Storytime
The Last Reunion by Kayte Nunn, Hachette
The women soldiers of the WWII Burma campaign were forgotten fighters. Nunn’s superb segueing skills bring to life three recruits and their commander, at a New Year’s Eve 1999, 55 years reunion. Calcutta 1944, rich Beatrix sits out the war rolling bandages. But when Bubbles and Plum sign up for mobile canteen duty, Bea enlists too. London 1999, Aussie Olivia is despatched by her art dealer boss to Bea Pelham’s mansion to finalise the sale of rare netsuke (valuable Japanese ivory, amber, coral sash toggles). When Olivia gets stranded at Bea’s remote mansion, the women forge a firm bond. In Oxford in 1976, a woman had stolen these netsuke from an unlocked cabinet at Ashmolean Museum.
The Affair by Danielle Steel, Pan Macmillan
A mother and her four daughters close ranks when one of their husbands has an affair with a high-profile actress who is now pregnant. Widow Rose McCarthy, 66, is the legendary editor of Mode magazine. Her eldest daughter, Athena, is a celebrity chef; Venetia a fashion designer; Olivia a high court judge; and the youngest, Nadia, a Paris interior designer who has two daughters with best-selling novelist husband Nicolas
Bateau. But when Bateau has an affair with 22-year-old actress Pascale there’s pressure at Mode to put her on the cover. The staff are unaware he is
Rose’s son-in-law;
Rose has a delicate decision to make. She does put Pascale on the cover but remains her dignified self.
Whereabouts by Jhumpa Lahiri, Bloomsbury
Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Jhumpa Lahiri usually writes in English, but having moved from the US to Italy she wrote this elegant, intriguing novel first in Italian and then personally translated it into
English. The spare poetic prose is addictive as we enter the mind of our narrator – single, female, middle-aged – who offers up snapshots of her life. With her we amble around an unnamed Italian city and learn of her bereavement following her father’s death, her distant and difficult relationship with her mother, her romantic longings, past lovers and frustrations at unavailable friends. Her observations are exquisite and slowly we reach into her soul. The power and poignancy of the story is as much in what is left unsaid.