Hello St Marks

I think both of these turned up in my Street Library, which is why Kindle is not getting much of my business these days. Frances Liardet's 'We Must be Brave' was lovely, literary fiction about a lost girl and a wounded young woman. Beautifully crafted and set largely in my favourite era for fiction—England during WWII—so I allowed the weepy bits.  'A Crooked Tree' by Una Mannion was more of a challenge. When people behave badly in a novel set in 1942 I can forgive them, but when brainless teenagers and their damaged parents do dangerous, daft things in contemporary Pennsylvania I want to throw things at them. The premise is brilliant and compelling: overstretched widowed mother of five leaves 12 year old Ellen by the side of the road in a fit of pique, and it doesn't go well. I couldn't put the damn book down; my frustrated fury at the behaviour of this pack of well-meaning, self-destructive idiot kids was overcome by my need to see how it all played out. 

How could I forget 'Leave the World Behind' by Rumaan Alam (via Audible)? What a corker it was, prompting many a dinner table and school run conversation about the end of the world. A nice white family staying in a swanky AirBnb is interrupted by a nice Black couple who say it's their house, and something had gone awry in the city. Wealthy Black people? So it's a scam, right? Or hysteria? Or the end of the world for real? And so it goes. Fabulous. 

I've given up reading as many books as I finished in the past fortnight or so. Finished 'Bluebird' by Malcolm Knox. Honestly, I could have killed bloody Malcolm Knox for his wretched cast of loser beach bum layabouts, but I forgave him for his writing, and for the cheeky device of recasting Sydney as 'Ocean City'. So very good, and those bloody losers were brilliantly observed.  Jennifer Haigh's 'Mrs Kimble' dumped me with another wretched man I did not want to spend time with—the eponymous Mr Kimble, the rotter. But was it "beautiful, devastating and complex" as the Chicago Tribune declared? It was.  Dean Koontz is usually reliable but failed me with 'Your Heart Belongs to Me', a truly stupid book about—lordy—a man stalked by the twin sister of his transplanted heart, or some such rot. Definitely not "a terrifying thriller" per the cover line. One star, Mr Koontz.