I've been lurking but not posting, and now have a bit of a backlog to report (apologies), which I'm going to split into a few posts over a couple of days to save my typing fingers and so as not to totally take over the thread!
Love is Blind, William Boyd
I'd read Any Human Heart and was looking forward to this one.
The protagonist is a young Edinburgh man, Brodie Moncur, who in the late 19th century goes to work in Paris to escape his tyrannical clergyman father. He works as a piano tuner and meets a famous (and pretty odd) very successful concert pianist, who offers him basically a retainer to be 'his' tuner and travel with him, share the good fortune etc. He falls in love with the pianist's lover and things go a bit Pete Tong.
Without wishing to spoiler people, the book from here on in takes place across various places in Europe inc Paris, St Petersburg, Edinburgh and the South of France, and there are some great evocations of these places in the 19th century. It is basically a romance, with emotional highs and lows.
It's a bit odd in that, treated slightly differently; with the back-and-forth across countries it could have been a 'caper'.
I felt more moved at the end than I'd expected to, as I had felt throughout that I wasn't always all that engaged with the characters and what happened to them. I wasn't disappointed, but I'd say I wasn't overwhelmed either. Having said that, I'd say read it; it is very vivid about time and place and it does have the epic sweep of a good romance.
Sea State, Tabitha Lasley A journalistic account of the men who work on the oilfields in the North Sea, but also an account of how the writer fell for one of the men she interviews and started an affair with him (she left her boyfriend; he is married).
This is fascinating about the life and culture of oilfield workers: the loneliness and the super-macho environment; the pressures, emotional, mental and practical (there is shocking material about how disasters happen and how much they're covered up/minimised).
I found the author herself a bit tiresome though; she seemed a little in love with her image of herself as rather wild and out of control. A bit self-regarding.
Behind the Seams, Esme Young. I love the Sewing Bee and I love Esme, so I snapped this up on an Amazon Kindle deal. She has had an extraordinary life and career, but I wish she was (sorry Esme) a better and more analytical/reflective writer (or had a biographer instead); this is very much in the 'I was born, this was my family, I did this and then this happened' vein of bog-standard autobiog. There are amazing stories and events but she doesn't go into much detail or reflect on them at all and I often almost didn't notice things that had happened and had to go back and reread them to get the impact.
She does though light up when she talks about her 'real work', as she describes her teaching; she clearly adores her students and is inspired by teaching them. And she is clearly (and rightly) proud of the fashion house she and some female friends set up in the 60s; they were hugely successful and influential, plus she obviously finds it important that they were young women of quite modest means, doing it themselves and supporting one another. A frustrating read in some ways but worth it for these gems.
Crow Lake, Mary Lawson Set in very rural Canada, about a family whose parents are suddenly and tragically killed, and the children's lives thereafter. There is conflict between the desire for education and ambition and the need to make money, as well as the family's interactions with their community, some good and some not so. It's a slow burn, but I liked that. I would say the narrative is a little bit like reading an essay at times; the narrator, one of the children but now an adult, has a tendency to pretty much say things like 'Now I'm going to look back at what happened next between me and my brother' (not in so many words but this is the gist). This had the effect of keeping me at a bit of a distance from the emotional world of the novel at times. Overall, though, it's gripping and well written and observed, and very believable about the feelings and actions of the main characters.
More (quite a bit more!) to come when we can all face it...