My Year in Books 2022: November

Time for my penultimate book review post of the year. I'm a little bit last posting this, but at least there's a healthy number of titles on this month's list. As you'll see, most of them are library books, so maybe that's what has got me out of the cycle of short posts!

In case you're interested, here are my posts for the rest of the year: January, February, March, April, May, June, July, August, September, October

Silverweed Road by Simon Crook (2022)

The first book on this list should really have been on last month’s, as it was one of my Halloween books. I didn’t quite finish it before I posted my October list, so I’ve included it on November’s instead. I got a copy of Silverweed Road as soon as it came out, because it looked like it would be a proper Halloween read. And it was! Although it’s a novel, it’s got the feel of an anthology horror film. Each chapter is a self-contained story, and each one is about a household on the eponymous cul-de-sac. The framing narrative is a blog written by a former police officer, recounting the mysterious occurrences on the road, as well as his failure to solve them. The reason why the book works so well is that each of the twelve chapters is a different kind of story, employing different horror tropes – this is what creates the anthology horror feel. So, we start off with a classic ‘don’t mess with jackdaws’ suburban horror, but elsewhere there’s some folk horror, a few ghosts, a very Tales of the Unexpected-esque story about a disreputable antiques dealer, a Faustian deal, a house that defies explanation, and so on. The novel draws on a lot of inspirations (some clearly stated, others more implicit), so it’s a fun read for genre fans. Ultimately, there is an explanation given, and I would probably have preferred a more open ending, but other than that, this one was perfect for the season!

The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North (2014)

The next book on this month’s list was a library book. I read another book by Claire North this year (84K), and I really enjoyed it, so I had high hopes for this one. But I was also a bit trepidatious. It was clear that The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August shares a premise with Life After Life by Kate Atkinson, a book that I absolutely love. That premise is that the protagonist lives the same life over and over again – i.e. when they die, they immediately return to the time and place of their birth. Given how much I like Atkinson’s novel, I was worried North’s might not measure up. But I needn’t have worried… the two books (for all their shared premise) are very different. Atkinson’s novel is a character study, with its protagonist being an unexplained oddity who never quite gets to grips with her unusual version of immortality. North’s novel, on the other hand, is an adventure story. Harry August is not the only immortal person (called kalachakra or ouroboreans) in this world. There are clubs full of them, and (unlike Atkinson’s protagonist) they generally carry memories of previous incarnations through their subsequent lives. When Harry gets a message from the future (the mechanics of this make sense – don’t worry!) that the world is ending, he’s drawn into a plot to wipe out the kalachakra, which throws him into the path of someone that will become his nemesis for many lifetimes. I loved this book!

Jasmyn by Alex Bell (2009)

And another library book now (this is very much the theme of this year, isn’t it?) Jasmyn is a bit of an unexpected read. As the foreword warns, it really doesn’t develop in the direction you might be expecting. The eponymous Jasmyn is a young widow. Her husband Liam has died of an aneurysm, and when we first meet her she’s lost in the rawness of grief. However, some strange things have started to happen. The bodies of five black swans fall on Liam’s coffin at his funeral, and before long a strange (and rather threatening) man turns up at Jasmyn’s door. And that’s not to mention the unexplained feud between Liam and his brother Ben, which no one around Jasmyn wants to talk about. The book begins with hints of something potentially supernatural surrounding Liam’s life and death, and I guess that is what transpires. But the sort of ‘supernatural’ here isn’t quite what I was expecting. When the blurb says it’s a ‘magical story’, that really is what you get from Jasmyn. Without giving too many spoilers, this is a book where magic and fairy tale intrude into the contemporary ‘real’ world. Bell works a fine balance between the fantastic and the realistic – we’re supposed to believe in Jasmyn as a person who exists in our world, but we’re also asked to accept the existence of folkloric and fairy tale creatures. On the whole, this works really well, and the result is a compelling and quite charming tale.

The Dinner Guest by B.P. Walter (2021)

The next book – you guessed it – was another library book. This one was a bit more of straightforward domestic thriller, which is a genre I have very mixed feelings about! Charlie is a well-to-do (very well-to-do) Instagram influencer, who is married to Matthew and has an adopted son called Titus. One night, as they’re eating dinner, a woman who they barely know arrives at their house, stabs Matthew through the heart, calls the police and confesses to the crime. This is where the book starts, by the way – it’s not a spoiler! This premise was intriguing enough for me to put aside my reservations about the genre and give the book a go. Straightaway, I enjoyed the fragmented way the story unfolds. Chapters are told from different perspectives, and they jump back and forth between incidents before and after the murder, sometimes showing the same incident from different points-of-view. It’s quite clear from the start that Rachel (the mysterious dinner guest) might not actually have committed the murder, and it’s also quite clear that the men’s friendship with her might not be quite as it seems (but that’s probably a given for this type of novel!). Admittedly, the characters are incredibly posh, to the point of almost being unrelatable, and some of their motives are a bit hard to believe (some of the ‘reveals’ towards the end are a little difficult to swallow). But ultimately Walters’s storytelling style is interesting and entertaining enough to keep you reading until the end.

The Lie of the Land by Amanda Craig (2017)

And the next book was another library book (as if you needed telling), and a bit of a change of pace. The Lie of the Land is part thriller, part dark comedy, part slice-of-life tale of well-to-do middle class Londoners moving to Devon after losing their well-paid city jobs. Quentin and Lottie are getting divorced as a result of Quentin’s infidelity, but neither of them can afford to buy out the other’s half of their London home. They decide to rent the house out until they can find a buyer, and move to Devon while they wait. Lottie’s son (Quentin’s stepson) Xan gets a job in the local pie factory, and the couple’s two daughters join the local school. Quentin (a journalist) gets a gig writing a regular column about what it’s like moving to the countryside from London, and Lottie (an architect) tries to find work with local firms. The family have moved to an old farm house on the grounds of a manor house owned by world-famous rock musician, Gore Tore, but they soon find out it was the site of a grisly murder not long before they moved in. There’s a lot going on here, and it doesn’t always gel together perfectly. The grislier elements – and the melodramatic resolution of the murder plot – seem to belong to a different novel to the depictions of rural life and musings on the London housing market. It’s well-written, with some interesting elements, but it’s a bit inconsistent in its storytelling.

Things in Jars by Jess Kidd (2019)

And finally… it’s another library book! I picked this one up as I read another novel by Jess Kidd earlier this year, The Hoarder, and I really enjoyed it. I knew Things in Jars was a bit of a different type of story (and not necessarily the sort I usually read), but I liked Kidd’s writing style in The Hoarder, so I was hoping for more of the same. And that’s what I got! The book is set in the Victorian period (mostly in the 1860s, but with some flashbacks to the 1840s). Bridie Devine is an unconventional investigator, part consulting detective (working with Scotland Yard in an almost Holmesian way) and part forensic scientist (she uses techniques she learnt while apprenticed to a surgeon as a child). She is accompanied on her pursuits by a ghost of a boxer who she picks up in a graveyard one night, and her housekeeper/companion, the seven-foot-tall former circus performer Cora Butter. Bridie ends up on the trail of a missing child, who may well be something out of the ordinary. The novel takes in the grand macabre of Victorian London – sinister circuses, psychopathic surgeons, cabinets of curiosities and resurrectionists – with a stylish mixture of ghoulishness and whimsy. Kidd’s writing keeps things moving at a fair pace, pulling off the impressive feat of being both chilling and charming in equal measure. And some bits are incredibly chilling! (And some incredibly charming!). This one is a real page-turner, and a strong recommendation from me.