Read: Ripeness by Sarah Moss ★★★★ 📚
Edith in her 70s in 2023 and 17 in the 70s in alternative chapters, the echos of the holocaust, family, belonging to a place, refugees & friendship. Excursions into Irishness & ballet.

Mike’s friend Phineas in Dublin is a sound engineer, hears whole orchestras of weather, traffic, birds that for her are only ambient noise. Sound and signal, she thinks, meaning in every atom and cell if you remember to look and listen. And Dennis the chef, eyes half-closed as he attends to his tongue, names each herb and the provenance of the oil in a salad, and the perfumery up the hill here, every note in a scent, they say, music the metaphor for smell, all of everything, everywhere.

Read: Now We Shall Be Entirely Free by Andrew Miller

After The Land in Winter, this turned out to be quite different. Reminded me of Kidnapped! An atrocity in Spain, an English solider, running from another sent to kill him, heads for the Hebrides. Excitement & sympathy for all the characters.

Below them, the last of the drinkers had perfected himself and swum away into the summer night. One by one, the landlady’s breath put out the stars.

There were tears on his cheeks. He hoped the doorkeeper, this woman whose name he had failed to learn, might notice them

Read: Havoc by Rebecca Wait ★★★★☆📚
Collapsing girls boarding school, where the buildings and most of the characters are broken. Illness, hysteria & comedy ensue. Mostly through the eyes of the most normal mistress & Ida, new 6th year fleeing from a Scottish islands scandal. I raced through.

Read: Tell Me Everything by Elizabeth Strout ★★★★☆ 📚
Back reading Elizabeth Strout after a couple of years break. She brings together lots of characters from different books. Olive is still my favourite. The first half of this was a bit too diffuse & simple, but somehow pulled it together so that the second half felt very much in the Olive vein.

Read Show Don’t Tell by Curtis Sittenfeld ★★★★☆📚
Midlife stories from mostly well educated, well off American (USA) women. Often looking back as well as moving forward. Despite being set in such a different world, I was both absorbed & entertained.

I might have enjoyed it even more if I had staked time between the stories.