Book reviews

The House On Vesper Sands

Paraic O’Donnell

In this Victorian-era mystery, detectives professional and amateur become involved in a murderhunt with supernatural overtones. Gideon Bliss, an impoverished theology student down from Cambridge, is on the hunt for a missing servant girl, Angie Tatton. His uncle, a distant, eccentric figure, has left him only cryptic letters about girls of a certain ilk that he works to help. There is talk too of a sinister group known as the Spiriters. Penniless and homeless, Gideon falls in with the bullish Inspector Cutter, a CID detective currently investigating the death of a seamstress who fell from a high window ledge at the home of her mysterious employer, Lord Strythe. These characters converge on the house of the book’s title, where questions are answered and dark secrets emerge.

7/10 The Bus On Thursday

Shirley Barrett

Life has hit Eleanor Mellett with a right-hook of relationship breakdown and an upper-cut of breast cancer. Reeling from her treatment, she takes a primary school teaching job in the tiny mountainside town of Talbingo to start again. But Eleanor’s predecessor disappeared without trace overnight... Barrett, an Australian screenwriter, has fun with chick-lit stereotypes in her second novel: Eleanor warrants sympathy due to her illness, but is herself rather horrendous, and the tropes of best friend, new love interest and maternal longing are all twisted into unsettling, then terrifying, incarnations. Like Twin Peaks or The Turn Of The Screw, the low-level weirdness and black comedy builds slowly into dark horror.

7/10 A Keeper

Graham Norton

Broadcaster Graham Norton’s second novel is surprising and sensitive. The heart of the novel is a family story – split over two generations and 40 years apart. Elizabeth Keane returns to Ireland after her mother’s death to sort out her things and finds a small stash of letters that sheds light on her mother’s past. The narrative switches backwards and forwards in time between the two intercut stories with a masterful skill in construction. Grief, bereavement and loss are perceptively dealt with. There’s an honest picture of family ties and relationships with gentle humour running through the messy lives portrayed. The balance between the two stories never goes out of kilter and the ways we impact those closest to us is acutely observed.

7/10 How To Think: A Guide For The Perplexed

Alan Jacobs

The people who built the internet were probably not evil, but they have created an electronic monster that feeds off the most primitive wiring of the human brain. This has turbo-charged the culture wars that have been rumbling since the 1970s and is fast destroying the civility, and respect for one’s opponent’s right to be wrong, upon which democratic systems are based. A person can be full of higher moral purpose, and still damnably cruel. Humanities professor Alan Jacobs leaves the actual science to eminent psychologists like Daniel Kahneman. Instead, in this chatty and readable book, he looks at how we ourselves can tame our appalling lizard brains by bringing our pre-conscious thought-formation processes into the conscious light of day.

8/10 Dry

Neal Shusterman and Jarrod Shusterman

Dystopian teen adventure novel Dry takes climate change as its bogeyman, starting with the realisation the taps running dry is not a plumbing problem. It follows a motley group of teenagers (and a little brother) thrown together for survival after their Californian street turns feral in the search for water. Teen fiction author Neal Shusterman has a dual credit with his son, film writer Jarrod Shusterman, and it’s no surprise they are adapting Dry for the screen, as it seems written with this in mind, from the “water zombies” to a Hunger Games-style survival of the fittest ethos. This pacy read combines snarky teenage dialogue and everyday concerns about friendship, family and the future with the heightened emotion of facing the apparent end of your world.

6/10