Tag: reading

Paperback publication day

Plashy Fen is now available in paperback today.

Publication coincides with Michaelmas Day, one of the quarter days I write about in the novel:

Today, Maurice’s ghost is taking in the autumn sunshine. It is 29th September, Michaelmas Day, the Feast of Michael and All Angels, a day that sits on the edge of winter, the last date for the harvest to be in.

When Maurice was alive, he and Beattie used to celebrate the day with a fattened goose to protect themselves and the girls against financial hardship.

“Eat a goose on Michaelmas Day,  want not for money all the year.”

The ghost of Maurice Dominey is one of the many characters in Plashy Fen, a small village layered by the stories of its characters.

There’s put-upon Lindy Vickery, hard-as-nails estate agent Anna Arborio (Maurice’s elder daughter), the teenage triplets Merlin, Ralph and Billy and the Symes brothers who live in three separate caravans in far-flung corners of their field.

There’s a celebrity chef, a nice and not-so-nice pub landlord who, naturally, are bitter rivals, and a grief-stricken vicar questioning his calling.

Possibly too many characters to get your head round straight away, but stick with it, rural villages can be a bit like that until you get to know them.

Said one reviewer: “By the end, I felt that I knew the people of Plashy Fen. In fact, if I ever walked into the Raven’s Head and found them sitting at the bar, I’d happily buy them a pint—or a glass of wine—and join them.

“A warm, funny, poignant and beautifully observed novel. Five stars.”

You can order Plashy Fen from bookshops or Amazon. It’s also available on Kindle.

September reviews

I’ve been a bit lax lately when it comes to reading books, being so caught up in promoting my own. (In case you didn’t know, Plashy Fen comes out in paperback on 29 September. As you can imagine, I’m very excited.)

I had been reading a doorstep of a novel, The Year of the Locust (2023) by Terry Hayes, and was finding it very easy to sink into its short chapters and fast pace.

However, I’m about an eighth of the way in and have decided to quit while I’m ahead. I don’t feel much engaged with the protagonist and there is more to life than ploughing through a big book just for the sake of it.

This spy thriller, published in 2023 is more up Mr Grigg’s street than mine, which is what I initially thought about Hayes’ debut I Am Pilgrim (2013) before I picked it up at a book swap a few years ago.

I couldn’t put it down, it was gripping.

My well-read friend, The Fragrant Mrs Putter, told me she felt the same, so I was in good company.

It still hasn’t been made into a film yet, which I find astonishing, although there are references online to Pilgrim being in production.

I’m about to embark on The Cuckoo and the Cuckquean (2025) by Patricia Román. The novel is about Spanish Suffragettes – a new subject for me, but it’s good to move out of one’s comfort zone every now and then.

I finally read Michael Palin’s Hemingway Adventure (1999) as part of research into one of my family stories and, although I still don’t very much like Hemingway as a man, it confirmed my view of Palin as an extremely engaging and talented writer.

While I haven’t been reading, I have been listening to quite a few podcasts.

I’m hooked on both the UK and the US versions of Goalhanger’s The Rest Is Politics, which are such ear openers when it comes to staying informed about the corridors of power and the strange things happening on planet Earth right now.

The BBC’s Disclosure Investigates series are really good. I’ve listened to two standout documentaries – Charmain And The Prophet {2026) and Matched With A Predator (2025). The programmes’ common link is the horrendous consequences of controlling behaviour by men over women.

To provide some light in the darkness, I’ve also watched The Magic Faraway Tree (2026), ostensibly a children’s film based on the book of the same name by Enid Blyton.

It was beautifully done, and so, so enjoyable, with the original story updated but still with a glorious, life-affirming fantasy at its heart.

Fearing I might have gone a bit soft in my old age, I looked up the reviews afterwards to see if the critics agreed with my verdict. They did, wholeheartedly.

We’ve also binge watched Last Tango In Halifax (2012-2020, BBC) – great, character-led drama which is down to the brilliant script of the show’s creator, Sally Wainwright, and the superb cast.

Now starting, rather late in the day, on Ted Lasso (2020-present, Apple TV) and enjoying it immensely.

Can’t wait for the new series of the BBC’s Small Prophets (2026) to appear on our television screens. And with Slow Horses (2022-present, Apple TV) flying out of the traps, telly just got a whole lot better.

Book launch – save the date!

I’m delighted to announce I’ll be launching Plashy Fen on Saturday 10 October at Washingpool Farm Shop, Bridport, from 11am-12 noon.

It’s a particularly appropriate venue because one of the key locations in my new novel is a village farm shop, run by Derek and Maggie Galpin.

Like the Holland family who run Washingpool, my fictional couple started the business years ago, way before farm shops were a ‘thing’ and farm-to-plate food became fashionable.

Derek and Maggie were far ahead of the curve and worked as hard as a pair of oxen to get where they are now.

Things happen at the farm shop in Plashy Fen, an imagined Dorset village overlooking the sea.

A jar of olives get spilt on the parish council welcome pack that has been put on the counter. And a couple of hoity-toity incomers’ children scrump the apples on display, much to the annoyance of Derek’s sister, Lindy, who works there part-time.

Lindy is the glue that holds the disparate yet desperately connected village together.

She works at the farm shop part time, in between looking after grandchildren and studying for a back-to-nursing course.

The Holland family started their business in 1971, when Lindy would have been still at primary school.

When I first arrived in Bridport as a young reporter back in the early 80s, I remember the Washingpool market stall and shop in West Street.

The business has grown dramatically. Now, it’s an award-winning farm shop on the outskirts of town, with a restaurant,  two holiday cottages and a caravan and motorhome site, set on a 80-acre working farm produging its own Devon Ruby Red beef, eggs and an array of fruit, vegetables, flowers and potatoes.

I’m looking forward to seeing you if you can make it on 10 October. If you’ve already bought a book (it comes out on 29 September), I’ll be happy to sign it but I will have copies available.

And just a thought, if you were thinking of coming along, you could book in for lunch…

All the best.

Maddie x

August book reviews

There have been some stinkers in my reading material of late, so I’m delighted to share with you two five star reviews for two very different novels.

Books have taken a little bit of a back seat in recent months as I put the finishing touches to my own novel, Plashy Fen, which will be out very soon, and research a narrative non-fiction story about the ancestor I share with that titan of 20th century American literature, Ernest Hemingway.

But it gives me great pleasure to recommend both these novels, which are well worth a read.

There Are Rivers In The Sky by Elif Shafak *****

(Contemporary fiction combining historical fiction, 446 pages)

This is the most extraordinary book – and a long one for me to find myself completing with great relish.

It’s difficult to summarise the plot but here goes:

After a prologue set in the ancient past, the novel follows three timelines focusing on three characters inexorably linked by a single drop of water.

We have Arthur, who was born and raised in the Victorian slums next to the Thames but possesses an incredible mind. He learns how to decipher ancient texts at the British Museum and becomes obsessed with the Epic of Gilgamesh, a poem written in Mesapotamia during the late 2nd millennium BC. He makes it his life’s quest to find the poem’s missing pieces, out in the dusty field.

And then there is Narin, a Yazidi girl living in Turkey in 2014, and Zaleekhah, a hydrologist who lives on a houseboat in London in 2018.

They lead entirely different lives but their stories are intertwined, with the past catching up with them all.

This is such a big concept book, but told intimately through the stories of the three protagonists. Beautifully written -a novel which will stay with me for a long time.

Lucie Dumas by Katherine Mezzacappa *****

(Historical fiction, 234 pages)

Katherine Mezzacappa is a voracious writer who has a real knack for finding fascinating true stories and characters from the past and turning them into literary gold, as her novel, The Virgin of Florence (2024), demonstrates.

Lucie Dumas was a real person, a young woman we would never have known were it not for Mezzacappa’s meticulous research and imaginative storytelling skills.

And it’s a good job, because Lucie’s story is important, particularly in an age where misogyny is still alive and well and living like a king, even in 2026.

Lucie is a ‘fallen’ woman, cast out of her native France and separated from the child she bore to become a prostitute in 19th century London.

She encounters many hardships and is then ‘rescued’ by a famous writer, Samuel Butler – to whom she refers as The Monsieur – who ‘keeps’ her in a modest house (with a maid) where she entertains him and other gentleman callers.

Lucie is never a victim but her tale unfolds quietly and with great dignity, a pawn in a world where men take centre stage and women are meant to fit in as they should.

The storytelling and writing are remarkable. I’d gone off historical fiction a bit but Mezzacappa has restored my faith in the genre.

This is a novel which means a great deal -it gives Lucie Dumas a voice and one with which we, the reader, empathise, giving us an unusual and important insight into the place of women in Victorian society.

Finding my bookish self

I’ve been out of the blogging loop lately, focusing on a writing project which is going to keep me busy for the next couple of years.

However, there is lots going on in the world (earthquake, heatwave, violent death and political farce) but I’m choosing not to obsess about these subjects and am trying (not very successfully) to stop doomscrolling on Facebook and Instagram, which is a complete waste of time and just feeds massive egos and conspiracy theories and lines the pockets of the megarich.

And news websites and a constant diet of updates and cliches are leaving me cold.

The reading is going well, but not in terms of me writing reviews. I’ve had some real duds in recent months, which has been incredibly disappointing.

I had high hopes for The Calamity Club (2026), by Kathryn Stockett, the author of The Help (2009), but it wasn’t for me. I gave it two stars out of five.

I didn’t fare much better with Under Story. I devoured an earlier Chloe Benjamin novel, The Immortalists (2018), but really struggled with this new book, which comes out later in the year.

The very science-based science fiction of Under Story is sweeping in its ambition. Set in the hostile, surreal world of Antarctica, it’s essentially a love story with two central protagonists who take their time to reconnect.

It’s beautifully written but moves forward at too slow a pace for me. I gave it three stars.

Having encountered a reader’s block with new novels other people seem to adore, I had a bit of a book break and then started reading narrative nonfiction, if nothing else but to help with the current writing project, to see how it’s done when done well.

The last bit of nonfiction I read was probably The Salt Path (2018), billed as memoir, nature and travel writing and definitely not fiction. I gave up after two chapters because I liked neither the style nor the whining presence of the author, who irritated me from the start. Well, we all know how that book panned out. Maybe I am more discerning than I think.

I’ve done a bit of research and have started giving nonfiction another go. Mixed results but I completely fell in love with the Bruce Chatwin’s groundbreaking travel writing classic, In Patagonia (1977).

Similarly, The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder (2023) by David Grann is unputdownable, telling the true story of what happened when a naval vessel hit rocks off the South American coast in 1740. Piecing together the story through solid historical research and strong primary sources, Grann has produced a knockout of a book. I was hooked by it.

After failing to ‘get’ an award-winning memoir that had been recommended to me (too highbrow and about a wealthy family I didn’t care much about), I was delighted to then plunge into Great Uncle Harry: A Tale of War and Empire (2024) by Michael Palin, a writer who takes a family story and turns it into a search for answers in this compelling biography, travelogue and history book. Palin is such an empathetic and kind sort of a chap and his writing reflects his humanity.

I’m now reading two novels: A Gentleman in Moscow (2016) by Amor Towles (my day book) and the beautiful There Are Rivers In The Sky by Elif Shafak (2024), which I turn to at night because I have a back-lit Kindle so I don’t disturb Mr Grigg when he’s trying to sleep.

So, you can see I haven’t been completely idle in this ennui-inducing heatwave, which is turning us all into gibbering wrecks.

More from me later in the week, I think. In the meantime, if you have any narrative nonfiction recommendations, I’m all ears.

That’s about it.

Love, Maddie x