The Christmas Quilt by Jennifer Chiaverini

I bought this paperback at Boston airport a couple of years back and it is a very cosy sentimental Christmas read...
Sylvia Bergstrom, a quilter, single and in her 70s, of German descent, has moved back into the old family home of Elm Creek Manor, now that her estranged sister has died. A young friend helps her find decorations in the attic on Christmas Eve and discovers an unfinished Christmas quilt that stirs up memories of times past.

She had never forgotten the Christmas Quilt, nor had she expected to see it again. From what she could see of the folded bundle of patchwork and applique, not a single stitch had been added since she last worked upon it. And yet every intricate Feathered Star block, every graceful appliqued cluster of holly leaves and berries had been tucked away as neatly as if a conscientious quiltmaker had had every intention of completing her masterpiece. Even the scraps of fabric had been sorted according to colour – greens here, reds there, golds and creams in their own separate piles. The Christmas Quilt had been abandoned, but it had not been discarded.

Tonight in the last few hours of Christmas Day, Sylvia intended to work on the Christmas Quilt, to complete a task too long neglected. In her home full of memories, she felt the presence of all those whom she loved, blessing her and wishing her well. At last she understood the true lesson of the Christmas Quilt, that a family was an act of creation, the piecing together of disparate fragments into one cloth – often harmonious, occasionally clashing and discordant, but sometimes unexpectedly beautiful and strong. Without contrast there was no pattern and each piece, whether finest silk or faded cotton, would endure if sewn fast to the others with strong seams – bonds of love and loyalty, tradition and faith.

The Mysteries of Glass by Sue Gee

I like all Sue Gee's novels but this is my favourite, just right for a wintry evening and frost at midnight.
It is 1860 and Richard Allen takes up his post in a remote country parish in Herefordshire. An amiable, devout young man and son of a clergyman, he finds parish life claustrophobic until he falls in love with an unhappily married woman who returns his love. Dramatic consequences follow; Victorian society is scandalised but true love knows no shame. Richard and Susannah are good people who deserve to find happiness in this fleeting world despite the hypocrisy surrounding them.
Gee's descriptions of the countryside are exquisite, like extracts from Kilvert's diary of the same period.
The lantern swung before them, shining on frozen ruts of earth, on bank and frosty hedgerow.

In the morning the window was thick with frost. Downstairs there was ice on every pane and the shutters in the snug cloaked a passage of freezing air. The world was yet in darkness: for a moment he felt like a ghost, returned to an unlit empty house, with no one to hear his voice or have any sense of his presence here at all.

Palm Sunday, 1861. The woods filled with paper-white anemones; catkins swaying over the stream; the birds a concert hall. The lambs and the ewes cried for one another long after dark, and Richard was woken by them long before the dawn.

And so, as the firelight played upon them, they went on gazing at each other's eyes, searching, finding, while outside the cold April wind stirred the trees, and across the darkening highway the house behind the laurels now was silent.

The Caves of Perigord by Martin Walker

They looked at it together in silence, feeling the strength and nobility of a long-dead beast, and wondering about the mind and eyes and hands that had crafted it into something more potent than life. In ennobling the bull, the artist had somehow ennobled the early men who had hunted it.
I stumbled on this title by chance and ordered it second-hand from Amazon. This is a really gripping novel that moves seamlessly through three time zones, each one enriching the others as the story unfolds. A fragment of a stone painting, 17,000 years old, surfaces at a London auction house, kept secret by a British officer serving in France during the Second World War. What happened fifty years ago in occupied France in the Caves of Perigord is about to be revealed.
Each character is well drawn: Malrand, Horst and Chlothilde, for example, and there are light touches in the blossoming romance between Manners and Lydia in contrast to much darker, sombre episodes portrayed during the history of the Resistance.
The undiscovered cave paintings near Lascaux have the last word: portraits of the first children of Perigord, our ancestors, whoever they were, as observed poignantly by an ageing Malrand, for perhaps his last time.

Moon Tiger by Penelope Lively

I read this novel when it won the Booker Prize in 1987 and now it has surfaced again at the local library book club I’m reading it again. Like most novels I admire, it is short by today’s standards (208 pages) and beautifully written.
She lies awake in the small hours. On the bedside table is a Moon Tiger. The Moon Tiger is a green coil that slowly burns all night, repelling mosquitoes, dropping away into lengths of grey ash, its glowing red eye a companion of the hot insect-rasping darkness. She lies there thinking of nothing, simply being, her whole body content.
The structure is masterful. Claudia, a successful and popular historian, is dying. From her hospital bed visitors come and go; fragments of streams of consciousness criss-cross back and forth: scenes from childhood, adolescence, all that has been and might have been had history not got in the way. Her lover Tom’s journal, sent to her after his death, is particularly poignant, even more so given that a dying woman, the woman he loved so fleetingly, would want to read it one last time.
I did not particularly care for Claudia but her relationship with Tom made her seem warmer somehow and perhaps excused her behaviour there after, having lost the love of her life.
Penelope Lively writes exquisitely about the every day, in contemporary London as in war-torn Egypt.
It is a grey winter afternoon, glittering with car lights, street lights, gold, red, emerald, the black rainy pavements gleaming, the shop windows glowing Wagnerian caves. He talks of events that have not yet come about and sees light and texture, the kaleidoscope of fruit outside a greengrocer, the mist of rain on a girl's cheek.

I saw the cluttered intense life of the fields and villages – and I saw the stark textural immensity of the desert, the sand carved by the wind, the glittering mirages, It has the delicacy of a water-colour – all soft grey-greens and pale blues and fawns and bright browns. I saw it through him and with him. Now, he and that place are one, fused in the head to a single presence of his voice and his touch, those sights and those smells.

My late father spent the war years in the Middle East and I find myself thinking of him and his time spent there. One day I too will visit Egypt and take a trip down the River Nile.

The Maid’s Request by Michele Desbordes

He took the pen and trimmed it, tried it out on a corner of the page; sitting on the terrace he wrote in notebooks, drew, annotated drawings, went on doing what he had always done, he had always written in notebooks; in the evening he lined them up in a cupboard in his room, twenty-five small books and two bigger books and sixteen even bigger than that, six books bound in vellum, another covered in green chamois leather…

Beautifully written and translated from the French title, La Demande, this short novel tracks an elderly Italian painter’s journey across the Alps to a commission in the Loire Valley. Although unspoken, this is a fictitious story of Leonardo da Vinci and his close friendship with a French maid who cares for him. As they approach the twilight of their lives their proximity allows her to make an unusual request…

When he leaves a notebook in his bedroom or his studio, he asks her to go and get it. She rises to her feet and hurries, brings it back at arm’s length like the priest at the offertory handing the host to the faithful. In the corner of a page he adds an angel, curly hair, pale eyes.

In Italy they had talked about the angel, about the delicacy of the bruised and budding flower, the hollow of the shadow on the cheek, that sense of heat, of burning skin, emotion, pleasure; how one could tell, sometimes everything had been so magnificent.

The Maid’s Request is a slow, lingering tale to be read on a winter’s night, savouring one beautiful description after another.

The Madonna of the Almonds by Marina Fiorato

I read a lot of historical fiction as a teenager: Jean Plaidy, Anya Seton et al and have read little since. But this is one I would go back to again and again.
Simonetta di Saronno has lost her husband at the Battle of Pavia in 1525 and subsequently falls in love with the young artist who paints her likeness for a fresco in the local church. Her fortune gone, she concocts a liqueur from the juice of almonds in memory of her new love…
Only then, when she let the remembrance of him help her, when she combined the bitter and the sweet, the very essence of their entire encounter, did she know she was done. She drank deeply of the finished draught, while she wrote rapidly with her quill the exact proportions and ingredients she had used. Her head nodded over her ink black fingers and as her brow touched the creamy pages of the ledger she thought of sharing a cup with him, laughing, somewhere where the sun warmed their skin as they drank in a way she knew could never be.
An intriguing, surprising yet satisfying read as characters’ lives criss-cross and take their own paths to an unimagined future.
This Christmas I will hunt down a bottle of Amaretto di Saronne, known as Disaronno Originale, and, one day, treat myself to a bottle of the limited edition perfume made by Floris in celebration of this stunning novel.

Under the Tuscan Sun by Frances Mayes

Every year I use a hardback desk diary for planning and recording writing projects. Instead of buying a brand new one for next year I found an unused one that would be suitable with quotations from Frances Mayes’s book and beautiful accompanying photographs of sun-drenched Italy. A couple of days later my husband was home late from a fishing trip so I watched a film I hadn’t seen before based on that bestselling memoir of la dolce vita. And now I’ve read the book again. It’s an inspirational account of a divorced writer from San Francisco buying an old villa called Bramasole near Cortona and finding a new life there, abundant with pleasures associated with living in Italy.
Frances Mayes writes beautifully; no wonder her book was made into a film.

When I first saw Bramasole, I immediately wanted to hang my summer clothes in an armadio and arrange my books under one of those windows looking out over the valley.

At nine, a slab of sunlight falls into my study from the side window, my favourite window in the house for its framed view over the cypresses, the groves in the valley, and out into the Apennines.

When it rains or when the light changes, the façade of the house turns gold, sienna, ochre; a previous scarlet paint job seeps through in rosy spots like a box of crayons left to melt in the sun.
Poppies have lingered and the fragrance of spiky yellow broom is intense.

I like cut flowers in the house every day. We both love the currents of scents swimming through the garden and how they rise to the house early in the morning.

Magic. I simply fell in love – like you fall in love with a person – and schemed to find a way to stay there.

It is late afternoon, just after a thunderstorm, when the light turns that luminous gold I wish I could bottle and keep.

The Tuscan sun has warmed me to the marrow.

I think this will all keep me going very nicely and keep me writing in the new year ahead.

Memory Maps by Lisa St. Aubin de Teran

I am a wanderer: one with a hoarder’s love of houses and things… I am tracing here a memory map of all the places that have stayed with me and, since this is also a map of all the voyages of discovery, this is also the story of getting to those places.
I have followed this writer’s exotic life over the years through magazine and newspaper articles and, of course, her books, both fact and fiction. She is perhaps one of few writers left I would like to hear talk about her work.
Memory Maps trawls through a lifetime of travel and living abroad including South America, Venice, Umbria, the Caribbean and finally Montmartre. She writes beautifully, wistfully about leaving Venice and then the Villa Quarata in the Umbrian village of Morra. It was not meant to end in tears:
‘I thought I would live and die here, and yet, per forza, as they say in Italian, I am moving on.’
Having read A Valley in Italy, an inspiring memoir of renovating a ‘half-ruined palace in the woods’ I too felt devastated when she was forced to sell the home she loved.
Lisa St. Aubin de Teran writes movingly of failed marriages and crushed dreams but her spirit is intact:
‘Sorting out the maps and memories has been the large stage of clearing my decks.
I find as Anne Frank did before me, that, 'In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart'. Sometimes that goodness is buried so deep it takes a shovel to unearth it.
I used to think I was different. Now I feel I am not so different from anyone else: the time and the places have been different, that is all.’

A Chance to Sit Down by Meredith Daneman

Just back from the Diaghhilev exhibition at the V and A and realised how much I loved ballet. I must have seen most ballets over the years and remembered Nureyev performing Nijinsky's roles: Spectre de la Rose, Petrouchka, L'Apres-midi d'un Faun. A favourite ballet was Ashton's A Month in the Country and anything choreographed by Kenneth Macmillan.
I love A Chance to Sit Down (1971) and have reread it many times. It allows the reader to go backstage and experience the blood, sweat and tears involved in being a professional dancer, seen through the eyes of Barbara who rebels against the restrictive discipline imposed. George, the set designer whom she marries is as lovely as Jack, her temperamental ex-lover and rising star of the company, is hateful. This novel was recommended to me years ago by a friend who had been a ballet dancer and it was spot on.
Curtain Fall by Jean Ure (1978) is equally poignant. A ballet dancer returns to England and meets her ex-lover and stage partner now suffering from MS. He wants to have nothing to do with her but when she refuses to be cast aside he lets her back into his life again. I especially love the scene when they go to the cinema, heavily disguised, to watch a film in which they were both starring at the peak of their careers. A wonderfully heart-breaking romantic story - the one paperback I would save from a fire to keep rereading!
Both these novels are probably out of print by now but are still available second-hand from Amazon.

Consequences by Penelope Lively

I love all Penelope Lively’s writing but this is my favourite. She has beautifully constructed a story spanning three generations from 1935 to the present day. The lives of Lorna, her daughter Molly and granddaughter Ruth are woven together seamlessly, making it a very satisfying read. Ruth’s visit to the Somerset cottage where Lorna and Matt spent their fleeting time together brings the novel full-circle. The fresco Matt painted as an impoverished artist for Lorna has been recently uncovered: a testament to their blissful marriage before War intervened to part them.
The walls. Dancing figures. Pink. Nude, but discreetly so. Male and female. Who hold out their arms to one another, link arms, swirl around the walls of the room.

Why is Penelope Lively one of my favourite novelists?
She writes thoughtfully, beautifully, sparingly.

She turns and there is the postman, so she smiles, and waves.
But the postman is neither smiling nor waving. He has a new look on his face she does not recognise.

But I realise it is her characters I like, time and again. They are kind, sensitive and honourable and that is what draws me back each time.

My House in Umbria by William Trevor

This short novel is one of two contained in the volume: Two Lives. My husband and I love William Trevor’s stories although they are unbearably sad. I once lent a neighbour a video of an adaptation of his novel Fools of Fortune and she was shocked by how heart-wrenching it was. How could we bear to watch it? It is one of my favourite films.
My House in Umbria was made into a film too starring Maggie Smith – the settings were exquisite but the ending spoilt by being much more cheerful than was portrayed in the novel.
Elizabeth Delahunty is flawed from childhood. This encourages her to write romantic fiction:
I fear abandonment and have instictively avoided it as a fictional subject. The girls of my romances were never left by lovers who took from them what they would. Mothers did not turn their backs on little children. Wives did not pitifully plead or in bitterness cuckold their husbands. The sombre side of things did not appeal to me; in my works I dealt with happiness ever after.
And so she lives in a beautiful house in Umbria, wears lovely clothes and stays in elegant hotels until one day she is seated on a train to Milan. A bomb explodes in her carriage and, on leaving hospital, invites a few others from Carrozza 219 to recuperate and stay at her villa. Her imagination as a romantic novelist knows no bounds as their lives become woven together through circumstance. And so she tells her story.
William Trevor writes beautifully, compelling that story to heard.
Except to write about that summer I have never since sat down at my black Olympia, and never shall again. I haven’t learned much, only that love is different among survivors.

The Small Hand by Susan Hill

This book is ‘hot off the press’, unlike a lot books I enjoy reading and re-reading.
I admire Susan Hill’s ability to tell a story clearly and succinctly in 167 pages. So many new books are far too long and much less satisfying to read. A good short novel can be read, again and again, savouring descriptions of people and places. I always enjoy her books and this one is very special.
Susan Hill has a particular forte for writing ghost stories such as this one. I’m going to recommend it to friends so we can discuss it further – the strange meeting between Adam Snow and the old woman at the White House, the photograph albums and the tended garden is masterful in making the reader wonder what is really going on there… In fact I need to read it again, slowly, carefully a second time. But not yet, because I’m too scared!
It will make an excellent audio book as long as one is not listening while driving along country lanes in Sussex or the remote mountains of the Vercors!

Mrs. Miniver by Jan Struther

Having taken our young grandson on a trip to the Cabinet War Rooms in Westminster today I am in the mood to re-read something about the Second World War. This book is the obvious choice: a cosy comfortable read I turn to time and again.
Originally written for a column in The Times, then published as a book in October 1939, just after the outbreak of war, these essays reflect the author’s positive enthusiasm for life seen through the eyes of a Chelsea wife and mother determined to ‘keep calm and carry on’ in unsettled times.
I’ve always loved the first essay: Mrs. Miniver Comes Home best: turning the key in the familiar latch, arranging flowers in a vase, settling down to tea and library books in the drawing room.
The clock on the mantelpiece chimed, very softly and precisely, five times. A tug hooted from the river. A sudden breeze brought the sharp tang of a bonfire in at the window.
And Mrs. Miniver, with a little sigh of contentment, rang for tea.
Weekends are spent at Starlings, their house in the country; Mrs. Miniver buys fireworks, goes Christmas shopping and treats herself to a green lizard engagement diary. They queue for gas masks at the Town Hall and life goes on. As indeed it must.
One is what one remembers: no more, no less.
Caroline Miniver comes into her own in four letters written to a friend , published in The Times in the autumn of 1939:
She observes people carrying gas masks with panache. You might think, walking around London, everybody was going off to a picnic with a box of special food.
Another noticeable thing is the way people are taking advantage of the wide sandbag ledges to sit comfortably in the sun and eat their lunch.
She describes the war-time concert at the National Gallery:
Everything she played seemed to have a double loveliness, as though she had managed to distil into it all the beauty of the pictures that were missing from the walls. It was quite unforgettable.
She recalls a quotation from a friend 'when it looked as if we were going to get no plays, films, pictures, music at all'. "We must live on stored beauty like a squirrel on nuts."
Mrs Miniver is an inspiration to us all.

The Beach Hut by Veronica Henry

He passed along the line of huts, head down. Some people were still outside, enjoying the night air, smoking the last cigarette of the day. Others were inside, and he could see their shadowy figures through the glass, eating, drinking wine, reading a novel, playing cards.
Our older daughter and her family have a beach hut on the Essex coast so I couldn’t resist dipping into this book to capture those memories of sandcastles, wind breaks, grandchildren body-boarding in wet-suits, going crabbing, brewing tea in the hut and sitting outside, just like my grandparents did in a sepia photograph taken in the 1930s along the same beach.
The Beach Hut is a compilation of fourteen short stories, some of them skilfully interwoven, about the lives of those spending their summers on the north Devon coast.
Veronica Henry writes: 'It was a writer’s dream watching the dramas unfold behind the weather-beaten walls – the only problem was going to be where to stop…'
At first I found the stories too ‘full-on’: the bored young girl typing for a selfish novelist who seduces her, a married woman embarking on an affair, an alcoholic coming to terms with the past. But I persevered and other stories about a single parent and her handicapped son and a widow scattering her husband’s ashes seemed all the more poignant.
I liked the structure of the book – each story is given the title of the possible name of a hut – but I can’t say ‘I wished I was there’. Apart from Roy and Harry, I didn’t really care enough for any of the other characters to wonder what might happen to them once summer faded.

September by Rosamunde Pilcher

Just home from my seventh holiday in Scotland and I want to recapture everything I love about the place: long winding roads alongside abandoned lochs, sombre glens, isolated cottages, bracken and Rose Bay Willow Herb, deserted beaches, pewter skies and fly fishing. Country houses with stags’ heads, tartan cushions and log fires, renovated castles, malt whisky and smoked salmon. And so I turn to Scott and Burns or rather, Rosamunde Pilcher’s Wild Mountain Thyme or September to evoke a splash of Tweed perfume once more.
September starts in May, as summer comes at last to Scotland. A September dance is planned in the Highlands as family and friends converge in Scotland. Old relationships are rekindled and the lovely, troubled Pandora returns to her childhood home for the first and last time.
September was passing, and soon the winter gales would begin. She made her way to the foot of the garden, to stand by the gap in the hedge, looking out to the south, over the incomparable view. The glen, the river, the distant hills: sunless today, sombre but beautiful.

As It Was and World Without End by Helen Thomas

Thirty-seven years ago I wrote a student dissertation on the War Poet, Edward Thomas and these books penned by his widow, not originally written for publication, were obligatory reading. They tell a poignant, heart-rending story of lives caught up in uncertainty and poverty under the shadow of the Great War. It is a world away from the comparative wealth we take for granted in the 21st century: a slow existence punctuated by changing seasons and observing nature in the midst of the daily round.
I particularly love the description of the room in a gamekeeper’s thatched cottage in which the young couple stayed: a small room almost filled by the four-poster… The tiny window was draped with dimity curtains, and the window was kept open by a large dried sunflower head.
Their last night together at the cottage at High Beech before the poet soldier leaves for the Front is made especially poignant by knowing, with hind sight, that he too will be killed in action like so many of his comrades. The snow falls and he writes his final poem Out in the Dark for Helen. Despite all the difficulties they have encountered in their marriage they remain soul mates to the end. Love is enough, much more than the writer’s periods of depression, anxiety about money and being able to provide for his wife and children. Their separation is unbearably sad.
These stories make me count my blessings, slow me down to a more authentic life and make me realise how swiftly time passes. Time spent together, digging the garden or listening to a blackbird singing, must be treasured before it is too late.

The Poet’s Wife by Judith Allnatt

It is 1841. Patty is married to John Clare: peasant poet, genius and madman.

A beautifully written, crafted novel telling the story of Patty Turner, the poet John Clare’s long-suffering wife. Judith Allnatt seamlessly weaves her historical research into a poignant story, so sad it could have been written by Thomas Hardy, as her husband returns to search in vain for his childhood sweetheart, Mary Joyce, to whom he believes he is married.
Clare walks home to Northamptonshire from the asylum at High Beech, Essex where he has been staying for the past four years. The poet’s life is well documented; Patty’s is less known. Judith Allnatt has given this strong, caring woman a compassionate voice, speaking for all those who have lost loved ones debilitated in body, mind and spirit.

The Botticelli Secret by Marina Fiorato

Florence looks like gold and smells like sulphur…

I’m not usually attracted to books this thick (548 pages) let alone anything delving into mysterious Da Vinci type codes. But the subject matter intrigued me: Botticelli’s painting, La Primavera, that hangs in the Uffizi Gallery, Florence. And as I had previously enjoyed Madonna of the Almonds by the same author I added it to my 3 for 2, or rather 6 for 4 basket in Hatchards in Piccadilly, recently and started it a few days later.
I have to say I couldn’t put it down. The Botticelli Secret became the ultimate page-turner as I sped from Renaissance Florence to Pisa, Venice, Genoa and Rome in the company of a beautiful ‘lady of the night’, Luciana Vetra, the model for Flora in the painting, and her unlikely companion, Brother Guido della Torre, a novice at the monastery of Santa Croce.
One day I’m sure this book will make a stunning film and I will race through it again, albeit more slowly. Now I know how the story ends I can spend longer unravelling the code. La Primavera will never seem the same again, thanks to Enrico Guidoni, a professor at Rome University who attempted to crack the ‘code’ of this enigmatic painting, on whose work the novel is based. Did Lorenzo de Medeci really have a plan for unifying Italy through a network of alliances between warring city states? I must confess I was more interested in the unlikely developing relationship between Luciana and Brother Guido!
Food for thought, but this is only one interpretation amongst many others attempting to unravel the mystery of such a beautiful painting. I am content to remain unconvinced and there let it rest. But it was a Good Read!

The Great Lover by Jill Dawson

It is forty years since my boyfriend (now husband) first took me to Grantchester Meadows, two miles along the river from Cambridge. We have been back many times, to walk along the river bank, picnic and take tea in the Orchard tea gardens, relaxing in old-fashioned deckchairs just as Rupert Brooke and his literary friends did before the Great War. The wide Cambridge skyline is unaltered; the river meanders on, green and lush with weeds and all is drenched in birdsong.
My mother passed on a leather-bound volume of Rupert Brooke’s poems, some of which I read to her when she, like Brooke, was dying of septicaemia years ago. I was familiar with his verse from school, even more familiar with sepia photographs of his handsome face but not too fond of his character, as revealed in letters and memoirs. Jill Dawson’s novel reinforces this; he is capricious, confused and complicated in his relationships with friends and lovers. In contrast, Nell Golightly, the fictitious maid with whom Brooke has a liaison, is grounded in hard work and a sense of duty to provide for her family despite her tender years. Although younger and of a lower class she is a much stronger character than Brooke and infinitely more attractive to the reader than his academic, privileged friends.
I love the familiar descriptions of the Old Vicarage and the Orchard at Grantchester: Byron’s Pool and lilac bursting through the poet's bedroom window. Similarly those of Tahiti, where we spent some time last year, abundant with tropical fish and fragrant tiare flowers. Brooke’s mistress, Taatamata, who bore him a daughter, is constant like Nell in her affection for the handsome poet, yet similarly abandoned when he returns to England.
I started this novel on a train to Cambridge yesterday on the way to meet my daughter and continued it on the train home to London. I finished it this afternoon, sitting in the garden; a gentle breeze, to quote Brooke was ‘sobbing’ through the trees. Time stood still as I was transported back to summer days before the Great War, recalled in those sepia photographs of long ago.
‘Was my father a good man?’ the poet’s daughter asks the elderly retired housemaid she contacts by letter years later.
The reader must decide. I would love to say he was but I am unsure. Another reading of the novel will help me make up my mind.

The Rose Grower by Michelle de Kretser

Just back from France and the garden is sprawling with old-fashioned English roses, tumbling into the sunshine: Ophelia, Rosa mundi, Rambling Rector, William Morris, Albertine. I love their scents, soft, pale colours and heavy delicate petals that fall away in my hand… The novel I read on holiday couldn’t have been a better choice.
June brings roses. Roses that show carmine in the bud and open to reveal petals of the palest shell pink. Roses in every shade of white: ivory, cream, parchment, chalk, snow, milk, pearl, bone. Roses with nodding globular flowers, large as teacups.
The Rose Grower contains tales of unrequited love: a young doctor’s love for a self-effacing aristocratic woman; her secret love for a visiting American who has fallen in love with her married sister on recouperating from a ballooning accident.
Set against the background of the French Revolution, the novel follows the lives of those living in rural Gascony, caught up in the Reign of Terror, under which they have no control. Sophie’s passion to create a repeat-flowering crimson rose survives through the turbulent times in which they are living.
The end is inevitable… At eight o’clock the sun in the courtyard is like a blade.
The previous night they chalked a number on her door, so she knew that the footsteps would stop there this morning…
The Rose Grower is a sad, moving story I long to read once more. It is beautifully written and the writer’s descriptions are to be savoured time and again.

The Shooting Party by Isabel Colegate

A tragic accident during a shooting party at Sir Randolph Nettleby’s estate leaves the guests in sombre mood. It was an error of judgement which resulted in a death. It took place in the autumn before the outbreak of what used to be known as the Great War.
This is a novel my husband and I have enjoyed equally. I love its craftsmanship: the way in which both time and sense of place are portrayed with such poignancy. It marks the end of the Edwardian era; the long summer is over. Words spoken by Sir Edward Grey, the Foreign Secretary, standing at a window of the Foreign Office at dusk watching the lamps being lit outside, the day before war was declared on Germany, are but a whisper away. ‘The lamps going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our time’.
The novel reads like a play, with a hand-picked cast of contrasted characters making up the house party, their lives intertwined with their below-stairs counterparts. Loyal Tom Harker, the game keeper, asks his employer to say a prayer for him as his life draws to a close. An ‘unutterable and infinite sadness’ hangs in the air.
The Shooting Party was successfully adapted for the screen in the 80s starring James Mason as Sir Randolph, John Gielgud and Edward Fox. I prefer it to other more well-known adaptations in the country-house genre such as Upstairs, Downstairs and Gosford Park and admire it as much, but for different reasons, as The Remains of the Day, beautifully adapted from Kazuro Ishiguro’s novel: an equally poignant story as war clouds the horizon once more although depicting another era and ‘gathering storm’.
The unspoken love of Olivia and Lionel deepens; they choose to remain close yet distant for the rest of their lives. After his death at the Battle of Loos in 1915 her letters were found in his possession. Their heart-felt restraint, coupled with his sad words, ‘But it is true that we love each other?’ allow the reader to consider what might have been, if circumstances had been different and fate had not intervened.

The Pursuit of Love by Nancy Mitford 1945

This is the novel I turn to when I am in need of cheering myself up. It is such a cosy, comfortable read: just right as we enter a long period of austerity. I love all the eccentric characters: volatile Uncle Matthew, vague Aunt Sadie, Lord Merlin and my favourite, charming Davey Warbeck. I love Nancy Mitford’s humour, eye for detail and her descriptive, elegant style of writing that captures an era long gone.
I especially love the scene when Linda arrives back at her Paris home to find her two old friends waiting for her in the drawing room who invite her for lunch the next day at the Ritz.
One boiling hot afternoon in July she arrived home wearing a new and particularly ravishing straw hat. It was large and simple with a wreath of flowers and two blue bows. Her right arm was full of roses and carnations, and in her left hand was a striped bandbox, containing another exquisite hat.
The novel is bitter-sweet, funny and tragic, set against the uncertainties of war; Linda’s happiness is fleeting as she finds the great love of her life too late.
When I first read this novel I laughed and laughed but now I smile, as I do when someone tells familiar jokes I thought I’d long forgotten. My sister Sarah loves this story too and it’s created a bond between us, recalling ‘the thin end of the wedge’, the diseased fossils and Uncle Matthew’s disapproval of Linda’s tulle ball-gown, ‘on the grounds that he had known three women burnt to death in tulle ball-dresses’.
It’s very comforting to know this book will always be around, whatever the future holds.
So the winter slowly passed. The spring came with extraordinary beauty, as always at Alconleigh, with a brilliance of colouring, a richness of life, that one had forgotten to expect during the cold winter months

Le Grand Meaulnes by Henri Alain-Fournier

I fell in love with this novel when I studied it for French A Level, aged seventeen, and it has haunted me ever since: comme des vagues sur un rocher desert, nos aventures…les jours les plus tourmentes et les plus chers de ma vie. I loved its wistful sadness evoking a ‘land of lost content’ in the misty French countryside – a place of abandoned chateaux and dovecotes at the turn of the century.
Yvonne de Galais, loved by both the adventurous Grand Meaulnes and his gentle friend, Francois Seurel, epitomised the heroine I longed to be: a princesse lointaine. The writer was inspired seeing a beautiful girl wearing a brown cloak by the River Seine one afternoon with whom he instantly fell in love, although she was already betrothed to someone else. She became his muse for Yvonne, the unrequited love of his life until he was killed in action in 1914 near Verdun. Yvonne de Galais has remained a constant role model, although thankfully my life has not been cut short so tragically as hers.
I loved Albicocco’s film, The Wanderer, based on the novel with its hazy photography of the Sologne and have seen it many times. Years ago I managed to buy a VHS copy of the film in Paris and had it converted to the English system. Thirty years after reading Le Grand Meaulnes my husband, daughter and I visited all the places associated with the novel; we made a little film, I wrote a long article, gave a talk and finally I was able to let it go. Or so I thought because it has surfaced again.
Later this year we are staying near Verdun and I hope to visit the writer’s grave at Saint-Remy la Calonne. His body was found in a mass grave in 1991 where he had been buried by German soldiers and has since been given a proper burial. It is time to read the novel again. In French, if I am brave enough.

The Mozart Question by Michael Morpurgo

This author generally writes for children but, as his well-known tale War Horse demonstrates, his stories are loved by adults too.
The Mozart Question, a little hardback edition illustrated by Michael Foreman is one of my favourites. Paolo Levi, a world-famous violinist, grew up in Venice. Throughout his childhood his parents kept a dark secret. The violinist unfolds their story to a young reporter and, for the first time, reveals the answer to the Mozart Question he has never answered till now.
The sight of a small boy listening to a busker near the Accademia Bridge in Venice inspired the writer to develop his story. As the horrors of Auschwitz are revealed Mozart’s sublime music takes on a sombre tone. But in time it soars again to fly free. The violinist tells the reporter:
"At my fiftieth birthday concert in London I shall be playing Mozart, and I shall be playing it on Mama’s violin, and I shall play it so well that he will love it, they will all love it, wherever they are."
This story captures the atmosphere of Venice, one of my favourite cities, as much as others that have caught my attention over the years: The Wings of the Dove, Miss Garnett’s Angel, Don’t Look Now. It is a mysterious, compelling place that draws me back time and again.

The Snow Goose by Paul Gallico

It is not a story that falls easily into sequence.
For the sea has claimed its own and spreads its rippled blanket over the site, and the great white bird with the black-tipped pinions that saw it all from the beginning to the end has returned to the dark, frozen silences of the northlands whence it came.
The Snow Goose is a beautifully written, poignant tale set against the background of the Dunkirk invasion. Frith’s unspoken love for Rhayader, a lonely artist, the snow goose’s constant presence and the haunting landscape of the Essex coast all fuse together to make this story as memorable now as in 1941,when it surfaced.
Gallico’s spare, poetic writing evokes a desolate sadness of both time and space: the sense of place of a war-torn past.
Greys and blues and soft greens are the colours, for when the skies are dark in the long winters, the many waters of the beaches and marshes reflect the cold and sombre colour.

The Snow Goose gives me everything I need: a poignant story, a sense of place, beautiful descriptions and authentic characters drawn from the landscape. Less is more: forty pages to be read again and savoured with as much joy as when I first came across it in 1972.

Gigi by Colette

Last week I spent a day in Paris with a couple of American friends from Massachusetts. I had forgotten how easy it is to travel there on Eurostar and so much more convenient now trains leave from St. Pancras and are even faster. In the old days we had to take a taxi to Waterloo to catch an early train – now we rolled on to the Victoria line around 6 and caught the 6.55 train. Despite losing an hour we arrived at the Gare du Nord at 10.15. A short taxi ride later we were sitting at a café in Montmartre as the bells of Sacre-Coeur rang out for Ascension Day. I was seventeen when I first visited the Place du Tertre and little has changed – it still reminds me of a film set from Mistral’s Daughter! The rest of the day was swallowed up with lunch in the Boulevard Saint Germain, tea in the Champs Elysees and taking the hop-on/off bus tour from the Eiffel Tower to the Trocadero. How lovely Paris looks from an open top bus – usually I walk miles through all the arrondissements but I was able to savour the impressive architecture on a grand scale and all the pleached horse-chestnut trees bursting into blossom along every boulevard. And then we passed Maxim’s, the famous belle epoque restaurant and I was reminded of Colette’s novella, Gigi.
Written in 1944, it describes a young Parisian girl, Gilberte, being groomed for a career as a courtesan by her grandmother at the turn of the century. Gigi’s transformation from ingenue is charmingly portrayed with a light touch throughout as when, for example, wealthy, handsome Gaston Lachaille buys her dresses for her prepared launch into Parisian society as his new mistress.
The full sleeves and wide-flounced skirt of blue-and-white striped silk rustled deliciously, and Gilberte delighted in pecking at her sleeves to puff them out just below the shoulder.
He laughs, and says she reminds him of a performing monkey, admitting to preferring her in her old tartan dress. Gigi is reluctant to enter into her new role; she loves Gaston, an old family friend, too much to be cast aside when he becomes bored with her, as may inevitably happen, but as she comes to terms with her future position he asks for her hand in marriage. For the first time in his life he has truly fallen in love.
Gigi was made into a film in 1958 starring Maurice Chevalier, Louis Jourdan and Leslie Caron. My mother took me to see Gigi at the cinema and I fell in love with Cecil Beaton’s beautiful costumes, the elegance and ambience of Paris, the most romantic of cities. The city retains that charm for me, all seasons, all weathers. I long to return. And if you’ve been there many times before and seen all the monuments, museums and galleries one day could well be long enough to savour its charms again.

The simple flowers of our spring are what I want to see again…

How astonishing does the chance of leaving the world impress a sense of its natural beauties on us. Like poor Falstaff, though I do not 'babble', I think of green fields. I muse with the greatest affection of every flower I have known from my infancy - their shapes and colours are as new to me as if I had just created them with a superhuman fancy. It is because they are connected with the most thoughtless and happiest moments of our lives. I have seen foreign flowers in hothouses of the most beautiful nature, but I do not care a straw for them. The simplest flowers of our spring are what I want to see again.
John Keats: A letter to James Rice, 14 February 1820
A year later, in Rome, on February 23rd 1821, Keats died.

‘I would I had some flowers of the spring that might become your time of day’, said Perdita in The Winter’s Tale. On a country walk in mid-January we came across a bank of pale yellow primroses coming into flower that filled that dark drear day with the promise of spring: ‘bold oxlips’, 'violets dim' and ‘daffodils that come before the swallow dares and take the winds of March with beauty’.

(Originally published in The Hedgerow, February 2003)


It is nearly forty years since I visited Wentworth House, where Keats lived in Hampstead. And now I have seen Jane Campion’s stunning film, Bright Star, it is all coming back to me again: the tree where the nightingale sang that inspired Keats to write his famous ode, delicate Georgian chairs and the poet’s letters to his dearest love, Fanny Brawne who lived next door. The film is visually beautiful and yet restrained: bluebell woods, bare trees. Butterflies fluttering in an airless room recall Keats’ poignant words: I wish we were butterflies and could live but three summer days…
I have lived with his poems for many years: autumn and nightingales and La Belle Dame sans Merci, evocative of Pre-Raphaelite paintings I loved in my youth.
A few years ago I visited the house where Keats died at the foot of the Spanish Steps in Rome, stood in his bedroom, imagining the scene when he was bed-bound, haemorrhaging badly, longing for death.
Read Andrew Motion’s acclaimed biography and also his account of Sailing to Italy (published by Faber and Faber in Salt Water) undertaking the same voyage that Keats and his companion Severn took from Gravesend to live in a warmer climate for the winter months. Keats was dying of consumption. He recognised that first drop of blood he coughed as his ‘death warrant’. How little time was left.
The sedge is withered from the lake and no birds sing...
But when the warm weather comes I will go back to Hampstead and find that tree, sit on the grass and read those poems again in the company of the youth who took me there years before.

Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier

I think this novel is very underrated and brilliantly done. I reread it so much as a teenager I could have given a guided tour of Manderley and the Happy Valley scented with azaleas. I loved the descriptive early scenes in the library and morning room when a vase is broken and later, as tension mounts, when Mrs. Danvers shows the young bride Rebecca’s evening dresses in the west wing of the house. It made me want to visit more stately homes and places associated with Daphne Du Maurier in Cornwall. And so I did. Lots. I fell in love with Cornwall and old houses such was the influence of this book. I enjoyed Susan Hill’s sequel: Mrs. De Winter, especially a scene in a London hotel when Jack Favell shows up again. More shattered harmony. I’m so glad I bought this novel when it first came out in hardback in 1993. I can’t wait to read it again. There have been some good television adaptations of Rebecca but I like Hitchcock’s black and white film best. But not half as much as reading the novel.

A Summer Birdcage by Margaret Drabble

First published in 1963, this is a short, first novel about a girl coming home to attend her older sister’s wedding. I reread this lots when I was a teenager, identifying with Sarah in the shadow of an older sister and enjoying the glamorous descriptions of London. I loved the easy style in which the novel was written and eavesdropping on all the characters’ conversations. I knew I too wanted to learn Italian, visit Rome and have a friend like Simone. I loved the quote from Webster too: Tis like a summer birdcage in a garden: the birds that are without despair to get in, and the birds that are within despair and are in a consumption for fear they shall never get out.
And so, as it happens, I went on to study Webster, visit Rome and learn some Italian. And tried not to end up like Stella, Louise’s friend, who married Bill, ‘the physics man’, and lived in Streatham.
I’d forgotten how much I enjoyed Margaret Drabble’s early novels and how they must have subconsciously influenced me over the years.
Perhaps that is also why I like short novels. And rereading them.

Fugitive Pieces by Anne Michaels

Anne Michaels is a poet living in Toronto; her first novel, Fugitive Pieces, was published to great acclaim in 1997. I read the novel in one sitting. Like Sophie’s Choice by William Styron, I feared it might be too harrowing to read in instalments. And now I have read it again and again. It is one of the most powerful novels I have read in recent years: unbearably moving, compelling, beautifully written. I dip into exquisite passages that are painful, healing, tragic, uplifting: part prose, part poetry, that reel round in my head and must be re-read, savoured, like the chapter when the poet, Jakob Beer falls in love with the young Michaela. We too fear that she will reject him physically – he is too old and ugly – then share his wonderment as her returned love heals his severed emotions. He marvels at being ‘saved by such a small body’. Anne Michael’s sensual, tender prose is sheer mastery as she describes their fusion of body, mind and spirit. No wonder it took the author ten years to complete the novel.
Fast forward towards the end of the novel. Ben, a university teacher and researcher, explores the house Jacob and Michaela once shared on a Greek island. We engage with him, as intimate with those who lived there as he is with Jakob’s poetry. Anne Michaels’ attention to detail is totally absorbing and satisfying as she conveys the spirit of the place through Ben’s narration. He alludes to lines of Jakob’s poetry, describes objects left behind, even remarking on the impact his body had on the sofa or worn shoes left behind. I find myself affirming that one day I too must live ‘a life so achingly simple: days spent in thought and companionship’. Ben remarks, ‘You sat on this terrace at this table, and wrote as if every man lives this way’. Is this a wake-up call to follow our hearts and find fulfilment like Jakob, before we die?
Jacob Beer’s broken-ness and survival are a testament to the endurance of the spirit and the power of human love. His sudden death in a road accident fifty years after surviving the Holocaust reminded me of a survivor from Cambodia, ironically gunned down in Los Angeles years later. Reading Fugitive Pieces reinforced feelings that life is fragile, elusive, incredibly sad, complex, beautiful but above all, must be lived. Rarely does a first novel make this impact, but Anne Michaels is an extraordinary, accomplished writer. Read it and judge for yourself.

(Originally published in New Writer magazine)

Journey to the Sea edited by Sarah Brown published by Ebury Press

Journey to the Sea is an inspired collection of short stories and travel writing. Alexander McCall Smith’s Bangkok, Ruth Rendell’s South America and Joanne Harris’ Blackpool surface in an eclectic fusion of fact and new fiction from 22 writers. A definitive sense of place, from Long Island to the west coast of Scotland, allows the reader to experience ‘the sun, the wind, the waves’ of Andrew Motion’s introductory poem. Tracy Edwards and Robin Knox-Johnson recall their adventures and surfers express their passion riding the waves. I particularly liked Libby Purves’ bitter-sweet story, set at the local leisure centre, and Gervase Phinn’s charming story of a retiring school teacher inspired by a traveller pupil’s gift for creative writing. This is the discerning reader’s ideal ‘holiday read’, admirably suited to armchair adventurers as well. £1 from each copy will raise funds for PiggyBankKids/Special Olympics Great Britain.

(Originally published in The Good Book Guide)

Tulip Fever by Deborah Moggach

Suddenly, entering rooms familiar from paintings by Vermeer or Pieter de Hooch, you are transported back to 17th century Amsterdam, A young artist, Jan van Loos, is painting a portrait of wealthy Cornelius and his beautiful young wife, Sophia. The scene is set. Sophia’s betrayal and the reckless lovers’ speculation on tulip bulbs trigger their undoing and bring down others around them. Nothing is quite as it seems. Passion burns beyond seemingly restrained facades; disguise and intrigue lurk behind heavy drapes covering chequered floors and Delft tiles. Tension builds, fuelled by anxiety, secrecy and deception. ‘Mankind’s hopes are fragile and life is therefore also short’: words etched on a glass in the opening paragraph recall life’s transience. Take time to study the sixteen paintings reproduced within the pages of the novel. Note the intimate relationship between mistress and maid, tall houses by the canal, mysterious interiors: rooms within rooms, still-life compositions of peeled fruit, foreboding skulls and billowing striped tulips as fresh as if painted yesterday. Tulip Fever is a wonderful read.
(Originally part-published in Women’s Weekly)

As it is in Heaven by Niall Williams

I enjoy contemporary Irish writing, from William Trevor’s beautifully crafted stories to John O’Donohue’s exquisite prose, so it came as no surprise that I should be drawn to novels by Niall Williams. I first discovered his writing in a bookshop in Cork a few years ago: a biographical tale O Come Ye Back to Ireland that related leaving New York for a tumbledown cottage in Co. Clare. Forget Toujours Provence, Under the Tuscan Sun et al, this was Ireland, unfashionable, unhurried, wet. Wonderful.

As it is in Heaven reflects the rugged landscapes, pewter skies and mercurial spirits to be found there. Stephen Griffin is a solitary, introverted schoolteacher, living with his retired father. Their lives have been shadowed by the tragic loss of Stephen’s mother and sister in a road accident. Stephen struggles on, until his life is transformed by meeting a beautiful Italian violinist. Lured by the memory of Vivaldi, he retraces her steps to Venice in an attempt to find her again. As it is in Heaven is a book about love in all its aspects. Unspoken tender loyalty between father and son balances the tempestuous passion that overturns Stephen’s life. It is a beautiful fable, at times unbearably sad and moving, at others joyous and vibrant. It explores the joy and pain of love and loss, conveying a sense of healing and well-being to the reader. As it is in Heaven is enchanting.
(Originally published in Books and Company, edited by Susan Hill)