Celeste Ng: Little Fires Everywhere

Published By: Little, Brown

Buy It: here

What The Blurb Says:

Everyone in Shaker Heights was talking about it that summer: how Isabelle, the last of the Richardson children, had finally gone around the bend and burned the house down.

In the placid, progressive suburb of Shaker Heights everything is meticulously planned – from the layout of the winding roads, to the colours of the houses, to the successful lives its residents will go on to lead. And no one embodies this spirit more than Elena Richardson, whose guiding principle is playing by the rules.

Mia Warren, an enigmatic artist and single mother, arrives in this idyllic bubble with her teenage daughter Pearl, and rents a house from the Richardsons. Soon Mia and Pearl become more than just tenants: all four Richardson children are drawn to the alluring mother-daughter pair. But Mia carries with her a mysterious past, and a disregard for the rules that threatens to upend this carefully ordered community.

When the Richardsons’ friends attempt to adopt a Chinese-American baby, a custody battle erupts that dramatically divides the town and puts Mia and Mrs. Richardson on opposing sides. Suspicious of Mia and her motives, Mrs. Richardson becomes determined to uncover the secrets in Mia’s past. But her obsession will come at unexpected and devastating costs to her own family – and Mia’s.

What I Say:

” …sometimes you need to scorch everything to the ground and start over.  “

Little Fires Everywhere was never a planned blog post. Quite often, I read a lot of books ‘behind’ my blog. I just want to read books without the pressure of trying to write down pertinent points and punchy quotes to put into a post.

However, sometimes, a novel comes along that knocks you sideways, and the only way you can get over not being able to read it anymore is to tell everyone else how wonderful it is!

From the first chapter, where the family house of the Richardsons is burnt to the ground, seemingly by their youngest daughter, Little Fires Everywhere drew me in and kept me there.

It is at first glance a book about two families – the Richardson and the Warrens.

The Richardsons, who live in the quaintly named Shaker Heights have it all. Two successful parents, a brood of children who are over achieving in every nauseating Round Robin Christmas Newsletter way possible, and an ordered, chocolate box existence that most of us can only dream of.

Mia Warren, a free-spirited, nomadic artist and her daughter Pearl, arrive in Shaker Heights to take up the rental of the Richardsons’ second house.  From that moment on, the two families become intertwined in a way that neither could have foreseen – perhaps the first little fire of the title has been lit.

Elena Richardson is initially welcoming to Mia, seeing her as a charitable cause to take under her wing.  Pearl becomes great friends with the Richardson children and relishes the stability and apparent normality that she longs to have in her own home.  There is no doubt that she loves her mother and has accepted that they move when and where her mother decides, but it is evident that Pearl longs for something more traditional, a secure base for her to develop and mature.

Similarly, Elena’s youngest daughter, Izzy, seems at odds with her family.  Constantly restless, she seems confined by the rigidity and conventionality of Shaker Heights, and her family’s reputation and place in it.  Izzy strikes up a close friendship with Mia, and as Pearl becomes more a part of the Richardsons family, Izzy falls into Pearl’s place with an ease that surprises even herself.

The stifling conformity of Shaker Heights is threatened when Elena’s friends, the McCulloughs have to go to court to keep their baby Mirabelle or May Ling Chow, that they wish to adopt.  Mirabelle was found abandoned outside a fire station, and given to the McCulloughs who were looking to adopt.  Bebe, May Ling’s biological mother and a friend of Mia, wants to take her baby home. This shocking turn of events reveals that Shaker Heights is not used to having to confront something this inflammatory in their perfect world and no one seems quite sure how to handle it.

Should Mirabelle stay with the McCulloughs who can offer her everything she needs in this privileged, monied life, or should she be handed back to her biological mother who can give May Ling the cultural and emotional roots she needs?

We see the emotions, background and daily realities of both the birth and adoptive mothers, and feel enormous empathy for both.  At the heart of it all, Celeste portrays them purely and simply as women fighting for the child they feel is rightly theirs.

“To a parent, your child wasn’t just a person: your child was a place, a kind of Narnia, a vast eternal place where the present you were living and the past you remembered and the future you longed for all existed at once.”

The volatile custody battle is perhaps the next spark of the little fires everywhere –  an incendiary moment that sets Elena against Mia, and Izzy against Elena as they face each other on opposite sides of the custody battle.  Elena feels increasingly frustrated that she cannot ultimately control the outcome of the trial, and sets about trying to find out as much as she can about Mia.  It becomes her mission to ensure that Mia is humiliated and shamed into leaving Shaker Heights. As Elena investigates Mia’s past, revelation after revelation comes tumbling out, which show us why Mia is who she is today, and why she and Pearl live the lifestyle they do.  It also means that Elena has to confront some unpleasant realities about her family and her own behaviour too, which is something she perhaps had never really faced.

Little Fires Everywhere is an epic contemporary novel about so many different things.  It is about family, race, motherhood and the choices we are forced to make in times of crisis.  Every character in the novel has important decisions to make which have far-reaching impact and will change the world they inhabit forever.

Celeste never forces an opinion on us, she presents us with the characters and their dilemmas, and as we live through them with them, we learn more and more about why they do what they do, and we are made to understand that things in life are not always black and white for any of us.

Little Fires Everywhere is a brilliant and thought-provoking novel to be savoured, read slowly and recommended to everyone.

I loved it.

Fiona Mozley: Elmet

Published by: J M Originals

Buy It: Here

 

What The Blurb Says:

Daniel is heading north. He is looking for someone. The simplicity of his early life with Daddy and Cathy has turned menacing and fearful. They lived apart in the house that Daddy built for them in the woods with his bare hands. They foraged and hunted.

Cathy was more like their father: fierce and full of simmering anger. Daniel was more like their mother: gentle and kind. Sometimes, their father disappeared, and would return with a rage in his eyes. But when he was at home, he was at peace. He told them that the little copse in Elmet was theirs alone. But that wasn’t true. Local men, greedy and watchful, began to circle like vultures. All the while, the terrible violence in Daddy grew.

Brutal and beautiful in equal measure, Elmet is a compelling portrayal of a family living on the fringes of contemporary society, as well as a gripping exploration of the disturbing actions people are capable of when pushed to their limits.

What I Say:

“I still smell embers.  The charred outline of a sinuous wreck.  I hear those voices again..”

Elmet had been on my ‘Must Read’ Pile for a long time.  I was entranced by the premise, of a family living outside society, whilst living within their own rural idyll.  After having read it in a weekend, I am asking myself why it took me so long to pick it up and read it!

Quite simply, Elmet is one of those books that once you start reading, you start bargaining with yourself – ‘Just one more chapter, one more page, five more minutes’, because it is absolutely impossible to put down.

Beautifully written,  it has the juxtaposition of the family  – Daddy, Cathy and Daniel, living contentedly in a house they have built, pitched against the underlying menace of the brutality their father can inflict on others when pushed to protect those he loves, and a world that doesn’t understand the choices they have made.

The family spend their days looking after the land where they live, farming and maintaining their property and generally existing in peace.  Daddy makes money for the family by taking part in fights, a violent side of him they are aware of but do not see, as he attempts to keep the two sides of his life separate.

Cathy is not constrained by what society expects of her – she lives her life as she wishes, free from the ties of school life, choosing her own path at a pace that suits her and always has that element of unpredictability and wildness at her core.

Danny on the other hand, quieter and more reticent than Cathy, takes on the majority of the domestic tasks, and seems to find his happiness in providing for and caring for his sister and Daddy.

Fiona’s detailed description of the rural idyll that the family find themselves in, almost lulls the reader into a sense of calm and peace.  Although it is a hard life, it seems a simple, uncomplicated one, and I have to admit I was at times jealous of them, and their ability to live without the constant need to be part of the overwhelming society we live in.

This false sense of security is testament to Fiona’s talent as a writer, as the arrival of the Price family into the landscape immediately creates a sense of unease and foreboding.  You know that things are never going to be the same again, and with that, comes the realisation that the Prices will be the catalyst to destroy the life the family have so carefully created.

Mr Price arrives with his two sons, claiming that he is the landlord and that they are his tenants. Daddy is aware that Price has the police and the council in his pocket, and that he is facing a huge battle against this powerful family to maintain the status quo he has fought so hard to create.

Cathy and Danny are now faced with people intruding on their landscape, but instead of fearing them, they find them intriguing, a side of life from which they have been shielded.

“..though I loved watching birds and beetles, watching human beings was the thing

I loved the best.”

Realising that their peace is threatened, Daddy comes up with a plan to exact revenge on Price, and persuades Cathy and Danny to infiltrate the teams that Price uses to farm the lands, and to get the workers to come forward and tell their stories.  In doing so, there is a new community that forms, a group of people who have been treated badly by Price, and Cathy, Danny and Daddy find themselves part of that.

What I also found really interesting was the way in which Danny explores his sexuality.  He is free from the confines of a narrow-minded world, where he can truly express himself.  He has no knowledge or constraints on how he should behave and I thought that was really liberating and a clever way to make us realise how defined we are by what society expects.

As Danny says,

“Nor did I have any understanding that there were parts of the body

that held a different worth”.

The tension in the novel starts to build as Price realises that his hold on his world is being threatened.  The final chapters are unflinchingly brutal and are at times difficult to read, but this is never gratuitous violence.  The actions of the characters caught in this world are reactions to the fact that their existences are being threatened, that what they thought they knew will be forever changed.

Fiona Mozley has written a quietly brilliant masterpiece which deserves every piece of praise which has rightly been heaped on it.

Elmet is a superb, thought provoking novel, filled with both the beauty and unrelenting harshness of the natural world. It shows us if we are determined, how easily we can live contentedly outside the confines of society, and that it is those that wish us to conform who are the biggest threat to our happiness.

I loved it.

 

 

 

Laura Wilson: The Other Woman

Published By: Quercus

Buy It Here: here

 

What The Blurb Says:

Shortly after Christmas, a message arrives at Sophie’s house, scrawled across her own round robin newsletter: HE’S GOING TO LEAVE YOU. LET’S SEE HOW SMUG YOU ARE THEN, YOU STUPID BITCH. Perhaps she should ignore it, but she ignored the last one. And the one before that. Now it’s time to take action.

But when a simple plan to identify and confront the other woman goes drastically and violently wrong, Sophie must go to extreme lengths to keep her life and her family together – while never letting on her devastating secret.

What I Say:

Trying to decide what to read next can sometimes be overwhelming.  Should you read a book you have had on your shelves for ages, or maybe look online to find out what everyone else is reading.  Sometimes, it is just as simple that your next read jumps off the shelf and into your hands.

The Other Woman was one of those books.

Sophie Hamilton, and her husband Leo, live the lives that most of us can only dream about.  They have a gorgeous house, wonderfully perfect children, a yacht and successful careers.

Sophie sends out an annual Round Robin family newsletter, only this time one is returned with the message:

“He’s going to leave you. Let’s see how smug you are then, you stupid bitch.”

I have to say, initially I didn’t warm to Sophie – her life seemed just a little too perfect and she was one of those Instaperfect People who annoy you, but you can’t help but scroll through all their photos!

The very fact that she had a round robin newsletter was enough to make me wonder whether I could warm to her and read this book!  However, this makes Laura’s novel even more beguiling, as in a strange sort of way, I revelled in the fact that Sophie found herself in a situation that was so out of her comfort zone.

What also confused me was that Sophie hid the letter from her husband, Leo.  Why didn’t she show him straight away?  Why not be upfront about it?  Sophie knows that if she shows him, she opens up a whole Pandora’s box of ‘What If’s?”.

If she is right, he could choose to leave her to be with the Other Woman and the comfortable and enviable lifestyle she leads will come crashing down around her ears.  If she is wrong, Leo could be so upset with her that he could leave her anyway and she will be in the same predicament.

Plagued by doubts, Sophie sets out to search Leo’s office to try to find some trace of evidence.  She finds a tissue with some lipstick on it, but the lipstick is not hers…

To add further suspicion, Sophie’s cleaning lady finds a camisole in the family’s washing that doesn’t belong to anyone.  Leo has a flat in London, so Sophie heads there to see if she can find anything else, and is unable to get in as the locks have been changed.

This is why Laura’s novel is so good, because the evidence starts to stack up against Leo so early on.  You are convinced that the Other Woman exists, and that Sophie’s desire to uncover Leo’s betrayal is something that we all would do when faced with the prospect of losing the comfort and safety of our home life. Sophie’s dilemma is also more acute because we learn about her unsettled childhood and perhaps her desire to maintain the status quo is a consequence of an unstable upbringing.

As a reader, you really feel Sophie’s sense of bewilderment and sense of disbelief that something like this could possibly happen to her.  However, don’t think for one minute that Sophie is to be pitied.  She continues living her life as normally as possible, all the time wondering what the hell her husband has been up to.  As she says;

“A perfectly ordinary Saturday morning.  Except it wasn’t”.

When Sophie makes a second visit to Leo’s flat, a woman emerges, but it is someone who she knows.  Her worst fears have been realised, threatening the life she holds dear and the social standing she desperately wants to cling onto.

“Pain, like a block of ice, lodged in her chest.  The world slowed, stopped.”

Faced with the prospect of losing everything, Sophie cleverly manipulates the woman she believes to be guilty into coming to meet her.  Sophie is clearly the woman with everything to lose, but with a sense of power over her rival, she aims to overwhelm her with her staunch belief in her right to continue to hold onto her husband.

What happens next?  As a blogger loyal to her authors, as always, I will simply say, you need to read this book!

I guarantee that you will never be able to guess the chain of events that spiral away from Sophie.  She desperately attempts to protect the hilariously awful secret she now has to keep to ensure that everything she holds dear stays the same.

The utter brilliance of this novel is that we see Sophie go into auto pilot, navigating her way through the mundane trivialities of every day life, cooking dinners, dealing with the children and the husband and the dog, all the time knowing exactly what has happened.

As the novel progresses, we watch in horror as Sophie’s life starts to unfurl in front of her, but there was also a part of me that recognised myself!  Faced with the dilemmas that Sophie has, I think I would have reacted in much the same way!

The awful truth is that irrespective of what has happened,  daily life still goes on, and Sophie has to keep up the facade of fabulousness she has so carefully crafted to ensure that no one suspects anything, even though she might have fallen apart inside.

However, just when you think that you understand everything, Laura plants a massive twist that will knock you sideways and adds a whole other layer to The Other Woman.  It at once makes lots of events click into place, but at the same time, like Sophie, realise how many catastrophic choices have been made because of it.

The Other Woman is a fast-paced, clever and refreshingly different novel.  It is also at times hilarious, as Sophie struggles to cope to maintain her precious facade.  The brilliant twists and turns keeps you on your toes and the genuine horror of the situation pushes you out of your reading comfort zone and you are with Sophie every step of the way.  Her nightmare becomes yours, as you do not know what life is going to throw at her next!

I loved it.

 

Fiona Barton: The Child

Published By: Bantam Press

Buy It: here

 

What the Blurb Says:

When a paragraph in an evening newspaper reveals a decades-old tragedy, most readers barely give it a glance. But for three strangers it’s impossible to ignore.

For one woman, it’s a reminder of the worst thing that ever happened to her.

For another, it reveals the dangerous possibility that her darkest secret is about to be discovered.

And for the third, a journalist, it’s the first clue in a hunt to uncover the truth.

The Child’s story will be told.

What I say:

“Angela looked at her hollow-eyed, the initial euphoria of getting the news draining away rapidly. “My baby is dead” she said.

I had read Fiona Barton’s previous novel, The Widow and loved it (you can buy it here), as it was a very cleverly plotted and intriguing novel.

When I saw that Fiona had written a second novel called The Child, I wondered whether it could live up to the excellence of The Widow.  It does, and in my opinion is even better.

The Child is a story of three women, and how a seemingly under reported minor story about the discovery of a baby’s body on a building site not only eventually brings them together,  but for two of them, blows apart the seemingly stable lives they have been leading up to this point.

For Emma and Angela, the story has huge personal significance, as it brings up extreme emotions in them both, and a need for them to determine the identity of the child that has been found. Quite simply, they both believe that the body which has been found is their child.  For Kate, a newspaper reporter, it is a chance for her to investigate a substantial and human led story in a world of online celebrity click bait reporting.

Fiona’s writing from the outset is always fast paced, thoughtful and intriguing. One of the many strengths of this novel is that I genuinely could not work out why the discovery of the baby’s body was so important to Emma and Angela.  In my blog notes, I have lots of question marks next to my theories (only one of which was correct!), and I loved the notion that as a reader you are with these women on their journey to discover the truth about the baby and why the body should be where it was.

As the novel progresses, we learn about Emma’s difficult relationship with Jude, her mother, and how the appearance of Will, Jude’s new boyfriend, means that Emma’s home life leaves her feeling increasingly isolated and unhappy.  Emma’s sudden disappearance from her home, means that the complicated relationship she has with Jude reaches breaking point and does not really recover.  Jude refuses to believe that Will could in any way be responsible for Emma leaving, as she is so in love with him and the notion of being in love.  We learn later in the novel. that Emma had faced giving birth alone and in secret, and had not been able to tell her mother anything about her pregnancy, the traumatic birth of her stillborn baby and certainly not who the father was.

As we switch between the women’s stories, we discover that Angela had a baby who went missing from her hospital bedside after she had given birth, and no trace was ever found.  I found it really interesting and quite upsetting to see how Angela is treated in the time after her baby is taken, as if she is almost overreacting to the enormity of her ordeal.  Angela is convinced that the body of the baby who has been found is her missing daughter.

While Angela is looking for closure, to know if the baby at the building site is hers, Kate is more and more driven to be the reporter that solves the case.  I did initially question Kate’s motives for getting so involved, as she is so determined to find out what has happened becoming blinkered to everything else.  I wondered whether she was trying to further her career in the male dominated newspaper world and that her interest in the case is determined by the glory she believes will get for solving it. However, as the novel progresses, we can see the more human side of Kate and how she genuinely wants to help Angela and Emma find the answers they so desperately crave.

Fiona’s depiction of the three main female characters are brilliant and you really care what happens to them.  They are all interesting, three dimensional women to whom you can really relate, and following them on their search for the truth just became more and more intriguing.  Reading this book was always an absolute pleasure, as the plot and dialogue fizzed off the pages.

So, who is The Child and how are Angela and Emma linked to her?  Well, I could tell you, but that would spoil the massive twists in this novel, and being loyal to the author, I am not going to!  Suffice it to say, I had no clue what the twists were going to be – they were very cleverly done, completely plausible and it often made me go back through the book to see how I missed them!  Just when you thought all the secrets had been revealed, another skeleton would slide out of the closet and appear in front of you, and the resolution was never far fetched or ridiculous, it just slotted another piece into the ever growing puzzle of the novel.

The Child is a really remarkable and unforgettable novel, to say it is simply a psychological thriller does not do it justice, but it also raises really relevant issues in a poignant and powerful way.  It addresses what it means to be a mother, how women are regarded in the home and in the workplace, and how when women work together and support each other, they are stronger than they could ever know.

I loved this book, and I hope you do too.

Katherine Heiny: Standard Deviation

Published By: Fourth Estate

Buy it: here

 

What the Blurb Says:

A divinely funny novel about the challenges of a good marriage, the delight and heartache of raising children, and the irresistible temptation to wonder about the path not taken.

Graham Cavanaugh’s second wife, Audra, is everything his first wife was not. She considers herself privileged to live in the age of the hair towel, talks non-stop through her epidural, labour and delivery, invites the doorman to move in and the eccentric members of their son’s Origami Club to Thanksgiving. She is charming and spontaneous and fun but life with her can be exhausting.

In the midst of the day-to-day difficulties and delights of marriage and raising a child with Asperger’s, his first wife, Elspeth, re-enters Graham’s life. Former spouses are hard to categorize – are they friends, enemies, old flames, or just people who know you really, really well? Graham starts to wonder: How can anyone love two such different women? Did he make the right choice? Is there a right choice?

What I Say:

“And who’s to say that there isn’t a standard deviation from the standard deviation.”

Standard Deviation is one of the novels that you might have heard of, but like me have believed (wrongly) that it was something to do with the scary world of mathematics!  I had heard a lot about Katherine’s book via Twitter and as so many people were falling in love with it, I was intrigued.

Something I have learned since starting this blog is that taking a chance on books can be a revelation.  Sure, sometimes you realise that a book is just not working for you, and even though hordes of other people may love it, having the courage to say well I don’t can be hugely liberating.  After all, who really cares if you don’t finish a book?

That is why my reading philosophy – life is too short to read books you don’t love has been a big turning point for me.

Let me say this now, Standard Deviation is 320 pages of pure unadulterated joy.

If you don’t fall in love with the character of Audra, then I really doubt whether we can truly be book friends!

Audra is Graham’s second wife, and they live with their son Matthew who has Aspergers.  Audra is poles apart from his first wife, the ice maiden Elspeth, and Audra lives her life in a complete whirl, talking to anyone who will listen.   She has no filter when it comes to saying the right thing and her verve for life and passion springs off the pages, and I must admit it is the only book I have read recently that has made me laugh out loud.  There is a scene early on in the book at a wedding where Audra says something completely scandalous about the bride (I won’t spoil it by telling you – read the book), but it made me spit my coffee out laughing!

This I think sums up Audra in a nutshell;

“You had to pretend you were talking to someone in the time before society had formed and social boundaries had been invented.”

We start to see Graham’s struggle with his marriage, as he wonders whether he did the right thing by marrying Audra, or if should he have stayed with Elspeth instead.  When Elspeth and Graham have to attend a lawyer’s meeting together, Audra suggests that they all go on a double date with Elspeth’s new partner Bentrup.  As the four of them start to spend more time together, Katherine is wonderful at writing about the complexities of marriage and the way in which families are no longer constrained by the idea of a traditional nuclear family.

However, when Elspeth ends her relationship, Graham edges ever closer to her, comparing the calm and ordered environment she inhabits, to the passionate, chaotic home life he shares with Audra and an ever-changing rota of house guests.  He is also blindsided by his suspicions that Audra is having an affair and he sets about trying to find out what Audra has been doing.  Eventually, Audra confesses to an ‘almost affair’ with Jasper, and as Graham tries to process what has happened, Audra wants his forgiveness.

Nevertheless, Graham still sees Elspeth, and he admits that it is:

“…just like an affair, except without the sex or love or excitement, or other good parts”.

I felt that Graham’s relationship with Elspeth gave him the tranquility and escape he feels he needs, as if he needs confirmation that there is a world where he could have peace and calm.  As the book progresses, I felt it was as if Graham has to get Elspeth out of his system to wake up and realise that this existence would also lack the excitement and joy that Audra brings him.

In fact, after realising that he cannot go through with spending the night with Elspeth, he returns home and sees Audra and realises:

“She was an absolute certainty in an uncertain world”.

When Elspeth dies, Graham is bequeathed one item from her apartment, and Audra, as many people would, uses this opportunity for a good snoop around.  Graham reminisces about his relationship with Elspeth, but also finally gets a chance to put this behind him and be thankful for the marriage that he has.

Something else that really resonated with me was the challenges and compromises that Audra and her husband Graham face in raising Matthew.  My eldest son has a range of special needs, and I cannot tell you how refreshing it is to read a novel which pulls so sharply into focus the daily challenges you face as a parent of a child with special needs.  The conversations that you have as a couple as you try to determine the right thing to do for your child, the ache you feel as you realise that your child is not doing what everyone else’s child is doing, and the realisation that the simplest tasks cannot be achieved without a mountain of planning and a whole lot of stress.

“Graham, like all parents of special needs children, had a range of stock phrases that he used when talking about Matthew to other people”.  

I cheered when I read this sentence!  Yes, this is someone who really understands what our life is like!  Katherine writes with the knowledge and compassion of someone who knows what we go through, and for that, I would buy this book for every person who has asked us or made a stupid statement about the reality of our life with our eldest.

Matthew’s fascination with origami and his willingness to join a club with a group of people who accept him for who he is, is so well written.  There is a brilliant scene where Audra has to cater for Matthew’s origami group, including one young man who will only eat white things, and when Audra realises she hasn’t got any white handled cutlery, she obviously panics. The young man then chastises Audra for thinking he is fussy!

After a number of setbacks, Matthew finally finds the confidence to go to a summer camp that caters for him, ditches the boy who has routinely been horrible to him, and finds a new friendship.  I loved the way this whole plot line was central to Standard Deviation, but that it was not the focus.  Matthew was not a character written to illicit our sympathy and pity, but rather as a way of cleverly depicting the day-to-day reality of living with a child with special needs. We as parents don’t want awards, a slap on the back, praise or recognition, we just want our children to be accepted and have the best life they can.

We leave Standard Deviation as Audra and Graham head out on a date, as if we have merely been eavesdropping on their daily life, as they move on with life, so must we.  It is a wonderful, funny and clever book, filled with love, laughter and a big dose of real life.

I loved it.

Laura Barnett: Greatest Hits

Published By: W &N

Buy it here

What the Blurb Says:

Alone in her studio, Cass Wheeler is taking a journey back into her past. After a silence of ten years, the singer-songwriter is picking the sixteen tracks that have defined her – sixteen key moments in her life – for a uniquely personal Greatest Hits album. In the course of this one day, both ordinary and extraordinary, the story of Cass’s life emerges – a story of highs and lows, of music, friendship and ambition, of great love and great loss. But what prompted her to retreat all those years ago, and is there a way for her to make peace with her past?

What I Say:

I had heard so many good things about this book before I had even had the chance to read it, and was looking forward to finally getting my hands on it!

I picked up my copy from Wendover Library (there are some of the loveliest librarians I have ever met there!), but at first they looked for a CD I have reserved until I had to explain it really was a book I was expecting!

The premise of Greatest Hits seems very simple.  Cass Wheeler, a renowned singer-songwriter has taken a career break after a life changing event.  Cass, and those around her, decide that the time is right for her comeback, so over one day, she decides to pick sixteen tracks that define her and her life.  These tracks will then form the basis of her comeback album, and will premiere at the party she is holiding at her home that evening.

However, Greatest Hits is so much more than that too.

As we move through the day, this opens up the chapters in Cass’ life too. Cass remembers how her mother left her and her father for another man, how Cass’ father who is a vicar gradually descends into pain and despair, although his love for her is never in doubt.  He recedes into his own private pain, leaving Cass left to her own devices as she looks for someone to guide her through her childhood.

Realising he is unable to cope, Cass’ father decides to send her to live with her Aunt Lily and Uncle John. As well as giving Cass the stability and creative environment she yearns for, they also nurture her musical talent on the guitar.

Ivor, who is a friend of Lily and John walks in to Cass’ life, and from that moment on their lives are inextricably linked, as their passion for music and each other draws them together.  Ivor and Cass decide to start playing together professionally in a group and soon Cass is spotted by a record label scout.  It becomes apparent that Cass is seen as the major talent, and the record label want Cass to be the main focus of the deal.

As Cass selects the songs that define her life, we are drawn further into her world.  The tempestuous relationship she has with Ivor is both her strength and her weakness.  They love each other completely and absolutely, but their relationship is marred by Ivor’s increasing dependence on alcohol.  Cass and Ivor have a daughter called Anna, who starts to witness the ever growing hostility between her parents, and after a violent incident, Cass makes the monumentous decision to leave Ivor.

Anna shuttles between her parents as they eventually divorce, and her health declines as she tries to come to terms with the state of her parents relationship.  Anna tries to communicate her pain to her parents, and her love for art becomes the medium through which she tries to articulate her emotions.  There is a particularly succinct but beautiful scene which takes place at Anna’s art installation, as her parents experience her life through their eyes, it is sparsely described, but yet expresses everything Anna feels about her place in their world in one short snapshot.

Soon after, an event happens that sends Ivor into freefall, and although Cass attempts to carry on with her life as before, it soon becomes clear that she is barely functioning and spirals into her own decline.  As Cass moves through her tracks, her day and her life, we see how she finally discovers the courage to have the belief in her creativity again and she starts to heal.  Slowly she discovers her own voice, one not influenced by Ivor or her own self induced limitations.  Cass allows herself to fall in love again with an artist called Larry, but she tests his love and pushes him away as he attempts to move forward with their relationship.

I found this book impossible to put down, Cass’ story will draw you in and keep you enthralled right until the last page.  I loved this book because I feel at the heart of the book is a woman searching for a sense of self and and a place of peace.  The idea that in spite of everything Cass has endured, she can put her past to rest, and learn to love life, music and performing once again.

Greatest Hits is so much more than a fictional biography of Cass Wheeler.  It encompasses life, love, death, grief and the always present power of music.  The novel is wide ranging and encompasses different decades and attitudes.  It is also a novel of relationships – between men and women, mothers and daughters, parents and children and of how women are perceived in society.

Ultimately Greatest Hits is a novel which will resonate with you long after you have read it, and is one I will be endlessly recommending.

Find more out about Laura Barnett on Twitter or Laura’s Website