In this memoir of a man’s life, from his problematic childhood in the rural south Yorkshire mining village of Hoyland Common in the late 1950s, through his current, highly successful adulthood in Sheffield, also in South Yorkshire, author Richard Hines makes total connection with his reader in “gentle and familiar” ways. Rarely, if ever, have I had such a feeling of intimacy with an author as he tells about his life and draws me in completely. The key to his whole life took place when he was just fifteen – the summer that he “manned a kestrel,” a small hawk. The first half of the book focuses on Hines’s childhood, beginning in 1955, when the author is eleven and living in Hoyland Common, a town in the shadow of the coal pits. His father and grandfather both worked in the mines, and as Hines reminisces about family life back then, we see a poor, working family dealing with a typically active young boy, sometimes in trouble, but mostly attentive to the “rules.” Close to his father, who is injured on the job more than once, Richard Hines also admires his brother Barry, six years older and an excellent student, with whom he shares a bedroom. Always a lover of birds and animals, the author keeps a magpie at home, a bird which, having never lost its wildness, terrorizes the neighborhood and inspires him, eventually, to release it into the wild. Not until he is on his way home from a hike to Tankersley Old Hall one afternoon does he see and get close to his first kestrel, a bird he decides that someday he will bring into his life. And he does. Vividly and honestly created and absolutely captivating.
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On the surface, The Illuminations, the fifth novel by Scottish author Andrew O’Hagan, appears to be a simple story about Captain Luke Campbell, a veteran of the war in Afghanistan, and his grandmother, Anne Quirk, with whom he has always been particularly close. Luke has returned from the fighting with issues which prevent him from becoming close to those around him, perhaps reflecting some aspects of PTSD. His beloved grandmother Anne, now eighty-two, is staying at a co-operative living facility on the west coast of Scotland, where the other residents and a caring staff are trying to keep her from harm as her developing dementia begins to become dangerous. A former art photographer, whose work has recently interested a group which hopes to present a retrospective showing, Anne spent time in Canada, New York, Glasgow, and eventually Blackpool, before she mysteriously stopped doing any photography in 1963 when she was in her early thirties. Luke, whose mother Alice’s issues have always prevented her from becoming personally connected with her son, has come to Scotland after the war to try to help Anne. Packed full of thoughtful imagery, well-developed characterizations, subtle changes which reveal the longings of the heart, and actions which each character hopes will inspire new beginnings, The Illuminations lives up to its title.
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As the novel opens on March 30, 1924, the Nivens, Sheringhams and others throughout England are celebrating Mothering Sunday, a holiday in which the citizens, aristocracy and servants alike, all celebrate their mothers. Servants are especially happy, as they all get a day off to travel to their homes and visit with family. Jane Fairchild, who works as a housemaid at Beechwood in an atmosphere much like that of a small Downton Abbey, will not be traveling, however. A foundling deposited at the door of an orphanage shortly after she was born, Jane has never known a mother or a father, does not know any birth name she may have had, and has spent her whole life in an orphanage – until, at age fourteen, she entered “service.” At sixteen she begins working for the Niven family, which, in the aftermath of World War I, has reduced the number of their household servants to two – Milly, the cook, and Jane, the maid. As we learn in the opening pages, Jane, now twenty-two, has been having a secret sexual relationship for the past six years with the only surviving son and heir of neighboring aristocrats who live near the Nivens. The young man, Paul Sheringham, will be entertaining Jane in his own house and in his own bed for the first time on this holiday, and, at his request, Jane will arrive at the estate’s front door as an equal, not at the servants’ entrance. Paul’s parents and the Nivens are off visiting with their friends, the Hobdays, celebrating Paul’s future marriage to Emma Hobday, a woman of “appropriate” class. The wedding is to be held in just two weeks. A close look at a young woman’s growth as an independent thinker.
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Both a journalist and a novelist, British author John Prescott puts all his writing talents to use in this stimulating work which straddles the line between reality and fiction. The Dig, set in June, 1939, near Woodbridge, on a North Sea estuary about a hundred miles northeast of London, engages the reader from the opening Prologue. Basil Browne, a local resident with great sensitivity to the both geology and archaeology, has returned at night to the site where he has been digging for several weeks and where he has already found evidence of a ship, its outline preserved by elements from the local soil which have replaced the material from which the ship was originally constructed. This Prologue sets the scene, the tone, and the atmosphere for the narrative which follows. Sutton Hoo is a real place, and its excavations, along with the internecine rivalries which emerged among local and national historic preservation groups, as they are described here, parallel what really happened in 1939, bringing the author’s journalistic skills to the forefront. The novel really excels, however, in the vibrant personalities created for Basil Browne, Grately the butler, Mrs. Pretty, and all the other participants in the drama of the excavation. These emerge from the characters’ conversations and behavior during the action, which though plausible, are not factual. Adding dialogue and some imagination to his reality allows author Preston much more flexibility in telling his story. His characters become much “rounder” and more realistic, allowing modern readers to identify with them and be drawn into the expanded story. A book that is hard to put down.
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In this remarkable and insightful novel, author Danielle Dutton recreates the life of Margaret Lucas (1623 – 1673) from her teen years until her death years later. From her exile in France with the Queen of England to her marriage to William Cavendish, an older widower who patiently accepts her unusual views of life and, eventually, her growing need for independence, Margaret shines here as a modern woman, one with whom the reader identifies because she feels so familiar, so modern. Despite the fact that as the Duchess of Newcastle she and her husband associate with kings, queens, philosophers, artists, and writers, Margaret is shy and vulnerable enough to make a modern reader hope for her success, despite some of her disastrous missteps and chronic inability to put herself into the shoes of others and to see herself as others see her. The history of the period, which the narrative wears lightly, focuses clearly on Margaret and her personal goals, and as the chronology slides smoothly from the civil war to the Restoration and eventually to Margaret’s career as a writer, the reader recognizes that it would actually be possible for a woman like Margaret to become an iconoclastic feminist recognized for her talent in the world in which she lived almost four hundred years ago.
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