The Correspondent, by Virginia Evans

 

Probably unfairly, I tend to be a bit suspicious of novels which have reams of enthusiastic quotes adorning the cover and inside pages, and which have won prizes as well. Jealousy, perhaps? Well, it's possible. So it's a good job that this book was chosen for our next book group discussion, else I would probably never have read it.

Well - I've just read it, and I loved it. Why? Well, it's about a woman in her seventies - Sybil Van Antwerp - who is stuggling to come to terms with several difficult things in her life. I too am in my seventies, so if not - I hope - sitting in Death's waiting room, I am certainly heading towards the carpark. And so... well, you do tend to contemplate things a bit, as Sybil does.

Sybil is an enthusiastic and inveterate letter writer - we take this on trust for most of the novel, which is entirely told through letters (though we do eventually find out the reason for her preference for expressing herself through letters). She has an eye condition which means she will eventually lose her sight. She lives alone. The letters are to a number of different correspondents, including Rosalie, her dear friend and sister in law, her son and daughter, her eye specialist, Harry Landy, the rather unhappy son of an old friend, her neighbour, Theodore, and the dean of the local college, with whom she is having a long-running dispute about her admission onto some courses. She also writes to famous people - mostly writers - such as Joan Didion, and gets letters back.

None of this sounds particularly gripping, does it? But it is. Partly because underlying all the apparent trivia, there are two mysteries. One relates to the death of her son, Gilbert, as a child, and the other concerns some rather disturbing anonymous letters which she begins to receive. Of course, we are invested in finding the solutions to these.

But mostly, I think, it is the character of Sybil itself which captures our interest. At first, she appears to be rather acerbic, perhaps selfish, set in her ways. But gradually, so much more emerges. She is honest. She admits when she is wrong. She is caring, even if she doesn't shout about it. She is formidably intelligent. She is willing to change - and she does change. One key scene for me is when, after years of wrangling with Melissa, the college dean, by letter, she finally decides to go to confront her. And when she sees Melissa, exhausted after a difficult meeting, she suddenly stops in her tracks and properly sees the other woman, and understands why she has behaved as she has done. And they become friends.

So she can recalibrate, she can change - she may be old, but she's not stuck. And in the end, her life does change - instead of narrowing down, it opens out. Which is a distinctly encouraging thing to read about.

As well as all that, the book is sharply written and cleverly constructed. I hugely enjoyed it.

Wild Dark Shore, by Charlotte McConaghy

This the best book I've read in quite some time. It's a gripping thriller, it's a book that's deeply concerned about climate and environment, it's about relationships between parents and children, it's a love story - and as well as all this, it's very beautifully written.

It's set on a fictional island called Shearwater - which does, however, have a lot in common with Macquarie Island, which is in the South Pacific between Australia and Antarctica. The fictional island has an international seedbank, which is threatened - as is the whole island - by rising sea levels. The island's caretakers are a close-knit family comprising widower Dom Salt and his children Raff, Fen and nine year-old Orly. 

Then one day, Fen rescues a woman who has been washed ashore after the boat which was bringing her to the island is wrecked. She - Rowan - is at first secretive about where she's from and how she comes to be in this remote spot - and she soon realises that the family has its own secrets too. But despite herself, she grows closer to all of them, and love grows.

If I told you any more than that about the plot, it would completely spoil it for you. And I wouldn't want to do that, because the author has constructed the plot with fiendish skill - just when you think you know what's going on, there's an unexpected twist, and another level is revealed.

The characters, and the relationships between them, are richly realised. Though there is one anomaly: Orly, the nine year-old, is incredibly knowledgeable about seeds and plants - about botany. This is fine - but the voice in the chapters which he narrates is absolutely not that of a nine year-old - it's the voice of an expert adult. Whereas when Orly is described by any of the other characters, he's clearly a child, and a very lovable one.

The writing is beautiful. The descriptions of the island, the sea, the wildlife - all stunning.

This is a very, very good book indeed.

Wild Journey, by A. m. Dassu, illustrated by Joe Lillington, published by Zephyr

 

NB - Although I'm a children's writer, I don't usually write here about children's books. But this one is special - AND it would make a lovely Christmas present, particularly for a child who's interested in nature.

I live near the Somerset Levels, which are famous for the murmurations of thousands of starlings which take place during the winter months. These are extraordinary events: the sound as the vast flocks fly overhead is like a rushing wind, or like great waves crashing onto the shore.

So I was immediately captivated by the murmuration pictured on the cover of A. M. Dassu’s Wild Journey, and by the subtitle: A Flight of Stories Across Deserts and Forests, Cities and Seas. And the book most definitely did not disappoint.

It is a collection of stories about children in different parts of the world, each featuring a murmuration, and with the recurring motif of a black feather. The first story concerns Jamal, who comes from London but is spending a long sort-of holiday in Egypt. Normally he loves his holidays in Egypt, enjoying days out with his mother and grandparents – but this time they are here because his grandfather is ill and confined to bed, and Jamal is bored, and misses his friends and his father.

Then one afternoon, his grandmother takes him to see a murmuration. He is thrilled by the spectacle – but then a falcon goes on the attack, and Jamal rescues a wounded bird which falls to the ground. They take it home, and his mother, who is a vet, binds up the bird’s damaged wing. Jamal becomes attached to the bird – it’s his new friend. But he has to learn the harsh lesson that sometimes the price of loving something is that you have to set it free, to let it go: much as he wants to, he cannot keep the bird – just as, though this is not made at all explicit, he cannot keep his grandfather.

The other stories are very varied. There’s an adventure in the Sahara, an encounter with wolves in Spain, a refugee in an English school, a boy on a French farm struggling to come to terms with a new half-sister. The starlings wheel and dive through them all, linking them gracefully together.

I love this book. There are so many fantasy books for children, often very good – but it’s comparatively rare, and such a delight, to come across a book about real children, dealing with real difficulties in the real world. The stories are beautifully told, and incidentally take the reader on a virtual visit to a variety of different countries. It’s perfect for reading aloud, in class or at bedtime, but also for reading to oneself. The illustrations and the design are gorgeous, celebrating wildlife as well as adding to the stories. This is a book to cherish.

 

 

The Covenant of Water, by Abraham Verghese

 First, an apology/admission: I finished this book a couple of weeks ago, and really should have written about it straight away while it was fresh in my mind. It was so good that I raced through it, and really I should have re-read it before writing about it, but it's over 700 pages long, so that isn't going to happen!

It is set in the southern tip of India, in what was then called Travancore, but is now, I think, Kerala. It begins in 1900, with a 12 year-old girl called Maryamma (but always to be known as Big Ammachi), who is on her way to become the second wife of a much older man, and the mother of his child, Jo-jo. Parambil, where he lives, is a remote, tiny hamlet. You might expect this to end badly, but in fact it doesn't: eventually the unlikely couple fall in love, and Big Ammachi becomes the matriarch of a successful community. 

After a few chapters, there is a sudden switch to the other side of the world - to a boy named Digby, growing up in Glasgow with a mother who is incapable of looking after him. Despite this difficult start, he becomes a surgeon, eventually joining the Indian service. A terrible accident ends his career in the service, and by happenstance, he ends up not far away from Parambil.

It takes a long time, however, before we find out how these two stories intertwine. The novel is meticulously and very cleverly structured, with one thing leading to another seemingly inevitably. Everything, it turns out, is connected: something that happens in one generation is bound to affect the lives of later generations, sometimes for good, sometimes not - there is a lot of terrible tragedy in this novel, though also a lot of tenderness, a lot of love, and quite a bit of humour. It's a family saga - it takes us all the way up to the 1970s, telling us a lot about the history of India in the 20th century along the way. The large cast of characters are beautifully realised: it's like Dickens in that way: no character is too insignificant for the author to be fascinated by him or her, to want to get under his/her skin.

I found it quite rivetting - a marvellous book. One thing - Verghese, who also wrote Cutting For Stone, is a surgeon himself. He describes medical procedures and the pathology of various diseases in considerable - often excruciating - detail: I found myself skipping paragraphs at times. And therein lies another puzzle: how on earth does he find the time to write a book - especially one of this length - alongside maintaining such a demanding career? I have no idea. But I'm glad he does.

Allan Ahlberg

 This week, the great children's writer Allan Ahlberg died. (As with everything, people will have their own opinions as to what's 'great' and what's not, but I really doubt that anyone who's read Alan's books with children would dispute that accolade.)

Some of Allan's books.

You may not be able to see it very well from this small picture, but these books are very well-worn. Pages are creased, some are even torn: one has a couple of pages missing. That's because they have all been read many, many times, first with our children, now with our grandchildren. They are very, very well-loved.

All these were illustrated by Allan's wife, Janet, who died much too soon. (He went on to write more books with other terrific artists, but I don't think they will mind me saying that his partnership with Janet was particularly special.) The illustrations are brilliant: so detailed, with so much to look at and talk about. Peepo, for instance, describes what a baby can see when he looks around him. It is set in wartime - the baby's father is in uniform - and much of what he sees is familiar to someone who can recall a fifties' childhood, but I really don't think that matters: Peepo is for small children, who take in and are fascinated by everything they see - it doesn't matter if what they see is different to their own world, the point is that it's interesting - and that it's about a family, about everyday goings-on. So on one particular spread, these are Alan's words:

He sees a bonfire smoking

    Pigeons in the sky

His mother cleaning windows

    A dog going by.

He sees his sisters searching

    For a jar or tin

To take up to the park

    And catch fishes in.

Janet takes up the pointers in the text and runs with them - but she also adds so much more: an outdoor toilet with a coal-hole next to it, an old-fashioned pram, a skipping rope, a toy tricycle, the mother's pinafore, the baby's toys, a little dog, and much more besides. So much to talk about and discuss, so much to share and enjoy.

Each Peach Pear Plum takes figures from nursery rhymes and fairy tales and spins a tale that includes all of them, ending in a triumphant page turn that reveals all the characters having a joyous picnic together: the Wicked Witch chortles happily, Little Red Riding Hood strokes a sheep, Robin Hood feeds Baby Bunting, and so on. Pure genius. And the words are perfectly balanced, so that each page of text leads you into the picture opposite, and then, with bated breath, onto the next page. (This book is very well-worn.) 

The other books in the picture are for older children. They too are absolute classics. They're just lovely to read aloud. The text is perfectly paced, leading you to pause in just the right places for a reveal or a joke, and again, the pictures don't just illustrate the text, they add to it. I'll leave you with this picture of one of my favourite spreads in this or any other book. Allan, thank you for the stories. The angels are lucky to have you. I can just imagine them sitting around chortling - and asking for just one more before bedtime - please!

The Glassmaker, by Tracy Chevalier

Tracy Chevalier's new novel is set in Venice, and it's about a glassmaker named Orsola. The author - perhaps best known for Girl With A Pearl Earring, inspired by Vermeer's famous picture - does very strange things with time in this novel. I'm still not entirely sure that this aspect of it works for me: I felt mildly irritated by it as I read the book - until I reached the end, when it suddenly came together triumphantly, and I almost burst out clapping.

What she does is this. The book starts in 1486 with nine year-old Orsola Rosso, the daughter of a glassmaking family on the island of Murano. It ends in 2020, with the Covid epidemic. At this time, Orsola is sixty five. The premise is that time flows differently in Venice, so that Orsola and her family and associates live somehow outside the passage of time on Terrafirma - the world that is not Venice. This enables the author to encompass centuries of Venetian history, as she takes up Orsola's life at various key points.

As a girl, Orsola is not expected to work in the family business. But when her father dies in a tragic accident, and the business, under the direction of her brother Marco, starts to go downhill, she is determined to do something to help. She learns how to make beads - and then she goes to Venice to persuade the merchant who handles the family's exports to sell them for her. On her trip she meets Antonio, a handsome young man who wants to learn glassblowing, and his friend Domenego, a Black gondolier who is a slave. These two become important threads in her life.

At this point, Venice is a powerful trading nation. But things change, as they always do, and time moves on - though not for Orsola and her circle. She experiences the plague, the advent of Napoleon, the wars of the twentieth century, and then the Covid epidemic of the twenty first. So it goes, until that very clever, satisfying ending.

I'm still not sure about the timing device, though it certainly enables the author to convey the sweep of more than 500 years of Venetian history. But quite apart from that, the writing is beautiful; the descriptions of Venice and particularly of the glassmaking process are extraordinary. It's clear from the novel itself that Tracy Chevalier did a vast amount of research for it, and this is confirmed in her note at the end. And the portrayals of Orsola, her family and friends, are vivid and engaging - we come to care about them. In the end, a very satisfying read.

Paris '44 - The Shame and the Glory: by Patrick Bishop

 Full disclosure: someone gave this to my husband for his birthday. It joined a fairly hefty to-be-read pile, and so I decided to liberate it and read it first. I don't think he minded.

I've read quite a lot of books about the Second World War. I probably would have anyway - how can you not be interested in all the stories that emerge from such a conflict? - but my particular interest arose when I decided to write a book inspired by - but not a faithful account of - my father's experiences as a prisoner of war for five years. It's not yet been published (interested publishers, please form an orderly queue) - but even if it never is, I don't regret the years of research I put into it. I visited Kew Records Office and the Imperial War Museum, I was enthralled by the many accounts in the BBC's People's War archive, and I read many books. The ones I enjoyed most - probably because I'm not an academic or a trained historian - were the ones that told their story by focusing on individual lives. Books such as Dunkirk, The Men They Left Behind, by Sean Longden, Home Run, by John Nichol and Tony Rennell, and, by the same authors, The Last Escape (this last was particularly relevant for my book, because it was about the experience of prisoners of war, and particularly about the terrible march they were forced to make in the bitter winter of 1945, ahead of the advancing Soviet armies - my father took part in this. It's a marvellous book.)

Patrick Bishop's book is called Paris '44 - but it's about much more than that particular point in time. It's about what led up to it - about what it was like in France, and particularly Paris, during the occupation. Like the others I've mentioned, it uses the stories of individuals to tell the story, as well as focusing on the well-known leading figures: de Gaulle, Petain, General Eisenhower, Hitler himself, and people such as is J D Salinger, who took part in the liberation of France; Ernest Hemingway, who just seemed to love being wherever a war was - and Picasso, who emerges as a fairly ambiguous figure in his method of navigating the war. But there are many other less-well-known people, whose stories help to show what a complex business it was living through the Occupation: was it better to be a hero, at the risk of endangering many innocent lives (notoriously, when the Resistance shot a German, many more French people were executed in retaliation) - or to keep your head down and compromise? Easy to judge from the outside, perhaps - less so if you had to live through it. The subtitle hints at this complex picture: there is shame as well as glory. 

It's a fascinating story, as readable as any novel. As a companion piece, I'd recommend Anne Sebba's Les Parisiennes, a fascinating book about the women of Paris during the 1940s.

Shrines of Gaiety, by Kate Atkinson

 I've decided that from now on, I'll begin with a bit of context as to how I came to read each book. I find that my reaction to a book is very much affected by all sorts of external circumstances - mood, place, time of year, who recommended it etc. Do you find that? Would be interested to know - do put something in the comments!

So I read Shrines of Gaiety whilst staying with my son and his partner, both of whom are voracious readers and tend to have books I haven't come across. They live in Brussels, and I only visit once or twice a year, so there are always new books to dive into and read while they are at work and the grandchildren are at school.

This jumped out at me from the shelf firstly because it was a hardback with a striking blue cover, and second because it was by Kate Atkinson, a writer whose books I've always enjoyed. I particularly like her dry humour - very much in evidence in her Jackson Brodie books: detective stories with a difference.

This sounded as if it was going to be another detective novel, albeit set in the 1920s. It has a DCI, as all self-respecting detective novels do. This one is called John Frobisher. He is well-intentioned, with a moral compass set in the right direction - but he turns out to be rather a lost soul, gloomy and hapless. He has flashes of inspiration, but somehow nothing ever quite works out for him - so he's not a typically charismatic and clever lead character.

The real star of the book is one Nellie Croker. When we first see her, she is being released from Holloway. She's small, dumpy and middle-aged - but she's also a powerful figure in the 1920s London underworld, and is considerably tougher than a pair of old boots. She runs a number of nightclubs - on one occasion a fight breaks out which develops into total mayhem - but when Nellie appears and shouts at them, calm instantly descends. (I've known teachers like that. I once had a very difficult group. It was last lesson on a Thursday afternoon, and all was not calm. Then a certain senior teacher walked in with a message: he didn't have to say anything, he just glanced round, and suddenly, magically, I had a classful of little angels...)

Anyway, back to Nellie. Her empire is under threat from various quarters, and DCI Frobisher is interested. Into the mix comes our second heroine, a cool and capable librarian from Yorkshire called Gwendolen Kelling, who comes to London in search of two missing girls, Freda and Florence. We, the readers, know what these two are up to - and we also know that other young girls have gone missing, and that they are in danger, though we don't know from whom.

Nellie has quite a few children, the eldest of whom, called Niven, is a veteran of the Great War. He's an interesting character. Tough, charismatic, very capable - he's really everything you would kind of expect the lead detective to be. Niven and Frobisher are both drawn to Gwendolen... so you can see that here is a mix of characters with great potential to create interesting story lines.

The glittering, tawdry world of 1920s London is vividly evoked, with its desperately bright young things, its war-weary veterans, its determination to have fun at any cost. The story twists and turns like a thief threading his/her way through the murky alleyways of the great city itself - and it's told with Kate Atkinson's trademark crispness and dry humour. Really, a very good read.

The Whalebone Theatre, by Joanna Quinn

 

I first read The Whalebone Theatre a couple of years ago. Lots of people had enjoyed it, and I did too, but it probably suffered a bit from something akin to 'tall poppy syndrome': do you know what I mean? It's when you hear so many good things about a book/film/place that when you eventually read it/see it/visit it, there's no way it can live up to all those high expectations. Also, I read very quickly, and I think I probably raced through it for the story and didn't accord it the time and attention it so richly deserved.

So I'm glad that my friend Penny Dolan mentioned earlier this week that she had read it recently, and, already having it on my Kindle, and being in search of a book to read while away on holiday, I was able to dive straight into it.

Reader, I'm so glad I did. It is a remarkable book. Of course, that's already established - it's been a huge best-seller - but it's one thing people telling you a book is good, and quite another to find it out for yourself.

In case you haven't come across it, it's a family saga, a little bit in the vein of Elizabeth Howard's Cazalet Chronicles, in that it tells the story of the fortunes of a well-to-do (to start off with) family, starting just after the end of the first world war, and finishing after the second. In particular, it focuses on Cristabel, a small child at the beginning, a grown woman by the end. But no character is neglected: each is gradually revealed in all his/her complexity - all reveal hidden depths, or indeed levels of shallowness. 

And because of the range of characters, Joanna Quinn is able to explore what is happening on both the national and international stages, in what seems like a perfectly believable and natural way. Old family friend Colonel Perry is key in this. He is a significant figure in one of the intelligence organisations, so he knows what's going on, and is also able to propel some of the other characters into particularly interesting places - notably, into wartime France. He's cool and perceptive, and clearly very fond of the Seagrave family - an enigmatic, pivotal character, though at first he seems like a bit of a bystander.

The writing is subtle and beautiful. I loved the way the author described the slowly unfolding relationship between Flossie, Cristabel's younger half-sister, and a German prisoner of war. They are two gentle characters, and theirs is not a dramatic affair, but it's a very moving one. And the descriptions of the Dorset landscape are simply gorgeous. (I'm sorry for not quoting in illustration of this, but useful as Kindle is, it doesn't easily lend itself to finding quotes.)

But it's not all gentle. Cristabel is a wild creature, prickly and tough: not surprisingly as her mother died at her birth, and her stepmother, Rosalind, ignores her as much as she can. The last section of the book, when she becomes an SOE agent in France, is very powerful - particularly towards the end, when she is searching for her beloved brother, Digby, in Paris, as the allies are marching to liberate the city. There were tears, I must confess, and it's a while since a book has made me cry.

Apart from this being a really good read and a beautifully written book, though, it made me think how valuable fiction can be in shining a spotlight (appropriate: I haven't mentioned about Cristabel's interest in the theatre) on historical events. Because history isn't just about the figures who set great events in motion: it's also about the countless millions of ordinary people who are affected - and often suffer - as a result. People sometimes ask writers which book they would like to have written: well, I would most certainly love to have written this one.

The One True Thing, by Linda Newbery

 

This is a book about a family, the Harpers. Like most, the Harper family might seem fairly ordinary at first glance - but in fact it's seething with conflict and secrets. The Harpers live in a lovely old house near Oxford called Wildings, and the novel begins and ends in the lyrically described garden which surrounds the house. At the beginning, Bridget, the mother, is gazing at this garden which she loves so much: 'Against the wall the clematis and climbing rose were fully out, the deep purple of Etoile Violette against the pink-flushed clusters like hedgerow dog roses. Next year she wouldn't see them...In three weeks it would be midsummer, and from that turning point her life would wind down as the days shortened...' So we meet Bridget just as she has found out that she's dying, and we are instantly intrigued and engaged: who is this woman? If this is the end of her story, where will the story go next?

Well, it moves on six years, with a new character, Meg, taking centre stage. Meg, to her surprise, has received a message that Anthony, Bridget's husband, is now also dying - and wants to see her. Meg and Anthony have never liked each other - Meg, a stone carver, was Bridget's friend, emphatically not Anthony's - and neither she nor any of the three Harper children, Rob, Suzanne and Jane, can imagine why Anthony wants to see her. When she arrives he is no longer able to speak, and so there is a mystery here: what did he so badly want to say to her?

Gradually, moving effortlessly from one character to another and from one time frame to another, Linda Newbery reveals the answers to these questions and others. We get to know the quite large cast of characters: how their past histories link them together, and what is 'the one true thing that motivates each of them. For Meg, who first uses the phrase which provides the title of the novel, it is her stone carving. For Bridget, we eventually learn, it is gardening. Arriving at Wildings as a new bride, she feels at a loss: she has had to give up her job to move out here to the countryside, and though it wasn't a job she cared about, she feels she needs to be doing something. The large garden is neglected, and she wonders if she could bring it back to her life. It turns out that she can. She has a natural gift for gardening, and gradually makes a successful career out of it, often working with Meg. The pair are even invited to make a garden for Chelsea - the ultimate accolade. In contrast, Anthony, at the beginning of their life together a successful, enthusiastic university lecturer embarking on writing a book, finds that his star is waning: frustrated by his inability to complete the book, he becomes embittered and depressed.

Each of the characters needs to find his/her 'one true thing' - though it's clear that some of them probably never will: there doesn't seem to be much hope for Rob, for instance, Anthony's eldest child, financially successful but cold and unsympathetic. Jane, the youngest daughter, is consciously searching for her own one true thing, at the same time as she is searching for answers about her parents' relationship and the mystery son. But alongside those explorations - which are fascinating enough - there is a central mystery. For a long time, we're not aware of the nature of this mystery, only that it exists, and has to do with the puzzling relationship that existed between Anthony and Bridget. 

Matters come to a head when Anthony's will throws up a number of surprises - in particular, the existence of another son, hitherto unknown to the rest of the family. But this is only the beginning - there is far more to learn, and the author skilfully keeps us guessing right till the end, when we can finally guess what it was that Anthony wanted to say to Meg right at the beginning.

Running underneath this family story is the issue of climate change and environmental activism. This is never heavy-handed, but it is there: it's a bedrock concern for at least two of the characters, and clearly, for the author. Alongside this awareness of the profound threat to nature, there is a profound appreciation of its beauty: here, for instance, is Meg, remembering Bridget and how she always looked forward to the arrival of the swifts in May: 'And now it was touched with a kind of grief, because everything, everything, was under threat: but there was joy in that too, because this evening was now, here, poignant in its fragility.' The writing is beautiful, particularly the descriptions of the garden and the landscape - but also in its depiction of Meg's carving, and the stones she uses. Here, for instance, is a description of the stone she wishes to use for Bridget's headstone: 'a local limestone, iron-rich, with subtleties of colour revealed in the cutting, blue-shaded grey against ochre and rust. A stone to suit the place, to suit Bridget.'

But as well as all these fine qualities, what any prospective reader will want to know, of course, is whether or not the book is a page-turner - whether it captures and maintains the reader's attention. And it does - it is a very good read.

One last thing - the cover, by Owen Gent, is gorgeous, as are the motifs - mostly swifts, the harbingers of summer, all the more poignant for their fleeting presence - by Victoria Heath Silk, which head up every chapter.

An apology for not showing up

 There really should be snother review up by now. The reason there isn't, is that I have a slight case of the end-of-summer blues, and to cheer myself up, I've been re-reading Louise Penny's Inspector Gamache series, set in Quebec. I've already written about them - here - so won't repeat myself. The thing about these books, which may cheer you up if you're feeling a bit down, is not the stories so much - it's that there's a 'gang' of recurring characters, who are funny, mostly kind, always interesting - and very good company. They live in a charming little village called Three Pines, where there is a wonderful bistro and a fantastic boulangerie. So you'll never be hungry, and you'll never be lonely. What could be nicer?

So that's where I've been, and will be till I reach the last book in the series, which is, I think, no.18. Not long now. Till then, see you in the bistro.

What you are looking for is in the library - by Michiko Aoyama

 Books set in Japan seem to be having a moment just now - there are several on the display tables in Waterstones. (If you scroll down a bit, you'll see my review of Four Seasons in Japan, by an English writer who has lived in Japan for many years.)

I read quite a variety of types of books. I've often tried to figure out why on the one hand, I like crime novels and thrillers - while on the other, I like life-affirming books about ordinary lives, where nothing obviously dramatic happens. I also read historical fiction, and non-fiction about travel, nature, and politics. I don't these days read science fiction or horror stories, though I did many years ago. And I'm increasingly unwilling to read dystopian fiction - I find real life quite worrying enough, without positing a horrendous future inhabited by feral tribes and featuring a deathly, post-industrial landscape.

It's partly to do with mood, of course - and partly to do with time of day. I want something soothing for my bedtime reading: recently, gripped by Jack Reacher novels, I've found myself waking from nightmares, and I can't be doing with that, thank you very much. Incidentally - did anyone hear Lee Child being interviewed on the Today programme earlier this week about libraries, and how important they'd been to him as a boy growing up in Birmingham? He was excellent. He said that any passing relative would be inveigled into signing up for a library ticket, so that the family could take out more books than their allotted number - even the dog had a ticket! (I remember this was a big advantage of working as a Saturday girl at the library in our town - I could take out as many books as I wanted.)

Anyway, back to quiet books, of which this is one. It takes the form of a series of stories about an unconnected group of characters, each of who feels 'stuck' in their lives. Each of them happens to go to a small library, where they encounter a rather mysterious librarian, Sayuri Komachi. 'Her skin is super-pale - you can't even see where her chin ends and her neck begins - and she is wearing a beige apron over an off-white, loose-knit cardigan. She reminds me of a polar bear curled up in a cave for winter... She is looking down at something, but I can't see what exactly.'

The thing she is looking down at is an object made by felting. When someone comes to her asking for a book on a particular subject, she will recommend one for them. But she will also recommend one which is nothing to do with what the customer has asked for, and she will also give them one of these small felted objects. And somehow or other, the unexpected book and the object will between them reveal - or help the customer to discover - what it is they need to do to change their life. Some of the customers meet, or their lives cross in some way - and that's essentially it.

So - nothing obviously dramatic. But a message emerges about hope, and the possibility that you  can make small changes which will make a big difference - at whatever stage of life you are at. It's clever, subtle, gentle and joyous. It might be just what you need in times like these.

Tom Lake, by Ann Patchett (but taking in Lee Child along the way.)

 I've recently been following some of the BBC Maestro courses about writing, and very interesting I've found them. (For more about these courses, see here.) The last one I did was with Lee Child, the author of the Jack Reacher books.

Now, I'd never read any Jack Reacher books before starting the course, but I've read several now. There's lots to say about them, but the thing I particularly want to focus on is that once you start one, you really don't want to put it down - at least I didn't. This despite the fact that I found the violence a bit much - there were times when I felt I needed to be reading from behind the sofa, or with one eye closed.

But that apart, they are really impressive. The prose is spare, the characterisation is strong, the plots are intricate and clever. 

In the course, Child is very clear about the sort of fiction he's writing and why he's writing it. Of course, one driver is that he always wanted to be a best-seller, and that he undoubtedly is. But another is this. At one point he discusses the difference between popular fiction and literary fiction. The latter, he says, is addressed to people who are already readers - who love books. These readers, he says, know that sometimes they will have to be a little patient. Their books may start slowly: you may have to work at getting into them - though when you do, the rewards may be great.

But the kind of reader he's chasing is not this kind. He is after the person who doesn't read very much at all. If this kind of person picks up a book - say to take on holiday - s/he will not be patient. S/he will want to be hooked from page one. At the end of every paragraph, every chapter, s/he will need to be enticed into reading on to the next. And if the writer has done his/her job, at the end of the book, they may have become a reader - someone for whom reading has become a joy and a habit.

Perhaps it was because I have so recently come across Lee Child that I find myself at a little bit of a loss with this latest book by Ann Patchett. 

It concerns a family who have a cherry farm in Michigan: Lara, Joe, and their three grown-up daughters. During one summer, as they pick the cherries, the three daughters nag their mother into telling them the story of a romance she had as a young actress with a fellow actor, who later became hugely successful, called Peter Duke. The youngest daughter in particular is obsessed with Duke, in a way that I never quite understood.

And so Lara tells the story (though not quite all of it). The narrative moves between the present and the past. It explores first love, different kinds of love, the mystery of what our parents were like before we knew them, the process of finding out what we really want to do with our lives. It's beautifully written: the farm is vividly realised, as is Tom Lake itself (the setting of that early romance). The characters are complex and interesting - particularly the older generation: I didn't feel I got to know the daughters, but perhaps that was partly because they didn't have much to do except listen.

And yet, and yet: I started this several times before I gave myself a metaphorical slap on the knuckles and told myself to just get on with it. I enjoyed reading it, but at the end, I thought - well, very nice, but actually so what? A pleasant read, but I'm very aware, when I look at the reviews, and hear the enthusiasm of friends who are great fans of Ann Patchett, that I'm missing something. I don't have that sense at the end that ah yes, this is telling me something important, something I didn't even know that I didn't know - if that makes any sense. And this isn't just a comparison between apples and pears, between Lee Child and Ann Patchett - a book certainly doesn't have to be a thriller to leave you with that sense that you've been made to see the world in a slightly different way.

Perhaps it's just me. So please, all you Ann Patchett fans out there - explain to me what I'm missing!

Madensky Square, by Eva Ibbotson

 

This book is quite luscious. I've just finished it, and I really wish I hadn't. As I mentioned in my last post, about The Seal on the Beach (and probably in lots of others too) the key for me  to a good book is that it creates a whole world: one I can enter and be absorbed by. The world of this book is a particularly lovely one: it's a square in pre-first-world-war Vienna. Now, it so happens that I've been to Vienna. I'm not a massive fan of cities, but there was something about Vienna that I loved. Actually, it probably derives from going to see The Sound of Music when I was fourteen. I loved the look of Austria: the mountains, the castles, the lakes - and the romance of patriots resisting the Nazis. And in real life there were the cakes. And the beautiful buildings and fountains. And the smell of lime blossom. And the glittering paintings of Klimt.

So the square in the book is the square of the title. And the characters of the book are (mostly) the people who live in the square. Which points to another successful element of many of the books I particularly like: the gang. You have it in Elly Griffiths' Ruth Galloway books, in Mick Herron's Slow Horses series, and in Colin Cotterill's Dr Siri books (for reviews of these, do make use of the search box). And in The Lord of the Rings, of course. In Madensky Square, the 'gang' is headed up by Susanna, a beautiful and very skilled dressmaker, who also narrates. She has a successful business, and she's also a lovely and charismatic person with a sharp sense of humour. And she's very kind. You're probably thinking she's too good to be true, but  somehow, she isn't - or at least I didn't find her so. Some of the other members of the gang are Nini, her irascible, stylish, tough-as-old-boots anarchist assistant; Edith, a bluestocking under the thumb of her ghastle mother; Alice, a milliner and Susanna's best friend, who is hopelessly in love with Edith's small, bandy-legged father; and Herr Huber, a large and very kind butcher who is hopelessly in love with the very beautiful other-worldly Magdalena. And of course there is Susanna's lover, the Field Marshal. There are quite a few more - it's a big cast of characters. 

The book is very definitely character-led, rather than plot-led: there are lots of stories, but there isn't really a single narrative that drives it, other than the story of Susanna's life. It's Vienna itself, and particularly the square, with its chestnut trees and fountain and statue, which underpins the whole thing. Eva Ibbotson was born in Vienna in 1925, but she and her mother fled the city for England in 1934 - they were Jewish, and her mother was a writer whose work the Nazis had banned. So perhaps the beautiful city of the book is in a sense a dream city, the unattainable setting of a lost childhood. It's utterly delightful.

The Seal on the Beach, by Mara Bergman

 

Full disclosure: Mara Bergman is an excellent editor as well as a writer, and some years ago, she edited two of my books, The Willow Man and Warrior King. But much as I like Mara, I wouldn't be reviewing her book if I didn't think it was something very special.

It tells the story of Maggie, a little girl who is on holiday at the seaside with her aunt and uncle. We soon find out that, much as she is enjoying her holiday, all is not well in Maggie's world; her baby brother is seriously ill, and her mother is consequently having to spend alot of time in the hospital - with the baby, and away from Maggie.

One day, she goes for a walk with her uncle and aunt and spots a baby seal, alone on the beach. Worried, they tell the lifeguards, who are reassuring: the mothers often leave their babies alone on the beach while they go hunting for food: this one's mother will come back, they assure Maggie - everything will be fine.

But Maggie isn't so sure. She feels a connection to the seal - she dreams about it at night - and she is worried about it. She goes back to check on it, and it is still there, but it's becoming listless and sad. The lifeguards, prompted by her, call the RSPCA, who came to the rescue and take it away to be cared for.

So then the two stories - of the sick baby seal and Maggie's sick baby brother - run in parallel, and are both resolved happily at the end.

It's a simple enough story, so what makes it stand out? Partly, of course, it's the emotional heft - it's not overdone, but we very much feel for Maggie. But it's also, I think, to do with the solid, real world which Maggie inhabits. When I first read this story, just last night, I emerged feeling that I had been inside this world and out of my own - and for me, that's one of the most important things I want from a book: I want to be immersed in a different world to such an extent that for a while, I quite forget my own. That this happens is partly because of the strength of the story - but also because of the space which is taken by Mara to describe the detail of this world and make it real. For example:

Then a walk along the sand's

    pebbles and seaweed.

Maggie found a bright yellow shell

    and a smooth white stone,

Like a gull's egg.

    Another, sleek black and blue.

It's seen, of course, through a child's eye: the colours and the textures are what Maggie notices - she doesn't know what kind of shell it is: she doesn't need to, and neither do we.

And notice too the way the words are set out: this is not quite poetry, and not quite prose. It's somewhere in between the two. (Like that bit of the shore between the sea and the land - liminal.) And it creates a spell, an atmosphere, which again binds this world together. It is, literally, enchanting.

There is one thing that puzzles me. Maggie's father is not mentioned at all - where is he? The only hint I could find was this:

She wished she could make 

    everything all right, the way it used to be. 

Before the baby got sick.

Before

    everything

        went

            wrong.

Was Maggie's father one of the things that went 'wrong'?

I hope I've not given the impression, though, that this is a heavy, message-laden book. It really isn't. It's full of the delights of the seaside, the joy of a child's feelings for other small animals, and it's full of hope.

And I haven't mentioned the illustrations, by Brita Granstrom, which are just lovely, and full of details that children will love to pick out. Really, a beautiful book.

Four Seasons In Japan, by Nick Bradley

 

Full disclosure - I read this book in the spring, and this would be a better review if I'd done it then - but there we are, I didn't, so I'll just have to do the best I can. This is the first book I've reviewed here for quite some time, and I want to kick off with a book I really enjoyed - and I liked this one so much that I've already given/recommended it to several friends.

First off, let's look at the cover - because it very much reflects the feel of the book inside. Its lines are clear and elegant: it's beautifully balanced: it exudes calmness and a contemplative feel. The branch at the top bears autumn leaves: the one at the bottom, spring blossom. The title, in a simple, clean font, stands out against the large moon, which in turn is suspended against a blue sky. So we know that nature and the turn of the seasons are going to be important. And the cat? Well, there is a cat in the novel, but this is also a nod to the author, whose first book was called The Cat and the City, and who did a PhD on the cat in Japanese literature. (Though Nick Bradley is English, incidentally, he spent many years in Japan.)

The book has two interlinked stories going on. It starts with Flo, a translator who is going through a difficult time in her personal life - her relationship with Yuki, her Japanese girlfriend, is breaking down, and she isn't handling it very well. 

And then she finds a book which someone has left on her train. It's called The Sound of Water, by Hibiki. She's never heard of the author or rhe publisher - and it has been rather beautifully published. She begins to read.

The story is about a tough old woman called Ayako, who lives in a small country town called Onomichi. We learn pretty soon that her husband and son are both dead, and that her son committed suicide. We learn that she owns a small coffee shop, and that she loves the familiar routine of her days, and her small circle of friends. But something has happened which she knows will disturb that routine: she has had a message from her daughter-in-law to say that her grandson is coming to stay. Throughout the day, the prospect niggles at her: it seems she does not know her grandson well, and is not looking forward to his visit.

He isn't either. He feels he's being sent into exile from the city because he's failed his exams, and the prospect horrifies him. 

At first things don't go at all well between them. But gradually, as one season changes to the next, their relationship develops. Kyo, the boy, learns a great deal - about his father, about the past, about life. And Ayako learns things from Kyo, too.

Flo is fascinated by the story and decides she wants to translate it. But she must first find the author to get his permission - and that turns out to be no easy task.

There's so much more to the book than this. In fact, glancing through the first few pages, I find myself being drawn again into this world, which is so different from my own - particularly that of Kyo and Ayako: I find them more likeable characters than Flo (who could perhaps do with a dose of Ayako's tough love) - and I decide I will read the novel again.

Oh, and the cat has one eye and is called Coltrane. And there are pictures. It's a really lovely book.

The Red Dress

It's a glorious object, the Red Dress.  Made out of burgundy silk dupion, it has a fitted, boned bodice with a v-neck and long sleeves, and a very full, beautifully draped skirt with a train. It's like an echo of something out of the Tudor era - but really it belongs to the world of myth, and legend, the sort of dress that a queen at the height of her powers might have worn for ceremonial occasions.

The Red Dress

But what's special about it isn't the cut. It's the embroidery which covers it. And it's not even exactly that: it's the symbolic value of that embroidery. This dress is the embodiment of an idea.

It first took shape in the brain of Kirsty Macleod, a remarkable artist from Somerset. She conceived the idea of a dress which would be created not by a small team, but by 380 people, mostly women, from all over the world, many of them vulnerable, victims of poverty, survivors of war, refugees. Of these 141 were commissioned and paid for their work, and continue to receive a share of the profits from exhibitions: the remainder were volunteers, many from audiences at exhibitions and events. For fourteen years, the dress - or often just sections of it - travelled the world, being seen, telling its story, and having embroidery added to it. Now it's finished - and still travelling. I saw it a few weeks ago in Somerton , the ancient capital of Wessex, now a pretty town in Somerset.

The dress itself is stunning, and of course it's the centrepiece. But its story, which is told in a series of short films, is an indivisible part of it. We follow Kirsty and the dress all over the world, and we hear the voices of many of the women who worked on it, creating beautiful work and making themselves heard. 

I keep thinking about the project, and trying to work out what makes it so powerful, so resonant. The world at the moment is a difficult, threatening place, with war, poverty, cruelty and want seeming to spread across the globe like a blight. But something like this shows that there are good things too: that there's kindness, and community, and beauty and creativity. It shows also how small beginnings can give rise to significant results, how an idea can take to its feet and dance across the world. It's a symbol of hope.

This half angel, half bird, is the work of a Russian woman. Not far from it is embroidery by Ukrainian refugees.

Motifs from Africa.

The snowdrops were done by someone local - possibly from Glastonbury. I particularly liked the swirly motif at the bottom, because it's a doodle I have done ever since I was day-dreaming in lessons at school. It's surprisingly hard to make it symmetrical.

For more information about the project, see The Red Dress.

A Killing in November, by Simon Mason

 Back to books, with this detective story set in Oxford. I thought to start off with it was going to be relatively gentle, I suppose because of the Oxford college setting - but gentle it certainly is not.

The 'hero' is Detective Inspector Ryan Wilkins, who has to be one of the most unusual police officers in fiction. He's skinny and foul-mouthed, always wears loud tracksuits, and has a very severe anger management problem.

But - he is clever, he's intensely observant, he's direct to a fault - and he is a wonderful father to his small son, also called Ryan. This little boy is perhaps a bit more articulate than most two and a half year olds, but he's also an absolute sweetie, and the conversations the two of them have are almost heart breakingly tender.

Ryan has come back to Oxford, where he was born and not-exactly brought up, after an unfortunate incident involving a bishop in his previous post. His new partner is DI Ray Wilkins, who is as different from Ryan as he could possibly be: elegant, black, from a privileged background, charming and successful. They don't get on at all at first, but their relationship develops: each has the other's back. But this is not enough to save Ryan from the consequences of his rage - which, in turn, is clearly a result of his horrendously violent childhood - even though he is actually extremely good at his job.

There's lots more to the book than this. I was absolutely gripped; I so wanted Ryan to triumph - as, in some ways, he did.

I'm indebted to Adele Geras, who recommended it on Twitter. The only problem is - there's only one more book published so far in the series... Oh well - off to read it now.

Cawdor Castle

  In the early summer of 2022, we were staying in the Cairngorm National Park. It was our first time in the north-west of Scotland, and we were wowed by the ancient Caledonian Forest, the gaunt hills, the sparkling rivers, and the variety of wildlife. However, on a day that was forecast to be wet and windy (in fact it was the latter but not the former), we decided to find somewhere that would offer shelter if necessary. So we went to Cawdor Castle.

All we knew about the place was that Macbeth, at the beginning of Shakespeare's play, was told by the witches that he would become Thane of Cawdor - and thereafter, of course, King of Scotland. So we were expecting somewhere dark and forbidding, probably half-ruined, and naturally haunted by ravens croaking in a doom-laden sort of way.

But the castle turned out to be none of those things. Built of grey stone, with a turreted square tower at its centre, the house is softened by the lawns, gardens and woodland that surround it. Inside, it has the feel of a comfortable home, in which you can imagine a family living happily - though reminders of a dark and bloody past do emerge. And in fact, we were told that the Dowager Countess, who manages the house, does live there in the winter, and even sleeps in the centuries-old scarlet four-poster. "Sooner her than me," commented the volunteer who told us this with a shudder. 

You enter through the drawing room, which is warm and colourful, with comfortable looking chairs and sofas and lots of lamps. There are also lots of portraits, which of course you don't tend to find in the average family home. In an alcove on a staircase there is a bold piece of wall-art, which at a second glance you see is a fan-shaped arrangement of nineteen rifles. (Why only nineteen? What happened to the twentieth?) I imagine these are a consequence of the aristocracy's strange desire to kill great quantities of wildlife, rather than earlier generations' propensity for killing their enemies, or sometimes their relations. But I could well be wrong...

The house is filled not only with interesting objects which generations of Campbells have collected on their travels - pictures, ornaments, sculptures, porcelain - but also with family photographs and some very lovely modern art. The tower is the oldest part of the castle, and was built with a view to defending the castle against enemies and marauders; but now, the top floor is a relatively small, very pleasant living room.

But go down the narrow winding staircase, and you will find this reminder of the building's long history. The castle was founded round about the end of the fourteenth century. Tradition has it that the site was chosen - bizarrely - by a donkey, which was set free and allowed to wander where it would. In the place where it stopped, there the castle would be built. And so it was.

I suppose it's just possible that this may not be entirely true - but what is certainly true is that the tower was built around a tree. The evidence is in the picture below - the tree is still there. It was said to be a hawthorn, but when samples were analysed recently, it was found to be a holly. This seems to make more sense: holly has a place in myth and legend. Certainly it has been credited with protecting the castle from destruction at various dangerous times in its history.

And dangerous times there certainly were. Cosy and comfortable as the castle seems now (apart from this basement, which has a bijou little dungeon tucked away on one side - just the place for unwelcome visitors), the family that lived there were, over the centuries, involved in some very nasty goings-on indeed. For example - in the early sixteenth century, the heiress was a child called Muriel. She was kidnapped by the Earl of Argyll, and, the guidebook tells us: 'For future recognition, she was branded on the hip by her nurse with a key. and the top joint of the little finger of her left hand was bitten off.' When she was twelve, she was married off to Argyll's younger son, Sir John Campbell. Surprisingly, the marriage was apparently a happy one. But this wasn't the end to the drama: Sir John's sister was married to one Lachlan Maclean. Wearying of his wife, he had her chained naked to a tidal skerry; she was supposed to drown, but was in fact rescued by passing fishermen. Sir John then knifed his brother-in-law to death in Edinburgh. He was pardoned, but deemed it a good moment to retreat to Muriel's far-distant ancestral home in Cawdor.

And that was only the beginning. There's far more blood-letting, feuding and killing people in hideously brutal ways - much too much to include in this post.

And talking of blood-letting, what of Macbeth? Was he really the Thane of Cawdor? We asked a guide. She sighed. One might almost have thought she'd been asked this question a million times before. "No. Macbeth was a real person - but he lived long before the castle of Cawdor was built, long before there was even a thane. What's more, there's quite a lot of evidence that he was a VERY NICE PERSON. He and his wife were very well-loved."

So there.

We certainly shouldn't leave Cawdor without a visit to the gardens, which are quite beautiful -see also the top picture. And the woodlands are lovely too, with rhododendrons and some very old trees, and a stream running through. Times have changed since the castle's founding - and in some ways - though not all - very much for the better. (I do wonder how the peasants were getting on while the aristocrats were whirling around killing each other...)

The Plant-Hunter's Atlas, and The Newt

  Some of you may recall that I have an interest in the history of plants, and particularly in the extraordinary adventures of the plant hunters. So much so that my last book, Jack Fortune and the Search for the Hidden Valley, draws on real histories to tell the story of a boy who goes plant-hunting in the Himalayas at the end of the eighteenth century. The plant hunters were - and are - incredibly brave (some might say foolhardy!) and resourceful, so it struck me that they would be an excellent subject for a children's book - and so, I think, it proved.

So when I noticed that among the luminaries appearing at the Wells Literature Festival was one Ambra Edwards, promoting her new book The Plant Hunter's Atlas, I of course booked a ticket and sallied forth, a week ago, to find out more. 

The book is published in association with Kew, and is lusciously illustrated with botanical paintings. As the title suggests, it is organised into geographical areas, and tells of the plants which were discovered (by the west: of course, indigenous people already knew all about them, and in many cases were indispensable in helping the emissaries from Kew and the Royal Horticultural Society in their mission to find new plants) - and the people who discovered them. So we meet old friends such as Sir Joseph Banks, who travelled with Captain Cook on his voyage to discover the Great Southern Continent, botanising enthusiastically, and fraternising possibly even more enthusiastically with the inhabitants of Otaheite (Tahiti), and on his return to England headed up Kew and was responsible for promoting the careers of scientists like the astronomers William Herschel and his sister, Caroline, as well as sending out plant hunters far and wide, in search of plants which would be useful for economic purposes as well as to ornament private gardens. Here too is David Douglas, who must have been one of the most unlucky plant hunters ever. He botanised in North America, and was subjected to storms, shipwrecks, dishonest guides, and every other plant-hunting misfortune you can think of, finally meeting a horrible end when he fell into a pit with sharp spikes at the bottom, designed to capture wild animals.

One of the gorgeous illustrations.

There are many more, but we are also introduced to some extraordinary plants. Take, for instance, the Corpse Lily, found in Sumatra. This produces 'the largest single flower in the world', which can grow to four feet across and weigh up to ten kg. It's a parasite, growing on the Indian chestnut vine: it takes more than two years to flower, and then the bloom - which smells of rotting meat - lasts for a mere week. Then there's Davidia Involucrata, the handkerchief tree, of which a single specimen was found by Dr Augustine Henry in China in 1888. He sent seeds back to Kew, but they failed to germinate, so in 1899 a young man called Ernest Wilson was sent to China to track down this one tree. He had to contend with an outbreak of bubonic plague and the Boxer Rebellion, as well as mountains and river rapids - but, astonishingly, he managed to find the site of the tree from a mere cross on a map: only to find that it had been cut down to clear the site for a smart new wooden house. Fortunately, a few weeks later he came across a small group of the precious trees. Imagine the relief!

The book is a treat, which I am still reading through - and Ambra's presentation was brilliant. But by coincidence, a few days ago another plant history treat came my way, when some friends invited us to go with them to The Newt in Somerset, an extraordinary garden created by South African businessman Koos Bekker, under the direction of Italo-French architect Patrice Taravella. We all know about Capability Brown and Humphrey Repton, who created gardens in the 18th century which involved the digging out of lakes, the rerouting of rivers - even the relocation of entire villages. Things these days are not usually done on this kind of scale, and this is why The Newt is so striking - it very much is a creation of that degree of magnitude. Everything is beautifully done, from the newly built tithe barn made out of warm golden stone which provides the reception area, to the curving elevated path made out of metal which takes you through the woods, to the gardens themselves - which of course were not at their best this week, but must look spectacular in spring and summer.

But the treat I mentioned lies at the end of that metal walkway. Inside a building which is tucked into the hillside, with a living roof, is a museum of garden history. And it's fascinating. Of course, it has extraordinary stories to tell. But it's the way it tells them too: it uses technology in a breathtakingly innovative way, so that in a relatively short space of time, you learn an enormous amount about garden history - from the Romans, through Islamic gardens, taking in Chinese and Japanese gardens, Eurpoean and British ones, right up to today. I'll let the pictures tell a little of the story.

The entrance, with tithe barn, cider-making on the left, and a fire in the foreground to ward off the chill.

The Parabola, with drystone terraces and lots of apple trees.

The vegetable garden. Love the flowerpots.

The Japanese room in the museum of garden history. You walk on a pond...

A Wardian case. Was very interested to see this - until the invention of the Wardian case, 

it was a very dodgy enterprise to try and transport living plants across oceans.

Beautifully displayed garden tools - here, flower pots and pliers.