Spell the Month in Books – September 2026

Published on by Margaret2 Comments

Spell the Month in Books is a linkup hosted by Jana on Reviews From the Stacks on the first Saturday of each month. The goal is to spell the current month with the first letter of book titles, excluding articles such as ‘the’ and ‘a’ as needed. That’s all there is to it! Some months have additional themes, but feel free to participate however you’d like!

Currently Jana is not assigning themes, so for September I’ve chosen to feature some of the Classic books that I have read. The links in the titles of each book go to my posts, where they exist.

The more Spell the Month books I do, the harder it becomes to use book titles beginning with the letter E as I prefer to use ones I haven’t already used in earlier posts – but I have managed it this time. I think the last three months of the year will be challenging!

S is for Silas Marner by George Eliot, set in the early years of the 19th century (Eliot was writing the book in 1861) 

The story revolves around Silas Marner, a weaver living in Raveloe, a village on the brink of industrialisation. He was wrongly accused of theft and left his home town to live a lonely and embittered life in Raveloe where he became a miser, hoarding his gold and counting it each night. Until one night his life is changed by the theft of his money and a little girl who came to live with him, having been abandoned in the snow.

It took me a while to settle into George Eliot’s style of writing, with her long, long sentences – some so long I had forgotten how they had started, before I got to the end. But once my mind had adjusted to the rhythm of her writing I enjoyed this short book 

E is for Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton, first published in 1911 this is in contrast to some of her other books about the New York society of the 1870s to 1920s. It’s a rural tragedy of inevitable suffering and sadness that reminded me of Thomas Hardy’s books.

It’s a beautifully told tale – a tragedy, signalled right from the beginning of the book, when the unnamed narrator first saw Ethan Frome and was told he had been disfigured and crippled in a ‘smash up’, twenty four years earlier. Life had not been good to him.

I enjoyed it very much.  As well as striking and memorable characters the setting is  beautifully described – a ‘mute and melancholy landscape, an incarceration of frozen woe‘, in the isolated village of Starkfield (a fictional New England village). Even though Ethan Frome is a tragedy there is light to contrast the darkness, and there is love and hope set against repression and misery. I hoped the ending would be a happy one, although I knew it couldn’t be. 


P is for The Power-House by John Buchan, written in 1913 when it was serialised in Blackwood’s Magazine and then published in book form in 1916.

Buchan tells a good story, even if I had little idea what the Power-House really was. It’s an international anarchist network, but who they were, what they were actually after, or how they hoped to achieve their ends was never clear to me. But I really enjoyed this book. As Stella Rimington says it has an ‘intoxicating blend of madness with scents of home and countryside.’ 

It has some interesting thoughts on the nature of civilisation, and of power and comments on the ‘the business of Government. When all is said, we are ruled by amateurs and the second-rate. The methods of our departments would bring any private firm to bankruptcy. The methods of Parliament – pardon me – would disgrace any board of directors.’

T is for The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Bronte, first published in 1848 under the pseudonym Acton Bell.

I read this years ago before I began blogging, so I have no record of what I thought of it, other than that I loved it.

In this sensational, hard-hitting and passionate tale of marital cruelty, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall sees a mysterious tenant, Helen Graham, unmasked not as a ‘wicked woman’ as the local gossips would have it, but as the estranged wife of a brutal alcoholic bully, desperate to protect her son. Using her own experiences with her brother Branwell to depict the cruelty and debauchery from which Helen flees, Anne Brontë wrote her masterpiece to reflect the fragile position of women in society and her belief in universal redemption, but scandalized readers of the time.

E is for East of Eden by John Steinbeck, first published in 1952.

This is the story of two family, the Trasks and the Hamiltons, whose generations helplessly re-enact the fall of Adam and Eve and the poisonous rivalry of Cain and Abel. I enjoyed this beautifully written book, which begins slowly, but not as much as The Grapes of Wrath, which I thought was amazing. It’s long – too long really – and to my mind it reads like a morality tale of good versus evil. There are many parallels to the Bible stories, with surely one of the most evil characters ever in Cathy. I liked the way Steinbeck set out the moral dilemmas and gave the characters personal choice using the Hebrew word ‘timshel‘, meaning ‘thou mayest’.

M is for Mansfield Park by Jane Austen

On the surface this is a simple story about a family and their relationships. Fanny Price, as a child of 10 goes to live with her wealthy aunt and uncle, Sir Thomas and Lady Bertram at Mansfield Park, where as the poor relation she is not treated badly, but not as cared for or as kindly as her cousins, but more as an unpaid servant dependent on the family for her welfare – a sort of Cinderella story. But through the story, Jane Austen reveals the complicated interaction of society, shows the development of Fanny’s character and the depiction of a heroine who is good and gentle who matures throughout the novel. 

It’s full of detail of everyday life, its boredom as well as its entertainments and pleasures, the  balls and dinners. There is much in it about the houses and gardens, not only of the wealthy but also of the lower classes, such as Fanny’s parents home in Portsmouth – but they have servants themselves, so it is only comparative poverty. Seen mainly through Fanny’s eyes, it’s a study of morals, the damage caused by being unwanted and unloved. There is also a gentle strain of humour and satirical observations about contemporary values, and even, with Mary Crawford’s pun on ‘Rears and Vices‘, a bawdy note.

B is for Barnaby Rudge by Charles Dickens, first published in 1841, a murder mystery as well as a historical novel, mainly concerning the events surrounding the Gordon Riots of 1780. It’s almost a book of two parts and the dramatic second half, to my mind, more than makes up for the slow beginning which I had to read slowly and carefully.

It begins in 1775, five years before the riots as a group of customers in the Maypole Inn in the village of Chigwell, on the borders of Epping Forest and about 112 miles from London, recollect the murder of Reuben Haredale, the owner of The Warren, 22 years earlier to the day. His steward, a Mr Rudge was found months later, stabbed to death.The murderer had never been discovered. Reuben’s brother Geoffrey had lived at The Warren with his niece, Emma ever since.

From then on the book becomes much more complicated with many characters and sub-plots. There are a number of themes running through the novel – the relationship between fathers and sons, the position of authority, justice and the question of punishment for crime, and religious conflict. Dickens paints a picture of London, the dirt and poverty, the terrible condition of the roads, the perils of footpads and highwaymen which is in contrast to the countryside that still at that period surrounded London making it a cleaner, purer place to live in.

E is for Excellent Women by Barbara Pym, first published in 1952. It’s not laugh-out-loud funny, but it is most entertaining, subtly and gently comic.  laugh-out-loud funny, but it is most entertaining, subtly and gently comic.

It’s set just after the end of the Second World War, about the everyday life of Mildred Lathbury, an unmarried woman – in other words a spinster – in her early 30s. The daughter of a clergyman she is one of those ‘excellent women’ who could be relied upon to help out at Church jumble sales, garden fêtes, to make tea when required or to make up numbers at social gatherings. She finds herself involved in the quarrel between her new neighbours, Helena and Rockingham (Rocky) Napier, a married couple who live in the flat below her, as well as in the difficult relationship between Julian Mallory, the local vicar and his unmarried sister, when he finds himself trapped by Allegra Grey, a vivacious widow when she moves into their spare room. It’s a slow-paced book but all the better because of that.

R is for A Room with a View by E M Forster. First published in 1908, this is a novella of 161 pages, a comedy of manners, satirising the manners and social conventions of Victorian/Edwardian society. It is about a young woman, Lucy Honeychurch, and her journey to self-discovery as she breaks out of the restrained culture of Edwardian England. It’s also a romance.

It begins in Florence where Lucy is staying at the Pensione Bertolini, with her older cousin and chaperone Charlotte Bartlett. They meet two other guests, a Mr Emerson and his son George who are not bound by the conventions of the day and Charlotte considers they are ill-bred. But Lucy is attracted by the Emersons’ free thinking ideas. They spend time in Florence visiting various locations including the Santa Croce church, the Piazza Della Signoria and the San Miniato church, with its beautiful facade, and take a trip into the hills.

The second half of the book takes place in England at Lucy’s home at Windy Corner where we meet the rest of her family and Lucy has to decide between the insufferable Cecil and the unconventional George. 

Six Degrees of Separation from The Vanishing Act to Miss Pym Disposes

Published on by Margaret9 Comments

This is a monthly link-up hosted by Kate at Books Are My Favourite and Best. This month we are starting with either with your book group’s current selection or if you’re not in a book group, start with the book that you’re currently reading.

I’m not in a book group so I’m starting with the book I’m currently reading, which is The Vanishing Act by Sarah Ward. It’s the third book in the Mallory Dawson Crime Thriller series. I enjoyed the first two books and so far (I’ve read over half the book) I’m really enjoying this one too.

This is about a missing family. They disappeared from the holiday cottage, they were renting in a remote part of Wales. Apparently they had left in a hurry whilst making sandwiches for a picnic and leaving a kettle still steaming on the Aga.

Just Another Missing Person by Gillian McAllister, a book that totally gripped and baffled me. Olivia just disappeared from a dead-end alley without being seen coming back out. The investigating police officer is DCI Julia Day, a detective with a passion for solving things, piecing things together and helping people to get to the truth. But she has come up against what seems to be an impossible crime.

The House of Lost Whispers by Jenni Keer, a review copy, which also contains a character called Olivia. I don’t often read romance or fantasy novels but this book has both elements and it’s also historical fiction set before, during and after the First World War. It explores loss and grief, family life, friendship and romantic relationships, as well as the devastating and horrific events of the First World War.

Next is another review copy, The Spy in the Archive by Gordon Corera. It’s nonfiction about Vasili Mitrokhin, a KGB archivist who defected to Britain in 1992. Mitrokhin, a quiet, introverted and determined man, was a reluctant defector, because whilst he loved Russia he came to hate the KGB and the Soviet system. It is a remarkable book about a remarkable man; an in-depth account, that took me weeks to read as it’s not a book to read quickly. It’s both fascinating and informative.

An Officer and a Spy by Robert Harris, historical fiction about the Dreyfus Affair. In his Author’s Note Harris writes that his aim in writing this novel was to ‘retell the true story of the Dreyfus affair‘, describing it as ‘perhaps the greatest political scandal and miscarriage of justice in history, which in the 1890s came to obsess France an ultimately the entire world‘. What follows is a chillingly dark, and realistic novel of conspiracy and espionage.

Miss Austen by Gillian Hornby – the untold story of the most important person in Jane’s life – her sister Cassandra. After Jane’s death, Cassandra lived alone and unwed, spending her days visiting friends and relations and quietly, purposefully working to preserve her sister’s reputation. It’s very well researched, a novel that held my attention from the beginning right to the end. A definite 4.5 star book.

Miss Pym Disposes by Josephine Tey. Miss Pym was pleased and flattered to be invited to Leys Physical Training College to give a lecture on psychology. But then there was a ’nasty accident‘. This is not a conventional crime fiction novel. It’s a psychological study focussing on the characters, their motivation and analysis of facial characteristics. It looks at the consequences of what people do and say and, as Miss Pym discovers who she thinks is responsible, it also looks at how much a person should intervene, or as one of the characters tells her, ‘Do the obvious right thing, and let God dispose.’ Miss Pym agonises over her decision, was she really going to condemn someone to death?

Making this chain into a very loosely linked circle I went from crime fiction to crime fiction, with historical fiction, non fiction and spy stories in between.

Next month (October 3, 2026), we’ll start with Rachel Cusk’s latest novel, Life of M.

Top Ten Tuesday: Books With Nationalities In The Title

Published on by Margaret16 Comments

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly meme created by The Broke and the Bookish and now hosted by Jana at That Artsy Reader Girl. For the rules see her blog.

The topic this week is Books With Nationalities In The Title (e.g. The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Mexican Gothic, An American Mariage, etc.) (submitted by Cathy @WhatCathyReadNext)

This was harder than I thought it would be! I’ve read all of them but some of them are books I read before I had this blog.

Italian Shoes by Henning Mankell

The Italian Girl – Iris Murdoch

The Quiet American by Graham Greene

Suite Francaise by Irene Nemirovsky

Frenchman’s Creek by Daphne du Maurier

English Pastoral by James Rebanks

God Is an Englishman by R F Delderfield

The English: a Portrait of a People by Jeremy Paxman

A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian by Marina Lewycka

The Dutch House by Anne Patchett

Top Ten Tuesday: Bookish Places I’ve Visited

Published on by Margaret18 Comments

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly meme created by The Broke and the Bookish and now hosted by Jana at That Artsy Reader Girl. For the rules see her blog.

The topic this week is Bookish Places I’ve Visited (Share all the cool places you’ve been that are bookish or tied to books! This includes neat libraries, book stores, places featured in books, places inspired by books, author homes/places they’ve stayed, etc. You can also share your bucket list of the bookish places you’d like to visit someday.) (submitted by Susan @Bloggin’ ’bout Books)

Jane Austen

Several years ago I visited Winchester where Jane Austen spent the last six weeks of her life. She died on 18 July 18i7 at the age of 41 with her sister Cassandra by her side.

Jane Austen’s house, Winchester

She was buried in the north aisle of the nave in Winchester Cathedral. A dark marble floor stone marks her actual burial site.

Agatha Christie lived in several houses during her lifetime, including Winterbrook House, near Wallingford, in Oxfordshire. She and her husband Max Mallowan bought the house in 1934 and it was where she died in 1976. It’s not open to the public but you can view it from the road, which I did in September 2009. I wrote about my visit in this post. You can read more about Wallingford and her life there on the Agatha Christie website.

Winterbrook House

Smailholm Tower is a four-storey tower house on a base of volcanic rock, a stark feature on the skyline between Kelso and Selkirk in the Tweed Valley. Sir Walter Scott’s grandparents lived here and he lived at Smailholm for a while with his grandmother and Aunt Janet after he’d had polio because they thought the fresh country air would be good for him. It was his aunt who told him tales of the Border countryside which gave him his passion for folklore and history. This isn’t far from me and we’ve visited it several times.

Bateman’s, near Burwash in East Sussex was the home of Rudyard Kipling from 1902 until his death in 1936. The photo above is the front cover of the National Trust guide book showing Kipling’s study, which according to the guide book was not how he left it. He was a messy writer. He wrote on large blue pads and he and the desk would be covered in ink. At times his desk was chaotic.

Lamb House (now a National Trust property) in the medieval town of Rye – Henry James lived here from 1898 until the autumn of 1914, when he moved to Cheyne Walk in London and deeply moved by the events of the war he became a British citizen. Rye House dates back to 1722-3 when the old house was rebuilt. It was here that James wrote The Wings of the Dove, The Ambassadors and The Golden Bowl. He had many visitors, established writers of the day including Edith Wharton. It has a lovely walled garden and it was in full bloom when we visited it.

E F Benson also lived here from 1919 – 1940. He used the house as the model for ‘Mallards,’ the home of Miss Mapp in his Mapp and Lucia novels (with Rye itself disguised as ‘Tilling’).

Rumer Godden, also lived here from 1967 to 1974. She wrote many volumes of poems, short stories and children’s fiction including The Diddakoi in 1972, which was awarded the first ever Whitbread Children’s Book Award. Godden lived at Lamb House from 1967 until 1974 and is buried in Rye.

West Street – Lamb House at the far end

Nottingham – D H Lawrence – We visited D H Lawrence’s birthplace at Eastwood, 8 miles from Nottingham. 8A Victoria Street is the house where Lawrence was born on 11 September 1885 and I think it is a fascinating place. The house was newly built when the Lawrence family moved there in 1883, one of several rows of houses built for the miners by the local colliery company, Barber Walker and Co. It’s a redbrick two-up, two-down standing in a row of terraced houses. The adjoining end terrace house is now a museum and shop.

D H Lawrence Birth Place
D H Lawrence Birth Place Museum

Rosslyn Chapel I first came across Rosslyn Chapel through reading Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code and was fascinated by it then. We’ve visited it twice, first on a cold windy day in March, which is probably the best time to go because on our second visit a few years later it was packed with visitors. It’s simply the most stunning building, packed with stone carvings. I was interested in all the mystery surrounding the carvings and their meanings and whether there really was a link with the Knights Templar. The guide book indicates that there were in fact connections – the carvings of the five-pointed star, the dove in flight carrying an olive branch, the floriated cross and the artichoke are all said to have Templar associations. But what struck me the most were the Mason’s Pillar, the Apprentice Pillar and the carvings of maize over one of the windows.

The Writers’ Museum, Lady Stairs House a 17th century house in Edinburgh, which I visited in 2010. This is a fascinating place full of things that belonged to Sir Walter Scott, Robbie Burns and Robert Lewis Stevenson. There are pictures, room displays containing Burns’s writing desk, Scott’s dining table and lots of memorabilia – including bibles, pipes and walking sticks.

I’ve been to Stratford- Upon-Avon many times, going to see plays at The Royal Shakespeare Company and spent visiting some of the houses where William Shakespeare lived, including his Birthplace, Nash’s House,originally owned by his granddaughter’s first husband and adjacent to it is New Place, which Shakespeare bought in 1597 and where he died in 1616. We also visited Hall’s Croft, which belonged to his daughter Susannah and her husband John Hall, an eminent doctor.

Shakespeare’s Birthplace

The Calamity Club by Kathryn Stockett

Published on by Margaret8 Comments

Penguin| 5 May 2026| 638 pages e-Book| Review copy| 4*

Fourteen years ago I read Kathryn Stockett’s first novel, The Help and loved it. I also watched the film and loved that too. So when I saw on NetGalley she’d written a second novel. The Calamity Club, I requested it and was pleased to find that I loved it, too, although maybe not quite as much as The Help.

Description on Goodreads:

In 1933 Oxford, Mississippi, Prohibition is on the wane, and the Great Depression is tightening its grip. Poor and rich folks alike have fallen on hard times, even as the old social order remains. For women on the margins, the options are few and the price of dignity and self-determination is unbearably high.

Eleven-year-old Meg, one of the unadoptable “big girls” at the Lafayette County Orphan Asylum, fights each day to keep her spirit unbowed. Birdie, unmarried and outspoken, has come to Oxford on a mission to ask her social-climbing sister to help the struggling family she’s left behind. And Charlie is a woman with a past, running low on luck but driven by fire, fury, and grit. When their fates converge, they come up with an audacious plan to take back control of their lives. Together, they form an unlikely sisterhood—but in a place and time where hypocrisy is rife, women’s freedom is fragile, and making an enemy can have dire consequences, will the price they pay for their outrageous risk-taking be too high?

My thoughts:

It took me a long time to read this book as it’s so long and detailed, with lots of characters and covering such emotive and serious issues. Maybe it could have been shorter, without losing any impact and it’s unevenly paced with slow sections that made the story drag at times. And I was surprised that the ending was so abrupt. Having said that the characters are wonderfully depicted, with depth making them really believable, especially Birdie, Charlie and Meg (although I wonder if she comes across as too adult for an eleven year old). The locations are well described, which really helped me as I don’t know the area at all.

The title tells you what you need to know. Set in 1933 during the Great Depression calamity follows calamity for all the characters; the miseries, pain and suffering are unrelenting right from the start as Meg enters The Lafayette County Orphan Asylum for Girls in Oxford, Mississippi. Her mother Charlie had gone shopping on Christmas Eve and never returned, leaving eleven year old Meg to fend for herself, until she was rescued by an unknown man – who he is is only revealed much later in the book. But this is not the end of Meg’s misfortunes as she is cruelly treated by Garnet Pitman, the head of the orphanage.

Birdie, meanwhile is living in Footely (a fictional small town) in the Delta, with her mother and sick grandmother. They fear they’ll lose their home as they are unable to pay the forty-three dollars they owe in property taxes. Her sister Frances has married Rory Tartt, a member of a wealthy family living in Oxford and Birdie travels there to ask for help. However, all is not right in the Tartt family and Birdie finds they’re unable to pay off a mortgage of  $2,754. Birdie then helps Frances and her mother-in-law as they try to raise the money to save the Tartt’s grand house as well as Birdie’s home.

What follows is truly remarkable, when Charlie comes up with a plan to raise the money through the Calamity Club she and Birdie set up in the Tartt’s house, employing a group of prostitutes. This could have developed into a farce, but it’s actually a story highlighting the hardships suffered by women at the hands of men and the Anti-Vice Leagues. So-called feeble minded women and those considered to be sexually promiscuous, were imprisoned and sterilized. Above all it’s a story of the women’s resilience, courage and determination to survive against all the odds. I loved it despite its length.

My thanks to the author and NetGalley for a review copy.

Classics Club Spin Result

Published on by Margaret8 Comments

The spin number in The Classics Club Spin is number …

which for me is Quartet in Autumn by Barbara Pym. The challenge is to read and review it by 4th October 2026. 

In 1970s London, Edwin, Norman, Letty and Marcia work in the same office and suffer the same problem – loneliness.

Lovingly and with delightful humour, Barbara Pym conducts us through their day-to-day existence: their preoccupations, their irritations, their judgements, and – perhaps most keenly felt – their worries about having somehow missed out on life as post-war Britain shifted around them

I’m looking forward to reading it because I’ve read two of Pym’s books, Excellent Women and A Glass of Blessings and thoroughly enjoyed both of them. And it’s a novella, so it won’t take me too long to read!