A Review By Keith Smith

Incarcerated in a punishment cell by the Germans, Sgt Frank W Clarke of the Norfolks is slipping into insanity. He is saved only by dreams of the beautiful American Red Cross nurse who has vowed to marry him – and by harking back to his fishing diaries written before the War. Clarke is a victim of the sadistic Major Bach who is determined to turn the British NCO into a traitor.

The Sergeant fights Bach using all the canny qualities of the angler; patience, introspection, determination, ingenuity and self belief. The soldier’s diaries take him back to the Munster Blackwater, the Boyne, the Liffey, the Bandon and other Irish rivers and loughs. The diaries also embrace the Norfolk Broads, the Kennet, Hampshire Avon, Derwent, Bure, the Alne and the Wensum in late Victorian and Edwardian times.

The reminiscences of Sgt Frank W Clarke (7852) of the Norfolk Regiment provide an insight into the rigid class system that ruled before the old officer class perished in Flanders. An ordinary soldier’s story – told by his loving grandson – reveals at platoon and section level Clarke’s small part in one of the most significant battles ever fought by the British Army. “Not Quite the Gentleman” is a testimony to a lost generation now finally gone, but whom we should never forget and remember with pride.

Most people who met Frank Clarke, perhaps at the Crabmill at Preston Bagot where he helped out for many years, thought he was just a fisherman – but his diaries revealed there was more to this man. Clarke fought ferocious warriors as a mercenary in Africa, entertained black boxer Jack Johnson in the city of James Joyce, bowled ‘reverse swing’ – before it was officially invented, played rugby against future Irish President Eamon De Valera, led a bayonet charge at the Battle of Mons in 1914, saw the Angel of Mons while lying wounded in a field, experienced the love of two women – one who died on the Somme, one who saved his life, escaped down the Edith Cavell network – but was betrayed then tortured in a PoW camp, saved Irish soldiers from Roger Casement’s ill-fated Irish Brigade, stole a German fighter plane in an escape attempt, chose life over death as he lay dying of dysentery, and overcame adversity in a final twist to his War. “Not Quite the Gentleman” is a humble fisherman’s story, and an awful lot more. And by an author who lives and works locally in Stratford. Don’t miss it. I read it in one sitting..I could not put it down. Amazing stuff.

A startling encounter on a New York subway platform leads two strangers to a run-down tenement where a life-or-death decision must be made. In that small apartment, ‘Black’ and ‘White’, as the two men are known, begin a conversation that leads each back through his own history – mining the origins of two diametrically opposing world views, they begin a dialectic redolent of the best of Beckett. White is a professor whose seemingly enviable existence of relative ease has left him nonetheless in despair.

Black, an ex-con and ex-addict, is the more hopeful of the men – though he is just as desperate to convince White of the power of faith as White is to deny it. Their aim is no less than this: to discover the meaning of life. Deft, spare, and full of artful tension, ‘The Sunset Limited’ is a beautifully crafted, consistently thought-provoking, and deeply intimate work by a significant writer.

‘Nothing short of dazzling. So astonishingly affecting, so powerful, so stimulating!’ – “Chicago Tribune”.

Rebecca, Daniel, Alex and Isabel have been best friends since university. Rebecca married Daniel, Alex married Isabel and, for twenty years, they have been inseparable. But all that is about to change…When Alex walks out on Isabel, Rebecca thinks things can’t get any worse.

But then she finds out the reason why and she’s left harbouring a secret she’d rather forget…And there’s more upheaval to come in Rebecca’s life as her emaciated, neurotic, self-obsessed colleague, Lorna – her arch nemesis at work – suddenly becomes a regular feature in her social life. Rebecca’s once-happy foursome is now a distant memory and with hearts broken and friendships fractured, it seems that change is never a good thing. Or is it?

Patrick is a loner. An intelligent but disturbed young man struggling to find his place in the world. He ventures out on his own and as he begins to find happiness commits an act of violence that sends his life horribly and irreversibly out of control.

But should a person’s life be judged by a single bad act? ‘This is How’ is a compelling and macabre journey into the dark side of human existence and a powerful meditation on the nature of guilt and redemption.

Enter a vanished and unjust world: Jackson, Mississippi, 1962. Where black maids raise white children, but aren’t trusted not to steal the silver…There’s Aibileen, raising her seventeenth white child and nursing the hurt caused by her own son’s tragic death; Minny, whose cooking is nearly as sassy as her tongue; and white Miss Skeeter, home from College, who wants to know why her beloved maid has disappeared. Skeeter, Aibileen and Minny.

No one would believe they’d be friends; fewer still would tolerate it. But as each woman finds the courage to cross boundaries, they come to depend and rely upon one another. Each is in a search of a truth.

And together they have an extraordinary story to tell…