The Long Song | Andrea Levy

Levy is English, born of Jamaican parents who emigrated in 1948 to England. This novel is about the lives of white planters and black slaves in the time of the Baptist Rebellion and beyond. The narrator is July, a slave on Amity, a plantation in Jamaica. The slaves are many, the overseer cruel, the masters feeble and incompetent, the mistresses, an embarrassment.
I found it a good read, but I became impatient with some of the white characters who were drawn in a less favorable light than the blacks. The story is primarily about the abolition of slavery and Jamaica's history since then so our sympathies are very much with the slave population but the tedium of engaging with the whites made me impatient to finish the book. I also found it very similar to "James Miranda Barry" by Patricia Dunker. I'm not sure if it is because of this that I didn't find it an altogether satisfying read, but on the strength of the writing I will chase down some of Levy's other novels and read them as she is very talented.

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Winter In Madrid | C J Sansom

Having just been in Spain, I was looking forward to this book. It was easy enough to imagine the scenes and cityscapes but it was quite hard to relate to the story. It is mostly about the British in Madrid at the beginning of WW2 (1940-1) and a lot of the story takes place within Diplomatic circles, embassies and is very stiff-upper-lip. The Spanish are being courted by Hitler, the British are trying to influence the Spanish by blockading the ports and the citizens of Spain are just trying to survive the starvation and unrest. The novel centers around the main character of Harry Brett who is asked by the British forces to become a spy after being injured in Europe. He is to watch an old school friend of his, Sandy Forsythe, who appears to be involved in the black market in Madrid.

Harry had been to Spain a few years before while looking for another friend Bernie Piper, who disappeared in the civil unrest and is presumed dead. He helped Barbara to look for him. Now she is involved with Sandy and .is trying to make sense of it all. Most of the book is slow, with the action taking place in the final chapters.

The relationship between the three men is very much developed at the public school they attended as teens and it colours everything they say and do as adults.

There is a certain amount of intrigue but not edge-of-you-seat kind of stuff. I read “The shadow of the wind” by Carlos Ruiz Zafon and it is a much better story than this one.

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Menagerie of False Truths | Greg French

I learned a new word reading this book ‘friction’, which is the way French describes his novel: a mixture of fact and fiction giving you ‘friction’. In the telling of any story the mix of fact and fiction rub up against each other creating friction between the two to the point where both are melded together. French draws on his experiences growing up in a family with various degrees of autism, a distant mother, a love of nature and fly fishing to weave a beautiful story.

A young man out in the Australian bush meets a young woman in a bogong. They have a weird conversation about native moths and fly fishing for trout and are mutually intrigued. Over the next ten or so years they write letters, using them as a means to tell their stories and piece together the truth about themselves. Cherry is in Dunedin, New Zealand, and Zack is in Australia. Both have autistic siblings and this has shaped their families. They also have friends in common and a love for art and nature.

I loved the way the story is interesting, it captures both the Australia and New Zealand landscape and a love of nature. A beautiful read.