"Mad About the Boy" by Maggie Alderson

An audio book.

Antonia (first person PoV, daughter of a poor parson - a sheltered upbringing) met Hugh (son of an Earl) at St Andrews university, was pregnant in her final year, married and moved to Sydney. After 10 years Hugh tells her he's moving out to live with Greg, a hairdresser used by her friends. She's nearly molested by Dave, the husband of Nicki, a friend, at a party. Rumours start about her being a desperate flirt.

Percy, an extravagently gay relative of Hugh, turns up and lives with her.

She's started a shop called "Anteeks". She renovates old things. Nicki starts a similar shop and it flops. Dee helps her and becomes a de facto business partner.

She (suddenly!) realises she's fat and joins a gym, meeting James there, a private eye. Having been celibate for a year she starts having sex with him without knowing where he lives. He invites her to a stake-out. Some people want an old, haunted building to be knocked down to build a shopping centre. For some reason the 4 main people interested in the plan decide they need to visit the place at night. They see James's car and approach. Antonia thinks that having oral sex in the car will stop them being curious. She's right - they don't even note the registration number. Nikki's and Dee's husbands are there.

She invites James to a meal, inviting Hugh and Greg too. Greg and Tom get on well. Hugh is rude and James, aware of the class difference, calls off the affair. Then he changes his mind and invites her to a pool club/pub. James's ex, Jasmine, is there.

Dee disappears. So does James. Heavies working for Dee's husband have busted his knees. The heavies then the police visit her shop. He tells her he was in prison for a while - an eco-warrier. Percy tells her that he was once in love - with a working class fellow student at Oxford. That's why he's against snobbery.

The wives – Dee etc - are hiding away. They used to be whores. When each moved to the city, rich old men competed to be the first to have sex with them. Sometimes they married their clients. The police apprehend the culprits. James and Antonia marry and have a baby.

Low octave. My favourite phrase was “with all the confidence of a 7 year old who has just learnt a new fact.” Male sex organ size is of prime interest to the gay characters, and becomes a theme even Tom picks up.

"Once upon a prime" by Sarah Hart (Mudlark, 2023)

It's an interesting "popular science" book about the connections between maths and literature written by a maths prof with a strong interest in literature. She considers maths as a structuring device (especially in poetry); maths concepts used as metaphors; maths/mathematicians used as subject matter. She covers the standard material like sestinas and OuLiPo, but also looks at the arithmetic mistakes that novelists make, and how viable Lillipotians are. Here are some notes -

• The sestina structure works for stanza lengths of 3, 5, 6, 9 etc., but not 4, 7, 8, 10, etc. It's not known whether there's an infinite number of possible lengths. She prints a sestina by Kirsten Irving - who I've met!
• She conjectures that primes, because they can't be factorised further, are useful building blocks. For example, if the 5-7 haiku pairing arose from an original 12-syllable line, the temptation to split further is less than if there were a 4-6 pairing.
• I didn't realise that each chapter of "The Luminaries" is half the length of the previous one
• "A gentleman in Moscow" (Amor Towles) is a novel where gaps between episodes rough double each time until the gap is 16 years, then halves
• I'd forgotten some details of "Life: A User's Manual". It's structured using a 10x10 double Latin square (which Euler had thought impossible, but was solved by a computer in 1959), and a Knight's Tour progression leads from room to room.
• A 10th century Byzantine encyclopedia says that in about 400AD Tryphioduros wrote a version of the Odyssey with α missing from chapter 1, etc
• "Ella Minnow Pea" by Mark Dun (2001) is a novel that uses lipograms as part of the plot
• The "choose your own adventure" books have to be cunningly designed to be both interesting and short.
• She says there are plenty of templates available to help with writing reversable poems.
• "Mobius the Stripper" by Gabriel Josipovici is a short story (presented as 2 "sides") whose ends join up, and also the 2 sides correspond.
• George Eliot "studied mathematics both informally and formally, including attending a course of twice-weekly geometry lectures in 1851"
• "... Even if these are deliberate mistakes, the number of corrections Joyce made to the calculation of Bloom's budget over the course of several drafts and proofs of the novel is good evidence that he did have some difficulty in manipulating the numbers"
• I knew about Flatland but not Dewdney's "The Planiverse"
• She's not impressed by Dan Brown's use of maths.
• She spends a while on Borges' "Library of Babel" - how are the hexagonal rooms connected?
• I didn't realise the cleverness of Alice in Wonderland's "Let me see: four times five is twelve, and four times six is thirteen, and four times seven is - oh dear! I shall never get to twenty at that rate!"

"Betrayal" by Lesley Pearse

An audio book.

London 1998. Eve is married to Don. He hits her repeatedly. When she's 30 and has 2 kids (Tabitha and Olly), she leaves him. The same day she and the kids are taken to a women's refuge in Devon, run by Marianne. She gains respect there from the others. She and the kids return to their house, Don evicted. Drunk, he sometimes sleeps in the shed. She sets it alight to scare him, making it look like his fault. He dies.

Months later she meets his parents for the first time. They seem nice. He'd severed contact with them.

There's a big life insurance pay out. She moves to Devon, where the refuge was. She's done curtain-making before. Now she expands into Interior Design (sounds unlikely). She meets George the estate agent and Tom the builder who both make her swoon with desire. Her bag is stolen, maybe by Button, a female investigative journalist who's been hounding her.

Button later talks to her, saying that she too has stayed at the refuge. She says that she knows Eve murdered her husband. She wants money to buy a house. Eve gives her £1k.

When Eve and Tom first sleep together, Eve hadn't thought about birth control issues(!). Their affair last 2 years. She never lets him stay the night because she doesn't want her kids to think that women need a man. He ultimatums her and leaves. Her friends and kids are on his side. After 2 months, George reappears - older than Tom, richer and more upper class. Less exciting in bed. Happier to fit into Eve's plans. Her company (somehow!) become successful. She takes on staff.

Eve catches George in bed with her 15 y.o. daughter and phones the police. He's arrested, and Tabby is taken away. Tabby's pregnant. Olly (14) acts as go-between between Tabby and her mother. He also tries to contact Tom. Tabby tells Eve to confess because the guilt is eating her (Eve) up. Really? It doesn't look like it. Before Eve decides what to do, Tabby has told Tom about it. So Eve confesses to the police.

George attacks Eve with a knife. Tom saves her. George kills himself. Tabby miscarriages. Eve gets off lightly in te court case. Don's parents don't blame her. In the epilogue Tom and Eve are together. Dawn?

No.

Other reviews

• goodreads
• lindasbookbag (What I enjoyed most, however, was Eve’s development over the plot. She couldn’t have been better named as she represents a universality of experience that women have had since the first woman herself. She does not begin in adversity and simply end up in success, but Lesley Pearse puts her through all manner of trials and achievements that make Eve feel vivid and real.)

"Barking Up the Right Tree" by Leigh Russell

An audio book.

The author's sold over a million crime fiction novels, so I thought I should read something of hers. This book is described as "cozy crime". I've read a book by Richard Osman which belonged to that genre but this book is cozier. Emily is 24, red-haired, and lives in London with Ben. When she loses her job, he leaves her within a week. A great-aunt who she's hardly met bequeaths her a house in a Wiltshire village as long as Emily looks after her pets. She accepts the offer and moves. The pet is a dog, Poppy. Maud runs the local shop. Toby is the eligible bachelor who looks after his old mother. He's allergic to dogs. Hannah runs the tea-room where Emily begins to work. Hannah and Toby used to go out.The pub landlord is XXX.

Emily soon becomes suspicious of her neighbour Alice, who has a metal fence among her garden. Poppy doesn't like her. Her young daughter suddenly disappeared - allegedly travelling. The great-aunt fell down the stairs 2 months after she got Poppy.

Emily tries to befriend Alice. Alice shows her the letters her daughter sends, and reads them out. They sound generic. Alice would like the stamps for her nephew, but Alice makes an excuse. Pete the postman tells Emily that Alice doesn't receive letters.

She's warned by Alice that Toby has a dark side. A lit firework is put through her letterbox.

Ben suddenly appears after 6 months. After an afternoon of love-making Emily's in love with him again. Hannah thinks that Dan's just after her money. She tells her that Toby likes her. Emily resigns from the tea-room job. She tells Ben about her suspicions. Ben thinks the pub, tea-room and village are rubbish. He warns her that whoever killed her great-aunt might kill her too. Ben accuses great-aunt's 2 sisters (Katherine and Denise) of pushing her down the stairs. He asks for money in exchange for silence. All they'd done wrong is to secretly sub-contract the care of Poppy until Emily took her over. He wants to sell "their" house and the dog.

Except for his looks Ben impresses nobody. She dumps him.

She visits Alice, who locks her in a bunker with her daughter. Alice and her daughter are both mad. After days, Toby visits Emily's house and alerts the police. Emily's found thanks to Poppy. The daughter remains mad. I'm surprised she's released.

Emily seems gullible and silly. Ben is obviously unpleasant and overbearing. Why does Emily think he has "undoubted charm"? The crime (which surely would have attracted national interest and would have had psychological after effects on Emily) is forgotten about as quickly as it happened.

Not a good book.

Other reviews

• goodreads
• crimeandmysteryclub

"The flower arranger" by J. J. Ellis

An aesthetic male flower arranger watches girls and steals flowers.

Holly Bain, a bisexual English woman working in Tokyo as a journalist covering teen culture, wants to cover more serious stories. She plays guitar in a band. Detective Tanackar (American father; brought up by a single mother) finds her skills useful when a 17 y.o. French girl, Marie-Louise disappears. Her father finally admits he's been to hostess bars. A Swedish girl had disappeared earlier. Her body is found in a rubbish tip, maybe drained of blood, with a flower in her mouth. Holly's girlfriend Haruka is a hostess.

The Swedish girl worked for 2 nights in a hostess bar before disappearing, having become friendly with 2 men. The bars may be infiltrated by gangs (Yagasa?). A policeman in Tanacker's team might know more about the club than he should.

Holly's girlfriend Haruka is a hostess. She knows someone who worked in the Swedish girl's hostess bar, and gives Holly info that lets her write a headline story. But Tanacker is angry that she didn't tell him first.

The French girl had asked for a long-term job at one of the schoolgirl-themed bars, which is strange because her father said they were in Japan only for a few days, having won a fashion competition.

There's CCTV footage of a man stealing flowers. He wore sunglasses, like a man seen at a bar. He models himself on Roy Orbison.

The flower arranger has a shrine to his mother, who killed hersef by draining her blood. His father shot himself. When police search his house they find a secret cellar containing the French girl alive.

Holly receives a 3rd cryptic message through the post, this time a death threat. She finds out that he's left for a tropical island to pick an orchid. She follows him though she knows it's a trap, and is choroformed, added to a flower arrangement and bled to get a pale complexion. The police follow, finding his lair while she's still alive. It's protected by snakes. We learn about the flower arranger's past - how his foster mother was killed in a typhoon. He kills himself. Holly is saved. Blane is Tanacker's daughter-substitute - his died young. Tanaker's deputy realises he was the flower arranger's adoptive brother. We learn that Holly is an orphan.

The plot details and coincidences are far-fetched.

"Mightier than the sword" by Jeffrey Archer

An audio book.

October 1964. The Buckingham liner is on its maiden voyage to New York. 3 IRA men are on board. So are the owners, Barringtons. A bomb is in their cabin. They call their security who throw it into the sea just in time. The passengers are told it was a navy night exercise.

The attempt had been paid for by Martinez, who'd tried to take over the shipping company.

The Barrington board meet on the ship. Emma Clifton (nicknamed the Bodacia of Bristol) is the chair (her husband Harry is a novelist). Her brother Giles is a politician. Her sister Grace is an academic, a labour supporter. Her 24 y.o. son Sebastian is voted onto the board. His US girlfriend is Samantha, who plans to do a PhD in London. Jessica, a younger sister of Seb, died a few years before. Bob Bingham's also on the board. He owns a fish-paste firm in Bristol. His wife is Presilla. Their son had been engaged to Jessica.

In New York Harry meets his publisher, Ginsburg. He wants to be active in PEN, helping an imprisoned Russian author. Emma visits the home of cousin Alistair, who she's not seen for 20 years. He's out. They all return to England.

Seb, a deputy at the property section of a Farthings (a bank), realises that his line-manager Sloan is cheating the firm. He tells the bank's boss about it. The boss is sacking Sloan when he has a heart attack. Sloan does nothing to help him. He dies, and Sloan takes over the firm, sacking Seb. Seb puts money before morals so Samantha leaves him.

Harry, who has contacts with the PM's office, goes to Moscow to do a PEN talk, memorises some data about spies, and returns. Harold Wilson is prime-minister.

Lady Virginia, Giles' first wife, convinces Prisilla to divorce Bingham. Alex Fisher is Lady Virginia's enforcer. Seb helps them reconcile.

Giles is 50. His marriage to Gwynneth isn't going well. Their first child died at 3 and she can't have any more. On a Berlin trip as Minister for Foreign affairs Giles sleeps with his interpreter, Karin. She's not Stasi or hired by Fisher, but nevertheless photos are released to the press. Gwynneth leaves him. He resigns as minister but is encouraged to stay as candidate for the forthcoming General Election. Fisher is the Tory candidate. Giles loses by a few votes. He flies to East Berlin to find Karin. At passport control he's asked if he supports Harry's campaign to free a criminal. He says yes, and is refused access.

In 1970 Seb goes to the States in search of Samantha. He sees her daughter and realises she's his daughter. Sam has recently married, though her husband is gravely ill. He secretly donates money to them.

There are attempts by people to take over the board of Farthings Bank and of the Barrington board - insider dealing etc.

Harry learns from the wife of the imprisoned Russian that the only copy of "Uncle Jo" is hidden in plain sight in a Leningrad bookshop. He fetches it but is arrested at Leningrad airport. If he signs a confession that he's an MI5 spy, he'll be released. Instead, he submits to a show trial. To his surprise, the imprisoned author appears as a witness. He says that his book was all lies. Harry pretends to believe him. They're left in the same cell! The Russian dictates the novel to Harry, who has a prefect memory. Harry signs a statement and is released.

Meanwhile, Emma has to defend herself in court against Lady Virginia's accusation of libel/slander. George Fisher is called as a suprise witness. After being exposed, he kills himself. The 2 trials are described in parallel. The novel ends on a cliff-hanger.

Honour and reputation matter to many of the characters. The initial bombing didn't in the end have such a bearing on events.

I didn't realise until I'd nearly completed the book that it was part of a series, a family saga. That explains the treatment of things like Jessica's death, Emma's visit to her cousin, etc.

"Fight Night" by Miriam Toews

An audio book.

Narrator Swiv (female) lives with a pregnant mother who goes to acting rehearsals, and an ailing grandma. They live in Canada? Swiv's been expelled from school. Her father is away. They watch "Call the midwife". Mother and grandma are disinhibited about sex. When they can't tell from the ultrasound scan the baby's gender (the sex organs obscured), Swiv thinks the baby's better off without sex organs. She thinks that adults are busy so they have to look happy and sad at the same time. Swiv wants everyone to be normal. Mother tells Swiv that she should have more friends, or at least one friend. Swiv thinks grandma isn't paying attention because she's too preoccupied with going insane. Suicide and madness are in the family tree.

While Swiv and grandma are on a plane waiting to take off for San Francisco, grandma explains with perfect clarity that Swiv's mother had gone to Albania for 4 months to do a film. Her passport had been taken, she stayed with some of the cast in a lighthouse, the drinking water made her ill, she did her own stunts, and had an affair. The baby she's expecting might be her lover's, which is why Swiv's father left and why her mother's feeling so guilty. In California they visit nephews. We learn that Swiv is about 100 months old (i.e. not yet 9).

Grandma breaks her arm dancing at an old people's home. The return to Canada, go a hospital where grandma goes into acute care. When Swiv's mother visits she goes into labour. Swiv takes the baby to Grandma.

It's full of jokes and funny anecdotes, aided by the cranky old grandma who gets into conversation with anyone. But the California part of the book didn't interest me.

Other reviews

• Stephanie Merritt ( the motifs that are reworked through all her books are largely autobiographical. She draws on her cultural background – growing up in a strict Mennonite community in rural Canada – as well as her family history: both her father and her sister killed themselves after long battles with mental illness ... Elvira shares a name and part of her biography with the author’s own mother; in the novel, she too has lost a husband and a daughter to suicide and escaped a repressive small-town religious community with an authoritarian leader. ... Her narrative takes the form of an extended letter to her unnamed father, who has recently left with no indication of any intention to return. As a framing device it’s not entirely convincing; for long swaths of the story the form appears to be forgotten, so that when the second person suddenly intrudes the effect can be jarring. ... Some of Swiv’s precocity can be explained by the weight of responsibility she carries, though at times she displays a knowingness that doesn’t quite ring true in a nine-year-old and occasionally tips into archness ... In less skilled hands, the emotional double whammy of the novel’s ending could easily come across as trite.)
• Dina Nayeri