The China Room of the title is a small outbuilding on a farm in the Punjab. It gets its name from the set of six old willow-pattern plates that used to be arranged on a high shelf above the fire. It is also the link between the two strands of Sunjeev Sahota’s third novel. In 1929 it is where we meet three young girls who have been chosen to marry the three sons of widowed … [Read more...]
John Banville – Snow
'The body is in the library,’ Colonel Osborne said. ‘Come this way.’ I love this as a set-up in this book. It immediately puts you in a Ngaio Marsh, Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers frame of mind. A country house murder, with a small cast of potential murderers, and a steady detective to piece it all together. The detective in question is St John Strafford. He has been … [Read more...]
Laura Shepherd-Robinson – Daughters of Night
The novel opens with Caroline (Caro) Corsham heading for a clandestine meeting at the pleasure gardens in Vauxhall only to find instead a dead woman, whose last words are 'he knows'. Caro knows the woman , a Contessa named Lucia having befriended her earlier in the year. However, it soon becomes apparent that the dead girl was actually a well know prostitute, called … [Read more...]
Charlotte McConaghy – The Last Migration
Set in the near future where more and more animals are becoming extinct, our protagonist Franny Stone, has tagged what might be the last of the Arctic terns, and is determined to follow them on what may be their final migration from Greenland to Antarctica . To do this she has to talk her way onto one of the few remaining fishing boats heading south – the Saghani (the Inuit … [Read more...]
Eley Williams – The Liars Dictionary
I have soft spot both for books about books and, books where two interlinked stories play out across time, so Eley Williams' debut novel immediately appealed to me. Alternating between the worlds of Peter Winceworth in the late 1800's and Mallory in the present day England the book is about dictionary words. The connecting tissue is the Swansby’s New Encyclopaedic Dictionary. … [Read more...]