All the books I read in the dark and chilly month of November

I can’t believe it is the end of November already! It doesn’t seem that long ago that I was rounding up the books I had read in October. This month has been a fun one full of seeing friends and visiting places (including trips to London, Salford and York!) but it has also been a good month for good books, gripping tales and some spooky short stories. Below is a round-up of the books I have read and enjoyed this month.

Magpie, by Elizabeth Day

Absorbing, intelligent, heart-breaking: this book had me hooked.

But with Jake, she had found someone who accepted her as she was without too many questions, and when she fell in love with him, it was not accompanied by fireworks and a surging feeling of rollercoaster stomach-leaping. It didn’t feel like a thunderbolt. It felt like something more beautiful than that. It felt like relief.

Magpie, by Elizabeth Day

Marisa moves in with Jake, the man she hopes will help provide her with stability and love after a harsh and difficult childhood and twenties. However, soon after moving in they start to experience money worries and decide to get a lodger. Kate moves in and soon Marisa starts to pick up on odd little things that, at first, annoy her but then cause her to question her own sanity. Is Kate leaving her toothbrush in the master bathroom as opposed to her own to try and usurp Marisa? Is she trying to cook their meals to get closer to Jake, especially as she is making his favourite meals? How does she even know what his favourite meals are? Marisa is also trying to get pregnant but she starts to notice little moments between Kate and Jake when they think she isn’t looking.

This book has an incredible twist in it. A drop-your-book-and-spit-out-your-tea kind of twist. But it is also a very sympathetic and sensitive look at mental health and the physical and emotional tolls that trying to have a baby can have on a person and a couple.

10/10 would recommend this book.

Anything is Possible, by Elizabeth Strout

I read this for my bookclub and was surprised by how much I enjoyed it! It is a collection of short stories that each follow a different character from the small town of Amgash, Illinois. It is an intricate look at small-town life where everyone thinks they know each other and everyone draws their own conclusions without knowing the full story.

The book is part of Elizabeth Strout’s Lucy Barton series, and she is referenced by some of the characters, but I don’t think you need to have read the other book to be able to enjoy this. I thought all the stories were very engaging, some quite surprising and others so gentle in their approach to devastating topic such as loneliness, PTSD and bereavement.

After reading this book, I am now looking forward to reading Elizabeth Strout’s next book Oh William and it also encouraged me to pick up some other short story collections, as you will see later on.

Olive, by Emma Gannon

Another book read this month that looks at motherhood and wanting and not wanting to have a child. In this story, Olive is seeing her friendships, that have stood the test of time, start to change as her closest friends start having children and families of their own. She feels the shift and starts to wonder if there is something wrong with her that she doesn’t feel any maternal urge. In fact, she and her partner of nine years have just ended their relationship because she doesn’t want children.

The book explores not wanting to have kids, and the pressure women feel having to defend that decision, as well as what it is like to be desperate to have a child and being unable to conceive. It is a wonderful look at female friendships and is also, despite the heavy subject, very funny.

‘…I just want everyone in this room to remember to look deep inside and know sometimes we don’t have to stifle ourselves with the pressure. We don’t have to build up this huge unanswerable question in our heads: Do I Want Kids? It hangs over us, but why? Sometimes we can just roll with it, make smaller natural decisions as we go along and follow what makes us happy daily, and in doing so we will make the right decision for us in the end, without turning into something so pressurized.’

Olive

The Haunting Season

Maybe my favourite book of the month because it was so glorious in it’s spookiness. These stories are full of pieces of furniture that move all by themselves, ghostly voices heard in the hallways of empty houses, and shadowy shapes in the dark.

With stories by authors including Natasha Pulley, Bridget Collins, Elizabeth MacNeal and Laura Purcell, this book is full jumps and scares and things that go bump in the night, and I thoroughly enjoyed each of them. This book is the perfect accompaniment for anyone who likes a good ghost story for these cold, dark nights.

I sat bolt upright, my hands clasped to my chest. Those footsteps again! Thud thud thud outside the door, up and down the landing, and now perhaps the rapping of a cane along the bannisters. These were the footsteps of an angry man, full of bluster, a man out to frighten me and whom I was wise to fear. I sat stock still.

Thwaite’s Tenant, by Imogen Hermes Gowar

Dead Relatives, by Lucie McKnight Hardy

The other short story collection I read this month. This one is not for the faint-hearted, it has some very unsettling stories, but they are so well-written with more than a tinge of black comedy.

For me, my favourite (or the one that I’m still thinking about weeks later), was The Pickling Jar which recounts a town’s tradition of what they do when a loved one dies. But I thought this collection was so clever in what was left unsaid. The title story Dead Relatives, for example, was very interesting to read because it was written from the point of view of a child living in a large old house which, we find out she has never left. The things she tells the reader that she doesn’t understand are very chilling and take the imagination to some very gruesome places.

The Ladies are coming today and Cook is beside herself with worry.

‘I’m beside myself with worry, Iris,’ she says, and the blade strips the darkness from the back of my eyes. ‘Do not just sit there, Iris,’ she says, turning the corpse over on the wooden board, spreading the legs just so. ‘Go find your mammy and ask her what jobs there are for you to do.’ She drops the knife and her hand goes out for the cleaver.

Dead Relatives

Learwife, by J.R. Thorp

Lear, you old ghoul, softening down in the soil, sprouting a mushroom out of your eye, listen: you have tried to do me wrong, you thought you’d bury me. After all I gave. And look how I took your punishment and made it thicken, made it bud down to the root with new growth, furred and greening.

Learwife

This book was astonishing to read. The voice and the character so strong and vivid, this is for anyone who enjoys historical books written from the point of view of the women who were left out of the original stories.

This is the imagining of the life of King Lear’s wife, banished to an abbey for a crime she doesn’t know she’s committed and is never explained to her. She lives there for over a decade until she hears of his death and the death of her three daughters, the youngest of whom, Cordelia, she was forced to leave when she was only days old. The book explores the main character’s grief which takes in every emotion from love to hate, sadness and rage, and all the questions left unanswered. What became of her husband and where are her daughters buried? What will become of her now that he is gone?

I thought this book was so very well written, poetic and lyrical in some places and sparse in others, it was so full of life and what it is to be human.

Hostage, by Clare Mackintosh

Clare Mackintosh is one of those dependable authors where you know that whichever of her books you pick up, you’re going to enjoy it. Hostage is no different – it is a superbly crafted thriller that will suck you in and slowly reveal layer after layer of mystery. As always, I take my hat off to her cleverness.

Mina is about to board a non-stop flight from London to Sydney: it is the first of its kind and the journey is set to be a special one with celebrities and journalists on board. Part of the cabin crew assigned to look after business class, Mina starts to notice strange things about the flight and it’s passengers, one of whom shortly after take-off becomes seriously ill. She finds in his wallet a picture of her daughter, Sophia, and then she receives a note that the plane has been hijacked and she has to help them get control of the flight-deck or her daughter will be in danger.

The wallet is black, an expensive but simple piece of folded leather. When I open it, a photograph falls out; a home-printed image, on cheap paper.

I put out my hand to still myself, even though the plane is steady. It isn’t possible. It’s a coincidence, that’s all; a similarity to be dismissed.

But it can’t be. I know this face as well as I know my own.

This is a photograph of Sophia.

Hostage

What have you read this month and what do recommend I pick up in December? Let me know in the comments!