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The Pavilion in the Clouds, by Alexander McCall Smith

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This stand-alone novel takes place in 1938, already setting us apart from the characters because we know what is coming.

Bella Ferguson is eight and lives on the tea plantation in Ceylon, now Sri Lanka, owned by her father. She leads a charmed life: lessons with Miss White, servants to attend to her needs, a beautiful home in the clouds, where she doesn’t have to see the terrible working and living conditions of the plantation workers.

Henry and Virginia, her parents, embody the English empire, somewhat to Virginia’s discomfort. She wonders by what right they should own this land that historically belonged to the indigenous people of the island, and if indeed the British would one day be driven out.

We are uninvited guests, just as we are uninvited guests in every corner of the globe, and yet we take it upon ourselves to dictate how things should be done. That was the massive, almost unbelievable, conceit upon which the whole colonial enterprise was built, and yet nobody seemed to see.

Empire, colonialism: these are weighty subjects, but barely touched upon here.

Meanwhile, Bella has come to believe that there is something worrisome about her governess’s relationship with her father, a concern that she confides to her mother.

I’m a huge fan of Smith’s novels, especially the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series with Mma Precious Ramotswe, and the philosophical Isabel Dalhousie series, but this one—no. A trite situation: a woman suspects her husband of cheating. And the characters are boring: he is barely present, and she does nothing day after day. She had been teaching her daughter, reading her poetry, but now they have hired the English governess, so she has nothing to do but to wander about and occasionally lunch at the club. And imagine what might be going on.

Maybe I’d have been more interested if there’d been more about Ceylon besides the initial lovely but brief description of the tea plantation. Maybe if the characters hadn’t been so predictable. Maybe if several story threads had been satisfactorily tied up rather than left hanging.

Still, I appreciate Smith’s humor, his moral universe, his gentle philosophical ruminations. My favorite parts of the book center on Bella, with her dolls, Li Po and Po Chü-i, named after Chinese poets. She carries on conversations with them and attributes distinct personalities to them, while they advise her out of their great wisdom. I love the way they participate in scenes like any human character.

I may be the only person aside from Li Po who is skeptical of the ending. I don’t want to give anything away, but really! Well, perhaps I am too cynical. Time for another dose of Alexander McCall Smith’s world.

What is your favorite Alexander McCall Smith book?

Disappearing Earth, by Julia Phillips

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In the intense first chapter of this book, sisters Alyona and Sophia, ages 11 and 8, playing alone on a public beach in Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, a city on Russia’s Kamchatka peninsula, encounter a stranger and accept a ride home with him.

The world of this remote area of Siberia is brilliantly brought to life. We learn that it is a time of great change in Soviet Russia, leading characters to say things like:

“This could never have taken place in Soviet times.”

“You girls can’t imagine how safe it use to be. No foreigners. No outsiders. Opening the peninsula was the biggest mistake our authorities ever made”.

“Now we’re overrun with tourists, migraines. Natives. These criminals”.

Bounded by mountains and the sea, there is no way the kidnapper could have taken the girls off the peninsula without being caught, thus creating a locked-room mystery, as the author says in a Paris Review interview.

However, this is not your typical mystery that describes the investigation into the girls’ disappearance. Instead, it is a set of interlocking short stories—twelve, one for each month of a year—about various girls and women in the city and surrounding communities, some of whom knew the girls and some who did not. It is about how they are affected by what we know is a kidnapping, though the police are pressured to call it an accidental drowning to quell panic.

In this way we learn that an indigenous girl also went missing a few years earlier, but there was no investigation, no posters or campaigns such as for the two Caucasian girls. The police assumed the young teen ran away.

We also learn much about the pressures on indigenous and Caucasian women in this distant corner of Putin’s Russia. These pressures and the various kinds of violence affecting these women’s lives are recognisable to women in the author’s native U.S. and elsewhere. The author has studied Russia extensively, as shown by her brilliant evocation of this place and its people, and lived in Petropavlovsk for two years. Still, I can’t help wondering how natives of Kamchatka would describe their lives.

Some readers are thrown by the nontraditional structure of the book, with each chapter introducing new characters and seeming to stand alone. I loved it, though, recognising immediately the similarity to one of my favorite novels: Jon McGregor’s Reservoir 13, which also starts with a missing girl.

Reservoir 13, too, is not about solving the mystery of the disappearance, but rather describes the effect on the community. Each of 13 chapters details a year in the life of the village, with seasonal celebrations coming around, life going on or not, and the way the missing girl echoes down through the years. In McGregor’s book, the village is the main character, while Phillips centers each chapter on one woman. The advantage of McGregor’s structure is that we are not introduced to a new cast of characters with each chapter.

I listened to the audiobook of Disappearing Earth, and only later realised the print and ebook versions included a cast of characters and a map. I would have found both very helpful, as I had trouble remembering characters from previous chapters. Still, Phillips’s novel is a brilliant debut that introduced me to a part of the world I knew nothing about. More importantly, it immersed me in the lives of these women, their dreams, their constraints, and their strength.

Have you read a novel with a nontraditional structure? What did you think of it?

Sisters of Night and Fog, by Erika Robuck

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This absorbing historical novel follows two real women who became French Resistance fighters during World War II. Violette Szabo and Virginia d’Albert-Lake both have a history with France. Violette was born there of a French mother and English father and grew up in England to become a strong-willed Cockney. Virginia is an American who, like Violette, falls in love with and marries a Frenchman.

From the start, we are caught up in the rumors of war, brought to life through the eyes of these two women. With the stunning invasion of France, a pregnant Violette in London immediately starts campaigning to do some kind of war work, despite her father’s discouragement, a campaign that takes fire when her husband in killed in North Africa. Meanwhile, Virginia elects to remain in France with her beloved husband, invalided out early in the war.

Alternate chapters follow the two women as they find their way forward, Violette doing various kinds of war work before joining the Special Operations Executive (SOE), a secret UK intelligence agency, in the hopes of being sent to France, Virginia and her husband sheltering and helping downed pilots and escaped POWs.

Beautifully written, full of stunning scenes that we discover in the historical note at the end actually happened, this is one of those books that you simply cannot stop reading. It’s a fantastic addition to our understanding of what was happening beyond the battlefields during this showdown with fascism.

You might think that I would have had enough of women Resistance fighters after reading nonfiction books about Virginia Hall, one of the first British spies in France where she organised Resistance units and provided critical intelligence to the Allies, and Marie-Madeleine Fourcade, who also ran a Resistance operation in France, supplying critical information to MI6, the UK’s Special Intelligence Service. I thought so too until I read reviews of this book by Robuck, whom I know slightly.

Why read yet another book about World War II? One: because this is a story of real people based on Roebuck’s extensive research. Two: because many people don’t realise the role that women played in the war effort, particularly in the Resistance. Three: because it is important to remember the actual horrors of Hitler’s fascist state and the weakness of those who supported and contributed to it. Remembering the heart-breaking realities of fascism is especially critical today when the radical right, funded by amoral one-percenters, are waving swastikas and trying to persuade people in this country to do away with democracy and embrace fascism in order to fulfill their white supremacist dreams and fantasies of a nation with no freedom of religion.

In her Author’s Note, Robuck tells us how Virginia and Violette’s stories came together, “showing the different ways that women, in particular, are called to serve, how each of us has a vocation, and we cannot have peace until we become who we are meant to be. Also, ultimately, they show us that none of us can operate alone. We are all called into a community of people working together for good.”

Virginia and Violette—their courage and integrity—are an inspiration for us all.

Have you read a history—fictionalised or nonfiction—that has inspired you?

Violeta, by Isabel Allende

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I haven’t read all of Allende’s novels, but I’ve read a few and enjoyed most of them, so I was glad when my book club chose her most recent (2022) novel. It is the story of a life, written as a letter from Violeta, now 100 years old, to Camilo, whose identity only becomes clear as we get fairly far into the book.

She begins with her birth in 1920, the year when the influenza pandemic which began in 1918 in the battlefields of the Great War finally finds its way to her unnamed South American country. Reaching the end of her life as the COVID pandemic takes hold provides a neat framework for a story whose characters try to determine their own fate, especially the strong-willed Violeta, but are often stymied by world events.

The beginning is full of warm humor, like the best Allende novels. Violeta is born after a raft of boy children—we never learn all their names and even their mother can never remember their ages. Her mother “loved her sons, in theory, but in practice she preferred to keep them at a comfortable distance” and “felt doomed to bear only sons, like a curse from the Devil.” So she doesn’t believe her sister when she says the baby is a girl.

Then there’s is the English governess imported to tame the spoiled little girl, who turns out to be anything but the matronly, old-fashioned woman they expected. Miss Taylor is Irish and only in her twenties, dressed in the latest English fashion and wearing makeup, who soon meets a local woman who recruits her to the Suffragette cause.

However, events move quickly—we do have 100 years to get through—and some things get dropped, such as the maternal grandmother who sits silently in the conservatory and is never mentioned again, though she has somehow disappeared a few pages later. There were incidents that I wanted to hear more about, but they are briefly narrated along with everything else.

I think the narration—pure exposition with almost nothing in the way of dramatic scenes—is the main reason the people in my book club began to lose interest in the book after the beginning. For me, an additional reason was that it all began to sound very familiar.

I’d recently read Allende’s memoir Paula, a letter written to her comatose daughter as Allende sat by Paula’s bedside. I thought it would be about Paula, but it is Allende’s life along with her memories of her parents and grandparents. It is also narrated and covering the same period, the same events as this book. Harder to read, though, because the paragraphs go on for pages, unbroken.

Similarly, Violeta was started in response to the death of Allende’s mother at the beginning of the COVID pandemic. The two had exchanged letters daily whenever they were apart throughout Allende’s life. The author has said in interviews that her characters start with a real person whom she then modifies to become the character for a story, adding a dollop of herself as good writers do. Having read the memoir, though, it seems to me that, while this book supposedly is based on her mother’s life, it is much more about Allende’s. Hence my feeling that I’d already read this book.

One thing I found interesting about it is that, instead of following a traditional (in Western literature) story structure of action in pursuit of a goal that rises to a climax, Allende employs an episodic structure. The most famous example of that kind of structure is Don Quixote, but the difference is that Cervantes’s novel has an overarching theme, where this one does not seem to have one. Nothing ties the episodes together except that they are all part of Violeta’s life. I may be missing something.

Each episode is narrated—told, not shown—sometimes engaging and sometimes not. One person read aloud part of a section dealing with a political event that, as she put it, sounded like something out of a political pamphlet. We also felt that the references to it being a letter to Camilo felt like they’d been dropped in here and there after the book was finished, rather than being an organic part of the story.

Some people didn’t finish the book; others did and enjoyed it but, as one person said, forgot it as soon as she turned the last page. We agreed, though, that based on our love of other books by Allende, we would be willing to read her work.

Do you have a favorite novel by Isabel Allende that you would recommend?

Paradise, by Abdulrazak Gurnah

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In one of my writing classes, we were discussing Isak Dineson’s memoir Out of Africa with its haunting opening: “I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills.” She goes on to describe the beauty of the landscape: “There was no fat on it and no luxuriance anywhere; it was Africa distilled up through six thousand feet.” She gives us the burnt colors like pottery, the spice-scented grass, and “the crooked bare old thorn-trees,” ending with “Everything that you saw made for greatness and freedom, and unequalled nobility.”

Since we were talking about setting and how to describe it through the perceptions of your main character, we speculated as to how someone from one of the tribes displaced by the colonial powers would describe the same setting.

In this second novel from Gurnah, who was born in Zanzibar—now part of Tanzania—and won the Nobel Prize, we find that important perspective so missing in Western literature. Yusuf, a rural Muslim boy who leaves his home at twelve, remembers:

. . . it was the season of drought, when every day was the same as the last. Unexpected flowers bloomed and died. Strange insects scuttled from under rocks and writhed to their deaths in the burning light. The sun made distant trees tremble in the air and made the houses shudder and heave for breath. Clouds of dust puffed up at every tramping footfall and a hard-edged stillness lay over the daylight hours.

Told he’s going on a visit with the man he’s been taught to call Uncle Asiz, a wealthy trader, Yusuf later learns he has been given in payment for his father’s debts and that Asiz is his seyyid or master, not his uncle. The boy is put to work in the store under Kahlil, an older Indian, also collateral for his father’s debt, who introduces him to the complex society of precolonial urban East Africa.

Yusuf’s story unfolds gradually. He begins volunteering to help the elderly gardener in Asiz’s gorgeous walled garden. When he’s 17, Asiz takes him on a trading trip to the interior, leaving him for years with one of his trading partners in a small village, before returning to take him even deeper in the hills. It becomes an epic journey into the heart of a country on the verge of change. They encounter disease, raging rivers, and hostile tribes, as well as a gorgeous waterfall that is said to be the gates of Paradise. Later Yusuf is brought back to town and the garden he loves, yet which becomes his undoing.

The seyyid could travel deep into strange lands in a cloud of perfume, armed only with a bag of trinkets and a sure knowledge of his superiority. The white man in the forest feared nothing as he sat under his flag, ringed by armed soldiers. But Yusuf had neither a flag or righteous knowledge with which to claim superior honour, and he thought he understood that the small world he knew was the only one available to him.

Although Yusuf is a slave, this is not structured like a traditional slave narrative which is about escaping to freedom. Instead, it is a coming-of-age story in which Yusuf seems to make the best of each new adventure. Terrified at times, he doesn’t rebel against being a slave. He doesn’t complain about his exile from each of the homes he’s found or try to escape, even as the dangers grow and the risks more terrifying. Then, as the walled garden turns into a place of danger, the rumored encroachment of the German colonizers becomes a reality.

It appears to be a retelling of the story of Joseph in the Koran, at least in part. Published in 1994 and shortlisted for the Booker prize, Paradise is set just before the World War I and provides an unforgettable portrait of precolonial East African society.

What book have you read set in East Africa?

Prelude to Foundation, Isaac Asimov

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This is the first book in Asimov’s classic Foundation series, though he wrote it after five of the six novels in the series. It is meant to be a guide as well as a prequel. Asimov says he hadn’t planned for his first Foundation short story, published in 1942, to grow into a multi-volume series, so had decided a better introduction was needed.

Hari Seldon, a young mathematician, delivers a paper at a conference held in Trantor, capital of the empire, and thus comes to the attention of young Cleon I, whom we are told is the last Galactic Emperor of his dynasty. Cleon is mostly a figurehead, somewhat like the British royal family, relying completely on Eto Demerzel, his brilliant and somewhat mysterious advisor.

Cleon is intrigued because it sounds as though Seldon has worked out how to predict the future. When they meet, Cleon is disappointed that Seldon’s work is all theoretical and unlikely to yield practical results. However, whether Seldon’s so-called psychohistory actually works is less important to the Emperor than the possibility of using the process to issue rosy predictions about Cleon’s successes, thus calming the restive planets in the far reaches of the empire.

The next day, as he’s preparing to return to his home planet, Seldon meets a journalist in the park. Chetter Hummin alerts Seldon that Demerzel will try to detain him and offers to use his connections to take the mathematician to a safe place. Thus begins what’s known in the Foundation books as The Flight.

I read some of the Foundation novels in my teens, at a time when I was reading a lot of science fiction. I certainly thought they were interesting enough to keep reading the ones that were available then, but now I remember nothing about them, unlike some of the other SF books I consumed back then. A writer friend suggested I read this Prelude.

The story certainly flows well and has plenty of suspense and potentially interesting characters. However, it shows its age. Don’t get me wrong: Asimov was amazing. What an imagination! However, in the following decades—the first Foundation story was published 80 years ago—SF has changed.

An obvious area that’s improved is world-building. Asimov uses two methods of conveying information about the people, culture and settings of the story. One is to preface each chapter with an excerpt from the fictional Encyclopedia Galactica, directly providing information to the reader. The other is that Hari, being new to every world he travels to in the course of The Flight, must have everything explained to him. We have no access to his thoughts, but he obviously doesn’t pick up things on his own; someone must tell him.

As a result, the story is more talk than action, and it’s awkward, stilted talk at that. In today’s SF novels, world-building is much more subtle. It’s incorporated into the story. A particularly effective example is the beginning of The Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins, which starts with action and the thoughts of the protagonist Katniss. We’re never lectured on the way that world works; instead it becomes clear through what’s going on.

Another area that’s improved in today’s stories is the characters. Hari and the other characters are flat. We don’t learn much about them as people; they are just there to serve the plot. None has the character arc we’ve come to expect in modern novels of every genre, where the person actually changes during the story, as a result of what they experience. Today’s authors get to know their characters as fully rounded people and then set them free to act and react naturally as the story progresses.

This is not a criticism of the Prelude. Plot dominated in most early SF stories. It was a rare author whose characters came alive; Ursula Le Guin comes to mind, though she was writing somewhat later than Asimov.

I’m grateful to be reminded of the enormous strides in quality that SF has made, specifically here with world-building, dialogue, and characterisation, but also thrilled to see again the strong plotting that made these early stories so interesting.

Have you gone back to read a novel from the early days of science fiction?

The Bay of Angels, by Anita Brookner

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What if you grew up reading fairy tales, all the ones I found in a corner of the little stone library near our house: the Blue Fairy Book, the Yellow, the Brothers Grimm, Charles Perrault? Perhaps like Zoë you would come to believe that someday a fairy godmother would come or a magic cloak be given, a prince, a slipper, so that you yourself need do nothing but hold yourself in readiness, be calm and pleasant and passive.

What if you lived with your widowed mother, a sad and solitary woman, with no friends or even visitors aside from two of your mother’s cousins-in-law who descend on you with indigestible food, unsolicited advice, and unwelcome invitations before disappearing again (to yours and your mother’s relief)?

Zoë says:

After I had done my homework in the evening I would take up my position at the window. I liked to watch the lights go on in other houses, as if preparing for a wayfarer’s return. My reading had conditioned me to think in terms of wayfarers, so that footsteps on the pavement gave me an agreeable sensation that the stories contained enough authenticity to justify the fact that I still read them.

When Zoë is sixteen, her mother unexpectedly meets a man at one of the cousins’ parties and marries him, whereupon Simon whisks his new wife off to his home in Nice. Zoë is delighted with Simon but wants to stay in their old London flat. She is finally ready for freedom.

Freedom. It can mean so many things. As Zoë faces increasingly difficult challenges, she discovers different ways of being free, from sacrificing her own ideas and desires as she clings to an indifferent lover to Sartre’s existentialist freedom with its attendant responsibility and anguish.

As with all of Brookner’s work, this is an iceberg of a novel: brief and quiet on the surface, with a huge mass of emotions and ideas and insights hidden below. Narrated by Zoë, the story is built on scenes that bring to life both the quiet London dusk and the blazing sun of Nice.

With her usual penetrating psychological insights, Brookner provides fascinating portraits of the people Zoë interacts with, such as elderly Mme Levasseur whose face was somewhat twisted after a stroke, and her bitter disappointment when her grandson, a small child, refuses to kiss her.

As quietly brilliant sentences follow one upon the other, Zoë’s experiences bring her to a place where many of us have found ourselves. As poet Stevie Smith put it:

Oh I know we must put away the beautiful fairy stories
And learn to be good in a dull way without enchantment

Then we must read on to discover how Zoë will manage her new adult freedom. This most unusual coming-of-age story will deliver surprising insights if you will let it.

What coming-of-age story have you read that was especially memorable?

The Far Field, by Madhuri Vijay

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“I am thirty years old and that is nothing.” It’s a great first sentence and resonates throughout the book, taking on new shades of meaning as Shalini tells us the story of what happened when she was twenty-four.

A privileged young woman, she lives in Bangalore in southern India. Her father is a successful businessman, freeing her to lead a life without purpose: drinking and clubbing, occasionally volunteering.

Like a few of my recent reads, this novel is set in motion by the death of the protagonist’s mother. Chapters alternate between what happens next, as Shalini sets out on a journey to politically unstable Kashmir, and flashbacks to her childhood growing up with her larger-than-life mother.

Shalini’s mother never went to the U.S. like her father, and still prays to the Brahmin idols that he’s abandoned. Sarcastic, rude, and uninhibited, her mother wields her anger like a cudgel to get her own way with shopkeepers, family, and everyone else. Only Stella, their servant, remains imperturbable in the face of the tornado. Shalini calls her mother “incandescent” and “vicious.”

Then a traveling salesman comes to the door selling clothing from Kashmir. Shalini is shocked when her mother invites Bashir Ahmed in and even more so when he treats her mother’s insults and barbs with humor. A teller of magical stories that enchant both mother and daughter, he becomes a regular visitor, the only regular visitor to the house.

However, at the time of her mother’s death, they hadn’t heard from him for ten years. Floundering without her mother’s strong presence, Shalini sets out to find the charming and mysterious Bashir Ahmed.

Some people in my book club believed that Shalini hoped to discover exactly what the relationship was between Bashir and her mother, but I thought she believed that in him she would find again the comfort and certainty she’d lost when her mother died.

The writing is gorgeous, and seduced me from the start. Vijay’s descriptions and unusual images are stunning.

. . . below us was the river. I’d learned its name as a child in school, and that it was one of the five mighty rivers of the north, but I had not been prepared for such a vital, living, thing. The water was gray in places, slate blue in others, and, farther off, a tawny green. The roar was so loud it seemed to dampen the sun’s glare, so that it felt momentarily as if we were standing in shadow.

As she steps out onto the swaying bridge, at first she watches her feet but then looks up.

I could see miles and miles up and down the river, mountains looming dark on both sides, all that tall blue sky held between. It was terrifying and exhilarating, and a sound—a laugh of delight or moan of fear, I couldn’t tell—escaped me, torn away in an instant by the gale that funneled through the valley.

There is much else to like about this story. I welcomed learning more about Kashmir and Bangalore. The political divisions in Kashmir emerge organically in this story. And I’ve never before run across Bangalore as a setting in the Indian novels I’ve read.

However, I found some of the plot hard to believe. Without giving anything away, the generous assistance Shalini encounters on her journey seemed designed to advance the plot rather than how people would realistically behave, even in a culture that honors hospitality.

Several people in my book club disliked Shalini to the point where it kept them from enjoying the book. However, I found her credible. It’s not surprising that an immature, very privileged girl would be self-centered and unable to understand how to behave with the very poor people she encounters in Kashmir.

The story is a fascinating look at the clash between the wealthy urban culture of Bangalore and that of an impoverished and politically unstable village in the Kashmiri mountains.

Have you read a novel set in Kashmir?

Undue Influence, by Anita Brookner

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This third bookshop book, like the last one, starts with the death of the protagonist’s mother. However, no one is throwing Claire out of the London flat—the only home she’s known—and she’s already working in a bookshop. Still, her father having died some years previously, she’s now alone in the world.

Claire is a curiously passive person, though she doesn’t see herself that way. The bookshop where she works is owned by two elderly sisters, Muriel and Hester, but Claire doesn’t sell books. She’s in the basement transcribing the writings of the sisters’ late father for possible publication. Between the sermons and the rather dry articles, she finds herself pleasantly immersed in a more predictable past.

She has one friend, Wiggy, whom she met at the National Gallery and sees occasionally. Although she enjoys her company, Claire thinks Wiggy is too passive. Mistress to a married man, Wiggy almost never leaves her flat in case he drops by. Still, Claire turns to Wiggy now to compensate in part for the loss of her mother’s company.

Before her mother died, Claire used to go on vacations to foreign cathedral towns where she’d dutifully see the sites so she could describe them to her mother. She also indulged in brief affairs that she did not tell her mother about.

It doesn’t seem like much of a life, but Claire’s imagination fills in the gaps. Convinced that she perceives the secret lives of people she’s barely met, she’s often tempted to give them advice or set them straight.

Thus when a quiet good-looking man ventures into the bookshop and is sent by Hester to the basement to find a particular book, Claire pursues an acquaintance with him. She believes she is helping him come out of his shell, but is she influencing him or the other way around?

She’s vulnerable, having been unmoored by her mother’s death, though she doesn’t recognise it. I have seen myself how a death can leave you bereft, not just of the loved one but of the routines that filled your days. Brookner captures that weightlessness, that waiting.

Brookner’s style, with its leisurely pace, subtle shifts, and extensive use of exposition may turn off some modern readers. Claire, as the first-person narrator, tells us this story, with only a few dramatic scenes, whereas we have become used to stories that are almost entirely scenes tied together with a little exposition. But I love the change of pace and the chance to settle fully into the mind of another person.

Like other Brookner novels I’ve read and loved, this story makes me think of the muffled sound of falling snow, so quiet you barely notice until you look out and see how the world has changed.

Have you read a novel by Anita Brookner? Do you have a favorite?

The Last Bookshop in London, by Madeline Martin

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When Grace Bennett lost her mother, she lost almost everything. Her sole relative, an uncle, not only takes over her house but also dismisses her from her job at his store without a reference. She and her more adventurous friend Viv have always dreamed of going to London, so they set off, buoyed by the offer of lodgings with a friend of Grace’s mother.

It’s August, 1939.

Viv gets her dream job at Harrods, but timid Grace has no luck because she has no references. Finally, the fond, if bossy, Mrs. Weatherford bullies the owner of a struggling bookshop into hiring Grace for six months so she can get the necessary reference.

Primrose Hill is barely staying afloat because it is far away from Paternoster Row, home of most of London’s bookstores, and its owner Mr. Evans is not much of a businessman. Grace is nervous: she’s not a reader, so how can she recommend books to customers?

However, her retail experience helps her make the shop more organized and attractive, and she finds the kindness lurking under Mr. Evans’s gruff exterior. She also enjoys the customers, especially George whose encouragement finally gets her to start reading.

Then war comes, with blackout curtains and the Blitz. Amid loss and constant fear, Grace volunteers as an ARP (Air Raid Precautions) warden, coincidentally paired with the grumpiest of the store’s customers, sending her out on the dark nights during the worst of the bombing. She takes refuge in her new passion: reading. On the nights she’s not on duty, when she and Mrs. Weatherfield sleep in the subway tunnels, she’s persuaded to read aloud to help others pass the time and distract them from their fears.

This second in a string of bookshop books for me starts out as a light read, but quickly turns serious with the start of World War II. The story eloquently depicts the home front: the women and old men left behind, the first attempt to find your way home in the blackout, the fear at the sound of the doorbell because it could be someone delivering a telegram, the sounds and smells of sleeping in the tube station turned air raid shelter, the attempt to extinguish incendiaries, the shock—first physical and then emotional—of a bomb blast.

What I most admire in this story is the way Martin integrates the larger story of the war with Grace’s particular journey. The grim accuracy of life in London during the Blitz, and all the losses—loved ones, homes, security—keep this from being a frothy romance or coming-of-age story. The war is not just pasted on to add drama; it informs everything in Grace’s story, from large events to the smallest detail.

What novel have you read that incorporates events current to the story?