sarahmatthews's reviews
66 reviews

A View of the Harbour by Elizabeth Taylor

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reflective medium-paced
A View of the Harbour by Elizabeth Taylor

Read in Braille
Vintage Modern Classics
Pub. 1947, 313pp
___

This was a surprisingly good choice for a holiday read, seeing as it’s main theme is loneliness so not the most uplifting of topics! I found myself reading it by the coast and the sound of the waves and clattering masts of boats along with the warm breeze all added to the experience.
There is a cast of about 8 quirky characters to get to know in this quiet and rather shabby post-war coastal town and it does take a while to get into their lives, but once you’re there you’re hooked.
The central friendship of Tory and Beth is so well told; they’ve known each other since school and are very different and argue, but also have moments of wonderful companionship. They live next door to each other now, Tory has a son, Edward, who’s at boarding school, and is divorced from her wealthy husband who’s run off with a young servicewoman he met during the war; and Beth and her doctor husband Robert have two children.
Beth is a writer and I was struck by how her storyline is concerned with the timeless issue of mother’s guilt, as she carves out a way to write which results in her becoming completely absorbed in her creativity and oblivious to what’s going on around her. And there’s a great scene where Tory’s delighting in dressing Beth up for her trip to London to meet her publisher where she’s comically disappointed at the end to find that Beth’s editor is a woman.
Bertram’s a key character who weaves the story together, and we’re introduced to him right from the beginning. He’s a retired naval officer who’s visiting Newby to take up painting but mostly spends his time ‘insinuating’ himself (as he puts it) into the lives of women in the town. He’s staying at the local pub where he spends his evenings playing dominoes with the men and meets Lily, a widow who he starts to befriend, and who craves his company. He soon transfers his interest to Tory who he’s admired from his vantage point at the harbour and also spends time with the housebound and rather bitter Mrs Bracey, who he gets to know through her daughter Iris, the pub’s barmaid. He thinks he’s doing good by making these connections but soon shows himself to be rather self centred:
“‘Yes,’ he thought to himself, ‘they will all remember me. Yes after, they will say to one another, ‘that was the summer he came,’ like the man in the concert party who wore the pink-and-white striped blazer and whom they all remembered and so often talked about. Where was he now? But wherever he was he had left something of his personality in the place as other visitors had not, a thumb-print, something not tangible like Mr Walker’s oil-painting hanging in the Anchor, but the very gentlest of mementoes, a stirring-up of the imagination merely. And I will leave both,’ Bertram decided, ‘the tangible and the intangible, the souvenir and the memory itself, the thumb’s pressure and the painting in the bar parlour.’”
Later in the novel I was rooting for Prudence, Beth’s 20 year old daughter. She’s a quiet girl who doesn’t have much of an independent life, cooking for her beloved cats and looking after her 5 year old sister Stevie, while her mother works. She sees what’s going on between her father and Tory and is filled with rage but is not mature enough to influence the situation. There’s a lovely scene where she finally goes on a date:
“While the sun was setting Prudence and Geoffrey sat under the may-tree in the churchyard. Prudence wore her sage green dress, her coral bracelets. Geoffrey read poetry out of a little suede-covered book. Prudence passed her hand across her jaw and put a little yawn into it as she did so.” That made me laugh!
This beautifully observed novel has a lovely afterword by Robert Liddell, a writer friend of Elizabeth Taylor. A touching book which leaves you wondering about the fate of the characters. 

   
   
My Lover's Lover by Maggie O'Farrell

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mysterious tense medium-paced
My Lover’s Lover by Maggie O’Farrell

Read partly in Braille and partly on audio
Headline Books
Pub. 2002, 288pp
___

I’ve loved Maggie O’Farrell’s writing for years, since her debut After You’d Gone had me in tears while waiting for a train at Paddington station back in 2000! I thought I’d read all her books but when I looked through her backlist recently, looking for a holiday read, I found a couple I’d missed. This is her second book and, honestly, it’s not one of her best but her characters are always brilliantly drawn and interesting enough to keep me reading, plus the mystery element of this book was intriguing.
The set up here is that Lily moves in with a man she meets at a party who has a spare room and they start a rather doomed relationship. I found it hard to really understand how she fell for him as he seemed self centred from the start and there were plenty of red flags and I wasn’t convinced they liked each other much, they never seem to have fun together. But I guess there’s a 10 year age gap and she was young and inexperienced and was caught up in the glamour of his career as a respected archetect; a power imbalance she didn’t want to confront. But the main point of the story is the haunting by the ex-lover that drives her to the edge and this was told pretty well on the whole. I enjoy a psychological thriller and this did keep me guessing and mentally shouting at Lily “don’t do  that, get out of that flat now!” Etc., which is part of the fun.
The second half of the novel changed mood completely but I really wanted to know the end by then so I switched to audio to finish it quicker and I’m glad I did as I found a lot to enjoy about it. Maggie O’Farrell does the time and perspective switches much better in some of her later books and it’s fascinating to see how she was figuring some of this out while writing this one. 
I was left a little unsatisfied by it on the whole and a bit perplexed as it could have gone in so many directions but just didn’t take the extremes in the end which many commercial fiction books do, and, you know what? I really liked that about it. I’m pretty sure the confusion I felt as a reader was intentional. A book about obsession, jealousy, being young and the weight of life’s pressures.    
 
Endless Night by Agatha Christie

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dark mysterious tense medium-paced
Endless Night by Agatha Christie

Read on audio
Narrator: Hugh Fraser
Harpercollins 
Pub. 1967, 245pp
___

Agatha Christie does it again! This dark and eerie novel starts slowly, setting the scene beautifully which lulls you into a false sense of security. You know there’s a murder coming but here I kept having to remind myself that something nasty was on the way.
This is a standalone Christie told from the perspective of Michael, a likeable young man drifting from job to job . Recently he’s been working as a driver, chauffeuring rich customers to expensive destinations across Europe and their easy way with money and carefree lifestyle has him feeling envious. One customer is the famous architect Rudolf Santonix, who is casually dropped into the story but becomes a big part of it in due course.
Michael is drawn to a derelict house that he spots for sale in a remote and picturesque part of the countryside with accompanying land which is known by locals as “gypsy’s Acre”, and is said to be cursed. There’s a gothic atmosphere reminiscent of Daphne du Maurier, including a local gypsy warning him off the land with stories of death coming to those that live there, which he brushes off as silly superstition.
Michael meets a young woman at Gypsy’s Acre who he’s intrigued by; they’re both drawn to the house and enjoy discussing what a wonderful place it could be. They arrange to meet again in London and a romance blossoms. Ellie turns out to be a wealthy American with a complicated network of family looking out for her and she tells Michael they must keep their relationship secret as they wouldn’t approve, their expectation being that she’ll marry a suitably wealthy man chosen for her. Ellie’s life up to now has been very protected and controlled so In order to maintain their privacy Ellie asks her loyal companion, Greta, to cover for her. I enjoyed this ‘calm before the storm’ start to this book but some readers might find it a bit slow.
This was a Christie in which I thought I knew where it was vaguely going, had spotted some connections between characters and possible motives and method for murder. And then there was a twist that struck seemingly out of nowhere and I was kicking myself for not having guessed it! Just brilliant.
The audiobook was a delight to listen to with Hugh Frazer doing a fabulous job with all the accents, very slick and professional.
I read this book in preparation for attending the live recording of an episode of Backlisted podcast at Foyles Bookshop in London next week and I think it’ll be a lively discussion!
   
Casting Off by Elizabeth Jane Howard

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medium-paced
Casting Off by Elizabeth Jane Howard

Read in Braille

Simon & Schuster
Pub. 1997, 496pp

___


The fourth in the Cazalet Chronicles series covers the years 1945 to 1947 as the family adjust to peacetime living in a changed England. We follow the innermost thoughts of all the characters including those who are on the edges of the family. The Cazalets have been very well off in the past, accustomed to running large London houses with many servants, and they are now leaving the safety and comfort of the big family home in Sussex where they spent most of the war, returning to London and having to make difficult choices about how they live now. Notably the younger children struggle to settle as they miss the country house full of others their own age to play with, having never known a different way of living.

I’m not going to go into detail for fear of spoilers as this book is part of a series, but here’s a small example of the writing:

“It was a windy evening. Blossom was being tossed off the trees to join the browning petals on the ground— it had rained earlier. A small child was listlessly kicking a large rubber ball down one of the straight gravel paths. Square gardens, he thought, were an adult’s view of a place for children. They had the appearance of being verdant—grassy lawns, shrubs, trees and a few flowers— but they were so ordered and confined that they contained no sense of adventure, of mystery: it was hard to enjoy something if you could see all of it at once.”

The three older cousins, Louise, Polly and Clary, are the heart of this novel and they all face tough decisions in their lives which are expertly explored with Elizabeth Jane Howard’s usual balanced and compassionate writing. You find yourself totally immersed in the intertwining storylines and I didn’t care at all that I saw several plot points coming as the storytelling is just so smart and compelling.

This series was originally going to conclude with this novel so the main characters get a resolution to their stories, some more definitively than others. I’m so glad she decided to write a fifth novel, All Change, many years later, set in the 1950s, as I’m not done with this family yet!
With transatlantic marriages, the harsh reality for newly disabled servicemen,messy divorces, unexpected pregnancies, navigating old age and many infidelities this book doesn’t shy away from the big issues of the time, and consequences of the war for one family.
So obsessed with these books that I’ve already decided that after I’ve finished them I’ll read Slipstream, Elizabeth Jane Howard’s autobiography, to see how closely Louise’s story matches her experiences.      
    

Have His Carcase by Dorothy L. Sayers

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medium-paced
Have His Carcase by Dorothy L. Sayers

Read on audio
Narrator: Stephen Jack for RNIB

Pub. 1932, 499pp

Victor Gollancz

___


I picked up this novel for the continuation of the relationship between private detective Lord Peter and novelist Harriet Vane that started in Strong Poison, and I’m looking forward to going on to her famous novel Gaudy Night after this one as they appear together again there.

This novel has a grisly murder (or was it suicide?) centred around a seaside town that Harriet’s visiting. She discovers the body on the beach and Lord Peter hot foots it down to help her try to figure out the details and ensure she’s not considered a suspect. Throughout the mystery Lord Peter and Harriet seem to have more creative ideas than the local police and Harriet even moves into the victim’s old lodgings!

The victim, Alexis, was a dancer at a large hotel and had been engaged to be married to one of the wealthy guests, and the mystery concerns the question of why would he have contemplated suicide when he had a secure life ahead of him?

There are so many quirky little moments to lighten the mood as things progress, such as this description of a policeman taking notes during an interview:

“The pencil happened to be an indelible one and had left an unpleasant taste in the mouth.he passed a pink tongue along his purple stained lips, looking to Mr Perkins’s goblin-haunted imagination like a very large dog savouring a juicy bone .”

Lord Peter continues to try to romance Harriet and she is still not having any of it, resulting in some amusing exchanges between them and this book is strongest when they’re interacting. 
I also enjoyed the description of Harriet reading through the books on the victim’s shelves as she tried to jog her subconscious for her detective novel, then turning to crosswords to try to get her writing going again.
The eventual solution was rather long winded with an overlong description of solving a cipher (which was tedious on audio), but otherwise entertaining. It took me a long time to read and the ending was rather abrupt, with Lord Peter and Harriet solving the mystery then speeding off to London to go out to lunch! A good read but not my favourite of hers so far.
Blind Spot: Exploring and Educating on Blindness by Maud Rowell

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medium-paced
Blind Spot: Exploring and Educating on Blindness by Maud Rowell

Read in Braille

404 Inklings

Pub. 2021, 106pp

___


This is probably the most enjoyable of all the disability related non-fiction I’ve red to date, just so full of relatable insights and thought-provoking discussion. I wrote so many notes!
It’s structured as 3 essays; the first called On Visibility (how the work of blind people is routinely undervalued and ignored), the second On Accessibility (how we improve life for all pwhen we design the world accessibly) and the third On Culture. My main focus at the moment is trying to explore how I can develop some kind of tactile art practice since losing my sight, so the highlight for me was the final essay where Maud Rowell talks about her own connection to art galleries and the meagre offering by major galleries and museums in the UK for blind and partially sighted visitors. I was very interested to read, for example, that in the 18th century, museum visitors expected to be able to handle the exhibits:
“This all changed with the rapid emergence of a middle class with wealth to protect, and so touch became linked with anxieties over theft or damage. Prudish Victorian sensibilities, exacerbated by fresh paranoia over invisible diseases, further vilified tactile encounters with art and artefacts by the uncivilised, unsanitary masses.”
This puts a very different spin on the events I’ve felt very lucky to attend over the years which are specifically designed for blind people, and often put a huge emphasis on touching sculpture with gloves on. As she continues:
“Across all UK museums and galleries, accessibility measures for the blind only ever facilitate engagement with a small fraction of the exhibits on display, a fraction of the time, with specially-designed tours (sometimes involving permissive handling) available only within small and specific windows.This significantly limits free and spontaneous explorations by visitors with sight loss.
This seems especially unjustifiable when the permanent collections of the UK’s metropolitan galleries and museums are free, protected by an almost sacred, untouchable subsidy that creates the illusion that art is accessible to everyone, without discriminating. The fact is that in reality ,the ability to walk into one of these spaces and freely explore any and all the exhibits as the master of your own time, pleasure, and cultural education is a privilege, and one that is not afforded to everyone in equal measure.” So very true!
This essay also talks about blind artists including a piece called Modes of Touch by Fayen d'Evie that I was blown away by when I experienced it at the In Plain Sight exhibition at The Wellcome Collection in 2022. It involved opening drawers in an old piece of furniture to discover 3 objects wrapped in cloth. The gallery assistant had a script written by the artist which was read aloud to talk you through ideas of how to interact with the objects and really focus on touch. It’s very much commenting on how exhibits are so often hidden in cabinets or behind glass.
The essay on accessibility has a section on how wonderfully thought out the train system is in Japan, with specially commissioned audio tracks for each line and I want to travel there even more now!
One more great quote to finish: “So while sight loss will always be an adjustment, it should never mean a severing from your sense of self, or from happiness - and we shouldn’t think it does, either. No one should have to feel that should they go blind, they must sacrifice their dreams or independence. We must fight the pervasive ignorance which feeds this mindset, and which continues to relegate blind history, blind accomplishments, and the realities of sight loss to the shadows.”
I think that at just over 100 pages this book effectively and eloquently introduces the barriers faced by blind and partially sighted people and I found I was very engaged with it throughout. Plus there’s a great afterward with suggested further reading. I’ll be telling everyone who’ll listen how good this one is for a long time! 
Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto

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emotional reflective sad medium-paced
Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto

Read in Braille

Pub. 1988, 160pp
___

This book contains a novella, Kitchen, and a short story, Moonlight Shadow, a fact I hadn’t realised before starting due to my aversion to spoilers on blurbs so when the character names changed I was a little taken aback and had to do some rereading to get back on track! Both stories were beautifully written but the voices were not particularly different and Kitchen ends rather abruptly so it’s easy enough to be a bit derailed.

Both stories are about loss, loneliness and adapting to change and I found them very relatable though of course with very different personal circumstances. In Kitchen, 20 something Mikage narrates the story. She’s alone in the world now that her beloved grandmother, who raised her, has died and is taken in by Yuishi and his mother Eriko who run the local coffee shop her grandmother frequented. The relationship between the 3 of them is very touching. Mikage starts cooking to help out in the house and becomes obsessed with it as a way to distract herself:

“I washed and bleached dish towels, and while watching them go round and round in the dryer I realised that I had become calmer. Why do I love everything that has to do with kitchens so much? It’s strange. Perhaps because to me a kitchen represents some distant longing engraved on my soul. As I stood there, I seemed to be making a new start; something was coming back.”

In the second story Satsuki is grieving for her boyfriend who we learn very early on was killed in a car accident. There are elements of magical realism in this one which I really enjoyed and the writing is gorgeous:

“It was a noon enveloped in warm sunlight—it made you think that spring would truly come.A light wind was blowing soft and gentle on the face. The trees on the street were beginning to sprout their tiny infant leaves. A thin veil of mist hung distantly in the pale blue sky far beyond the city. 

Such blossoming delectability did not make my own insides flutter; it left me unmoved. The spring scenery could not enter my heart for love or money. It was merely reflected on the surface, like on a soap bubble. Everyone out on the streets” coming and going, looking happy, the light shining through their hair. Everything was breathing, increasingly sparkling, swathed in the gentle sunlight.The pretty scene was brimming with life, but my soul was pining for the desolate streets of winter and for that river at dawn.”
Kitchen is melancholy, soothing, sad and uplifting all at the same time, a brilliant read! Written in the 1980s it’s very progressive for it’s time though some of the terms seemed a little confused at times and not how we’d write about these issues now. 
Spoiler Alert: Eriko is a transsexual character which is written about sensitively in general for a book from the 1980s. I did notice a couple of points where transsexual and transvestite seemed to be confused and a line that appeared to insinuate that she decided to transition because her wife had died and she didn’t want to be a man any more. Obviously not what we’d want to read from a 2024 perspective. Overall though Eriko’s character is written very sympathetically.
 
The Next Big Thing by Anita Brookner

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reflective sad slow-paced
The Next Big Thing by Anita Brookner

Read in Braille
Viking
Pub. 2002, 247pp
___

Julius is retired, his parents and brother have died and his wife has left him. He’s living alone in central London, his adopted city after his family fled from Nazi Germany. He’s looking for the next big thing in his life, pondering his past and feeling concern for his failing health. Sounds gloomy, right?! Well, the insightful writing just carries you along and pulls you in before you know it and you’re hooked on this story of loneliness and regret in later life. I found myself, like I often do with Anita Brookner, rereading sections due to the beautiful prose. Here’s an example to give you a flavour: 
“He raised his eyes to a rooffline bristling with television aerials , lowered them again to windows still blank before the evening lights were lit. The sky was already darkening; signs of spring were absent, and yet the chilly damp held a promise of greenness, of new life only just in abeyance. it was even possible to appreciate that sky; its opaque blue reminded him of certain pictures, though no picture could compete with this strange sense of immanence. With the crust of the earth ready to break into life, the roots expanding to disclose flowers, the trees graciously putting forth leaves. The impassivity of nature never ceased to amaze him. This awakening process was surely superior to anything captured on canvas, yet art made all phenomena its province.in its unceasing war with the effort of capturing moments of time art won this unequal contest, but only just. The majestic indifference of nature was there to remind one of ones place, and no doubt to serve as a corrective to the artist’s ambition. When the canvas was finished it was already a relic, outside change. And surely change was primordial; all must obey it. To ignore the process was to ignore the evidence of one’s own evolutionary cycle.’
Haunting, introspective and with a hint of dark comedy this was so good, just maybe  one to approach with caution if you’re about to retire! This novel was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2002.   
Western Lane by Chetna Maroo

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emotional reflective sad medium-paced
Western Lane by Chetna Maroo

Read on audio

Narrator: Maya Saroya

Picador
Pub. 2023, 176pp
___

“A clean hit can stop time, sometimes it feels like the only peace there is.” Gopi is grieving for her mother and at 11 she’s the youngest of three sisters and this new world is difficult and confusing. Their father is struggling, as an electrician he’s letting his customers down and has started talking to his wife late at night. The only way he can think of to connect with his daughters at this turbulent time is to immerse them in the world of squash (which he played with his brother growing up) at their local leisure centre, Western Lane. They all train hard after school but it’s only really Gopi who shows promise. She’s soon in need of more challenging opponents than her sisters and starts playing with Ged, the son of a woman who works at Western Lane. I really enjoyed reading about their friendship: 
“In the court with Ged I had the feeling that we were making something, and it wasn’t anything we could see or touch. I hit well, I saw the ball, it was as big as a tennis ball.i couldn’t help but hit it well, I changed direction and lunged…i moved easily and without effort. It was all Ged. He wasn’t pushing me exactly, but I felt he was completely aware of me. He was also aware of the walls and the red outline, and of the glass behind us and the corridor and the whole of the sports centre building…I felt his awareness of it all becoming mixed up with mine.”

As the story moves on Gopi finds that the discipline and intensity of training at Western Lane is helping. In the evenings she stays up late with her father to watch clips of a famous Pakistani squash player, Jahangir Khan, which both motivates her and brings her closer to him. So much is unsaid, with the family being unable to express their grief with one another. A squash competition comes up that both Gopi and Ged want to enter and their training intensifies. I know nothing about squash but found it didn’t matter as this story is very much about Gopi and her relationship with those around her and how they are all coping without Ma. It’s very touching and poignant:
“I got up early in the mornings, not to be alone, but because the whole night I’d been waiting for the day to begin. I stopped thinking of Ma,. The world seemed big and luminous, with some secret that would soon be known to me.”
Gopi’s previously safe world has fallen apart and in squash and the wider life of the sports centre she finds purpose and belonging again. This was an affecting exploration of grief that was both shortlisted for The Booker Prize and longlisted for The Women’s Prize. 
A Glass of Blessings by Barbara Pym

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funny reflective medium-paced
A Glass of Blessings by Barbara Pym

Read on audio

Narrator: Mary Sarah for Listening Books

Pub. 1958, 234pp

___

Wilmet Forsyth is a rather disappointed woman, though she lives very comfortably with her husband Rodney and likeable mother-in-law Sybil and also spends time with her friends Mary and Rowena. Rodney, who works for the Ministry, doesn’t approve of wives working so she spends her days trying to find ‘good works’ to do in her local parish, though she doesn’t seem too successful. She attends church and is well known and liked by the various clergymen who she finds amusing and fascinating.
The assortment of characters in this delightful novel are typically Pymian in their quirky ways and, as the story is told from Wilmet’s perspective, we hear her witty and often cattish observations which made me laugh out loud! Here she is giving blood for the first time, where she encounters a demanding woman with a rare blood type:
“‘This precious blood’ she murmured, and began muttering to herself, first about her blood and then about irrelevant things that I could only half hear - a quarrel with someone about a broken milk bottle and what they had said to each other, it seemed like a ‘stream of consciousness’ novel…Virginia Woolf might have brought something away from the experience, I thought; perhaps writers always do this, from situations that merely shock and embarrass ordinary people. And after all, Miss Daunt was probably only a little odd, nevertheless, I was glad when I was lying down in another room, drinking rather too sweet tea.”
Wilmet’s husband, who she met while serving as a Wren in Italy during the war, isn’t the most attentive and they don’t appear to have a huge amount in common so when both Rowena’s husband Harry and brother Piers separately invite her to lunches and long walks she indulges in their attention and finds herself a bit carried away. She imagines their romantic feelings towards her, but in no way intends to do anything more disloyal than mild flirtation. The scene where she and Piers stroll by the river and contemplate the furniture repository they pass is so well written and an unlikely highlight but I always remember it. There’s a lightly comedic feel to the book overall, though Wilmet does examine her own shortcomings including her self absorbed and judgemental nature, and we see her grow in subtle ways throughout the book.
This was a reread for me and I thoroughly enjoyed revisiting Pym’s world which is always more progressive than you might imagine for a novel centred around church life; here we find a gay relationship heavily hinted at well before it was legalised. I enjoy spotting characters from Pym’s previous novels mentioned in passing; Rocky Napier, Julian Mallory and Prudence Bates all appear.
Oh, and Wilmet’s unusual name was taken from one of Charlotte M. Yonge’s novels which her mother had adored. Interestingly, I’ve just read The Ministry of Fear by Graham Greene which includes quotes from one of her novels, The Little Duke, at the start of each chapter, a nice coincidence.