My Year in Books 2025: June

After almost getting back on track last month, it seems I'm back to one-book-a-month posts again. I only read one novel for fun in June, and it was a reread at that. Ah well. Maybe July will see a longer post.

In case you're interested, here are my posts from the rest of the year so far: January, February, March, April, May

The Chimney Sweeper's Boy by Barbara Vine (1998)

At the end of last month, I read Asta’s Book, my favourite book by Barbara Vine (and probably one of my favourite books full stop). I think it was almost instinctive that I picked up The Chimney Sweeper’s Boy afterwards. This book is a family mystery, like Asta’s Book. It begins by introducing the ostensibly happy (but rather smug) Candless family. Gerald Candless is a successful novelist, who dotes on his daughters Hope and Sarah, but is on frosty terms with his wife Ursula. When Gerald dies unexpectedly, his publisher asks Sarah to write a memoir of her father. As she begins work, she starts to discover that her father wasn’t quite the man she thought he was. In fact, as she quickly learns (and this is in the blurb, so it isn’t a spoiler) he wasn’t actually Gerald Candless. The mystery here isn’t quite as rich and deep as that in Asta’s Book, and Sarah isn’t as engaging or likable a character as Ann (the protagonist of the earlier book), but it’s still a gripping read. As Sarah discovers the truth of her father’s life, Vine gives the reader period flashbacks, allowing the story to unfold through the dramatic irony as we get to know the real ‘Gerald Candless’ in a direct narrative his daughter will never fully understand. Some aspects of character motivation are questionable, particularly the way that Hope and Sarah ignore all the red flags of the childhood, but it’s a compelling study of troubled character.