Lolly Willowes

~ Jane ~ 25 Comments

What a fantastic and surprising start to this year’s reading!

First published in 1926, it all begins so conventionally. A large, comfortable house in the Somerset countryside, filled with Lolly, brothers and parents’ following the traditions set by previous generations of Willowes’ and the brewing business they founded. Then with the death of her mother and her brothers’ leaving home, Lolly continues as housekeeper and much loved daughter to her father. But when he dies the brothers’ decide that Lolly should leave her home and the countryside and move in with her older brother and his family in London.

Good Old Aunt Lolly, she’s very handy with the sewing basket, at looking after nieces and nephews, she can make up numbers at dinner parties and only needs the small guest bedroom. She’s 28 and too inclined to enjoy her own company; definitely a spinster for the shelf.

But behind this conventional beginning there’s been a quiet drip of information that tells us this isn’t the tale we’re expecting. Lolly never calls herself Lolly, she affords herself the respect of being Laura Willowes, and she has a firm interest in the business of brewing, brewing that goes alongside her love of botany.

Botany and flowers, powerful and forgotten herbs, the earth is what she loves; and one day the greengrocer adds a spray of beech leaves to her bouquet; they’re from his sisters’ garden in the Chiltern Hills. Laura finds a map of the Chilterns and arranges her escape to the village of Great Mop.

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Just Watching A Film: 2026

~ Jane ~ 18 Comments

A new year and a great new list of films To Be Watched! I haven’t seen any of them before, not even the juggernauts that begin and end the year and many of them I hadn’t even heard of; but hopefully as in previous years, there’ll be some corkers and new all time favourites. I think my favourite from last year was, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari in October, a work of German Expressionism from Robert Wiene in 1920. Silent and black and white, I don’t think I would have watched it if I hadn’t been encouraged too and it’s brilliant. Nothing from Germany this year but there is some Agnès Varda who’s becoming a fixture, and another classic from Yasujirō Ozu.

January: His Girl Friday (1940, USA)
A newspaper editor manipulates all around him for the sake of a scoop in a classic screwball comedy.

February: Bicycle Thieves (1948, Italy)
The quiet tragedy of a man’s desperate hunt for his stolen bicycle with his son, has a fable-like simplicity. 

March: We Are The Best! (2013, Sweden)
A joyful, exuberant tale of three teenagers discovering punk in the 80’s, in the suburbs of Stockholm

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6 Degrees From Frenchman’s Creek

~ Jane ~ 16 Comments

A Happy New Year! and this year I resolve to join in with 6 Degrees of Separation, hosted by Kate at Books Are My Favourite and Best, on the first Saturday of each month. Kate provides the first title and then we make a chain of 6 titles, linked to the one that went before. This month’s title is the one we finished with in December and for me that was Daphne du Maurier’s Frenchman’s Creek.

It’s a story of adventure and pirates as Lady Dona St. Columb leaves London for Cornwall and swaps gowns for trousers as she begins her new life. Adventure, new beginnings, and trouser wearing provides my first link to Orlando, Virginia Woolf’s brilliantly funny gender bending time warp, that follows Orlando across the centuries, the globe, and from male to female. My favourite part is when she arrives in London after years abroad and spies poets sitting along the Thames.

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A Candle For Christmas

~ Jane ~ 14 Comments

I haven’t finished this collection yet, but it’s Fiction Fan’s winner for best Anthologies and Collections 2025 and I have to say a worthy one!

A couple of the stories are with regular Detectives, Superintendent Dalziel and Chief Inspector Peter Pascoe and they’re a very likeable pair combining Dalziel’s experienced, straightforward Yorkshire cop with Pascoe’s psychology degree caring. And it was great seeing them behind the scenes, especially ‘Uncle Andy’s’ avuncular relationship with young Rosie Pascoe.

But the collection includes some stories that have the best twists I’ve ever read while dealing with some pretty dark subjects. It’s not that the stories are ‘light’, but I could be engrossed in a story about a serial killer or revelling in a jumped up twerp who’s just won the Man Booker see his life spiralling before him, while thoroughly enjoying the humour, sometimes macabre, sometimes silly.

There’s more than humour though, Hill manages in so few pages to show us the loneliness that can be caused by childhood trauma or even make us feel empathy for a killer. And then some of the stories are just plain clever.

Of the couple I still have to read, one is a Conan Doyle pastiche ‘The Italian Sherlock Holmes’ and then ‘A Shameful Eating’, an historical seafaring tale, which is a completely different world to the one of contemporary publishing, or Dalziel and Pascoe, but isn’t the only look back to a ghostly Christmas past. But even though I haven’t finished I wanted to get this tiny notice out to sign off for the year and wish everyone a very

Happy Christmas

“Arrest The Bishop?”

~ Jane ~ 18 Comments

I wanted to read a Dean Street Press title to join in with Liz’s Dean Street December and when I saw this title and book jacket I knew it was the one!

It all takes place in the Bishop of Evelake’s Palace over a couple of days when the palace is full of young men preparing for Ordination. Mrs Broome, the Bishop’s wife is there of course, and their two daughters, Sue and Judith (more of Judith later), But into this reverential setting crashes The Reverend Ulder, a man who carries with him scandal and has managed to blackmail quite a few of those present.

‘He caught the back of a chair, staggered and groaned. There was a heavy crash and fall, and the parson lay motionless and livid, while lilies from a vase fell, like a wreath, across his chest.’

Unfortunately for many of those enjoying their sherry he isn’t dead and is carried upstairs and put to bed. The doctor is called and they’re all told that under no circumstances must he be given anything to drink. But footsteps are heard through the night passing his door along with the rustling of a dress, and in the morning Ulder is dead and his case of papers missing. Next to his bed is an empty glass, who could have given him a drink? A rustling of a skirt could mean anyone, how do they know it wasn’t a cassock? Major Mack of the local constabulary arrives, a man with no respect for the clergy and is determined to find one of them guilty; but the case is practically taken out of his hands by a young parson appropriately named Dick, who has no respect for anyone outside of his social circle.

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The Sittaford Mystery

~ Jane ~ 14 Comments

Winter 1931 in the weeks leading up to Christmas and the tiny village of Sittaford on the fringe of Dartmoor has been completely cut off beneath deep drifts of snow.

Mrs Willet and her daughter Violet have just arrived from South Africa and have rented Sittaford House from its owner Captain Trevelyan, who has moved to a cottage in the nearby town of Exhampton. The Willett’s love a party and invitations are readily given out to the nearby cottages for tea and drinks, and on this particular night cocktails lead to a seance. The lights are dimmed, the group assemble and the board begins to spell out a name – Captain Trevelyan, and D-E-A-D.

There’s a pause, someone gasps, they all shudder and in the confusion Major Burnaby sets out with a hurricane lamp to walk the six miles to Exhampton, and just check on old Trevelyan. Mrs Willett thinks everyone needs a cocktail and rings her bell.

And that’s how Major Burnaby discovers the body of his best friend Captain Trevelyan, ‘on the floor, face downwards. His arms sprawled widely.’ and how we meet Inspector Narracott, with the far away eyes and soft Devonshire accent.

He’s an efficient officer, persistent, with a keen eye for detail and a logical mind, but he doesn’t get it all his own way. James Pearson, a young man down from London is quickly arrested for the murder and it’s his fiancee Emily Trefusis that gives Narracott a run for his money, determined to prove her true love innocent. But she teams up with Clive Enderby, a young reporter from The Daily Wire to try and solve the mystery and in doing so provides a love triangle – will James be her true love at the end?

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A Film For December: Fanny and Alexander

~ Jane ~ 15 Comments

What makes a good Christmas film? sleigh bells ringing and drifts of snow? presents around a tree? a family full of noise, the adults sitting around a table groaning with food and wine while the children play happily under it? plush velvet gowns in deepest red sweeping across the polished floor? or something more gothic, more horror? a monotone world where the children have nothing, the windows have bars, and the only choice is which punishment?

At just over 3 hours this classic from Ingmar Bergman gives us both films. It opens with the theatrical Ekdahl family preparing for Christmas. Laughing maids bring baskets of gift wrapped boxes to go under the tree, children run through the rooms, the adults drink and chat and laugh and drink and chat; it’s 1907 and the rooms are richly decorated, vibrant with colour and furnishings. Family is central to them, confirmed by the willingness of the widowed mother, Helena, to accept her sons mistress as part of the family, a relationship that’s also accepted by his wife into their obviously happy marriage.

But then another of Helena’s sons, the kindly Oscar dies, leaving his wife Emilie (Ewa Fröling) and their two children Alexander (Bertil Guve) and Fanny (Pernilla Allwin). And everything is thrown off kilter. Emilie turns to religion and the bishop for comfort and becomes his wife. Fanny and Alexander must leave their home and live in the bishops palace, taking nothing with them.

Large swathes of the film are seen from Alexanders’ perspective and it’s one of the films triumphs that he is such a true character. He feels the loss of his father and sees his ghost to talk to, but we also see him swearing, using all the bad words he knows under his breath, unafraid to look adults in the eye, and confront them if he needs too. Fanny, his little sister, stands by him, almost silent, she smiles at his use of language and backs him up all the way.

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Murder in Vienna

~ Jane ~ 16 Comments

I’m sticking with Crime this month, Detectives in December if you will! And my first detective is Lorac’s trusty Superintendent Robert Macdonald, off on holiday to visit an old friend, the psychiatrist Dr. Natzler in Vienna.

First published in 1956, the occupation is over and the Austrian State Treaty has just been signed, so that the 25 people aboard the British European Airways flight to Vienna: twelve British, eight Austrian, two American and three French, are flying into a free, independent country. Which makes for an exciting and quite cutting-edge setting; behind the well to do professionals like the Natzler’s there’s certainly a sense of gossip and espionage in the bars and any one who says they know someone called ‘Auntie’ is obviously not all they say they are.

But as Macdonald flies over England and across France he doesn’t want to think about occupying powers, or the turmoil of East-West powers, or of the many place names he remembers from his time in the 1914-1918 war; he’s on holiday and he’s going to relax. He looks about him and considers his fellow passengers. A self-consciously artistic young man, a young women neat as a daisy, a photographer, a silver haired civil-servant or two. They fly over the Carpathian Mountains and he thinks of the Mongol hordes galloping in; Vienna the gateway to central Europe, from the Romans to the Hapsburgs ‘anyone with a gift for intrigue can make hay in Vienna.’

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Six Degrees of Separation:

~ Jane ~ 17 Comments

I’ve wanted to join in with Six Degrees hosted by Kate at booksaremyfavouriteandbest for ages and ages and when I saw that this month begins with Seascraper, a book I’ve actually read I knew this was the time to start. Kate says, link 6 books to the introductory one and see where you get too.

Funnily enough the very next book I read after Seascraper held a link through the surname Flett. In Seascraper Tomas Flett is the young shanker, scraping the sea for mussels. My link from there is too Clear, which has a schoolmaster living in Orkney called William Flett.

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Brave New World

~ Jane ~ 19 Comments

It’s 2540 a.d, or the seventh century of Our Ford, meaning 632 years after the production of the first Model T car. It’s a shiny new world order that runs itself on consumerism and prizes itself on absolute social stability.

Not achieved through a political or economic revolution, this new quality of life could only be found through a personal revolution of the souls and flesh of human beings, a revolution that purged the minds of the laboriously acquired inhibitions of traditional civilisation, and the messiness of choice. But how did they achieve such a revolution?

The Bokanovsky Process provides a foolproof system designed to standardise human products into a scientific caste system. If you’re Alpha or Beta then you’re ‘normal’ – one egg, one embryo, one adult; but the Gamma, Delta and Epsilon castes are derived from eggs that have been bokanovskified; the egg will proliferate and divide – the most humans from one egg has been over 16,000 in London alone; providing the government with a docile workforce they can control.

For the Alpha and Beta castes it’s almost a fertility cult, everyone belongs to everyone else; the government expects promiscuity and encourages it with rewards, while reproductive rights are controlled through an authoritarian system that sterilises two-thirds of women, issues contraceptives and surgically removes ovaries when it needs to produce new humans.

At the heart of the World State’s control of its population is a rigid control and psychological conditioning that maintains obedience; as well as proscribing Soma, the drug that clouds the realities of the present and replaces them with happy hallucinations; it’s a tool for producing social stability through anonymity, lack of thought, expression and individuality. It’s a utopia that cherishes technology and gives easy access to every desire, there are no signs of ageing, no poverty, disease, unhappiness or war.

But what if there’s a backlash? What happens when Bernard Marx, who’s 8cm too short for an Alpha and feels like an outsider, wonders what it would be like to experience the full range of human emotion; or when Lenina, who on the whole is very happy, thinks she actually enjoys seeing the same man for four months? They get together and take a holiday to the ‘reservation’.

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