Author: Caradog Prichard

The suggestion for this book came from a Facebook group I’m part of. It is only the second suggestion I’ve followed up on but both have been excellent.

The narrator is telling us about his life as a young boy in Wales. It seems a fairly ordinary life but there are a few twists and turns. The story is mostly autobiographical but there is a small mystery at the end that moves the story into novel territory (at least I think it does).

If you are going to read it yourself you must read the Translator’s Note in order to make sense of some of the characters.

Goodreads Rating: * * * *

Author: Henning Mankell

Another Kurt Wallander mystery and they never disappoint.

A party of three young people disappear while celebrating Midsummer’s Eve. Are they really missing or are they travelling as their postcards home would indicate. When one of Kurt’s colleagues is found dead Kurt struggles to make sense of the two crimes and find a link between them.

Goodreads Rating: * * * * *

Author: Kate Mosse

This is a book I picked up at a yard sale this summer. The biggest draw to the book was the size – over 700 pages. I noticed that this is listed as a time-lapse book in that the story takes place during a couple of time frames.

Leonie Vernier is a 17-year old girl living in Paris in the late 1800s. When an aunt asks her and her brother to visit her on the family estate, Domaine de la Cade, they are happy to get out of the city. The brother is embroiled in “something” and Leonie is happy to have the company of her brother to herself.

Meredith Martin is writing a biography of Debussy who lived in the apartment below the Vernier’s. Her reason for visiting the Domaine de la Cade in 2007 has very little to do with Dubussy. It is her belief that somewhere in her past she has a link to the Vernier family.

The story takes you into the occult and a unique deck of tarot cards. A bit like an Anne Rice novel, but not quite as good. This is the second book in a trilogy but the other books are also time-lapses and a quick review didn’t seem to have much to do with this particular story.

Goodreads Rating: * * *

Author: Vikram Seth

I picked up this book from the shelf in March, thinking it was a novel. When I found it was a biography I was okay with it as I assumed it was a biography of the author. In fact, it is a biography of his Uncle and his aunt, by marriage. I continued to read it while I waited for books I had on order from the library. I finally decided it was time to get it off my Currently Reading shelf in Goodreads.

The book is well written and the background of his Shanti Uncle (this is how he is referred to in the book) comes from family history. The life of his Auntie Henny (who was German) was mainly put together from here correspondence to and from friends. Henry escaped Germany just before war broke out but her mother and sister were killed at different camps near the end of the war.

The author made an interesting comment at the end of the book mentioning that both Shanti and Henny lived through traumatic times in the 20th Century – life in India under British Rule and the subsequent partition into India and Pakistan , the Holocaust, and the Second World War to name just a few.

Goodreads Rating: * * *