Getting Away - Kate Sawyer

New summer read by Kate Sawyer

This was a very pleasing read. A word of caution though, you will require a family tree/understanding of genealogy to remember the names and relations of all the people. However, once you get your head around that - this book was entertaining and enlightening. 

Using family holidays as the means to show familial relationships and how they alter over the years, decades and generations coupled with the ever-changing types of family holidays - from day outs to the beach by train, to the growing market of package holidays booked on Ceefax, to the globe-trotting gap years of the grandchildren.

Indebted to the work of David Nicholls, nevertheless Sawyer has crafted a work that is original yet familiar, comforting but challenging and by the end the reader would have developed a lump in their throat. Delicately handled with poise and guile by a writer with nuance. As you get nearer to the present day, the writer is able to incorporate the ever changing landscape of communication - using tweets, emails and magazine articles as a changing style of writing from by-gone eras of postcards and diary entries.

Sawyer writes with assuredness having an ear for how characters talk to each other, and she does this well with her plethora of protagonists ranging from the overweight police officer, to the shy retiring teenager who was born premature and must keep on fighting for his place in society

This is a book that will stay with the reader after completing it, and is a real find and a must for the summer of this year.

My thanks to Compulsive Readers for letting me be part of the blog tour for this title and the preview copy in advance.

Getting Away is published by Zaffre/Bonnier Books, thanks to them 

Needless Alley

 

The debut novel by Birmingham based author, Natalie Marlow, out in January from John Murray Press/Baskerville

Arriving on a wave of fanfare on this side of Christmas 2022, this reader had the pleasure of reading Needless Alley devouring this debut novel by Natalie Marlow. It is the highly promising beginning of a probable long-running series featuring Birmingham gumshoe William Garrett in 1933. 

Garrett we meet as an individual, a private detective, who sets up honey traps by photographing adulterous wives in illicit affairs, therefore forcing divorces from the wealthy male elite of the city who want out of their now loveless marriages.

Garrett, has a good way of life, he gets help from his friend and out-of-work actor Ronnie Edgerton in these traps, his world is turned upside down when he encounters Clara Morton - who upon first meet with her is the next wife a husband wants divorcing from.

Set in that tricky period between world wars when the world was still coming to terms from the heavy scars of the Great War(1914-18), while the pounding foot of impending fascism is heard across continental Europe and shaking itself from the doldrums of a global recession/depression. Marlow has created a world which is ripe for cultivating narrative fodder, Morton's unloving husband is intrinsically tied to Oswald Mosley and his blackshirt brigade, who came so very close to power and popularity in the mid-1930s of Britain.

Now this may strike you as familiar if you had watched the latter series of that other Birmingham cultural touchstone, Peaky Blinders, and Mosley is used creatively in the narrative as a person of great relevance and importance in pre-World War 2 British history, a sobering reminder as to how close our nation was to following in the footsteps of Nazi Germany but for the rationale minds to prevail thankfully.

Marlow writes with a flair and panache that is refreshing and enticing, she has created a character in Garrett she is clearly fond of and like most detectives he has to overcome the odd fistfight and moral dilemma, sometimes in the same instance.

This book features one of the cleverest 'did not see that coming' moments I can remember, and yet rather than stop the narrative in its tracks it does the opposite and prompts the reader to plough on and digest the remainder of the book.

Delicately balancing between homage and originality and definitely leaving the door open for more stories to come from the Brum, Needless Alley is a welcome addition to the British Detective Noir genre and Mrs. Marlow promises to be a voice we will pleasingly hear more of in the coming years.

Needless Alley is out from Baskerville on 19th January.

Night Driver by Marcelle Parks

Out from Urbane Publications on Thursday 2nd August, the debut novel by Marcelle Perks

Frannie is an English woman living in Germany, married to her Deutscher spouse and heavily pregnant expecting the birth of her first child; she feels like a fish out of water both hopeless with her minimum language skills and struggling to pass her driving test in a foreign country.

In an effort to cope when her baby is born, she attempts to instill herself with some independence and after passing she takes to driving at night to gain confidence on less crowded roads.

She enjoys the freedom the night gives her yet an encounter with a Polish motorcyclist looking for his missing sister leads to her being sucked into a world of nightclubs, autobahn prostitutes and organ trafficking.

Perks is a doyen of horror cinema, having written for publications including British Horror Cinema, Fangoria and Kamera.  This in-depth knowledge comes to the fore, with Perks creating a sinister at times horrific world one that is at times frightening and shocking to read; the author does not hold back during the sexual encounters of these villains leaving nothing to the imagination of gruesome gory detail.

The book whips along at a cracking pace and in the protagonist of Frannie, Perks has written a character that is fiercely independent and one that is on an arc of her own from naïve beginnings to strong ending; the influence of Alice Lowe's Prevenge is prevalent in the work as well as the literary work of J. G. Ballard and his famous Crash novel.

While sold as a thriller, the book is very much a horror novel in context and one that will definitely stay with the reader if my reaction to it is anything to go by - and married with a great cover it is a book that is sure to be discussed at length by many a book group and book lovers.

Night Driver is out from Urbane Publications on 2nd August

My thanks to LoveBooksGroupTours for the review opportunity.