"History of the Rain" by Niall Williams

Longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2014, this lyrically written novel traces the tragic history of an Irish family. 

It is narrated in the first person past tense by the phenomenally well-read young daughter, who is herself in bed, ill, possibly with a terminal disease. This, together with the sometimes breathless prose (“... Sean O'Grady of the O'Gradys beyond in Bealaha, not the one who was married to the one of the Kerry Spillanes who had the red hair and went off with the Latvian, the other one, who had the arm after the accident, was going out for it must have been on to ten years with that wonderful Marie of the O'Learys, had already survived a family so numerous that two of them were named Michael, and the father who went into Crotty's pub in Kilrush and woke up in Paddington, him.”; 2.16), and the acerbic comments on others, gives it a YA vibe. It helps that she has the world-weariness of the invalid, together with the wisdom that conveys, and a degree of naivete which feels perfectly teenage.  

It is the style that turns what might otherwise have been a faintly depressing story into an entertaining commentary on life. I particularly enjoyed the comments on the other characters in the village, from the postmistress who, after her post office had been axed in efficiency cuts, went to town once a week to buy stamps so that she could sell them from her front room, thus maintaining her self-conferred status, to the teacher ("Lady Macbeth"), to her father, a failing farmer who writes poetry. Some of these provided laugh-out-loud moments (and readers of this blog will no how rarely I even chuckle): 

• “Even Tommy McGinley was quietly admired despite the kind of hit-on-the-head mouth-open expression he got from eating cork, after hearing on RTE it was the main ingredient in Viagra, and not what they actually said, that the main ingredient was made in Cork.” (2.15)
• “Canice Clohessy, The Constipated, in whose unique case shit didn't happen.” (3.2)

This comedy of weird people enables the narrator to construct a deep and perceptive meditation on the human condition. And it never gets pretentious! The comedy rescues it, and the glorious magic of the prose.

Selected quotes:

• “The longer my father lived in this world the more he knew there was another to come.” (first line)
• “I don't know if time tarnishes or polishes a human soul.” (1.1)
• “The basis of the Philosophy of Impossible Standard is that no matter how hard you try you can't ever be good enough. The Standard raises as you do.” (1.1)
• “On good days it can be a bit Michelangelo, like you've drunk Heaven-Up. ... No angels though. I've never gone the whole Sistine.” (1.4)
• “Once the Councillor started getting asked his opinion, fatally he became convinced of the existence of his own intelligence.You ask him a question you get a paragraph.” (1.6)
• “That was always Mam's role, to show Dad he was alright, to redeem him from the place he kept pulling himself into.” (1.6)
• “Back in those days once you were wedded you were in Holy Deadlock, and in Ireland the priests had decided that once a man entered a woman there was No Way Out.” (1.8)
• “It's a thing you just never hear, the weather in the next life.” (1.9)
• “That's the thing about boys. ... Boys have No Go Areas, they have an entire geography of places you can't go because if you do they'll crack open, they and, not ever.” (1.15)
• “Plots are for precocious schoolboys.” (1.16)
• “Boys can fall deeper in love than girls, they’re a lot bigger and heavier and they can fall much further and harder and when they hit the ground of reality there's just this terrible splosh that some other woman is going to have to come along and try to put back into the bottle.” (1.16)
• “In the morning the birds are singing with that extra-demented loudness they have in spring in Clare, they're all ADHD and they've got this urgent message they're trying to deliver but because God's a comedian they can only speak it in chirrup.” (2.3)
• “Basically, at every moment our farm is trying to return to some former state where muck and rushes thrive.” (2.7)
• "She's in the deep waters of realising that if he was gone her life would be over, which in my book is basically substance essence and quintessence of Love.” (2.10)
• “Sometimes things are darker, worse, and with inexplicable torment you hear the gulls, whose complaints are complex and constant when they come in over Cappa with cries crazy it seems from banishment.” (2.15)
• “When I lost my brother I lost more than half the world. I was left in somewhere narrow as the margin, and in there, parallel to the main text, I would write my marginalia.” (3.2)
• “Each book a writer writes has all the others in it, so there's a library that's like a river and it keeps on going.” (3.6)

Wonderful and easy to read, enjoyable and enlightening.

April 2026; 355 pages

First published by Bloomsbury in 2014

My paperback edition was issued in 2015

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)

"Kala" by Colin Walsh

Fundamentally a crime thriller. A teenage gang broke up after one of them, Kala, disappeared. Fifteen years later, four of them reunite in the Irish town. Then Kala's remains are discovered. 

 It is told in multiple first-person using the present tense. The characterisations are strong, elevating the narrators from what might otherwise be stereotypes (a rock star, a journalist, a cafe worker) into believable characters with whom I developed rapport. This meant that I was concerned to know what happened to them, especially since no punches were pulled I didn't know, when they faced life-threatening jeopardy, whether they would survive. The mysteries of the past (Kala's disappearance, Mush's scars etc) were solved in a nicely drip-feed fashion which kept me turning the pages nearly all the way to the end, the final few pages kept me going because I wanted to know whether at least one of the characters would make it. If you add in the beautifully written prose, this novel is elevated from just another crime thriller.

My only caveat is the plot. Mystery piles upon mystery but the solution requires two of the villains to make more or less unprompted confessions. While the first of these is by means of hints, the second revelation which basically solves the mystery is all a bit 'deus ex machina' and therefore slightly unsatisfactory.

Otherwise this is a hugely enjoyable read.

Selected quotes:

• “There's a turning melt of sky above us.” (Summer 2003)
• “Our group’s like a murmuration of birds, turning telepathically into ever new shapes.” (Summer 2003)
• “Kinlough is a sudden sea foaming up around me, and I am islanded in the grinning churn of Hogan's Square.” (Friday: Helen)
• “I am old enough to stop being afraid of many things. I will never stop being afraid of teenage girls.” (Friday: Helen)
• “Time archived in the lines of his skin.” (Saturday: Helen)
• “Quiet’s not peaceful, man. Quiet is when the monsters come out.” (Saturday: Mush)
• “People are like trees; live long enough, and your life becomes a tangle of trajectories, a crooked monument to its own mutilations.” (Saturday: Helen)
• “Life is like this: immense when you are inside it, but manageable from the outside.” (Sunday: Helen)
• “Every bedroom, a laboratory of the self.” (Sunday: Joe)
• “Organs squelching. All that blood. The things that keep us alive happen in the dark, because they're fucking ugly.” (Sunday: Joe)
• “She is acting like she is just another bloody adult. Talking constantly and saying nothing.” (Sunday: Helen)
• “The things that make life comfortable are always unacceptable, if you look at them square on. Someone, somewhere, is always suffering so you can be happy.” (Sunday: Mush)
• “Feels like my body’s made of fucking bumblebees.” (Monday: Mush)
• “The moments when you can say something are just that - moments - and once they're gone, they're gone, and you've added another brick to the wall.” (Monday: Mush)
• “You pretend you're cool but ... you need to read the instructions before doing anything.” (Monday: Joe)

Note:

Apollonia, the name Joe sometimes uses for Kala is either a female name meaning 'belong to Apollo', a god linked to poetry and music, which seems appropriate but unlikely, suggesting a higher degree of classical education than teenage Joe probably had, or the first name of an actress who was the lead singer of the girl group Apollonia Six (which might reference the six members of the teenage gang) and co-starred with the musician Prince in the movie 'Purple Rain'.

April 2026; 406 pages

Published in 2023 by Atlantic Books

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"Loving" by Henry Green

Selected by Time magazine as one of the best novels since Time began (1923) and by the BBC as the 58th best ever novel.

Set in a castle deep in rural Ireland with a English family and (mostly) English servants during World War Two. The butler dies and Charlie Raunce, the footman, is appointed to take his place. He falls in love with one of the maids, Edith; the other, Kate, seeks solace elsewhere. The daughter of the chatelaine also seeks solace elsewhere since her husband is away at war; her daughters are augmented with the cook's nephew, an evacuee and a bit of a handful. And hanging over everything is the shadow of a rumoured German invasion or alternatively the IRA who have been blowing up English-owned properties.

I thought at first that it reminded me of the Gormenghast novels (eg Titus Groan) in which the daily life of a large and labyrinthine castle is disrupted by a baleful newcomer; the nannies in both books are ineffectual, in fragile health, and address themselves in the third person. But this is solidly grounded in the everyday and is firmly rooted in character as opposed to plot while the Gormenghast trilogy has fabulous Dickensian caricatures and its prevailing mood is fantasy.

In some ways, Loving is reminiscent of Ivy Compton Burnett's novels such as A House and Its Head or A Father and His Fate in that both are set in country houses whose owners have no financial worries but Loving is much more about the servants than even ICB's Manservant and Maidservant. Both authors have dialogue-heavy narratives but while ICB's is deliberately formal, Green attempts to capture speech as it is spoken, more or less. 

Despite the verisimilitude, the novel starts "Once upon a day" and ends "lived happily ever after" as if it were a fairy tale. And the realism doesn't prevent Green from indulging in sumptuous lyricism from time to time, such as: 

• "It might have been almost that O'Conor's dreams were held by hairs of gold binding his head beneath a vaulted roof on which the floor of cobbles reflected an old king's molten treasure from the bog." (p 43)
• "For answer he had a storm of giggles which he could not tell one from the other and which went ricochetting from stone cold bosoms to damp streaming marble bellies, to and from huge oyster niches in the walls in which boys fought giant boas of idled with a flute, and which volleyed under green skylights empty in the ceiling." ( pp 98 - 99)

Sebastian Faulks (author of, inter alia, Birdsong, On Green Dolphin Street, Engleby, and A Week in December) says that by occasionally disrupting the normal grammar of his prose, Green changes the "triangular relationship between reader, writer and character" so the reader somehow becomes more intimate with the character without sensing the mediation of the writer. 

I was expecting more fireworks. This was a quiet and meditative masterpiece. But I read enough to convince me that I need to further explore Green as a novelist. A glance at wikipedia shows he was at Eton with Anthony Powell and Magdalene College Oxford where he met Evelyn Waugh. His novels include:

• Blindness (1926)
• Living (1929)
• Party Going (1939)
• Pack My Bag: A Self-Portrait (1940)
• Caught (1943)
• Loving (1945)
• Back (1946)
• Concluding (1948)
• Nothing (1950)
• Doting (1952)

Selected quotes:

• "He went so soft he might have been a ghost without a head." (p 9)
• "He did not meet their eyes in this low room of antlered heads along the walls, his back to the sideboard with red swans." (p 81)
• "There's worse than sleeping alone in your own bed, with a fresh joint down in the larder for dinner every day." (p 107)
• "There's only one language these little merchants understand an' that's a kind of Morse spelt out with a belt on their backsides." (p 152)

April 2026; 201 pages

First published by the Hogarth Press in 1945

My Vintage paperback edition was issued in 2000

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"Tales of Love, Madness and Death" by Horacio Quiroga

 Short stories from a Uruguayan who spent much of his life in Argentina, dying of prostate cancer in 1937. He wrote plays and poems and at least one novel as well as short stories. This collection shows that he was influenced by Edgar Allen Poe; in turn he would go on the influence Jorge Luis Borges, although the style he demonstrates in this early collection is very much his own.

The tales range from derivative horror to hugely original stories told about very poor people in the jungle and from the PoV of animals.

One of my favourite stories, Sunstroke, is told from the perspective of a five pet dogs of a farmer. They see the man's doppelganger in the fields and realise that Death has come for the farmer, and they bark furiously, and the Doppelganger wanders off in the direction of a horse. It's a delightful tale with a pack of loyal mutts. And the next story, Barbed Wire, has horses escaping from a field and having a chat with cows about their fearless bull. Another story, Little Jaguar, also features a dog (another fox terrier), considering his scavenging life in the face of a drought: it could be a metaphor for the life of a human on the poverty line. Another of his stories, The Exploited, considers just such a person: a man who builds up a debt in port, being taken for a ride by women and barmen, and then has to work almost as an indentured slave to repay his boss. And the final tale, Meningitis and Its Shadow, which is perhaps a metaphor for the attachment between a therapist and their client, tells of an engineer recruited to dance attendance night after night on an aristocratic girl on her sick-bed since it is only his presence that can soothe the fever caused by her meningitis. 

A fascinating and original collection published by Will Dady at Renard Press who seems to be making a habit of unearthing forgotten classics. 

Selected quotes:

• “When a man lusts after a beautiful body he doesn't let opera glasses get in the way.” (Isolde’s Demise)
• “On moonlit nights, the grave digger walks amongst the Tombs with particularly rigid steps.” (Artificial Hell)
• “The honeymoon gave her the shivers.” (The Feather Pillow)
• “Footsteps echoed throughout the house, as if years of neglect had refined its resonance.” (The Feather Pillow)
• “The only thing a labourer really owns is his brutal capacity for squandering.” (The Exploited, Los Mensu)
• “There has been no time of greater joy for Maria and me than that which our aunt afforded us, with her death.” (Our First Cigarette)

March 2026; 213 pages

First published in Spanish in 1917

My paperback edition of a translation by Diego Jourdan Pereira was issued by Renard Press in 2026

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"White Sunrise" by John Newton

This sage-style novel is mostly set in East Africa starting in 1902 and continuing past 1920, centring on the war between the British and German settlers. Narrated in the past tense (sometimes slipping into present tense for internal monologue) and 3rd person limited from the perspectives of Adam, Eva, Christy and Kristina. among others, it's a long story which shifts between genres. It starts as an apparently faithful and detailed exposition of the development of a farm from scratch reminded me of A Place Called Winter by Patrick Gale, (although farming all alone in Canada and managing a team of Africans to farm for you in Africa are surely very different experiences). But it then metamorphises into a tale about multiple adulteries, after which it becomes about war - I was reminded of William Boyd's An Ice Cream War (written from the British perspective) which was shortlisted for the 1982 Booker Prize and Afterlives (from the African perspective) by 2021 Nobel Laureate Abdulrazak Gurnah. It then turns into a spy thriller before slipping into the brothel fiction genre. 

Lots happened but I was bored well before the end. For me, a long book has to have some great characters to keep me interested and White Sunrise, being plot-driven, never took sufficient time to develop the characterisation of its cast sufficiently for me to care about any of them or to believe in the reversals within their character arcs. Adam is a good man, Eva and very temptable woman, Kristina the prostitute with a heart of gold (well, money) and Christy the ultimate pantomime villain, a sort of portmanteau of everything nasty, not just a rapist but also a coward. (I did wonder whether there was a metaphorical significance in the names Adam, Eve and Christy but I couldn't decide on the theology intended).

It is problematic to write a book about colonisation without considering whether it is racist. There are certainly comments made by some of the characters which seem to imply that the colonisation project is a 'Good Thing' bringing civilisation to benighted natives:

• “They’re [the indigenous Masai] from the Stone Age and we’re from the future....” (Ch 2)
• “Being good Christians we’ll probably push the blacks into reservations and make them work for all the European settlers Eliot plans to bring in. In no time at all we’ll have the place all sewn up - just like America.” (Ch 4)
• “‘What about land for Africans?’ ‘We’re putting them in locations to the east of town. Out of the way but in easy reach as labour. Brilliant arrangement, don’t you think?” (Ch 5)
• “We settlers must cooperate to build a business and political base and make the British Government realise this is a white man’s country - our country.” (Ch 16)
• “The Government plans to transfer the northern Masai down off the Laikipia Plateau and free more land for white settlers. We’ll reunite the tribe in a big reserve on the Mara plain. Been planning it for years. The Masai are not stupid. They know Laikipia is good cattle land. Last year they took us to court. Who would have thought it? Bloody people may still live in the Stone Age but they’re sharp enough to hire lawyers and take an injunction against the Government to stop the move.” (Ch 17)
• "The sun is rising from the west. A lot more Europeans are on the way to join us. Good British stock. ... Soon we'll have the whole area booming with farms and industry and towns." (Ch 57)

These remarks could be justified on the basis that they are made by racist characters and that they are being used by the author to illustrate the immorality of the colonial project. But there are also moments when the racism seemed to extend to the author, starting with the title (White Sunrise) and a comment in chapter one in which the white protagonist is travelling with a huge retinue of Africans who are carrying for him, labouring for him, serving him and protecting him comes across some other white people and remarks "Good to have company for breakfast. I found it damned lonely out here on my own”. Fundamentally the Africans, even the heroes such as Musa, are there as supporting characters, rather than considered as proper people. It made me wonder whether the author believes that some genes are superior to others. Much later in the book, I found evidence suggesting this might be the case. When tracking down the ancestry of one of the characters. it seemed important that he isn’t low-born but rather the illegitimate son of an aristocrat, as if intelligence and physical prowess are reserved for those with special DNA, a position adopted by eugenicists which underpins racism. This left an umpleasant taste in my mouth.

It was also difficult to read in the literal sense because of the multiple glitches in layout and typography in my kindle version. I found it very distracting to be continually required to decipher words. At one point, chapter 16 seems to be (mostly) repeated which was confusing. These factors certainly didn't help my enjoyment.

But in the other hand, if you enjoy stories with plenty of action, lots of sex and a fair bit of death, war and hunting and excitement, with Churchill and Bela Kun thrown in, then this might be the book for you.

Selected quotes:

• “As the column settled into stride between brilliant white mountain to the west and brilliant gold sun to the east, her mood changed and she almost wept at a barely remembered dream of death.” (Ch 2)
• “We had bubonic plague in the bazaars. Bloody rats everywhere. Only solution was to burn the place. So we did. Hope it works.” (Ch 5)
• “‘You don’t believe in God’ ‘I do when He gets something right.’ said Musa.” (Ch 5)
• “Death nearly got me three times. Will it try again? No one ever talks about four times lucky....” (Ch 29)

March 2026

Originally published in 2013

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"The Magician" by W Somerset Maugham

An early novel by a master story-teller, inspired by WSM's encounters with Aleister Crowley, the occultist whose biography I reviewed, in  Paris in the early 1900s. It's an entertaining story, though very Victorian Gothic horror in style, occasionally straying into Grand Guignol. WSM himself, in a prologue to my copy, states: “The style is lush and turgid, not at all the sort of style I approve of now, but perhaps not unsuited to the subject; and there are a great many more adverbs and adjectives than I should use today. I fancy I must have been impressed by the ‘Écriture artiste’ [a highly mannered and impressionistic style favoured by, among others, Edmond de Goncourt] which the French writers of the time had not yet entirely abandoned.”

Arthur Burdon, a young British surgeon, is engaged to his ward, Margaret, who is presently living in Paris, sharing a flat with her friend Susie, to study art. At a restaurant, they encounter Oliver Haddo, a self-styled magician whom animals instinctively fear. Arthur is sceptical of Haddo's claims and, when Haddo kicks a dog who bites him, thrashes Haddo. Humiliated, Haddo vows revenge ... and what could be sweeter than to seduce Margaret. 

Selected quotes:

• “The formal garden reminded one of a light woman, no longer young, who sought, with faded finery, with powder and paint, to make a brave show of despair.” (Ch 1)
• “The eyes of most persons converge when they look at you, but Oliver Haddo’s, naturally or by a habit he had acquired for effect, remained parallel. It gave you the impression that he looked straight through you and saw the wall beyond.” (Ch 3) This is more or less repeated in chapter 6. WSM, in his prologue, remarks that it was a characteristic of Aleister Crowley, whom he knew.
• Elemental forces, such as the wind, have an existence which depends upon “the continuance or some natural object, and hence for them there could be no immortality. They must return eventually to the abyss of unending night, and the darkness of death affected them always.” (Ch 3)
• “Magic is no more than the art of employing consciously invisible means to produce visible effects. Will, love, and imagination are magic powers that everyone possesses; and whoever knows how to develop them to their fullest extent is a magician. Magic has but one dogma, namely, that the scene is the measure of the unseen.” (Ch 3)
• “Magic ... may be described merely as intelligent utilization of forces which are unknown, contemned, or misunderstood of the vulgar.” (Ch 3)
• “If the adept is active, pliant, and strong, the whole world will be at his command. He will pass through the storm and no rain shall fall upon his head. The wind will not displace a single fold of his garment. He will go through fire and not be burned.” (Ch 3)
• “No well-bred sorcerer is so dead to the finer feelings as to enter a room by the door.” (Ch 4)
• “If he sought for gold it was for the power it gave him, and it was power he aimed at when he brooded night and day over dim secrets.” (Ch 7)
• “Only he who desires with his whole heart will find, and to him only who knocks vehemently shall the door be opened.” (Ch 7)
• “Naked and full of majesty he lay, the outcast son of the morning.” (Ch 8)
• “The hours passed with lagging feet.” (Ch 15)

Notes:
Mackenzie Crook, the writer of the BBC TV sitcom Small Prophets must have been inspired by The Magician (or both WSM and Crook were inspired by the same original source) since this description is growing homunculi is very close to the instructions given by Michael Palin in the sitcom: “There were ten homunculi - James Kammerer calls them prophesying spirits - kept in strong bottles, such as are used to preserve fruit, and these were filled with water. ... The bottles were closed with a magic seal. The spirits were about a span long, and the Count was anxious that they should grow. They were therefore buried under two cart loads of manure, and the pile daily sprinkled with a certain liquor prepared with great trouble by the adepts. The pile after such sprinklings began to ferment and steam, as if heated by a subterranean fire. When the bottles were removed, it was found that the spirits had grown to about a span and a half each; the male homunculi were come into possession of heavy beards, and the nails of the fingers had grown. In two of the bottles there was nothing to be seen save clear water, but when the Abbé knocked thrice at the seal upon the mouth ... the water turned a mysterious colour, and the spirits showed their faces.” (Ch 7)

This is an enjoyable and entertaining read but it is not in the first league of WSM books.

March 2026; 233 pages

First published by Heinemann in 1908

My Vintage paperback edition issued in 2000

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

Novels and short-story collections (designated SS) by William Somerset Maugham

• Liza of Lambeth (1897)
• The Making of a Saint (1898)
• Orientations (SS, 1899)
• The Hero (1901)
• Mrs Craddock (1902)
• The Merry-Go-Round (1904)
• The Bishop's Apron (1906)
• The Explorer (1908)
• The Magician (1908)
• Of Human Bondage (1915)
• The Moon and Sixpence (1919)
• The Trembling of a Leaf (SS, 1921)
• The Painted Veil (1925)
• The Casuarina Tree (SS, 1926)
• Ashenden (SS, 1928)
• Cakes and Ale (1930)
• Six Stories Written in the First Person Singular (SS, 1931)
• The Book Bag (SS, 1932)
• The Narrow Corner (1932)
• Ah King (SS, 1933)
• The Judgement Seat (SS, 1934)
• Cosmopolitans (SS, 1936)
• Theatre (1937)
• Christmas Holiday (1939)
• Princess September and the Nightingale (SS, 1939)
• The Mixture as Before (SS, 1940)
• Up at the Villa (1941)
• The Hour Before the Dawn (1942)
• The Unconquered (SS, 1944)
• The Razor's Edge (1944)
• Then and How (1946)
• Creatures of Circumstance (SS, 1947)
• Catalina (1948)
• Quartet (SS, 1948)
• Trio (SS, 1950)
• Encore (SS, 1951)

"Slow Horses" by Mick Herron

Significantly better than most of the offerings in this genre. this is 

an enjoyable and entertaining spy thriller, containing plenty of comedy and moments of genuine tension.

A student has been kidnapped and his captors are threatening to behead him live on the internet. Can the 'slow horses' of Slough House, where the failures from MI5 are sent so, bored with mundane paperwork, they will resign, save the young man. 

It is written in the past tense using multiple 3rd person limited points of view.

Selected quotes:

• Hobden “still read [journalistic] copy as if it were Braille; bumps in the language letting him know when D-notices were an issue; when the Regent's Park mob had left their fingerprints on the facts.” (Ch 2)
• “Half of the future is buried in the past.” (Ch 2)
• “Nobody wanted to get on the wrong side of Moody, and most sides of Moody were the wrong one.” (Ch 2)
• “He worked with a bunch of morons. Couldn't make a pun with a dictionary and a Scrabble board.” (Ch 4)
• “She waved her hand airily; her standard semaphore for trivial detail.” (Ch 5)
• “You had more chance of reaching a consensus with a vox pop on Marmite.” (Ch 8)
• “If we're paying for supper, we get to glance at the menu, surely?” (Ch 8)
• “The look she bestowed upon him would have stuck six inches out the back of a more sensitive man.” (Ch 8)
• “‘Once upon a time’ was another way of saying the old days.” (Ch 8)
• “The wheels started coming off before you screwed them on.” (Ch 11)
• “This couldn't have fallen apart faster if you'd bought it at IKEA.” (Ch 11)
• “Sleep was ceding control. While you slept, anything might happen.” (Ch 13)
• “Web was under thirty, and married to the notion that anyone twenty years older was lucky to have made it through the flood.” (Ch 15)

Notes:

• The dodgy politician Peter Judd ("PJ") is a caricature based on ex-British Prime Minister Boris Johnson (BJ).
• At one point, Slough House is compared to Pincher Martin's Island. Pincher Martin is a novel about a shipwrecked sailor written by William Golding.

March 2026; 328 pages

First published in 2015 by John Murray

My paperback edition was issued in 2017

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"The Cliff House" by Chris Brookmyre

 

A group of women assemble for a hen weekend on a remote and uninhabited Scottish island. Once there, they become cut off, all communications cut. One is kidnapped. 'The reaper' contacts them, threatening to murder the kidnap victim unless each of the women confesses their secrets. They all have them.

Michelle is a pop star who ditched her guitarist, childhood friend Helena, on the road to stardom. Helena, in revenge, has hacked Michelle's cloud and released a self-made porn tape of the pop star having sex. Jen, another childhood friend, murdered her husband Jason, who raped Michelle, and who is Beattie's brother. Nicolette, Kennedy and Beattie also have secrets. 

It's a sort of version of And There Then Were None (other titles are also available) by Agatha Christie. It is told in the past tense from the third person limited PoV of each of the women. 

I guessed every one of the twists.

Selected quotes:

• "Sometimes when you have a secret it makes you feel vulnerable. You are afraid of what you could lose, afraid of what everyone might discover. But ... being the one who knew a secret gave you a power over everyone who didn't." (Helena)
• "The kind of place where the bouncer frisked you for weapons, and if he didn't find any, gave you one before he let you in." (Beattie)
• "She was starting to understand what it must feel like to be a stag when the royal family were loose in your postcode." (Nicolette)
• "You tend to scream louder when a blow hits a sensitive spot." (Michelle)
• "Looks had always meant a lot to Jason. Some called him vain, buit that was what the envious said when someone more blessed than themselves wore their pride without apology." (Beattie)

Entertaining.

March 2026; 344 pages

First published in 2022 by Little, Brown

My paperback edition was issued in 2023.

I have also read The Cut by Chris Brookmyre

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"The Cut" by Chris Brookmyre

A crime thriller told principally from the PoVs of Millie, once a make-up artist on films, recently released after serving over twenty years for a murder she didn't commit, and Jerry, a mixed-race film studies student whose accent seems to become more Scottish as the novel progresses. They are on the run across Europe after Millie stumbles across a clue to why justice miscarried for her and somebody tries to kill her. As is typical of the genre there is the mystery of a supposedly-cursed horror film whose negative has gone AWOL, a leavening of comedy in the dialogue between these two mismatched characters, and a secret which must be revealed before the final reel. 

Entertaining.

Selected quotes:

• “Maybe she didn't have a trust fund, and maybe Danby didn't either, but Jerry was damn sure that whatever their fathers gave them, it was more than his. The only thing daddy had given Jerry Kelly was pigmentation.” (Belonging)
• “Jerry had heard it said that there were two types of rich people: smart people who knew they'd got lucky, and lucky people who thought they were smart.” (Belonging)
• “She had dealt with people like Anne for decades: a rulebook with shoes.” (A social call)
• “Everybody dreams of being a starving artist until dinner time” (Blood)
• “Weirdly, after months of imposter syndrome at uni, he was finding it easier being an actual imposter.” (Intruders)
• “It turned out that sourcing condoms was not an issue when a rock band's tour bus was parked outside.” (The Fog)
• “It was like I was searching in the fog, not because the answers lay there, but because the fog looked intriguing, mysterious. But fog is not just insubstantial, it is constantly changing.” (The Fog)
• “Peroxide locks that hadn't changed a Pantone in decades.” (Casting)
• “I wonder if the French have a word for volte face.” (Casting)

March 2026; 404 pages

Published by Little, Brown in 2021

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"That They May Face the Rising Sun" by John McGahern

A lyrical evocation of life in rural Ireland. Not so much a novel as a fictionalised (?) account of a year in a small farming community peopled with wonderfully eccentric characters, such as: 

• Bill Evans was brought up by the church in an orphanage and then sent out to work for a farm as little more than a slave; he demands cigarettes and drinks from everyone he meets.
• John Quinn's fundamental philosophy is that the Lord intended men and women to copulate. His first wife bore him eight children, his second left him after which he contented himself with casual affairs; now he is seeking a third wife.
• Jamesie is a clown.
• The Shah owns the scrapyard and is the richest man in town but now wants to sell the business to the man who works for him despite the fact that they refuse to speaks to one another.
• Patrick travels across Ireland as a jobbing builder ... but has left one job unfinished for years.

The book contains glorious descriptions such as:

• “A river of beaten copper ran sparkling from shore to shore in the centre of the lake. On either side of this bright river peppered with pale stars the dark water seethed. Far away the light to the town glowed in the sky. His own footsteps were loud. When he came to the corner of the lake, the heron rose out of the reeds to flap him lazily around the shore, ghostly in the moonlight. On such a night a man could easily want to run from his own shadow.” (pp 201 - 202)
• “Hundreds of daffodils and scattered narcissi met the spring again with beauty. Birds bearing twigs in their beaks looped through the air. The brooding swan resumed her seat on the high throne in the middle of the reeds. The otter paths between the lakes grew more beaten. In shallows along the shore the water rippled with a life of spawning pike and bream: in the turmoil their dark fins showed above the water and the white of their bellies flashed when they rolled. The lambs were now out with their mothers on the grass, hopping as if they had mechanical springs in their tiny hooves, sometimes leapfrogging one another.” (pp 250 - 251)

The nearest comparisons I could think of were My Family and Other Animals and its sequels by Gerald Durrell. I was also strongly reminded of This is Happiness by Niall Williams, another book set in rural Ireland in a village when the telephone poles appear.

Selected quotes:

• “He was ... drawing in the cigarette smoke as if it were the breath of life, releasing it to the still air in miserly ecstasy.” (p 15)
• “Empty houses, falling down houses, one house on the mountain, its floor covered with rat traps, new bungalows full of children. Dreams in tatters with the 'For Sale’ sign at the gate.” (p 17)
• “We think the birds are singing when they are only crying ‘this is mine’ out of their separate territories.” (p 21)
• “As with many diminished people, Edmund’s response was to rephrase each thing the other person said in the form of a question.” (p 51)
• “He's still as thick and as ignorant as several double ditches.” (p 66)
• “I would not swap with a lord. We all want our own two shoes of life. If truth was told, none of us would swap with anybody. We want to go out the way we came in. It's just as well we have no choice. If there was a choice you'd have certain giddy outfits having operations to get themselves changed into other people like those sex change outfits you see in the newspapers.” (p 66)
• “Lies can walk while the truth stays grounded.” (p 98)
• “How can time be gathered in and kissed? There is only flesh.” (p 132)
• “Cattle round a bullying cow in the middle of a field would be more decent.” (p 199)
• “There are times I don't know who I am from one minute to the next. That's why I always liked the acting. You are someone else and always know what you are doing and why.” (p 214)
• “Anyone with livestock is going to have deadstock.” (p 265)

March 2026; 314 pages

First published by Faber & Faber in 2002

My paperback edition issued in 2009

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God