Sarah Waters wrote a Stephen King book, you guys! Don’t be facetious? Oh, okay. Once again, Waters sets her novel in 1947, just after World War II, but in Warwickshire instead of London. Time-honored social hierarchies are beginning to break down, much to the bemusement of the genteel Ayres family. Their home, Hundreds Hall, was once a grand mansion but is now falling apart due to a lack of money. The family has been forced to sell its more valuable belongings and acres of the […]
We’re Gonna Go Back In Time
“Sometimes I sit through the films twice over. Sometimes I go in half-way through, and watch the second half first. I almost prefer them that way – people’s pasts, you know, being so much more interesting than their futures.” Sarah Waters takes an audacious approach to her fourth novel. The initial setting is 1947, when Great Britain is still recovering from the damage of World War II. We meet four unfulfilled Londoners: Kay, a former ambulance driver, wanders aimlessly around the city, unsure of what […]
Like Jane Eyre meets Jane Austen meets V.C. Andrews
Well, this book wasn’t what I expected at all. I picked it because I saw it had won the Orange award, and went into it not knowing much else about it. The cover made me think I was in for a romance novel with heaving bosoms and complicated schemes to bring about unexpected and perhaps diasapproved but fortuitous marriage proposals. However, the beginning quickly disabused me of those notions, as it started with a description of a decaying body being carried clumsily down stairs, and […]
A loveable grab-bag of historical danger and drama
Goodreads summary: “Their passionate encounter happened long ago by whatever measurement Claire Randall took. Two decades before, she had traveled back in time and into the arms of a gallant eighteenth-century Scot named Jamie Fraser. Then she returned to her own century to bear his child, believing him dead in the tragic battle of Culloden. Yet his memory has never lessened its hold on her… and her body still cries out for him in her dreams. Then Claire discovers that Jamie survived. Torn between returning […]
Historical fiction that bites, whimpers, howls, and won’t let go
This is my first Cannonball read and I can’t believe I picked a book–sort of at random, I admit–that I love this much. It’s a story of the Northwest frontier at the turn of the twentieth century so lumberjacks, railroad laborers, miscreants, drunks, and a few coyotes and wolves are par for the course. But there’s also a (maybe real/maybe an apparition) wolf-girl and a sort of carnival side-show version of a wolf-boy. In a book that’s just 125 pages long. I’ve never read anything by Denis Johnson […]
Book Two of the Century Trilogy
Book Two of the Century Trilogy takes us through the time between the World Wars and all the way through World War II. Lady Maud Fitzherbert is married to a German, and struggling in Germany with her family – trying to survive and fight the Nazis at the same time. The American Dewars end up fighting in different theaters (one Pacific, one European). The Russian Peshkovs (well, the one that stayed behind) are part of the Communist regime. This book features most of the main […]
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