"Japanese Fairy Tales" by Yei Theodora Ozaki

 A fascination anthology of Japanese Fairy Tales collected and translated in 1903 by the child of a Japanese father and an English mother, with illustrations by a Japanese artist Kazuko Fujiyama. 

They have a typically fairy-tale narration, the simple 'this happened and then that happened' lending credence to the otherwise unbelievable happenings. As with Western fairy-tales a la Grimm, there are cruelties and horrors: per dogs are slaughtered, people killed without any sense that this might be any more than a personal tragedy. I was, however, a little surprised when, in 'The Happy Hunter and the Skilful Fisher' the hunter tries fishing and loses his brother's fish-hook and has to go down to the undersea palace of the Dragon King (who rules underwater) and the fish is found embedded in the throat of the red bream who is held responsible for stealing the hook and only escapes punishment because of how much he has already suffered with the hook inside him. There is no suggestion that the Dragon King might protect his subjects against the evil humans who are snatching them from the sea to be eaten!

There are some themes and motifs. Kintaro, the Golden boy, grows up alone in the wilds, a sort of cross between Tarzan and Dr Doolittle. Under the orders of her stepmother, a princess is taken out into the wilds by a servant to be abandoned (but he takes pity on her) just like Snow White and her male predecessors such as Oedipus. There is another princess who is to be the prize of a competition between suitors. Clearly folklore themes are universal expressions of the human condition.

But the context of emperors from the mythological age and samurai and dragons etc is all great fun. and lends the feeling that you are reading these tales for the first time.

Entertaining and interesting. With notes and a biographical sketch of the anthologist.

January 2026; 226 pages

First published as The Japanese Fairy book  in 1903

My paperback edition was issued by Renard Press in 2025.

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"This is Happiness" by Niall Williams

 

• “I came to understand him to mean you could stop at, not all, but most of the moments of your life, stop for one heartbeat and, no matter what the state of your head or heart, say This is happiness, because of the simple truth that you were alive to say it.” (Ch 33)

The narrator, Noe, is seventeen and has just dropped out of training to be a priest. He goes to stay with his grandparents in Faha, a remote corner of rural Ireland where there has been more or less constant rain for years. But when Christy [is that a significant name?], one of the men who will bring electricity to the parish,arrives to lodge in the house the rain stops. 

It is told by the narrator as an old man - “Bear with me a while; grandfathers have few privileges and the knowledge of your own redundancy has a keen tooth.” (Ch 2) in the first person and the past tense.

This story is peopled with eccentrics who nevertheless seem flesh and blood; even the non-speaking walk-on parts are built into reality: 

• “Sam Cregg, whose clock ran slow, in fact and metaphor.” (Ch 2)
• “Father Coffey, the curate, was ... pale and thin as a Communion wafer, he was addicted to the Wilkinson Sword and shaved to the blood vessels.” (Ch 2)
• “Father Walsh ... had the pink, unmade lips of a baby, but the ice-blood of the county coroner.” (Ch 3)
• “My father ... had ... short dense eyebrows like dashes of Morse that lent him a look indecipherable. Your father is a mystery it takes your whole life to unravel.” (Ch 3)
• “Ganga had the large ears that God puts on old men as evidence of the humour necessary for creation.” (Ch 3)
• “There was nothing of the lamb in Mother Acquin. She could have been second choice to command the Allied Forces.” (Ch 4)
• “He was deep-wrinkled, like a chamois.” (Ch 6)
• “Salty was an intelligent customer; by Aristotelian and Jesuitical reasoning he had ascertained that though Lent was prescribed as forty days and nights, the true measure between Ash Wednesday and Easter Sunday was forty-six, which showed Our Lord wanted human beings to have wriggle room.” (Ch 10)

The story is told in prose of stunning beauty and intelligence. There's lots of humour too, and some moments to make you think. A remarkable book from a magnificent writer.

Selected quotes:

• “Rain there on the western sea board was a condition of living. It came straight-down and sideways, frontwards, backwards and any other wards God could think of. It came in sweeps, in waves, sometimes in veils. It came dressed as drizzle, as mizzle, as mist, as showers, frequent and widespread, as a wet fog, as a damp day, a drop, a draping, and an out-and-out downpour.” (Ch 2)
• “The known world was not so circumscribed then nor knowledge equated with facts. The story was a kind of human binding. I can't explain it any better than that.” (Ch 2)
• “Saint Anthony has often found my glasses, wallet and keys. Why he keeps taking them in the first place, harder to say.” (Ch 3)
• “My principles have a small p. That way I can keep on loving my fellow man.” (Ch 3)
• “When the spun cotton of cobwebs began to enshroud the upper rafters, there was a sense that all the fiveish rooms were longing for the river just a field away.” (Ch 4
• “Along the hem of both trouser legs were brown exclamations of dirt thrown up from traveling a puddled road.” (Ch 6)
• “Swimming was achieved by a sort of head-up back-and-over tossing accompanied by wild arm and leg thrashing in the belief that you could outrun drowning if you thrashed fast enough.” (Ch 7)
• “I noticed that he was a citog, and there were few enough of them then, left-handedness having been almost entirely purged by Sisters, Brothers and Masters who were all of one conviction: the world spun right-handed off the fingers of God.” (Ch 9)
• “Cravens had glasses ... but customers preferred bottles, and sat along the wall silently sucking, at bladder-intervals staggering out the back door where, licensed by nature, they urinated loose loops in the general direction of the river.” (Ch 10)
• “We played ... in the slur of the river-sounds until night fell. We played after that too, shadow-bats like fragments of dark dipping and swooping, and all but the company become insubstantial.” (Ch 12)
• “The phrase on her way out hung there and the image of a doorway through which Mrs O Dea was to pass was carpentered into reality.” (Ch 12)
• “I sat in the kitchen. The front door open, a ladder of sunlight footed on the threshold, a hectic of birdsong.” (Ch 13)
• “He was a boy with heart blown open in the amaze of the world and the largeness of his own feelings.” (Ch 14)
• “He walked this line between the comic and the poignant, between the certainly doomed and the hopelessly hopeful. In time I came to think it the common ground of all humanity.” (Ch 15)
• “Thank God for small mercies, large mercies being unknown in Faha.” (Ch 18)
• “She would put her hands to her mouth to hold in what couldn't be said.” (Ch 23)
• “I let that statement stand there, bald and barrel-chested, its feet planted and thumbs tucked in the lining of its waistcoat” (Ch 24)
• “We were near the top of the hill, one of the Kilkenny girls sailing a white sheet up and over the line, a grace note not lost to me in its simplicity and beauty.” (Ch 24)
• “Once he got going, my grandfather's way of telling the story was to go pell-mell, throwing Aristotle's unity of action, place and time into the air and in a tumult let the details tumble down the stairs of his brain and out his mouth.” (Ch 26)
• “He had grown up in an age when storytelling was founded on the forthright principles of passing the time and dissolving the hours of dark.” (Ch 26)
• “She didn't oil for reasons too deep to be fished.” (Ch 26)
• “The parentheses occurred at the corners of her lips again.” (Ch 31)
• “When I looked at Christy I saw the sorrow in his happiness had made shine his eyes.” (Ch 33)
• “Cycling home from Looney’s you’d have a hundred tunes and not a small bath of liquid in you, with consequent chaos of feeling and thought. The code we had evolved was to concentrate on the cycling part, avoid discourse, and that way stay between the margins of the ditches.” (Ch 36)
• “That playing tonight, it was as pure as a bishop's rectum.” (Ch 36)
• “Sin has no opening or closing hours, was Father Coffey’s chilling dictum. To have any chance of a fair fight, neither should the mother church.” (Ch 38)
• “I was frightened ... when the pain outmanoeuvred the roadblocks of pills and it was two hours before she was due the reinforcements.” (Ch 40)
• “The more the musicians played the more it struck me that Irish music was a language of its own, accommodating expression of ecstasy and rapture and lightness and fun as well as sadness and darkness and loss, and that in its rhythms and repetitions was the trace history of humanity thereabouts, going round and round.” (Ch 43)
• “If he had the robe he could have played the Messiah.” (Ch 44)

December 2025; 380 pages

First published by Bloomsbury in 2019

My paperback edition issued in 2020

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

Also written by Niall Williams:

• Four Letters Of Love (1997)
• Named Notable Book of the Year in The New York Times Book Review
• As It Is In Heaven (1999)
• Shortlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award
• Shortlisted for the Irish Times Literature Prize
• The Way You Look Tonight (2000)
• The Fall of Light (2001)
• Longlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award
• Only Say the Word (2005)
• The Unrequited (2006) (novella)
• Boy in the World (2007) (YA novel)
• Boy and Man (2008) (YA novel)
• John: A Novel (2008)
• History of the Rain (2015)
• Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize
• This Is Happiness (2019)
• Listed in Washington Post's Best Books of the Year
• Shortlisted for the An Post Irish Book Awards Best Book of the Year
• The Unrequited (2021) (novella)
• Time of the Child (2024)
• Also set in Faha

"Bones and Silence" by Reginald Hill

This novel received the Gold Dagger Award in 1990 and was nominated for an Edgar Award.

Andy Dalziel is a fat, superintendent of police in a Yorkshire town; he is a heavy drinker. Peter Pascoe his Chief Inspector is a university educated thoughtful copper. There is both tension and respect between these two. Other major characters are the gay Sergeant Wield and heartthrob Constable Seymour. Outside the policemen are Ellie, Pascoe's wife, Mrs Horncastle, unhappily married wife of a rather narrow Canon and theatre director gorgeous Chung.

Dalziel witnesses a murder and arrests the man holding the gun, a local builder called Swain. But Swain pleads it was an accident. He is also receiving anonymous letters from someone who wants to kill themselves and has chosen him as a confidante. Meantime, Chung is producing a cycle of Mystery Plays and wants Dalziel to play God.

These parallel mysteries intrigue. The investigation is told from the PoV of the four detectives. It is a classic murder mystery from the days before DNA evidence.

But what I really loved about this book was the writing, which is heavily allusive and can be very funny. In some ways, it is like(and at the same time utterly unlike in voice) Chandler (eg in The Big Sleep), with some wonderful lines which lift simple detective fiction to another level.

Selected quotes:

• “Every amateur thespian in the area started sending press cuttings ... Aged Jack Points, stripling King Lears, Lady Macbeths of the Dales, infant prodigies, Freds ‘n’ Gingers, Olivier lookalikes, Gielgud soundalikes, Monroo mouealikes, Streep stripalikes, the good, the bad, and the unbelievable were ready to stride and strut, fume and fret, leap and lounge, mouth and mumble, emote and expire.” (1.1)
• “It was like a trainee para opting for ground crew after he'd stepped out of the plane.” (1.1)
• “Next time I feel in need of an untroubled and untroubling confidant, I'll ring the Speaking Clock!” (2. Intro)
• “Time’s the great enemy. You look back and you can just about see the last time you were happy. And you look ahead and you can't even imagine the next time.” (2. Intro)
• “Wield had the kind of face which must have thronged the eastern gate of Paradise after the eviction.” (2.1)
• “The oldest of the city's hospitals, it had been built in the days when visitors were regarded as a nuisance even greater than patients and had to prove their fitness by walking a couple of furlongs before they reached the entrance.” (2.2)
• “Devil detection begins at the feet, and those zodiac-printed moccasins with leather thongs biting into golden calves each separately sufficient to seduce a Chosen People, were a dead giveaway.” (2.3)
• “The bishop was said to respect his views highly, which her interpreter assured her was Anglican for being shit-scared of him.” (2.3)
• “Dalziel ... was notorious for his distrust of any form of intelligence that couldn't sup ale.” (2.4)
• “With the mingled relief and bafflement of a supplicant leaving the sibyl’s cave.” (2.6)
• “A bit of roughage is cheaper than a bit of rough. Paul's Epistle to the Aberdonians.” (4.2)
• “Resources were ... allocated not on the basis of argued priorities but by gentle vibrations sent out across a web of owed favours, or if that failed, by a not so gentle rattling of cupboarded skeletons.” (4.9)
• “Isn't the image most people have of God precisely that of a big fat copper who will put everything right?” (5.2)
• “He sipped his coffee which occupied the grey area between emetic and enuretic.” (6.5)
• “She was gorgeously angry and using a joke to keep it under control.” (6.5)
• “Clever buggers didn't play clever buggers with other clever buggers.” (7.2)
• “Leave assumption to the Virgin Mary.” (7.2)
• “This was Gotterdammerung, this was old Saturn in his branch-charmed forest acknowledging that the time of the Titans was past.” (7.2)
• “It was ... an attempt at comfort on a par with assuring Mrs Lincoln she'd have hated the rest of the show.” (7.2)

Thank you to Steve Flook for gifting me this book. Now I'll have to read the rest of the series!

December 2025; 524 pages

First published by Grafton in 1991

My paperback edition was issued in 2003

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

Dalziell and Pascoe books in order:

• A Clubbable Woman (1970)
• An Advancement of Learning (1971)
• Ruling Passion (1973)
• An April Shroud (1975)
• A Pinch of Snuff (1978)
• A Killing Kindness (1980)
• Deadheads (1983)
• Exit Lines (1984)
• Child's Play (1987)
• Underworld (1988)
• Bones and Silence (1990)
• One Small Step (1990), novella
• Recalled to Life (1992)
• Pictures of Perfection (1994)
• The Wood Beyond (1995)
• Asking for the Moon (1996), short stories
• "The Last National Service Man"
• "Pascoe's Ghost"
• "Dalziel's Ghost"
• "One Small Step"
• On Beulah Height (1998)
• Arms and the Women (1999)
• Dialogues of the Dead (2002)
• Death's Jest-Book (2003)
• Good Morning, Midnight (2004)
• The Death of Dalziel (2007), (Canada and US Title: Death Comes for the Fat Man)
• A Cure for All Diseases (Canada and US title: The Price of Butcher's Meat) (2008) Shortlisted for Theakston's Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year Award 2009.
• Midnight Fugue (2009)

Also by Reginald Hill: Joe Sixsmith (Luton PI) books in order:

• Blood Sympathy (1993)
• Born Guilty (1995)
• Killing the Lawyers (1997)
• Singing the Sadness (1999)
• The Roar of the Butterflies (2008)

"Fyneshade" by Kate Griffin

 Conceived as the prequel to The Turn of the Screw by Henry James, Fyneshade is an interesting hybrid of Victorian Gothic and Fantasy. But whereas TTotS is a masterwork of ambiguity, in which generations of readers have debated to what extent the narrator is reliable, and whether there are ghosts or not, Fyneshade embraces certainty. We know from the start that the governess is a bad 'un who can do haematomancy and make poisonous potions. As for the wicked heir to the estate, a stud straight from regency bonkbusters, from his first appearance I was in no doubt that he would double-cross her. 

If you like a straightforward story with secret passages, a child with special needs, the hint of ghosts and some tasteful sex, this might be the book for you. But I like three-dimensional characters in whom I can believe and, for me,he only character who had the least degree of complexity was the housekeeper. 

Some great descriptions.

Selected quotes:

• “Occasionally, when we juddered over a furrow in the road, the trunk bumped hard against the wood behind my head. My old life knocking.” (Ch 2)
• “Snow had fallen throughout the night. Flurries still danced in the air like feathers plucked from a goose.” (Ch 5)
• “Snow continued to fall throughout my first week at Fyneshade. Sometimes it came in blizzards that blanked the view from the windows and stained the daylight green; at other times tiny flakes fluttered and danced beyond the glass. When the snow came lightly, the pale landscape sharpened to something resembling an engraving.” (Ch 7)
• “The nursemaid was almost mute in my company but she tumbled like a fountain when it came to discussing her charge with the housekeeper.” (Ch 10)
• “Rain tapped on the glass like the fingers of an exasperated schoolmaster.” (Ch 16)

December 2025; 363 pages

First published in 2023 by Viper

My paperback edition issued in 2024

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"In Chancery" by John Galsworthy

This sequel to The Man of Property (and the Interlude called The Indian Summer of a Forsyte) is set during the Boer War and contrasts the difficulties of Soames and his sister Winifred as they try to divorce their partners (hence the title, the Court of Chancery was where family and matrimonial disputes were settled). Winifred's husband Monty Dartie is a cad and a bounder who always has to borrow money from his father-in-law to pay gambling debts but Winifred has finally had too much when he runs off to South America with her pearls and a dancer. But the difficulties of the divorce laws of the time mean that she must either prove adultery or plead for him to return to her which, if he doesn't within a certain time, will lead to divorce on the grounds of desertion. 

Meanwhile Soames has lived apart from his wife Irene for more than twelve years (she has an independent income thanks to a bequest from Old Jolyon) so her admitted adultery with Bossiney is not too old to be grounds for his divorce; he decides to set a private investigator onto her. Meanwhile Val Dartie, Monty's son, and his cousin Holly, Young Jolyon's daughter, fall for one another and when Holly's brother Jolly finds out he dares Val to enlist with him as a volunteer to fight the Boers.

In this book, Soames progresses from a villain to a tragic figure, a plaything of the gods, as Young Jolyon foresees: “Was there anything, indeed, more tragic in the world than a man enslaved by his own possessive instinct, who couldn't see the sky for it, or even enter fully into what another person felt!” (1.12) Soames wants a son in order to leave his property to. Meanwhile his father James is going senile and is fretting about having no grandson to carry on the Forsyte name.

This book is followed by an Interlude called 'Awakening' and then by the third novel in the sequence: To Let.

It's a fascinating slice of social history. Galsworthy was a scion of the class that he scrutinises and this enabled him to be forensic about his attack on the Forsyte values whilst still recognising that not all Forsytes are the same and empathising with those who are trapped by their upbringing. Galsworthy won the  Nobel Prize in 1932 "for his distinguished art of narration which takes its highest form in The Forsyte Saga". This is the saga's first installment.

Selected quotes:

• “People have a right to their own bodies, even when they're dead.” (1.1)
• “Nicholas ... had, of course, never really forgiven the Married Women's Property Act, which would so have interfered with him if he had not mercifully married before it was passed.” (1.1)
• “A student of statistics must have noticed that the birth rate had varied in accordance with the rate of interest for your money.” (1.1)
• “Placing the revolver against his chest, Dartie had pulled the trigger several times. It was not loaded.” (1.2)
• The London mob celebrates the news of the Relief of Mafeking and Soames feels intimidated: “This, then, was the populace, the innumerable living negation of gentility and Forsyteism. This was - egad - Democracy! it stank, yelled, was hideous!... In 1900, Soames, with his Forsyte thousands, had never seen the cauldron with the lid off; and now looking into it could hardly believe his scorching eyes.” Looking at houses, he reassures himself. “After all, we're the backbone of the country. They won't upset us easily. Possession’s nine points of the law.” (1.14)
• “Aunt Juley was sure that dear Val was very clever. ‘I always remember,’ she added, ‘how he gave his bad penny to a beggar’.” (2.11)

Notes:
In chapter 1.10, Young Jolyon returns home and is greeted by the old dog, Balthasar, in a scene nicked straight from Homer's Odyssey.

In 2.2, Galsworthy tells us that the word “attractive” is “just coming into fashion”

December 2025; 210 pages

This Novel was originally published in 1920, sixteen years after The Man of Property. 

My paperback edition was issued in an omnibus together with The Man of Property, To Let and the Interludes 'The Indian Summer of a Forsyte' and 'Awakening', in 2012 by Wordsworth Editions

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

The Forsyte saga in total is made up of nine novels and several interludes. In narrative order (dates published in brackets) they are:

• The Man of Property (1906)
• Interlude: The Indian Summer of a Forsyte (1918)
• In Chancery (1920)
• Interlude: Awakening (1920)
• To Let (1921)
• The White Monkey (1924)
• Interlude: A Silent Wooing (1927)
• The Silver Spoon (1926)
• Interlude: Passers-By (1927)
• Swan Song (1928)
• Maid-in-Waiting
• Flowering Wilderness
• Over the River (aka One More River)

There was also a prequel: On Forsyte 'Change, a collection of short stories

"The Man of Property" by John Galsworthy

John Galsworthy won the Nobel Prize in 1932 "for his distinguished art of narration which takes its highest form in The Forsyte Saga". This is the saga's first installment.

The book opens with the Forsyte family assembled at Timothy's; they have gathered to meet June's new fiancee, penniless architect Philip Bossiney. Noticeable by his absence is June's father Young Jolyon who has been ostracised for leaving June's mother and running off with June's governess. Soames, who is experiencing marital difficulties with his distant wife, the incredibly beautiful Irene, June's best friend in the family, decides to have a country house built at Robin Hill near Kingston-Upon-Thames and employs Bossiney for the purpose.

Old Jolyon, June's grandfather, who has brought her up, is feeling lonely so he decides to visit his son, Young Jolyon , and is charmed by his other grandchildren: Jolly and Holly.

But Irene and Bossiney have fallen in love. So reconciliation on one level is matched by family discord on another. The plot unfolds to its inevitable, if surprising, conclusion.

It is, essentially, a critique of the English Victorian upper-middle-class. As with Galsworthy's stand-alone novel The Patrician, it isn't always easy to tell where the author stands. These people tend to look on life with a commercial eye, seeking profit from their relationships as opposed to love, so the unregulated love of Irene and Bossiney (both of them, note, outsiders rather than born into the clan) is hugely disruptive. Galsworthy condemns this money-based view of values as Forsyteism, extending the family to a whole section of society. And yet there are sympathetically-drawn Forsytes, such as Old Jolyon (modelled on the author's father) and black sheep Young Jolyon. This is the critique of an insider and the condemnation is balanced with empathy, making it so much more interesting than the black-and-white morality of the recent TV series. Even Soames, cast in the role of villain and capable of black deeds, is fundamentally portrayed as a tragic figure.

Characters: A partial family tree

Jolyon (1770m - 1850) 'Superior Dosset' Forsyte was a housebuilder, property developer and landlord. He had ten children:

• Ann, the eldest, is an old maid
• Old Jolyon made a fortune in tea. 
• Young Jolyon, 'Jo', his son, is in disgrace for having run off with his daughter's governess, leaving his wife. He becomes a 'name' in Lloyds and a watercolour artist living modestly in St Johns Wood (now a hugely desirable London address). Once his wife has died, he married the governess.
• June is Young Jolyon's daughter from his first marriage. She in engaged to Philip Bossiney, a down at heel up-and-coming architect
• Jolly is Young Jolyon's son by his second marriage
• Holly is Young Jolyon's daughter by his second marriage.
• James, who married Emily, was a solicitor. He has four children:
• Soames is the son of James and Emily. He too is a solicitor. He is married to Irene, the daughter of Professor Heron.
• Winifred is the daughter of James and Emily. She is married to Monty Dartie.
• Val Dartie is their son
• Imogen Dartie is their eldest daughter
• Maud
• Benedict
• Rachel
• Cicely
• Swithin, twin brother to James, was a flamboyant bachelor.
• Roger is a landlord. He has five children:
• Young Roger 
• George, a caustic wit
• Francie, an atheist
• Eustace
• Thomas
• Julia (Juley) married Septimus Small but he swiftly died and she lived her widowhood in Timothy's house; she is notoriously indiscreet.
• Hester is an old maid.
• Nicholas is the wealthiest Forsyte and fathers the largest brood of his own.
• Young Nicholas
• Very Young Nicholas, a barrister
• Blanche
• Christopher
• Violet
• Gladys
• Patricia
• Ernest
• Archibald
• Marian 
• Florence
• Euphemia
• Timothy, unmarried, was a publisher of religious books but then sold out and invested his money in 3% Consols. By saving and reinvesting he has since doubled his fortune. Regular meetings of the clan are held at his house, where gossip is exchanged, but Timothy rarely leaves his bed to attend.
• Susan, the youngest, is married. She has five children:
• St John Hayman
• Augustus Hayman
• Annabel
• Giles and Jesse who are together known as 'the Dromios', presumably because they are identical twins.

The title comes from the nickname that Old Jolyon gives Soames. Soames himself sees everything as property, including his wife:  “Could a man own anything prettier than this dining-table ... Could a man own anything prettier than the woman who sat at it? ... Out of his other property, out of all the things he had collected, his silver, his pictures, his houses, his investments, he got a secret and intimate feeling; out of her he got none. ... He had married this woman, conquered her, made her his own, and it seemed to him contrary to the most fundamental of all laws, the law of possession, that he could do no more than own her body.” (1.5) But fundamentally the epithet could be applied to almost any of the Forsytes. 

The Dickensian influence is manifest, although some of Galsworthy's main characters are more complex than the caricatures of Dickens . Old Jolyon's scruples are undermined by his affection for young children; June is able to forgive her betrayal by her best friend. But Irene, in the role of Helen of Troy, is as bloodless as any Dickensian young women and Bossiney (Paris?) is little more than a cipher. The plot has a tendency to veer into melodrama: love is almost inevitably counterpointed by death as in an opera. 

Fundamentally, however, this grandparent of family sagas is an enjoyable read.

Selected quotes:

• “He could take nothing for dinner but a partridge, with an imperial pint of champagne ...” (1.9)
• “In the security bred of many harmless marriages, it had been forgotten that Love is no hothouse flower, but a wild plant, born of a wet night, born of an hour of sunshine; sprung from wild seed, blown along the road by a wild wind. A wild plant that, when it blooms by chance within the hedge of our gardens, we call a flower, and when it blooms outside we call a weed; but, flower or weed, whose scent and colour are always wild!” (2.4)
• “As every Forsyte knows, rubbish that sells is not rubbish at all - far from it.” (2.7)
• “The pale flame singes men's wings whether they will or no.” (2.12)
• “He still hankered in quiet City moments after the tasty fleshpots of his earlier days. Here you were served by hairy English waiters in aprons; there was sawdust on the floor, and three round gilt looking glasses hung just above the line of sight. They had only recently done away with cubicles too, in which you could have your chop, prime chump, with a floury potato, without seeing your neighbours, like a gentleman.” (2.13)

December 2025; 245 pages

The book was first published in 1906.

My paperback edition was issued as an omnibus with the subsequent novels 'In Chancery' and 'To Let', together with short interludes 'Indian Summer of a Forsyte' and 'Awakening' , in 2012.

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

The Forsyte saga in total is made up of nine novels and several interludes. In narrative order (dates published in brackets) they are:

• The Man of Property (1906)
• Interlude: The Indian Summer of a Forsyte (1918)
• In Chancery (1920)
• Interlude: Awakening (1920)
• To Let (1921)
• The White Monkey (1924)
• Interlude: A Silent Wooing (1927)
• The Silver Spoon (1926)
• Interlude: Passers-By (1927)
• Swan Song (1928)
• Maid-in-Waiting 
• Flowering Wilderness
• Over the River (aka One More River)

There was also a prequel: On Forsyte 'Change, a collection of short stories

"The Paper Men" by William Golding

 Hunted by an American academic who wants to be given access to his papers as his official biographer, best-selling author Wilfred Barclay  - aware of secrets in his past which he very much does NOT want to be unearthed - flees across Europe from one hotel bar to another in an alcoholic delirium. 

It was quite funny for a while but, like Wilf, the alcoholism seemed to destroy its structure. In the end I was disappointed. I found it slightly tedious. Perhaps there are too many books about old, curmudgeonly, drink-sodden novelists. It was written after he was awarded the Nobel Prize. It has a neat ending.

Selected quotes:

• “I had the loaded gun in one hand, my torch in the other and no third hand for my trousers which now fell suddenly under my dressing-gown so that I only just caught them by clapping my knees together. It was, perhaps, no situation from which to face the charging badger.” (Ch 1)
• “The question to be asked when reading one book is, what other books does it come from?” (Ch 2)
• “My ageing heart missed a beat and syncopated a few others.” (Ch 3)
• “Marvelous views don't get writers or painters going. they just give them excuse for doing nothing. ... What a writer needs is a brick wall.” (Ch 3)
• “I could see a file of Austrian, German, Swiss walkers going the other way, that is, back to the rack railway ... giving an impression of a set of figures going to be put back in their box.” (Ch 7)

December 2025; 191 pages

First published by Faber & Faber in 1984

My paperback edition issued in 1985

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"The Killings at Kingfisher Hill" by Sophie Hannah

 On a motor coach to Kingfisher Hill, one woman is scared that she will be murdered if she sits in a certain seat; another woman confesses to Hercule Poirot that she has committed a murder. The story is narrated by Scotland Yard Inspector Edward Catchpool who, with his friend Poirot, is heading to a family home where another murder has been committed by a woman presently under sentence of hanging; they are to discover whether a miscarriage of justice is about to take place. Of course all the murders are linked and of course Poirot reveals the convoluted solution to the assembled guests at the end of the novel.

Selected quotes:

• “It was the sort of winter day that is light-starved at dawn and remains so deprived for its duration.” (Ch 1)
• “Her features had all the same look to them: as if someone had stopped short of adding the final touches that would have given her a more conventional visual appeal.” (Ch 1)
• “She was one of those women who put plates loaded with all sorts of baked treats in front of you and then cajoles until all present have eaten enough to rupture their stomachs.” (Ch 8)
• “Romeo and Juliet. ... I had studied it at school and its lessons had stayed with me: pursue your romantic urges with no thoughts for what society will allow and there is a good chance that you will end up in a disadvantageous situation.” (Ch 8)
• “The strangest thing about being inside a prison is that one expects to meet evil face to face ... What one encounters instead ... is hopelessness and regret: the traces of stale betrayals, tempers fatally lost and horrible compromises in impossible situations.” (Ch 9)

December 2025; 335 pages
First published by HarperCollins in 2020

My paperback edition issued in 2021

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

Sophie Hannah has had the blessing of the Agatha Christie estate to write this novel as part of this series:

• The Monogram Murders (2014)
• Closed Casket (2016)
• The Mystery of Three Quarters (2018)
• The Killings at Kingfisher Hill (2020)
• Hercule Poirot's Silent Night (2023)
• The Last Death of the Year (2025)

"Beware of Pity" by Stefan Zweig

There is a frame story in which an author meets a young man who has served with distinction during the First World War and become a war hero ... and who then explains why he isn't heroic. 

The main narrative is then told, conversationally, in one long monologue, unchaptered, with some repetition (although it is too polished for real speech). In this way it reminded me enormously of The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford, although that conversation is more of a meandering ramble and this is chronologically and narratively straightforward, although there are one or two excursions into sub-stories that add little to the main narrative.

Fundamentally, the triggering incident is when a young army officer, sexually naive, socially innocent, makes a faux pas. And the consequences follow like a line of dominoes, each triggering the next with the inevitability of fate. It's like watching a car crash happening in slow motion and it is mesmerising. I certainly wanted to turn the pages and discover what would happen, even though I was sure what the outcome must be. And I was wrong! The ending was exactly as Aristotle recommends in his Poetics (6.1) when he says that a twist should causes astonishment yet nevertheless have, in retrospect, a causal connection the the plot, like the denouement of a good murder mystery.

The major theme of the book is set out when the young army officer reads The Thousand and One Nights: “I read the opening story about Scheherezade and the Sultan ... I had come to the strange story of the young man who meets a lame old cripple on the road ... In the story, the cripple calls out desperately to the youth, complains he can't walk and asks if the young men will let him sit on his shoulders and carry him for a while. The young man is sorry for him ... he helpfully bends down and takes the old man on his shoulders. However, the apparently helpless old man is a djinn, a wicked magician, and as soon as he is on the young man's shoulders, he suddenly winds his bare, hairy legs around his benefactor’s throat and cannot be thrown off. Mercilessly, he rides the helpful, sympathetic lad as if he were a horse, whipping him on without mercy or consideration, allowing him no rest. And the unfortunate youth has ... to go on and on, the victim of his own pity, carrying the wicked, cunning old man on his back.” (pp 250 - 251) Beware of Pity, indeed.

The second major theme is that of unrequited love ... but from the point of view of the love object. What responsibility does he have to respond to the love?

Selected quotes: I had to give page numbers because it was unchaptered. 

There are some tremendous descriptive passages of which my favourite are of a full moon and of a storm:

• “A huge full moon stood overhead, a shining, polished silver disc in the middle of the starlit sky ... a magical winter seemed to have descended on the world in that dazzling moonlight. The grave looked white as freshly fallen snow ... and the trees themselves seem to be holding their breath, standing now in the light and now in the dark, like alternating mahogany and glass. I cannot remember ever feeling moonshine is haunting as here in the total peace and stillness of the garden, drenched in the icy light of the moon, and the spell it cast was so deceptive that we instinctively hesitated to set foot on the shining steps as if they were slippery glass.” (p 135)
• “Shop signs were rattling and banging, as if woken in alarm by a bad dream, doors slammed, the cowls of chimney pots creaked ... the few late passers by hurried from one street corner to the next as if blown on a wind of fear ... the Illuminated town-hall clock gaped at the unaccustomed void with a foolish white gaze.” (pp 206 - 207)

Other quotes:

• “The conversation was drowsy, and as slow as the smoke from a cigarette burning down.” (p 36)
• “She has eyes like coffee beans, and indeed when she laughs it's with a softly sizzling sound like coffee beans roasting.” (p 43)
• “Theoretical, imagined suffering is not what distresses a man and destroys his peace of mind. Only what you have seen with pitying eyes can really shake you.” (p 72)
• “All that I myself expected and wanted of life was to do my duty properly and not incur disapproval.” (p 80)
• “Just as our excellent military band, in spite of its rhythmical verve, played nothing but music for brass - hard, cold, down to earth, intent on nothing but keeping time, lacking the tender and sensuous tone of stringed instruments - so even our most cordial regimental occasions had none of that muted fluidity that the presence or even the mere proximity of women adds to any social gathering.” (p 83)
• “In the same way as there is an ineradicable awkwardness between a creditor and a debtor, because one inevitably gives and the other takes, a sick person always nurtures a secret irritability and is ready to flare up at any visible sign of concern.” (pp 85 - 86)
• “In general a long illness wears out not just the invalid but the sympathy of others.” (p 86)
• “Our whole world, street by street and room by room, is fill of sad stories, is always flooded with terrible misery.” (p 88)
• “This creative magic of pity.” (p 89)
• “We often accuse him of suffering from chronic quotationitis.” (p 92)
• “We always fall hopelessly prey to the delusion that nature endows the particularly gifted with a particularly striking appearance.” (p 125)
• “Pity, like morphine, does the sick good only at first. It is a means of helping them to feel better, but if you don't get the dose right and know where to stop it becomes a murderous poison.” (p 241)
• “At the age of twenty-five I had never entertained any idea that women who were sick, disabled, immature, old, outcast, marked out from other women by fate would dare to love.” (p 276)
• “Only at that moment did I faintly begin to understand ... that the outcasts, the ugly, the faded and afflicted, the social misfits desire with a much more passionate and dangerous longing than those who are happy and healthy, that they love with a dark, fanatical, black love, and no passion on earth is felt more greedily and desperately than by those of God's stepchildren who have no hope, but feel that their earthly existence can be justified only by loving and being loved.” (p 277)
• “Pity is far too lukewarm a feeling, an emotion to be felt between a brother and sister, a poor imitation of real love.” (p 278)
• “Every form love takes, even the most ridiculous and absurd, involves the life of another human being.” (p 287)
• “A lame creature, a cripple has no right to love ... someone like me has no right to love anyone, and certainly none at all to be loved. She ought to crawl away into a corner and die, not upset other people's lives with her presence.” (p 293)
• “As you hear bells ringing in church towers when you are drowsy.” (p 362) Did Zweig have tinnitus?
• “Love detects rejection in every inhibition of the beloved, every evidence of restraint, it suspects unwillingness in any reluctance to make an unconditional commitment, and it is right.” (pp 363 - 364)
• “Lazarus must have looked like that when he rose from the grave, bemused, to see the sky and the blessed light of day again.” (p 389)
• “The only effect of those three cognacs was to make my feet feel leaden and set off a buzzing sound inside my head, like the high-pitched noise of a dentist’s drill before it hits a truly painful spot.” (p 391) More evidence on tinnitus.
• “I was God that evening. I had created the world, and behold, it was full of kindness and justice.” (p 397)
• “It was not exactly walking, more like flying close to the ground, the unsteady, tentative flight of a bird with broken wings.” (p 402)

December 2025; 454 pages

Originally published in German in 1939.

My translation, by Anthea Bell, was issued as a Pushkin Press paperback in 2013.

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God