they could see the value of that kind of detail.

Linda: In similar vein, I was struck by the scenes of utter devastation in the cities and suburbs - you describe them so vividly. Were these derived from photographs and first-hand accounts, and where did you find them?

Celia: My aunt had photographs of ruined cities and ships half submerged in harbours. Some she'd sent to my mother, so I remember seeing them as a child, others I found in her effects. There are plenty more on the internet. One thing people did was take photographs of the devastation. Touring the ruins was quite the thing to do. I also found eye witness accounts of Hamburg and Berlin, so I had those for reference.

Adèle: Is the Swiss hotel based on a real hotel?

Celia: Yes, it is. The Beau Rivage Palace. I haven't been there but it looks fabulous! I bought a vintage post card and trawled their website. The wonders of the internet!

Linda: You obviously visited Lübeck for research - did you visit other settings for the novel, for instance Vipiteno Sterzing?

Celia: I did visit Lübeck, also Hamburg and Berlin but I didn't get to Vipiteno Sterzing. Again, internet to the rescue: tourist information and TripAdvisor, also Google Maps and Google Earth. I did cheat a little bit and put a lake where there is no lake...

Linda: Often, when a writer is researching, something crops up that's a gift to the plot, or that's useful thematically. Did you come across any unexpected bonuses of that kind?

Celia: There is a definite magic in that first moment when the ideas begin to swarm together. After that, you are on a journey and it is remarkable how things pop up, exhibitions that are on just the right subject, a chance find in a bookshop or the person you just randomly met and who is actually from Lübeck and whose aunt and uncle still live there and would love to show you round the city. The most surprising the thing was how my aunt's seemingly unremarkable life and character lent itself so perfectly to this kind of novel, especially when I found a box of bullets hidden in her writing case. I took that as a Sign! Maybe she had been a spy after all...

Adèle: If this became a movie (which it should!) who would play Dori, Edith, Kurt and Harry? (Ps. I know who I'd like to play Elisabeth: was in The Night Manager.)

Celia: Endless hours of idle speculation... Well, and they are a bit disparate but I think Anna Maxwell Martin would make a good Edith, Rachel Weisz as Dori, Thomas Kretschmann as Kurt, Cate Blanchett as Elisabeth (although, agree Elizabeth Debicki if Cate unavailable) and Ben Whishaw as Harry - I had a photo of him pinned to my board!

Miss Graham's Cold War Cookbook is published by Harper Collins.

Photograph of Celia Rees at Compton Verney, by Linda Newbery. Compton Verney is the setting for many a conversation about books in progress, and also where Writers Review was first hatched, four years ago.

Guest review by Rachel Ward: THE LOST MAN by Jane Harper

"A fabulously plotted and absorbing story."

Rachel Ward has written five thrillers for young adults, the first of which, Numbers, was shortlisted for the Waterstones Children's Book Prize. Her novels for adults, The Cost of Living and Dead Stock (Sandstone Press) are cosy crime stories set in and around a supermarket; Expiry Date will be published on June 18th . Rachel lives in Bath where she also paints and takes photographs. Twitter: @RachelWardbooks Facebook: Rachel Ward Art

In an isolated part of Australia, two brothers meet at the stockman’s grave, a landmark so old that no one can remember who is buried there. But today, the scant shadow it casts was the last hope for their middle brother, Cameron. The Bright family’s quiet existence is thrown into grief and anguish. Something had been troubling Cameron. Did he choose to walk to his death? Because if he didn’t, the isolation of the outback leaves few suspects…

Many of you will have read The Dry,  Jane Harper’s first crime book which deservedly won numerous awards including the British Book Awards Crime and Thriller Book of the Year 2018. If you thought that couldn’t be topped, The Lost Man gives it a run for its money.

Once again, the bleak sun-scorched outback landscape comes to the fore, providing a lethal environment for anyone caught out in it without shelter. Harper’s descriptions are vivid and compelling.

The book follows Nathan, one of the surviving brothers, who lives in an adjacent farm, as he tries to unpick the tortured family relationships on the main Bright family farm and the events which led to Cameron’s death. All the characters are well drawn and complex. Nathan himself is an outsider within his community and his family and is a fascinating focus for the book.

It is a fabulously plotted and absorbing story. There’s a real sense of menace and despair, as secrets are gradually revealed. The ending is surprising (at least to me) and satisfying.

I’m rationing Jane Harper books, because they are real treats to be relished. I’ve yet to read Force of Nature, and I’m delighted to see that a new book, The Survivors, is due in September. Highly recommended.

The Lost Man is published by Abacus.

See also: The Dry reviewed by Adele Geras

Independent Bookseller feature No.10: Haslemere Bookshop. DISAPPEARING EARTH by Julia Phillips, reviewed by Emily Adsett

"I found that the women of this book stayed with me long after I’d finished it."

I run The Haslemere Bookshop with my mum, Sue, and a small team of wonderful booksellers. We’re located on the Surrey/Sussex/Hampshire border and our Tardis of a shop is packed with books- both new and secondhand. We work hard to create a warm and welcoming atmosphere, and to promote the message that bookshops are for everyone. In 2016 we were regional winners of the Independent Bookshop of the Year Award! In recent years we’ve started to organise author events, and in June we were delighted to host Ben Aaronovitch on his tour of independent bookshops. I have worked in the shop since I was 15 and I couldn’t imagine working anywhere else!

It has been a summer of good books. Some of my favourite authors have brought out long-awaited sequels and hotly anticipated follow-ups! However, the book that has stayed with me, and was ultimately my favourite, was a debut and reached me by way of a glowing recommendation from a friend.

Disappearing Earth by Julia Phillips begins with the abduction of two young girls. I found that the overall plot reminded me of Reservoir Thirteen by Jon McGregor; however, instead of taking place on the English moors, this story is set on Kamchatka Peninsula in far eastern Russia. Both books start with a disappearance but then the story moves - each chapter a new perspective. In Disappearing Earth, each perspective is from a woman, either directly or indirectly affected by the abduction. A year passes, and each new chapter brings in a new month while the reader feels that it is increasingly unlikely that the Golosovskaya sisters will be found alive - if at all. At times it’s difficult to understand where new characters fit in, but the thread of the missing girls always appears, binding the story together. I found the structure wonderfully frustrating - just as you were becoming fully absorbed in a character and her story, the narrative would pull back and you’d suddenly be on the other side of the city or in the north of the peninsula following another woman. While this unique arrangement could become quite jarring, I think Phillips pulls it off incredibly well. She wastes no time in setting up the new character, and often in just a few lines you are hooked in again. Some of the stories are just a glimpse into a life: a fleeting (yet action packed!) camping trip; or a widow reflecting on the anniversary of the death of her first husband; while others span weeks or even the whole month.

I found that the women of this book stayed with me long after I’d finished it, one of whom was Ksyusha, who appears early in the story. She is a student at Petropavlovsk University, living with her extrovert cousin Alisa and feeling like an outsider due to her childhood spent in a remote town as the daughter of reindeer herders. The abduction of the sisters has made her overbearing, long-distance boyfriend, Ruslan, even more over-protective; he demands phone calls twice a day and doesn’t like her spending time with others. After joining a dance group at the insistence of her cousin, Ksyusha begins to grow in confidence, and what starts as friendship with a fellow dancer soon turns into a love affair that gives her a freedom and a happiness that she didn’t think possible. There are not many neat and happy endings in Disappearing Earth. This chapter is no exception, and a surprise visit from Ruslan brings her blossoming relationship to an abrupt halt.

You cannot discuss Disappearing Earth without mentioning its sense of place. For me, this was one of the most powerful aspects of the book. I felt transported to this remote area of Russia. The blurb on the back of the book promises “densely wooded forests, open expanses of tundra, soaring volcanoes and glassy seas” and I could see it all. Her descriptions of the city of Petropavlovsk with “its buildings dark, parking lots empty and shop repair yards motionless” seem particularly bleak and real. Phillips spent two years living in Russia and has studied the language and culture extensively. For me, a bookseller living in West Sussex, this research pays off and the subtle observations and sensitivity in which she draws the characters gives the book authenticity. However, a recent review by Sarah Moss brings up issues of appropriation and questions Julia Phillips’ right to tell this particular story, a thought which hadn’t crossed my mind on my first read.

Disappearing Earth is a challenging book to review. The clever and complex structure make for an intriguing reading experience but a difficult one to summarise! While maybe not the book for anyone hoping for a straightforward crime thriller, this story offers so much more: an incredible sense of place; thoughtfully written, authentic characters; and, actually - a pretty thrilling final chapter!

Disappearing Earth is published by Scribner UK.

THE FAMILY UPSTAIRS by Lisa Jewell, reviewed by Adèle Geras

"A gem from Lisa Jewell. Someone has probably said this before, but I couldn’t resist ..."

Adèle Geras has written many books for children and young adults and six novels for adults, the latest of which is Love or Nearest Offer, published by Quercus in paperback. She lives in Cambridge. A historical novel for adults will be published by Michael Joseph in June 2020 under a pseudonym yet to be publicly revealed.

This is going to be a very difficult review to write. In fact, now that I come to think of it, I’ve not read that many reviews of Jewell’s work over the years. Her début romantic comedy Ralph’s Party  was very joyfully received but since then, even though her books are bestsellers, and even though she’s moved from romantic comedy to what you could call psychological drama, she’s not the sort of writer who garners half a page in the TLS.

Never mind. Jewell’s books come out with delightful regularity and head straight for the charts. This one is presently sitting at the top of both the Sunday Times bestseller list and the Neilsen Bookscan Original Fiction list in the Bookseller. The readers have made their judgement and I agree with them. The Family Upstairs is a real “can’t put it down even while you’re frying onions “ book. You hold the pages open with one hand and cook with the other.

It’s the very model of my younger daughter’s definition of a good novel: Proper People in Interesting Situations. It centres around a mansion in Chelsea: 16 Cheyne Walk. ( By coincidence the Historical House books written by Linda Newbery, Ann Turnbull and me also take place in Cheyne Walk....what a small world!)

The structure of the book is somewhat complicated because there are three narratives unwinding alongside one another. In one, a young woman takes possession of 16 Cheyne Walk under the terms of a slightly mysterious will and sets out to discover a very murky truth that lies deep in her childhood.

In the second and perhaps overarching strand, Henry, who lived in the house when he was a child, explains exactly what went on there....I’m not going to give even a hint of a spoiler, because plenty of terrible things did go on there.

In the third strand, Lucy, Henry’s sister, tells her quite separately gruelling adventure. All three strands are plaited together to produce maximum tension, gasps of horror and a dénouement in which....but no, I’m going to resist saying anything about that as well. It’s terrific, and has a glorious little twistette in the tail.

If I have a single criticism, it’s that two of the heroines’ names are quite similar: Lucy and Lizzie, but truthfully it’s not really a problem. I got used to it in the end.

This review might be posted too late for the sun-lounger season, but The Family Upstairs would work just as well at a fireside, or in bed or....well, anywhere really. It’s a gem from Lisa Jewell. Someone has probably said this before, but I couldn’t resist.

The Family Upstairs is published by Century.

Guest review by Ian Beck: STASI 77 by David Young

"... the constant fear of being observed, followed or overheard runs like a strong thread throughout ..." 

Ian Beck is the author and illustrator of many books for children. He has also illustrated books by Adele Geras, Rose Impey, Geraldine MaCaughrean and Philip Pullman. He has published several novels for young people including the Tom Trueheart series, Pastworld, The Haunting of Charity Delafield, and The Carmody Casebooks. He recently revisited his iconic illustration to the cover of Elton John’s 1973 album Goodbye Yellow Brick Road reimaging it for the cover of Elton’s final world tour programme. His most recent picture book is The Magic Hour published by Tate Gallery in March of this year.

It is 1977 in the Deutsche Demokratische Republik of East Germany. The anti-fascist protection barrier (to give the Berlin wall its official title) will still be standing for another 12 years. Major Karin Muller of the Kriminalpolizei has been recalled from holiday to investigate the suspicious death of a party official. As with the three previous books in the series (Stasi Child, Stasi Wolf and A Darker State) her enquiries are never straightforward. There are always deeply hidden crosscurrents and darker motives. The shadowy hands of the Stasi, the state secret police, are close  behind her at almost every turn.

Karin has an odd kind of relationship with her country and its politics. Frequently frustrated at her attempts to get to the truth and yet, in passing, admiring the architecture of their brave ‘new world’, feeling at one point in the centre of a new development that ‘Marx himself would be proud of what they had achieved’. However, she can still deplore the qualities of the official ersatz coffee, Kaffe Mix. It comes as a delightful, almost ecstatic shock when in one scene she ís covertly served a cup made from real coffee imported from the West.

The party official has been found suffocated by smoke inhalation. What at first might have been seen and dismissed as an accident is soon revealed to be murder. A similar killing of another party official is reported, and further murders using the same modus operandi. Karin sets off with her assistant, Hauptmann Werner Tilsner (with whom she has shared the odd dalliance in the past) who says, ‘I’d much rather be getting dirty hands than shuffling paper and pushing pens.’ However an interview with the widow of one of the murdered men is made difficult through the presence of a Stasi official who censors certain questions and forbids particular lines of enquiry. It seems that the Stasi are taking a very keen interest in what appears at first to be a routine case. Even those officials and colleagues who she has been able to trust in the past now seem at times to be untrustworthy, even perhaps capable of physically doctoring evidence. Who can Karin Muller trust? In the end, perhaps, only herself.  

The narrative is interrupted at certain points with the testimony of a French prisoner in WW2. A fisherman from the Isle de Re, he was in the resistance with his two siblings, ‘a band of brothers’. They have been caught and shipped to Germany as slave labourers, known as Zebras, for their striped uniforms. They work in terrible conditions tunnelling for the secret V1 and V2 rocket bases, flogged and starved and treated as barely human by the Kapos in charge of them. The horror of their story, each time it appears, provides a vivid and continually worsening counterpoint to the main thrust of the investigation. Karin seems especially vulnerable this time round. Her twins, aged seventeen months and mostly looked after by her grandmother Helga, are a sensitive pressure point, a possible bargaining chip for any officials out to thwart her investigation if it gets too near the truth. The narrative constantly circles the very dark secrets of Germany’s past in WW2. Karin is from the generation born too late to be held responsible for what happened in the war: as one of the characters says to her at one point, ‘You are too young to bear the guilt’. Later in the narrative a series of immediate post-war debriefing interviews between a major in the American forces and a member of the Nazi party are transcribed, throwing more light on the darkness at the heart of the book and its shocking conclusion. 

David Young writes with admirable clarity and atmosphere. The day to day details of East German life, the suspicions and petty inconveniences, the constant fear of being observed, followed or overheard runs like a strong thread throughout. Interviews might be conducted at an especially unpopular bench at the Zoo. Older buildings and their history are evoked: ‘Like many of the Republic’s older structures, bullet hole damage from the Second World War was still evident in its brickwork’....indeed that damage is not only physical but runs deep into the structure of the state itself. This gripping and satisfying read is a worthy conclusion to the Karin Muller series. It is also fascinating to read of the true deeply moving and shocking events behind the story in the author’s note at the end of the book.

Stasi 77 is published by Bonnier.