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.

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

Guest review by Graeme Fife: THE GO-BETWEEN by L P Hartley

 

"Hartley weaves a compelling net of intrigue and a brilliant portrayal of the starchy customs of aristocratic life ..."

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.

"I put a spell on you

Because you're mine ..." Nina Simone

"Once a go between never a go between." (The older Leo)

Towards the end of this outstanding novel, one of the principals, Marian, tells the narrator, Leo, returned to the village years after the book’s climactic end: ‘There are stuffy people, even in Norfolk’. I knew stuffy people in Norfolk. I arrived there immediately after the film of the book was shot but only now have I read it.

This novel tells a gripping story, a tense drama of sharply defined characters in another world, Hartley’s ‘foreign country’. Moreover, it’s not only the past that is a foreign country, so, too, is the present we enter as strangers. The language we use to explain the new experiences is tested, just as the shaping of the novel tests our sensibilities. The imagery is eloquent: Leo, the young boy invited by a school friend to the big house in the country, the wealthy, landed owners with their set ways and strict protocols of behaviour and dress, finds himself caught up in a bewildering game of intrigue, and stuffy manners, certain things that ‘are not done’ all strange to him. In soaring temperatures, the lad with a fixation about magic and making spells, through them hoping to manage circumstance otherwise beyond him to control, ironically is trussed up in a heavy Norfolk jacket. Add starched Eton collars – as stiff as the etiquette which governs his hosts, especially the horribly priggish Marcus, his school pal, and Hartley has cunningly outlined the central theme of Leo being used, as if he, too, were in a box, ready for wear, all analogous to the anxieties of the young boy which he never entirely shakes off.

At one point, Leo imagines himself proleptically, in conversation with his twelve year-old self: he’d been ‘flying too close to the sun’. Marian, whom he calls the Zodiac, a sort of immortal object, could he but put a name to his bewitched feelings, of his helpless schoolboy crush, uses the pretext of a visit to Norwich to meet her paramour, a secret concealed until later in the story, to go to a shop to buy Leo a suit of lighter clothes. First lie. The summer suit, in Lincoln green, evokes Robin Hood the outlaw, flaunter of repressive rules and regime.

Leo explores the deserted outhouses of the Hall, where in the tangle of weeds, the boy addicted to spells and curses, totems of his desire for otherness and escape, discovers deadly nightshade, atropa belladonna, whose juice is poisonous if drunk but squeezed as drops into the eyes, enlarges the pupils, hence the ‘beautiful lady’. A perfect symbolism. Even the contrast between the orderliness and formality of the house and the wild tangle of the outhouses – where the terrible climax of the novel explodes – is telling, the areas of life under constant surveillance and the neglected places where secrets flourish and are, eventually, catastrophically exposed. Hartley weaves a compelling net of intrigue and a brilliant portrayal of the starchy customs of aristocratic life, and, like a deadly leitmotif, the messages carried between Marian and Ted the local farmer – Beauty and the Beast…? – by their postman, Leo, the bewildered newcomer sucked into their conspiracy and ignorant about this mysterious practice of ‘spooning’ about which Ted, cleaning the shotgun – ominous portent – remains tight-lipped.

One of Marcus’s favourite words is cads - ‘only cads eat their porridge sitting down’. And into this strait-laced world comes the boy whose widowed mother cleaves to him almost as tightly as the Norfolk jacket and Hartley brilliantly shows us this new world through the child’s eyes; Leo wonders at the behaviour of the adults: ‘their worlds are private, even their games are mysterious’. Marian herself, affianced to the Viscount, is trapped, like a fieldmouse taking refuge in a stook of newly harvested wheat, caught between the heat of desire and the prickle of hidebound, emotionally shorn reserve. After the trauma of what he experienced at the Hall, Leo is, as Marian later tells the older man, ‘all dried up inside’. By contrast, the love that she and Ted Burgess shared was a ‘beautiful thing’, they were made for each other but social convention forbade that. The excruciating moral pressure arising from this denial lay heavily on Leo and crushed him forever, that and the sticky web of lies into which he’d blundered, forced to intrude upon an alien adult world of disappointment and misprision. All masterfully delineated by Hartley.

At the end, I cried.

The Go-Between is published by Penguin Modern Classics.

The Go-Between directed by Joseph Losey, 1971

The Go-Between directed by Pete Travis, 2015

More of Graeme's choices:

The Shapeless Unease by Samantha Harvey

One Day by David Nicholls

What a Carve Up! by Jonathan Coe

Guest review by Anna Wilson: WRITERS AND LOVERS by Lily King

 

 'I needed to be reminded that the only constant in this life is change and that “I write [and read] because if I don’t, everything feels worse.”'

Anna Wilson has been a children’s book editor both in-house and freelance for twenty-five years. She has also been a published writer for twenty years. Anna has published 50 books for children and young teens including picture books, short stories, poems, non-fiction and fiction series. Her books have been chosen for World Book Day and been shortlisted for the Hull Libraries Award, the Lancashire Book of the Year Award and the ALCS Educational Writers’ Award. Anna’s recent young fiction series Vlad the World’s Worst Vampire is published by Stripes. Her adult memoir A Place for Everything: my mother, autism and me is published by HarperCollins.

Anna is a Writing Fellow of the Royal Literary Fund and a creative writing tutor for City University, London, the London Lit Lab, the Arvon Foundation and the HarperCollins Author Academy.

This is the novel that got me out of Lockdown Reader’s Block. I know now that I wasn’t alone in not being able to focus on writing or reading last spring, but at the time I didn’t know what had happened to my brain and felt bereft. Then a neighbour lent me this book and I immediately felt less panicked. The main character, Casey, is not experiencing living through a pandemic, but she is grieving the sudden loss of her mother and is also coping with a health scare of her own. She has been trying to write a novel for six years, while battling a huge amount of debt, living in a grim, over-priced potting shed and working arduous, under-paid shifts in a café. So far, so depressing, you might think! But the book is so sharply observed, and so real that I couldn’t help but be swept along by it.

It is also witty and warm. I found myself all but shouting, “yes!” at Casey’s comments on the writing life, as well as on her observation of (some) male writers who seem to think “they should already be famous and believed that greatness was their destiny.” The book is full of such quotable observations, my favourite being that Casey feels she “can’t go out with a guy who’s written eleven and a half pages in three years. That kind of thing is contagious.” She comes up time and again against men who doubt her ability to write a novel that anyone else would want to read. Even her landlord says, “I just find it extraordinary that you think you have something to say.” This reader felt her outrage keenly, and was cheering her on from the side-lines when she finally hit flow state and everything outside her writing dissolved: “There’s a particular feeling in your body when something goes right after a long time of things going wrong. It feels warm and sweet and loose.”

Casey is juggling two lovers while racing to the finish with her novel, both of whom are also writers. One, Oscar, is older and much more successful than she. He is the sort of man she feels she should be with: he is caring and protective of her and has two gorgeous young sons with whom Casey admits to falling more in love than with Oscar. Her other lover is Silas – less of a catch, but infinitely sexier and more of a distraction. The way King writes about the dilemmas of falling for the “wrong” man is funny and convincing.

There is no clear-cut ending to this novel, which felt right given the realism of its setting, characterisation and style. There is more a sense that life goes on, just as writing and loving do, and that sometimes it “goes right after a long time of things going wrong”. For this reason alone, the book arrived in my hands at the right time. I needed to be reminded that the only constant in this life is change and that “I write [and read] because if I don’t, everything feels worse.”

Writers and Lovers is published by Picador.

See also Michèle Roberts' Negative Capability, reviewed by Jill Dawson.

and Anna's review of Unsheltered  by Barbara Kingsolver.

Guest review by Sue Purkiss: IVY & ABE by Elizabeth Enfield

Sue Purkiss writes for children and young people. She has been a Royal Literary Fellow at Exeter and Bristol Universities, and has also taught English and worked with young offender. Her latest novel for children, Jack Fortune and the Search for the Hidden Valley, is an adventure story set in the Himalayas at the end of the 18th century, featuring plant hunters, a sacred mountain – and its mysterious guardian! For more information, see Sue's website. She also has her own literary review blog, A Fool on a Hill, and is a contributor to The History Girls, blogging there once each month.

Ivy & Abe tells the story – or rather, stories – of the eponymous characters. I almost wrote ‘couple’ there, and they usually are a couple, but not always. For this is one of those books that explores the idea that what happens is not inevitable, was not always ‘meant to be’. In a way, it’s a comforting notion, that if everything is fore-ordained – if Fate rules supreme – then we really don’t have to worry very much about the choices we make: everything will be as it will be.

This beautifully-written book begins in 2026. By chance, Ivy and Abe, both in their seventies, meet in a supermarket. They realise that they knew each other when they were children; they were the closest of friends, but then one family moved after a tragedy and they were separated. They get to know each other again, and become close in a way they were not with their previous partners: they feel that they are two parts of a whole. They marry, and have a precious, albeit very short, time together.

The next episode takes place in 2015, with the characters younger now. Once again, they meet and part. And so it goes on, moving backwards through the years, until they are children again and we learn why Abe’s family moved away. At each stage there's an encounter, sometimes intense, sometimes fleeting – in one, Ivy, distressed, is helped by a kindly stranger (Abe). He puts her into a cab and pays the fare, and gives her his card, while assuring her there is no need to get in touch. She intends to, but the card is lost and the chance for them to properly meet each other is lost. In another, there is a passionate affair, and so on.

Other motifs recur. There is a lorry carrying hay bales, which has an accident. This has varying consequences. One time, Abe is driving back from a meeting with Ivy and witnesses the accident. The police later contact him, and so his wife (always Lynne) discovers that he wasn’t where he was supposed to be, and that he is having an affair – and of course, her discovery has consequences. Another time, it is Abe’s mother who witnesses the accident, cradles a dying victim in her arms, and is so overwhelmed by the experience that the course of her life changes completely. We must all have thought at some time, What if? What if I’d left the house a moment earlier? What if I’d chosen to be somewhere else that day? What if the road hadn’t been icy? And so on. That’s one of the things this book is about.

Another motif is the hereditary illness which blights Ivy’s family. Another is Abe’s job: he designs fountains. One of them, which recurs several times, is modelled on a clock: it’s a sort of meditation on time. And very early on, the author introduces the concept of quantum entanglement:

“It’s to do with the behaviour of particles, tiny ones, like electrons, that have interacted in the past and then moved apart…they say that even if they end up millions of miles or galaxies apart, they still continue to be affected by each other. Tickle one and the other dances…”

Later, this is picked up when the eruption of the Icelandic volcano has kept Ivy’s husband, Richard, out of the country when she needs him with her for a significant hospital appointment – which in turn leads to that episode’s very brief encounter with Abe. She sees the ash on her windows, and wonders: could particles from another part of the world really settle here so quickly?

The concept of the book reminds me of Kate Atkinson's Life After Life. That, too, explores the what if notion, by positing a number of possible futures if events had conjoined in a different way. It plays out on a different stage: instead of focusing on the lives of ordinary people, it considers what might have happened if, for instance, a certain girl had been in a certain café in the 1930s with the intention of shooting Adolf Hitler; and it plays out against a background of social change.

This book is quieter, perhaps. But Elizabeth Enfield explores beautifully the way in which so-called ordinary lives play out: she reflects on how relationships change at different times of our lives, on what shifts things from one direction into another.

Recently, I went to a Magritte exhibition. Magritte was a surrealist, and I’ve never really ‘got’ surrealism. But as I wandered round, I came to see that it really didn’t matter whether I got it or not: I just needed to look. And then I saw what a marvellous painter he was. And my reaction to this book was a bit like that. At first I thought, yes – great fun for a writer to play with different possibilities in this way, to try out different stories for her characters, but really, for the reader, what’s the point? But actually, I think the point is that this is a structure which allows Elizabeth Enfield to explore and reflect on life and all its variousness – and what could be more worthwhile than that?

Sometimes, you want to experience waves crashing on the shore, or a waterfall tumbling over rocks. But if you’re in the mood for a still, quiet, clear pool, this is the book for you.

Ivy & Abe is published by Michael Joseph.

Guest review by Julia Jarman: THE IMPROBABILITY OF LOVE by Hannah Rothschild

Julia Jarman has written books for children of all ages. Her work includes The Time Travelling Cat series for readers of eight to twelve or thereabouts and the acclaimed picture book, Big Red Bath. She is currently trying her hand at writing for adults ‘to see if I can’.

Don’t let the first dozen or so pages put you off.

Attracted by the blurb I started reading this novel on a long flight from China. I needed something to keep me awake and looked forward to a light-hearted read in which I learned something about art and the art world.  The prologue, detailing preparations for the sale of a famous picture by Watteau at an illustrious London auction house, was entertaining at first but began to grate. Did I need to know every prospective purchaser and all the members of staff assigned to mind them? It didn’t help that the character through whose desperate eyes we see this line-up is an unattractive oh-so sorry-for-himself penniless Old Etonian, who is in charge of the sale; records must be broken if he is to collect his bonus and restore the family fortunes. Did I sympathise? Hmmm. The chapter ends with a hook hinting at skulduggery to come, which kept me turning the pages. Clearly this auction will not go to plan . . .

                             

Flashback. (Sorry, Colm Toibin, this plot flash, bangs and wallops from Skulduggery Past to Skulduggery Even Further Past and Skulduggery Long Before that, before it gets back to the auction.) In chapter one things look up when we meet chef Annie McDee, thirty-one and broken-hearted, but gamely trying to rebuild her life in London.  Looking for a present for her new boyfriend she comes across an old picture in a junk shop, likes the look of it and buys it.  It is of course THE picture, The Improbability of Love, and the find sets in motion a mostly fast-moving, rollicking tale with more ups and downs and twists and turns than my wonky spiraliser.  

Write about what you know, we’re told, and author Hannah Rothschild knows lots. Part of the fabulously rich Rothschild family, she grew up immersed in fine art and old rich. She went on to study art and made her career in art and the media, which brought her into contact with the new-rich: Russian oligarchs, hedge fund buyers and pop-star billionaires. She has facts at her finger tips that would take most of us years to research and her accomplishments are prodigious. Acclaimed as a hard worker, she has written biography, art criticism, film scripts and documentaries, as well as serving on the board of various art galleries. In this her first novel she writes assuredly, effortlessly it seems - I do mean seems - and evidently enjoys the freedom fiction gives to imagine and invent.

Flashback 2: the talking picture. This for me is her most delightful invention. The picture, The Improbability of Love, is a character in the novel speaking to the reader directly. I love this personification of the conceit that pictures ‘speak to us’, or not of course. The picture speaks to Annie in the metaphorical way which is why she buys it, and that distinguishes her from most of the potential purchasers.  I hear a female voice, by the way, possibly because of the Miss Piggy-ish way she refers to herself as ‘moi’.  I loved the way she described her life going back to Watteau’s first inspired brushstrokes, with detailed portraits of her various owners, some of them very nasty characters indeed. 

The story has a dark side and gives the reader plenty to think about.  It raises the question: what is Art and what is it for?  In the book as in life for some characters it’s merely currency, for others status and for an increasing number it’s a substitute for religion. Next time I go to a gallery I’ll ask myself ‘Why?’

I should perhaps say this is a much commented-on book, well aired on the media and short-listed for the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction.  A lot of people love it, but not a friend of mine who knows a lot more about art and the art scene than me.  She says - shock horror - there are mistakes. ‘And did you know there’s no such picture as The Improbability of Love?’

I’m still thinking about that.

Guest review by Sophie Masson: READY TO LOVE by Jon Appleton

"The city background of these contemporary thirty-something professionals is painted with a light yet vivid touch, adding to the enjoyment of a novel that is both most entertaining and elegantly written."

Born in Indonesia of French parents, and brought up in France and Australia, Sophie Masson is the award-winning and internationally-published author of over 60 books for children, young adults and adults. Her latest young adult novel is Hunter's Moon, (Random House Australia) while her latest adult novel is Trinity: The False Prince, (Momentum.) Sophie is also a founding partner and co-director of Christmas Press, a boutique publishing house producing acclaimed children's picture-books and fiction. She holds a BA and M.Litt from the University of New England in Australia and is currently undertaking a PHD in Creative Practice at the same university. She is on the Boards of the Australian Society of Authors, the New England Writers' Centre and the Small Press Network. She has also served on the Literature Board of the Australia Council and the Book Industry Collaborative Council.

Writing about nice, ‘ordinary’ people, in a way that will make readers want to keep turning the pages, is not easy. And writing about nice people made tentative and ineffectual by life’s defeats and challenges—and other people’s attitudes and expectations--is harder still. In many ways, it’s so much simpler to write flamboyant, selfish, silly or psychopathic characters: those extreme personality traits can be very useful characterisation shortcuts. So it’s a real achievement when a writer not only pulls off the difficult task, but does it with keen observation and generous wit, as Jon Appleton does in his debut novel, Ready to Love.

As its title indicates, Ready to Love can broadly be described as a romantic comedy. Set in contemporary London, it’s centred around two main characters: Minna, who’s just ended a relationship with self-absorbed Julian, latest in a short line of unsatisfactory lovers; and Jeff, still hurting from the breakup with his equally self-absorbed wife Sarah a year ago. Neither Minna nor Jeff have been ‘high-flyers’ or ‘movers or shakers’ in the world of work anymore than they have been marked successes in their love lives, but they are good people who try to do the best they can by their colleagues and families and friends. Unfortunately, that can lead to them being patronised or even bullied by stronger personalities who think that they know better than Minna or Jeff what each of them are like or should do.

The reader hopes of course that these two nice yet rather bruised and tentative—but never pathetic or unsympathetic-- people will eventually find the beginnings of happiness with each other once they realise that they are, indeed, ‘ready for love’, but it’s not just that, pleasant as it is, which keeps you absorbed in the novel. In an interview I conducted recently with Jon Appleton, he said that, Ready to Love is about the way we see ourselves and how we think other people see us, and the different kinds of attachments we form to those around us: family, friends, lovers, colleagues. And that is what makes the book so satisfying: too often, in romantic comedies, the focus is just on the search for love, but in this novel, the author does not forget the other large chunks of life, including the everyday world of work, which in real life takes up so much of people’s time, thoughts, and emotional energy. And the great cast of secondary characters, from all the different areas of Minna’s and Jeff’s lives, are deftly sketched in with telling detail.

Jon also mentioned in the interview how important the novel’s London setting was to him, as the idea for it came out of a feeling of homesickness when he was living away from his London home for a year, but was developed fully later, when he was back. That development is evident in the novel, where the city background of these contemporary thirty-something professionals is painted with a light yet vivid touch, adding to the enjoyment of a novel that is both most entertaining and elegantly written.

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