What a fun book this was. I enjoyed every minute that I listened to it. It is a fictional story of a gathering of actual women crime writers who work together to solve a murder. The story is told by Dorothy Sayers who along with Agatha Christie, gather the women together. The others are Ngaio Marsh, Marjorie Allingham, and Emma Orczy. I was a big fan of Dorothy Sayers’ Peter Wimsey series...
What a remarkable bit of history this author has brought to life. I had never heard the story of Ellen and William Craft who escaped slavery in 1848, traveling from Macon, Georgia by public transport in disguise. Ellen was enslaved in the household of her half-sister. Her husband William was a skilled cabinet-maker who had been allowed to keep a bit of the money he earned. Their escape plan...
The subtitle changes the false impression the title gives: The Women Who Created a President makes clear this is not a salacious tale of Teddy Roosevelt’s love life. Instead, as the author puts it in the Preface, “Theodore Roosevelt was not the impossibly hardy, self-made man of myth and lore. Far from it. The most masculine president in the American memory was in fact the product of...
This is the third book I’ve read by Carys Davies; this one and Clear are in the category “historical fiction.” Clear was set in Scotland in the middle of the 19th century and I learned about the upheavals in the Church of Scotland and the land clearances. This one is set in 1815 in the US and opens in Pennsylvania with a widower setting off for the wilds of the western...
It was Reading Matters that took me to this book. Kim noted it has been compared to Sally Rooney’s Normal People and l agree with Kim that there is a superficial similarity. The characters are young adults trying to decide what their lives will be and that description fits countless books. In this case Ava, a young Irish woman narrates the story of her time in Hong Kong where she moved to...
I was uncertain whether to try this book until I read Tony’s take on Carys Davies. It turns out that I had forgotten the book I read by her in 2021, also based on Tony’s recommendation. Clear is set in Scotland at the time of two upheavals there and this book introduces both of them to us. In 1843 there was a major disruption of the Church of Scotland, resulting in...
When Ron Charles begins a review this way, I pay attention: “Me again, banging on about Sunjeev Sahota. I won’t stop until you read him.” And now that I read this one, I will put his previous works on my list of books to read. At the center of this novel set in a former coal mining area in the Midlands of the UK is Nayan Olak, a working class Anglo-Indian man as he is running to be...
I heard about this book from Jennifer and found it to be a great listen. It recounts the experiences of women in the CIA and is subtitled, The Secret History of Women at the CIA. Jennifer mentioned it in connection with the women analysts who had been gathering data about Osama bin Laden for years before 9/11. It was a source of frustration that despite what they knew, the attack was not thwarted...
This novel by Louis Bayard focuses on some aspects of the life of Oscar Wilde, the playwright and novelist who spent two years in prison for sodomy and gross indecency. His libel suit against the father of one of the objects of his affection resulted in his criminal conviction, as the accusation made by the Marquess of Queensberry was factual. This book focuses on his family members, chiefly his...
After watching a four-part series made in 2016 called Mary Beard’s Ultimate Rome: Empire Without Limit, I looked for an audiobook by her. She was on the screen every minute, along with views of the Roman Empire beginning with Rome and going to the far reaches of empire from the north of Britain to North Africa. It was an engaging series and I am now a fan of Mary Beard, a classics scholar...