We review five books in this week’s Mirror Book Club’s rundown of the best reads in shops now.
Internationally acclaimed Irish-British author Maggie O’Farrell makes her first foray into historical fiction and the result is eloquent and moving.
Meanwhile Lee Child’s Jack Reacher is back in another violent and pacey thriller.
For all this and more, read on.
Hamnet, by Maggie O’ Farrell
Tinder Press, £20
It’s summer’s day in Stratford, 1596. A child calls out to his mother, older sister, grandmother, uncles, aunt, the maid, but no one is there.
And because of this temporary absence, a devastating tragedy unfolds that will break hearts, almost undo a marriage, and inspire Hamlet, one of Shakespeare’s greatest plays.
For the young boy in the doorway is Hamnet (a name that was interchangeable with Hamlet), son of Agnes and William Shakespeare. And now Hamnet will wander back upstairs to his twin Judith, who is sick with the plague, and lie down beside her.
This is Maggie O’Farrell’s first foray into historical fiction and her characters inhabit a beautifully evoked past but are entirely relatable in their joys and sorrows.
O’Farrell focuses her gaze on Agnes, an oddity in her family. She wanders the woods, understands the medicinal benefits of herbs and flowers, keeps bees, flies a kestrel.
William is tutor to Agnes’s young stepbrothers, and O’Farrell describes the delicious unfurling of their relationship. They marry and have children – Susanna, Judith and Hamnet. But the plague comes, Hamnet succumbs, and their world is ripped apart.
O’Farrell’s depiction of their grief is, at times, almost unbearable to read. Eloquent and moving, this is a painful literary pleasure.
BY EITHNE FARRY
Blue Moon, by Lee Child
Bantam, £8.99
Jack Reacher, fearless dispenser of rough justice, returns an envelope bulging with cash to its rightful owner, a frail elderly man called Aaron Shevick. When he learns Shevick owes a fortune to Ukrainian loan sharks, borrowed to pay for his daughter’s medical bills, he sets off on his latest mission.
Not content with tackling the Ukrainians, he also sets his sights on their deadly Albanian rivals. And, of course, he has an attractive stranger named Abby by his side. Violent but pacey – his fans will love it.
BY JAMES MURRAY
Redhead By The Side Of The Road, by Anne Tyler
Chatto & Windus, £14.99
Micah Mortimer is an obsessively tidy 43-year-old IT specialist who has an easy-going relationship with a similarly finicky schoolteacher called Cass.
Micah assumes they are both too devoted to their routines to move in together, ignoring Cass’s hints to the contrary. Then a teenage boy turns up claiming to be his son. Will it help Micah re-evaluate his life and save his relationship? Despite the minimal plot, I could not put this novel down.
BY JAKE KERRIDGE
To War With The Walkers, by Annabel Venning
Hodder & Stoughton, £10.99
This superb collective biography views the Second World War, through the experiences of one family.
Ruth, a nurse, worked with plastic surgeon
Harold Gillies; her medical student brother Harold was badly wounded in a German bombing raid; Air Ministry official Bee lost her husband in a plane crash; Walter was a Gurkhas commander in the Burma campaign and Peter was taken prisoner by the Japanese. A rewarding read.
by LEO McKINSTRY
The Turn Of The Key, by Ruth Ware
Vintage, £8.99
Rowan Caine spots an advert for a live-in nanny to three young girls in a remote part of Scotland. The Elincourts live in a house controlled by an app with cameras in almost every room.
But the book opens with Rowan in a prison cell, accused of murder and writing a letter to a barrister which will reveal why. What begins as a murder mystery morphs into a ghost story. A slightly unsatisfactory denouement aside, The Turn Of The Key is a cracking read.
BY PAUL DONNELLEY
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