The Book of Summers
The book begins with Beth Lowe, a young professional in London, living in a flat and awaiting her father on a visit from Devon. He brings with him a parcel for Beth from Hungary with a letter telling Beth her mother has died and a photograph album displaying the photographs of seven consecutive summers of her late childhood. The Book of Summers is structured around this album as Beth tells us the stories of those summers, of her parents' marital breakdown, of her own relationships with both her mother and father and of her growing-up and falling in love with a Hungarian boy Tamas.
The album idea and series of flash backs are, like the cover design, rather overworked features of some forms of genre fiction (Chick lit? Holiday reading? Maeve Binchy chest flatteners? Take your pick) and at this point I'd have been wondering what the heck the publicist thought they were doing sending this to me had not I been immediately enchanted with both Hall's prose and the protagonist Beth. Not, in the end, that I particularly like Beth (she is self-focused, juvenile, and full of misplaced anger and loyalties) but that in itself already lifts this novel away from what it first appears. Unlike typical holiday reading you need not identify with the main character, nor like her at all; she is too real, and like a colleague or a neighbour one just accepts.
Throughout the book has so much to recommend it. The handling of the troubled teenage years is done beautifully and if I am frustrated by Beth's rather arrested emotional development, then the events of her youth and the progression from happy child to surly adult is clean, clear and believable. The descriptions of life in Devon versus Hungary are lively, colourful and full of believable details. Relationships too are handled well, believable but not too tidy.
In the end I found myself thoroughly enjoying the book. As a bookseller I should know better than to judge a book by its cover. But what of the reader who picks this up seeking holiday reading? Well, it is a lovely read but it also has a very dark heart, and it is one that darkens as you finish the book and think about the events over the next days. On a sunbed I'd have been rather un-nerved by this. The colours of this book, despite the summers of the title, seem rather more autumnal to me. It has pretensions to literary fiction but it is at the more entertaining end of that spectrum. To me it is a warm throw and open fire kind of book, to mull over as the nights draw in.
All in all a very readable and worthwhile book, rather oddly packaged.
The Book of Summers
by Mark Forsyth is subtitled 'A Circular Stroll Through the Hidden Connections of the English Language' and that is exactly what it is. We potter along with Forsyth teasing out the meanings, origins and associations old and new for each word before progressing to another word, like a word-association game with a PhD. Part linguistic treasure chest and part history book it is a delight from start to finish, not that you ever do really finish. I keep picking it up and going round again. I know quite a bit about words, in part because of my academic background, in part because my father collects them like other people collect stamps (actually he collects stamps too), but there was plenty new to me here. Having waded through Paradise Lost as an under-grad I closed my eyes and my mind, I think, to the linguistic richness, and the section on new words by Milton was the one that amazed me the most. How did I miss all that!
. As many of you no doubt know you can follow Mark via his 
series by Peter Robinson. Some of the titles have been filmed recently for the 
, which I enjoyed, but I wish I had found the books first as they are so much better. They are set round here (Yorkshire Dales) and I am very much enjoying the local flavour.
by Simon Tolkien. Strangely out-of-print I thought this was an utterly engrossing book on both plot and character levels. An MP's second wife is accused of conspiring to murder his first wife setting her husband and his son against each other at the trial. Part conventional detective story, and part coming of age novel, I think The Stepmother captures the difficult relationships perfectly. Tolkien is a lawyer and much of the novel is courtroom based giving it a 'Witness for the Prosecution' layer, but it is so much more than that. I will be hunting down Simon Tolkien's other books. And, yes, he is of that family.
and it is very much still available in that edition. There are two subsequent books too and you can read more on the author's own website 
by Anthony Clavane. This is a wonderful book that I can see myself reading and re-reading. It is about football, but that is not the half of it and you should not let the football put you off. Promised Land is a tripart history telling, in lovely old-fashioned narrative style, the story of the arrival and rise and then dispersal of the Jewish community in Leeds; the arrival and rise of Leeds as a large commercial centre and newly minted city and its subsequent fall into depression with the other industrial towns of the north of England, and then its further yo yo economic fortunes; and the arrival and rise (and fall), (and rise), (and fall...) of Leeds United FC.
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