Also running through the book is the intense loneliness felt by Davies as he carried his secret. He talks of an overwhelming desire to please others, which manifested in shoplifting on behalf of schoolfriends; of trying to share achievements with teachers he liked, only for it to come out as boasting; and playing the joker at home, the absence of laughter from his family only making him push harder. On top of the abuse, Davies endured the contempt of his siblings who looked on him mostly as an irritant. His father, brother and sister frequently formed a united front against him. Only later did he understand that this was a further manipulation by his father. That he was cast as unreliable, disruptive and a habitual liar – a caricature that would become self-fulfilling – meant that should he ever tell on his father, he would never be believed. In the present we meet Cassandra Danvers, a photographer who has just returned to her small hometown following a traumatic break-up in New York. Also, she has recently suffered the loss of her beloved grandmother June, who raised her following the deaths of her parents when she was just a child. Cassie is in denial about just about everything in her life. Depressed and grieving, she has squirreled herself away in “Two Oaks” the old mansion left to her by her grandmother. The house is in poor repair with leaks, critters, and many layers of grime. Cassie lives in this three story house by herself relishing her self-inflicted solitude. She seldom leaves and neglects her surroundings including the mail which is piling up inside the door.

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You're pulled into the spellbinding world of then versus now... the story twists between present day, told from Cassie's point of view and the 1950s, which is really accurately portrayed. I'm usually a contemporary fiction reader all the way, but this period portrayal is so well-done, and I loved it. The character of Lindie, especially, makes your heart ache. As the book flips between time and the story unfolds, you become completely enmeshed in the characters' world; Beverly Whittemore does such a good job of creating them that you feel with them and really become part of their lives. I received a complimentary copy of this book from Celadon Books. Opinions expressed in this review are completely my own. According to Teltscher, the Palm House is the finest surviving Victorian glass and iron building. Its design was largely due to the “irrepressible inventiveness” of the Dublin iron-founder, Richard Turner, though its “grand establishment architect”, Decimus Burton, received the credit. One of the earliest examples of prefabrication, the Palm House’s ironwork was forged in Dublin. It was completed in 1848, with some 16,000 panes of glass covering more than half an acre. The architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner rated it more highly than even Crystal Palace as “one of the boldest pieces of 19th century functionalism in existence”. In her afterword to a new edition of Bette Howland’s 1978 story collection, Blue in Chicago, Honor Moore writes of “the exhausting formulaic epithet” that is “a lost woman writer”. I know what she means. All my life, “lost” women writers have suddenly reappeared, brought down from the attics where they languished, yellowing quietly. When I was young, I found this exciting: the green spines of my Virago Classics transmitted to me nothing but energy and pride. But with every year that passes, the idea of the lost woman grows more wearying. It’s not only that there are so many. The gap between disappearance and re-emergence is shrinking, something that suggests, at best, a certain collective carelessness on our part and, at worst, that the patriarchy is still snoring quietly away in its favourite library chair. Why the Germans Do it Better: Notes from a Grown-Up Country John Kampfner In praise of a rich, cultured and often progressive nation

Soon she begins having dreams of earlier days in this house. A house with a past. Did she really ever know June, her grandmother? Houses don’t always dream. In fact, most don’t. But once again, Two Oaks was dreaming of the girls—the one called June, who looked like a woman, and the one called Lindie, who looked like a boy. I received a complimentary copy of this book from Ballantine Books through NetGalley. Opinions expressed in this review are completely my own. Three decades on, when Tara develops dementia, the adult Antara takes her into her home. It’s Antara’s internal conflict that forms the novel’s central theme: how do you take care of a mother who once failed to take care of you? Antara examines the question with a self-inspection so unflinching that it makes you catch your breath. “I would be lying if I said my mother’s misery has never given me pleasure,” she admits coolly. From 2015 (present) day to 1955 (past), a multi-layered complex coming-of-age tale of redemption, love, loss and family.

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That day was the beginning of my friendship with Sebastian, and thus it came about, that morning in June, that I was lying beside him in the shade of the high elms watching the smoke from his lips drift up into the branches.” This funny and plangent book is shot through with an aching awareness that though our individual existence is a “litany of small tragedies”, these tragedies are life-sized to us. It’s difficult to think of any other novelist working now who writes about both youth and middle age with such sympathy, and without condescending to either.You should have taken me with you," I whisper to him. Then I lean my head against his and begin to cry. In my mind, I make a silent promise to my brother's killer. Barnes is as attentive to what he can’t know as what he can. Highlighting the limitations of fact and empathy, his book flirts occasionally with the tone of his novel Flaubert’s Parrot, foregrounding the writer’s present and the difficulties of accessing the past, feeling the way to where truth might lie. In the months after the US declares war on Iraq, an American Muslim teenage girl and her family must navigate identity, friendship, love, and heartache. Shadi has enough going on to have to deal with bigotry, too. Her brother is dead, her father is dying, her mother is falling apart, and her best friend has disappeared. She tries to keep it all inside, but when her heart is also broken, she finally explodes. Oh my goodness, I feel like may is a HUGE month for books I’m interested in. Like nearly everyone I cannot wait for Malibu Rising. Also looking forward to The Maidens, though your review makes me pause. Also interested in Somebody’s Daughter, One Last Stop (I adored red white and royal blue) and 100 Years of Lennon and Margot. Plus I think The Plot also comes out this month, though not on your list. Holy cow!

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I received a complimentary copy of this book from Harper. Opinions expressed in this review are completely my own. In each story, Babalola weaves in all the variations of what love, “unburdened, pure and without expectation”, can look like, whether we are watching the early stages of an innocent friendship develop into romance in Psyche, or in Yaa, a deeply moving tale about familial ties and class struggle. In many ways, these stories are examples of the consequences or triumphs of love untested, imagined, endured and experienced. Just in time for summer comes a touching novel perfect for fans of Five Feet Apart or A Man Called Ove. When Lenni, a dying 17-year-old girl, meets Margot, an 83-year-old woman awaiting heart surgery, at the art room of a Glasgow hospital, an unlikely friendship blooms. Together, they decide to make 100 paintings to celebrate the 100 years they have lived between them. Cronin’s debut novel is heartwarming and sweet, playing on your emotions as it weaves between grief and joy, loss and love, and all the things that make up a life. As I mentioned earlier, the characterization in this novel was top notch. As were the use of apt and charming descriptive phrases. I loved the language of the novel with many of the sentences almost artistic in their rendering. (“on her bicycle, she turned in to the Elm Grove Cemetery, speeding past those gray headboards of eternal rest”) and (“her lustrous hair had grown thin and her face had been swallowed by a conspiracy of chins.”) In a media career spanning more than two decades, Dent has trained her irreverent eye on most aspects of popular culture, but she’s best known now as a restaurant critic and the early part of Hungry revisits the ways in which family life shaped her relationship with food. Ex-soldier George teaches her to cook with Campbell’s tinned soup. The Dents were a happy, if undemonstrative, family, though George is given to hugging his daughter and telling her: “You’re my only little girl.” When this later proves untrue – he turns out to have two previous daughters, whose photo she finds in a drawer – Dent finds ways to excuse him so that she doesn’t have to revise her feelings.In Barnes’s lavishly illustrated account, Pozzi proves an illuminating figure in this rare company. He was a politician and senator as well as a precociously talented surgeon, first specialising in gunshot wounds. He transformed the practice of gynaecology, setting the first guidelines to a woman’s comfort in examination, and writing a definitive two-volume treatise that established the specialism in its own right. He found time to translate Darwin, become a connoisseur of all manner of art, travel extensively to everywhere from Buenos Aires to Beirut and became a lieutenant-colonel in the Great War. He married Thérèse Loth-Cazalis, a “provincial virgin of 23”, heiress to a family that had made a sudden fortune from the railways. Their eldest child, Catherine, a novelist and compulsive diarist, provides Barnes with invaluable insights into her parents’ unhappy marriage, and a shifting, intimate commentary of her father’s prodigious abilities and flagrant infidelities. I received a complimentary copy of this book from Flatiron Books through NetGalley. Opinions expressed in this review are completely my own. Julian Barnes saw Sargent’s portrait of Pozzi when it was on loan to the National Portrait Gallery in 2015. His initial curiosity led eventually to this enjoyably obsessive study of Pozzi, in which the doctor comes to life among a vivid circle of artists and libertines, including the irrepressible aesthete Count Robert de Montesquiou, (known by his friend Marcel Proust as “the professor of beauty”), his sometime enemy the wolfish scandal-monger, writer and duellist Jean Lorrain, and a revolving cast of friends and sparring partners including the free-loving Bernhardt and Oscar Wilde, Sargent and James MacNeill Whistler.