Books, books and yet more books

Jenni Mills - Buried Circle - very good novel with two inter-twined stories - from the 1930s and the present day. Set around the Avebury stone circle.

Georgette Heyer - A Blunt Instrument - body in the study and plenty of suspects not to mention a Bible quoting PC. Another case for Hannasyde and Hemingway.

Trisha Ashley - Twelve Days of Christmas - chick lit set around Christmas with widow Holly Brown coming to terms with her grief for her late husband. Serious issues but feel good factor too.

Veronica Heley - False Money - latest instalment in the Abbot Agency series. Cosy crime with interesting characters and fascinating scenarios.

Elizabeth Buchan - That Certain Age - two women sixty years apart - facing very similar problems in balancing their own lives with family life

Angela Thirkell - Wild Strawberries - I first read this book about forty years ago and had forgotten how good it is if you like reading about life for the upper classes in the 1930s. Her dialogue and witty descriptions raises this author's work above run of the mill novels.

M C Beaton - Death of a Gossip - first in the Hamish Macbeth series - good light reading.

Anna Dale - Magical Mischief - a children's book but still worth reading for adults - Mr Hardbattle's bookshop has been taken over by magic. We see drawing pins sending messages, a velour elephant which marches up and down a shelf, a step that turns to custard and books that rearrange themselves in the colours of the rainbow when no one is looking. Fun for any age.

Trisha Ashley, Angela Thirkell and Veronica Heley were books the rest were e-books.

Good book

I've just finished reading Elizabeth Buchan's Separate Beds. From the cover it looks like something light and frothy but it's actually quite serious and covers a great many problems faced by families today: falling out with nearly adult children, facing up to redundancy in middle age; female breadwinners, caring for children when parents are at work, looking after elderly relatives etc. Tom and Annie have three children - Mia and Jake, twins, and Emily. It is clear from the start of the book that Mia's abrupt exit from the family home five years ago is still having repercussions now and is the cause of the separate beds - actually separate rooms. But Tom's unexpected redundancy from a well paid post at the BBC throws the family into turmoil.

The house suddenly becomes overcrowded when Jake returns home with his small daughter Maisie and Tom's redundancy causes his mother Hermione to move in with them as her care home can no longer be funded. The small irritations of every day family life are recognisably real and even Hermione - the aged relative from hell - has her good points as well as her bad ones. I loved all the characters - faults and all - and wanted things to work out for them. The book provides no trite answers to the problems but shows clearly that family life is based on compromise. I enjoyed it and would recommend this author's thoughtful and thought provoking novels of family life and marriage.