"Bird by Bird" by Anne Lamott

Sub-titled 'Some instructions on writing and life', this book offers perceptive and delightful insights into the world of the writer. Write for the sake of writing, she urges. Don't write to be published. Publication won't change your life: you'll still be as screwed-up after being published as you were before. Write because it is the best possible way of creating art out of an exploration of what it means to be human. Therefore it is hard. Therefore you will have to expose your worst side to the world. And therefore it is rewarding.

That sounds a bit intense.The book is really funny. She sees the humanity within the experiences she describes and so she is like a wonderful stand-up comic doing observational comedy. She describes how she took her three year old son to see a dead baby and how he gave the baby a ball, in case they play catch on the other side, and a small toy time-travel car for reasons she doesn't understand. She writes about a day out at the Special Olympics. There is warmth and laughter and humanity and, yes, sometimes, a little tragedy.

Did I learn how to write? I learnt to enjoy the writing process and not obsess about where the written product is going to end up. I learnt to focus on tiny bits and get them right rather than trying to do too much. I learnt to work every day and to use all the material I possibly can. I learnt that I am not good enough yet, and that I may never be good enough, but if I work hard and steadily and try to write the truth every day that I will one day be better. And that should be good enough for anyone.

A brilliant, wonderful and enjoyable book. April 2014; 237 pages

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

"The life and strange surprising adventures of Daniel Defoe" by Richard West

The man born Daniel Foe was an extraordinary man who lived in extraordinary times. Born in the year of the Restoration of Charles II, he lived through the Plague and Fire of London, the Glorious Revolution, the Union with Scotland, the first Jacobite risings, and the South Sea Bubble. He was a rebel, fighting with the Duke of Monmouth at the Battle of Sedgemoor, a hosier, a maker of bricks and pantiles, a bankrupt, a pilloried pamphleteer, a prisoner, a journalist, a secret agent and finally a writer responsible for Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders, and  A Journal of the Plague Year as well as many other titles. With such a cv he is an obvious subject for biography.

Richard West faces some difficulties. Defoe loved to mix fact and fiction and his own accounts of his own life are inconsistent, contradictory and partial. There is no record of his birth. So West has relied a great deal on Defoe's own writings, whilst warning us about them. This means extensive quotes. West also quotes from historians about the period but concentrates almost exclusively on Macauley and Trevelyan. There is a feeling that West has done insufficient independent research and has relied too heavily on a limited number of sources.

But the book rattles on until the middle when the journalist becomes the author. You might think that this is where the story would become compelling. For 236 pages, Defoe has led an exciting life but now he is going to become the author of the famous books. Suddenly, West goes weird. Robinson Crusoe is described, with two other books, in twenty pages. Twenty three pages are devoted to A Journal of the Plague Year with two other works of historical fiction. Moll Flanders and Roxana merit twenty five pages. Then 84(!) pages are given to his three volume travelogue, A Tour of the Whole Island of Great Britain. This one work is thus given more space than all his fiction put together!

Moreover, West attempts little in the way of literary criticism. Most of the descriptions of the books are taken up with an exhaustive summary of their plots. I would have been far more interested to know how Defoe came by the ideas for these books, what they shed upon his life (West does note the repeated obsession with money that was a probable legacy of Defoe's bankruptcy), how they were received by his contemporaries (both Crusoe and Flanders were best-sellers), and how they influenced future writers. But West only mentions in passing the fact the Moll Flanders was published the year before The Beggar's Opera was first performed and he is virtually silent on the presumable obsession with crime that Georgian society must have had at the time. As for the 84 pages on the Tour, most of this is devoted to discussing each place Defoe went to (or claims he went to).

In short, I felt the first half of the book was a triumph but I was extremely disappointed in the second half.

April 2014; 408 pages

In A Pirate of Exquisite Mind, Diana and Michael Preston make the point that Robinson Crusoe was in poart based on the best-selling travel books of William Dampier who was on the expedition that marooned Alexander Selkirk, the model for Crusoe, and on the expedition that rescued him!

"Restoration" by Rose Tremain

I read the sequel, Merivel, to this book first.

Robert Merivel is an orphaned medical student who successfully treats an ill spaniel belonging to Charles II; this leads to his preferment at court and eventually to his being installed as the master of a Norfolk country estate as the nominal but cuckolded husband of Charles' latest mistress. But he falls in love with the woman and incurs the king's wrath.

The story rambles from Fenland madhouse to Cheapside lodgings. There seems no coherence or purpose to the tale. As with the sequel, it is a picaresque. It works because it explores the character of a remarkable man, a frail mortal who can laugh at himself, an Everyman in whose flaws and sufferings we can recognise ourselves.

This book was short-listed for the Booker Prize in 1989.

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

Rose Tremain novels:

• Sadler's Birthday (1976)
• Letter to Sister Benedicta (1978)
• The Cupboard (1981)
• Journey to the Volcano (1985)
• The Swimming Pool Season (1985)
• Restoration (1989)
• 1989 Sunday Express Book of the Year
• Shortlisted for the 1989 Booker Prize
• Sacred Country (1992)
• Winner of the 1992 James Tait Black Memorial Prize
• Winner of the 1994 Prix Femina Etranger
• The Way I Found Her (1997)
• Music and Silence (1999)
• Winner of the 1999 Whitbread Award
• The Colour (2003)
• The Road Home (2008)
• Trespass (2010)
• Merivel: A Man of His Time (2012)
• Shortlisted for the 2012 Wellcome Book Prize
• Shortlisted for the 2013 Walter Scott prize
• The Gustav Sonata (2016)
• Winner of the 2016 National Jewish Book Award
• Shortlisted for the 2016 Costa Book Awards
• Longlisted for the 2017 Baileys Women’s Prize for fiction
• Winner of the 2017 Ribalow Prize
• Islands of Mercy (2020)
• Lily: A Tale of Revenge (2021)
• Absolutely & Forever (2023)
• Shortlisted for the 2024 Walter Scott Prize

"The Watchers" by Stephen Alford

This is a history of the Elizabethan espionage services. Because Elizabeth I continued her father's breakaway from Roman Catholicism and because she never had a clearly nominated successor there were many attempts to replace her by assassination, coup or invasion. The pope called for her replacement, branding her a heretic and a bastard with no legitimate right to the throne and therefore exonerating in advance any Catholic who might kill her. Mary Queen of Scots, who was for 29 years the next in line for the English throne and who was a member of the ultra-RC Guise family, was the focus for a number of attempts to replace Elizabeth, even when a deposed Queen under quite strict house arrest in England. Philip II of Spain, once King of England as the husband of Elizabeth's elder sister Mary, always threatened even though it was not until 1588 that he managed to launch the Great Armada invasion attempt (and there was a second Armada in 1596 which was wrecked by a storm off Finisterre before the English discovered it was on its way). And there were a number of assassination attempts (though some might have been more due to the zeal of rival intelligence services to discover plots than actual attempts). So there was a need for England to have people involved in what we know call espionage but they then called spiery.

First Sir Francis Walsingham ran a very successful intelligence service which, amongst other things, 'discovered' (or maybe manufactured or provoked) evidence for the Babington Plot in which Mary Queen of Scots appeared to assent to a plot to kill Elizabeth. After his Walsingham's death in 1590 the Earl of Essex and Sir Robert Cecil ran rival intelligence services (Cecil's prevailing and eventually, although this is after the book finishes, preventing the Gunpowder Plot).

This book chronicles the spies who worked for them, decoding ciphers, collecting information, penetrating conspiracies, acting as double agents and agents provacateur and disseminating disinformation. Some of these shadowy spies are working for ideals, others for money, others because they are fascinated by aspects of a life where one is never whom one seems to be. Many of them are turncoats and one often wonders how any spymaster could be certain that his men would not turn their coats a second time.

Alford's book has moments of extraordinary interest, especially when he describes the spies in the shadows. Concentrating on the characters as he tends to does mean that sometimes the narrative is not chronological and it is sometimes a little confusing when he repeatedly returns to an event to describe it again from a different point of view. Furthermore, not all of the spies are as interesting as their colleagues and there are moments when the story drags. I also would have liked more details about the spycraft; it would have been fun to have learned more about the ciphers used (Simon Singh's The Code Book has a fascinating chapter on the Babington code cipher which shows how a technical discussion of code-breaking can be very readable).

Overall, however, Alford's book keeps the interest going and throws light on what must be one of the murkiest areas of history. April 2014; 325 pages

"Moll Flanders" by Daniel Defoe

A best-seller in 1722 by the man who had also written Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders is a sort of Rake's progress about a lady who descends (quite slowly) into iniquity. Born in Newgate and raised first by gypsies (a common theme in 18th Century fiction and a strange paranoia of the times) and then by the parish, the lady who later becomes known as Moll Flanders (although she makes it clear that this is a pseudonym, the trade name she used when she later became a famous thief) dreams of becoming a gentlewoman. As a companion to the daughters of a family she is first seduced by the elder son and then marries the younger. Following his death she marries a spendthrift linen-draper; when he runs off she marries (bigamously, though this doesn't seem to be important) a man who takes her to Virginia where she discovers that he is her brother And this is important; she is horrified by incest); she then oscillates for a while between widowhood, being a mistress and marrying again. As in Jane Austen, the purpose of marriage is to improve one's fortune and therefore much effort is made to conceal her relative poverty: finally everything goes wrong when both herself and her new husband discover that they have both tricked one another into marrying for money and they are virtually destitute. However, Moll never really sees the need to work for her living, so poverty is a relative matter, and she never worries too much about supporting her children, most of whom she discards with little care. Finally, staring poverty in the face, she resorts to theft and begins a long and successful career as pickpocket, shoplifter and opportunistic sneak thief.

This is a fascinating insight into the morals and morality of early eighteenth century London. Without an effective police force, criminals could only really be caught 'in the act' by a hue and cry and then turned over to the authorities. One notorious criminal .mastermind', Jonathan Wild, ran a criminal gang and acted as crime boss, fence, 'recoverer' of stolen property for reward, and thief-taker. Moll's exploits, written when Jonathan Wild was at his height, seem based on the story of one of his female associates. He became iconic as a base for literary stories including 'The life of Jonathan Wild' by Henry Fielding and 'The Beggar's Opera' by John Gay (first performed in 1728).

Although there are some rather slow passages where Moll painstakingly analyses the moral dilemmas facing her (albeit from a very materialistic moral viewpoint), there is a lot of action. Little of it would seriously shock the modern reader: Moll is never a whore in the modern sense of the word although she often refers to herself as this because she has sex with men whilst she is unmarried, or married to someone else, or married illegally (eg incestuously). Her thieving is essentially opportunistic (it reminded me very much of 'Harry the Valet', the jewel thief). What seems appalling to her are abortion (which she goes to some lengths not to commit) and incest (which she commits accidentally).

Seen from a modern perspective, Moll is a deeply flawed woman. She casts her children away, marriage is a financial transaction, she has no compunction about her victims (a fact she admits herself) and even after her repentance in the face of death and redemption she is still more than happy to build the foundations of her new life as a businesswoman on the ill-gotten gains she has amassed from her life of crime.

I enjoyed Moll Flanders. Although there were moments when I struggled, there were also moments when the narrative had me hooked. Nowadays its principal delight is probably as a social commentary of the criminal underworld of London in the early 1700s but it is still well worth reading as a story.

April 2014; 317 pages

I have just finished reading a biography of Daniel Defoe. He was an extraordinarily interesting man who lived from the Restoration of Charles II, through the Glorious Revolution, till the Jacobite Rebellions of the early Georges.

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"The Late Scholar" by Jill Paton Walsh

This is another Lord Peter Wimsey novel by Jill Paton Walsh based on the characters created by Dorothy L Sayers and continuing the story from Walsh's The Attenbury Emeralds.

With affection and gusto, Paton Walsh returns Wimsey back to an Oxford College where, as visitor, he has to adjudicate in a fellows' dispute as to whether they should sell and mediaeval manuscript to purchase some farmland which they might then develop for much money. Although I enjoyed dipping myself back into some much-loved characters I was again disappointed by the plot. One by one the dons are being bumped off and the methods used seem to correspond to the previous cases investigated by Lord Peter (and written up as fiction by his wife, Harriet Vane). For this reason, this novel should come with a huge spoiler alert (although it might be argued that no-one would read these books if they hadn't already exhausted the authentic Peter Wimsey corpus). Such clues as there are seem transparent: one of the dons has being sneaking over to Cambridge to buy detective fiction and, yes, it is the one I thought it would be and, yes, he is the villain even though he has next to o motive apart from insanity. Improbably, among these few fellows there is another murderer as well! He also has little in the way of credible motive.

So as a whodunnit it fails but as fan-fiction it gives you that cosy sense of having been amongst old friends. Paton Walsh drops real people into the text: Wimsey's brother-in-law Charles Parker asks to drink in the pub where he can see C.S.Lewis (whose theological works he admires) and Tolkien gets a mention.

A fun read but not a great whodunnit. April 2014; 356 pages

"To sell is human" by Daniel Pink

I described Pink's Drive as "a fantastic and deeply thought provoking book". 

This suffers by comparison. Drive proposed a revolutionary third type of human motivation, neither derived from biological necessities (Maslow's hierarchy of needs) nor from externally imposed rewards and punishments but from the intrinsic pleasure of contributing such as is experienced by those who write wikipedia. 

The present book seeks first to convince the reader that we are all in the sales business: teachers 'sell' the idea of learning to pupils; doctors 'sell' to patients the treatments on which patients must sometimes gamble their lives. In other words, any employment which involves perusading anyone else to do something is, in Pink's view, selling.

Pink also suggests that the old fashioned stereotype of a seedy salesman seeking to rook his 'prospect' is precisely that, old-fashioned. That sort of salesman can only operate in a market in which there is 'information asymmetry'; for example, when the man selling the used car knows whether it is a clapped out old lemon or a juicy peach but the customer doesn't know this. Pink suggests that in the internet age information is rarely asymmetric and therefore the old-fashioned sales can no longer exist. Rather, the modern salesman has to be an advisor, helping the client navigate a landscape in which information can be deafening and sometimes conflicting and confusing.

Then Pink offers training for the new-style salesman. They have to be:

• attuned to the customers needs
• buoyant to cope easily with repeated rejection but not to ignore sings of how they can improve
• clear about what problems they can solve for their clients and how to solve them

Then Pink offers a variety of exercises to help trainee new-style salesmen improve things such as their Pitch. 

And what started out as a book with interesting ideas becomes just another sales training manual.

Don't get me wrong: some of the ideas are interesting and there are one or two neat tricks that I would like to adopt. But this book has nothing like the mind-altering impact of Drive.

April 2014; 233 pages

"The secret speech" by Tom Rob Smith

This is the second of the Leo Demidov trilogy about a former MGB officer in Moscow as Stalin's regime gives way to Khruschev. The title refers to the 'secret' speech given by Khruschev at which he denounced the state security systems for their brutal repressions under Stalin. At the start of the novel these are being distributed to former agents who either then kill themselves from remorse or from fear of what their neighbours will say or who are killed. This is a promising beginning: it offers the opportunity for menace to stalk the city in an atmosphere of moral ambiguity. Leo is, after all, the head of the Homicide Division and unbelievably good at his job, diagnosing that an apparent murder was a concealed suicide within a few minutes of seeing the body. Alas, any pretence at a whodunnit is swiftly abandoned as the Homicide Division is dissolved and the killer reveals herself by kidnapping Leo's adopted daughter in revenge for wrongs done to her by Leo in the past. The story turns into a thriller. Leo must travel to the Hungarian uprising via a prison ship and a Gulag in order to retrieve his daughter who has undergone a Patty Hearst style conversion and fallen for a young pickpocket.

This book has clearly been written with the intention of turning it into an action thriller film. Unfortunately it would be the sort of film that millions watch and I hate. A great deal of action is packed in: the story moves on relentlessly. Tank shells explode all around Leo and his family. Lesser characters are killed off with minimal grieving. Few scenes last longer than a few pages; some moments of potentially high drama last no more than a paragraph.

The characters are mostly shallow and unbelievable. The relationship between the boy who grew up as a pickpocket and became a thriller and the rebellious teenage girl is ludicrous. The transformation of the meek wife of a priest into a hardened manipulative criminal gang leader is justified by suggesting that she became embittered in the gulags. I just don't believe any of it.

Thrill-a-minute action with minimal depth. March 2014, 449 pages

"Dedicated to..." by W. B. Gooderham

Mr Gooderham buys second hand books. Some of these have fly leaf inscriptions. Some of these he has recorded in this unusual little book. Thus Oscar Wilde's 'Ballad of Reading Gaol' was given to Mo in May 2005 and the donor, Claudia, has written: "Sometimes 'only when it is dark can you see the stars'." 'A Book of Surrealist Games' given to Ted is inscribed "My period is 3 days late." On Valentine's Day 1976, Ben explained that his gift of 'Papillon' "is not a text book of how to get out of the wedding." And Dad writes in the front of 'Bawdy Ballads' "Mum says it is disgusting: I say it may encourage you to learn the piano."

My favourite is the dedication in Jean-Paul Sartre's 'Words' (which quotes him on its cover as saying "I loathe my childhood and all that remains of it") which is "To Mummy".

A delightfully quirky little book. March 2014; 181 pages.

"Fidel and Che: a revolutionary friendship" by Simon Reid-Henry

Fred gave me this hardback. It felt heavy and looked really dry. I put off reading it for a couple of weeks. I picked it up with the feeling that I was going to have to push myself.

But Che Guevara is such a romantic figure and Reid-Henry writes so well that I really enjoyed this book. From his youth motorbiking and hitch-hiking around South America to fighting as a guerilla in the Cuban Sierra the story rattled along. And it bounced backwards and forwards to the story of Fidel Castro who, if not so good-looking and less exciting still packed an awful lot into his early years staging an attempted coup, being imprisoned, seeking exile in Mexico and then leading the small group of men on a leaky boat who were almost wiped out on landing in Cuba but went on to defeat an army.

The book falters slightly in the early days of the new Cuban regime. It's difficult to thrill when describing the manoeuvrings of politicians although there is a fascinating narrative in the story of how the US repeatedly pushed the Cubans into the arms of the USSR despite the Cubans feeling terribly betrayed when Khrushchev backed down to Kennedy during the Missile Crisis. But the tale picks up again when Che, desperate to foment world revolution by repeating his Cuban guerilla success abroad, disappears from the Cuban stage. Rumours abound. Is he dead? Has he been put away by Castro? In fact he is fighting anonymously in the Congo from which he barely escapes with his life. After having hidden in the Cuban embassy in Tanzania for some time he then returns to Cuba briefly to move on to try his luck again in Bolivia. Another failure awaits him and he is finally captured and executed.

This book is a brilliant exploration of the enduring friendship of two different but very complimentary men. It is unlikely that either would have achieved all that they did without the other and the fact that they split at the end does not mean that they stopped being friends. Rather, Fidel supported Che in pursuing his dreams abroad. The difference was that Che was the idealist (which caused difficulties and tensions when they were finally in government together) and Fidel was the pragmatic politician, shucking and jiving to stay in power.

There is one brilliant photograph of the pair together in a Mexican prison before they set out to invade Cuba. Reid-Henry says it is the first photograph of the pair together. The unbearded Fidel is buttoning up his jacket; he looks rather like a natty dresser. Che stands to the side. He is topless with his hands behind his back; his trousers are undone at the top and the belt is undone. It looks for all the world as if Fidel is dressing after having enjoyed a rent boy. But what is stunning is how young Che looks. He too is clean shaven and his hair is quite short; he is no more than a handsome boy. He is 28. He looks 17. Within three years this pair will be the leaders of Cuba.

The book stops with Che's death before his fortieth birthday. The friendship is finished although Castro and Cuba continued to honour Ernesto Guevara.

I thoroughly enjoyed this revealing and well written joint biography of two fascinating men. March 2014; 382 pages

"Child 44" by Tom Rob Smith

This thriller has sold over 1.5 million copies and has been shortlisted for or won over 20 awards. It was even longlisted for the 2008 Booker Prize. The cover proudly proclaims that it is NPR's (I understand that this is the National Public Radio network of the US) top 100 thrillers of all time.

Why?

The book starts with young Pavel and his younger brother Andrei hunting a cat in a Ukrainian forest to try to keep themselves from starving.

Twenty years later Leo is a war hero and an officer in Stalin's feared MGB. His job is to 'investigate' denunciations which really means to arrest suspects, arrange torture to extract confessions and arrange for their imprisonment or execution. The system must be perfect which means that once a man is denounced he must be guilty. This is the perfect system for Leo's jealous underling, Vasily, to win promotion by denouncing his boss's wife. Demoted and sent away from Moscow, Leo and his wife start to investigate a series of child murders.

Thus this book is set in the paranoid last days of the Stalin regime (and the Beria regime after his death and the early days of the Khruschev regime after Kruschev's coup) and there is a lot of backbiting and betrayal but somehow I never felt the atmosphere of the novel recreated the sense of paranoia and suspicion and mistrust and general darkness that there must have been. 'Nobody can be trusted' is therefore more useful as a plot device that an ethos. Equally, Leo and his wife fall out because his job entails arresting, torturing and executing mostly innocent people but you don't get the feeling that this is a major flaw in his own character.

The plot is standard. It is not a whodunnit in any sense of the word: there are no clever deductions by the detective: he works out, long after the reader, that the killer of many children in different towns often near railway tracks must be a man who has access to travel. All he then has to do is to work our which two factories regularly exchange people and scan their personnel files. He's still late. We have been introduced to the killer half way through the book. The odd peculiarities of the killer's MO are never properly explained and even the final twist I anticipated long before it came.

I also hated the writing. The author uses the word 'would've' with distressing frequency, not in a dialogue nor even as characterised PoV narration but in the standard author voice.

This is a standard thriller; nothing special. I wish I hadn't bought the whole trilogy!

March 2014; 470 pages

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

"Perfect" by Rachel Joyce

In 1972 Byron lives with his perfect mother and his sister in a lonely house on the moors paid for by Byron's mostly absent banker father. Byron's mum drives him to his posh school in her new Jag. One day, taking a short cut through a run down council estate, there is an accident. And their perfect world, already stressed to breaking point, begins to unravel.

Forty years later Jim, newly released from the closed-down mental asylum, cleans tables in the supermarket cafe. Unless Jim performs his rituals, such as saying hello to everything when he gets home, something terrible will happen and someone will get hurt. The world rests upon Jim's shoulders. He is exhausted.

The two stories dovetail. Jim's mostly meaningless life provides a perfect counterpoint to the story of Byron lurching towards his inevitable doom.

The descriptions are wonderful. The posh world of Byron contrasts beautifully with the tatty world of Jim. The tautness of Byron's mum and her women friends was perfectly portrayed. I found more difficulty with the sordid world of the council estate. But the characters are nicely rounded. Byron's mother has a murky past - she had a show-girl mum - while her nemesis from the council estate is a vicar's daughter who seems to have few scruples about blackmail. Even Byron's dad, the control freak, is allowed a single moment of weakness. But Byron's friend, James Lowe, and his mother Andrea, a very one-dimensional. Worse, I found it difficult to believe in Byron. I couldn't work out his age. At times his naivete, and his young sister, suggested that he was about ten but the maturity of his language, his perception of underlying currents in social situations and the way he took control of situations with adults made him seem adult. At one point he becomes the carer for the family.

There is a twist on page 335. I spotted it coming before page 100. It knits the two narratives together though I found the link contrived.

This book has some wonderful prose and the sense of guilt twisting its knife to compound tragedy is classic. But it didn't quite work for me.

By the author of The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry. March 2014; 361 pages

"Stoner" by John Williams

The Sunday Times call this 'The greatest novel you've never read'. Of course this put my back up straight away.

Stoner is a farm boy who goes to University in the early 1900s to study agriculture but is seduced by literature and becomes an assistant professor of English. This is his life. The book begins by telling you that when he dies he is quickly forgotten.

Stoner is the everyman who is a holy innocent, making his way through a world scorns him and does him down. His only weapon is his integrity. As he dies he thinks he is a failure.

In some ways this book reminded me of Herman Hesse's Knulp. Williams seems to suggest that there is a transcendence to everyday life.

It is beautifully written. There are moments of perfect description. The prose is lean and tight but each sentence appears to be just right.

The plot is carefully crafted. The characters shape the world in which they live and are shaped by their interactions with one another. What happens flows inevitably though purposelessly from what has happened.

Is it a tragedy? For the first half of the book,Stoner faces repeated trials. There is a sense of impending doom that makes it harder and harder to read. One can scarcely bear to discover what more pain can be inflicted on this patient stoic. Exactly half way through the book, Stoner's integrity and purpose as a teacher faces its greatest test. Happiness does not really arrive until two thirds of the way through; at the three quarters mark this happiness is inevitably snuffed out. But from this moment things get better, even when he faces his terminal illness.

Is it a great book. Certainly it is almost perfect. I did find it difficult to read quickly, in part because I was constantly expecting more heartache. It wasn't a page turner for me. But I think it is a book I will remember for a long time.

Beautifully crafted. March 2014; 288 pages

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