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Thin Ice by Compton Mackenzie – #1956Club

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Thank you for some additional 1956 Club reviews since I updated the page recently – I will make sure the list is fully updated at the end of the week. And will read all the reviews too! This week has rather got away with me, but I always manage to read them in the end – and what a variety of books people have been reading.

I don’t think I’ve seen anyone else reading Thin Ice, though. It’s my third Compton Mackenzie novel, and the other two (Poor Relations and Buttercups and Daisies) both of which ended up being among the favourite books I read in those respective years. Since then, I’ve been buying a lot of his novels, and I was aware that he wrote in various different styles. The first two I read were very funny, bordering on farce. Thin Ice is… not.

It’s narrated by a man called George and is about the life of his close, long-term friend Henry Fortescue, from 1896 to 1941 – when, as we learn on the first page, Fortescue dies. They were friends as youths and continued to be as Henry became an MP, with an eye on potentially becoming prime minister. The only thing that might stand in his way is if he ‘indulges in his indulgence’ – which is being gay. This is a secret for only a few dozen pages, and even during that time it is a secret only from George – the reader has worked it out almost instantly. Henry states early on that he will never marry any woman, and that he intends to either be celibate or throw caution to the wind completely – and this is where the title of the novel comes from:

”You’re pacing this orchard with me, Geegee, trying to look sympathetic, and only occasionally peering nervously round over your shoulder to see that nobody is within earshot, but how can you be sympathetic? You can’t possibly understand my emotions. I can assure you that I shouldn’t be inflicting them on you now if I were not determined to suppress them henchforth. That’s why I’m telling you. Edward Carstairs would jeer at that. All he would ask is that I should be discreet. And that’s what I was intending to be until I realised that for me discretion was impossible. It had to be complete self-denial, or complete surrender. And walking about for ever on thin ice does not appeal to me.”

It’s certainly an interesting theme for the 1956 Club, being published more than a decade before homosexuality would become legal in the UK. Sadly, it’s not a very interesting novel in any other way.

Because it covers such a long period, and gives weight to each year, the chapters hare through a lot of time at breakneck speed. Details of the day are thrown in, often political, many of which didn’t mean much to me but do give a good sense of historical accuracy. Doubtless the 1956 reader enjoyed the references that took them back to their own younger days. But this speeding through years gives Thin Ice a feeling of being constantly in flux, and never letting us bed in to any details of the characters. The narrator is largely there to relay events, but we expect a bit more of a personality from the main character’s best friend. And Henry himself is drawn with a bit more complexity, but we don’t get enough time to dwell on any of it.

Mackenzie isn’t writing in humorous mode here, and I certainly missed that. It all felt a bit colourless and repetitive. Bland. Perhaps it wouldn’t have done if he’d picked a few years and focused more on characters and relationship between them. The scope of the novel left it without any depth.

A shame to end 1956 Club with a bit of a dud, and perhaps it wouldn’t feel quite so much a dud if I didn’t love Mackenzie’s comic fiction as much as I do.

Spam Tomorrow by Verily Anderson – #1956Club

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It is well documented that I want to own every single one of the Furrowed Middlebrow titles from Dean Street Press, and I’m doing my best to achieve that goal. I bought Spam Tomorrow by Verily Anderson last year, having coveted it when Scott first blogged about it. It’s a war memoir – and it’s always interesting to see the tone these have in the post-1945 club years. I get the impression that things went a bit quiet on the war memoir front immediately after the war, but 10+ years later people were ready to look back on that bizarre time.

First off, yes her name was Verily. And here’s why:

One of my father’s interests is words. He devised a system for naming his five children. Each name had to have six letters; and, because his and my mother’s names contain an R and an L, each of ours had to too – plus some peculiarity not shared by others. Merlin (n), Rhalou (h), Erroll (doubles), Verily, (v) – not so much a name as an adverb – and finally, to fall in with the system, he had to invent Lorema.

Spam Tomorrow starts off with Verily going briefly AWOL as a F.A.N.Y. (First Aid Nursing Yeomanry) so that she can marry Donald, which they do hastily and illicitly – illicit because she didn’t have leave, rather than because they couldn’t be married.

She then jumps back a bit to joining the F.A.N.Y. – before which she had found a job that used her artistic talents to some extent, in that she designed the wrappers for toffees. It is an example of the slightly eccentric and bohemian spirit that is key to understanding Anderson’s character and writing – a detail that might seem too niche and absurd in a novel, but just happens to be true.

Anderson doesn’t work for the nursing yeomanry for a very long time, and is quite open about how poorly suited she was to such a regimented life. There is a very funny and odd scene early on where she is arrested and threatened with court-martialling for crashing a government vehicle into a gatepost.

A few minutes later, while I was getting ready for lunch, two F.A.N.Y.s of the quiet, useful, obedient type came into the bedroom which I shared with four others (including one whose claim to fame was that her husband had been fallen on by Queen Mary in her recent motor accident). The two F.A.N.Y.s stood in a waiting attitude, one each side of me.

“Want to borrow a comb?” I asked affably.

“You’re under arrest,” said one.

“I’m what?” I asked.

“Under arrest. We’ve had orders to close in on you and march you to the orderly room without your cap or belt.”

She never quite works out what is going on, but ultimately receives a reprieve. It’s an insight into the daftness that always comes with a militaristic attitude to life.

The bulk of Spam Tomorrow is taken up with her married life and particularly her domestic life. Some of the most dramatic pages, unsurprisingly, are when she goes into labour during an air raid. Apparently this left her quite ill for a long time, and the only cure was to have another child – which rather baffled me, but it seemed to work.

I loved everything about her looking for housing, and it was fascinating to read about the precarious nature of homes in London in a period when they could easily be bombed at any moment. And then there is the section where she starts taking house guests in a larger place in the countryside, and discovering how inept she is at it. Which gives plenty of opportunity for being scathing about some of the worst paying guests – particularly those who come from an artists’ colony and have extremely demanding tastes. It reminded me quite a lot of the latter stages in another Furrowed Middlebrow title, Ruth Adam’s wonderful A House in the Country.

Basically, the whole book was very funny and enjoyable, without ever shying away from the perils and privations of the home front. I’ve read far more home front memoirs than those of active soldiers, and I can’t imagine that trend will change, and Anderson’s is a worthy addition to the genre – because of her experiences, but mostly because of her frank, eccentric, and indomitable character.

Beyond the Gates by Dorothy Evelyn Smith – #1956club

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I’ve been buying up Dorothy Evelyn Smith’s novels, because I’m worried that when O, The Brave Music is published by the British Library later in the year, there will suddenly be none of them on the secondhand books market. Of course, Miss Plum and Miss Penny from Dean Street Press might already be having the same effect. Well, I bought Beyond the Gates earlier in the year and was delighted when I saw that it qualified for the 1956 Club.

This novel came somewhere in the middle-to-late period of Smith’s all-too-short writing career – she was 50 when her first novel was published. It concerns a 15-year-old called Lydia and the gates she is going beyond are those of Mary Clitheroe Orphanage. She has been chosen to go and be a servant for Marion Howard and her small household – though she is so diminutive that Marion initially mistakes her for someone much younger than 15. Rather a lot of emphasis is placed on how small and ugly Lydia is, though they’re not particularly significant characteristics for the rest of the novel – except for contributing to the low self-esteem she has.

Marion is unsure if Lydia will be able to manage the work on her own, but takes her back to the house and agrees to a trial. Marion is a single woman who lives with her niece Midge – various other siblings and nephews/nieces come to visit at different times, though most members of the sprawling family were killed in an accident. I drew out a family tree in the pack of my copy, and then most of them died and it became less relevant!

When she was a very old woman, whatever else Lydia might forget, she would never forget one thing – her first sight of the room which Miss Howard told her was to be her very own. 

She advanced across the threshold slowly, warily, as an animal enters strange territory, fearful of the hidden enemy, the biting trap. She stared about her furtively. Her flat, sallow face showed nothing of the leaping, incredulous pleasure that swept her in a great wave.

“Put down your box, Lydia.”

Lydia set the trunk down carefully against the wall.

This is all in 1920. The novel is in three parts, and the others are in 1930 and 1940. There is some plot along the way, not least when Lydia’s past life catches up with her in the middle section, but for the most part Beyond the Gates is about relationships. It’s about how Lydia discovers being part of a family for the first time, gradually thawing until she can believe that she is loved.

Which makes it sound extremely mawkish. And it does lean a tiny bit that way occasionally – I would have preferred Lydia and Marion to have a few more negative character traits, to offset the loyalty and kindness that they have in common. But mostly Smith is too good, too delicious a writer to be disliked. I’ve read four of her novels now (though don’t remember much about the one I read years and years ago), and what really makes her stand out is the way she brings the reader into the world of the story. I never visualise the books I read, but I feel like I’ve spent time in each of her communities. I don’t know quite how to explain that, because I haven’t imagined myself in those surroundings (my brain doesn’t work like that), but I belong to these worlds. There is something in the warmth of them, the timbre of them, the atmosphere of them, that has enveloped me and kept a bit of me behind.

It’s a rare quality, and it’s precious. O, The Brave Music remains my favourite of her books, and the one that enveloped me most completely, but I loved reading Beyond the Gates too. I’m so glad this special writer is finally being rediscovered.

Talk of the Devil by Frank Baker – #1956club

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book cover of Talk of the DevilAnother book that’s been on my shelves for at least 15 years is Talk of the Devil by Frank Baker [image on left from Fantastic Fiction]. It’s no secret that his earlier novel Miss Hargreaves is all all-time best-beloved book, but I’ve had mixed-to-negative reactions to all the other novels I’ve read by him. Will Talk of the Devil be any different?

Spoilers: not really. But let’s keep on.

The narrator, Philip, has headed to Cornwall, an area that Baker particularly loved, to visit a couple of old friends – Paul Acton and Jeremy Holden. And Baker is good on descriptions of Cornwall – here’s what he says about St Zenac, which isn’t a real place but is a wonderfully Cornish name:

‘It is a place so much on the edge of unreality, you can never decide where myth ends and history begins. Wild moorland, with massive stacks of granite clutched by lichen; streams that trickle secretly to the sea; the raven, the buzzard, the viper; and in little ravines, soft mounds of sweet turf where bladder-campion and thrift grow in rich masses. It is a country too ancient to be safe. The few farming people, in wind-swept stone cottages, are a troglodyte race, stunted in growth, with thick burry voices. Antiquarians, geologists, archaeologists, and novelists – all have written about this last edge of England, once called Bolerium. And those who have come under the spell of it invariably have to return to it; to return to the last sweeping fire of the falling sun as it sinks beyond the Atlantic, the death of day in England.’

I think Baker is at his best in Talk of the Devil when writing about Cornwall – the landscape and also the feelings it evokes. This is very near the beginning of the book, and I was filled with hope. But…

The actual plot of Talk of the Devil is rather more confusing. While Philip is visiting, he hears about the death of Gladys Acton – which many locals believe was the result of dark supernatural forces, though officially she died of natural causes.

”Because she was murdered in such a way that there could never be any evidence. Because, in fact, she was murdered by the power of malicious thought, bent upon her end. And shall I tell you why I’m so interested, Jeremy? Because people can be, and are being destroyed without any material force being employed. You don’t need guns in this game. Simply the collective power of evil. And especially for unfortunate people like Gladys Acton, who have enough integrity and determination to get in the way.”

The above is the sort of conversation a lot of people have, and Philip spends quite a lot of the novel trying to establish the nature of evil, and determine whether or not there is such a person as the devil.

Baker often looks to the metaphysical in his books. In Miss Hargreaves, a significant element of the novel explores the power of creative thought – being sufficient to make a fictional person come alive. It works there, because it is an undercurrent to a very funny and enjoyable narrative, and it is attached to a very concrete example. In Talk of the Devil, as elsewhere in his other novels, Baker gets too tangled up in philosophical and metaphysical conversations without enough surface story to make them compelling.

I found myself quite confused by Talk of the Devil. It was enjoyable enough to read, but it hovered between a rather flimsy thriller and something with more sophisticated, but more baffling, aims. Putting together a treatise on the nature of evil with a murder mystery sounds quite promising, but the tangle didn’t ever really become disentangled.

If this were the first novel I’d read by Baker, I’d probably give it a lukewarm appreciation. It’s certainly not poorly written on a prose level, even if the construction isn’t wonderful. But I start each Baker novel with the hope that, finally, I might have found a worthy successor to the wondrous Miss Hargreaves. Maybe after 15 years I have to acknowledge that lightning struck once. But more likely, I’ll keep slowly reading his books, hoping for that second miracle.

Tea at Four O’Clock by Janet McNeill – #1956Club

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One of the reasons I love these club years is that it makes me delve into the books that have sat on my shelves for donkey’s years. I bought Tea at Four O’Clock by Janet McNeill in 2005, and it has sat quietly waiting for a long time. I even read a couple of her other novels when Turnpike Press republished them (they’ve also done this one), and I enjoyed them though I wasn’t blown away by them. Not in the way that I was by Tea at Four O’Clock. It’s brilliant.

As the novel opens, Laura Percival is returning from the funeral of her sister Mildred. They have lived all their lives in a very large house (‘Marathon’) in Northern Ireland, now neither parent is alive, and for the past six years Laura has been looking after Mildred. As she walks home from the funeral, the words of the priest are going around in her head: ‘the sister who with exemplary devotion did not spare herself in the long months of nursing’. It is the only tribute she has received for these years of service. Now that Mildred has finally died, Laura has agency – and for the first time in her life.

We learn that, even before this sickness, Mildred dominated Laura’s life with a well-intentioned but draconian insistence on routine. And on respectability above all else. It’s that rigorous routine and respectability that Laura finds hard to escape in the days after Mildred’s death – she has left such an imprint on Marathon that it is unthinkable to do anything but obey her. This is what George sees when he returns – the wastrel brother who has been estranged from the family for decades. The quote below is where the novel’s title comes from. (Miss Parks is a friend of Mildred’s who came to visit and then moved in, and is clearly hoping to be asked to remain.)

“It’s a good many years,” he said, a little uncertainly, “since I heard that clock.”

Miss Parks was quick to emphasise her more intimate acquaintance with it. “Four o’clock! That’s always been a very special time with us. Mildred rested in the afternoon, you see, and Laura brought her tea-tray in at four o’clock. Mildred did like regular habits, you know. It’s a great help to an invalid, and Laura understood that so well. Do you know, Mr Percival, I’ve seen Laura waiting outside the door in the hall, with the tray in her hand, and the minute the clock had finished striking she would knock and come in. ‘Mildred,’ she would say, ‘Mildred dear, it’s four o’clock.'”

George could suddenly bear no more of it. He could see Laura standing there waiting, the tea-tray with all its appointments of lace and china and silver correctly placed for the personal satisfaction of one querulous invalid. He could imagine Laura’s hand, a small hand, never very clever at anything except the delicate brushwork of her paintings, poised ready to knock when the sound of the clock had sunk to silence. Then the hesitant rap and the opening door, and Mildred on the sofa turning her ailing body to feed on Laura’s apparent health. He felt sick and turned to the sofa to reassure himself it was indeed empty. “I’m going out into the garden,” he said, “for a smoke,” and fumbling his way through the blinds he opened the french windows and went out onto the lawn.

Hopefully that’s given a sense of how good McNeill’s prose is in this novel. She is also so good at the nuances of how Laura is reacting now – some relief, some guilt, some helplessness, some uncertainty. She doesn’t want to switch her dependency from the dead sister to the newly returned brother, but nor does she know what to do with independence. Each of the interlocking characters, dead and alive, is drawn so subtly and cleverly.

We also see the lost chances of the past – and the different paths for the future. George has affection for this sister, but also a plan to get him, his wife and child out of relative poorness (his wife is a wonderful and wise character). It’s hard not to sympathise with all of the characters. Even those whose motives are initially suspect grow more forgivable as we understand them more.

It’s a beautiful and brilliant novel, and I’m so glad I finally got it off the shelf.

#1956Club – ready, set, go!

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The 1956 Club starts tomorrow – this is the place to leave your review links, or feel free to put your review in the comments if you don’t write reviews anywhere.

For the uninitiated – every six months, Karen and I ask everyone to read books published in the same year, and together we compile a portrait of the year. All types of books welcome; all languages welcome. Make your own rules if you’re in doubt.

Can’t wait to see what everyone reads – it already looks like it’s going to be an absolutely stellar year.

My Dog Tulip by J.R. Ackerley

Madame Bibi Lophile

Spam Tomorrow by Verily Anderson

The Captive Reader
Stuck in a Book

The Naked Sun by Isaac Asimov

Harriet Devine

Talk of the Devil by Frank Baker

Stuck in a Book

Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin

Kinship of All Species
Book Around the Corner
Madame Bibi Lophile

A Legacy by Sybille Bedford

Alexander Pamment

Zama by Antonio de Benedetto

1streading’s Blog

Italian Folktales by Italo Calvino

Gallimaufry Book Studio

The Fall by Albert Camus

Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings
What Me Read

The Chase by Alejo Carpentier

1streading’s Blog

Marching with April by Hugo Charteris

Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings

Dead Man’s Folly by Agatha Christie

Hopewell’s Library of Life
Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings
Booker Talk

Fifteen by Beverly Cleary

Staircase Wit

Journals of Jean Cocteau

Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings

The Man Who Japed by Philip K. Dick

Pining for the West

Minority Report by Philip K. Dick

Annabookbel

A Dangerous Game by Friedrich Durrenmatt

1st Readings

Five A.M. by Jean Dutourd

Neglected Books

Knight’s Castle by Edward Eager

Staircase Wit

Every Eye by Isobel English

Karen’s Books and Chocolate
She Reads Novels

We Made a Garden by Margery Fish

The Captive Reader

Diamond are Forever by Ian Fleming

Mr Kaggsy

Gentlemen at Gyang Gyang by Miles Franklin

Brona’s Books

Thieves and Rascals by Mavis Gallant

JacquiWine’s Journal

Les Racines du ciel by Romain Gary

Finding Time to Write

The Miracle Worker by William Gibson

Becky’s Book Reviews

Howl and other poems by Allen Ginsberg

Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings

An Episode of Sparrows by Rumer Godden

Harriet Devine

Down There by David Goodis

Paul Lajoie

The Last Resort by Pamela Hansford Johnson

HeavenAli

Sprig Muslin by Georgette Heyer

What Me Read
Desperate Reader
The Captive Reader

The Sybil by Par Lagerkvist

1streading’s Blog

Miss Hogg and the Bronte Murders by Austin Lee

Desperate Reader

Rasmus and the Vagabond by Astrid Lindgren

I Read That in a Book

Mio, My Son by Astrid Lindgren

Sally Tarbox

Voyage into Violence by Frances and Richard Lockridge

Bitter Tea and Mystery

The Towers of Trebizond by Rose Macaulay

Bookword
What Me Read
Dovegreyreader

Thin Ice by Compton Mackenzie

Stuck in a Book

Palace Walk by Naguib Mahfouz

What Me Read

Cop Hater by Ed McBain

Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings
Typings

Tea at Four O’Clock by Janet McNeill

Stuck in a Book
746Books

A Devil in Paradise by Henry Miller

Intermittencies of the Mind

The Last Hurrah by Edwin O’Connor

Staircase Wit

A Family Party by John O’Hara

Hopewell’s Public Library of Life

Houseboy by Ferdinand Oyono

Winston’s Dad

The Diehard by Jean Potts

A Hot Cup of Pleasure

The Brazen Head by John Cowper Powys

Intermittencies of the Mind

Mrs. Pepperpot by Alf Prøysen

Finding Time to Write
I Read That in a Book

The Wings of the Night by Thomas H. Raddall

Consumed by Ink

A Certain Smile by Francoise Sagan

746Books

The Lonely Londoners by Sam Selvon

Adventures in reading, running and working from home
Annabookbel
Bookish Beck

The Silver Sword by Ian Serraillier

Finding Time to Write
Bookword

Train to Pakistan by Khushwant Singh

LouLou Reads

Beyond the Gates by Dorothy Evelyn Smith

Stuck in a Book

Wildfire at Midnight by Mary Stewart

Scones and Chaise Longues

A Haunted Land by Randolph Stow

ANZ Lit Lovers

The Key by Jun’ichirō Tanizaki

Winstonsdad’s Blog

The Keys of My Prison by Frances Shelley Wees

Bitter Tea and Mystery

Captain of Dragoons by Ronald Welch

I Read That in a Book

Night by Elie Wiesel

Bookish Beck

French Leave by P.G. Wodehouse

Karen’s Books and Chocolate

The Children Who Stayed Alone by Bonnie Bess Worline

The Captive Reader

Harry the Dirty Dog by Gene Zion

Staircase Wit

 

A 1956 Club game from Josie Holford!

The club is dead – long live the club!

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(Firstly, sorry to people who get emailed all my posts – you’ll just have received my ‘about me’, because I realised I didn’t have one and wanted to link to it in the sidebar. But nice to meet you all, even if you’ve been reading for 13 years!)

And what a great 1956 Club it’s been! Even if I kept writing 1965 by mistake – hopefully none of those slipped through.

You can see links to all the reviews here (let me know if I’ve missed any). An amazing variety, and SO many authors I haven’t heard of. We’ve checked our usual club regulars of Georgette Heyer and Agatha Christie, but the usually-reliable Georges Simenon didn’t make an appearance!

From my own reading, I’m so glad it motivated me to pick up Tea at Four O’Clock by Janet McNeill, which is likely to be one of my best reads of the year.

Thanks so much for joining in! Karen and I are always so thrilled at the turnout.

Over to you!

We’ll be holding another club next April – and we’re asking for suggestions. As long as we haven’t done it before, and it’s between 1920 and 1980, then it’s up for grabs.

As a reminder, we’ve previously done: 1920, 1924, 1930, 1938, 1944, 1947, 1951, 1956, 1965, 1968, 1977

Pop your suggestion in the comments, and why you’re suggesting it, and Karen and I will chat and make a choice!

 

Announcing the next club!

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As promised, Karen and I have decided on the next club year – for October, which will come around quickly, I’m sure. After some suggestions and some discussion, we’ve decided to go for… 1956!

Obviously we’ll give you lots of reminders nearer the time, but I’m excited already!

Simon and Andrea’s Film Club

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My friend Andrea and I have a two-person film club. Once a fortnight we hold it at either of our houses; the host surprises the guest with the choice of film. We then put our mini-reviews and marks out of ten in a book.

Now that we’ve finished our first notebook, I thought I’d share the films we’ve seen – along with our marks out of twenty.

11 – Shakespeare Wallah (1965)
13 – The Edge of Love (2008)
14 – I Live in Grosvenor Square (1945)
14.5 – Portrait of Jennie (1948)
14.5 – A Bunch of Amateurs (2008)
15 – On Approval (1944)
15 – The Way We Were (1973)
15.5 – Carrie (1951)
15.5 – Peter’s Friends (1992)
15.5 – Passport to Pimlico (1949)
16 – Thoroughly Modern Millie (1967)
16 – Stand By Me (1986)
16 – Thank You For Smoking (2005)
16.5 – Mildred Pierce (1945)
16.5 – Evening (2007)
16.5 – Star! (1968)
17 – Separate Tables (1958)
17 – Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993)
17 – Suddenly, Last Summer (1992)
17.5 – And A Nightingale Sang (1989)
17.5 – The Enchanted April (1991)
17.5 – The Innocents (1961)
17.5 – Private Lives (2013)
17.5 – The Queen (2006)
17.5 – Mr Skeffington (1944)
18 – Like Crazy (2011)
18 – Funny Face (1956)
18.5 – Casablanca (1943)
19 – Secrets and Lies (1996)
19 – Kramer vs. Kramer (1979)
19.5 – Life in a Day (2011)

Top 12 Books of 2020

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It’s been a terrible year, but it’s been a great reading year. I always wait until December 31st before I let myself compile this list – and going through the year’s reading, picking out the best books for a shortlist, is one of my favourite book-related moments of the year.

Often I already have a vague idea of which books will make the cut, but sometimes things leap out as reminders of wonderful times. This year, I couldn’t keep it just 10 – and there were another half dozen I’d have been happy to see on a Best Of list.

As always, I have firmly ranked – every year I hope for fewer ‘in no particular order’ lists on blogs! – and have excluded re-reads. That meant missing off Tension by E.M. Delafield, which I loved but apparently read in 2005. Each author can only appear once, otherwise Michael Cunningham would have taken up two places.

Each link goes to the original review. Without further ado…

12. Strange Journey (1935) by Maud Cairns

A body-swap comedy from the 1930s, where a lower-middle-class woman and an upper-class woman swap places. Cairns keeps it from getting stale by having them go back and forth a number of times – and, eventually, meet.

11. Told in Winter (1961) by Jon Godden

A beautifully written, dark, and atmospheric novel about a playwright, his male servant, a devoted dog, and the young actress who arrives to change things forever. So psychologically interesting. Rumer Godden is better remembered, but her sister deserves to be known too.

10. Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936) by George Orwell

A novel about poverty, pride, stubbornness, books, and class – all done with Orwell’s wonderful prose, totally unshowy and yet totally beautiful.

9. The Stone of Chastity (1940) by Margery Sharp

The first of two Furrowed Middlebrow titles that will appear on this list – Sharp’s comic novel is about a professor investigating the legend of a stepping stone on which unchaste women will stumble. A brilliant premise for a completely delightful novel. Even more to my liking than The Nutmeg Tree, which I also loved this year.

8. The Snow Queen (2014) by Michael Cunningham 

I wasn’t sure whether to include this or Flesh and Blood, but ultimately went with the more compact novel. Cunningham has such a gift for creating a real group of real people, and sprinkling it with magic. Here, a group of New Yorkers live, love, and lie to each other in the early 20th century.

7. Sally on the Rocks (1915) by Winifred Boggs

A total gamble on an unknown author that paid off – Sally is drawn back to her home village at the prospect of financial security in marrying the curate. The novel is a feminist crie de coeur about the moral standards applied to women, while also being witty and like a 1910s Cranford.

6. Doctor Thorne (1858) by Anthony Trollope

I only wrote a paragraph about this novel, which took me nearly a year to finish: “The plot is about secret inheritances and couples who might not be able to marry because of poverty, but the plot is dragged out and (especially in the second half) very predictable. What makes this wonderful is Trollope’s delightful turn of sentence, and the leisurely and assured way he takes us through each conversation, reflection, and narrative flourish. A protracted joy.”

5. Tea at Four O’Clock (1956) by Janet McNeill

A 1956 Club choice that I’ve owned for more than 15 years, hitherto unread. As it opens, Laura is returning from her sister’s funeral – free for the first time. Until her ne’er-do-well brother turns up, that is. A beautiful novel, in which even the suspect characters end up being (by the reader) understood and thus forgiven.

4. Inferno (2020) by Catherine Cho

An extraordinary memoir of post-partum psychosis. Cho writes brilliantly – about this, but also about domestic violence, fear, and love.

3. A House in the Country (1957) by Ruth Adam

How fictionalised is this memoir? Unclear, but this Furrowed Middlebrow about moving into an enormous mansion with seven friends is charming and funny, even when we learn in the opening sentences that the whole thing goes terribly wrong.

2. Business as Usual (1933) by Jane Oliver and Anne Stafford

The novel we’ve all loved this year, right? If you’re among the few yet to get hold of it – like me, you might be sold simply by its being a novel in letters about running the book department of a thinly-disguised Selfridge’s. It’s every bit as delightful as it sounds.

1. Jack (2020) by Marilynne Robinson

I was toying up between this and Business As Usual, but while Business As Usual is a charming wonder, Jack is an extraordinary masterpiece. The fourth in Robinson’s Gilead series, though can be read as a standalone, Jack is a prequel to Home, seeing Jack falling in love with Della. She is African-American, and their relationship is illegal in their state. Nobody writes like Robinson, every sentence a tiny marvel – and even more marvellous that she doesn’t edit or re-draft. What a gift to writing, and the character portraits in this novel will stay with me forever. Even more incredible, Jack went from being someone I hated in Gilead to someone I love here – while recognisably exactly the same person.