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Book Review – Miss Treadway and the Field of Stars by Miranda Emmerson

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About the Book

miss-treadway

Soho. 1965, When an American actress disappears from the Galaxy Theatre, her young dresser, Anna Treadway is determined to find out what happened to her.

Anna’s search will lead her through a London she barely knew existed: a city of reggae clubs and back street doctors, of dangerous prejudice and unexpected allies. She is aided by a disparate group of émigrés, each carrying secrets of their own.

But before she can discover the truth about Iolanthe, Anna will need to open herself – to her past, her present and the possibility of love.

Format: ebook (306 pages) Publisher: 4th Estate
Publication date: 12th January 2017 Genre: Historical Fiction

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My Review

This was a great read that would keep you entertained for hours on a train or plane journey.  At first, it seems like it’s going to be a straightforward period detective mystery but there are a number of elements that, as you read on, raise it to another level. 

Firstly, the authentic feel of the period setting.  This is the England of homes without central heating, smoke-filled bars and buses, seedy clubs, drugs, awful coffee, backstreet abortions and, most shockingly, homophobia and overt racism against black people, Irish people and basically anyone who is perceived as an outsider. 

Secondly, Miranda Emmerson has created such a great cast of supplementary characters, including Ottmar, the Turkish café owner, and Aloysius, the Jamaican accountant.   It is no accident that the characters who help Anna in her search for Iolanthe are all outsiders and perhaps it’s the fact that Iolanthe is also an outsider that makes them care so much for her fate. 

Lastly, this is such a multi-layered novel because underneath the simple mystery narrative are questions of identity and reinvention.   All the characters have either reinvented themselves, wish to reinvent themselves or are struggling to play a part they haven’t quite come to terms with.  There’s Anna, who admits “I tried to be someone and I failed” and is drawn to starting over anew; Sergeant Brennan Hayes, who changes his Christian name and accent to disguise his Irish origins (“His new voice commanded more respect, his new name spoke of privileged beginnings.  He didn’t belong anywhere, he was aware of this, but he looked like he belonged, sounded like he belonged”); his wife, Orla, who empathises with Iolanthe’s determination that “one part of your life needs to end and another to begin” when she realises that Brennan “just wasn’t who I thought he was at all”;  and Aloysius, who has moved to London because he is “in love with the idea of England” but the England of Dickens, which turns out to be a far cry from reality he experiences.   

I was really impressed with this book.  At the end, there are questions unanswered but I’d like to think these were not unintended loose ends but deliberate on the part of the author or (even better) threads to be woven into a future book.

I received an advance review copy courtesy 4th Estate via NetGalley.

In three words: Authentic, engaging, satisfying

About the Author

Miranda is a novelist, playwright and academic. Originally from London she now lives in South Wales where she watches the fairground at Barry Island spin and whirl from her desk.

Before she started writing novels she wrote drama for BBC Radio 4, adapting books and writing original dystopian science fiction. And before that she was a secretary, a copy writer, a receptionist, a sale assistant and all the others things writers do to get by. Before all those things she was a reader, an only child who lost herself in books and loved the worlds they allowed her to explore.

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Book Review – World’s End (Lanny Budd #1) by Upton Sinclair

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About the Book

worlds-end

Lanning “Lanny” Budd spends his first thirteen years in Europe, living at the center of his mother’s glamourous circle of friends on the French Riviera. In 1913, he enters a prestigious Swiss boarding school and befriends Rick, an English boy, and Kurt, a German. The three schoolmates are privileged, happy, and precocious—but their world is about to come to an abrupt and violent end.
 
When the gathering storm clouds of war finally burst, raining chaos and death over the continent, Lanny must put the innocence of youth behind him; his language skills and talent for decoding messages are in high demand. At his father’s side, he meets many important political and military figures, learns about the myriad causes of the conflict, and closely follows the First World War’s progress. When the bloody hostilities eventually conclude, Lanny joins the Paris Peace Conference as the assistant to a geographer asked by President Woodrow Wilson to redraw the map of Europe.

Format: ebook (922 pages) Publisher: Open Road Media
Publication date: 19th January 2016 [1940] Genre: Historical Fiction

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My Review

World’s End is the first novel in Upton Sinclair’s ‘Lanny Budd’ series. First published in 1940, the book covers the period from 1913 to 1919 and is the beginning of a monumental 7,340 page novel, the story of a young American, Lanny Budd.

Lanny is drawn to art, poetry and music but, as the son of an American munitions manufacturer, is exposed to arguments of commercial reality,  power-broking and realpolitik.  The conflict Lanny experiences as he struggles to make sense of these opposing forces is at the heart of the novel.   This is a long novel and at times, particularly in Part 5 covering the attempts to arrive at a peace settlement, it seems more straight history than historical fiction but Lanny’s Forrest Gump-like ability to be at the centre of important events and several underlying stories stop it from feeling completely like a college course. 

Upton Sinclair depicts the motives of the countries involved, particularly Great Britain, France and America, with brutal clarity. ‘Now they were here, not to form a League of Nations, not to save mankind from future bloodshed, but to divvy the swag.’  That the war was fought for control of  natural resources (coal, oil, steel) and territory is made very clear and in this sense, the lesson of history is that nothing much has changed.

In three words: Epic, detailed, factual
Try something similar: Any Human Heart by William Boyd

About the Author

Upton Sinclair wrote close to one hundred books in many genres. He achieved popularity in the first half of the twentieth century, acquiring particular fame for his classic muckraking novel, The Jungle (1906). To gather information for the novel, Sinclair spent seven weeks undercover working in the meat packing plants of Chicago. These direct experiences exposed the horrific conditions in the U.S. meat packing industry, causing a public uproar that contributed in part to the passage a few months later of the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act. In 1943, he won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.