Tag: ReadersFirst

#BookReview How To Belong by Sarah Franklin @ZaffreBooks

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How To BelongAbout the Book

Jo grew up in the Forest of Dean, but she was always the one destined to leave for a bigger, brighter future. When her parents retire from their butcher’s shop, she returns to her beloved community to save the family legacy, hoping also to save herself. But things are more complex than the rose-tinted version of life which sustained Jo from afar.

Tessa is a farrier, shoeing horses two miles and half a generation away from Jo, further into the Forest. Tessa’s experience of the community couldn’t be more different. Now she too has returned, in flight from a life she could have led, nursing a secret and a past filled with guilt and shame.

Compelled through circumstance to live together, these two women will be forced to confront their sense of identity, and reconsider the meaning of home.

Format: Hardcover (368 pages)               Publisher: Zaffre
Publication date: 12th November 2020 Genre: Contemporary Fiction

Find How to Belong on Goodreads

Purchase links*
Amazon UK | Hive (supporting UK bookshops)
*link provided for convenience not as part of an affiliate programme

My Review

I was initially drawn to Sarah Franklin’s first novel, Shelter, because it was set during World War Two which is one of my favourite periods for historical fiction. I was also intrigued by the choice of location, the Forest of Dean. I loved the book and it left me keen to read whatever Sarah came up with next.

In How To Belong the location is once more the Forest of Dean but this time we’re very much in the present day. However, there is a sense of the timelessness of the Forest, even if much around it has changed and is still changing. Not only a source of recreation and employment, and a haven for wildlife, the Forest acts as a place for contemplation and reflection. As one character puts it, “The trees will restore the mess“.

The book switches between the points of view of Jo and Tessa, two women who are very different in terms of their life experience and character. Tessa is by nature an introvert whose one attempt at reaching out and expressing her true self ended in rejection, disappointment and a sense of failure, for reasons the reader will gradually discover. Jo, on the other hand, has forged a life for herself away from the Forest, a life that had been successful in many ways but which has left her unfulfilled and with a desire to return to her roots.

Jo returns with big plans for the family butcher’s shop but is disappointed to find it more difficult than she expects to be absorbed back into the community. The friends she grew up with have built their own lives – married, started families – and talk about people she doesn’t know. “The group’s shifted. She doesn’t know who she is or where she fits in. There’s nowhere left for her to go.” In particular, Jo struggles to understand the change in her relationship with her childhood friend, Liam, with whom she was once so close. “She’s homesick for happy Liam, who doesn’t exist anymore; perhaps never did outside her own naive bubble… Most of all, she’s homesick for her old self.” What Jo comes to realise is that it’s possible to be the repository of others’ hopes and dreams, not just your own.

Tessa has become used to living a life socially distant from others. From childhood, she’s instinctively felt different from her peers for reasons she couldn’t initially explain. Traumatic incidents in her past have left her with a misplaced sense of guilt as well as worries about her future.

Thrown together by chance, Jo and Tessa slowly discover they have more in common than they may have thought and that each can help the other find a way to achieve the sense of belonging they both crave. Whether that’s feeling a part of a community or a family, having a sense of security, fulfilling a dream or simply being comfortable in your own skin.

How To Belong is an engrossing human drama that shows it’s never too late to start again, if you just give yourself the chance.

I received an advance review copy courtesy of Zaffre Books, NetGalley and Readers First.

In three words: Tender, insightful, intimate

Try something similar: Birdie & Jude by Phyllis H. Moore

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Sarah FranklinAbout the Author

Sarah Franklin grew up in rural Gloucestershire and has lived in Austria, Germany, the USA and Ireland. She lectures in publishing at Oxford Brookes University and has written for the Guardian, the Irish Times, Psychologies magazine and The Pool. (Photo credit: Twitter profile)

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#BookReview The Forgers by Bradford Morrow

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The ForgersAbout the Book

The rare book world is stunned when a reclusive collector, Adam Diehl, is found on the floor of his Montauk home: hands severed, surrounded by valuable inscribed books and original manuscripts that have been vandalised beyond repair.

Adam’s sister, Meghan, and her lover, Will – a convicted if unrepentant literary forger – struggle to come to terms with the seemingly incomprehensible murder.

But when Will begins receiving threatening handwritten letters, seemingly penned by long-dead authors, but really from someone who knows secrets about Adam’s death and Will’s past, he understands his own life is also on the line – and attempts to forge a new beginning for himself and Meg.

In The Forgers, Bradford Morrow reveals the passion that drives collectors to the razor-sharp edge of morality, brilliantly confronting the hubris and mortal danger of rewriting history with a fraudulent pen.

Format: Paperback (256 pages)                          Publisher: Grove Press UK
Publication date: 5th November 2020 [2014] Genre: Crime, Mystery

Find The Forgers on Goodreads

Purchase links*
Amazon UK | Hive (supporting UK bookshops)
*link provided for convenience not as part of an affiliate programme

My Review

Previously published in the US in 2014, The Forgers is set in the slightly obsessive world of antiquarian book collectors and dealers who, according to the book’s narrator, share “little else than a rabid passion for the printed page”. But not just any old printed page; we’re talking rare first editions, unpublished manuscripts, private letters and volumes inscribed by the author.

The narrator, Will (although he is rarely referred to by name), is a self-confessed forger.  As he declares, “I myself was once a forger.  Undeniably, and even unashamedly, triumphantly a forger.” He has a high opinion of his own ability, considering the forged inscriptions he adds to books to be ‘improvements’ and works of art in their own right.  Reflecting on one of his creations, he says, “A forgery of this high quality is, to my mind, as informed by genius as any of your everyday authentic originals.  It’s just that the creativity involved is of an altogether different variety.”

Given the above, the reader may well consider his testimony suspect from the outset. Will’s one redeeming feature is his devotion to Meghan, the sister of the murdered man, for whose sake he has undertaken to leave his nefarious past behind.

These worthy intentions are disrupted by the arrival of accusatory letters from a man whom Will comes to think of as his ‘epistolary nemesis’, rather in the manner of Sherlock Holmes’ arch-enemy Moriarty. An apt comparison, since Will is an expert on the writings of Arthur Conan Doyle. After all, he’s forged enough of them.

The author creates an air of increasing unease and tension as Will tries to discover the identity of his mystery correspondent and becomes increasingly paranoid about the threat he poses. There is also some playful humour.  Reflecting on his progress at learning to operate a printing press, Will reports, “To say I took to it like a duck to water would be to employ a cliché – a lame duck of a cliché, at that.”

The book includes misdirection and red herrings in the manner of Agatha Christie and, although it started off promisingly, I have to say it rather fizzled out and I was left with a sense of anti-climax as I turned the final pages. The Forgers is an entertaining read and interesting as a portrait of the darker side of the antiquarian book world but not the completely satisfying mystery I’d hoped for.

I received an advance review copy courtesy of Grove Press and Readers First.

In three words: Clever, playful, humorous

Try something similar: The Word Is Murder by Anthony Horowitz

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Bradford MorrowAbout the Author

Bradford Morrow is the author of eight previous novels, including The Forgers and The Prague Sonata. He is the founding editor of Conjunctions. A professor of literature and Bard Center Fellow at Bard College, he lives in New York City. (Photo credit: Goodreads author profile)

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