Independent bookseller feature No.6: Borzoi Bookshop, Stow-on-the-Wold: SIXTEEN TREES OF THE SOMME by Lars Mytting

"Don't rush it - you could miss the vital hints which help solve the mystery."

I am Aloÿse Packe and I have worked for the independent Borzoi Bookshop in Stow-on-the-Wold for the past 29 years. The shop has been in the town since the late 1970s. During this time there have been three owners and twice as many shop dogs. There have been too many changes to go through here but some of our customers are still the same and they certainly appreciate our quirky individualism. We have just moved premises within Stow, so please don’t think we have closed - we have just moved. We are the official bookshop for the Chipping Campden Literature Festival held in May; we hold regular book signing events, and we run a successful book club for Daylesford Organic. We love to chat to our customers about books, as Linda will testify, so please drop in.

I chose The Sixteen Trees of the Somme because it has tremendous all-round appeal. I have read it twice. Usually I find this an annoying thing to do but I enjoyed it just as much the second time round. In fact I found so much more in the detail.

Lars Mytting, the author, is better known in the UK for his best selling non-fiction book Norwegian Wood: Chopping, Stacking and Drying Wood the Scandinavian Way. Wood plays an enormous part in this atmospheric family saga spanning the twentieth century.

Edvard is brought up by his grandfather on a remote farm in Norway. Following his grandfather’s death in 1991 Edvard decides to delve into the mystery of the death of his parents in France where, as a small boy, Edvard went missing for four days. Intertwined with this is the story of Einar, Edvard’s great uncle, a skilled cabinet-maker who was estranged from his family. The story moves to Shetland where Edvard meets Gwen Winterfinch, a young aristocratic Scottish girl, whose own family story is entangled with Edvard’s. Together, they travel to France hoping to find the truth about a missing inheritance. The chapters set in France are poignant and deeply moving. It is appropriate that the paperback edition was released in October 2018 as we remembered the end of hostilities in 1918.

Through the descriptive passages on wood we discover the link between the main characters. Trees have deep roots. The idea of a family tree is deeply symbolic.

To begin with the book moves slowly but take heed – every little piece of information fits into the jigsaw puzzle (rather like stacking wood). Don’t rush it – you could miss the vital hints which help solve the mystery. Ponder on the love story – attractive, wild, girl versus the sensible committed girl next door. This book may not stand the test of time but it is a really good read.

The Sixteen Trees of the Somme is published by MacLehose Press. 

Guest Review by Jocelyn Ferguson: COLD EARTH by Ann Cleeves

Jocelyn Ferguson was born in Scotland and grew up there and New York. She is author of Rope Tricks (Virago) and Anne Hathaway, an award winning play performed at Birmingham Centre for the Arts. She has won both an Arts Council Award and a Hawthornden Castle Residency. She has taught Creative Writing at Keele University and, most recently, at the Seamus Heaney Centre in Queens University, Belfast. She now lives in the south of France.

Crime Fiction fans of Ann Cleeves have come to expect a compelling narrative, a powerful sense of place and atmosphere, acute characterisation and pared back prose, and with Cold Earth, her seventh novel in the Shetland series, she does not disappoint.

It has been raining so hard and for so long on Shetland that while DI Jimmy Perez attends a funeral, the hillside behind the graveyard begins to slip relentlessly down towards the sea. Tombstones tumble, the road vanishes, and the stout stone walls of a cottage collapse and disappear. In the aftermath, the body of a woman is discovered with the detritus from that cottage. Considering the weather and the terrain, she is curiously dressed in red silk. And, more curious still, no one on the island appears to know who she is. A post-mortem reveals that her death was not, as assumed, a tragic consequence of the landslide. It was “violent and quite unnatural”: she’d been strangled. At which point Jimmy Perez digs his teeth in; he becomes a man possessed.

But unlike single-minded Vera Stanhope, Cleeves’s best known detective, Jimmy has other pressing issues to deal with, most of them of his own hyper-sensitive making, He frets about his step-daughter and about the (possible) blossoming romance with detective Willow Reeves. Is it too soon after the death of his ex, Fran, he wonders? Is Willow really interested, he wonders? He’s not very good at reading the signs, and Willow, in turn, can’t tell his come-ons from his confusion.

These ‘other issues’ form the backdrop to the gradual unravelling of the central mystery. And it’s in this that Ann Cleeves’s strength as a writer lies. Her characters are so warmly and solidly depicted, they steam in the dank atmosphere of a Shetland winter. Jimmy’s personal fears and uncertainties keep his feet firmly on the ground, while his astute perceptiveness (Willow notwithstanding) and dogged tenacity make him a fearsome detective. We like him a lot. He’s a very good egg: he’s nice to children and quietly considerate of others, especially women, even while he notes the smallest discrepancy in each conversation. DC Sandy Wilson, Jimmy’s insecure bagman and the island's other main police presence, regards him with some awe.

Discovering the dead woman’s identity is essential to uncovering her killer, and the former has to be done before Jimmy can really get to grips with the latter. There are implications in this for tension and pace. Cleeves deals with the pitfalls by focusing our attention on a handful of islanders with edgy secrets, who may or may not have links to the woman. And thus we get much too of local Shetland culture. At the same time, the geography of the island solidifies. At every turn we view with Jimmy the bleakly beautiful landscape he has chosen for his home. It’s a fitting context for disturbing undercurrents.

Cleeves is on record as saying that she may well kill her hero off in the next, final book in the series. She fears the absurdity of so many murders within the confines of a relatively small (and relatively peaceful) island – a kind of ‘Midsomer’s Murder’ effect. We can only commend the fact that her work is rooted in the plausible but I, for one, would emphatically regret Jimmy Perez’s passing.


Cold Earth is published by Macmillan, 2016