"The Family Remains" by Lisa Jewell

An audio book

Samuel (detective) is called to the mudflats of the Thames. Body parts are in a binliner - 20+ years old, but recently dumped.

Rachel Rimmer's husband is found dead in his French house. The wife's unconcerned.

Henry Lamb, 42, has a sister, Lucy, staying with him, who was pregnant at 13 because of who moved into their house at the time. Their parents are dead - suicides. They've recently inherited millions. Finn had got her pregnant. Henry fancied him and goes looking for him in Chicago. Clemency/Libby is Finn's younger sister. Henry discovers that Finn is bisexual. Libby (Serenity) is Finn's daughter. Birdy brought in David (40+) in the house where she was a gues - a healer - her lover. David brings his wife (Sally) and 2 kids (Finn and Clemency). He rips the family off. She grooms Lucy to have sex with him because she can't have a child herself.

Rachel met Michael in the US. They met later in London. He's rich, and several years older than her. She makes jewelery. On their honeymoon she shows an interest in BDSM that puts him off sex. She wants a divorce. She goes to French to find his first wife (Lucy?) and his son. Lucy is poor, and has another child - a daughter.

Rachel's sensible father is sent porn pictures of Rachel and pays £700,000 to the blackmail (unlikely!). Rachel goes over to France again to sort things out. She finds him dead. She sees Lucy cleaning up.

The dead person was Bridget (Birdy), a pop star. Samuel traces her back to the Lamb house. Several of the people from that time have disappeared. As he points out, nearly all of them have changed their name. The bones were thrown in the Thames roughly when Libby was 25 and inherited the house which she quickly sold, giving lots of the money to 2 people.

The police interview Justin - Bridget's boyfriend at the time. He knew she was bad and left the big house.

Lucy takes her 2 kids to Chicago, looking for Henry who once chained Finn to a radiator. Lucy has done some bad things.

The police interview Lucy and Henry from London.

In Justin's suicide letter we learn that Birdy died by accident when Justin and Henry tussled. Henry knows it's untrue - it was Henry alone who's to blame. Henry's touched that Justin took the blame. Henry had been fixated by Finn. He'd had surgery to be more like him. He sometimes used his name. Now he thinks his old self may have been ok.

Later, Rachel goes over to Lucy telling her the the case is closed, but she knows. Rachel's father got his money back.

Too many names for me. Also some parts of the book strain credibility - the need to continue from the earlier book dictates the plot which in turn take precedence over character.

We learn that Henry had found Finn after all. A few months later, Finn visits his kids.

Other reviews

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• Mary Cadden
• Kathy Reel

"Hinton" by Mark Blacklock

An audio book

Howard, exiled from the UK in the 1880s, having spent 5 years in Japan, sails with his wife and 4 kids to the States for a job. He's a maths lecturer, and tries to teach his kids about navigation, etc. But he's also a science fiction writer of sorts, interested in thought experiments, Flatlands (flatfish, flying fish) and worlds with different moral codes. At Oxford he was aware of Wilde and Ruskin. He likes curves and spheres and especially N-dimensional geometry. Parallel lines meeting at infinity are used as an analogy. Working at Princeton he invents a mechanical baseball pitcher. His children go off in several directions. He works at Greenwich, where stars determine the official time. He helps invent the tesserract and in the 1880 inspires discussion of "time-space". He dies suddenly. He wife kills herself a year later.

Three-quarters through, an academic voice takes over, and various notes/letters are presented - letters from Havelock-Ellis etc. We learn of Howard's bigamy, his idea of a book being an example of spatial technology. One of his sons patents a climbing frame designed to help kids understand 3D co-ordinates.

Until I read the reviews I didn't know that this was based on a real person. There are letters in the book - some may be authentic documents. Trouble is, there are long boring sections - e.g. the earnest father's letter at 4:19 (Chapter 8.10?).

Other reviews

• Nina Allan (This is a dense, multilayered, knotty book, demanding the reader’s full cooperation. But Blacklock’s attention to detail, his imaginative reach, not to mention his willingness to wrestle with problems of geometry, have produced a singular literary achievement.)
• Anthony Cummins (Hinton serves as an ingenious variant on the traditional buried secret narrative, in which the requisite playing for time is primarily an effect of structure, not to mention any number of diverting typographical tricks - when Hinton tries looking through a stereoscope for the first time, there’s a ghostly doubling of the text; when he invents a machine for throwing baseballs, the sound appears in supersize fonts. Yet, perhaps aptly for a novel concerned with the psychic repercussions of denial, it’s hard not to feel that the relentless game-playing might also work to ward off hard questions about the value Blacklock is adding by telling Hinton’s story this way, rather than as orthodox biography.)
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"The fine art of invisible detection" by Robert Goddard

In Tokyo, Wudda, a 47 year-old widow, is a plain, childless PA for an older, single male detective, Kodaka. She knows English. A woman comes in asking them to find out if her father's suicide when she was 5 was really a murder. Her father had been working with a young translator, Peter. Wudda is setting off for London to investigate when her boss is killed.

She plans a meeting in London with Martin Caldwell, who doesn't turn up. She goes to his Exeter flat, gets inside. She sees references in Japanese to Sarin (her husband had been killed in an incident involving it). The phone goes. She picks it up. It's someone called Nick, wondering where Caldwell is. She's attacked. The man (Japanese) leaves with laptop and papers. She has a memory stick. She wakes in a hospital to find a man waiting. Holgate was a journalist in the old days. He knew there'd been a secret government lab near the place where a drowning happened. Returning to London, she discovers that her hotel room has been broken into. She finds out that Caldwell was in Iceland when he should have been seeing her.

Nick, an art teacher living in London, is married to Kate. His mother Cara died not longer before. He's never met his father Jeff. He was brought up by Cara and April. The 2 women as students had shared a house with Peter and Alison (who died at sea, though Peter's body was never found), Caldwell, Jeff, and Melissa (who became an MP). Caldwell phones him, asking to meet. He fails to turn up. Nick talks to Melissa. He sees a japanese man leave her house. She gives him an invitation to an auction in Iceland. He's learned that Peter, not Jeff, is his father. He goes to the Exeter flat, meets the journalist that Wudda met. He says that on the night of the drowning, a guard died at the lab (Sarin might have been there).

Wudda visits her brother in New York. She flies to Reykjavik. A shady company with offices in Japan have an office in Iceland. She finds files there, with map references. While investigating, "The Irishman" who attacked her in Exeter kills a person she met. She runs him over in self-defence. She encounters Martin Caldwell who keeps her handcuffed because in 3 days a big deal is going through. He's working for Peter, to do with a company called Cortezone. He's launching a company called Emergence. She talks him into releasing her. She calls for help. A thug arrives, then another to save her. When Nick gets there, the farmhouse has burnt down. 4 corpses - one of them Caldwell.

When Nick goes to the auction he's given a plane ticket to leave the next day, for his own safety. Peter knows what's been going on.

Wudda makes for Cambridge to find an academic involved with Emergence. She's a climate predictor. The plots of Scandanavian land that Emergence are auctioning will be prime land when global warning hits hard, but Emergence have falsely extended the safe areas. She complains. Nick and the lecturer are kidnapped and taken to the same place.

Wudda meets Peter in Ely. He's been tracking her. He tells her about the drowning event. Peter's been swindling his boss via the Emergence company. The boss (who was behind the Sarin episode that killed Wudda's husband) has found out and is holding Nick and the lecturer. He will return the captives if Peter resolves the money issue. Peter asks her to represent him in a face-to-face deal with his boss in London. They agree that Peter and the boss will meet on the beach where the drowning happened. Peter invites Wudda to watch from a headline. A bomb explodes on the beach. Peter and the boss die. Everyone else escapes. At the end of the novel, some weeks later, Nick has news that Peter might be alive, a terminally ill man having taken his place on the beach.

Very plotty, but it's snappy. I like how the main characters, Wudda and Nick, don't meet until the end of chapter 29 (of 31), and how Peter disappears yet again - a new life where his first was supposed to have ended. Wudda's concept of behaving correctly is about the only theme developed.

"Holgate visibly winced" isn't ideal.

Other reviews

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“The Stranger’s Child” by Alan Hollinghurst

An audio book.

Cecil, who has poems in Granta, is taking a break from the Cambridge of Rupert Brooke to stay with his lover, George at their stately house, Two Acres. They boast about being candid, but their lust is secret. George might be in love. Cecil has a servant who looks after him. The servant Jonah looks through Cecil’s poetry notebooks, wondering whether the fact that they’re poetry makes them more or less true. Daphne, 16, George’s sister, wants to visit Cecil. Cecil French-kisses her.

After the war, Daphne (now Lady Valance) has married Cecil's brother Dudley, a writer. Mrs Riley (a designer) and others are down for the weekend. Cecil died in the war, bravely. His "Two Acres" poem has entered the language. People think he wrote it about Daphne, but the unpublished parts suggest it was written about George. George (gay) is married to Madelene. Prof Stokes (Oxford) is visiting to research for his bio + collected works of Cecil, interviewing one person at a time in the library. Daphne's starting an affair with Revel, a young artist. She's kept Cecil's revealing letters. Mrs Riley makes a pass at her. Her young son discovers one of the old guests, dead.

Paul starts a job at a bank, ending up at the bank manager's house where he meets a grand-daughter of Revel and Daphne. She's going to Oxford. The bank manager's wife, Mrs Keeping, is a music teacher. Peter is a teacher at a boarding school (Cecil's old house). Peter meets Paul in the bank. Paul suspects Peter's gay. He fantacises. He knows the coded language of small ads. He writes in the evening and reads poetry.

They meet again at the Bank Manager's family gathering. Peter and Mrs Keeping play a duet. Paul meets George and Madelene - still together having co-written a standard history book. Peter invites Paul to see Cecil's tomb, a pretext for sex in Peter's room.

10 years later, Paul (who's had a piece or 2 in the TLS) is writing a book about Cecil. We learn about interviewing techniques. 3 years before, Mrs Keeping died and Mr Keeping committed suicide. He visits Jonah for an interview. He has photos. He interviews Dudley (now 84) He meets Madelene and senile George. The latter says that Mrs Keeping was Cecil's child, not Dudley's. He visits Daphne (her night thoughts going on too long). Wilfred's still with her.

We jump ahead to 2008, Peter's Celebratory ceremony. He had presented 2 TV series. Rob, a bookdealer, is the first person PoV. Paul is there. His book provoked a scandal. Rob knows a house-clearer. He has a book of transcribed letters from Cecil. He directs Rob to a house where there were some relevant items. When he arrives he's told that the workers have been burning useless paperwork for a day or so.

The language of the Georgian upper class, Oxbridge common rooms, first dates, and (sometimes) the working class are faithfully reproduced. Some of the internal monologues go on too long for me, and the Jonah interview section feels stretched.

Descriptions and emotions are rarely simple. Nuances are squeezed out of each moment. Your chances of liking the book depends rather on how you feel about observations/phrases like

• in the warm uncertainty of being teased
• a sense of betrayal discoloured the following seconds
• her joy of discovery was shadowed by the sense of being left behind
• the sense of the sticky moment [was] still thick about him
• with a question hidden somewhere in his smile
• He passes a room "with a remembered sense of refuge"
• "The solidarity of the shy"
• The "implicit moral commentaries" of the butler
• "almost yawning with casual pride"
• "smiled tightly and looked away as if both were after the same bargain."

Other reviews

• Theo Tait (In an inversion of the Brideshead theme, the outsider, the stranger's child, is an aristocrat visiting a middle-class home and seducing the family in it ... Hollinghurst has a strong, perhaps unassailable claim to be the best English novelist working today. He offers surely the best available example of novelistic ambition squared with the highest aesthetic standards. ... His best books are beautiful at the level of the sentence and impressive at the levels of character, incident and plot; they manage to be nearly perfect and great fun at the same time. ... he has limited the use of his gorgeous observational voice, which dominated his previous works. A lot of the narrative is carried by dialogue and relatively basic description. It also has a principal female character, for the first time, and the story is warmer and more forgiving than in the past. It almost seems as if Hollinghurst is refuting the most commonly made criticisms of his work: that he's not very interested in women; that there's too much sex; that his writing is too lush; that his characters are not likeable. )
• Emma Brockes (As Eskimos do with snow, the English see gradations of social inadequacy invisible to the rest of the world ... a story of people trapped in the wrong life ... The novel is divided into five parts, each occupying a different era and arranged around a single extended scene. (Mr. Hollinghurst does parties very well))
• Thomas Mallon (Underpinned with a range of styles that run from Iris Murdoch to William Trevor and back to Forster ... “The Stranger’s Child” is especially concerned — sometimes gravely, sometimes comically — with the effects of gay liberation on literary biography. )

"The zebra stood in the night" by Kerry Hardie (Bloodaxe, 2014)

I've not heard of this poet, which is a surprise given that this is her 7th book and she's had a "Selected" published. Poems come from Atlanta review, Manchester review, Ploughshares, Poetry Ireland, Poetry London, Stinging Fly, etc.; an impressive list.

Several pages in, I'm still to find anything noteworthy. On the back cover George Szirtes writes that the world is "rendered truthfully, plainly yet freshly". Pages 15, 17, 18 and 24 for example seem to be true enough, plain, but not fresh. She can do imagery though - Black-boned trees gibbet/ the spread skies of morning (p.30) for example. I like "Europe" in the sense that if it started a short story (which it could easily do) I'd look forward to reading more. I was attracted to "Software Update" by the title, but I don't get the poem.

Part two is a 5-page article and 16 poems about grief. I prefer it to part one. Here are some extracts -

• Everyone tells us this pain will lessen but they speak from a reality that has very little to do with us ... it isn't that we don't believe them: we simply stare at them blankly waiting for their mouths to stop moving ... Death pushes us deeper into our lives, we act and react from a place that is not normally accessible to us, we experience phenomena that at other times we would be unable to experience (p.59)
• Slowly the suffering of he (or she) who loves lessens until the day comes when there are moments when it is almost absent. If these moments join up for even a brief period of time, then we are capable of relaxing into a state of non-suffering .. The return of joy, however fleeting, is usually accompanied by feelings of betrayal and hence the return of suffering ... There is a gap in the intensity of our grief so life rushes in (p.59)
• The door is always open ... You'd simply walked through the door that you'd stood beside since the day of your birth (p.68)
• Hiddenness is the ballast on the ship's keel, the great underwater portion of a life that steadies the rest (Jane Hirshfield, quoted on p.73)

Other reviews

• Claire Prescott (Refreshing the themes of seasons, nature, and time, Hardie contemplates, while at the same time experiences, the non-linear process of finding peace in loss, grief, and mortality. ... the clarity and simplicity of her poetry seems to stem from her own disillusionment with inaccessible poetry ... The power in Hardie’s work lies in her vulnerability and honesty. She does not pretend to have discovered the meaning in death and aging or to have found peace in the loss of her brother. In sharing her solitary experience of grief, she establishes a sense of belonging and unity. )

"Hot water" by Christopher Fowler

An audio book.

Hannah has left the UK because of her life with Aiden. She gets a job in Nice, cleaning rented holiday homes. The agent, Julia, knows about the locals, the rich Russian renters, etc. We learn that Hannah got pregnant the first time she had sex. She was 19 and Aiden was a 27 year old teacher. She didn't like him much. He offered to marry her. She had an abortion and married him anyway, to spite her mother. Then she found out he was into young-girl porn and shopped him. He killed himself.

In London, Steve, 42, a risk-taking wine merchant, is having an affair with 18 year old Summer (who's a virgin). He rents a Nice house for 2 weeks. Summer's there alone in the first week. She and Hannah start having sex together. The plan was for Steve to arrive midway through the first week but he ends up arriving later, just hours before the others arrive, by which time Summer should be out of the house.

The others are Steve's wife Jennifer, son Jamie, and Steve's employee Giles (upper class, not bright - he knows about Summer) with his snobby, childless, flirty wife Melissa. Steve's company is collapsing and he blames Giles. 2 years ago Jennifer found out about an affair Steve was conducting.

Clearing up, Hannah finds Summer's phone, passport, bikini, and signs of a quick departure. She hears that Summer and her boyfriend were involved in a scuffle at a bar. She suspects Steve might have killed her (Hannah knew Summer wanted to break up with him). She leaves clues/notes for people to find because she doesn't want to lose her job by going to the police. Creepy Jamie starts chatting to her. She learns that Summer has had mental health problems.

Melissa (I think) finds the note and tells Steve that she knows about him. She warns him not to sack her hopeless husband. A mentally impaired village girl goes missing. Hannah thinks Steve's involved. She thinks a body might be buried in the garden.

Some people think that Hannah is framing Steve. Hannah wonders if Summer is playing a game n all of them. Jennifer leaves Steve. Hannah finds the girl, held captive by control-freak Jamie. A mob of locals come to search the grounds. Steve gets aggressive and is shot. In the final chapter, from Summer's PoV, we learn that she is trapped (and expects to die) in the swimming pool plumbing.

Other reviews

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• Laura Wilson (A pitch-perfect mix of mystery and social satire, expertly plotted and written with relish.)

"Run time" by Catherine Ryan Howard

An audio book.

Some people (crew and cast total 8) are on the way to filming "Final Draft" in an isolated cottage in Irish woods.

Kate (doing a lit MA) meets Joel (aspiring novelist) in a bookshop. They get together.

Adele Rafferty has been in LA for 6 months, auditioning in vain. She used to be a child actor for years in an Irish soap opera. She left it to do a film but something went wrong, which is why she'd left for the States. She gets a phone call offering her 2 weeks work in Ireland plus a plane ticket. She leaves straight away. When she arrives she's not impressed. She's the only woman, she has to skimpy clothes, there's no wiki, barely a mobile signal, and they'll start by filming at night. Only Donal (assistant director) is at all friendly.

She awakes alone. She thinks maybe this is a trick, her reactions being filmed. She hears noises. Her stuff is tampered with. She goes looking for a signal. She reads the drafty script. There are similarities between the real life events and the script. One of the props is a book called "First Draft". The book (featuring Karin and Jack) also has similarities with real life. As Adele notes, it's getting very meta, like a Christopher Nolan film. Jack is killed by Gus.

The screenplay (main characters Kate and Joel) is presented in screenplay format.

We learn about her earlier film. The director, Martin, had taken her on for personal reasons and she was gaslighted - a psychotic breakdown, the rumours said. She thinks she might be the victim of gaslighting again.

Donal returns. He says he was a late recruit too. He has explanations for all the funny stuff that's been going on, and suspects that the director, Steve, might be playing tricks. She discovers a bank of CCTV monitors in the loft, with cameras around the house. She hears Martin arrive. What's he doing there? She escapes to the next house where she finds Julia, a childhood acting rival with a successful acting career, lover of Martin, and the friend who Adele had phoned for help. When Martin appears, Adele and Julia escape in Julia's car. Julia says that Adele has tried to wreck her career and take her man. She'd written the script with Martin and had expected to be the lead. She tries to kill them both in an accident. Both survive.

In the script, wannabe novelist Gus wants his novel to have the selling point of being true, so he ties to enact the plot. Kate smashes his head with his own typewriter.

After, talking about events, Adele says that were it a movie it would need another twist. A movie is planned about the making of "Final Draft".

I may well have got some of the plot details wrong. Had it been a paper novel I'd have flicked back to check.

Other reviews

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