Lorelei's Secret by Carolyn Parkhurst


Paul's beloved wife Lexy is found dead having fallen from the branches of the great apple tree in their back garden.  The only witness is her Rhodesian Ridgeback Lorelei.  Paul, a university professor in linguistics, is desperate to know why.  Did she slip and fall, did she commit suicide.  As Paul delves further into his memories of his time with the woman who was everything to him and further into a kind of madness trying to enable Lorelei to tell him what happened he maps beautifully the torments of the shining artistic soul who was the love of his life.

One of few non thriller / action / crime books which has gripped and held me from the first page to the last, poignant, and deeply comforting in that Lexy's feelings of inadequacy, being lost and fearing her own self were a mirror to my own 3am reflections on my self.

Forbidden by Tabitha Suzuma

Lochan is an unwanted child, his mother married her father after she fell pregnant and had four more children to please his father before he abandoned them and left for America to have a new family.  As she didn't want her family Lochan's mother takes no responsiblity for them, acting as if they don't exist, spending her time money on clothes to impress her latest boyfriend rather than on food and clothes for her children.  17 year old Lochan is highly intelligent and deeply introverted, opening up only to his beautiful sister Maya, 13 months younger than him, his brothers Kit, an angry mosher rapidly getting in with the wrong crowd, 8 year old Tiffin, a complete tyke with genius for football and the baby, 5 year old Willa, an angelic faced cherub with a talent for art and a quiet goodness.  Out of this horror of neglect and emotional abuse comes love as Lochan and Maya quietly and desperately parent their younger siblings.  Suzuma deliniates each character perfectly and this is one of the few books lately I have actively cried while reading, so very very sad.

A Change in Altitude by Anita Shreve

Margaret and Patrick are not long married when Patrick takes up a post at a hospital in Nairobi.  Seen from Margaret's point of view A Change in Altitude plays on the elison of Altitude and Attitude, describing her culture shock as she becomes a priveliged white ex-patriate in a largely black impoverished society, a target for the simple reasons that she is visible and has whilst thousands have not.  Living in a cottage in the grounds of the large house of another couple - Diana, a native white Kenyan, and Arthur, an Englishman - they are invited to stay in the 'Big House' when their plumbing fails.  As emotions between the four become entangled Diana and Arthur invite Margaret and Patrick to climb Mount Kenya with them and the smallest of actions result in catastrophic consequences which raise questions about fidelity, love and what marriage can survive.  Very well written but very sad, deals with the subjects of ex-colonialism, marriage and love with a light but devastating touch.

The Blindfold by Suri Hustvedt

The first time I read this book I really didn't like it, then I reread it and began to be enchanted. On one level it is the story of the coming of age of Iris Vegan, an intellectually intelligent but emotionally naive midwest girl come to New York to university. Like a little girl in a fairytale she meets a cast of characters on the streets and in the buildings of the urban jungle, the creepy obsessive Mr Morning, the too too cool Stephen and his artistic friends, Iris' professor lover and Iris' own transformation into a she/he wandering the seedier pits of the urban landscape and New York itself. Iris an literature student and she describes the world around her in first person narration through the filter of her heroines. Give it time and it will haunt you.

On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan

I was first introduced to McEwan by my sixth form English teacher, through a slim little book called The Child in Time, a small book with a massive impact, and he's been my companion ever since, shining a light on the unspoken areas of our world, lost children, incest, grief and despair, and writing about them with heartbreaking sparse beauty. Few other authors could write about the marriage night of a newly married couple and extend it into a book length heart wrenching tale of misunderstanding, social life in 1962, hierarchies of life coming from academia and money (her) and squalor and madness (him) and hinted at incest and its devastating consequences for both. A book that makes me hope that I can be less judgemental and more forgiving in my relationships. This is more tender than his usual, a beautiful elegy to lost opportunity that made me more determined to live and speak without restraint, McEwan always has something to teach me.

AZ: "It is June, 1962. In a hotel on the Dorset coast, overlooking Chesil Beach, Edward and Florence, who got married that morning, are sitting down to dinner in their room. Neither is entirely able to suppress their anxieties about the wedding night to come ..."On Chesil Beach" is another masterwork from Ian McEwan - a story about how the entire course of a life can be changed by a gesture not made or a word not spoken."