Flanagan’s memoir of his father—though it is far more than simply a memoir—imparts fascinating historical information as well as rewarding food for the soul and imagination.

In 2024 I read only 101 books, the same number as in 2023 and 21 fewer than the year before. Guess I’ve been doing more writing, so that’s all good.

Phew. The first novel is done in my Secrecy Trilogy is done. I’m still seeking an agent, so it’s hot off the printer, rather than the press. Now, like a pie on a windowsill, it’s cooling off while I pitch it to agents.

The Author’s Note at the beginning of this novel is a highly unusual disclaimer. Harris aims to “use the techniques of a novel to retell the story of the Dreyfus Affair,” which he characterizes as “perhaps the greatest political scandal and miscarriage of justice in history.” “None of the characters,” we learn, “is wholly fictional.”

One good thing that came out of the changes in available produce was the arrival of Ashcroft onions in local farm markets. In the past, except when buying Okanagan fruit and vegetables at the farms where they were grown, I’ve always had to buy imported onions — most often from Washington or California.

As Shafak says in her final note to the reader, “beyond the borders of time, geography and identity,” water connects us all. The author has dubbed her latest work a love song to rivers. “Fluid bridges, they “link one bank to the other, the past to the future, the spring to the delta, earthlings to celestial beings, the visible to the invisible…the living to the dead.”

It’s always a joy to read Kate Atkinson’s work. This latest Jackson Brodie adventure struck me as even wiser and more hilarious than the wonderful stories of his previous exploits. When the story opens, Jackson, now sixty and a grandfather, has been house-hunting. However, he’s just overcome “several weeks being sensible and mature” and bought a brand-new “rugged, blokey” Land Rover Defender. After all, he reflects, “you could live in a Defender if you had to, “but you couldn’t drive a house.”

In the opening story, a husband and wife move from the country to Moscow during the Russian Revolution. Irina, the convinced communist, is a brilliant foil for her husband Pushkin, whose character evolves in an entirely different direction.

I just finished listening to The Glass Maker. The structure of this riveting novel expresses the fluidity of time while providing a wide canvas for the author to paint the history of Venice and Murano. We see through the eyes of Orsola Rossi, whose glass making family have lived and worked on Murano for centuries.

This afternoon I was honoured to take part in the 139th iteration of the monthly Surrey Muse reading series at the Central Branch of Surrey Public Library. Since I read first — a short story and the opening of my novel Unspoken History, I was relaxed and focused on hearing the presentations of the other contributors.

Writers often talk about point of view and it can be challenging for novelists to differentiate the “povs” of different characters.

Reading Percival Everett’s novel is a dramatic demonstration of the vital importance of point of view in fiction—and indeed in life.

Ex-Kolkata policeman Kamil Rahman, introduced in previous novels, began his London life as a waiter, then worked as a cook. In this volume, he is seconded from his job as a detective for the London police to assist MI5. Thanks to his brown skin and Muslim heritage, Five asks him to infiltrate a mosque where they suspect a major act of terror is being fomented.

This gripping novel by Jeanine Cummins is filled with profound ideas and nuanced emotion. The opening action is the murder of a Mexican journalist by one of the cartels. His widow Lydia knows that “fear and corruption work in tandem to censor the people who might otherwise discover the clues that would point to justice.” She is also aware that the previous year, “Mexico was the deadliest country in the world to be a journalist, no safer than an active war zone.”

Recently the Reverend Richard Coles gave a fascinating interview through the Guardian. A veteran of many jobs besides the ministry, he mentioned that he’d wanted from childhood to write mysteries. By exposing him to all manner of human frailties, his pastoral work has provided fodder for his stories.

As John, a British airman, returns home from a rendezvous in Paris, his beloved Nicole returns to her home to apply for a visa to come to him and his widowed father in London. Wanting to “do things properly,” they wait to tell him together of their plans to marry. The declaration of war derails their plans and the young pilot is killed.

Last month our online writing group gathered from Austria, the UK and Canada for a face-to-face writing retreat.

In the lobby of the respectable Meredith Hotel in the seaside village of Hazelbourne, two English ladies from different backgrounds face a dilemma that results from being female.

A conventionally structured tale of murder, the story plays out against actual and imagined social history. Fortunate to be educated and married to the enlightened and liberal Doctor Ramu Murthy, Kaveri not only involves herself in solving a murder, but persuades Ramu to aid her efforts in helping the police. As she does so, she comes across all manner of social ills. The burden of a home’s respectability, Kaveri quickly realizes, is placed on the womenfolk.

This well-researched and riveting book exposes how vastly different the world was just a hundred years ago. Before World War I, Parker tells us, “imperialism had been the familiar form of government for much of the globe.” After it, “the future seemed to belong to alternative forms of government — the nation state, democracy, communism, fascism. In Britain itself, 1918 had seen the ushering in of (almost) mass democracy for the first time, with a universal male franchise and votes for most women over thirty.”