Micro Review 18 (2025)

 

The Eights by Joanna Miller (Penguin Books Ltd.)

Wow! What a book. I can't remember the last time I stayed up past midnight because I just *had* to finish a book.

Set just post WW1 this book follows the residents of corridor 8 at St Hugh's College, Oxford as they start their university studies. They are among the first cohort of women students to be granted full student status and who will be awarded their degrees fully at the end of their course.

The four women, like all students in halls of residence, couldn't be more different but a bond is forged between them and they become close friends as their first year unfolds. All of them have secrets and past traumas to overcome - but none of these feel unreal or too modern and I just felt like I was a fly on the wall of 1920s Oxford.

The legacy of both the suffrage campaigns and World War One loom large and you really feel just how the impact of the latter in particular affected everyone in some way or another.

I see this book as a wonderful female centric companion to In Memoriam by Alice Winn, and also to Pip William's Bookbinder of Jericho  and even Jessica Swale's play Blue Stockings.

One thing Miller does so well is to bring in real life people into the story without it feeling like a name drop or research being crowbarred in to the plot - the story is just brilliant and I think it is another that will end up on my 'best of' lists at the end of the year. I really hope that it does well and appears on lots of prize lists!

Many thanks to Net Galley and Penguin for my advance copy of this novel

Micro Review 8 (2025)

 

Poor Girls by Clare Whitfield (Bloomsbury Books)

I had this book marked as a February release and so had been saving it for a New Year read but I think that in fact this was published in 2024 - oops!

It was the premise of this book that drew me in - set just post WW1 and all about how the girls and women who'd had freedom and money during the war thanks to their work settled back in to an ungrateful society.

1922. Twenty-four-year-old Eleanor Mackridge is horrified by the future mapped out for her – to serve the upper classes or find a husband. During the war, she found freedom in joining the workforce at home, but now women are being put back in their place.

Until Eleanor crosses paths with a member of the notorious female-led gang the Forty Elephants: bold women who wear diamonds and fur, drink champagne and gin, who take what they want without asking. Now, she sees a new future for herself: she can serve, marry – or steal. 

I raced through the first part of the book which covered this return to society but then found my reading slowed down as Eleanor leaves home and joins the London gang. In this part I found that there were a few 'information dumps' from Whitfield as she explained how the gang worked and they didn't flow as well for me. Some of the actions and descriptions were also a bit too dark for me - I'm a real coward in my reading and viewing!

Overall I'm glad I read this book, it is always good to try new things and I liked the social history aspects a lot but rather than more crime/thriller books like this one I'd rather read the non-fiction books that formed the research for the novel!

Micro Review 3 (2025)

 

The Artist by Lucy Steeds (John Murray Press)

Wow - two weeks into 2025 and I am still keeping on top of my vague bookish resolution with another review of a NetGalley book that will be published in January! I think that I will need a lie down soon...

As can be seen from my best of lists from 2024 I do like a novel that is based around art/music and in general the ones that aren't biographical work the most for me. I enjoyed Hamnet and The Painter's Daughters but I do spend too much time looking up the 'real' details to fully lose myself in these books.

The Artist could be about any of the artists working pre or post WW1 in France but is all based around a completely fictional artist - however it is obviously written by someone who knows a lot about art as it feels utterly real. I felt I could see, smell and touch every item described in the book and as I was reading it I am sure that I felt the hot Provencal summer sun beating down on me, even in a Norfolk winter.

It was refreshing to read a book that is set in France in the 1920s for it not to carry on into a WW2 setting, and the flashbacks to WW1 were beautiful and definitely opened up a new seam of history for me. 

There are a few twists and mysteries in the book but they aren't the point of the narrative as such and even when 'real' people pop up in the story it feels organic and appropriate.

The Bookseller has tipped this as one of the debuts of the year and I have to agree - it is published on 30th January and really recommend it! 2025 is really shaping up as a good book year. 

Many thanks to the publisher for providing me with an advance copy via NetGalley

Micro review 2 (2025)

 

The Life of Herod the Great by Zora Neale Hurston (HQ - Harper Collins)

Keeping on top of my vague 2025 plan and reviewing another NetGalley book that is published this January - this time the historical novel about Herod the Great.

I've long loved books that retell parts of history in novel form, and this includes novels based on parts of the Bible - The Red Tent from Anita Diamant came out back in 1997 and I think that I read and loved that one very close to its original publication date.

This book wasn't fully completed in Hurston's lifetime and has now been published using the drafts, notes, and letters that she left about the book and for the most part I think that the book works really well. Towards the end the details become more sparse and large chunks of time are passed over quite quickly, which is at odds with the rest of the book but there's just enough left that the book hangs together.

The Herod at the heart of this book is the King Herod from the Nativity in the Bible and we learn about how he came to rule Judea and what type of man he was. Hurston has obviously researched many of the contemporaneous sources as well as later interpretations and you are left with the idea of a man who could have called for the Massacre of the Innocents as in the Gospels or who might not have done and is on the receiving end of biased history - an interesting point to ponder.

I think for me the best part of this book was the way it clarified in my mind how all the various books/histories I'd read about before were actually linked. It hadn't actually occurred to me that Herod the Great and the birth of Jesus occurred roughly at the same time as is covered in Shakespeare's Anthony and Cleopatra / Julius Caesar  and Robert Graves' I, Claudius. I felt spectacularly dim as all the dots connected but also these other reference points did help to colour in some of the gaps from the book.

I'm certainly going to look out more of Hurston's books now - probably starting with Moses, Man of the Mountain.

Micro Review 9 (2024) Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize

 

The Silence in Between by Josie Ferguson (Transworld)

Next from the Debut Fiction list for me was The Silence in Between and again on paper just the type of book I adore:

The Silence in Between is a historical novel based in Berlin in 1961 and during the Second World War. Lisette lives in East Berlin but brings her new-born baby to a hospital in West Berlin.

Under doctor's orders, she goes home to rest, leaving the baby in the care of the hospital. But overnight the border between East and West closes, slicing the city - and the world - in two. With a city in chaos and armed guards ordered to shoot anyone who tries to cross, her situation is desperate.

Lisette's teenage daughter, Elly, has always struggled to understand the distance between herself and her mother. Both live for music but while Elly hears notes surrounding every person she meets, for her mother - once a talented pianist - the world has gone silent. Perhaps Elly can do something to bridge the gap between them. What begins as the flicker of an idea turns into a daring plan to escape East Berlin, find her baby brother, and bring him home....

This is the 3rd book I've read this year that is set all or partially in East Berlin during the Cold War and all of them have been absolutely brilliant - with this one sneaking ahead by a whisker.

As the author says in the end notes so much of this book seems to be too far fetched to have any historical basis where as the opposite is actually the case - and Ferguson makes the facts from history books and documentaries come to life in an incredibly visceral way. 

Some of the book makes for very hard reading but from page one I was hooked and I can definitely see this one being on my 'best of' lists at the end of the year. 

(The overall winner of the prize was announced as I was reading this one and I was genuinely upset that the prize didn't go to Ferguson.)

Micro review 15

 

The Figurine by Victoria Hislop (Headline)

I was very lucky to win an advance copy of this in a Twitter competition and it has to be said that I abandoned everything else and just got stuck straight in - I'd only been back from Greece a matter of weeks but I was already homesick for the people and place so this just ticked so many boxes!

I really enjoyed Hislop's sweeping history of Greece from 1941-1970s (Those Who Are Loved) told from a family perspective but I did find the ending abrupt, and it left me wanting to know a lot more about the military Junta rule of the 1970s.

The Figurine isn't quite a sequel to the earlier book in that all of the characters are new, but it does pretty much pick up historically from where Those Who Are Loved ended which was great.

In this novel we follow Helena first as a child where she spends summers with her maternal grandparents in Athens where she becomes fluent Greek speaker while observing the politics of the time without understanding them. Her family decide that it is too dangerous for her to continue these visits eventually, but while a career in the sciences beckons, Helena never forgets her Greek roots.

Life continues and Helena has the opportunity to return to Greece, first as a volunteer on an archaeological dig with her new boyfriend, and then thanks to an inheritance as an expat returning home and there discovering her family's past.

The title 'Figurine' refers to the second theme of the book and is about the topical subject of who owns ancient artefacts and the problem of their illegal trade.

I say topical as it was as I was reading The Figurine the story about the curator at the British Museum stealing items from the collection broke - sometimes books are incredibly timely and not written after the events to highlight a story!

I loved this book totally, I did spot the little twist in the tale coming, but this isn't a 'who dunnit' book, it is Helena's story and all of the events fit in totally with her narrative.

Another book for my best of 2023 list and I really need to re-read Hislop's earlier books to give myself that real Greek buzz as winter approaches!

Micro review 12

 

Disobedient by Elizabeth Freemantle (Michael Joseph)

I've just been lucky enough to spend a long weekend in Venice, surrounded by wonderful architecture and art so when I was looking for a book to read on my journey home Disobedient seemed the obvious choice from my Kindle.

This is a retelling of Artemesia Gentileschi's early years as she learns her craft and is caught up in the politics, intrigues and scandals of Rome in the early 1600s. Her life was quite shocking and she was subject to some terrible abuses but overcame them all to become a wonderful, if often overlooked, artist.

Rome 1611.

A jewel-bright place of change, with sumptuous new palaces and lavish wealth on display. A city where women are seen but not heard.

Artemisia Gentileschi dreams of becoming a great artist. Motherless, she grows up among a family of painters - men and boys. She knows she is more talented than her brothers, but she cannot choose her own future. She wants to experience the world, but she belongs to her father and will belong to a husband.

As Artemisia patiently goes from lesson to lesson, perfecting her craft, she also paints in private, recreating the women who inspire her, away from her father's eyes.

Until a mysterious tutor enters her life. Tassi is a dashing figure, handsome and worldly, and for a moment he represents everything that a life of freedom might offer. But then the unthinkable happens.

In the eyes of her family, Artemisia should accept her fate. In the eyes of the law, she is the villain.

But Artemisia is a survivor. And this is her story to tell.

The book definitely evoked Rome of the time, and I could clearly 'see' the action (and smell it too, such was the power of the writing) but at times I felt that the writing was too Twenty-first century and I did step out of the period setting.

I'd have loved this book to have been longer and contained more about the art and methods used - maybe not quite as detailed as Irving Stone's The Agony and the Ecstasy but heading this way! Once I read the author's notes at the end I understood the authorial choices more and came to admire the book in an extra way.