Review: Vivien Horler

Catherine, The Princess of Wales – The biography, by Robert Jobson (John Blake Publishing)

The Wales are just like everyone else – they have their family disagreements. But theirs, it must be said, are of a higher order.

The late Queen Elizabeth didn’t like it when Prince William, a former professional helicopter pilot, would fly his immediate family from Kensington Palace to their country home Anmer Hall in Norfolk.  After all, if he were to crash with all three children on board, who would be next in line to the throne? Whinging Harry, that’s who.

Earlier this year King Charles also objected to William’s use of the helicopter. When William refused to listen to his dad, “the King insisted that he sign a formal acknowledgement of the risks involved and take full responsibility for his actions, a grim reminder of the weight of succession”. Continue reading →

Review: Vivien Horler

The Life Impossible, by Matt Haig (Canongate)

Matt Haig is an enormously successful British writer who has sold untold numbers of novels, notably The Midnight Library, which is in the genre of magic realism, not one I particularly like.

At one point in this new novel I thought he’d obviously eaten all the mushrooms, because some weird stuff happens.

What the two books seem to have in common – and I haven’t read The Midnight Library – is that they both deal with conflicted women who have an experience that enables them to introspect, as the ANC puts it, consider the trajectory of their lives and how they can do better. Continue reading →

Review: Vivien Horler

Close to Death, by Anthony Horowitz (Century/ Penguin Random House)

In his acknowledgements Anthony Horowitz writes: “This was quite a complicated novel to write….”

I thought it was quite a complicated novel to read – and I’m still not sure who the baddy was.

But I thoroughly enjoyed the process.

Until last month I’m not sure I’d read Horowitz before, or certainly not his Hawthorne novels.

In these murder thrillers Horowitz becomes a fictional alter ego in his own books, working as a writer alongside Daniel Hawthorne, a former top detective who left the police under a cloud (an accused in handcuffs slipped down the stairs, and Hawthorne was right behind him) and is called in as a freelancer to help solve tricky cases.

My first Hawthorne novel – read just last month – was The Sentence is Death, published in 2018, a tale about a divorce lawyer bludgeoned to death in his London home.

Hawthorne is seconded to the case, and Horowitz, who has a three-book contract to write about Hawthorne, stumbles along behind him, trying to figure out what’s going on. Hawthorne doesn’t think much of Horowitz’s detection abilities. It was a great read on a long flight. Continue reading →

Review: Archie Henderson

The English Understand Wool, by Helen DeWitt (Storybook ND)

The title was enough to deter me, but the size and the cover did appeal (yes, you can sometimes judge a book by those!) Wool, it turned out, is a warm, comforting read.

DeWitt is best known for her debut novel, The Last Samurai. It was her 50th completed manuscript, which she finally handed in to a publisher in 1998, hitting the shelves in 2000. Then began a runaround for the author after the publisher went belly up, leading to what appears to have been terrible exploitation of DeWitt.

Behind the enervating attempt to be published and what followed must lie a story: a difficult relationship with publishers. Is Wool her revenge? It certainly is not a good optic for publishing and all who sail in it, from agents, to lawyers and all the rest of that crew. Continue reading →