Guest review by Graeme Fife: THE WOMEN by Kristin Hannah

 

‘People made us think we had done something wrong, the women especially.’

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.

On the train home from Norfolk recently, I observed a man reading a book whose title, about spies, intrigued me; also a woman reading this book. I noted both and bought them. The spies thing was a dud and I gave it to the charity bookshop. The Hannah, however, captivated me. Its subject is the women who volunteered as nurses to work in the evacuation hospitals in Vietnam during that other misguided conflict. The experiences she describes – all derived from very broad research, cited at the back of the book - are breathtaking, terrible, near unimaginable.

Whilst this is cast as a novel and therefore at its core an imagined story with relationships lost, broken, betrayed, held to, its fiction follows the best example of show not tell: auditory, visual and emotional encounter, sensory in all aspects – you can smell it, too, the hospital, the clothes they wear, their kitbags - fill out a narrative of soul-searching depth. I cried.

To be remembered, also – and Hannah sheds vital light on this – back in America, a society forever torn by its own inner conflicts, was further assaulted by a new age of self-expression, hippies growing their hair and dropping out…anti-war protest marches, the Gay Liberation movement, Civil Rights…

The chaos and urgency of a Big Push in the hospital when casualties flooded in, brought by Dust-Offs, helicopters, the injuries, the incessant calls of work work work, with little respite, the agonies of death, a nurse holding a dying man’s hand…

The central character, at first a barely trained nurse, is flung into action with a terse ‘you can do this’ from a surgeon who doesn’t want dither, he wants determination, and help right now and the novel draws in stark detail the process through which a tiro becomes an expert often through the sheer propulsion of expectation. There is no time for hesitation, never any time, for, just as on the battlefield some kilometres away, the bullets fly without delay from the pressure on a trigger, so the injury, very often mortal, nevertheless has to be seen to immediately. As a catalogue of how the human heart and moral power are strengthened by this intensely stressful experience, I have read few novels which do it more poignantly. As Hannah shows: torment can lead to compassion, a strength we may not have known lay inside us.

There are lies, misunderstandings, misreports of death and the anguish of love found and snatched away by the imperatives of war and its terrible repercussions – not only on the soldiers of the army, navy and air force, but on the civilians, women and children, the horror of Agent Orange and indiscriminate bombing … the cruelties perpetrated by men dehumanised by conflict.

There is, too, and powerfully exposed, the generation gap and the mutual incomprehension. Thus the father to his volunteer nurse daughter: ‘Your generation, the need to talk, talk, talk…’

Gone the days of put up and shut up. Hannah makes no judgement – that is for the reader. She does lapse occasionally and when a mother makes an emergency call to see her son in hospital, do we really need to know exactly what she is wearing? But it’s s small flaw. Everyone wants a best seller and one thing which is evident in best sellers is the writer’s obsession with detail, detail, detail. Hannah avoids that. She knows her own heart and that emotional sensibility is evident on every page, without show or personal reflection and intervention. She sees, she hears, she brings it all to life, even life teetering on the edge of death.

I have asked American friends about this and their reaction varies, depending on what neighbourhood they live in, but Hannah brings to the surface the way in which returning veterans were reviled, even spat at, called unpatriotic. But veterans were only ever seen as the men. Groups of veterans gathering in therapeutic sessions to talk about the way their psyche unravelled on their return home - nightmares, broken relationships, alienation – were male clubs, women disbarred. As the returning nurse says to one Marine: ‘If you didn’t see a woman in Vietnam, you were lucky because it means you didn’t end up in hospital.’

The Women is published by Macmillan

Guest review by Nick Manns: THE MAKING OF THE ENGLISH LANDSCAPE by W G Hoskins

 

"Once you’ve spent time in Hoskins’ company, you start to interrogate a familiar world in a new way..."

Nick Manns taught English in comprehensive schools in south London and the Midlands for 20 years. He is the author of four novels for young adults, including Control Shift and Dead Negative, and is a founder and director of Dyslexia Lifeline, a company based at De Montfort University, Leicester. 

The stump of an old windmill can be seen a couple of hundred metres from the A43, just outside Easton on the Hill in Northamptonshire. The mill is situated at a high point on the upland that looks down on the Welland valley and its sails would have been turned by winds coming from the west.

The relic is a mile or so north of RAF Wittering, which is marked by the rotating clam-shell radar dish at the end of the runway. The aerodrome, originally constructed for the Royal Flying Corps, dispensed with the acres of arable farmland that would have given the windmill its reason for existing.

This process of picking up signs in the landscape and reconstructing a past world is at the heart of Hoskins’ book. Published in 1955, it expanded the notion of ‘landscape’ from simply an idea of ‘nature’ to include how people have interacted with (and changed) the natural world. In the case of RAF Wittering, that change could have been more than simply retiring an old technology: a Valiant bomber accidentally dropped a thermo-nuclear device onto the runway in the late 1950s.

Hoskins came from a family of Exeter bakers but after studying economics at the University College of South West England, he became a lecturer in the subject at University College Leicester, subsequently Leicester University). His research into local history and articles on ancient farming, deserted medieval villages and so on led (in 1948) to his appointment as head of the newly formed Department of English Local History. He became convinced that visual evidence was vital to understanding the historical landscape.

In the preface to his study, Midland England (1949), he wrote:

‘… the whole of the English landscape is a manuscript written on again and again, a palimpsest with endless discoveries waiting to be made; and one can learn, with sufficient patience, skill and imagination, how to decipher this manuscript and make it yield its hidden meaning.’

The phrase, ‘one can learn’, is inclusive. People don’t have to be academics to ask questions and seek answers, however tentative. And although it might be tempting to rely on the internet to find answers to questions about localities, sometimes those localities raise their own questions.

For example, three miles below the nuclear near miss at Wittering lies the market town of Stamford. It’s small and compact and largely consists of 17th and 18th-century houses. They’re made from the local limestone, weathered to a honey colour. One of the interesting features about the town is the great width of some of the streets. One of them is called Broad Street, and another, Sheepmarket. The town layout, the width of the streets, reflects its medieval past as a major market for sheep and wool. Great herds of sheep would fill the town on market days.

These observations are entirely in keeping with Hoskins. At the end of his book, he writes: ‘towns …ought to be approached for the first time on foot. For only on foot does one detect the subtle rise and fall of ground to which the earliest settlers were so sensitive, or alignments in the town scene that may throw light on some fundamental change of plan: or the names of streets and lanes that set the mind working at once.’

The Making of the English Landscape is, in modern parlance, a ‘mash-up’: it combines different elements that are normally encountered separately. With-it French cultural theorists in the 1960s would have regarded it as a work of bricolage and that Hoskins was a bricoleur. A bricoleur, since you ask, is an odd-job person who uses whatever is at hand to complete a project. A project is usually a problem-solving exercise: why was this village built here? How old is it? Why is the church on the edge of the settlement?

Consequently, once you’ve spent time in Hoskins’ company, you start to interrogate a familiar world in a new way, the book working as a kind of exemplar. He’s at home when commenting on the use of hawthorn to demarcate fields; ruminating on the significance of place-names; considering the bits of pottery found in his back garden. And he’s not afraid to express sympathy for past calamities that would seem strange in the pages of a standard academic work. When reflecting on the many abandoned medieval villages across England, he notes that rural depopulation following the Black Death meant that it was more cost-effective for some landowners to switch from arable (and labour-intensive) farming to pastoral practices. Large, open fields could be parcelled up into smaller units and tenant farmers evicted. Hoskins writes:

‘The village houses were demolished – an easy business, for above their rubble foundations they mostly had mud walls – and men, women and children departed in tears to find a new livelihood elsewhere.’

Easton on the Hill is not a site of dereliction: a compact village of limestone houses that date from the 18th century. Hoskins writes that hill-top villages are ‘suggestive of great antiquity’ where height (working like radar) might allow the early identification of hostile forces, but the oldest buildings here are the Priest’s House (late 15th century) and the charming All Saints Church (12th century). The name, Easton is probably Anglo-Saxon (the ‘-ton’ suffix indicating farm or settlement). So, what attracted the early settlers?

All Saints Church, Easton on the Hill: Les Hull (WikiCommons)

Part of the answer can be found if you park just off the main road, south of the village. Hoskins had emphasised the desirability of walking as an aid to discovery and the wisdom of those words was immediately apparent on the day of my visit. There was a stiff westerly wind blowing across the upland, but Easton lies below the crest of the escarpment, on gradually sloping ground. It is largely sheltered from the elements.

The village is clustered around the junction of Church Street and High Street. There’s a war memorial there now, but it’s probably the site of the village green. The streets themselves are narrow, originally designed for the passage of farm carts. That world is evoked by the sign on one of the houses, The Old Forge.

Google Easton on the Hill and you’ll find it’s recorded in Domesday Book and that Romano-British objects were found in various digs. It’s therefore quite possible that Easton on the Hill replaced an earlier name.

So, what drew the various settlers to this (obviously) desirable site? There’s no clue on Wikipedia, but on the village map, Spring Close pocket park is identified. Walk there, to the very northern edge of the village, and you’ll discover a grassed area and a pond, surrounded by flag irises and ragged robin. A sign warns of Deep Water (and danger to children). Although inconspicuous, this is the spring that explains thousands of years of settlement: the omphalos of the community – the centre of their world.

Hoskins noted the importance of ‘patience, skill and imagination’ as qualities necessary to make sense of a landscape and he went on to say: ‘I am not much interested in surface impressions. The three visible dimensions of a building or landscape are not enough: they may entrance for the moment, but they make no abiding impression on the mind. One needs the fourth dimension of time to give depth to the scene: one wants to know as much as possible about the past life of a place, about its human associations, and to feel the long continuity of human life on that spot before it can make its full impression on the mind.’

The Making of the English Landscape is published by Little Toller Books.

Photographs by Nick Manns

More of Nick's choices:

The Antidote: Happiness for people who can't stand Positive Thinking, by Oliver Burkeman

The Darker the Night, the Brighter the Stars by Paul Broks

Billy No-Mates by Max Dickins

H is for Hawk by Helen MacDonald

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

Bookseller feature: Richard Hayden of THE RYE BOOKSHOP chooses CRAFTLAND by James Fox

 

"Craft, it is implied, is for hobbyists at home; instead, this tiny and shrinking minority do work. Hard work ... "

Richard Hayden and Emma McGrath

Launched ten years ago, The Rye Bookshop is one of the smallest in Waterstones’s range of boutique unbranded shops. All the stores in this select portfolio are in small towns and are granted greater autonomy and independence. As one might expect from a rural location, Rye specialises in nature writing but also features a wide selection of local books, the very best in new fiction and non-fiction, and a lovingly curated children’s section. 

Perhaps the first thing to strike you when you start reading James Fox’s Craftland is how few practitioners of the various skills on show actually consider themselves craftsmen or women. Craft, it is implied, is for hobbyists at home; instead, this tiny and shrinking minority do work. Hard work. 

Once, Britain was an entire land of manual workers, designers, builders, tinkerers, engineers, smiths, wrights, coopers, bodgers and Uncle Tom Cobley and all – people skilled with their hands and who profoundly understood their land and (whisper it) their craft. 

Fox sets out to show us that the country still produces the things it has always produced, just in far fewer and, regrettably, ever decreasing numbers, skills stripped away by dynamic changes in the local, national and global economies. 

As such, Craftland begins as a journey around the UK, looking for the pre- and post-industrial trades that have for varying reasons begun to fade away. It asks can they be saved? Should they be saved? The answer to both, of course, is yes, but Fox takes the questions further and looks at how it could (or, indeed, can) be done. 

During his search, Fox can often appear wide-eyed, almost naive, in his initial comprehension, but he is never mawkish nor sentimental. In fact, as he learns the details of the work and challenges, so the hardness of the lives lived by many of the practitioners is accented in his writing. These are often difficult lives. Hard but fulfilling. There are no wistful lingering looks back at a supposed long-lost comfortable bucolic existence.

 Instead, he explores the extent of the problems and then considers solutions: some theoretical, others already being put into practice. The significant issue faced by most of the British crafts featured is that as the economies around them changed so, too, did the nature of demand. For instance, Fox charts how hedges and fences replaced the dry-stone walls of farms in Northern England and Scotland simply because they were cheaper and easier to maintain. 

But, as Fox shows, many crafts can be repurposed to suit a modern market, saving the skillset from extinction – such as those dry-stone wall builders who now renovate property boundaries of private homes rather than miles of sheep farm. Or the woman who rescued river reed harvesting and turned it into an international export industry. Crucially, these efforts are not driven by charitable funding or heritage grants but by pure business sense. 

Craftland succeeds wildly in delivering upon its thematic promise. It is also a literary study in quality, written as it is in wonderfully accessible language and with a structure that explores its ideas clearly and with colour. Each chapter ends on a philosophically inclined portrait of the craft in action – renovated church bells ringing out for the first time in decades was an especially emotive sequence. 

In addition to the history and the interviews, Craftland is also full of amazing details about unique human elements of our home country, such as the fact that there are 5,000 change-ringing bell towers in England but only 300 in the rest of the world. Or that Scottish thatchers don’t use wheat straw or water reed, as their English counterparts do, but the much more recalcitrant local bracken, heather, marram grass or a whole host of other tough plants. 

Ultimately, Craftland is a history of the past but also of the present. Or, as Fox himself says: ‘The book is nostalgic... for the skills and traditions we think are gone but are actually all around us.’ There is also sadness within its pages as it charts Britain’s passage from the world’s workshop to the more service-based economy that is has become, showing the decline in manufacture, skill-based crafting, and the supply chain-led communities that once thrived here. 

While it admits that Britain is not necessarily materially poorer for that progress, it is perhaps socially and spiritually worse off. Or, at least, deeply changed in a way that has left many bereft. Craftland hopes to highlight the occasional hopeful streams of light that point to the benefits of human manufacturing: as much a history of a potential future as one of a recent past.

Craftland is published by Bodley Head.

Guest review by Linda Sargent: THE OLD WAYS - a Journey on Foot, by Robert Macfarlane

 

"What a complete joy it’s been, timely and so sustaining in these darkening times in our world."

Linda Sargent is a writer who worked for twenty years as a publisher’s reader (David Fickling Books since 2002). She has published short stories and articles and her first novel, Paper Wings, appeared in 2010; she is also the author of Words and Wings, a training guide to creative reminiscence work, available as a free download from her website. 

Tosh's Island, a graphic novel for children and based on Linda's childhood experiences, written in collaboration with Joe Brady and illustrated by Leo Marcell, was published last October by David Fickling Books, having first appeared in serial form in The Phoenix Comic.

A book about walking might not seem like the obvious choice for me, now a full-time wheelchair user, but this is about so much more than the mere physical act itself. As well as the obvious meaning, the “old ways” explore and traverse humanity’s various journeyings and their resulting connections over the millennia; covering not just the more well-known tracks, but lesser-known ones too, over mountains and even the those more fleeting passages across the seas. These are journeys rooted both in the physical reality of walking and, perhaps more importantly, that of the imagination. Over the years I have been giving it to more agile friends, but now since moving to rural Wiltshire with our monthly trips down to the Mobile Library in the village hall car-park I decided to add it to my order reserve list. And what a complete joy it’s been, timely and so sustaining in these darkening times in our world. I messaged the author as much on Instagram, not expecting a reply, but one came in the form of a warm and thoroughly empathetic response. Since feet connecting with earth is clearly so vital for the author, he seemingly totally grasped what I was trying to say about how I nurture and ponder the memories of past walking times, as well as continue such journeying vicariously via writing such as his, in many ways even more enriching as they mostly are in settings I would never have visited and never shall. Although that isn’t true of all, since there are places featured that are familiar, including Cambridgeshire, the Downland country of the south of England, Sussex, Wiltshire and my old home in the Kentish Weald, landscapes referenced through the author’s deep admiration and connections with the work and lives of Edward Thomas and Eric Ravilious which thread through this book enriching the reader’s experience not only of the land, but also these two artists.

So many paths trodden here, from Scotland, the Camino, Tibet and more. And not all are land-bound. His descriptions of the Sea Paths show a more ethereal, yet equally powerful way marking. He tells the reader (p.88) of the many names of these paths, for example “In Old English the hwaell-weg/the whale’s way” – invisible currents bringing humanity together over thousands of years, leaving no trace on the water, but resulting in a sharing of trade, culture, stories, songs, invasion of course and the aftermath of man-made upheavals. The latter with such a profound modern resonance.

It is impossible to do this book justice. For me it worked and will continue to work in so many levels through my own imaginative, internal world. As the writer says these are (p.198) “the landscapes we bear with us in absentia, those places that live on in the memory long after they have withdrawn in actuality”.

Yes. Exactly this.

(NB: I have recently come across a newly formed organisation called Slow Ways, a community initiative mapping accessible walking and wheeling routes and encouraging more to be developed. More here.) – see slowways.org)

The Old Ways is published by Penguin.

See also Linda's review of 12 Birds to Save your Life - Nature's Lessons in Happiness by Charlie Corbett

Alison Layland reviews Sarn Helen by Tom Bullough

Guest review by Penny Dolan: THE PLOT by Madeleine Bunting

 

"She sets this personal acre within the wider movements affecting the British countryside over the centuries, bringing in the topography, myths, history and custom, and expanding the vision out beyond the Hambleton Hills."

Penny Dolan works as a children’s storyteller and writer. Her last novel for older children, A Boy Called Mouse, was nominated for the Young Quills Historical Fiction Award, and she is currently completing a companion book. She posts on The History Girls, on An Awfully Big Blog Adventure and can be found on Twitter @PennyDolan1.

A bookish friend had praised The Plot by Guardian writer Madeleine Bunting, so when the paperback lay there, face up on the Waterstones counter, what could I do?

I was already interested in the topic: an acre of land on the edge of the Hambleton Hills in North Yorkshire, where the sculptor John Bunting lived and worked from the Fifties. His ‘plot’ was up a rough track, some distance from the cold cottage where his artist wife looked after their six young children. John had, aged sixteen, seen the view from the ridge, and in his twenties, came back to make his live his life in that spot. Once I had come across a similar breathtaking view, from the top of Sutton Bank, a winding hill with a 1:4 incline. I stared, from the car park at the top, out over the Vale of York and right across to the hazy summit of Pen y Ghent, and saw why this was called ‘God’s own county.’

Madeleine Bunting, John’s daughter, wrote her memoir as a way of coming to terms with her father. To me, this was not a book like Helen McDonald’s H is for Hawk, wrung out of deep grief. Instead, Bunting’s book felt brisker, written in anger, puzzlement and sadness, as she tries to understand her father and his love for his remote acre. Named Scotch Corner, the plot is marked on OS Navigator 100.

John Bunting’s passion, even at Ampleforth, his prestigious Catholic school, was carving in wood and stone. He visited the workshop of the Robert Thompson, the ‘Mouseman of Kilburn’ just as, later, he sought out sculptors like Henry Moore, Eric Gill and Brancusi. Returning to the seclusion of the Hambleton Hills and North Yorks Moors, John made a thin living through various commissions and part-time teaching at Ampleforth, where Anthony Gormley was among his students.

What marked Bunting out was that he was one of the young men who ‘escaped’ WWII, but not from its shadow nor its fallen heroes. Returning to Scotch Corner, he built a small ‘memorial’ chapel, as well as an everyday stone hut. Madeleine recalls his carved angel heads atop the doorway, and two crucifix and images of the Virgin and Child inside.

In particular, she describes sitting on the cold floor during mass, squashed between her siblings, because the chapel’s aisle was filled by her father’s life-size sculpture of a fallen soldier. Who was the soldier and why did this lost hero matter so much to John Bunting? And the other admired names she found in his notes? How did they and their reputations, over time, fare?

Gradually, Madeleine Bunting examines her father’s life, and the selfishness of his ’man among men’ attitude. After a day working in the hut, he spent evenings in the village pub, leaving his artist wife with six children in a cold, primitive cottage in the village. ‘It seemed that his belief in the dignity of physical labour meant that my mother’s should never end,’ adds the author. A not unfamiliar situation.

However, The Plot is far more than a single story, and stronger for it. In and among the author’s pursuit of her family story, she writes about the geography and history of that whole area, describing it as ‘a landscape known in reality and in imagination and in memory.’

She sets this personal acre within the wider movements affecting the British countryside over the centuries, bringing in topography, myths, history and custom, and expanding the vision out beyond the Hambleton Hills.

She writes about early flint-workers travelling the ridge; the people who marked the land with barrows; the foreign king who ‘wasted’ the North and made it uninhabitable for three generations; the incoming monks who gave order, wool and beautiful buildings to the area, and of the Scots drovers, bringing flocks of cattle to the markets of the south. She writes of the rise of Romanticism and the individualistic ‘view’ of the landscape; the arrival of sightseers, the railways bringing hunting parties, and the ugly sitka spruce plantations across the North Yorkshire moors. Separately, these histories might seem familiar but her overview is both thoughtful and interesting.

In her last chapters, Bunting considers the area of Hambleton in recent decades. She not only writes about the economic importance of grouse-shooting but also the tinder-box monoculture of the moors. She speaks of machines and pesticides, of the crisis in modern farming and in wider agricultural planning;. In particular, she draws attention to the nostalgia for rural life that has created holiday cottages, second homes and emptied out farms and village communities. Even, she says, her father who came here, in search of old, orderly society, might have seen the idyll disappearing as he carved.

This is, as my friend might have suggested, a very wise, worthwhile and intelligent book.

Afterword

A small but interesting point for food enthusiasts. While she was researching her book, Madeleine Bunting made friends with and relied on Fred Banks, a local farmer and self-taught historian. In the last chapters, Fred and his son Tom decide they cannot make a living from their farm and are thinking about buying a pub instead.

Now, in 2024, The Black Swan at Oldstead is a Michelin starred restaurant, and the main chef is better known as Tommy Banks, of  Roots cookbook fame.

The Plot is published by Granta.

See more of Penny's choices:

Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus

Horse by Geraldine Brooks

The Secrets of Wishtide by Kate Saunders

The Cold Cold Ground by Adrian McKinty

Seven Miles of Steel Thistles by Katherine Langrish

Guest review by Penny Dolan: HORSE by Geraldine Brooks

 

"Her historical and geographical settings feel convincingly well-researched, whether she is describing families and their great estates, life on the Mississippi or the horrors of the American civil war."

Penny Dolan works as a children’s storyteller and writer. Her last novel for older children, A Boy Called Mouse, was nominated for the Young Quills Historical Fiction Award, and she is currently completing a companion book. As well as being a regular reviewer here, she posts on The History Girls, on An Awfully Big Blog Adventure and can be found on Twitter @PennyDolan1.


Horse, by Geraldine Brooks, a Pulitzer winning novelist, appeared on my book group’s reading list. Its nomination by a member who, to our surprise, is a part-owner of a racehorse, gave Horse strong equestrian support. Additionally, when our local library supplied not four but eight new hardback copies, it was clear that somewhere in the county was a librarian who thought the novel worth purchasing. But was it worth reading? Here are my thoughts.

Brooks’ wide-ranging novel is spread between three American centuries, being a narrative about the early growth of horse-racing and about the meanings within that word “race”. Horse revolves around three specific ideas: a bay foal that became a prize-winning stallion, a lost equine portrait and a skeleton stored within the Smithsonian Museum.

The cover design gives a glimpse at an old painting which reveals a formally dressed black groom holding the rein of a tall brown horse and a black jockey in the coloured silks of the 1850s. Both men appear wary about being “uncovered”. This groom and the bay horse form the core of Brooks’ novel.

When the reader first meets Jarrett, he is an enslaved boy, working beside his father in the stables of a rich Kentucky landowner. After forming a deep bond with the new-born foal named Darley, Jarrett stays close to the creature during its early years. When the colt, re-named Lexington, passes to another landowner, Jarrett follows.

We see that his life is clearly easier than that of black slaves out in the fields. Jarrett is clothed, fed and treated well, principally because of his value to Lexington. Yet both are at the mercy of the wealth, whims and promises of their owners. For example, although gambler and race-course owner Ten Broek had given his word that Lexington would never be whipped, as soon as he has starts promoting timed, high-stakes races on his track, that promise gets forgotten:

Jarrett ‘could see the horse’s flanks heaving in obvious distress. He turned on (the jockey) Meichon. “What were you rowling him for?” he cried. “You could see it wasn’t in him.”

Meichon looked defiant. “Marse Ten Broek say I ‘ave to ride ‘ard. I think – they say – he ‘as bet against us so ‘e want no person to say he cheat.”

Jarrett threw his head back and cursed the sky.’

Even as Jarrett curses, he knows that challenging the master’s actions could mean being sent out to work in the fields or sold.

Moreover, throughout the book, Brooks emphasises his situation as evident in her chapter headings: at first he is Warfield’s Jarrett, then Ten Broek’s Jarrett and finally Alexander’s Jarrett. He is a man without independence.

Around this historical core, Brooks wraps a contemporary tale about two academics meeting in Washington in 2019. Jess, an Australian, and interested in bones since childhood, is an anthropologist and Smithsonian scholar. who starts to study a forgotten equine skeleton to discover more about the horse’s identity and power of endurance. Theo, an Afro-American art historian, is studying the role of Black men during the early years of horse-racing. When an energetic dog brings the pair together, their quest leads them through all the hidden archives of the Institute. However, their deepening relationship also emphasises social pressures within modern America and the insidious influence of prejudice.

The third thread in the novel lies in that mysterious painting partly seen on the cover. An early character, Thomas J. Scott, is a racing journalist and a hopeful equine portraitist. As he paints Dr Warfield’s horses, he notices how helpful and sensitive the boy is, and does something kind.

“I remembered I’d promised him a painting . . . and as sometimes happens when the stakes are small, the painting came together with an uncommon felicity. I captured the light on that rich bay coat and the intelligent look in the eye. I considered keeping the piece myself. I was glad in the end that I did not, when I saw the look of joy on the boy’s face. It occurred to me then his condition afforded him few possessions he might claim as his own.”

Scott’s painting passes through Jarrett’s family until, in 1954 it becomes the property of Martha Jackson, a New York gallery owner who exhibits bold modern paintings. She has her own secret reason for keeping the small portrait which, in due time, will unlock the equine mystery for Jess and Theo, and act as part of the powerful ending.

Knowing little about gambling or horse racing before reading Horse, I had not realised that equine paintings, such as Stubbs' famous “Whistlejacket”, are an aspect of the business of horse-breeding and were adverts promoting the best bloodlines.

Perhaps, because there are more passionate and personal novels that give a voice to the life on the plantations, Horse does not attempt to offer the reader a close inner experience. Brooks, as a white woman novelist, writes with a distanced third person narrative voice which allows her to expand her themes and also allows her concluding chapters to stand out clearly. In addition, her historical and geographical settings feel convincingly well-researched, whether she is describing families and their great estates, life on the Mississippi or the horrors of the American civil war. I appreciated the contrast between Jarrett’s time, the easy academic life within the museums and galleries and the edgy emotions within Jackson Pollock and the art scene of 50’s New York.

While I did not entirely love Horse, I did love Jarrett as a character, and I enjoyed the care and balance within Brook’s storytelling. I welcomed the world that the novel introduced me to, and the strength of its still-relevant messages. Yes: well worth the read.

Horse is published by Little, Brown.

Guest review by Graeme Fife: THE SCENT OF DRIED ROSES by Tim Lott

 "I have, so to speak, just been turned inside out by a book."

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.

I have, so to speak, just been turned inside out by a book. We all know the injunctions: the Delphic Oracle – know thyself, echoed by Polonius; Socrates – the unexamined life is not worth living – Sophocles – what is neglected runs away from us. However paled into cliché the familiar axiom may become, its truth still holds. Tim Lott’s The Scent of Dried Roses – an intriguing title whose disclosure I leave to him – offers a salutary lesson in the essential value of self-scrutiny. His writing is merciless in its pursuit of detail and causation. He lets nothing slip. Not only does he bring to light with merciless resolve the various conflicting influences, bodily and mental, that test us, the vicissitudes which unsettle and undermine us. He also, as if inadvertently, uncovers how the patterns and habits of life in this country altered so radically after the Second World War. It’s an important element in understanding who we are, where we are now. Post-war austerity, the emergence of a different class, the rise of an entirely new human species, hitherto unclassified and uncatalogued, the teenager, with all the accretions of teenage culture and shifted values, disturbing the accepted continuum, life as she has always been lived. No longer. The resultant rage in the enquiry: ‘What is going on? What has happened to us?’ Empire, colonies, British hegemony, all gone or given away, the very fabric of life in this throne of kings, this sceptr’d isle shredded. A queen, even? Queenies still did the knees-up in Bethnal Green but Southall, where Lott grew up, saw a new influx, from abroad, a place we’d rarely had to go because we were already here. No longer. Changes altered the scenery, just as the knowns of childhood distintegrate in adulthood.

With the shifts in life and its acquisitions – all, to those of us growing up through the grey into technicolour, as medical science confronted a new phenomenon, depression – everything changed. How? We’d always had nutters and loony bins but now? Unhappy and a bit worse? Here’s a pill.

Well, Lott’s story is more complex than that, of course but it’s a story that need to be told and Lott tells it marvellously well, with one proviso: in a striking image he exposes the perils of belief, often desperate, in fixity. The painting which seems so ordered, locked in a frame, a moment fastened for all time, the permanence of our viewing, is never more than a construct, a seemingly motionless truth pinned down like a dead butterfly in the flux of reality.

Lott explores that flux, the watching eye unblinking, the listening ear pricked and the colour of the detail he registers is staggering in its range. I admit that the immediate resonances prejudice me a little – the fact (eg) that we both learnt Marian Richardson handwriting at primary school, a dullness soon ditched. Ditched, the very word is like a bell … you know the rest. We look and often do not see, listen but don’t hear, forgetting that both might lead to a sort of conclusion. It may be a paradox that one conclusion is the need to discard the quest for certainty, fixity, the definite, like an anchor. A useful, I’d say essential, paradox. And Lott calls it ‘the awesome responsibility that accepting uncertainty and insignificance entails’. [p 267]

Above all, this troublesome truth is what emerges most forcefully and altogether welcome, from this very often painful, always exhilarating, if difficult, memoir which, presented as personal, reaches out to a wider humanity in a way that only unflinchingly honest introspection can. Honesty can be overused in critique, a slick judgement of writing about self when that writing purports to be record, the untailored result of what is there, palpably there: us, our very self. Does that make fiction dishonest, then? Of course not. In books is found knowledge, even if, as the preacher warns, knowledge leads to sorrow. The vale of tears? Hmm. I once undertook a job of interpreting for a French street theatre group, because the organiser told me that, at the end of the show, ‘grown men cry’. And so they should.

You know what purgative means. Lott has, in this restlessly managed careful exposé, made forensic pathology of the heart and mind a kindly operation. Forensic is the adjective for forum where, in ancient Rome the law courts were sited. I use forensic because in writing of the hurts and desires, the tribulation of heart and soul, a certain legalistic dispassion does not go amiss. Reporting on the fevered heat takes a cool head. There is that here.

The Scent of Dried Roses is published by Penguin Modern Classics.

Guest review by Ignaty Dyakov-Richmond: FROM GAS STREET TO THE GANGES by Simon Wilcox

"This is not an ordinary local history book, albeit written by a professional journalist with a degree in History. This is more like The Thousand and One Nights ..."

Ignaty Dyakov-Richmond wears several hats (apart from a deer-stalker and a faux-fur Russian hat). A Chartered Linguist, he has authored a series of unconventional Russian and ELT textbooks, which help students learn grammar and vocabulary through fun-to-read detective stories. They are now used at universities and schools all over the world, US, UK and France being the biggest markets. Ignaty is currently on the Management Committee of the Society of Authors, where he also chairs the Educational Writers Group.

In recent years, after he qualified as a life coach and Ayurvedic consultant, he has set up a health and wellbeing coaching practice in the Midlands. He works on a one-to-one basis, delivers talks and workshops and writes articles on a holistic approach to health, complementary therapies and coaching methods. More information can be found on www.lifesensei.uk or on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/lifesenseiuk/

In his spare time, he loves writing and reading short stories, walking, vegan cooking and a bit of DIY.

I must admit this wouldn’t be a book I would look for in bookstores; in fact, I wouldn’t seek to search books on this topic, not at this stage in my life. It was just that at a chance authors’ meet-up in a cafe I saw Simon Wilcox giving a copy of this book to someone else. I had finished conversing with a fellow writer and thus had a moment to look around and try to catch what others were talking about; that’s when I spotted the first words in the title, From Gas Street to the Ganges, and the cover. The cover did it for me: two pictures - one of warehouses along the canal and the other of a splendid, yet clearly vacant Oriental palace on a river bank. I knew then that I wanted to learn about the connection, the reason why these two pictures were placed next to each other.

This is not an ordinary local history book, albeit written by a professional journalist with a degree in History. This isn’t a Wikipedia-style collection of facts, albeit it has lots of facts and lots of references, methodically noted. This is more like The Thousand and One Nights - an easy-to-read collection of stories, stories which once happened but of which we might not have known all the details if not for the research coupled with the imagination and experience of the author. These stories always start in Birmingham and then take us on journeys to far-away countries. We meet protagonists, like James Chance of glass-manufacturer Chance Brothers, John Sumner of Typhoo Teas, or indeed Ron Wilcox, journalist and Simon’s father. We follow them to India, Sri Lanka, or Australia; we can almost see these places with their eyes, through the imaginative writing of Simon Wilcox. I find this is the best way to learn history - through personal history. Through emotions you might understand and remember the past better.

The book starts with a brief insight into Simon Wilcox’s biography, his childhood in Birmingham and then his escape into the open world, then coming back to see his birthplace decades later. I cannot deny that I was relieved to learn that I wasn’t the only one who hadn’t understood and who had disliked Birmingham. My wife, who lived in Harborne, Birmingham, when we met four years ago, says to everyone that one of my first questions on our first date was, ‘Why on Earth do you live in Birmingham? Let’s get out of here!’ I am glad that having now read Simon’s book I understand the place better and look forward to coming back there and exploring it further, checking on all those places I have now read about.

We then proceed to learn about various prominent people and buildings in the city and the connections they have with other countries within the Commonwealth. Each chapter is dedicated to one country or territory: from Sri Lanka, to India, to South Africa, to Gibraltar. I like how the author weaved in his father’s story and journey to Australia towards the end of the book, almost as if all the research he’d done led him to appreciate his family history more and got him back to his roots – a great circle starting from himself and then bringing him to the generation before him.

Was there anything of note to improve? Well, we all know that publishers these days have to cut down on everything to ensure that a book can still be priced attractively so I can only feel for the time-pressured editor as some paragraphs seemed disjointed from others which disrupted the flow of the text at times. There is only so much that even the most thorough author can notice in their own writing and that’s why publishing a book has always been a team effort. Yet overall, it is a solid work based on good research that mostly reads very smoothly and with ease.

I would also like to learn more about social history and lives of ordinary people in Birmingham and their families in far away lands, so perhaps the second tome would be great to have (no pressure!).

Overall, I liked From Gas Street to the Ganges very much and would definitely have it in mind later this year when the Midlands will be hosting the Commonwealth Games and I might be asked for reading recommendations.

Did I judge this book by its cover? To a degree perhaps, as every time I was ready to read from it, I would spend a few moments looking at the photos and feel how I was transported deep into the past and far into the distance, a good feeling. So yes, I am as partial to the cover as I am to the title, and yet there is so much more inside the book too which makes it a good and educating read.

From Gas Street to the Ganges is published by The History Press.

Guest review by Sheena Wilkinson: BAD GIRLS, A HISTORY OF REBELS AND RENEGADES, by Caitlin Davies

"Bad Girls joins my library of non-fiction about women’s experiences in the past, and I know I’ll return to it many times."

Described in The Irish Times as 'one of our foremost writers for young people', Sheena Wilkinson writes both contemporary and historical fiction for young adults. She has won many awards, including the Children's Books Ireland Book of the Year. Her most recent novel Star By Star, winner of the CBI Honour Award for Fiction, commemorates the centenary of women’s suffrage.

I love fiction, and perhaps best of all I love stories set in institutions. Especially women’s institutions, and especially in the past. I thrill to books about closed communities, with their intense relationships, their special rules, their sense of being worlds apart and worlds unto themselves. My PhD was on fiction set in girls’ schools and colleges, and my work in progress is about a working girls’ hostel, but you could add to that a obsession with convents, hospitals (Call The Midwife scores twice here) and of course prisons. And I am not alone. The success of dramas such as Orange Is The New Black testifies to an abiding fascination with women who break the rules and how society deals with them.

My own first memories of being politically aware involve prisons. I remember the IRA hunger strikes of 1981, and very shortly afterwards seeing women from Greenham Common being sent to prison. This coincided with my learning about suffragette prisoners in the 1910s, so I always knew that prisons were complex spaces. As a student and later as a writer I have spent time working inside prisons, and know that they are places bristling with stories, often harsh and horrifying, always reflecting the world outside as well inside their walls.

So when I heard about Caitlin Davies’ forthcoming Bad Girls, a history of Holloway Prison, some time before publication, I was really excited about it. Because even more than fiction I love social history, especially the history of women’s experience. Sometimes when I feel a bit storied-out I reach for social history as a kind of palate-cleanser. I knew this book was going to tick a lot of my boxes, and when it arrived I was almost scared to start reading it; I had invested so much interest and expectation in it. I’d also rashly agreed to review it for this blog before I even started reading it.

But I needn’t have worried. A quick glance at the contents page was enough to reassure me that this was very much my kind of book, with chapters on subjects ranging from Victorian baby farmers to spies in World War Two, and of course a detailed and horrifying section on the treatment of suffragettes. There are also sections covering sex and relationships, medical matters, and the changing regime at Holloway. The book is comprehensive and thoroughly researched, with a successful balance between telling the overarching factual story of Holloway as an institution and exploring some of the individual characters and events who found themselves incarcerated – or dependent on Holloway for their livelihood. It is dense with detail but always readable and engaging.

Davies writes fascinatingly about the women who worked as warders, and the changing demands of that role from Victorian times until more or less the present day. (Holloway closed in 2016.) I was surprised to learn that many of the wardresses were in fact sympathetic to the cause of suffragette prisoners, though this sympathy was not encouraged, and in fact the opposite was suggested in the press. As Davies says, ‘The press preferred to portray them in opposition to the suffragettes, for… a prison full of inmates and wardresses who wanted the vote was a frightening prospect.’

The book raises important questions about what constitutes crime and punishment, and the extent to which this is determined by changing social mores. Women are particularly vulnerable to this, as their crimes and misdemeanours are sometimes less clear-cut than male crime, and very prone to shifting notions of morality. I had imagined that the prison regime would have been harshest in the nineteenth century, growing gradually more humane, but the truth is more complex than that.

Bad Girls joins my library of non-fiction about women’s experiences in the past, and I know I’ll return to it many times. I’d recommend it to anyone with an interest in social history, especially women’s history.

Bad Girls is published by John Murray.

Guest review by Keren David: FAMILY SECRETS: LIVING WITH SHAME FROM THE VICTORIANS TO THE PRESENT DAY

"If you love watching Long Lost Family or Who Do You Think You Are? then this book is for you."

Keren David is the author of eight novels for Young Adults; she is also Features Editor for the Jewish Chronicle. Her latest book is The Liar's Handbook (Barrington Stoke)


There are some works of non-fiction that help and inspire me when I’m writing one book in particular. For my latest I've been reading books about Canadian life in the 1900s, and very interesting they have proved.

But there are other books which provide enlightenment and underpinning for almost everything I write. Deborah Cohen’s marvellous Family Secrets: Living with Shame from the Victorians to the Present Day is most definitely in the latter category and I commend it to any writer whose subject matter involves families, secrets, lies, shame or privacy; that is, very many of us.

Cohen examines areas of family life which have involved secrecy and shame, particularly in the twentieth century and examines social attitudes towards them. Adoption, homosexuality, learning and physical disabilities, race, domestic violence, incest and illegitimacy are all covered, as well as the prevailing attitudes towards secrecy itself, as society moved towards today’s confessional culture. Cohen tells the story of what happens within the family, a change from the usual accounts of social change which focus on protest movements and changes in the law.

To tell those stories she has looked at family letters and diaries, the files of adoption agencies and institutions for the mentally handicapped, the records of marriage counsellors and the divorce court. Just reading about her research (“In Edinburgh, staff had to cut the plastic bands strapped tightly around marriage-counselling files from the 1940s and 1950s before I could begin my research”) gives me a frisson of excitement. The curiosity, that need to know more and understand people better which fuels many a journalist or novelist (I am both), is very well satisfied in this book. It also helps place the current fascination for revealing more and more Love Island-style in a narrative starting in the teeming Victorian tenements where privacy was a luxury that the poor could not afford.

The book starts with a sentence that could come from a novel: “Celia Ward was resourceful and she was desperate.” Celia and her husband wanted to adopt a baby, and in 1920 she felt it had to be as secret as possible. She stayed in a nursing home for a month, pretending to have given birth, and told everyone that the child was her own. If you love watching Long Lost Family, or Who Do You Think You Are? then this book is for you, it puts many such stories in context, leaving enough to the imagination that to read just one chapter provides a writer with a fertile river of ideas to develop.

“There are an infinite number of stories to tell about families, for they are all famously unhappy (and perhaps also happy) in their own ways…” says Cohen, “Writing about the families of the past is an enterprise that necessarily balances the universal and the particular, for the emotions that families call forth (love as well as hate, the warmth of protection and the struggle against dependence) are uncannily familiar - whether considered from the standpoint of legal frameworks, social structures or the brute facts of demography - has often changed utterly.”

Her book made me reflect on my own family’s twentieth century secrets ; the ones I know about anyway, which include one great uncle in a mental asylum, another who was homosexual, and another uncle who disappeared from our lives when I was six, and then reappeared again when I was 14. My husband’s genealogical researches likewise turned up lies about a marriage and a great-aunt who died in a poorhouse. And when I wrote books about adoption and bisexuality, Cohen’s research and insights were invaluable; I can’t recommend it highly enough. And I will be reading it yet again this summer.

Family Secrets: Living with Shame from the Victorians to the Present Day is published in hardback by Viking, and in paperback by Penguin with the title Family Secrets: The Things we Tried to Hide