The Blurb (by Goodreads)

London in the 1920s is no place for a woman with a mind of her own. Gang wars, violence, and an unforgiving world have left pickpocket Alice Diamond scrambling to survive in the Mint, the gritty neighborhood her family has run for generations. When her father goes to jail yet again and her scam artist brother finds himself in debt to the dangerous McDonald crime syndicate, Alice takes over. Fighting for power at every turn, she struggles to protect her father's territory and keep the people she loves safe from some of London's most dangerous criminals.

Recruited by the enigmatic Mary Carr, Alice boldly chooses to break her father's edict against gangs and become part of a group of notorious lady shoplifters, the Forty Elephants. Leaving the Mint behind, she and the other girls steal from the area's poshest department stores, and for the first time in her life, Alice Diamond tastes success. But it's not long before she wants more--no matter the cost. And when her past and present collide, there's no escaping the girl from the Mint.

My thoughts:

A swift-paced and gritty page turner set in 1920s London, The Forty Elephants was inspired by the true story of the first all-female gang of London. This is a world of pickpockets and con-artists, razor fights and gang wars. The heroine Alice Diamond has to take her father’s place as the leader of the Mint after her father is sent to gaol, but it’s tough proving herself when you’re both young and a woman. Alice is clever and ruthless, though, and soon she has a plan to score bigtime …. If she can survive. 

Christine, welcome to my blog! Can you tell us what is your latest book about?

ONE WOMAN’S WAR is about Victoire “Paddy” Bennett, the woman who is said to have inspired the character of Miss Moneypenny in the James Bond novels and her involvement in Operation Mincemeat, one of the most eccentric and effective intelligence deceptions of all time.

How did you get the first idea for it?

I’ve always been interested in spies—I saw my first James Bond movie at age seven—and have recently written several novels about female intelligence operatives during the Second World War. I was reading about James Bond creator Ian Fleming’s real experience in Naval Intelligence during World War II and came across a newspaper article about the women that were said to have inspired his characters. Upon researching further, I discovered that Paddy Bennett was a redoubtable woman—clever, brave, and resourceful. The perfect protagonist for a story!

What do you love most about writing?

I love when I’m deep into a novel and the words flow and the world falls away, and hours pass without my noticing. I also love the wonderful people I’ve met through writing—readers and other writers, as well.

What are the best 5 books you've read recently?

I don’t rank books I read but here are some fabulous ones I’ve read lately:

The Crimson Thread by Kate Forsyth — and I am not just saying that because I’m on your blog! You know how much I loved that book.

The German Wife by Kelly Rimmer

The Three Lives of Alix St. Pierre by Natasha Lester

The Librarian Spy by Madeline Martin

The Diamond Eye by Kate Quinn

What lies ahead of you in the next year? 

I’m currently working on a book about a girl who grows up at the luxurious Shepheard’s Hotel in Cairo and comes to believe she is the illegitimate daughter of Edward VIII, later Duke of Windsor and a scandalous French courtesan, Princess Marguerite Fahmy. It’s been fascinating to research this one! Hopefully it will be out next year.

The Blurb (from Goodreads):

Sparked by her unexpected encounter with the surviving roses he planted in 1936, Solnit’s account of this understudied aspect of Orwell’s life explores his writing and his actions—from going deep into the coal mines of England, fighting in the Spanish Civil War, critiquing Stalin when much of the international left still supported him (and then critiquing that left), to his analysis of the relationship between lies and authoritarianism. Through Solnit’s celebrated ability to draw unexpected connections, readers encounter the photographer Tina Modotti’s roses and her Stalinism, Stalin’s obsession with forcing lemons to grow in impossibly cold conditions, Orwell’s slave-owning ancestors in Jamaica, Jamaica Kincaid’s critique of colonialism and imperialism in the flower garden, and the brutal rose industry in Colombia that supplies the American market. The book draws to a close with a rereading of Nineteen Eighty-Four that completes her portrait of a more hopeful Orwell, as well as a reflection on pleasure, beauty, and joy as acts of resistance.

My Thoughts:

A fascinating bibliomemoir that explores the life and works of George Orwell through his love of roses. Rebecca Solnit’s canvas is huge. Orwell’s political acuity and his love of this most romantic of flowers is a launchpad for her to consider the art and life of the early 20^th century photographer and activist Tina Modotti, Stalin’s determination to force lemons to grow in the snow, writer Jamaica Kincaid’s scathing critiques of colonialism, and the awful Columbian rose factories that send millions of identical red rosebuds to the American market every year. Written with such fierce intelligence & clarity – loved it! 

The Blurb (from Goodreads):

France, 1944: The Nazis still occupy Paris, and twenty-five-year-old Gabby Foucher hates these enemies, though, as the concierge of ten rue Royale, she makes it a point to avoid trouble, unlike her sister Yvette. Until she, like her sister, is recruited into the Resistance by Catherine Dior—sister of the fashion designer, Christian Dior.

Gabby and Yvette are both swept into the world of spies, fugitives, and Resistance workers, and it doesn't take long for the sisters to realize that their lives are in danger.

Gabby discovers an elderly tenant is hiding a wounded British fugitive, and Yvette becomes a messenger for the Resistance. But as Gabby begins to fall in love with her patient and Yvette’s impulsiveness lead her into intrigue at an ever-higher level, both women will discover that their hearts and even their souls hang in the balance as well.

This page-turning novel is perfect for any reader fascinated by the role of women during World War II, whose stories are often untold, and introduces us to Catherine Dior, the fearless real-life Resistance hero.

My Thoughts:

I hugely enjoyed ‘Sisters Of The Resistance’ by Christine Wells - it’s her best book yet! 

I’ve been interested in the story of Catherine Dior & her work with the French resistance for a while, and so when I heard that she was a major character in Christine’s new book, I was very keen to read it. Catherine Dior was the younger sister of couturier Christian Dior; he is said to have named his perfume Miss Dior after her. She worked with the underground resistance in France during the war, but was arrested in July 1944 by the Gestapo, tortured, and deported to the Ravensbrück women’s concentration camp where she almost died. After the end of the war, she spent the rest of her life growing flowers in Provence. She was a very private woman, and not much is known about her personal experiences during the war. Christine Wells solves this problem by weaving an imaginary story of two Parisian young women around the apartment block in which she lived. One is twenty-five-year-old Gabby who does her best to look after her mother, her sister, and the tenants of the ten rue Royale, where she works as concierge. Her younger sister Yvette is far impetuous, however, and determined to fight the Nazis. Both sisters find themselves in every-growing danger, as they follow Catherine Dior into the shadowy world of rebels and spies. A real page-turner of a novel!

The Blurb (from Goodreads):

In 1937, young Lisette Roux and her husband, André, move from Paris to a village in Provence to care for André’s grandfather Pascal. Lisette regrets having to give up her dream of becoming a gallery apprentice and longs for the comforts and sophistication of Paris. But as she soon discovers, the hilltop town is rich with unexpected pleasures.

Pascal once worked in the nearby ochre mines and later became a pigment salesman and frame maker; while selling his pigments in Paris, he befriended Pissarro and Cézanne, some of whose paintings he received in trade for his frames. Pascal begins to tutor Lisette in both art and life, allowing her to see his small collection of paintings and the Provençal landscape itself in a new light. Inspired by Pascal’s advice to “Do the important things first,” Lisette begins a list of vows to herself (#4. Learn what makes a painting great). When war breaks out, André goes off to the front, but not before hiding Pascal’s paintings to keep them from the Nazis’ reach.

With German forces spreading across Europe, the sudden fall of Paris, and the rise of Vichy France, Lisette sets out to locate the paintings (#11. Find the paintings in my lifetime). Her search takes her through the stunning French countryside, where she befriends Marc and Bella Chagall, who are in hiding before their flight to America, and acquaints her with the land, her neighbors, and even herself in ways she never dreamed possible. Through joy and tragedy, occupation and liberation, small acts of kindness and great acts of courage, Lisette learns to forgive the past, to live robustly, and to love again.

My Thoughts:

I’ve long been a fan of Susan Vreeland and her novels inspired by art and the lives of artists. I’ve had ‘Lisette’s List’ on my to-be-read bookshelf for a long time, however, and somehow never got to it. At last I picked it up this month, and was soon absorbed in its gently unfolding story of love, grief, and art.

 

Set in France during the dark days of World War II, it is a novel about the power of art to bring light into dark days. Lisette is just an ordinary young French woman seeking to survive through the German occupation. Her husband has died in the first days of fighting, and she is left alone to try to bear it. Before he left for the front, her husband hid his family’s collection of paintings and she determines to find them again and bring them home. She has always found beauty & consolation in art, and her fascination with painters is only deepened by a meeting with Marc Chagall who is in hiding near her village. She only meets him a few times, but he teaches her something important about the need for freedom, self-expression and creativity. Her search for the lost paintings brings her into conflict with the Germans and the village policeman, but her fear does not prevent her from keeping on trying.

 

A quiet, deep, beautiful book full of grace notes.

I often teach what is called the Rule of Three in my workshops and lectures, and thought I’d share the idea with you all. 

Basically, the Rule of Three is an ancient principle of storytelling in which words, characters or events occur in patterns of three. 

Humans are pattern-loving creatures. In fact, to be honest, all living organisms are. Pattern recognition helps us make sense of a chaotic world, predict what may happen next, and acquire response behaviours that can become virtually instantaneous in the face of danger. Quite simply, our brains need patterns and order to learn and remember and adapt. Pattern recognition helps us survive … and so we crave it. 

And because things which are highly patterned are more memorable than things that are not, stories and songs and advertising jingles all use rhythm and rhyme and repetition (repeated patterns of sound) to help people remember them.

So now we understand why we love things that appear in patterns. But why the number three? 

Basically, three is the smallest number of elements required to create a pattern. It is the only number which equals the sum of all the numbers below it, which apparently led Pythagoras to call it the noblest of numbers (unsurprisingly, maths is not my greatest strength but even I can work out what that means.) And it’s a key number in the Fibonacci sequence, often called the golden ratio for the fascinating way in which it appears in art and mathematics, & in nature – flower petals, seed heads, spiralling shells, hurricanes and spiral galaxies all adhere to the same ratio.   

The pattern of three appears in such common everyday things as: 

• Past, present, future 
• Birth, life, death
• Heaven, earth, hell
• The Three Fates 
• Maiden, Mother, Crone 
• Son, Father, Holy Spirit 
• Blood, sweat, tears
• Scissors, paper, rock
• The good, the bad & the ugly

 

I am most particularly concerned, though, with the Rule of Three in storytelling. And so it’s worth taking a look at the oldest of all human stories – myth, fairy-tales and folk-tales - where unsurprisingly we see the number three appearing again and again and again. 

Vladimir Propp was a Russian folklorist and linguist who rigorously studied thousands of his country’s folktales in order to identify their simplest narrative functions. In his book Morphology of the Folktale, published in 1928, he identified a basic and fundamental rule of narrative structure that he called ‘trebling’. 

Trebling appears most obviously in folktales and nursery rhymes such as ‘The Three Little Pigs’, ‘Goldilocks and the Three Bears’, and ‘Three Blind Mice.’ However, we also have Rumpelstiltskin and his three spinnings of straw into gold, and then the queen’s three chances to guess his name. The wicked stepmother tries to kill Snow White three times with three poisoned objects. And in the earliest versions of ‘Cinderella,’ she goes to a ball and dances with the prince three times.  

Here are some of the ways that trebling appears in literature:

• Trebling in Use of Language
  The use of three adjectives or phrases, as in these famous quotations: ‘Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness’; ‘Government of the people, by the people, for the people’; ‘Friends, Romans, Countrymen’; ‘I came, I saw, I conquered’; and one of my own personal favourites, Mary Oliver’s ‘Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?’

• Trebling in Individual Elements
  We often see patterns of three in individual motifs or symbols – such as in the braid of impossibly long hair in Rapunzel, or the three-headed dog of Hades, or the three-headed giant in ‘Jack the Giant-Killer’

• Trebling in Characters
  If a protagonist is part of a family, there are usually three siblings of the same sex, as in Cinderella and her two stepsisters, or King Lear’s three daughters, or the brothers in the Romani fairy tale ‘An Old King and His Three Sons’. If so, the youngest and humblest will be the protagonist. Often the two older siblings set out on some kind of quest but fail. The youngest is the one who succeeds in the task, even though he or she may be scorned, mocked, or denigrated by the older siblings. This is usually recorded as Try & Fail/Try & Fail/Try & Triumph.
   
• Trebling in Narrative Patterns i.e. three tests, three tasks, three trials
  The Rule of Three is very prevalent in narrative patterns, in which the protagonist must overcome three obstacles before they can triumph. In this case, the difficulty increases with each obstacle. Usually, the first two attempts result in failures and the final third in triumph i.e. the house of straw, the house of sticks, the house of bricks in ‘The Three Little Pigs’, another example of the Try & Fail/Try & Fail/Try & Triumph pattern. In some myths and fairy tales, the protagonist succeeds at each task but the third is the hardest & most crucial. For example, in the story of ‘The Golden Bird’, the third son must rescue a golden bird, then a golden horse, and then a princess to save the life of his king. Three trials or ordeals is less common; the most famous occurrence is in the Norse myth of Odin who endured three torments upon the World Tree in his quest for wisdom: 
  • • he hanged himself
    • he wounded himself with a spear
    • he suffered from hunger and thirst

 

• Three Gifts or Three Magical Helpers
  Sometimes the protagonist is given three gifts, as in ‘East of the Sun, West of the Moon’ and ‘The Singing, Springing Lark’. In this case, it is the third and final gift that helps the heroine win the day and rescue her beast-husband, and so we again see the pattern of Try & Fail/Try & Fail/Try & Triumph. In other stories, the protagonist will be helped by three magical helpers, as in the story of Psyche and Cupid, in which an ant, a reed and an eagle assist her in succeeding at impossible tasks set by the goddess Aphrodite. Again, the third task is the most difficult.
   
• Three Revelations
  Sometimes the Rule of Three applies to three revelations or epiphanies that bring about radical transformation, such as in Charles Dickens’s novella A Christmas Carol. The protagonist Ebenezer Scrooge receives visits from three spirits: The Ghost of Christmas Past, The Ghost of Christmas Present, and finally The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come. To him, Scrooge says, ‘Spirit, I fear you most of all.’ Each ghost opens his eyes to some aspect of his past, teaching him some kind of lesson, which transforms him utterly by the end of the story. 

 

• The Threefold Structure
  The Rule of Three can also be seen, more subtly, in narrative structure.  Northrop Frye, in Anatomy of Criticism, said stories have ‘three main stages: the perilous journey and the preliminary minor adventures; the crucial struggle, usually some kind of battle in which either the hero or his foe, or both, must die; and the exaltation of the hero.’ In myths from around the world, we see journeys to the underworld adhere to the pattern of Descent/Search/Ascent. And, of course, the well-known three-act structure of the dramatic arc, usually expressed as Problem/Confrontation/Resolution.

 

Of course, sets of three are not the only patterning in narratives, but it is by far the most prevalent. The Rule of Three is so ancient and universal, there is a perfect trio of Latin words to express the idea: Omne trium perfectum

It means ‘everything that comes in threes is perfect.’  

The Blurb (from Goodreads):

My Thoughts:

‘The Red Tent’ by Anita Diamant was published about 25 years ago, and was a huge bestseller. I never got around to reading it, though, and so I was intrigued when it was chosen by my book club. I did not know much about it, other than that it’s a retelling of a biblical incident involving a woman named Dinah. My knowledge of the bible is absolutely zilch, and so I came to the story with no expectations whatsoever. Rather to my surprise, I loved it!

 

Basically, Dinah is the daughter of Jacob, who married two sisters, Leah and Rachel, and had about a dozen sons including Joseph of the many-coloured coat. The red tent of the title is the place where women go when they are menstruating. Men are not permitted within, and so the women wait out their cycle, telling stories, singing songs, and sharing feminine wisdom, including forbidden myths of the Great Gddess. Dinah’s aunt Rachel is a midwife and teaches her the craft. But tragedy strikes when Dinah’s brothers murder her husband and all his people. Dinah’s story then becomes one of recovery from her grief and horror, and the rebuilding of her life in Egypt.  The book has a wonderful rhythm to it, making it impossible to put down, and Dinah’s voice feels urgent and true. A wonderful reinvention of a lost woman’s story.

The Blurb (from Goodreads):

In North Devon, where two rivers converge and run into the sea, Detective Matthew Venn stands outside the church as his father’s funeral takes place. Once loved and cherished, the day Matthew left the strict evangelical community he grew up in, he lost his family too.

Now, as he turns and walks away again, he receives a call from one of his team. A body has been found on the beach nearby: a man with a tattoo of an albatross on his neck, stabbed to death.

The case calls Matthew back into the community he thought he had left behind, as deadly secrets hidden at its heart are revealed, and his past and present collide.

An astonishing new novel told with compassion and searing insight, The Long Call will captivate fans of Vera and Shetland, as well as new readers.

My Thoughts:

I am a huge fun of “Shetland’ and ‘Vera’, the TV series inspired by Ann Cleeves’s crime novels, but have actually only read one of her books. Most unlike me!  So I thought I’d try her newest book, the first in a new series. ‘The Long Call’ is set in Devon, and features a gay detective who grew up in a cult-like evangelical religion until he realised both his sexual orientation and his atheism. He has not spoken to his family since. On the day of his father’s funeral (to which he was not invited), a body is found on the beach nearby: a man with a tattoo of an albatross on his neck, stabbed to death.

 

Compulsively readable, with really interesting and vital characters, ‘The Long Call’ is top-notch contemporary crime. I was not at all surprised to hear it has been turned into a TV series too!

The Blurb (from Goodreads):

Prussia, 1836. Hanne is nearly fifteen and the domestic world of womanhood is quickly closing in on her. A child of nature, she yearns instead for the rush of the river, the wind dancing around her. Hanne finds little comfort in the local girls and friendship doesn't come easily, until she meets Thea and she finds in her a kindred spirit and finally, acceptance.

Hanne's family are Old Lutherans, and in her small village hushed worship is done secretly - this is a community under threat. But when they are granted safe passage to Australia, the community rejoices: at last a place they can pray without fear, a permanent home. Freedom.

It's a promise of freedom that will have devastating consequences for Hanne and Thea, but, on that long and brutal journey, their bond proves too strong for even nature to break...

My Thoughts:

‘Devotion’ by Hannah Kent is so beautiful, so compelling, so filled with awe and joy and grief at the terrible beauty of life, it’s humbling. It’s leapt into my list of ‘Best Books of All Time’ which is a very select list indeed. 

It’s a story of two young women, both outsiders in some way in their strict German Lutheran village, who find each other, first as soul sisters and kindred spirits, and then – slowly and delicately – as lovers. The book begins when they are fifteen, and their community is suffering religious persecution as Prussia’s king determined to unify the state religion under his lead. Hanne lives with her parents and twin brother in a small village whose church is chained and locked, their pastor fled. Hanne is an odd girl, unlike the other girls. She has a strong connection to nature, and can hear its song. Her parents try to keep her in check, but there’s a wildness in her that resists all attempts to bridle her. One day a new family comes to live in the village. They have a daughter named Thea. Hanne is drawn irrestistibly to her. Like Hanne, she does not fit in – her mother is a midwife and, it is rumoured, a witch. The two become the dearest of friends.

The Old Lutherans (as they are known) decide to emigrate to Australia so they are free to worship as they please. Hanne fears being separated from Thea, but the two manage to make sure they will travel together. Once on board the ship, though, tragedy strikes as typhus claws its way through the overcrowded accommodaton. 

To say anymore is to diminish the pleasure of discovering this exquisitely constructed and composed novel. I could not put it down, and I did not want to leave it. It’s a book I will keep forever, and read again and again and again, for the luminous purity of its language and the bittersweet beauty of its story. Beyond wonderful.

Get your copy of Devotion HERE