Book reviews

The Ninth Child

Sally Magnusson

Broadcaster Sally Magnusson’s latest novel The Ninth Child is an eerie tale blending Scottish folklore with historical fiction in a page-turning read. Varying voices tell the story of a well-to-do doctor and his wife moving from a slum-ridden Victorian Glasgow to the Trossachs as a pioneering water scheme is built at Loch Katrine to serve the cholera-plagued city. At the site which inspired Sir Walter Scott to pen The Lady of the Lake, the wife, Isabel Aird, meets a mysterious minister as she grieves a series of miscarriages, but her Highland housekeeper discovers his true nature. Entertaining, educational and thought-provoking, The Ninth Child is pacy and accomplished, with particular skill in capturing the supernatural chill attached to some of Scotland’s most picturesque sights.

7/10 A Thousand Moons

Sebastian Barry

In A Thousand Moons, Sebastian Barry takes the reader back to the world of 19th Century America and the lives of former soldiers Thomas McNulty and John Cole, and their adopted daughter Winona, who he first introduced in his novel Days Without End. This time, the story is told by Winona, a Lakota girl who the two men have rescued from the violence inflicted on her people and brought to live with them on a farm in Tennessee. There she suffers a traumatic event with far-reaching consequences for her and their little family. With his lyrical prose, Barry brings vividly to life a society struggling with violence and disorder in the aftermath of the civil war. In returning readers to a world they already know, sequels rarely quite match the freshness of a brand-new story; but people who loved Days Without End won’t be disappointed.

7/10

This Lovely City

Louise Hare

It’s 1948 and the Blitz has left London in ruins. Lawrie arrives with the Windrush, a jazz musician ready to help England rebuild itself, only to find his welcome is less than sincere. A postman by day, Lawrie tours Soho’s music halls by night. He falls in love with the girl next door and struggles to find his place in a broken city. But London isn’t ready. Caught in a strange period between victory and mourning, the city punishes Lawrie and his friends, ostracising them and setting them apart. So, when Lawrie discovers the baby, dead and abandoned on the black side of town, it comes as little surprise that he is made chief suspect. Louise Hare’s compelling debut is a slow-moving murder-mystery and a fractured love story, tenderly shedding light on an overlooked moment in history, when discrimination forced ordinary people to take unthinkable measures for acceptance. 6/10

House of Glass

Hadley Freeman

Guardian journalist Hadley Freeman first holds up to the light her Polish-French (and reluctant American) grandmother, Sala Glass. Her intention was to tell this glamorous, mysterious and distantly dissatisfied woman’s story through fashion, yet Freeman pans wider into The Story and Secrets of a Twentieth-Century Jewish Family. Cultural identity, the Second World War and lethal anti-Semitism are all embraced. Hadley’s portal is a shoebox of memories found in her grandmother’s wardrobe, from which she pulls her characters, notably Sala and her flamboyant brother Alex, wheeler-dealer and unlikely couture king of Paris, and Sala’s American-Jewish husband Bill, forever more in love with his wife than she with him. Freeman writes with great clarity and has an enviably light way with a weight of information.

8/10

Grief Angels

David Owen

This YA novel is a powerful meditation on grief and friendship told from the perspectives of two struggling teen boys. Owen’s dad has recently died, his old friends have abandoned him, and now he’s all alone in a new school. At the new school, Duncan has troubles of his own – a friendship group he feels increasingly isolated from, a terror of girls, a depression he daren’t tell anyone about. The story alternates between each viewpoint as Owen and Duncan get to know each other and what gives the novel an additional, rich dimension are our excursions into Owen’s inner world. Owen sees powerful visions of skeletal angels which circle above him and gradually lead him on a terrifying otherworldly quest to seek out the answers about who he is and how he can continue. This is a very satisfying read – tense, moving and emotionally intelligent.

9/10