Spanning the architectural history of the country house from the disarming Elizabethan charm of South Wraxall, the classical rigour of Kinross in Scotland, the majesty and ingenuity of Hawksmoor’s Easton Neston, the Palladian sweep of Wentworth Woodhouse, with over 300 rooms and frontage of 600 feet, the imperial exuberance of Clandeboye, through to the ebullient vitality of Lutyens’ Marshcourt, the stories of these houses tell the story of our nation. All are the are buildings of the greatest architectural interest, each with a fascinating human story to tell, and all remain private homes that are closed to the public. But their owners have opened their doors and allowed Dan Cruickshank to roam the corridors and rummage in the cellars as he teases out the story of each house – who built them, the generations who lived in them, and the families who lost them.

Along the way he has uncovered tales of excess and profligacy, tragedy, comedy, power and ambition. And as these intriguing narratives take shape, Dan shows how the story of each house is inseparable from the social and economic history of Britain. Each one is built as a wave of economic development crests, or crumbles.

Each one’s architecture and design is thus expressive of the aims, strengths and frailties of those who built them. Together they plot the psychological, economic and social route map of our country’s ruling class in a rich new telling of our island story.

A Review By Frances SmithSeveral Scandinavian crime writers are now being discovered by British publishers and translated into English, one of the most successful being Jo Nesbo. The books are set in Oslo and Harry Hole is Nesbo’s dysfunctional detective. In Nesbo’s hands, Oslo, like the Oxford of Morse and the Edinburgh of Rebus, becomes a dark and threatening place, full of shadows and mysteries. The links in the chain are revealed to the reader only slightly more clearly than they are to Harry himself. As the tension builds, we, like Harry , think we are on the path to a solution when it suddenly turns in a new direction and confuses us once again. Harry Hole is a brilliant creation, always on the edge, an alcoholic just about in control, Oslo’s best detective but with a seriously flawed personality who only just hangs onto the job he loves and also hates.

The Snowman is not the first in the Harry Hole series, but is, probably the best known. Women disappear and outside the place they go from a snowman silently appears, sometimes just an ordinary snowman with a carrot nose and charcoal eyes, sometimes something more grotesque, such as the one with a severed human head instead of a snowball. Links between the missing women are found and then dismissed, various unpleasant characters emerge and Hole himself is also threatened. Wonderful stuff!

A Review By Frances Smith 

Set in London the week before Christmas in 2007, this story tracks seven characters through seven wintry days towards a seemingly inevitable crisis. The link in the chain is the circle line as it weaves its way through London, sometimes above ground with glimpses of suburban life, and sometimes diving below the surface into a mysterious world seen differently from the train driver’s point of view with the silver rails pointing towards the next station, the passengers merely seeing the dark walls with their almost invisible pipe work and occasional flashes of light. Sebastion Faulks writes beautifully and each of the seven characters is clearly drawn. We come to care about even the less pleasant ones, such as John Veals who was described by the Times critic as “brilliantly insidious” and the Independent as “deadly as a coiled rattlesnake”.

The nearest to a heroine is Jenni fortune, the underground train driver, but we also come to care about Finbar, the teenage son of wealthy parents who wants for nothing except the vital ingredients care and love. We follow a disaffected Muslim youth towards spiritual freedom and Spike, an international football star, recently transferred to a London club, struggling with the vagaries of the English language. The paths of the various characters cross, recross and sometimes meet as Faulks skilfully entwines the threads of the novel towards the seventh day and story’s end. Definitely recommended.

A Review By Frances Smith

Penny Freedman is the local author who was invited to talk about her book at the recent “Lock In” at Kenilworth Library celebrating World Book Night. This is her first crime novel and she plans to write more about some of the characters she introduces in “This is a Dreadful Sentence”.

With unashamed influences of well-known successful British crime writers, particularly Agatha Christie, this novel has many of the elements of the traditional crime story. There is a body, it is found in the library ( a college library, rather than that of a country house) and there are plenty of suspects and red herrings strewn around.

The amateur sleuth is the college English tutor, Gina Gray. Gina previously taught in the school where the detective leading the murder investigation, DCI David Scott was educated and she was in fact his English teacher for a while.

Although I enjoyed this book, rather too much time is spent on the back story of the various characters, particularly the family of Gina Gray. The fact that Gina teaches English as a Foreign Language to a group of students from a variety of cultural and linguistic backgrounds certainly adds an unusual touch. The unique structure of the English language and the problems this causes non-English speakers forms an important part of the plot, but the strained relationship between DCI Scott and Gina Gray is a rather obvious ploy to allow for future books.

Recommended for crime fiction lovers, I read this quickly and found the denouement satisfying if not particularly original.

This is quite a large book – 660 pages, and I was given a copy by Keith of Warwick Books on Friday evening as the shop was closing. Such is its power of fascination that by Sunday evening, I had read most of it. It’s genuinely one of those ‘can’t put it down’ books: hugely entertaining, impressively learned, really well written, in all a stonkingly good read. The Sunday Times calls it , “Tremendously entertaining”, whilst the Mail on Sunday says it is “Relentlessly and energetically rude”. Which may be typical Mail hyperbole, because it is not so much rude as immaculately researched and light-heartedly written.

The book begins with the Norman Conquest, which the author is keen to point out was a Norman (really a type of Viking, I suppose) rather than a French victory, and goes right up to the present day and a state visit to the United Kingdom by diminutive President Sarkozy, taking in some fascinating and at times slightly scurrilous stuff about WWI and II. In between there are ten centuries of what the French suspect to have been one long campaign by Perfidious Albion to irritate, annoy and infuriate them.

The English and the French are clearly members of the same family, because only members of the same family can get on each other’s nerves so much, and so deliberately, and so protractedly. Only members of the same family can at the same time love and hate one another so completely.

A great book. I loved it.