Are they telling big little lies?
THE COTTINGLEY SECRET by Hazel Gaynor (HarperCollins £7.99) IN 1917, two Yorkshire children claimed to have seen and photographed fairies.
The images — of pretty little girls and tiny winged creatures — caught the warwearied public imagination, including that of Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes. Many wouldn’t have been fooled, but Conan Doyle and other ‘experts’ were.
Cue trouble for Gaynor’s heroines, Frances and Elsie. They’re not quite lying, but neither is it the truth.
This fascinating fictionalisation of their story alternates with that of Olivia, a present-day bride-to-be.
She returns to Ireland when her grandfather leaves her a bookshop. Wonderful things start to happen, many of a mystical nature. Do the Little People really exist?
This absorbing, unashamedly romantic novel sprinkles fairy dust on unmagical February.
IVY AND ABE by Elizabeth Enfield (Michael Joseph £12.99) ANOTHER of those novels where the same pair of lovers find and lose each other through the decades.
The USP here is that Ivy and Abe have different relationships at different times and no version connects to any other. Sometimes they’re husband and wife, sometimes partners in an affair.
They meet for the first time at an Eighties party in Bloomsbury and also in a bar in Copenhagen in 2000.
Equally, they have known each other since they were children and they’re together at the end of their lives.
Confused? You might be, as you have to work out what’s happening in every new chapter. While a tad downbeat and a bit self-indulgent, it’s nevertheless well written and full of emotional truth.
THE QUEEN OF BLOODY EVERYTHING by Joanna Nadin (Mantle £14.99) IT’S the famously hot summer of ’76. Six-year-old Dido and her mercurial mother Edie are moving from a London squat to suburban Essex.
Having lived in boho squalor, Dido’s desperate to be normal. So, when she sees the perfect life of Harry and Tom, the children over the fence, she wants a piece of it.
A friendship begins that lasts through teenhood and university, through jobs and disastrous relationships.
Will Dido and Tom ever get it together?
This heartfelt coming-of-age novel is a wonderful example of ‘Spangles Lit’, books recalling Seventies childhoods in all their polyester glory.
But, while it’s amusing, some characters are hard to warm to and there’s much Young Adult-style emoting. Possibly Nadin — a great YA success — hasn’t yet nailed adult fiction.