Reading Horizons: Episode 11
Reading Horizons: 4 September 2018
What are you currently reading?
The Girl in the Red Coat is the debut novel by Kate Hamer. It garnered a lot of positive comment when it was published in 2015. Hamer was a finalist in both the Costa Book Award for First Novel and the Dagger Award and the novel was selected as the Wales Book of the Year.
The red coat of the title refers to the garment worn by eight-year-old Carmel on the day she went missing at a story-telling festival. She is spirited away by a man who claims to be her estranged grandfather. As Beth, her mother, desperately searches for her, Carmel realises that her kidnapper has not taken her at random: he believes she has a special gift.
This is a novel told in alternating perspectives of the grieving mother and the missing daughter. I started reading it yesterday and am finding it gripping.
What did you recently finish reading?
Love in a Cold Climate by Nancy Mitford was the book I ended up with via the recent Classic Club Spin.
For years I’ve heard Mitford’s work described as brilliantly witty and irreverent in the way it portrays the upper classes in England between the two world wars. Some parts of Love in a Cold Climate did deliver well-time timed comic dialogue and I enjoyed the characterisations of Lady Montdore and Cedric, the outré homosexual heir to her husband’s estate, but overall I was underwhelmed by this book.
What do you think you’ll read next?
While on holiday I’d planned to read the latest novel by Andrew Miller —Now We Shall Be Entirely Free — but the download from the NetGalley site to my Kindle app hasn’t worked. Since I’m having to rely on the usual slow Internet speeds in hotels, I haven’t been able to figure out where the problem lies. So that’s going to be moved back in the queue.
Instead I think it’s time to pick up another of the Booker prize winners. I started How Late it Was How Late by James Kelman last year and — once I’d got used to the strong Glaswegian dialect — began to enjoy it but for reasons that now escape me I put it down and never finished the book.
Reading Horizons is linked to WWWednesday, a meme hosted by Sam at Taking on a World of Words. It involves answering 3 questions:
The three Ws are:
What are you currently reading?
What did you recently finish reading?
What do you think you’ll read next?
I love the sound of The Girl in the Red Coat. Thanks for sharing, and enjoy your reading. Here’s MY WWW POST
Just finished reading it Laurel – I think you would really enjoy this
I suspect I would have little sympathy with Mitford the way I feel at the moment – probably best avoided!
Any particular reason for your lack of sympathy??
Class, basically! I’m somehow feeling less tolerant of reading about the foibles of the rich at the moment!! 🤣
Got you…..
I hope you manage to get a copy of the Miller. Mystified as to why that wasn’t on this year’s Man Booker longlist.
I got it in the end and have started reading it. the first chapter has me hooked….
Pleased to hear that. My partner has his head deep in my copy.
I think I read How Late it Was How Late years ago – I enjoyed it if I recall!
I enjoyed it overall though thought it was a little repetitive at times
I read Mitford for the first time at the back end of last year and was not only underwhelmed but seriously irritated. Is it bad of me to say that I’m glad you felt the same way?
Not bad at all. I took a long time to read this book which is always a sign that I’m not that enamoured.
The Girl in the Red Coat sounds good! Currently I am reading and loving Naomi Novik’s newest, Spinning Silver. I recently finished another chilling J G Ballard novel, The Drought. Next in the queue is Robert A Heinlein’s Farnham’s Freehold published in 1964. That and the Drought are for My Big Fat Reading Project.
My husband has enjoyed Ballard but I’ve never tried him.