mystery

Wakenhyrst, by Michelle Paver

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For the winter solstice I wanted to return to East Anglia and the fens, a time and a place when the veil between our world and another seems to thin. Paver’s novel fit my mood perfectly with its luminous and sometimes eerie descriptions of life in fen country.

Many Gothic novels use a frame story, usually told by an ordinary person, someone the reader can identify with. Then the inner story plunges into the darker twists and turns of human nature before ending with a return to the realistic world, reassuring perhaps, yet still haunted by a suspicion of unease.

Here the frame story takes place in 1966, starting with a magazine article. The first paragraph lands us right in the story.

Like a witch’s lair in a fairytale the ancient manor house crouches in its tangled garden. I can’t take my eyes off the ivy-choked window above the front door. It was from that window in 1913 that 16-year old Maud Sterne watched her father set off down the steps with an ice-pick, a geological hammer—and murder in his heart.

The article’s author describes a visit to the now elderly Maud, alone in her crumbling manor, Wake’s End, in Suffolk. He suggests that Edmund Sterne might have been innocent, adding, “We only have Maud’s word that he did it.” Then comes an exchange of letters between Maud and an academic culminating in her inviting him to Wake’s End.

From there we go into the larger story, beginning in 1906 with young Maud as our guide. The house is situated by Guthlaf’s Fen, one of the few fens that hasn’t been drained to create more farmland. Her father Edmund hates it and won’t allow any of the windows on that side of the house to be opened, but Maud loves it.

To her the fen was a forbidden realm of magical creatures and she longed for it with a hopeless passion. In summer the scent of meadowsweet drifted across the Lode and the reeds rang with the eep-eep of frogs. In winter Maud could hear the ice cracking on the Mere and the skies were alive with vast skeins of geese. One afternoon they’d flown right over the garden, and the beat of their winds had lifted Maud as if she were flying.

The sense of dread grows as Maud’s mother suffers multiple unsuccessful pregnancies. “ ‘Perhaps not every night,’ ” the doctor advises, but Edmund brushes him aside. Maud finds her father’s private journal where she learns of the foggy afternoon when Edmund walked by the church in the nearby hamlet of Wakenhyrst. “The church loomed, deep black against the charcoal sky. It seemed not a place of sanctuary, but the menacing relic  of a savage and haunted past.”

Then he tripped over the planks he’d ordered stripped from the chancel arch as part of the renovations. Seeing an eye peering up at him from the grass, he felt a strange sense of guilt and caught “a strong marshy whiff from the fen.”

It turns out that the planks hold a medieval painting that had been whitewashed by the Puritans, a Doom that depicts the Last Judgment, dominated by the gleeful devils torturing the damned. It is restored and mounted in a separate room in the church, yet the painting clings to his imagination until he begins to see devils everywhere.

With the unearthing of the Doom, he comes to believe that “Something has been let loose…” The old superstitions still have a hold, not only on the church-going residents of Wakenhyrst, but also on the manor house where servants tell Maud stories of the fens, and now they gradually take hold of Edmund himself.

Maud finds, though, that her father won’t give up his autocratic grip on the household and is frustrated in her attempts to educate herself. The sense of intrigue grows as she begins to unearth other secrets even as the claustrophobic atmosphere tightens around her.

What I liked about this story was its slow burn. It moves within that liminal space between the ancient mysteries and the modern world without completely spilling over into either horror or rational explanation. I found plenty of tension and suspense, but they are curiously muted by the proximity of reality; somehow that intensifies them.

Framed narratives like this one, with their multiple narrative voices, do increase suspense and also create a sense of unease through the blurring of reality and fiction. There are some daring moves on the author’s part, such as revealing so much in the first paragraph and then staying within that liminal space between the natural and supernatural worlds. I thought she succeeded and look forward to reading more of her work.

Can you recommend a good Gothic novel or perhaps a literary novel with some Gothic attributes?

Before the Ruins, by Victoria Gosling

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“The year Peter went missing was the year of the floods.” Thus begins this tale from Andrea (Andy) set in the present-day but reaching back twenty years to the summer of 1996 when she and her friends have finished their final exams. A bored teenager with few prospects, Andy enriches her life by coming up with games to play with her three best friends: Peter, Marcus and Em. The guardrails come off when Andy’s alcoholic mother predicts the apocalypse is about to occur—if the world is ending, their actions have no consequences—and the four friends take over an empty manor house near Marlborough in Wiltshire.

 

Learning that a valuable diamond necklace had been stolen at the manor fifty years earlier and never recovered, they embark on a new game of playing detective. Em acquires a cheap copy of the necklace—a tourist item in town—and they take turns hiding it, a game that has the added relish of perhaps actually finding the real necklace and changing their lives. Another teen, the suspiciously charismatic David, turns up one day, claiming to be a friend of the absent owners and quickly becomes a part of the group.  

 

Yet there’s an ominous push-pull within the group as they practice deceiving one another. Relationships fray; secrets and lies erode trust; betrayals lurk in the shadows. The story builds gradually, moving between the search for Peter in the present and unpacking the events of the past, turning them this way and that, looking at them anew.

Memory is a house, a castle with many rooms. Some of the rooms are deeper inside, honeycombed away. Each has a thousand keys – an image, a smell, a sound. Behind each door are a thousand other doors.

I was drawn to this novel because I like the narrator of the audiobook, Kristin Atherton, and because a reviewer compared it to Tana French’s work. My favorite is The Likeness of which I said, “French captures so well the fun of being part of a tight group of friends, when you’re young, and it’s all happening for the first time, and everything seems unbearably sweet.” Gosling’s story comes at youthful friendship from another angle, capturing its mystery and beauty, but also its fragility and fear.

 

To sleep on? Or to wake? This was the question facing me. To sleep, or to wake and face the reckoning, to find out what had been lost.

I thought Before the Ruins would be another in a long line of gothic mysteries about a narrator revisiting formative events in the past, secrets that come to light, etc. However, I underestimated the book. It rewards deeper investigation, from the pun in the title (before) to the use of diamonds as a MacGuffin to the sly use of imagery (floods, treasure, playing games, losing your nerve at the prospect of a leap).

 

Caught up in the story I noticed little else, but on reflection I wish we could have gotten to know the characters other than Andy a bit better. The way they are presented makes sense since we are getting the story through her point of view which comes with her own blinders; only near the end do their actions indicate more complexity. I would also have welcomed more description of the manor itself.

 

As a writer, several things in this book impressed me: the complexity of the narrative with multiple storylines and reveal after reveal; Gosling’s willingness to let the slow burn unfold in sentence after delicious sentence; and the way she hits the reader flat out near the end, signaling that whatever you thought the theme was, it’s so much more. No spoilers here, but be prepared to discover layers upon unexpected layers of this story.

 

Have you read a novel that turned out to be much more than you expected?

 

 

A Piece of Justice, by Jill Paton Walsh

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Imogen Quy is a nurse at St. Agatha’s College in Cambridge University. Working part-time gives her the freedom to enjoy other activities like quilting, which is where the story begins. She and two friends must choose a pattern and fabric for a quilt that will eventually be raffled off for the Red Cross funds. This seemingly unimportant activity foreshadows what’s coming in this smart mystery.

The three have different ideas for a quilt pattern: one wants something simple and basic while another wants an elaborate pattern with lots of curves. Imogen likes patterns that are more complex: “one block merged with the next, so that the pattern shifted as you looked, part of one block completing squares or diamonds in the next.” So right in the first paragraph we know what sort of story we’ve landed in.

This sense of unease and shifting ground is reinforced on the next page: Imogen always starts out with fabric with  a “tasteful” pattern and “soft harmonising colors,” yet once she puts them together, she finds them boring. When her friend Patsy combines the most unlikely colors and patterns—orange fabric “printed in scarlet blotches” next to a bright turquoise—Imogen finds it unexpected and perfect.

As an independent woman, Imogen supplements her income by renting out her two spare bedrooms—currently to two undergraduate men—and her upstairs flat—now to Fran, a postgraduate student at St. Agatha’s. Fran has a problem: she needs to earn money for her living expenses, so she’s thrilled when the new chair of her department, Professor Maverack, offers her a job.

It’s a new department: Biography. In what seems an aside but is more foreshadowing, a brief conversation among dons gives us a history of biography going back to Plutarch. Their back-and-forth is enlivened by the theories of what is important in a life and how these theories have changed over time.

When Fran meets with Maverack, he tells her he’s been hired to write the biography of a recently deceased Cambridge don, Gideon Summerfield. Maverack doesn’t have time—he’s too busy with his own research–so he proposes that he pay Fran to be his ghost writer. Since the relationship between biography and autobiography is the subject of her dissertation, the job will also give her some good experience.

And the job should be easy because the person previously hired to write the book has already completed the research. When Imogen asks why Mark Zephyr didn’t finish the job, Fran breezily replies, “ ‘He died.’ ”  

When that research is delivered, the giant carton disintegrates “String snapped, corrugated cardboard tore open, and bundles and sheets of paper thumped and fluttered everywhere.” What a description! In it I can feel Agatha’s horror and dismay, knowing how hard it will be to restore any kind of order to the precious papers. As she and Fran find after much sorting, the disorder was there even before the box fell apart: different kinds of handwriting, seeming cross-references that don’t make sense, postcards with mysterious numbers on them.

When she finally creates a timeline, Fran finds that there is one summer that is not accounted for. Then Summerfield’s wife, the person who commissioned the biography, comes banging on Imogen’s door demanding that the papers be returned to her.

Such dramatic scenes punctuate this quiet mystery which also abounds in what Donald Maass calls microtension, described as “the line-by-line effect of creating uneasiness in the reader, which can only be relieved by reading the next thing on the page.” For example, Imogen pauses under a cherry tree on “a fine, crisp autumn day” when it is “just warm enough to sit for a few moments on a damp bench and relish the day.” All lovely, but there’s that damp bench.

Large and small moments like these create suspense that keeps the pages flying by. The shifting patterns of the plot also had my mind ticking over even when I tried to set the book aside for a while. I’m not into quilting these days, but Imogen is someone I’d love to sit down and work a cryptic crossword with. I like the way her mind works, sort of a modern Miss Marple. I’ll be looking for more books in this series.

What do you look for in a mystery—or in a quilt?

The Incredible Crime, by Lois Austen-Leigh

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This has been my month for virtual travel: from a remote Finnish island to southern Virginia to Tuscany and London. Now this recently republished novel from 1931 takes me to East Anglia, a part of England I love, where we move between Cambridge and a manor in Suffolk.

Prudence Pinsent, a thoroughly modern woman in her thirties, lives with her father, the Master of (fictional) Prince’s College and a retired bishop. In her role as his hostess she’s perfectly proper but “she reserved to herself the right to swear like a trooper when she chose.” She attributes her independent spirit and unconventional behavior to “a far-back buccaneering ancestor.”

We meet her at a bridge party throwing a crime novel across the room in disgust. The conversation with her three friends, Cambridge wives, quickly turns from a discussion of novels and Cambridge gossip to a new and untraceable poison acquired by one of the odder professors. Then the professor husband of one of the wives enters: “About  the last thing in the world that Skipwith looked like was what he was, an eminent scientific professor. He was not only washed, he was even shaved.”

 A few days later she heads out to visit her beloved cousin at his home Wellende Old Hall, a (fictional) isolated manor among the marshes and canals of Suffolk, that has its own ghost. The description of the autumn drive, passing Ely Cathedral, the Devil’s Dyke, and Bury St. Edmunds, invites the reader in.

Already the academic feeling of the University was beginning to fade, and the feeling of the country-side, of long furrows made by the plough, of thickets scratching in a stubble field, of tired cart-horses going home o’ nights, was beginning to supersede it—the beech woods were all turned to a russet brown, mingling with the soft tints of the ploughed fields and the hedgerows.

As she approaches Wellende, the startling white of gulls against the soft brown fields and then the cold, grey North Sea call up the atmosphere of the fens with their secret streams and ghosts and history of smuggling.

The plot spins out around smuggling, spies, and drugs seasoned with academic satire, country house mayhem, and modern romance. Also, hunting, so be warned.

In Kristen R. Saxton’s introduction, she points out that, “Just as The Incredible Crime combines conventions from the traditions of village and college mysteries, it also offers a sparkly union of the Jane Austen novel of manners with the mystery genre.”

Lois Austen-Leigh is said to have written her novels at the very desk used by her great-great aunt, Jane Austen, later donated to the British Library by Lois’s niece. Lois wrote four crime novels during the Golden Age of British mystery, the period between WW1 and WW11. Her uncle, Augustus Austen-Leigh, was Provost of King’s College, Cambridge, hence her understanding of University doings. She did war-work in both wars and was friends with people like Benjamin Britten and M.R. James. All this makes me curious about her life, and I’m looking now for a biography of her.

The intriguing cover design is based on a British Rail poster from the 1920s, reproduced on the back cover. I learned about this novel and many more set in Cambridge from a post by Anne Kennedy Smith on Substack.

Although the plot is a bit thin in this period piece, the atmosphere and setting are delightful. I found the story great fun and a welcome step back into a different time and place.

What is your favorite Golden Age mystery?

The Strand Magazine, Issue LXXV 2025

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A new story by Graham Greene? And a new one from Ian Fleming, too? Wow! I had to send for this issue.

Greene’s story is a departure from his usual explorations of moral ambiguity in the worlds of diplomats and spies, which he knew from having been recruited by MI6, as well as the Catholic faith and imperialism. “Reading at Night” is an entertainment indeed: a ghost” story, reminiscent of classic British ghost stories such as those described in Ghostland, by Edward Parnell.

A man who is traveling on the Côte d’Azur stays in a borrowed house has a nervous disposition, traumatised by a boyhood reading of Dracula. He picks up an anthology of stories to read himself to sleep, but unfortunately the one he lights on . . . Well, Greene shares the story with us and it’s disturbing and mysterious. When our man becomes too terrified to read any more, he puts the book aside and turns out the light. Then . . .

I found myself going back to look for what Donald Maass calls promise words: words that tell you what to expect in the story. I found plenty that helped create the ominous atmosphere, the sense of being outside of the natural world, and the suspense.

Ian Fleming’s “The Shameful Dream” is not about James Bond, but rather a story of psychological suspense as a successful literary editor, Caffrey Bone, drives toward the home of the Chief. Lord Ower has invited Bone for the evening at The Towers and to spend the night. Gradually, though, we learn the reasons why he wishes the invitation had been sent to someone—anyone—other than himself. Plenty of promise words in this sentence alone:

Bone stared moodily ahead at the rain and the dripping hedgerows and at the shaft of the headlights probing the wet tarmac of the secondary road which would bring him in due course to The Towers.

I had heard of The Strand Magazine in its British incarnation. From 1891-1950 it published short fiction and general interest articles and was perhaps best known for being the first in the U.K. to publish Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories and some of Agatha Christie’s. I somehow missed that it was revived in 1998 in the U.S. The magazine features stories from emerging crime and mystery writers in addition to stories by established writers. These are genres that I often turn to, and I thoroughly enjoyed this entire issue.

Aside from the stories by Greene and Fleming, there are two by writers I’m familiar with—Denise Mina and C.J. Box—and two by authors new to me—Mike Adamson and John M. Floyd. All are excellent. What a box of wonders! To top it off there’s a fascinating talk with Amor Towles, author of A Gentleman in Moscow and The Lincoln Highway, and pages of reviews of additional mysteries and thrillers.

Sometimes it seems as though there are too many magazines and too little time, but The Strand is one I now intend to make time for.

Have you read a magazine full of short stories lately? Tell me about it.

The Sunset Years of Agnes Sharp, by Leonie Swann

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There’s a body in the woodshed at Sunset Hall, Agnes’s home that she’s turned into co-housing for other elderly folks. They include Bernadette who’s blind, wheelchair-bound Winston, flighty Edwina who practices yoga and bakes impossible biscuits, and Marshall who sometimes goes off into la-la land. And of course Hettie the tortoise.

Agnes already has a lot on her plate: finding her false teeth, the occasional ringing in her ears that renders her temporarily deaf, and having to take the stairs when the doorbell rings because the stairlift is broken. The door turns out to be the police to tell them about the fatal shooting of a neighbor, Mildred Puck. The murder may be a solution to one of Agnes’s problems.  To add to the confusion, a new resident arrives: Charlie who has a fabulous wardrobe, a mind as yet untinged with dementia, and a dog named Brexit. Then Marshall brings in his grandson Nathan without prior authorization. The television gets moved to the basement, but not because of the grandson.

A lot of quirky characters, but it’s easy to keep them straight in this fun mystery. The way they have to navigate their disabilities adds a bit of shading to the story, along with a lot of unexpected suspense. I quickly became attached to these pensioners, and their surprisingly shadowy pasts.

I’ve been thinking about a post I read recently by Leigh Stein. She discusses John Truby’s idea that a story should have a designing principle, some way of organising the story as a whole. It can be the way it uses time—such as the film Titanic which unfolds in real time—or the perspective from which it’s told—such as Darling Girl, by Liz Michalski a story of Peter Pan from the point of view of Wendy’s granddaughter.

The designing principle is like a plot twist but in the story as a whole, in the story’s premise. In this cosy mystery, the first twist is that the amateur detectives are elderly. We’ve seen that before, from Miss Marple to the Thursday Club mysteries. So the second twist is that almost all of them are disabled in some way that affects the plot. And then the third twist is that they all have unexpected pasts.

I enjoyed this mystery a lot, though it took me a while to work out what rules had been established by the residents for their co-housing situation at Sunset Hall. This is what Ray Rhamey calls an information question rather than a story question. Withholding information about the world of the story creates irritation rather than the suspense we get from true story questions (what’s going to happen next?). Aren’t you wondering why the corpse is in the woodshed? That’s a story question all right. This is a small quibble, and not something that I have to worry about as I chase down the rest of the series.  

Have you read a story where a tortoise plays an important role?

Hush Hush, by Laura Lippman

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I was thrilled when this twelfth book in Lippman’s Tess Monaghan series came out in 2015. I decided to save it for a moment when I really needed it, a moment that came this week. Hush Hush is everything I hoped it would be and more. Lippman is in top form, digging into the darkness of family life—and its joys too.

After the death of her baby, Melisandre Harris Dawes was found not guilty of murder by reason of insanity (postpartum psychosis). She spent some time in rehab and then moved to South Africa and then England. Her husband Stephen had full custody of the two older girls, Alanna and Ruby. Now, twelve years later, Melisandre has returned to Baltimore to reclaim her daughters—now teenagers—and her reputation.

A stunning woman, imbued with the glamour and confidence of old-style Baltimore wealth, Melisandre expects to impose her will on everyone around her. She has hired a filmmaker to create a documentary about her trial, supposedly to expand public understanding of the verdict. Interviews for this documentary crop up between chapters, adding new insights for the reader. Mindful of her notoriety, she has contacted her old flame, lawyer Tyner Gray, for help.

Through Tyner—Tess’s friend, mentor and husband of her beloved aunt—Tess has been hired by Melisandre to look into her security. It’s not work Tess and her new partner, ex-policeman Sandy Sanchez usually do, but Tess is feeling the financial pinch of being a parent. The interweaving of the investigation with Tess’s home life—deepening relationship with Crow, adoration of their three-year-old daughter Carla Scout, and the inevitable complicated scheduling of their work and day care—furnish an extra level of depth to the story.

The theme of mothers and daughters is one of those universal themes that always draws my attention. The subtheme of questioning what constitutes good parenting adds complexity and further deepens my interest. Both Tess and Melisandre receive anonymous notes criticising their parenting, though most parents (me included) don’t need outside critics in order to question themselves. I’ve been faced with more than one toddler meltdown in a busy grocery store and could thoroughly identify with Tess’s reaction. Carla Scout is not the first three-year-old with Big Feelings whom I’ve encountered.

The mystery itself is satisfyingly twisty. Alanna’s rebellion against, well, everything and Ruby’s tendency to search out secrets and hold them close complicate the story, as does their young stepmother’s struggle to care for her own new baby. Sandy Sanchez adds a gravitas to the story and another point of view. Lippman does a good job of showing how his strengths align with Tess’s. As events escalate, each character adds to the richness of the story.

The story felt especially poignant for me because I left Baltimore a few years ago after a lifetime there. On the trail with Tess, crisscrossing the city, even visiting some of my formerly regular spots left me a little homesick.

I’ve read and enjoyed Lippman’s standalone novels since Hush Hush came out. If you search my blog you’ll find seven other Lippman novels I’ve reviewed. I am still hoping for another Tess story.

What’s your favorite Laura Lippman book? Do you have a favorite spot in Baltimore?

The Face on the Wall, by Jane Langton

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Professor Homer Kelly already has plenty on his plate, when his wife Mary presents the part-time sleuth with an important task: find out why her former student Pearl Small has disappeared. Worryingly, Pearl’s husband Fred is negotiating a deal to turn the land, a former pig farm which is in Pearl’s name, into a development of McMansions.

Meanwhile, the Kellys are helping Mary’s niece Annie as she uses the windfall from her suddenly success as a children’s book illustrator to build her dream home, constructing it as an extension to her current house and renting that out. Annie goes all out to make it everything she’s ever wanted, including a 35-foot blank wall where she begins to paint a mural of famous stories for children.

Enter the Gast family. Social climbers Roberta and Bob who rent Annie’s house have two children: ten-year-old Charlene, a self-centered swimming champion, and eight-year-old Eddy, who has Down’s syndrome. Eddy loves to visit Annie and watch her paint. When she gives him some materials to work with, she finds that he is a remarkably gifted artist.

All is not well, though. The Gast parents are embarrassed by Annnie’s artistic eccentricity, and covet her part of the house. Accidents plague the property. Worst of all, a face keeps appearing on Annie’s wall, no matter how many times she and Flimnap O’Dougherty, a strange handyman who showed up one day, paint over it.

And where is Pearl? We learn that she loves her inherited acres and has been turning them into a nature sanctuary, planting trees and flowers.

This thirteenth Homer Kelly mystery is a light-hearted story about art, hubris, and community action. What do we value? What do we owe each other?

There are a few incidents that strain the reader’s credulity, but they fit with the fairy-tale atmosphere of the story. I especially enjoyed mentions of various beloved children’s books, such as Wind in the Willows, and other favorites, such as Three Men in a Boat, and the pen-and-ink illustrations of Annie’s wall. There is also plenty of suspense that builds throughout the story, so that the pages fly by.

Jane Langton, who died in 2018, remains one of my favorite authors. Her children’s book Diamond in the Window has to have been the most influential book I read as a child. I still often think of the adventures in it. What I love about her adult books is the way she weaves a tale that whose charm and humor hold serious questions for those who care to look for them.

Have you read any of Jane Langton’s books?

The Blue Hour, by Paula Hawkins

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“How very odd it must be, living at the mercy of the tide.”

Eris is a tidal island off the coast of Scotland, meaning that it can only be accessed at low tide. It is a place of crashing seas, wild storms, and dark woods where mainlanders once buried their dead to keep wolves from disturbing them.

Once the home of the reclusive artist Vanessa Chapman, now—five years after her death—the island’s only inhabitant is Grace, her friend and companion. However, Vanessa’s art and papers were left, not to Grace, but to the Fairburn Foundation run by Vanessa’s lover-turned-enemy Douglas Lennox, who feuded with Grace for years, certain that she was holding back art and papers. He is now dead, shot in a hunting accident, and his son Sebastian in charge.

When one of Vanessa’s pieces, on loan to Tate Modern, is discovered to contain a human bone, Sebastian sends James Becker, curator of the Chapman collection to Eris to gather any papers that may shed light on the origin of the piece. Becker intends—unlike Sebastian’s family—to be conciliatory toward Grace, while she initially defends her isolation but gradually finds Becker eases her loneliness.

The shifting ground between the two of them captured and kept my attention.I found myself eager to get back to the book every time I set it down, wanting to explore the twists in the plot, rummage through the complicated relationships between the characters, and measure the reliability of each person. In a time when we are told so many lies, looking for the truth becomes a skill to be honed.

While two of the story’s voices are those of Grace, who loved her, and Becker who wrote his thesis on her work and is still obsessed with her, it is Vanessa—the third voice—who is at the heart of this story. A creative woman who fled domesticity and came to this wild island, her journal entries throughout the book bring out her voice and her rage to be free.

Through Vanessa’s own words, as well as those of Becker and others, her paintings became so vivid in my mind that I could almost swear I’ve seen them. I enjoyed imagining them and can easily say that it would have been worth reading the book solely for them.

The title also drew my attention, as I have always loved that mysterious hour before sunrise and after sunset. The image signaled to me that this would not be a breakneck thriller like Hawkins’s The Girl on the Train. Instead, it’s a slow burn of buried secrets, sinister suspicions, and mysterious deaths. It reminded me of Daphne du Maurier’s novels.

A glimpse at some of the reviews on Goodreads reveals a widespread dissatisfaction with the ending. I won’t give it away, but my interpretation of it is quite different from most people’s. I like ambiguity in fiction. I like being asked to invest some of my attention into working out the subtext of a story. Here, I felt quite certain of what was being said between the lines, and am surprised to find myself at odds with so many others. I’ll say no more, but once you’ve read the book, I’d be happy to share views on the ending.

 Can you recommend a mystery about a woman artist?

Best Books I Read in 2024

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As a writer, I learn something from every book I read. In no particular order, these are ten of the best books I read in 2024. Please check the links to the blog archive for a fuller discussion of those I’ve reviewed.

Note: I did not include poetry here, though I read the work of some amazing poets, such as Richard Wilbur, Sam Schmidt, Linda Pastan, Ellen Bryant Voight, and Mahmoud Darwish. If you’re interested in reading a wider range of poets, consider joining in on the monthly Poetry Discussion Group I host. Free, no experience necessary, and copies of the poems are provided. Details on my website.

Fiction

  1. Our Missing Hearts, by Celeste Ng

Twelve-year-old Noah Gardner receives a letter from his mother, who disappeared several years earlier. It has been opened by the authorities of course, and is covered with drawings of cats. Noah and his father, formerly a linguistics professor but now demoted to a janitor, live in a U.S. that shows what our current country could easily become. Noah decides to find out once and for all what happened to his mother, a famous Chinese-American artist. A powerful story that puts our current social and political tensions into a (so far) fictional authoritarian world.

  1. The Cartographers, by Peng Shepherd

Nell Young loves maps and once dreamed of working with her brilliant father in the Map Room of the New York Public Library. Her even more brilliant cartographer mother died when Nell was a toddler. When Nell gets an emergency call from the New York Public Library, she embarks on a quest to identify the monster behind a string of thefts and murder. The delightfully complicated plot uses maps in surprising and satisfying ways.

  1. The American Queen, by Vanessa Miller

This fascinating novel is based on the true story of twenty-four-year-old Louella Bobo who in 1865 leads a group of her fellow former slaves to build a community in the Carolinas. The part I enjoyed most was the building of the Happy Land: how Louella managed to negotiate what they needed, the ways they found to make the money they needed, and the success of their communal sharing of all resources.

  1. Small Mercies, by Dennis Lehane

Mary Pat Fennessy just wants to find her daughter. It’s 1974, and life is hard in the grinding poverty of South Boston’s housing projects. She’s buried both her first husband and her son, who fought in Vietnam but came home to Southie to overdose on heroin. Her beloved second husband left her, and now her remaining child, Jules, has not come home from a night out with friends. In this complex story, Lehane shows how difficult it is to go against your tribe. It is a cracking good read, and accurate in its depiction of the time and place, at least according to my memories.

  1. The Old Capital, by Yasunari Kawabata

Chieko lives with her parents in the same building that houses their shop in Kyoto. This gentle story of a few months in her life begins with three images that embody themes central to Japanese literary tradition while later, more modern themes emerge. The microcosm of Chieko and her family holds a much larger story about how we handle the past—what we keep and what we discard—not only traditions but also our memories and our own identities.  This beautifully written story is one that will haunt me.

Nonfiction

  1. Vesper Flights, by Helen MacDonald

The author of the exquisite and deeply moving memoir H Is for Hawk returns with this collection of essays. She compares them to the objects you might find in an 18th-century cabinet of curiosities. As MacDonald opens the doors on these wonders of the natural world, she encourages us to see nature as something other than a reflection of ourselves. I read and reread these essays, loving the way she communicates the “qualitative texture of the world.”

  1. Burning Questions, by Margaret Atwood

Subtitled Essays and Occasional Pieces, 2004 to 2021, this is Atwood’s third collection of essays, speeches, book introductions, and reviews. What astonished me was how readable this heterogeneous collection is. Of course, we have Atwood’s voice throughout: intelligent, calm, learned, self-deprecating, and witty. For a more global understanding of the issues facing us, their interconnectedness, and how we can move forward, this book cannot be beat.

  1. Normal Women, by Phillipa Gregory

This astonishing book should be required reading everywhere in the Western world. This history of women in England for the last 900 years is fascinating and infuriating. Women have suffered ever since William the Conqueror brought his patriarchal ideas about the superiority of men over women to England in 1066, obliterating the more equitable society he found there. In this book, every assertion is backed up by example after example drawn from primary sources, starting with the Norman laws that dictated the so-called natural inferiority of women, morally, mentally, and physically. As the book progresses through the centuries, we get stories of many extraordinary women and their struggles.

  1. The Equivalents, by Maggie Doherty

Subtitled A Story of Art, Female Friendship, and Liberation in the 1960s, Doherty’s fascinating new book tells of the Radcliffe Institute for Independent Study, created in 1960 to provide a stipend, office space, and a like-minded community to help women advance their careers as scholars and artists while also caring for a family. Doherty concentrates on a few of the first fellows: poets Anne Sexton and Maxine Kumin, writer Tillie Olsen, sculptor Marianna Pineda and painter Barbara Swan. The book provides fascinating insight into the creative life and what can inspire or hinder it. It’s also a wonderful portrait of that era and of these remarkable women.

  1. Proust’s Duchess, by Caroline Weber

Even those who don’t care who inspired Proust’s Duchess of Guermantes may enjoy this biography of three fascinating women in fin-de-siécle Paris. At a time and in a society where women had no power, these three embarked upon “a conscious strategy of self-promotion.” Like so many today, they became famous for being famous. However, Weber goes beyond that easy judgment and delves into their lives, showing us that in striving to be celebrities, they wanted to be noticed. They wanted to assert some agency over their lives.

 

What are the best books you read in 2024?