In Black Swan Green David Mitchell has brilliantly recreated the struggles of a teenage boy who's trying to make sense of the world. It's narrated by the thirteen-year-old Jason Taylor in thirteen chapters, each representing a month in his life from January 1982 to January 1983.
What a pleasure to revisit Ely and the Fens of eastern England in Jim Kelly's crime mystery novel Nightrise. It's a couple of years since I read my last Philip Dryden book, The Skeleton Man, and this one is set five years after the fictional journalist's previous outing.
Driving back from visiting a wealthy client in the south of England, Adam Snow takes a wrong turn and finds himself at the gate of a deserted house with an overgrown garden that used to be open to the public. As he stands in the silent dusk he "felt a small hand creep into my right one". So begins Susan Hill's ghost story, The Small Hand.
Here's one thing I liked about Delia Owens's Where the Crawdads Sing. It's a vivid description of the onset of a storm: "The wind hit first, rattling windows and hurling waves over the wharf." The use of the word hurling is very evocative. Unfortunately, that's about the only positive thing I have to say.
Hannah Mitchell describes herself as a "very ordinary woman" in her autobiography The Hard Way Up. The fact that she's managed to write a fascinating account of working-class life in the late 19th and first half of the 20th centuries belies that description. Her story is incredibly uplifting and an example of what one can achieve with determination.
