50 Books Challenge 2026 Part Six

We went to Turkey years ago on a bargain package that included 'two-centre' B & B accommodation in Bodrum and Kuşadası, but decided to hire a car and just take off for a few days. We got rooms from people who came up to us and offered 😬😱 - there were loads of them all descending on the tourists offering accommodation in their homes in the countryside. I remember being woken in the pitch black by a muezzin, and creeping out of one place to get going early while it was still cool, leaving the cash for the stay on the table. Everything was fine though basic, but there’s no way on earth I'd dream of doing that now!

48 The Close by Jane Casey

Maeve Kerrigan #10 and I am just about keeping to my resolution of limiting myself to one a month. She's not making it easy, though, with the continued romantic tension! This instalment sees Derwent and Maeve pretending to be a couple as part of a somewhat improbable undercover stakeout in a seemingly-normal close. Predictably, it's anything but normal, and they end up with more than one crime on their hands. I figured one of them out myself, which I don't usually manage with Casey. Enjoyable as always although I found Maeve a bit wetter than normal in this one. Hoping she's back to her spiky self next time.

Intimacies by Lucy Caldwell
Stories centred around motherhood, ageing and the possibility of life turning out not quite as you would have wanted.
I liked these a lot. Interesting to read them straight after the Claire Keegan stories, as they were more ‘everyday’ and so perhaps more relatable.
I must have picked this up on recommendation from here, as I haven’t read anything else by Caldwell and a book of short stories wouldn’t normally be my first point of contact with an author.

73. The Everlasting by Alix E Harrow - I have been reading a lot more fantasy recently and this book has made me want to go back to good solid historical novels. Not that it was bad. It was rather good. There was just too much packed into it for my taste. Multiple timelines, overlapping memories and a wealth of themes - legend vs truth, cowardice vs bravery, freedom vs devotion, patriotism vs nationalism, free will vs predestination, and half a dozen more.

It is very well written and I can't fault the execution. But just a bit too much for me.

102. The Bad Seeds, C J Skuse
Final book in the series about a female serial killer - will she get her happy ending? By this point the series has overstayed its welcome and the jokes are worn by repetition. This instalment is mostly set in a small Irish village, not very convincingly portrayed. We find out more about one minor character, which is mildly interesting. I'm at least pleased to have finished the series.

103. Lady of Quality, Georgette Heyer
The last book published before GH's death and very standard GH fare. A young woman unexpectedly finds herself chaperoning a teenage girl who is determined to escape from her home. This brings her into contact with the girl's guardian, her uncle, and, much to no-one's surprise, sparks fly. GH has her usual fun with family relationships, punch dialogue, and amusing bathos - the big proposal here happens when the heroine is suffering from the flu, which is not something you often see.

104. Memoirs of a Fellwanderer, A Wainwright
We get some cranky old man grumbles - the welfare state is ruining people! Bring back the birch! - but there are also some more endearing moments in this memoir, where the author recounts how he fell in love with the Lake District. He doesn't claim any big-man climbing feats - his early encounters with the mountains have him sliding around in his smooth-soled shoes, getting soaked and lost and being intimidated by hotels. His first marriage, he says, "was to prove a mistake although it produced a son who won a beautiful baby competition". The introduction is written by his second wife - it was a late second marriage for each and their happiness together seems to have been a wonderful surprise for both of them. I was rather charmed by this.

105. The Winner's Curse, Marie Rutkoski
The first of a YA trilogy, this was pressed upon me by my teen dd. I'm pleased to report that her taste is reliable. The storyline is inspired by the fate of Greek slaves in Rome and Rome's attitude to Greek culture, a mixture of admiration and contempt. In this fictional state, a young woman of the conquering nation is drawn to a male slave. Fate has, of course, twists in store. Although it's all fairly predictable, it's competently executed.

106. Long Live Great Bardfield: The Autobiography of Tirzah Garwood
The introduction by the author's daughter compares this to Period Piece by Gwen Raverat, and there are similarities both in content (a description of her family and her life in the early decades of the twentieth century) and tone (irresistibly artless and confiding - or at least so it seems). Tirzah married Eric Ravilious and there is plenty here for anyone interested in artistic circles between the wars. The book might have benefited by stricter editing, cutting down on the sheer number of people who flit in and out of the pages. Even so, I really liked this and the authpr's determination to wring as much out of life as she could, before a sadly young death.

107. Return to Kirrin, Neil and Suzy Howlett
I snapped this up after a mention by @ChessieFL , as the Famous Five books were my gateway drug into reading when I was six or seven. It's the 1970s and they (well, four of them) are in their forties, dealing with work and teenagers and modern life, when Julian invites them back to Kirrin Island in pursuit of a particular plan. It's always a risk to read this kind of follow-on book as it can retrospectively colour your childhood image of the characters, but this was an affectionate homage, teasing but without malice, so no harm done.

108. Dead in the Morning, Margaret Yorke
This was part of a kindle offer of a whole crime series (5 books) for 99p. The books were originally published in the 1970s and so far very much in the classic vein - we're in an English village, someone has been killed in the big house, an Oxford don happens to be in the neighbourhood, and due to his superior intelligence, manages to solve the mystery before the police. You know what you're going to get and you get it. It's all done with a light touch and I'll happily read the next.

60. The Scientist Who Wasn’t There - Joanne Briggs

Most of my recent reads have been courtesy of recommendations from here - thanks @bibliomania for this one! It’s a memoir/speculative fiction about her father, 'Professor' Michael Briggs - quote-marks because she discovered that, after his legit degree in chemistry, his subsequent stellar scientific honours were all faked - interesting to read just as the Arday scandal is happening.

In Briggs's case this had much more serious consequences, because he was a senior figure in a firm manufacturing synthetic hormones, and marketing a drug called Primodos, given to women as a pregnancy-testing method. It was alleged to cause horrific birth defects although all attempts to win accountability have, sadly, failed. Briggs left his wife, Joanne's mother, and his two children, for another woman and died young, largely estranged from his family.

The true story drew me in although I wasn’t convinced by the fictional passages where the author imagines events in her father’s life, and there was a slightly frustrating unfinished feel to the narrative - though I suspect this reflects the fact that there’s so much she just can’t know about his web of half-truths and outright inventions, and now will never know. Ultimately a sad story.

47 The Secret by the Lake - Louise Douglas It's 1961 and Amy, a working class young woman from Sheffield, has spent ten years working as a nanny for a family she loves. She returns home to nurse her dying grandmother, but within months she ends up back with the mother and daughter of the family, helping them survive following the father's death. They move to the mother's childhood home on the edge of a creepy reservoir and that's when the weird stuff starts happening...It turns out the mother had a sister who died as a teenager and is doing some hardcore haunting - genuinely scary stuff, especially when the little girl adopts her evil dead teenage auntie as an imaginary friend! Then we gradually get the backstory and it turns out the truth is very different from what everyone has always believed...

This was quite good, and I enjoyed the spooky bits. The twist at the end was well-signposted - some might say it was too obvious but at least there was a credible lead-in to it, which is better than being a "where the hell did that come from?" curveball. Overall, a decent read albeit most of the characters were not fleshed out well enough (and trigger warnings needed for child abuse).

I've also DNFd Helen of Nowhere from the Booker longlist. Nearly 50 mins of man with big ego waffling on about how his wife has left him and his career has taken a downturn, then on to a realtor talking nonsense while trying to sell a house to said man with big ego. Life is too short so I returned it.

I collected Yesteryear from the library yesterday, so far so good.

47 Stone Yard Devotional, Charlotte Wood

I really loved this but made the mistake of reading something else before writing my review, so I am going to struggle to communicate what I loved about.

So firstly: nun fiction alert. The narrator (unnamed, I think) retreats to a small convent in rural Australia to escape problems in her marriage. It is near the town where she grew up, and memories of her childhood and now long-dead parents rise to the surface. She doesn't, it seems, believe in God, or in the power of prayer, but finds a kind of comfort in the mundane hard work and sisterhood of the convent community.

Her peace, though, is disturbed by what Wood has described as three "visitations". Firstly, the less-than-official return of a set of bones belonging to a previous inhabitant of the convent (yes, everyone on the Les Mis thread, it's another secret nun burial, although with less midnight body-swapping). Secondly, the fact that the living nun who is chaperoning the bones on their journey back to the convent is someone connected to the narrator's childhood. And finally an almost biblical infestation of mice, who invade every corner of the convent buildings, chewing and biting and dying in horrific numbers.

This is a quiet and low-key book where much of the substance lies under the surface. The narrator tells us early on that she will leave a lot out. There are many questions unanswered, often arising from remarks that drop quietly, without fanfare. The things that I thought might happen didn't happen. But the writing, and the depiction of the life of the convent, and the interactions between those very human women, is beautiful.

I wasn't sure whether to make it a bold as there are a LOT of loose ends left flapping and I had hoped for at least a few of them to be satisfactorily resolved. But yes, I'm going to declare it bold because I was sure from a few pages in that it would be, so I won't let the anti-climax of the ending put me off. Also I've had very few bolds so far this year - this was definitely one of my best reads of recent months.

48 The Eights, Joanna Miller

1920, and Oxford is admitting female students for the first time. Four very different (1) young women find themselves neighbours in Corridor Eight at St Hugh's College.

I wasn't sure if this would have much substance but I liked it more than I thought I would. Behind the "isn't female friendship just the BEST" are some genuinely moving stories of grief and longing. Miller uses her setting, the aftermath of the Great War, the changing social norms, to good effect.

(1) except not very different. This is one of my main issues with the book. By concentrating on four white, middle- or upper-class young women, Miller has restricted her story very much to one limited patch of history. I would LOVE for someone to do a Longbourn on this and give us the same place and time but tell the story through the eyes of one of the dowdy spinster chaperones (frequent objects of the girls' mockery) or the poor scout who runs their baths and cleans up their messes. The feminism in this book seems almost pointless without those voices.

@VikingNorthUtsire I've just started reading The Eights and while I like the history of it, I'm finding the characters very similar. Each one has one thing to distinguish them, but not much depth aside from that.

@Stowickthevast they do get fleshed out as the book goes on, and I did get invested in a couple of their back stories, but as a group they are certainly homogeneous. I kept thinking "surely these servants won't just exist in the background to clear up mess and be patronised by Otto". But apparently they would.

I have finished my major project for this summer which I started at the beginning of June and have always wanted to tackle as it is seen as a masterpiece of Irish literature
119 and 120 Ulysses by James Joyce and Ulysses Unbound by Terence Killen
The second book is a handbook to the first without which I would never have persevered past episode 3. This is the story of one day in Dublin and the experiences of our main characters during that day- Stephen Dedalus- a teacher and failed medical student who sees himself as a bit of a genius, Leopold Bloom- middle aged cuckold and Everyman outsider and his wife Molly, she who is having an affair. It is the least straightforward thing I’ve ever read. I went in thinking- it’s stream of consciousness- I like s of c- but the technique changes in every chapter or episode as Joyce calls them. Some of these were clever and funny and you could recognise truths in and others felt difficult for the sake of being difficult or irritating in how farcical they could be. Overall, it’s very male, (even the section in Molly’s PoV is a man trying to imagine what it’s like being a woman) with its obsessions with fatherhood, sex and bodily functions. But it also raises interesting issues and it talks of many things and uses many phrases which my late father used which made it more precious to me. I’m making it bold because I feel a real sense of achievement having finished it.

34) The Wedding People by Alison Espach. Widely reviewed on here already so I won't leave a synopsis.

I enjoyed this one, despite thinking Gary the groom wasn't the prize the other characters insisted on telling us he was! I liked the main character, Phoebe, and felt sorry for Gary's preteen daughter, 'Juice'. I also found Lila the bride to be quite compelling, spoilt and ridiculous as she was sometimes.

Having said that it did irk me that almost everyone (bride, groom, mother-of-the-bride, the groom's sister, best man, daughter of the groom) had a meaningful, soul-bearing conversation with newcomer Phoebe the second they were alone with her. I understand Lila, Gary, or even attention-starved Juice doing that for the sake of plot, but the rest was a bit on the nose.

Still worth a read.

Next up Dissection of a Murder by Jo Murray.

Well done on completing Ulysses ÚlldemoShúl. That is a great achievement.

Well done @ÚlldemoShúl 👏

Congratulations @ÚlldemoShúl

I have been mulling over a Odyssey - Ulysses double header for next year. What do you think - wonderful feast of reading or torture?

I never had to read Ulysses as a student but I remember great moaning and groaning from all those who did. I loved your review though (and a companion handbook sounds like a genius idea)

That’s the way I did it (the two together) and it is hard work. I’d definitely a supporting handbook- there’s bits I wouldn’t have been able to tackle it without it. Reading the analysis made me go back and reread and make (a bit) more sense of it.

It is both wonderful and torture but the sense of achievement is immense! If you do go for it, give yourself plenty of time - sometimes I read 10 pages a day and I only finished this quickly because I’m a teacher on summer holidays- otherwise I’d no doubt be ploughing through for another three months!

Well done @ÚlldemoShúl when I finished I declared that I would never get those hours back!! I basically remember a discussion on Hamlet and some Catholic references! I liked the end

Brilliant achievement @ÚlldemoShúl!

Latest reads:

Murder at the Palace - Frances Evesham

Latest in the series with chocolatier Libby solving murders that baffle the police. This is really a bit too ‘cosy crime’ for me, bordering on twee, but I read them because they’re all set near where I live. Here someone was murdered at the Bishop’s Palace in Wells.

The Parkwood Murders - Chris Chibnall

Murder at a Centre Parcs type resort in Dorset. I liked this - decent story and characters and I liked the setting.

Pied Piper - Nevil Shute

Read for the Rather Dated thread on here, I loved this story set in 1940 about an older chap escorting an increasing gaggle of random children across France, trying to get back to England before the Nazis arrive. There’s some suspension of disbelief required, but the writing is great and it’s a lovely story. Recommended.

Bing Banged My Lula - Frankie Park

I had a vague recollection of the title of this from when it originally came out in the late 90s, so decided to reread. It’s about four single mums who decide to form a band, while trying to either get together with or get rid of various men. It was fine - it was the title rather than the book itself that had stuck in my head, but I did enjoy the reread.

The Thursday Murder Club - Richard Osman

I finally got round to watching the film last week so I reread the book to see how close the film was to the book. The answer is - pretty close in terms of story although I wasn’t sure about all the casting decisions.

The Tailor - Tim Sullivan

The latest in the series featuring detective George Cross, who is on the autistic spectrum so doesn’t approach solving murders in the way others might. In this one, a tailor who makes bespoke suits is murdered on a train and George has to find out why. I like this series and this was a good addition although not my favourite of the series.

She Never Lived Here - Rita Maxil

This is one of those books where the premise sounds really intriguing but the payoff is ultimately a bit disappointing. Camila moves to a new estate and is invited round to Erin’s house, where she has a great night. However the next morning the house is up for sale with no sign anyone’s lived there for months, and nobody’s heard of Erin. Started well but lost its way somewhere.

Everything She Didn’t Say - Jane Casey

This is a stand alone book and while I really enjoyed it, it wasn’t as addictive as the Maeve Kerrigan books. Ruth and Maura have been staying at a cliff top cottage, but then Ruth is discovered covered in blood and Maura’s vanished. This kept me guessing and even right up to the end I wasn’t really sure who was telling the truth and who wasn’t.

Death and Deja Vu - Ian Moore

Latest in the Follet Valley series set in France where English B&B owner Richard and French bounty hunter Valerie solve crimes together. All very silly, but fun. However for this one they’re not in their usual village - they’re on holiday on an island where the owner has gathered a group of people together to play a game to win the island, but then people start dying. This is a sort of homage to Christie’s And Then There Were None, but I preferred the earlier books in the series set in more rural France.

V is for Vengeance - Sue Grafton

I’m getting to the end of the series! The books are starting to get too long now - this one could easily have been 100 pages shorter if all the unnecessary description of every person or place was removed. Anyway, Kinsey helps bust a big shoplifting ring and inadvertently solves a couple of murders while she’s at it.

@ÚlldemoShúl that's an impressive achievement! Congratulations

I don't know if any of you follow Alexandra Stedman's The R.U.E on Substack, but she's just written a post about travelling in 2006 which fits perfectly into the discussion here earlier this week:

(I am very much not a substack expert so apologies if this link doesn't work: alexandrastedman.substack.com/p/20-years-ago-i-surprised-myself-and?r=8zqks&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web)

Like most 23 year olds, I rarely considered the dangerous situations I was in until I found myself in them. I had read in my Lonely Planet that the only way to find accommodation in Split was through Pensiones or staying with locals and you just had to flag them down at the train station (only now can I comprehend Lonely Planets at that time were mostly written from a male perspective). When I told some passengers on the train that I was going to stay with whichever stranger held a sign with a reasonable price, they looked alarmed. And admittedly, once I disembarked the train and passed hordes of men shaking signs in my face, the idea seemed less than appealing. I ended up accepting the generosity of an older lady who took me to her flat where I was to sleep on the living room sofa surrounded by many, many portraits of her son in military uniform. I stayed out that evening until as late as possible, nervous to sleep, but when it was time to head home, no one seemed to recognise the address scrawled by the lady on my notepad. It did not help that I spoke not one word of Croatian and couldn’t even fathom what was written down myself. A shudder came over me: all my belongings, my interrail ticket, my passport - they were all left in the apartment. I felt sick and stupid for risking everything. After a few hours of panic and blindly wandering, a stranger overheard and they knew the building. Everything was fine, my sofa set-up was exactly as I left it and the lady had stayed up to ensure I was okay, she even shouted at me for good measure. By 5am the next morning, I had left and felt quite awful that I had even considered that this woman might have robbed me but it did open to my eyes to my vulnerability. I can imagine my daughter doing this exact thing now and it terrifies me.

53 Vengeance - John Banville
54 Holy Orders - John Banville
55 Even the Dead - John Banville

More murders being solved by the pathologist Quirke in 1950s Dublin with a lot of time spent in pubs either drinking or trying very hard to resist a drink. He is clearly irresistible to women as they seem to leap into bed with him on first encounter which seems quite unlikely in a 1950s Catholic country. The grip of the Catholic Church on people and institutions is apparent and often key to the plots. I like the world this is set in although some of the books deal with troubling matters but am pleased to have got to the end of the solo Quirke books. Onto something different now.

Congratulation, @ÚlldemoShúl !

44 The Harbour house by Rachael Lucas
A successful writer who was fostered as a child returns to the coastal village in Scotland she grew up in. She rents the renovated house she lived in and works on her latest novel she's stuck on. She reconnects with people from her childhood including the handsome man who used to tease her.

Another lovely book in the Applemore series. This one was a bit slower to get going but I enjoy how she puts in slightly bigger social themes in her romances.

45 Helen of nowhere by Makenna Goodman

A misogynist ex professor looks around a house in the country with a realtor. Strange things happen.

This is written like a play. It is quite mad. I enjoyed the ride. The ending is enjoyable to the horrible professor. One I really wanted to discuss afterwards