April 2011 Archives

Mafia and murder in the Marghera - another very good outing with Commissario Brunetti.

Amazon.co.uk link: About Face - Donna Leon

"Apples are from Kazakhstan."

A lovely, readable, fascinating, harrowing book*, written in 2007 and drawing much upon the author's conversations with President Nursultan Nazarbayev who saw Kazakhstan through the transition from Soviet Socialist Republic (exploited as a land for gulags, Kolkhoz and nuclear weapons testing) to an oil/gas-rich independent nation with hope for the future.

Amazon.co.uk link: In Search of Kazakhstan: The Land That Disappeared - Christopher Robbins

* even if my copy - a library book - featured annoying pencil annotations. It's not your book, so don't write in it.

AKA Uhtred and Alfred versus various Viking raiders, Danelaw invaders and would be kings of Wessex and Mercia.

There are other battles going on too: Norse paganism versus Christianity; Pictish tribes led by King Constantine versus the Jarls of the Danelaw; Uhtred versus his uncle, usurper and occupier of the family fortress at Bebbanburg; and learned Alfred versus soldier Uhtred.

En route we meet Frisian pirates, killer bees and two very different powerful women: curse-invoking Skade and Alfred's eldest daugher, Æthelflæd.

Amazon.co.uk link: The Burning Land (Alfred the Great 5) - Bernard Cornwell

Part of a previous haul from Frinton, I realised that I'd read A Question of Blood before, soon after settling down to read it. Still Rankin's Inspector Rebus is always a good read and A Question of Blood is no exception, with an ex-SAS loner shooting 3 school boys in an Edinburgh private school and Rebus falling under suspicion of the death of Siobhan's stalker....

Amazon.co.uk link: A Question of Blood - Ian Rankin

Set in 1570 as Renaissance and Reformation converge in the northern Italian city of Ferrara, Sacred Hearts focuses on the nuns at the convent of Santa Caterina.

Serafina is sent to the convent to put an end to her nascent love affair with her music master and to free up funds for the dowry of her younger, more worldly wise sister. Sister Zuana, the convent herbalist and physician, had been forced to enter the convent following the death of her physician father almost two decades earlier.

Whilst on the surface Sacred Hearts is a love story, the setting allows Sarah Dunant to demonstrate the unexpected opportunities and freedoms women could find within convent walls, opportunities threatened, paradoxically, by both Renaissance and Reformation.

Amazon.co.uk link: Sacred Hearts - Sarah Dunant

Lovely, and far deeper than I'd been led to expect. This is not some trite tale an artificial annual rendezvous of two lovers manque, but instead it tells us what Emma and Dexter's lives look like on the anniversary of the day / night they spent together in 1988, at the end of their university days. 15 July is an anniversary of sadness and happiness in our family too.

Thank you Charlotte for the loan.

Amazon.co.uk link: One Day - David Nicholls

Peter's Hessler's second book drawing upon his time in China, ranging from pre history and the archaeological record represented by the Oracle Bones themselves to the social and political change of 20th and 21st centuries, telling the stories of the Uighurs of Xinjiang, academics who lived through the Cultural Revolution, his River Town students who become the migrant workers out in the stimulated economies of the Special Economic Zones. All completely fascinating. Editing could have been tighter though - but don't let the random reappearances of topics put you off.

Amazon.co.uk link: Oracle Bones: A Journey Between China and the West - Peter Hessler

Fabulous telling of the rise and rise of Thomas Cromwell, and the people and politics at play in the court of Henry VIII: the fall of Cardinal Wolsey, the rise of Anne Boleyn, the break with Rome.

Amazon.co.uk link: Wolf Hall - Hilary Mantel

Inspector Montalbano grew on me as I read more.... but the tone is a bit too knowing compared to the voices of Zen and Brunetti.

Amazon.co.uk link: The Voice of the Violin - Andrea Camilleri