Category Archives: Books

Rob Roy by Sir Walter Scott

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Rob Roy by Sir Walter Scott was first published in 1818, but the setting is around about 1715, just before the first Jacobite Rising but the story begins in the south of England, Frank Osbaldistone narrates the tale.

Frank’s father owns a succesful business which he expects Frank as his only child to take over, but Frank has no intention of being tied down to something that he knows he wouldn’t enjoy. He refuses to follow his father into his business, which disappoints and upsets the father so much that he says that Frank must leave home, he’s cutting him off.  His father had been looking forward to the company and friendship of Frank now that he’s an adult. Frank doesn’t really believe that his father will throw him out of the family home, but he does, he also gives Frank the task of visiting the home of Frank’s uncle and cousins who are strangers to Frank as the senior Osbaldistone brothers had fallen out years ago, due to religious differences. Frank is to ask the eldest cousin Rashleigh to replace him in the family business, Frank almost changes his mind about refusing to work for his father.

Frank travels to their home in the north of England and meets his uncle, six male cousins and their relative the lovely Die Vernon whom Frank falls for. Rashleigh sets off for England and his new position, but eventually Frank hears news that Rashleigh has not been the good and dutiful businessman he has been expected to be, and Frank’s father’s whole business is in danger.

There’s a lot more to the story than this as Frank gets involved with Jacobite Highlanders and Rob Roy MacGregor, whom he had met earlier when he was calling himself Campbell.

I found the beginning of this book really hard going as Scott would never use one word when he could write two hundred, and it makes everything very dense, but towards  the end I felt my way through the fog, (I think) I was glad to reach the end of the 455 pages of quite small print. I think it’ll be a while before I tackle another book by Walter Scott.

When the book was first published it kicked off tourism in Scotland as people wanted to visit the locations mentioned in the book, and that continues to this day. I intend to visit some of the places that I haven’t been to already, but I grew up close to some of the locations. My gran was a MacGregor.

If you’re interested in seeing Abbotsford, Sir Walter Scott’s home, have a look at my previous blogposts about it here.

 

The Shadows of London by Andrew Taylor

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The Shadows of London by Andrew Taylor was published in 2023. The setting is London, 1671 and it’s a continuation of the Cat and Marwood series.

Architect Cat has a contract to restore an old almshouse, but work has to be stopped on it when a body is discovered.  The face has been mutilated, making it almost impossible to identify the victim. It could be a financial disaster for Cat and others. Marwood is still working at Whitehall and he has the job of investigating the murder.

At court King Charles II has his eyes on yet another mistress, this time she’s a young French woman, Louise de Keroualle, supposedly a virgin.  There’s more to the liaison than just the King’s lust though as it involves European politics, with the French intending to use Louise as a spy in the camp, and presumably to manipulate the King for their own ends.

For some reason the Duke of Buckingham who is the most inflential courtier has taken against Marwood, putting him in danger of his life.

This is the sixth book in the Cat/Marwood series which I have really enjoyed, but for me this one dragged a bit in the middle, I suspect that was because I felt there was too much of Marwood and not enough of Cat.  I’ll still read the next one in the series though, if there is one.

The historical note at the end makes it clear that the Louise and King Charles II episode is historically correct, with many powerful men involved in the seduction of the young woman. The author compares it with the Harvey Weinstein and Jeffrey Epstein shenanigans, but women have always been used by men – just ask Eve.

 

The Anthology of Scottish Folk Tales

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The Anthology of Scottish Folk Tales was published by The History Press in 2017. The cover illustration is by Angela Annesley. The book is split up into various areas of Scotland. Orkney, Shetland, the Western Isles, the Highlands, Aberdeenshire, Perthshire, Argyll, Fife, Midlothian, East Lothian, Scottish Borders and Dumfries and Galloway, with local authors and storytellers contributing. I had only heard of one of them, Sheila Kinninmonth, I was in a local history group audience when she told a story, not one in this book. She was quite well-known in her day.

The stories were all new to me, but they weren’t quite what I was expecting somehow. A couple were just local ghost stories. I can see though that if the stories were actually performed as they were meant to be, rather than just read then they might be a lot more entertaining.

I enjoyed most the Highland Origin Myth by Bob Pegg, about how those dastardly wee midges came into being.

I must admit that I gnashed my teeth when I read the story by Claire Druett The Fairy Boy of Leith (Midlothian section) as she writes Carlton Hill, Edinburgh when of course it should be Calton Hill. It’s not the first time I’ve read or heard people wrongly adding in that ‘r’ to Calton but it really should have been corrected by an editor.

I borrowed this book from the library.

 

Our Castle by the Sea by Lucy Strange

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Our Castle by the Sea by Lucy Strange was published in 2019. The setting is the south-east coast of England during World War 2.

On the first day of the war Magda came home from school with a split lip and a swollen eye. She had been in a fight and her younger sister Petra is shocked. The girls live with their parents right on the coast as their father is a lighthouse keeper, but their mother originally came from Germany and some people aren’t happy about that. They live in a cottage adjoining the lighthouse.

Of course the lighthouse lamps are no longer in use, but the glass still has to be polished up, just in case an important convoy has to be guided briefly.  The foghorn is the only way of alerting shipping to the coast now.

They all love living there, it’s ideal as there’s plenty to sketch, even their mother sketches, and that’s what causes a problem. She’s regarded as being an ‘enemy alian’ and under suspicion of being a spy and as Churchill had said “collar the lot” including people who had come to Britain to escape the Nazis. she is taken away, they’re all devastated.  She is accused of sending information to Germany, but the real enemy is much closer to the authorities than they would expect.

I really enjoyed this one which is I suppose aimed at older children (YA) but like all good writing it’s entertaining no matter what age the reader is. The story includes local legends such as standing stones, generational family strife, unresolved problems from the earlier Great War and the blot of home grown Fascism in Britain.

I bought my copy of this book from the internet, something I don’t do all that often, and I was chuffed when I realised that my copy of the book had been signed by the author.

 

Murder in a Heatwave – short stories

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Murder in a Heatwave is a compilation of ten vintage crime short stories. I was attracted by the bookcover which was on display in a charity shop, so art deco.

The authors are: Dorothy L. Sayers, Rex Stout, Arthur Conan Doyle, Carter Dickson, Baroness Orczy, Michael Innes, Julian Symons, Ethel Lina White, Margery Allingham and surprisngly Ian Rankin.

I had read all of the authors before, except Baroness Orczy and although I’m not a huge fan of short stories I enjoyed most of them. I wasn’t massively taken with the Rex Stout story which is I think the longest, and I have  a bit of a Conan Doyle phobia. I enjoyed The Mystery of the Russian Prince by Baroness Orczy, and I’ll definitely give one of her books a go.  A Good Hanging by Ian Rankin features the Edinburgh Festival and Rebus, it seems strange that he should count as classic crime, but that probably says more about me than anything else.

I think that the back cover is more art deco than the front.

After reading these stories all set in summer heat I’ll soon be going on to my Christmas/Winter themed books that I’ve been hoarding throughout the year. Fingers crossed they get me into the festive mood!

Bewildering Cares by Winifred Peck

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Bewildering Cares by Winifred Peck was first published in 1940, but  Dean Street Press reprinted it in 2016.

The setting is Stampfield which is a market town in the English Midlands and it’s a week in Lent.  Camilla Lacely is married to a vicar, and it’s the busiest time of the year for them. The book is Camilla’s diary of that week, there’s a lot to write about and she does it in an often witty style.

Camilla gets herself into a fankle (tangle) with the parishioners as when the curate preached what they regard as a pacifist sermon, she slept through it all, so she has no idea what they are up in arms about! They are all for running him and his family out of town, and she can’t admit that she was having a nap behind a pillar.

The country has been at war for about six months, it’s the period generally referred to as ‘the phoney war’ as not a lot had changed, rationing wasn’t that bad yet and ‘blitzkrieg’ was yet to happen.

Naturally Camilla is worried about her son Dick as he is at a training camp and presumably will be in the thick of it soonish.  Memories of World War 1 are coming back to her and she writes: Already I recognize the syptoms of the last War, when it grew more impossible to pick upthe newspaper, so that I often discover Dick learnt more about  the years 1914-18 at school than I did by living through them.

But this isn’t a grim read, there’s a lot of humour and although the vicar and the work that he does is very much appreciated by his wife, it’s evident that Camilla is the one with the heaviest burden dealing with the locals, all unpaid of course. This situation was very true to life right up to the 1970s for women who had chosen to marry a minister/vicar, like my sister-in-law, but nowadays I think that most spouses have their own careers to keep them busy. So making cheese rolls for tramps at the manse door probably doesn’t happen now!

There’s an introduction to this book by social historian Elizabeth Crawford, and Penelope Fitzgerald described (her aunt) Winifred Peck as being ‘A romantic who was as sharp as a needle.’

The book cover is a detail from Village Street  (1936) by Eric Ravilious.  I love his art, he became a salaried war artist during WW2 and sadly died when the RAF aeroplane he was in disappeared without trace in 1942.

Bags-I the Georgian house in the middle of the cover!

 

Zennor in Darkness by Helen Dunmore

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Zennor in Darkness by Helen Dunmore was published in 1993 and it’s the first book that the author had published. It won the McKitterick prize which is apparently for debut novels by authors over the age of 40. The setting is mainly Spring 1917, in Zennor, a coastal village in Cornwall, close to where D.H. Lawrence has settled with his German wife Frieda.

Clare Coyne is a talented young artist who has always been very close to her cousin John William. But he is preparing to join the army, much to her grief.

The village is full of rumours about D.H. Lawrence and Frieda. Obviously the fact that she is a German is more than a little annoying to people, especially as so many families have suffered the loss of loved ones in the war. Clare befriends them and asks to draw them. Clare’s father isn’t happy about that at all, people say that Frieda is signalling to U-boats from the cliffs, but he’s a vicar and has secrets of his own.

The first part of this novel didn’t quite work for me, it became more interesting when the Lawrences made more of an appearance. Dunmore, based that part on what is known of the movements of the couple who eventually were forced by the authorities to move away from the coast.

This was an enjoyable read but not as good as the other books that I’ve read by Helen Dunmore, which is to be expected I suppose.

The Winter Visitor by Joan Lingard

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The Winter Visitor by Joan Lingard was first published in 1983.

The setting is the 1970s in a seaside town in the east of Scotland, not far from Edinburgh (Portobello?) where Mrs Murray is living with her two teenage children. Mr Murray is working in the Gulf, but for how long nobody knows, he seemed to have dificulty holding on to jobs. To help with finances Mrs Murray runs a boarding house during the high season, visitors rarely want to have a holiday in winter, it’s freezing.

So when Ed Black turns up looking for a room the locals are surprised, especially as he comes from Northern Ireland, as Mrs Murray’s mother comes from Belfast the rumour locally is that Mrs Murray and Ed knew each other in the past. Nick, the son isn’t happy about the situation. The injured Ed had apparently been a victim of a car bomb which had killed his wife. ‘The Troubles’ mean that N. Ireland is a dangerous place to live.

This is the first of Lingard’s Northern Irish books that I’ve read. Although she was born in Edinburgh she lived in Belfast from the age of 2 to 18, from then on she lived in Edinburgh again. The atmosphere in Belfast was/is very similar to that of the west of Scotland, with ‘mixed’ marriages between Protestants and Roman Catholics being more than just frowned upon. I think things have moved on nowadays as religion has less of an influence on people in general.

I enjoyed this one so I’ll seek out her books that have a Northern Irish setting – eventually.

I really like the book cover which was designed by Krystyna Turska.

O Caledonia by Elspeth Barker

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O Caledonia by Elspeth Barker was first published in 1991. In some ways it reminded me of I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith which I liked but I ended up liking this one more, possibly the Scottish setting had something to do with that.

At the beginning of the book we are told that 16 year old Janet, who is the narrator has been murdered. Then in chapter one we’re told that Janet had been born in Edinburgh during wartime, she was her parents’ first child and as her father went back to the war having been unimpressed by his new baby daughter, her mother settled with the baby in her in-laws’ house by the sea, it was a cold and damp manse. But Janet was adored by her grandparents and the nanny, then 14 months later her brother was born, and all was right with the world as far as the grandfather was concerned, boys being much more important! According to grandfather Janet is a plain girl, girls are supposed to be pretty I presume.

Luckily as the family grows larger and larger they inherit a castle in the Scottish Highlands, but Janet has never fitted in. As she grows up her mother longs to have girly conversations about clothes and make-up with her, but Janet is only interested in books.  Luckily for Vera the mother, the younger daughters are pretty and girly.

When they were given the castle it was on condition that they allowed the father’s cousin Lila to stay there too and Janet is more like Lila who is seen especially by Janet’s mother as being a misfit, she collects fungi to study and draw – as well as drinks a lot of whisky.

When Janet is sent  to a boarding school she’s also a misfit. Not only is she bookish and studious but she dislikes playing games and has nothing in common with the other girls, so they pick on her.

Janet’s closest ‘friend’ is Claws a young jackdaw which had been blown out of its nest during a storm. Claws roosts on the end of Janet’s bed, she’s like the mother the bird can’t remember, but inadvertently Claws will settle his beloved Janet’s future, or should I say – lack of future.

Christmas reads

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Throughout the year I’ve been collecting Christmas and winter themed books, with a view to reading them throughout December, in an attempt to get myself into a festive mood. Last year was fairly dismal, my own fault as I didn’t even bother to put up a tree.

Christmas/Winter Themed Books

1. A Christmas Card by Paul Theroux

2. The Christmas Egg by Mary Kelly

3. Christmas Term at Vernley by Margaret Biggs

4. Murder in the Falling Snow – classic crime short stories (D. Sayers, G. Mitchell, R.A.Freeman, J. Symons, G.K. Chesterton. A.C Doyle, E. Wallace and others.)

5. A Country Christmas by Miss Read

6. Excitement at the Chalet School by Elinor M. Brent Dyer

Probable re-reads are:

7. Christmas at High Rising by Angela Thirkell

8. A Child’s Christmas in Wales by Dylan Thomas

I was lucky enough to be sent a copy of Stories for Winter and nights by the fire, for review. It’s a new one from the British Library Women Writers series.