Books for September

  

by Diana Studer

- gardening for biodiversity

 in Cape Town, South Africa

 

We are in loadshedding (5 x 2 hours on Sunday, 3 slots yesterday, 4 today), and I had read my last library book. Nice fresh pile on Monday!

 

Deborah MOGGACH

The black dress

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I loved the film Best Exotic Marigold Hotel - didn't realise it was about outsourcing care of old British people - must read that one. This however is chick lit rom com targeting over seventies. In four parts. Starts slowly, then tips to WHAT plot twist next?! A definite maybe.

 

Black dress
going to the Nutcracker in 2017

Mick HERRON

Slough House

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Darkness was falling fast, in response to strange rural gravity.

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Spy thriller out of London. I have enjoyed his finely crafted words before. His darkness, falling, stays with me.

 

Darkness falls on Chocolat

Gill HORNBY

All together now

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It had seemed like such a good idea after choir practice, but then everything seemed like a good idea after choir practice: they always came out on a high.  

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... nearly everybody these days was out of town all week working. There was an excellent train service and a choice selection of arterial roads and only the residents left behind who didn't get on one or the other of them, like Annie, could really understand quite how they sucked the life-blood out of the place every single day.

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A small town choir of random and varied people drawn together by music. I miss that.

 

Lovely pile of library books

Gerald SEYMOUR

The waiting time

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She came to the Brandenburger Tor. At the great gate of grey-brown stone old history had been renovated and new history had been destroyed.

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Cold War. Baltic coast of East Germany. Stasi war crimes revealed years later.

 

Brandenburger Tor Berlin

Melissa A VOLKER

Shadow flicker

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... watched the energy from far-off storms roll through the ocean to the shore. The swell was about three to five foot and the breaking wave was a beautiful left. Over and over, the white water crashed and rushed in over the rocks.

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A love story. An edgy love story. Set around environmental impact assessment for a new wind farm. It's local and surfing is different to what I usually read.

 

Windfarm at Hopefield

Sarah BLAKE

The postmistress

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Long ago, I believed that, given a choice, people would turn to good as they would to the light. ... reporting ... I must have believed, when I started out, that the shoulder of public opinion could be put up against the door of public indifference and would, when given the proper direction, shove it wide with the power of wanting to stand on the side of angels.

~

Inspired by war reporters like Martha Gellhorn. And the days when a letter delivered, or not, meant something significant. This book I read slowly in rationed portions, spreading the horror of desperate Jews fleeing from Germany, and Europe. But also taking time to read and reread beautifully worded passages.

 

Letter from my grandfather in 1917

My grandfather died just before the war ended, when my mother was four. This embroidered card from France is over a hundred years old with generations of memories in a few words. On his last leave in Perranporth, where granma lived with her two tiny daughters to escape from daylight bombing in London. After he left, my grandmother found his crumpled leave form. He had another day. For the Other Woman in London. Then my mother said abruptly No More! And cut her story off.  

 

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