Viral by Helen Fitzgerald

Reviewer: JJ Marsh

What we thought: In a similar way to Louise O’Neill’s use of a real incident as a basis for her fiction, Fitzgerald uses an infamous viral video as the trigger for this unsettling story.

From the first line – I sucked twelve cocks in Magaluf – the reader is drawn into an experience much like a nightmare: how did I get here and what happens next?

Su wants to be a doctor. She’s a virgin and a good girl. She wants to make her adoptive parents proud. Her sister, a natural conception shortly after the adoption, dismisses the ambition of good girl and chases good times instead. When the two travel to Magaluf with a bunch of friends to celebrate their exams, only one will return home.

Su’s drunken (drugged?) escapade is filmed by the club staff and put online to go viral. She can’t bear to go home and face her family, friends, boyfriend, neighbours, knowing they’ve all seen it. So she runs.

Her mother, Ruth, is a judge (or Sheriff as it’s known in Scotland). Enraged at the judgement of her daughter and the lack of any shame attached to the men or those filming, she goes after them. This is not just for Su, but for herself.

All the three women are significantly changed by their efforts to manage the impact, and the ending is unexpected yet satisfying.

Fitzgerald’s black humour and skill with changing pace makes this a speedy read while luring the reader into genuine emotional investment. Not to mention striking a terrifying note about social media.

You’ll enjoy this if you like: Jodi Picoult, Louise O’Neill, Fay Weldon

Avoid if you don’t like: What really goes on in Magaluf, exploitation of young women and emotional stress

Ideal accompaniments: Gin and bitter lemon, dried seaweed and Amanda Palmer’s Machete

Available from Amazon

Hamelin's Child by D.J Bennett

Reviewer: Gillian Hamer, author of The Charter, Closure, Complicit, Crimson Shore & False Lights (www.gillianhamer.com)

What we thought: Excellent first in the series gritty crime drama from a new crime author for me, and I always love discovering new talent! Hamelin’s Child is the story of Michael Redford, one day an innocent seventeen year old and the next through no fault of his own he becomes a heroin addict known as Mikey. The journey into his new lifestyle was totally real and I learned a lot of details and information about the dark side of London’s underbelly.

The author has a background in police work and the realism and procedural details help to make this book a real page turner. I found the journey into the murky world of drugs a real eye opener, the details of how heroin takes over Mikey’s life was very real and created a real sense of empathy with the character. It was a refreshing approach to see the story unfold from the point of view of the victim rather than the bad guy.

Characters and dialogue were expertly handled by a competent writer. The lost innocence of Mikey and Lee were very well detailed and the imminent threat and sense of danger hung heavy over the story, giving the reader no doubt that even though these boys were often not prisoners in the real sense of the word, they were most definitely under the complete control of their captures and the drugs they made sure the boys soon became addicted to.

Pacing, style and tone suited the genre perfectly and I would recommended this book to anyone who enjoys dark and realistic crime fiction. The ending was well handled, the highs and lows of Mikey’s family kept the reader gripped to the very end, and leaves us wanting more from the next in series.

Highly recommended!

You’ll enjoy this if you like: Val McDermid, Peter James, Peter Robinson.

Avoid if you don’t like: Drugs and life on London streets.

Ideal accompaniments: McDonalds Quarter pounder and a coke.

Genre: Crime Fiction.

Available from Amazon

The Gospel According to Cane by Courttia Newland

Reviewer: Catriona Troth

What We Thought:

The Gospel According to Cane shares its kernel with stories such as Martin Guerre, or Josephine Tey’s Brat Farrer – a stranger who turns up claiming to be a lost love one, in this case a child snatched when he was still a baby. Yet it contains much deeper resonances.

It is twenty years since Beverley Cottrell’s son, Malakay, was snatched, and although she has lost home, husband, job – she has managed to make a kind of life for herself, teaching creative writing to disadvantaged kids at a youth centre. But her frail balance is disturbed when she spots a young man in the street, staring at her, following her. Against the opposition of everyone around her, she becomes convinced that this is her son, returned to her.

The book is written as a series of almost haphazard journal entries by Beverley. In amongst the present day narrative are memories of her childhood, memories of her marriage and the loss of Malakay, dream sequences that take her back to the slavery era in the Caribbean, scientific analyses of pain perception – and a scattering of passages that only make sense when the book reaches its shocking climax.

The title appears to be a play on words. The Gospel According to Cane suggests both Cain, the brother of Abel, and the sugar cane harvested by the Caribbean slaves. Newland would thus seem to confront, head-on, the teaching of some white supremacist churches that the Mark of Cain, placed on him by God for the murder of his brother, was Black skin.

In Beverley’s dreams, she belongs to a family complicit in the slave trade. Despised by the Whites and hated by the Black field hands, they forge the chains and shackles and neck braces used on the slaves. These dreams make a bridge between the violence done to Black bodies in the slave era, and the violence – and acceptance of violence – that bubbles beneath the surface and occasionally erupts into the present day narrative. When Beverley records an episode of animal cruelty, Newland seems to dare us to be more shocked by that than what was done to human beings.

Newland's recurring image of a spider (including in one dream sequence probably best avoided by arachnophobes) evokes both the West African and Caribbean figure of Anansi – and the arachnoid mater (literarily ‘spider mother’) which, as Beverley’s journal entries tell us, is one of the three layers of meninges that protect brain and spinal chord and play a role in our perception of pain.

The question of whether the young man, now known as Wills, really is Beverley’s son Malakay is never fully answered. It is left to the reader to decide what the truth is, and whether it matters.

The Gospel According to Cane takes a simple narrative of maternal loss and psychological trauma, and gives it a far wider depth and resonance. Reading this, one cannot forget, either that countless babies were stolen from enslaved mothers, or that the damage done by the slave era still echo down through the generations today.

A Note on the Cover: The edition I read was the 2013 UK paperback, and the cover bothered me a lot, to the point where I have used what seemed to me the far more fitting American paperback at the head of this review. From the opening pages, it is clear that the narrator is a light-skinned Black woman of Caribbean heritage. And yet the woman on the UK cover seems to me to be generically Caucasian. Is this my distorted perception, or is it the publishing house ‘whitewashing’ the cover to make it more appealing to White readers -   Something I would have hoped would not happen to an established Black author like Courttia Newland?

You’ll Enjoy This If You Loved: The Long Song by Andrea Levy, Unless by Carol Shields

Avoid if you dislike: disjointed narratives, stories of lost children, spiders

Perfect Accompaniment: Curry Goat

Genre: Literary Fiction

Available from Amazon

The Ship by Antonia Honeywell

Reviewer: Catriona Troth

What We Thought:

The Ship is set in the not too distant future, when financial catastrophe has collided with destructive climate change to bring about the downfall of our world.

At the beginning of the great crash, Lalla’s father invented the Dove, a shell within the Worldwide Web, with the intention of bringing “fairness, equality, hope into a desperate situation.” It didn’t work. Instead, the Dove has become a tool of oppression in the hands of a brutal dictatorship.

Nevertheless, Michael Paul is perhaps the last rich man in the world. He has constructed a plan to take his daughter away from the violent, famished world they inhabit and give her everything he believes she needs to live a good life. But is this the right way to secure her future?

Lalla’s mother wants to live in the world and rescue as many survivors as she can. Her father wants to create a ideal world and choose the people to live in it. And as for Lalla, “If they were the knives cutting through the difficulties of the world they were living in, I was the whetstone upon which they sharpened themselves.”

When they finally set sail from London on the huge ship Michael has built and provisioned, the five hundred people he has selected to sail with them are overwhelmed with gratitude.

“But my inclusion was automatic. No one had made sure I was starving before they set a feast before me.”

Lalla is an adolescent, shielded to a great extent from the brutalities that the chosen passengers on the manifest have experienced at first hand. And she is not content to have her life circumscribed by the ship and mapped out by the father’s grand plan. Is she spoilt, or could her vision be wider than her father's?

Perhaps appropriately for a book set in a time where the modern world has crumbled away, there is something reminiscent here of Victorian novels. It is written in the slightly detached tone of a ship’s log, and the chapter headings, with their brief descriptions of the incidents to come [*We remember our missing * the stores *an apple *], echo Victorian imitations of the published journals of explorers. Lalla, like a Victorian heroine, seems by contemporary standards, at once mentally sophisticated and emotionally immature. There may be a clue, too, in the choice of her name – Lalage – borrowed from John Fowles’s homage to the Victorian novel, The French Lieutenant’s Woman.

The Ship’s warning about how close to disaster our civilisation is sailing is timely; its vision of the world after the fall, plausible. At its heart lies the moral dilemma with which Lalla’s parents wrestled – as human beings pushed to the edge, who do we choose to save, and how?

You’ll Enjoy This If You Loved: Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood, The French Lieutenant’s Woman by John Fowles,

Avoid if You Dislike: Post-apocalyptic stories, adolescent narrators

Perfect Accompaniment: A crisp, green apple, water cooled in a stone jug, and a garden.

Genre: Literary Fiction, Post-Apocalyptic fiction

Available from Amazon

Echo Burning by Lee Child

Reviewer: Gillian Hamer, author of The Charter, Closure, Complicit, Crimson Shore & False Lights. (www.gillianhamer.com)


What we thought: I am enjoying my literary journey through Lee Child's novels and the audio books are extremely entertaining.

Here, newly-single Jack Reacher is back on the road, unencumbered by his foray into home ownership and back to living in motels with little more than a toothbrush as luggage.

When his first attempt at hitch-hiking for some time comes with a higher price, Reacher finds himself involved in a bizarre murder plot in which he wants no part. The desire of an abused wife to have her violent husband wiped out might be viewed as self-defence in some American states. But Reacher is in Texas. And in Texas the law has its own way of dealing with victims.

This is another gripping tale of Jack Reacher at his best. I think I secretly admire the way Child shows so many different sides to this character. We have an ex-cop, scared of no-one, who knows he only has to roll up his sleeves and pump up his biceps to have people quivering in their boots. And yet, here we get to see his empathetic side, his intelligence and also his people skills. When the good guys are lying and the bad guys are invisible, Reacher has this seventh sense that seems to kick in and it makes for a brilliantly perceptive read.

I shall continue through my journey of Reacher reads, and keep you informed along the way. For those who prefer to dip in and out of Lee Child’s books, this is definitely up there among my favourites and shows off his exceptional writing talent to its best.

You’ll enjoy this if you like: Karin Slaughter, Jeffrey Deaver, Peter James.

Avoid if you don’t like: Long hot days and Texas.

Ideal accompaniments: Jack Daniels and ice cold Coke.

Genre: Crime

Available from Amazon

Empty Cradles by Margaret Humphreys

Reviewer: Liza Perrat, author of Spirit of Lost Angels, Wolfsangel and Blood Rose Angel

What we thought: The author of this shocking non-fiction tale, Margaret Humphreys, was originally a Nottingham social worker who, in 1986, began investigating the claim of a woman who stated she’d been transported to Australia on a boat, unaccompanied, at the age of four years old.

She gradually discovered, to her horror, and the horror of the British and Australian public in general, that as many as 150,000 children had been sent (without parent or guardian) from British children’s homes, starting in the 1920s, to a “new life” in Canada, Australia, Rhodesia or New Zealand. And that this had continued well into the 1960s.

She also discovered that many of these children were sent to remote farms run by religious organizations, and that this “new life” was, sadly and shockingly, filled with neglect and abuse, the children often working as slaves.

Once these children reached adulthood, they were turfed out into society to find their way as best they could, with no idea of who they were and where they’d come from. Or why.

For the charities, the child migrant scheme was apparently a solution to the overflowing British orphanages and the fact that the colonies were in need of a cheap labour force.

At great cost to herself, both financial and emotional, Margaret Humphreys made it her mission to try and reunite some of these child migrants with their families.

Empty Cradles is a well-written, heart-wrenching, tragic, but ultimately uplifting, story about the child migrant scandal from the UK to Australia post WWII, and I would highly recommend it to readers interested in such shocking social issues as this.

You’ll enjoy this if you like: true stories about bureaucratic scandal and cover-ups.

Avoid if you dislike: tragic accounts of neglected and abused children.

Ideal accompaniments: a comfortable chair as this is a real page-turner.

Genre: Non-fiction

Available from Amazon

All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr

Reviewer: Liza Perrat, author of Spirit of Lost Angels, Wolfsangel and Blood Rose Angel

What we thought: Set in both Germany and France before and during WWII, this brilliant literary masterpiece moves back and forth in time, switching points of view amongst several finely-spun characters with whom we identify and empathise. Through beautifully flowing prose, the author paints pictures of light, and dark, and everything in between.

It is an amazing story of determination and love from both sides of WW2 and Occupied France. The author weaves historical fact––The German Occupation of France and the secret radio broadcasts of the French resistance––with the fictive story of a cursed diamond, into a rich and compelling story, deftly guiding the reader toward the day when gifted German boy, Werner, and blind French girl, Marie-Laure meet during the bombing of Saint-Malo.

Right from the first page, each small part of the story puzzle fits together as deftly as the miniature models Marie-Laure’s father constructs to help his daughter navigate the streets of Paris and Saint-Malo. And culminates in an unpredictable outcome as the final plot piece slots into place to uncover the hidden treasure.

Heartbreaking but ultimately uplifting, this portrayal of the light we don’t, or cannot see, is nothing short of dazzling; a novel to inhabit, to learn from and to mourn once it’s finished.

You’ll like this if you enjoyed: literary works such as The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey, The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt and Sue Monk Kidd’s The Invention of Wings.

Avoid if you don’t like: character-driven, descriptive drama that doesn’t necessarily end happily ever after.

Ideal accompaniments: glass of smoky Bordeaux red wine, a portion of pigeon pie and a comfortable armchair (you won’t be moving for a while).

Genre: Historical Literary Fiction

Available from Amazon