Penguin

This is a gift of a cookbook! Great ideas for Every. Night. Of. The. Week!  Lucy Tweed is an Australian foodie writer and mother of three boys so she really gets that cooking for family can sometimes feel totally overwhelming in that relentless every-single-day kind of way.  She’s come up with a book full of quick, delicious dinners that’s actually great fun to use. Everything from family friendly fish curry to duck pancakes with some great sauces to perk up any dish.  Her write ups are chatty and friendly and so familiar.  I made the zucchini frittato for Sunday supper and it was DIVINE.  I’ve also made up a jar of her Herb Thickener which has been used on everything this last week – roast chicken, salad and fish cakes!  Follow her on Instagram on @everynightoftheweek

Penguin

Ooooo this book is as delicious as the Black Cake of its title!  I couldn’t put it down.

Eleanor Bennet is dead.  When her estranged children, Byron and Benny, arrive for her funeral the lawyer issues them with two instructions from their mother:

The first is to listen to a voice recording which begins: “Please forgive me for not telling you any of this before. Things were different when I was your age. Things were different for women, especially if you were from the islands.”  Over several hours of listening the siblings have the rug pulled from under them as they learn of a brave, strong-willed and adventurous woman they hardly recognise.

And the second is to “share the Black Cake (which she has left in the freezer) when the time is right”.

Evocative, colourful and mysterious, Black Cake is a story about how the inheritance of betrayals, secrets, memories and even names can shape a family for generations.  And of course, its a story about cake – it’s origins, it’s recipe and it’s healing power…  I gather that Oprah Winfrey has optioned the book for a TV series.  Its perfect for Netflix but do read it first!

Here I am raving about the book!

The Language Laundry

South African authors, Lucinda Hooley and Daisy Jones have been friends for years and back in the day they were avid letter-writers.  Re-reading these colourful letters from their youth inspired them to write a novel together and Love You Madly is the charming and nostalgic result!  It’s not their own story, it’s an entirely fictional story about two sisters, Mielie and Mare, who spread their wings in the early 1990’s.  It’s a story about growing up in Cape Town, moving to Joburg, working in London.  It’s a story of the right friends and the wrong men.  It’s a story of falling in love and finding your feet.  It really is delightful, plus there’s a complete bonus for the Jane Austen fans out there – the book is based on the Sense and Sensibility story: two sisters who fall in love with the wrong men.  It’s fabulous!  So much fun following and remembering Austen’s story line as you go along. As the authors say in the credits, they are forever grateful to Jane Austen “for her writing gift and her compassion for the girls who yearn”.

And oh, the memories this book brought back!!!   Do you remember mixed tapes made for you by a boy you fancied, the answering machine in the hallway, fold-up blue airmail letters, stamped envelopes, the miracle of email and waiting till Monday to get to the office to read the reply, not to mention the pure joy of receiving a handwritten letter?  Did you move to Joburg, jol in Rocky Street, eat at the Italian bistro in Hillbrow? Did you work in London in the early 1990’s, eke out a living, learn how to use the tube, and especially an umbrella? Are you up for a trip down memory lane?  Then this book’s for you!

And don’t you just LOVE the cover?

An engrossing read – flowing and funny and tender, chatty and lyrical. It casts a very shrewd eye on young love, social foibles, and getting through a certain time of life. It brought back a million memories. – Henrietta Rose-Innes

Michael Joseph

As I’ve mentioned before I adore Marian Keyes so I find it impossible to be objective about her books.  I always open up her latest expecting to LOVE it and I always do!  Again, Rachel is no exception, in fact, it might be up there as one of my favourites!

Having sworn she’d never write a sequel, this is Marian’s sequel to Rachel’s Holiday which you may remember was no holiday at all … back in the 90’s Rachel found herself in rehab with her life crumbling around her but now Rachel is back on track.  Her life is in order. She’s back in Dublin, she’s in love, she has time for her delightful family and she’s loving her job as one of the top councillors at the very clinic in which did her own rehab.  Life is good.  But then Luke, a great love from years ago, appears and the good life she has painstakingly built for herself seems to be on shaky ground.  Not again, Rachel??

Its deliciously funny, in that gloriously Irish way, but it’s heart-breaking in equal measure.  Marian is the master at creating characters we love, warts and all; flawed characters grappling with whatever life throws at them and still managing to hold onto their sense of humour.  I loved it!

Click here to see me twittering on about how much I loved it!!

If there’s a core theme in Again, Rachel, it’s that of forgiveness: forgiveness of oneself for human failings. Forgiveness for loved ones who don’t always behave in ways we might wish. Forgiveness for the adversities – seemingly perverse in their cruelty – that life sometimes throws at us. Again, Rachel has all of Keyes’s trademark wit, humour and whip-smart dialogue, but it’s also a novel teeming with compassion and redemption. – The Guardian

‘Keyes weaves the joy and pain of life in a unique and magical way’ – Cathy Rentzenbrink

Mantle (Pan Macmillan)

Nina de Gramont’s The Christie Affair is a most intriguing, clever and unputdownable novel of star-crossed lovers, heartbreak, revenge, and a real Agatha Christie-type murder as well as a brilliant re-imagination of one of the most talked-about unsolved mysteries of the twentieth century.  Here I am chatting about the book.

“The Christie Affair is a genuine marvel. An astonishingly clever novel that manages to be both a deeply satisfying mystery and a profoundly moving story about lost love and the many ways in which grief can shape one’s character. Full of unexpected twists and written in beautiful prose, The Christie Affair brilliantly answers a question that has haunted readers for years: What happened to Agatha Christie in the days she was missing? Nina de Gramont takes this thread of a story and weaves it into a rich and vibrant tapestry.” – Kristin Hannah, author of The Four Winds

Please read the author, Nina de Gramont’s explanation of the inspiration for her reimagined story, as told to Reece Witherspoon.

On the morning of December 3rd, 1926, Agatha Christie’s husband announced he wanted a divorce for the most heart-shattering of reasons: he planned to marry his mistress. Late that night, the thirty-six-year-old author’s Morris Cowley was abandoned at the lip of a chalk pit near her Berkshire home, her suitcase and fur coat still in the backseat. She was discovered eleven days later at the Harrogate Hotel, claiming amnesia, and registered under the last name of her husband’s lover.

There launched nearly a hundred years of speculation and imaginings, including a Dr. Who episode that identifies the cause of her disappearance as a giant alien wasp. “She never spoke of it until the day she died,” says Dr. Who.

Perhaps it’s all because the word “mystery” is so intrinsically associated with our beloved Dame. Where Christie went and what she did during those eleven days is less unknown than a century of guesswork would have us believe. As Jared Cade documents in his book Agatha Christie and the Eleven Missing Days, on December 4th Christie arrived at the precise place she would be found. She bought a new shawl, and took books out from the Harrogate library (mostly detective novels). Every day she ordered breakfast in her room, had a massage at 3:30, ate dinner in the hotel dining room, and even danced when the band played, “Yes We Have No Bananas.”

Meanwhile all of England was searching, a thousand police officers and hundreds of civilian volunteers. Hounds and even airplanes were employed, the latter for the first time ever in the hunt for a missing person. Most mornings Christie had a newspaper delivered to her room along with her breakfast, so she would have been well apprised of the nation-wide hunt. Can you imagine the horror, the embarrassment, for a proper Englishwoman, trained from infancy to never cause a fuss? No wonder the author, having ascended only a few rungs on the climb toward the unimaginable success she’d go on to achieve, feigned amnesia when she was finally discovered in her luxurious hideaway.

It’s not the story of most missing women, then or now. Think of Gabi Petito, the body discovered, the girl gone forever. For thousands of years, women have disappeared via violence – at the hands of strangers, or more often the men they loved.

The devastating stigma toward unmarried pregnancy has also caused countless disappearances. For decades women disappeared from schools, and from their hometowns. From their families and their jobs. One day they’d be sitting in a classroom, or laughing with friends, or walking hand in hand with a beau. Then, poof. Whatever happened to that girl? Don’t you remember her? Where did she go?

In America some went to Florence Crittenton homes. In England, to Clark’s House. In Ireland, a woman who’d given birth in a Catholic-run mother and baby home might find herself moved to a Magdalene Laundry, where she could toil as unpaid labor for the rest of her life. And some women didn’t go anywhere at all. They bled to death on butcher’s tables. They jumped off bridges.

As a respectable married lady, there was no chance Christie would be discovered in a home for unwed mothers. Authorities dredged a lake near her home – ominously called the Silent Pool – expecting to retrieve her corpse, flung into its dark waters in sorrow over her husband’s defection, or else by her husband’s hands. That’s the way most stories of missing women end.

Perhaps, then, it’s not Christie’s disappearance, and her lack of explanation beyond “I forgot” that captures our imagination. Perhaps it’s the glamour of her safe return. However Agatha Christie traveled away from that chalkpit, we can assume she was the architect of her own vanishment, as she went on to become the architect of her own, grand life.

Maybe, too, we’re intrigued by the glamour of keeping a secret so perfectly, for so long. Christie may have taken the train from London to Harrogate. But how did she get from that abandoned car to London? And why did she abandon her car and belongings in the first place? Why did she never make her whereabouts known when she must have been aware the whole world was searching?

Thanks to Christie’s ability to protect her own story, no fictional account can ever get close to the whole truth. We can invent a publicity stunt, a plan for revenge, a clandestine love affair. A giant alien wasp. But we’ll never really know.

One can’t help but imagine the novel Agatha Christie might have written – if it had been some other woman who went missing, and then returned – miracle! – safe, whole, and unharmed. Her whole glorious life ahead of her. 

The Christie Affair is the February Book of the Month for Reese’s Book Club (reesesbookclub.com)