Seven Contemporary Novels I've Enjoyed in 2022
Even some of these have an element of history about them!
If she Wakes by Erik Therme - Psychological thriller
https://www.amazon.com/If-She-Wakes-Harlow-Book-ebook/dp/B09J44N4WY
Imagine a situation in which a woman tells you that her sister is mentally deranged and not to be trusted. Then the sister tells you that it is really the first woman whose mental health is questionable. Add to that a narrator who exhibits signs of being paranoid. Sound like a recipe for an excellent psychological thriller? I'm sure it is. I'm not so sure that Erik Therme has pulled it off with this one.
To be fair, I kept reading, needing to find out what was really going on. To that extent the author succeeds, by keeping the reader guessing. And it was a pleasant surprise to find, in a book set in what is supposedly one of the most gun loving states in a gun loving nation, a protagonist who hates guns and is horrified when she discovers one of the characters owns a pistol. Most of the other characters seem to be equally ill disposed towards such weaponry, exhibiting a preference for the use of a handy rock as weapon of choice.
If you have read and enjoyed the first book in this series, then I have no doubt that you will also enjoy this one. Don't, however, make the mistake I made and try to read it as a stand-alone novel.
The Date by Louise Jensen - Psychological thriller
https://www.waterstones.com/book/the-date/louise-jensen/9780751574203
Waking up and finding yourself in hospital having suffered a serious injury is a not uncommon trope in literature. Nor is the subsequent realisation that you can not remember how you sustained those injuries. Both are sensations that most of us can relate to, if not from personal experience, then from an understanding of the effect on short term memory of a blow to the head.
Less well known is a form of brain damage that makes it impossible to recognise faces. Friends, family members, medical staff are indistinguishable from each other except by their clothing and their voices.
As you recover some of your memory, and friends tell you that you were on a blind date but that they have no idea what happened after you left the venue, you start to receive messages insinuating that you did something terrible.
That is how The Date begins and the tension never lets up. I enjoyed every twist and turn. I found the characters, and their development, completely plausible, and the relationships between Ali, her ex-husband, her brother and her best friend compelling.
Lake of Echoes by Liza Perrat - Psychological Thriller
https://www.amazon.com/Lake-Echoes-Novel-1960s-France-ebook/dp/B0B5FCQ1NZ
For those of us old enough to remember them, the years embracing the end of the sixties and beginning of the seventies can offer a rosy hued vision of 'flower power'; of Height Ashbury and Woodstock, of armed guards confronted by hippies pushing flowers into the barrels of their guns. But it was also a time of riots across several European nations and the USA, of the cold war and fears of communism and nuclear war; a time when strange cults emerged led by charismatic psychopaths who brainwashed their adherents into believing dangerous nonsense. It is this atmosphere that Perrat taps into with her mesmerising tale.
Léa took on the business of running an Auberge beside a lake in rural France in order to take her mind off the tragic loss of her son by cot death at just 3 months old. Now, in 1969, it is clear that her marriage is on the rocks. She and husband Bruno, Head Master at the village school, are constantly bickering. During one particularly heated exchange their 8 year old daughter, Juliette, wanders off. When she does not return we have the beginnings of a tension filled mystery.
The first half of the book concentrates on Léa's attempts to come to terms with the loss of another child. The second half presents a description of the lives of the girls under the discipline ordered by their abductor and administered by his wife and sister.
The climax is superbly handled. I can't tell you how the situation is resolved, for that would spoil your pleasure in reading it for yourself, something which I urge you to do.
Red Leicester Blues by Richard Cunliffe - Contemporary Fiction
https://www.amazon.com/Red-Leicester-Blues-Richard-Cunliffe-ebook/dp/B09NLSGSB9
For as long as I can remember I have followed political events in England, especially with regard to the relationship between the UK and Europe. In 1989 I was a candidate for election to the European Parliament. Inevitably a book in which the principle protagonist is similarly energised by politics is going to appeal to me.
We first meet Billy as a five-year-old, living in a council house in Leicester with his older brother, younger sister and his parents George and Sheila. It's 1975 and the country is about to vote in a referendum to determine if the UK should remain a member of the EEC. We then leap forward to 2016 and Billy's older self, Will. The electorate has just voted, by the narrowest of margins, to leave the EU. The rest of the book alternates between Billy's childhood, adolescence and early adulthood and Will's life as a business man and parent up to the end of 2020. Each episode in his life is linked to a key moment in British politics.
For those of you for whom politics and Brexit are a turn off, you can rest assured that Billy/Will's life contains much more. The story explores his father's drunkenness, especially after his mother's death from cancer; his brother's descent into violent criminality; his failed marriage and his doubts about his performance as a father. Each of these characters, and several others, are well drawn, fully rounded individuals who develop throughout the 45 year span of the story.
It is altogether a superb evocation of the lives of English people, residing in a provincial city, during a period of enormous political, social and technological change.
Perfectly Ordinary People by Nick Alexander - Contemporary/Historical Fiction
https://www.waterstones.com/book/perfectly-ordinary-people/nick-alexander/9781542032476
It begins with a casually anti-Semitic remark during a family gathering at Christmas. The grown up son and daughter of the man who makes the remark are horrified, not least because the son is in a relationship with a young Jewish woman. The daughter, used to frequent contact with her Irish mother's extended family, wonders why she knows so little about her father's French parents. All she does know is that they came to London as refugees immediately after the war when he was 5 years old.
It's the mid-1990s and it turns out that, ten years before, her paternal grandmother recoded an interview with a journalist from a French gay magazine. In it she recorded the truth about her life in Alsace before the war, after the province's annexation by Germany, her escape, with a friend and a Jewish infant, to a hide-away in the Alps, culminating with the emotional reunion with her gay lover in post-war London.
This is a monumental work which deals with the issue of prejudice and bigotry in modern Britain by describing how such attitudes morphed into the holocaust in which not only Jews, but many perfectly ordinary people who displayed 'difference', including homosexuals, were brutally tortured and murdered by the Nazis.
Frequently moving, sometimes funny and always completely relatable, never marred by impossible plot twists, this is a book that deserves maximum exposure. It is fiction, but events like those described did indeed happen in real life, a fact that cannot be repeated often enough.
Tales from the Hamlet by Cassandra Campbell-Kemp - Memoir
https://cassandracampbell-kemp.com/cassandra-campbell-kemp-books/tales-from-the-hamlet/
Cassandra's memoir begins in Verona where she has just been informed that her services are no longer required. She is in her sixties, not in the best of health and her 30 year career in property sales and development is seemingly over. Fortunately she has friends and former business associates to whom she can turn for assistance, which is how she finds herself in a region of Northern Italy that she has not previously visited.
Her explorations of the geography, gastronomy, history and culture of the region form the bulk of the book. It is written in an easily accessible style. Her love of everything about the place and its people shines through. And there are cats. Who doesn't love everything about cats?
Stolen Summers and Matilda Windsor is Coming Home by Ann Goodwin - Contemporary/Historical Fiction
https://annegoodwin.weebly.com/matilda-windsor.html
A two-book series that can be read in any order so long as you read both. Stolen Summers details a young woman's arrival in a mental hospital in 1939, her friendship with a more worldly inmate and what happens 25 years later when they are allowed out to attend a circus. Matilda Windsor is Coming Home is set in 1989-90, when the institution is set to close with the inmates transferred to a sheltered housing development.
Taken together, the two books form an entertaining, informative and often moving exploration of the changes in the treatment of mental patients over the half century leading up to the UK's "care in the community" reforms of the late 1980s and early 1990s.
But it is much more than that. Society's attitude to women, especially those who become pregnant whilst single, underwent profound change too. Changing the opinion of the general public towards those it regarded as insane was much harder to achieve.
An important theme of the books is that of how we perceive what we observe and experience. Coming Home is narrated in episodes that alternate between the lives of the three central characters, Matty, Henry and the social worker charged with facilitating her re-integration into the community. This enables us to see things from three very different perspectives.
Now 70, Matty has rationalised her 50 years in the institution by creating a fantasy life in which she is the lady of the kind of country house featured in an Agatha Christy novel. In it, appropriate roles are assigned to the staff and inmates: the butler, the chauffeur, the maid, the Belgian detective.
Henry, about to retire from a minor role as a bureaucrat in the local council, seems wedded to the past. He still lives in the house where he was born. He has fond memories of the young woman, Tilly, who looked after him for the first six years of his life. He has preserved her attic room exactly as it was 50 years ago. But, as he nears retirement, he begins to wonder about the young woman: what became of her? His efforts to trace her having repeatedly come to dead ends, was she really his sister, as he has always believed? Did she even exist? The only tangible evidence is a faded photograph in which the Blackpool tower sprouts from his head. Could the woman accompanying him be his mother, not his sister?
The social worker is equally stymied in her attempts to discover Matty's past, not least because they are based on assumptions that may or may not be correct.