"The Codes of Love" by Hannah Persaud

An audio book, each section beginning with a rule about open relationships (perhaps the rules that Emily made Ryan agree to when they married).

In 2016 a couple (Ryan and Ada) get lost on a rainy Wales walk. They see a run-down cottage which Ada wants to buy.

Emily, 43, had been in a relationship with Charlotte at university. She'd wanted to be a writer. Charlotte left her for a man and died young. A lecturer, Emily has 2 teenage sons and an open marriage (her idea) with Ryan, a prize-winning architect. She's more highly sexed than Ryan, having slept with over 30 people before marriage. She's had 60 partners during their marriage. He only wanted sex each fortnight or so. She's currently interested in a male student, Leo. Leo formally complains about her. She's also friendly with Adeline (Ada). Ryan and Ada go to the cottage each fortnight, trying to renovate it "in character". Spending money, keeping secrets, and repeat performances break the rules, but Ryan has done that for 7 months.

While Ryan and Ada are at the cottage Emily phones him to say that one of their sons has gone missing. Ryan want to go home. Ada questions his loyalty to her. The son's ok. Ryan and Emily are becoming distant. They try a family holiday, which doesn't help. Emily has sex with Ada (she'd been attracted before. She thought she was only into men). She has a one-nighter with Leo - they'd agreed that he'd retract his complaint if she did so. She liked it but that's all. He gets clingy. She buys a hut - a sort of writer's cabin. She and Ada frequently spend time there. Leo meets Ryan.

Emily moves out, stays with her sister. She meets Tom. Leo meets Emily. He says he's written a novel, a character based on her. Ryan suggests to Emily that they could be together again. When the boys were about 5, Ryan had threatened to leave. Leo tells Ada that he'll tell Emily about Ada and Ryan. He hopes that Emily will return to him.

Ada had told Emily that Emily and Leo had had sex while Emily was drugged, which is why she was prepared to sleep with him again. but now Leo says it's not. Leo tells Emily about Ada and Ryan, giving Emily the address of the Welsh cottage, saying that Ryan and Ada will be there. Ada tells Ryan that Emily is the best thing that's happened to her, but she likes the Welsh cottage too. Both Emily and Ryan ask why Ada kept the relationships going on too long. She says she was hedging bets.

I'm not too content about the ending. The plot device of whether or not Leo and Emily had sex (when she was drugged?) feels strained. And I'm not convinced by the choice of when gaps are left in the time-lines, and when we're told about the Venice trip details.

"boats leave stretchmarks in the sea" is an interesting phrase.

Other reviews

• Elspells (Recklessness is an important theme here, and the isolation of the cottage is effective in upping the stakes.)
• samstillreading (While The Codes of Love is essentially about a failing marriage, it’s also about things within that marriage. Power. Responsibility. Ageing. Emily has always held the power in the relationship and to see Ryan happy with someone else leads to a reduction in that power. Their children are also becoming more independent where Emily can’t control their movements. )
• goodreads (currently 3.8)

"Old men" by Peter Daniels (Salt, 2024)

Poems from "High Window", "Ink, Sweat & Tears", "London Grip", etc.

There's rhyme (e.g. "Two Uncles"), there are poems where the approach seems to be "When in doubt spell it out" (his most common mode), and poems which leave much to the imagination: I wouldn't call them difficult or obscure - for a start, there's always a surface clarity - but it's unclear what the pieces are "about". There are prose interludes, some as long as a poem -

• In "A Map", sitting at the piano, he most likes looking at the music. There's a plan to go fishing with a friend, but he has no idea about fishing. At 7 he was interested in men but unsure why. Then there's "How what you like moves you into being/ who you've become: he has no idea what/ you might need to do to make it happen.// In the long days before growing up, he can/ spend the whole time drawing a map/ of an elaborate city that will never exist." (p.9)
• "I used to take evening primrose oil, which I thought was good for/ depression till I found it was St John's wort for that,/ and evening primrose is meant for pre-menstrual tension" (p.16)
• "In the shower" is the clearest example of prose set-up and poetic pay-off - the persona has set up their phone so that they can see some one else showering and vice versa. "I've propped it by its leather case, book-like, angled perfectly to open my own body like a book ... while you in your bathroom, somewhere I've never been, open your body ... and we watch each other shower down whatever held us back, and the water takes it away" (p.24)

Also,

• "A Metaphor" begins with "If old men are trees". It reminded me of James Lasdun's "The Locals" though they share no phrases - Lasdun's has "They peopled landscapes casually like trees, ... and their fate, like trees, was seldom in their hands."
• "Empty Boxes" begins the way I often begin poems - "A seashell has been emptied of its owner, but/ a box begins as itself, with a need to enclose". I'd suffocate the poem with o'erleaping imagery about Self. He calmly concludes with "The shoes and sweets/ are elsewhere now, but Pandora's things/ will still be jostling us, they mock our boxes"
• I like "The Laundry" - 16 "abab" stanzas starting with "As I was walking down Higgledy-Piggledy Lane/ I thought I smelt the truth,/ that beauty is the answer,/ and the rest is all uncouth." Shades of James Fenton.
• On p.55 there's "As the earth heaves, the clatter of syllogisms/ where it opens up, logic falls and consequences slide" which is a bit of a surprise because his symbolism is usually much more concrete than this.

In the 4th section of the book is a 13 page poem that I've written about elsewhere - see Happy and Fortunate

"A long way down" by Nick Hornby (Penguin, 2005)

Martin, ex Morning TV presenter, slept with a 15 y.o. girl, went to prison, was divorced by his wife. He has kids. On New Years Eve he goes to a London tower block roof to kill himself. He's interrupted by middle-aged Maureen, who looks after a chronically ill (never conscious) son Matty, now 19. She only had sex once, and Matty is the result. She's religious and has been planning suicide for months. They're interrupted by Jess, 18, who's suddenly had suicidal ideas. She misses Chas. She sounds a bit wacky. They're interrupted by JJ, a pizza delivery guy whose band made 2 albums. He's literary, American, and has suddenly had suicidal thoughts too. PoV switches between the 4 of them, a page or 2 at a time.

They bicker. Maureen realises that the only thing that would make her life livable would be Matty's death. Martin blames himself for his problems - though the 15 y.o. looked 18. Jess just wants an explanation from Chas. JJ has just broken up with his girl, but now that Jess has taken that role, he says he has a fatal brain disease - CCR.

They all get in a taxi and gate-crash an art-students' party looking for Chas. Martin and Maureen find him, hiding from Jess who's tried to kill him twice. They just want him to talk to her. He does. She kicks him. There's closure. The 4 go back to Martin's. His ex co-presenter Penny is there - he'd walked out on her that evening. They've been having an on-off relationship for years. While Penny shouts at Martin the others watch. It was like "when you're being torn a new asshole by your dad for some crime you've committed, while a pal watches and tries not to laugh? And you try not to catch his eye, because then you'll laugh too?"

"When you're sad - like, really sad ... - you only want to be with other people who are sad" thinks Jess. Maureen thinks that young people expect change, but she hasn't changed since Matty was born. She's bought age-relevant toys for him. They agree to meet up again on Valentine's day. But next day there's a story in the media - Sleazy Martin is sleeping with the daughter of a junior Education Minister (Jess). The 4 convene an emergency meeting at Maureen's after Martin meets with Jess's father (who she manipulates). JJ says there's no such thing as CCR - he was depressed that he's become a nobody. Jess says how her older sister Jen disappeared in suicidal circumstances when Jess was 15. Jess thinks she's still alive. They agree to let it all blow over. But then Jess tells the press that they saw an angel. She does it partly to test the loyally of the group. She gets £5k from a reporter as long as the reporter meets all 4 of them. They meet up again. The reporter wants Martin to say he saw an angel. In the end he doesn't quite deny it. He gets them all on his CableTV show. Then they decide to start a bookclub - suicidal authors. Then they holiday in Tenerife. Maureen's never been abroad and hasn't been on holiday since Matty's birth. She realises Matty doesn't need her. JJ realises that he can only get women if he mentions he was in a band. Martin checks out of their hotel because he's fed up with the lot of them. To JJ the group's break up feels like his band's break-up.

When they meet back on the roof on Valentine's day, a man's there. He jumps. They re-evaluate their situation. Maureen and Jess visit Martin's ex-wife Cindy to tell her he's sad. Cindy's new partner is blind.

Jess arranges a surprise meeting in Starbucks - her parents, Maureen and Matty, Martin, Cindy and the daughters, JJ plus his ex Lizzie and band partner Ed, and Penny. She storms out after talking to her parents, sleeps with a man as wacky a her, a squatter who was walking his dog. JJ angers Ed. Penny flirts with one of Matty's carers, who jealous Martin insults before leaving. Maureen goes home with Matty and the carers. The carers ask her to complete their pub quiz team that evening. A member asks her to do part-time work in his shop. Martin starts volunteering at a school. JJ tries busking.

90 days after their first meeting they meet on the roof again. Nobody wants to jump. They've improved enough to consider the effect their death might have on others. The book ends with them looking at The London Eye - "It didn't look as though it was moving, but it must have been I suppose".

I was worried that the escapades would become more extreme until only farce was left, but the pacing was ok. Even Martin's behaviour at the gathering came over as cringe-worthy and funny rather than silly. More than one of the characters address the reader. At one point Jess explains her reasons for expressing dialog in play-script form.

Other reviews

• Joanna Briscoe (A Long Way Down is a good novel struggling to find a way out of the limitations of its own gimmick, but ultimately the conceit is so off-beam that one can almost ignore it and flow with the farce. This is an enjoyably readable, bumpy ride of a book, paradoxically both dangerously contrived and genuinely moving.)
• motherbooker (Maybe it’s because the discourse surrounding mental health has moved on significantly in recent years but A Long Way Down feels quite dated now. The way it brushes off the group’s suicidal thoughts feels quite dismissive. It’s hard to ignore the feeling that Hornby missed the mark somewhat. Then there’s the fact that the rest of the story just feels like a mess. It’s all quite manic and disjointed. Obviously, this story requires you to suspend your disbelief and that’s not the problem. It’s just that it doesn’t really feel as if it knows what it’s trying to achieve. There are so many random plotlines that don’t necessarily follow each other organically. The only thing keeping them together is this one group. )
• Hugo Lindgren (What ensues is an odyssey that might best be explained as a modern, profane version of The Wizard of Oz. ... As in the original Oz, these characters are after something they already possess; they just have to locate it within themselves. But sadly, there isn’t all that much serendipitous fun along Hornby’s Yellow Brick Road. In fact, you can’t help wondering why these characters don’t just flee from one another the first chance they get ... the characters’ voices tend to blur into one that sounds distractingly like Hornby’s own.)

"Open secrets" by Alice Munro (Vintage, 1994)

7 stories from The New Yorker and 1 from The Paris Review. They're usually about 30 pages long.

• Carried away - 1917. Louisa, 25, lived in a hotel and worked as a librarian. While in a sanatorium (TB) she'd been in love with a doctor. Jack, away at war, started corresponding with her though he was engaged to Grace. He returns and marries his fiancee. Louisa loses her virginity to Jim, mid 50s, a rep who lives at the hotel.
  Years pass. Arthur Doud, the boss of the piano factory, has to tell Grace that Jack's died in an accident at work. He returns Jack's books to the library. Louisa asks him what Jack looked like (she'd never seen him). He asks to marry her. She agrees.
  Years pass. Arthur is 6 years dead. Jack, now a trade union speaker, recognises her and they talk.
  The final 1 page section take us back to Louisa's arrival in the town, her wish for a new start.
• A real life - In 1933 Millicent married a farmer 19 years older than her. Muriel (30+, piano teacher, single, goes out with many men) was her best friend - she's hoped for better but people were snobby. Dorrie and brother Albert rented a house from her. Albert died. Millicient has a party at her house, inviting her 2 friends and others along. Dorrie told a visitor from Australia about her trapping and hunting. Months later she surprises Millicent by saying that she and the visitor had been corresponding and he'd return to marry her. With wedding day approaching, Millicent visited Dorrie to find she had cold feet. Fear of sex? No, more fear of a new life, of leaving the place where she still missed Albert. Millicent lied that she'd already found new occupiers for the house.
  Dorrie had a happy life with her rich husband in Australia, learning to fly. She died climbing a volcano. Muriel, spurred by the wedding, had gone off to find a husband. She married a widower with 2 young children, a strict Christian. Millicent, decades a widow, was happy that she'd made Dorrie go, and had kept Dorrie's house empty.
• The Albanian virgin - during an adventurous holiday on horseback, Charlotte (Canadian) is injured and taken in by an Albanian village. Among them is a "Virgin" - a woman who wants to be treated like a man. The narrator talks to Charlotte when she's in a Canadian hospital. Sections alternate between Charlotte's narrative and the narrator's. Charlotte was kept for a year or so by the villagers, offered to a Muslim for a price, then exiled to a cottage when she's advised by a visiting churchman that she become a "Virgin". Later he helps her escape and she goes to Canada. The narrator was doing a degree, and married to Donald, an older doctor, when she had an affair with Nelson. She left town alone and opened a bookshop. She tried to stay in contact with Nelson and her husband (who now lived with his secretary). Charlotte was a customer who invited the narrator to their flat for a meal. Charlotte and her husband were poor, bohemian, booky. The narrator wanted to tell them her story - "to a person who would not be surprised or outraged by it. ... Had I taken on Donald as a father figure?". When the narrator finds out that Charlotte's in hospital, she visits. Charlotte disappears from the hospital with her husband, vacating their flat. As the narrator fantasises about a future she could have had with Nelson, he turns up at the bookshop. The ending's obscure.
• Open secrets - When Miss Johnson was a girl in an iron lung, Jesus appeared to her. When 60+ she took some girls on a trek. Heather never returned from the trek. Maureen's husband, a lawyer, is 71. At 69 he had a stroke. He'd given up sex when Maureen couldn't have children. Now he has sudden urges that embarrass Maureen. Mariam arrives one morning at their house asking whether she should report Mr Siddicup's odd behaviour to the police in case it related to Heather's disappearance. The lawyer goes to the police for them. Siddicup eventually ended up in a mental house.
• The Jack Randa hotel - Canada. Gail's baby died at 7 weeks. She went on to marry Will when he was middle aged and living with his mother Cleata, who drank. Will met a woman who was visiting from Australia, corresponded with her when she returned, and moved out with her. He's 56, she 28. Gail sells up and follows him. She assumes the identity of a cousin he's trying to contact. She senses he's not happy and they exchange letters. When she holding the hand of a dying neighbour she sees him. He guess who the cousin really is. She returns to Canada to see if he follows her.
• A wilderness station - 1852. Canada. An epistolary piece, a reverend interceding then dying. 2 orphans, brothers, start a farm. Simon gets a wife, Annie, from an orphanage then dies in a farm accident. George, his brother, says a bough falls on him. Annie runs away, wants to be sentenced for murder. She makes herself useful in prison. A doctor says that she has delusions to make her boring life interesting, to make herself important. Eventually George marries the neighbours' wife and they have 8 children, merging the farms. Annie starts writing from prison to Sadie (a friend from the orphanage) saying that Simon had axe wounds. The letters never arrive. Simon had been violent with her. She assumed that he'd been violent to George too, and George had finally lost his temper. She convinced him to lie. She was scared that George would kill her too, which is why she'd left the house.
  A final letter dated 1959 written by an old woman gives info for a biographer (one of George's grandsons became a politician). Old Annie was the sewer employed by the letter writer's family. Old Annie once asked the letter-writer when she was young (and owned a car) to be driven somewhere. They met George. Old Annie talked to him while the young woman entertained the others with rides in her car.
• Spaceships have landed - Rhea and Billy Doud (heir to a piano factory) used to go out with Wayne and Lucille. Sometimes they went to the Monk's to drink and play cards. Did Mrs Monk really take men upstairs during the games? Eunie lived 3 doors away. Rhea used to play with her. She disappears one night, the night Wayne gets Rhea drunk so that she pukes. Next day Eunie returned saying she'd been abducted by 3 children and taken to their vessel. Eunie became briefly famous. Rhea decides that Wayne is exciting and leaves with him suddenly. They have 5 lovers between them, and 3 children. Wayne becomes a TV presenter. She teaches EFL. Billy sells the failing firm, goes away to do good deeds, then returns to ask Eunie to marry him.
• Vandals - In a letter that Bea Doud doesn't send to Liza, she says that Ladner died while being operated on. She dreams about collecting her late partner Ladner's bones then wonder's whether they're Kenny's (Liza's brother who died at 15. After a lively early life, then widowhood, Bea calmed down by going out with Peter (whose wife is in a care home with MS). Then she met rough, raw Ladner, a taxidermist, and is excited. She moved in. Liza and Kenny (aged 6 and 7) lived nearby and had become regular visitors. Bea gave Liza money to get through college. While Ladner and Bea were away, awaiting his op, she asked Liza and her husband Warren to check if the house is ok. Liza trashes the place, making it look as if it's been vandalised, and phones from the house to tell Bea the bad news.

Some features and details recur. There are interlinking stories - set in Carstairs with the Douds. There are letters returned "Unknown", affairs conducted by mail between a Canadian and an Australian, ending with the Canadian going to Australia. Also

• We're given flash-forwards. There are big gaps in narrative time. There are several couples with big age gaps. The final section of a story often returns to an earlier time.
• Curiosity is raised then immediately dowsed. E.g. we're told rumors about Mrs Monk then we're immediately told "Later [Rhea] came to believe these rumors were false"
• We're given a summary of the rest of a character's life before they disappear from the story.

"Murder at the Christmas Emporium" by Andreina Cordani

An audio book.

The main time-line is an Xmas eve in the recent past. There are sections from past Xmas-eves to give us the characters' backstories.

Merry (in the 2020s?) is a Greetings Card writer. She wants to be with Ross, especially on Xmas day. She takes her boss's invitation to Verity's (a retro department store) for Xmas Eve. Verity's closed in the 1980s then re-opened. At the entrance she sees Vera's name on the guest list and pretends to be her. Phones are taken on the way in, which angers influencers. Attractive Monty is the owner. Fran is another guest. She's black. She used to be on daytime TV. She got cancer and raised lots of money for charity. She was at Oxford University. She has a secret. Evangeline is a guest too. She went to Oxford University and shared a room with strange Peggy. After a party there, Peggy and Evangeline were with 2 boys, Kit and Peter, in their room. Peggy started asking Kit about the Emporium - his surname was Verity. Evangeline hooked up with the older boy, Peter.

In the Emporium a few of them fall asleep (drugged) and get stuck in the dark. Barbara (Evangeline's assistant), in a rush to catch a plane, escapes. Dean, who's tried to take control, dies in a fall trying to escape. Rudi, the best craftsman, is killed.

Peggy Goodchild was Verity's first toymaker. She came from Jamaica. It's revealed that she was exploited and had a child.

One by one the trapped guests are revealed to have possible grudges against Monty - business-related, love-related etc. Merry is keen to work out why they're all there. Evangelene is hung and killed. We learn that Josie lived/squatted in the shop and that she was in a children's home (her nickname was "knife"). Some of the remaining people think that people might have been working together, Monty the main suspect.

Fran tells Josie and Merry that she had lied about having cancer. A doctor helped her sustain the lie as long as she didn't profit from it.

Rita is Ross's mother. We get her PoV. She was orphaned and went to Oxford. She was Peggy and Margaret before becoming Rita. She married Kit, a womaniser. He died. She was a controller, disliked by Kit's family (the Veritys). Merry told Ross to break free of Rita's influence.

Monty regains consciousness. He says that Rita hired Verity's that night as an Escape Room. She exploited her knowledge of the guests' dynamics to set up some murder opportunities. She was Barbara. She has the same kind of cancer that Fran claimed to have. She has grudges against all the trapped guests. Rita makes herself known to the remaining guests who wonder how Rita's going to kill them. Rita shoots Josie when Josie tries to retrieve a phone. Rita tells Merry to shoot her (otherwise she'll kill Fran). But Merry fears that Ross will never marry her if she kills Rita. Fran overpowers and kills Rita. Nigel/Monty phones the police.

After, we learn that Ross and Merry are together. Actually Fran didn't kill Rita - she dropped the knife and Merry did. Fran takes the blame so that Ross and Merry can be together and because she thinks she deserves to be punished. Josie contacts Merry to say that she saw what happens and intends to blackmail Merry.

I like the complicated plot, the way that the clues first lead to Monty then Rita.

Other reviews

• goodreads
• ladybookdragon (I loved this book because it gave me real Charlie and the Chocolate Factory vibes with Agatha Christie vibes. It was a weird concoction which worked brilliantly together and although it was set in modern day London, at times you could almost say it was set in Victorian times with a bit of Dickens Christmas thrown in as well. Montagu Verity is definitely the Willy Wonka character in this book)
• Kirkus reviews (The problem is that at no time do any of her retrospective thumbnail sketches give readers much reason to wish for the grown-up characters’ survival. ... When bad things happen to good people, justice cries out for an explanation. But when bad things happen to bad people, well…why the hell not? A joyless Yuletide tale offers little to celebrate.)

"I will crash" by Rebecca Watson

An audio book.

The narrator, Rosa is an assistant teacher living with John. She hasn't seen her older brother for 6 years - he used to bully her. When he went out with her friend Alice she felt safer. When she discouraged Alice from going out with her brother, Alice thought it was sibling rivalry. Rosa once wanted him dead. Recently she turned him away when he tried to visit. Her father phones to say that he's died in his car. John asks if he should stay rather than go to give a conference talk on Gertrude Stein who said "what is the point of remembering anything?" He warns her that the shock may bring memories back. She tells him to go, though nearly changes her mind. She talks to Sarah, a friend from school.

An older man chats her up. She tells him her brother's died. He tells her that he's been divorced for a year, that he overworked to earn money to treat his sick son. She briefly contemplates sex with him.

She recalls when she realised she had power over boys. When she saw her rapist in a TV quiz show, she told John. She doesn't know why her mother suddenly left the family. She suddenly turns up on the doorstep. She didn't know how Rosa had suffered. She knew Rosa's brother was living with a girl. We learn that Alice died after Rosa's brother had humiliated her (broadcasting nude pix etc).

She goes to Portsmouth to visit his girlfriend Julia, and asks if he was an aggressive person. Julia says that he said Rosa irritated her and she was aggressive against him. His telling of Alice's plight doesn't match what Rosa knows. Julie is 5 months pregnant. Rosa had come to tell her the truth about her brother, then changes his mind. They discuss the possibility that it was suicide.

30 mins from the end of the audio book we learn about how she's permanently scarred him with a lighter. Maybe she'd suppressed this memory. He used it to get Alice and Julia to think that she, Rosa, was the guilty one. That evening (she was 15) she got drunk for the first time. She was with Alice.

At the end John hasn't yet returned. She thinks about lines drawn. Cordons? Who did the lines protect?

Things I'm not keen on -

• "arms a foil blanket wrapped around me" - would arms really feel like that?
• Too much of the info-dripping isn't justified psychologically. For example, why is the news of Alice's suicide delayed?
• The reviews suggest that the book has typographical trickery. I'm glad I had the audio version.
• Julia doesn't seem overwhelmed by loss. He'd died less than 5 days before.

Other reviews

• Nina Allan (As with any deeply rooted family trauma, it is difficult for those who were not there to fully appreciate the damage that has been done. Neither can we as readers ever be certain. ... Through word-patterning, font-switching, broken lines and poetic cadences, she integrates the raw strangeness of the present moment with the dagger-bright flash of memories that will not be eradicated. Once again, her free-form approach, a dense intermingling of different registers of language, of spoken words and internalised thoughts, allows the reader a uniquely personal experience of the novel’s spaces.)
• Anthony Cummins

"The garden of evening mists" by Tan Twan Eng

An audio book.

The epiphet points out that there's a goddess of memory but not of forgetting. Later in the book somebody points out that we may have forgotten that there was a goddess of forgetting.

The narrator, Teoh Yun Ling, a respected female judge in Malaysia, has just retired earlier than she needed to. She's been told that in the coming year she'll forget a lot. She has bouts when she doesn't understand language. "Memories I had locked away had begun to break free like shards of ice fracturing off an arctic shelf. In sleep these broken floes drift towards the morning of remembrance". After spending so much of her life wanting to forget, she now wants to remember - "I pull myself from the quicksand of memories". She'd spent 3 years in a Japanese prison camp. She was maimed there (2 fingers cut off for smuggling food from the kichen). Her sister was a whore for the soldiers. Teoh became a translator for the camp leader. She was let out just before everybody else was killed. She'd been an informer.

There's a mix of cultures - Japanese, Chinese, Malay - combined with mock tudor buildings. Mangus came from the South Africa, married to Emily. Mandarin, Malay, Tamil, English and Japanese is spoken.

In her 20s she was a researcher for the War Crimes Trials, trying to find out where her sister was buried. She studied Law at Girton college, Cambridge. Aritomo was a gardener - Japanese. She wanted him to design a garden in memory of her sister. He'd only do the job if she became her apprentice. He'd the palace gardener for Hirohito. He taught her the ancient wisdom of garden design. She became his lover. She's warned that she mght be a target for CT (Chinese Terrorists), having sentenced them in the past. Her servant's brother wants to surrender (he gets a reward for doing so). She helps. The new High Commissioner visits. His security entourage say to Cho that they suspect Magnus of helping (or paying protection money to) the CT. And they don't trust the Aritomo either. They want Teoh to spy for them. Aritomo had already given Mangus a tattoo. He wants to give the narrator a big one, on her back - with a garden theme. Having finished the tattoo he disappeared, leaving a letter to be sent to his son. Aritomo was the last to see the tattoo - no other lovers.

Returning to the mountains after 36 years she sees a heron like the one she saw 40 years ago. She'd like it to be the same one. She wants to restore the garden to the way it was, but there's no plan to follow. Frederick (67) is the house-keeper. Long ago she slept with him. She says she wants to sell off Aritomo's woodcuts. She calls Tatsuji, who's writing a book about Aritomo. She shows him her tattoo, saying she'd like it preserved after her death. He tells her that the Japanese used Malaya to hide treasures (the "Golden Lily" project), and that Aritomo might have been involved with selecting sites etc. She realises that her camp might have been a site.

In a framed story Tatsujia tells how he was Japanese suicide pilot and had to abort because his plane was broken. He met his teacher who wanted to sabotage the plane - were they in love? The pilot's father was a plane designer who killed himself in the pilot's presence, in shame.

The CT raid again, taking Mangus and killing him. Emily dies soon after. Mangus hadn't been paying protection money - the gardener had been, for her sake.

Bats were "trusting in the echoes and silences in which they fly. Are all of us the same I wonder, navigating our lives by interpreting the silences between words spoken, analysing the unspoken moments of our memory?". Fredrick offers to nurse her.

I didn't realise how plotty the book was until later. I enjoyed the book. I didn't like the phrase "light brown in colour". The concentration-like details aren't new, alas.

Other reviews

• Kapka Kassabova (informative, if bland ... The reason I found it impossible to love is the quality of the writing. There is no discernible personality in the dutiful, dull voice of Yun Ling, and non-events stalk us on every page ... The self-conscious dialogue resembles a history lesson collated for the benefit of the western reader, and everything is ponderously "like" something else, so it takes twice as long)
• liketellingthetruth
• maxxesbooktopia (The pacing is not the best part of the novel. I thought it dragged sometimes and some scenes in the novel flew by too quickly. For example, the scenes about the guerrillas went by so quickly that I cannot actually understand the guerrillas intentions and why they did what they did. The scenes that dragged are normally scenes that can be cut out of the novel and it will make no difference in the end)
• goodreads
• an interview, with a sketch of the garden