Hangsaman

Natalie Waite, seventeen years old, from a reasonably well-off family, is preparing to leave for college at the start of this novel. Over the course of several months, we follow her as she moves into a new phase of her life, gradually makes new friends, and starts to become an adult. Except of course it’s a Shirley Jackson novel, and none of that is what actually happens.

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The Essex Serpent

Strange News Out of Essex: it is 1892*, and residents of a coastal village have reported glimpses of a mysterious animal in the marshes of Blackwater Estuary. Thither goes our heroine, one Cora Seaborne, a young woman recently (and mercifully) widowed, hoping to add to the collection of ammonites and other fossils in which she has an amateur interest. She meets the local vicar, Will Ransome, a friend of a friend, and they develop an intimate relationship that defies attempts at definition.

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The Stone Diaries

The autobiography of a fictional character, this novel charts the significant periods in the life of one Daisy Goodwill, born in 1905 in rural Manitoba. The novel dedicates one chapter apiece to birth, childhood, marriage, motherhood, etc, right up to (and including) death, which you have to admit is an unorthodox choice for a novel purportedly narrated by the protagonist (though often not in the first person).

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Hot Milk

The heroine of this novel, Sofia, travels with her mother Rose to a coastal Spanish town in order to consult an orthopaedic surgeon about the pain (or is it numbness?) that has resulted in the mother being mostly unable to walk for many years. The father is long since out of the picture, having moved back to his native Greece, married a woman the age of his own daughter, and started a new family. The relationship between mother and daughter is strained, to the point of abusiveness. It seems that, her mother having been under a disability for most of her life, Sofia has been forced to care for Rose in her father’s absence since childhood, and Rose has done everything she can to make it as difficult as possible.

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Eileen

It is 1964, and Eileen lives alone with her verbally abusive alcoholic father in a small town in Massachusetts. Underfed, embittered, and lonely, she has never felt loved or appreciated by anyone, until the arrival of a new colleague, Rebecca, at the (literal) prison where she works. From a vantage point some years in the future, she narrates what she tells us is the last week she spent living the identity with which she was born.

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My Name is Lucy Barton

Guys. You guys. This book.

I don’t even know what to say about it. I read it on my Kindle, which lets me highlight sections; usually I use this feature to highlight things I think are significant, that I can come back to at the end to help me understand the book as a whole. At a certain point while reading this book, I realised I was highlighting on just about every second page. Every sentence, almost, seems weighed down with significance. Yet somehow, the touch of the author is so light, feather-light, so fragile, that it seemed the book might come apart if I breathed wrong.

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The Pursuit of Love & Love in a Cold Climate

It occurs to me that some people might not know who the Mitford sisters were. Do you know who the Mitford sisters were? They were the daughters of a minor peer, raised partly in London and partly in Oxfordshire, and were notable for their eccentricities, which is what you call it when rich white people do things that would be unacceptable if they were poor or black. Nancy, the eldest, had a string of husbands and lovers before settling down in Paris with a man she refused to marry but lived very happily with (scandalous at the time). Jessica eloped with an aristocratic communist, and then, much worse, with an American communist. Unity and Diana both got into fascism in a big way; Unity shot herself in the head when Britain declared war on Germany (she survived, but later died essentially due to complications arising from the bullet that was STILL IN HER HEAD). Diana’s second wedding took place in Joseph Goebbels’s drawing room. Deborah towed the line a bit more by marrying well, and ended up managing Chatsworth house in her capacity as Duchess of Devonshire. Pamela was mostly into animals, bless her, though that goes for all of them: during Unity’s debutante season, she frequently showed up at balls and parties draped in her pet grass-snake, Enid.

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Mothering Sunday

The year is 1924, and Jane Fairchild, a housemaid in a country house, is engaged in a long-running affair with the son of a nearby estate. Paul Sheringham, too young to have been killed in the war along with all of the other local young men, is due to marry another woman in a few short weeks, and this novel charts their last day – really only a few hours – together.

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Grey Mask ff

As a person who has had a love of Agatha Christie inculcated in me from the years of my earliest literacy by older female relatives on both sides of my family, I am the first to admit that I am less than conversant in other great mystery novelists of the same period. It took me until my 30s to discover John Dickson Carr, for example – arguably the greatest of the so-called “locked room mystery” writers. My family bookshelves just didn’t deign to notice the existence of any detectives that weren’t Miss Marple, Hercule Poirot, or (grudgingly) Tommy and Tuppence Beresford*. No surprises, then, that Patricia Wentworth has only just appeared on the horizon of my literary radar**.

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