The American Way of Death (1963) by Jessica Mitford

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Cover of The American Way of Death

I remember being fascinated by The American Way of Death when I had my Mitfordmania in 2008. Eagerly reading everything I could about this extraordinary family, it seemed so strange and unexpected that one of their many achievements was revolutionising the American funeral industry. How on earth did that factor into the lives of English socialites in the mid-20th-century?

I kept an eye out for a copy of the book, finally buying one in 2019. And it might have languished on my shelves forever, only an episode of Lost Ladies of Lit spurred me to take it off the shelf – and, gosh, what an unusual and excellent book it is. If you think that you aren’t interested in the mid-century funeral industry in the US, then let me tell you – you will be.

Here’s how it opens:

O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory? Where, indeed. Many a badly stung survivor, faced with the aftermath of some relative’s funeral, has ruefully concluded that the victory has been won hands down by a funeral establishment – in disastrously unequal battle.

Encapsulated in that paragraph is everything you can expect from Mitford throughout this book. The American Way of Death is characterised by a wry humour which makes it a constant delight to read, even when you are infuriated on behalf of those ‘survivors’. She is gently sarcastic in the direction of the bombast of the poe-faced men and women (mostly men) benefitting from other people’s grief, and she is driven by a sort of compassionate, righteous anger.

I have never organised a funeral, let alone one in mid-century America, and I have very little idea of what the process is – except for the bit involving the vicar. One of the features of growing up in a vicarage is that I often answered the phone to funeral directors, and they were always very pleasant and, indeed, jolly. (Incidentally, one of the strangest phone calls I ever took was a lady hoping to arrange funerals for both her parents – neither of whom were actually dead.)

Having said all that, it becomes clear from Mitford’s extraordinary research that undertakers in mid-century America (who were only recently adopting the term ‘funeral director’ that now seems so commonplace) were on the make. They confronted grieving families with the most underhand tactics of the secondhand car salesman, using the language of faith or duty to extort the most money possible from relatives at a moment when they were least able to defend themselves. Mitford spends much of the book exploring and uncovering what these tactics look like, from the layout of coffin (‘casket’) showrooms to the bending of the truth regarding laws around cremation or embalming. Indeed, you’ll get more details of embalming than you could ever have hoped for, including whether it does or does not impede the decomposition process.

Mitford is clearly winsome enough to have got plenty of funeral men to confide in her – sometimes in the guise of a grieving relative, sometimes more openly as a journalist. Alongside, she has done indefatigable research, gathering brochures, conferences notes and more in giving a full picture of the situation. The defences of the profiteers are pretty flimsy, and she exposes them as such:

The guiding rule in funeral pricing appears to be “from each according to his means,” regardless of the actual wishes of the family. A funeral director in San Francisco says, “If a person drives a Cadillac, why should he have a Pontiac funeral?” The Cadillac symbol figures prominently in the mortician’s thinking. This kind of reasoning is peculiar to the funeral industry. A person can drive up to an expensive restaurant in a Cadillac and can order, rather than the $40 dinner, a $2 cup of tea and he will be served. It is unlikely that the proprietor will point to his elegant furnishings and staff and demand that the Cadillac owner order something more commensurate with his ability to pay so as to help defray the overhead of the restaurant.

Mitford has such a way with words, and it is her style that keeps you reading. Being honest, the book can be rather repetitive. We know the premise and it doesn’t take long to get to grips with the broad trend of what’s going on. Her thoroughness means we see the industry from many different angles and perspectives, but The American Way of Death is endlessly interesting because of the compelling way she writes. What could have been a dry thesis often feels like a novel, peopled with bizarre characters – some good, many bad, and plenty of eccentrics.

One of my favourite sections was on florists – and specifically the increasing popularity of ‘no flowers please’ in funeral notices and obituaries. At the time of Mitford’s writing, the florists were up in arms. I have to quote in full this extraordinary letter, written to a local newspaper after a ‘no flowers’ request was printed:

We wish to express an objection to the reporting of an article concerning the death of —— as it appeared in a recent issue of your paper.

At the close of this article you reported, “The family has asked that flowers be omitted and any tribute be given to the Red Cross or to the Mary Endowment Fund.”

We feel it is not clean business or necessary in reporting a situation, for one business to express the opinion that another business can afford to be penalised in the light of charity. We do not believe in doing a good job of reporting it was necessary to include this paragraph, and the omission of this request would not have changed your ability of reporting his passing.

As a member of the Allied Florists of Saint Louis publicity committee, I know the Post-Dispatch has a generous share of our advertising funds, and the encouragement by your paper to ‘kindly omit flowers’ can hasten the day when the funds available for advertising could be so restricted that the newspapers of this community can lose that source of revenue they have been receiving.

It is not of my mind to question the wishes of any personal family. I naturally am puzzled as to why we florists have been selected as a business which can afford to do without a portion of their business at the expense of charity. I have yet to see a newspaper article on a paid obituary notice suggesting the omission of candy, liquor, cosmetics or tobacco, with funds to be forwarded to charity. It is only in the light of what I consider good business that I draw this to your attention.

This sort of thing scarcely needs any commentary! Mitford knows when to give people enough rope to hang themselves.

The American Way of Death is, of course, a snapshot of a particular time. Some of the things feel like they never caught on (does anybody say ‘cremains’ for cremated remains? Certainly I’ve never come across it) while some things feel irreparably embedded in Western culture. Apparently the publication of the book did lead to significant changes in the funeral industry, and a certain amount of outcry, but I suspect the creeping dominance of late-stage capitalism means some of the worst excesses have found their way back.

While the book was written as an exposé, it is so much more readable than you’d expect a 1960s exposé to be. We are no longer reading primarily as a way of understanding a public scandal – but it is fascinating as a cultural artefact and delightful as the work of a very funny, very persistent author. Come for the funeral facts; stay for the dry wit. What an unexpected classic.

#147: Quality vs Quantity and Two Books About Artists

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Douglas Bruton, Carolyn Trant, and quality vs quantity – welcome to episode 147 or Tea or Books?!

In the first half, we discuss quality vs quantity in our reading goals (inspired by this Guardian article). In the second half, we debate two books we picked from each others ‘Best reads of 2025’ lists – Blue Postcards by Douglas Bruton and Voyaging Out: British Women Artists From Suffrage to the Sixties by Carolyn Trant.

You can support the podcast at Patreon – where you’ll also get access to the exclusive new series ‘5 Books’, where I ask different people about the last book they finished, the book they’re currently reading, the next book they want to read, the last book they bought and the last book they were given. Sorry that I’m behind with posting those, but more are on their way…

And, of course, do get in touch at teaorbooks@gmail.com with any questions or comments!

tea or books logo

The books and authors we mention in this episode are:

The Spring House by Cynthia Asquith
The Spring Begins by Katherine Dunning
The Party by Tessa Hadley
The Greatcoat by Helen Dunmore [is the novel I was trying to remember!]
All My Sons by Arthur Miller
O, The Brave Music by Dorothy Evelyn Smith
Freida McFadden
If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller by Italo Calvino
The Mushroom Tapes: Conversations on a Triple Murder Trial by Chloe Hooper, Helen Garner, and Sarah Krasnostein
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
‘Master and Man’ by Leo Tolstoy
A Winter Away by Elizabeth Fair
Moominland Midwinter by Tove Jansson
The Tenderness of Wolves by Stef Penney
Told in Winter by Jon Godden
The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey
Winter in Thrush Green by Miss Read
Emma by Jane Austen
Life After Life by Kate Atkinson
The Long Winter by Laura Ingalls Wilder
Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill
The Hours by Michael Cunningham
Hope Never Knew Horizon by Douglas Bruton
The Dutch House by Ann Patchett

StuckinaBook’s Weekend Miscellany

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I recognise that, at the time of writing, the weekend is almost over – and somehow it is only my third post in February. It has been a busy year so far! I hope you’re having a good month – I’m pleased to say there are finally signs of spring in the air, and I even have a window open (albeit also a heated blanket). For the final hours of the weekend, here is a book, a blog post, and a link…

1.) The link – I enjoyed this Guardian article on reading targets, with quotes from a wide range of philosophies (and pics of the darling of Book YouTube, Jack Edwards, who seems like a wonderful advocate for reading. And followed me on Twitter back when I had a Twitter account, y’all).

2.) The blog post – is actually a video, forgive me. Ages ago I filmed with Shawn from Shawn Breathes Books about a book we both love: O, The Brave Music by Dorothy Evelyn Smith. And now you can watch our hour-long chat in the video below!

3.) The book – speaking of British Library Women Writers, I have now spotted a cover in the wild, so I’ll make a little announcement! It’s been a long time (too long) since we had a new novel in the series – but there will be one in June, and it’s the wonderful The Spring House by Cynthia Asquith. You can preorder in the usual places, and have a gander at what I thought of the book when I read it in 2024.

P is for Panter-Downes

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This is part of an ongoing series where I write about a different author for each letter of the alphabet. You can see them all here.

My incredibly occasional look through the alphabet is picking up again at P! I don’t even want to think about how many years I’ve been doing this series for, considering I initially imagined it would only take a few months.

ANYWAY, today we are looking at Mollie Panter-Downes – which wasn’t the hardest choice in the world, since there aren’t many authors beginning with P that have lots of books on my shelves.

How many books do I have by Mollie Panter-Downes?

I have nine books by Mollie Panter-Downes at the moment, and I used to have ten (but passed on At The Pines after reading it, as it sadly wasn’t my cup of tea). Nine doesn’t sound like many, but I think she only wrote ten books – and, believe me, tracking down The Chase, Storm Bird, and The Shoreless Sea isn’t the easiest thing in the world.

How many of these have I read?

All but one of them – just Ooty Preserved remains unread on my shelves. Actually, now I write that, I think perhaps I never read Good Evening, Mrs Craven – one of the short story collections reprinted by Persephone.

How did I start reading Mollie Panter-Downes?

It might have been Minnie’s Room, but I suspect it was One Fine Day. But I certainly first heard of her because of Persephone reprinting her stories.

General impressions…

Would you believe – when I first read One Fine Day, I was rather underwhelmed by it. I was 18, and it was the summer before university. And perhaps I just wasn’t old enough for it? I’ve since re-read it and recognise it as one of the great novels about life immediately after the Second World War – and potentially just one of the great novels altogether.

As for the rest of her writing… London War Notes is absolutely brilliant, on the non-fiction front. It is MPD’s journalistic take on the Second World War in London, written for a contemporary audience in America. It’s fascinating to see the slow progression and changes of wartime experience, with enough contextualising detail to make sense.

And her other novels… well, they’re a mix of fun, silly, and frustrating, to different levels. The best of the rest is definitely My Husband Simon, which is now a British Library Women Writers title – but there is no doubting that One Fine Day is her masterpiece.

A new biography of A.A. Milne

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You may well know how much I love A.A. Milne. I wrote all about it back in 2014, and he is such an instrumental part of me establishing my literary taste and discovering what being a bibliophile and book-hunter looked like. And so I was excited to learn that Gyles Brandreth had written a new biography of Milne – and of Winnie-the-Pooh, so goes the subtitle. Called Somewhere, a Boy and a Bear, it is clearly intended to charm an audience more invested in Winnie-the-Pooh than Wurzel-Flummery or Chloe Marr. On whatever front, I was ready to be charmed – and Mum and Dad got me a copy for Christmas.

Brandreth has written a fair few books, but I’d say he is best known in the UK as a sort of cultural curio. He turns up on breakfast TV shows or Celebrity Gogglebox wearing jumpers with teddy bears on them, and says posh, eccentric, kindly things. You can easily imagine that he would love everything connected with the 100-acre wood with the same upper-class simplicity that he probably approaches toast and marmalade, or going to Lords. (He was a Conservative MP for five years, but we won’t hold that against him. It was probably inevitable.)

And so, what sort of book has he written? It is much more focused on Milne than I’d anticipated – it goes through his childhood, his unhappiness at school, his happiness at university, his dizzyingly early achievements as a sketch-writer, comic essayist and playwright. We tread the path through his wartime experience, his sudden and brief success as a detective novelist before the children’s books dominate – and then we wind down on his gradual fading from literary grandeur.

Winnie-the-Pooh et al certainly get plenty of the book, but less than I’d expected – and I was quite grateful about that. Brandreth hasn’t shunted the rest of Milne’s career to the sidelines to give the children’s books unparalleled attention. Rather, he considers them as part of Milne’s long and often-glittering literary reputation. The only exception to this is the way that he intersperses otherwise unrelated sections with quotes from the Pooh books, slightly awkwardly placed in boxes in the middle of the text.

As a Milne aficiando, there wasn’t anything new to me, but I still loved reading it. Brandreth writes with an ease and affection that is infectious. He has clearly read everything he could get his hands on, and it’s evident which works particularly chimed with him – he returns to Chloe Marr quite often, for instance. But… it really is just an affable rehash of Ann Thwaite’s magisterial biography A.A. Milne: His Life. I did wonder if that was why it has no formal referencing – because the source of almost everything he writes is almost certainly Thwaite’s book. It’s a bit of a pity that, 35 years later, there is nothing new to add – but that’s probably because of the sort of writer Brandreth is.

Brandreth is an enthusiast – he is not a researcher. The only new things he brings to the book say more about the world he lives in, because the novel material comes from friendship with Christopher (Robin) Milne. He doesn’t hide this, nor is he needlessly showy about it – he simply shares discussions and perspectives that Christopher Milne shared with him. This largely came when Brandreth was putting together a play, Now We Are Sixty, though it does sound like it flourished into a friendship rather than simply a fleeting professional relationship.

“We were so close,” Christopher told me, “until I left school and beyond, until after the war, really.” Father and son had sport, nature and mathematics in common. Alan delighted in his boy as once he had delighted in his brother.

One presumes that Brandreth is turning to old notes, rather than remembering conversations of many decades earlier.

This is not an insignificant contribution – it takes the book more into the territory of the friend-of-the-family memoir, which is a genre I greatly enjoy, even if Brandreth is certainly on the peripheraries. And it’s a good job that he brings his individual charm to the tone, because otherwise (besides the lack of new material) there are a few things that would otherwise make Somewhere, a Boy and a Bear feel a bit howlery. It seems rather rushed and repetitive – as one example, he is unable to mention Milne’s brother Barry without rehashing that Milne didn’t like Barry but did get on with Barry’s wife. It is probably repeated six or seven times. And then there are unforgivably bad sentences like this:

Boldly, for this feature, in June 1902, for the special May Week issue of The Granta, Alan wrote about the soon-to-be-crowned new king, Edward VII, who had succeeded his mother, Queen Victoria, on her death in January 1901.

How fast do you have to be rushing a book out to let that comma-strewn monstrosity get through? He also has a habit of this sort of chatty, decisive tone, that feels a bit like listening to a self-styled expert in a bar:

When Alan first met the young woman he was destined to marry, he was delighted to discover that she could quote episodes from The Rabbits line by line. Perhaps that’s why he married her. Seriously. He liked that. He liked it very much.

I know I’m singling out suspect sentences, but this isn’t intended as a censure. I only mention them to explain the sort of book this is: it’s a chatty, charming book about an author I love, written by someone who shares that love. Somewhere, a Boy and a Bear is not the work of a biography exploring new territory. It’s a bibliophile sharing his enthusiasms. And, you know what, that was exactly what I was in the mood for.

Turn Again Home (1951) by Ruby Ferguson

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I bought Turn Again Home (1951) by Ruby Ferguson when I was in Inverness a couple of years ago – largely on the strength of having enjoyed Lady Rose and Mrs Memmary about 20 years ago, but… I think I’d have bought a book with this cover regardless of who wrote it. This illustration sums up more or less everything I’m looking for in a novel. A big old house, clearly falling apart? Some people in period clothing who are clearly drawn to it? Yes pleeeease. I was prompted to put it closer to the top of my tbr pile when Gina reviewed it so glowingly.

As it turns out, the house plays a relatively minor role in the novel. But it is perhaps emblematic of what the characters are experiencing: Wright, Vida, Hope and Daphne are travelling back to the northern mill town where they grew up. The fictional town of Hockworth, in West Riding of Yorkshire, is dominated by the mill and its industry, and hints of modernity have done little to change that. But for these four siblings – technically three siblings, because Daphne is a sort-of-adopted-but-not-actually addition to the family – Hockworth is a distant memory. They have all left home behind, and only their brother Haigh remains in Hockworth.

Four of the people who stood waiting and shivering on this February afternoon, while the Bradford to Hockworth local train seemed as though it would never come, had a look of being out of place in their surroundings. It was difficult to say exactly how they were unlike their fellow-passengers, for the difference was subtle, and might be described as the look of metropolitans among provincials. On the man and the three women who paced the platform and occasionally glanced anxiously at wrist-watches, you could see overlaid, like the patina on old furniture, that something which was London and which Snebley Heights – never fear! – recognised and scorned. Their clipped voices, borne on the wind, were like the voices of foreigners.

The reason they’ve all travelled back is for an inheritance from their grandmother. The house on the cover, though I was sad by how little time we spent in its environs. But that is because there was so much else to pack into the story…

The four characters are drawn in slightly broad brushstrokes. Vida and Daphne are fashionable, smart women married to wealthy men, and who most openly look down on Hockworth. Vida is sharpest and most disdainful, and Daphne is something of a shadow of her – she reminded me of the way Kitty emulates Lydia in Pride and Prejudice, though what is being imitated is different. Wright is a bachelor too busy with London business to have time for family, and similarly considers his father’s mill-ownership to be rather provincial and very old-fashioned. Hope’s name is rather on the nose, because she is the optimistic, kind one. Working as a teacher, she is the only one with residual fondness for their home.

I’ll be honest – halfway through Turn Again Home, I was a bit disappointed. It was enjoyable enough, and the writing was good, but the characters were a bit one-note. I could see exactly where this sort of story was going. It seemed inevitable that, one by one, they’d be beguiled by nostalgia and the honest goodness of provincial folk, letting their London airs and graces fall away. It was particularly predictable to have all their old servants, and other working-class characters, be mindlessly delighted to see them again. Every working-class figure in Turn Again Home seemed to exist only to hero-worship the memory of the upper-class characters, without a streak of any negativity or individuality in them. I was enjoying the book, but wasn’t very impressed by it.

And yet… things changed. And I think that was largely the introduction of Jessie. For a chapter or so, we are fully back in the past – in the ardent, forceful courtship of Wright with Jessie, the daughter of a mill-hand. Wright’s parents are not snobs – the community seems to be far better integrated than would be possible in a larger town – but they don’t trust his youthful infatuation to last, and they know that Jessie will be the one to suffer. And they are right.

When Wright and Jessie meet again, in present day, we see a much more interesting character than any of the other working-class people. Or, indeed, than any of the upper-class ones. Her mix of regret, contentedness, dignity, and reproach is done extremely well. The strongest of the stories in Turn Again Home is about the ways Wright will or will not be able to reconnect with the woman he wronged.

Once I’d been hooked on that story, the others got me too. I was right in one respect – of course the honest charm of Hockworth would overcome these London cynics – but I was wrong in others. It wasn’t as clear-cut as that, and there were moments of surprise in the narrative. More than that, though, the characters filled out. Their one-note responses to Hockworth revealed hidden depths and complexities, and the plot became extremely compelling. I raced through the final 150 pages, keen to know what would happen to each member of the family, and unsure whether I wanted reality or fantasy to dominate. Ferguson ends up finding a combination of the two that was much more satisfactory than I’d anticipated.

As Gina said, it’s not an easy novel to track down. I was very fortunate to find it in the wild. But it is on Internet Archive, if that is your cup of tea! I’ll certainly be open to reading more by Ferguson, should I be lucky enough to stumble across them, and will make sure I don’t judge the book too quickly.

Children at the Gate (1968) by Lynne Reid Banks

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Nobody immerses you in a world like Lynne Reid Banks. Given how devotedly I love The L-Shaped Room, it is curious how slowly I have read the rest of her works. But perhaps you’ve noticed one popping up here every year or so, and I’m enjoying getting more familiar with her wider work. I started with the ones set in the UK, since I always feel a little uneasy with a ‘Brits abroad!’ novel, particularly one from many decades ago – what sort of attitudes will it take for granted? I’d so much rather read about other countries from the perspective of someone from that country.

But Lynne Reid Banks has the honourable exception that she at least lived in Israel for a good number of years. And the protagonist of Children at the Gate (1968) is, like Lynne Reid Banks, an immigrant from a Western country – in the case of Gerda, Canada. Unlike Banks, Gerda is Jewish. And she has come to Acre (or Acco), Israel, following a recent divorce and a tragedy that we gradually piece together – one that has brought her to the brink.

Gerda’s only friend is Kofi, an Arab-Israeli man who is forthright and caring and suffering his own tragedies. He is easily the most lovable person in the novel, and Banks excels at creating men who are broken but kind – Kofi is like a stronger, more resilient version of Toby from The L-Shaped Room. He is, I suspect, something of authorial wish-fulfilment.

Reading a book set in the Middle East is, of course, a setting that comes with a lot of weight. Banks doesn’t skirt around the tensions between Israel and Palestine, or between Jewish-Israelis and Arab-Israelis, but because the novel is focalised through Gerda, the narrative shares her narrow view. Gerda, of course, knows a good deal about the geopolitical situation. But she is more immediately invested in her own life and her own hurts.

I don’t know how Banks does it, but she takes me totally into any world she creates. We wholly inhabit the buildings or rooms she describes. They become the whole world, and the reader becomes enveloped in the isolation and loneliness that Gerda experiences. It is largely self-inflicted, but that never made pain any easier to bear.

The square outside was pitch dark except for a paraffin lamp hissing high up on one of the arched galleries opposite. Our house has iron balconies but the rest of the square was built much earlier and has a kind of cloister with beautiful arches at first-floor level which goes round three sides of the square. I say ‘beautiful’ because at night they are – this is  Acco’s second self, her night-self, when all the day-smells are lifted from her and replaced by cool sea-winds drifting through her narrow alleys and flooding softly into the open squares; when darkness covers the dirt and squalor like snow, leaving only the shapes, the smooth outlines of domes and minarets against the stars, the perfectly balanced archways, the mysterious broken flights of stairs and half-open doorways, the cold but not unkind flare of a paraffin lamp showing a brief interior, its walls painted in grotto shades of blue and green and hung with prints whose cheap tastelessness a passing glimpse does not show.

Gerda is not satisfied with the life she has jumped into. It is really just an escape from a different, distant life that needed to be over. ‘I walked home through the maze of cobbled alleys and archways and squares. My loneliness was, for once, simple and uncomplicated.’ Banks is a pro at the short, sharp observation, and that reflection on her type of loneliness is not only accurate – it also tells us about the sort of self-analyst that Gerda is. She can be self-pitying at times, but she is the first to assess and berate herself.

I’m going to have to tell you a bit more of the plot, so stop reading if you want to get Children at the Gate and go in completely blind. But, to be honest, the cover and the title of the novel might clue you into something else that is going to happen. And it is the only really clumsy thing that Banks does in the novel. Because, suddenly, all the Gerda can think about is her desperation to have a child. It goes from something she hasn’t really considered to an all-devouring obsession.

Kofi is the man to help her. To save her (from herself, or from loneliness, or fear), Kofi convinces her to join a kibbutz. Lynne Reid Banks lived on a kibbutz and loves writing about them in her novels, often from the perspective of an outsider who finds themselves at odds to the environment. And Gerda is not an easy fit. Even among the other North Americans there, she doesn’t seem to slip into the role with ease. And things get yet more complicated when she ‘adopts’ a young girl called Ella. Her fast-track to motherhood is complete in one fell swoop – and the emotional response has to trail after it.

Of course I don’t know yet the full extent of what I’ve undertaken, but what fills me with anxiety is trying to analyse my own feelings towards her. I am obsessed with the need to make her well, to see her fat and laughing, to hear her chattering away to other children. I watch her by the hour, trying to imagine her with a head of curly hair, with an expression of happiness on her face. And I want her to turn to me. I want that desperately, that, even more than her health, is why I am really doing all this.

But do I love her? Do I love her? Or do I just want her to love me?

Adoption – even the informal sort that Gerda has undertaken – certainly should never be done as spontaneously and selfishly as this. Gerda has clearly adopted Ella to fill a hole she perceives in her own life, and Ella herself is something of an afterthought. And, yes, there are two children on the cover. A second ‘adoption’ follows, of Ella’s brother, and the young boy is violent, angry, fearful and has a vicious, jealous relationship with Ella. Both the siblings are Arab, and that adds further to the unstable dynamic of this new, chaotic family that is ruled by uncertainty. And yet, over time, the uncertainty becomes a sort of fierce love.

I shan’t go any further with the plot, but it is often fraught and often sad, and people behave unwisely and sometimes unkindly. But there is still somehow a force through it – the power of different kinds of love to overcome all the oppositions stacked in front of them. And maybe even the irrationality of love, and the damage it can bring in its wake, even if it comes from the best motives.

And, truth be told, it often doesn’t. Gerda is an immensely flawed character, and if you’re the sort of reader who gets frustrated at people behaving foolishly, then you’ll find Children at the Gate frustrating. But I think I loved it. Lynne Reid Banks creates characters who are so infuriatingly real that I can’t help care about them and want to know more and more about them. They are certainly all deeply interesting – and interesting is the best thing for a fictional creation to be, in my book.

Children at the Gate doesn’t have the life-affirming comfort that I unexpectedly found amidst the squalor of The L-Shaped Room, but it is still rich in life. It has power, vividness, and certainly demands emotional investment from the reader. I’m not sure I’d read it again, but it reaffirms my belief in Lynne Reid Banks’ unusual and sometimes uncomfortable brilliance.

Top Ten Tuesday: Authors I Discovered in 2025

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I haven’t joined in with That Artsy Reader Girl’s Top Ten Tuesday for an awfully long time, but I thought this week’s topic was really fun. Every now and then, I make more of a concerted effort to read books by new-to-me authors – and it often pays off brilliantly. In the past, discovering a new author I loved would send me off to read their entire backlist. Nowadays, it’s likely to send me off to buy their entire backlist, and it’s a matter of chance if and when I actually get to the others.

Some new-to-me authors are on my Top 10 of 2025 list anyway, so they’ll definitely make an appearance…

  1. Susanna Tamaro – Follow Your Heart was so beautiful, and captured a voice so perfectly, that I’m excited to read more. Particularly if others are also translated by Avril Bardoni.
  2. Douglas Bruton – I adored Blue Postcards, and I wasn’t entirely sure how that would translate into a book that wasn’t told in vignettes, since I have a particular fondness for that format. As the previous post shows, I needn’t have worried. He is definitely an author I’ll be tracking down everything by.
  3. Bernice Rubens – The Five-Year Sentence was just outside my Top 10 for the year, but she’s the author I’ve followed up on most. I now have five or six of her novels on my shelves, and need to make sure I actually read something else by her this year.
  4. Paul Auster – obviously I knew the name, but had assumed he wouldn’t be for me. Which, sorry to say, is usually my assumption for the Big White Men of American Literature. But I humbly admit I am wrong.
  5. Vincenzo Latronico – I’m putting him here, because I loved Perfection, but… I will also say that Perfection felt like a unique, ambitious gem. I am less certain than other authors on this list that it would translate to his other books.
  6. Gabrielle Zevin – a little after everyone else, I loved Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow – and it is the sort of compelling storytelling that I would very happily follow to another book.
  7. Preston Sprinkle – as well as having an amazing name, Sprinkle is my new favourite theologian / Christian writer. I read quite a few of his last year, and his compassion and wisdom are inspiring.
  8. Harry Trevaldwyn – I started The Romantic Tragedies of a Drama King thinking that it would be a memoir, but it was actually very, very funny YA. Not my usual cup of tea, but would definitely read another.
  9. Sally Carson – like a lot of us, I was pretty blown away by the prescient Crooked Cross. I’m glad to say the first sequel is being published by Persephone Books this year.
  10. Verity Bardgate – I read a couple of her sharp, dark, funny, strange novels last year – Tit for Tat and No Mama No. When I’m in the mood for something excoriating, I’ll definitely revisit her.

Hope Never Knew Horizon (2024) by Douglas Bruton

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You might have seen by now that Blue Postcards by Douglas Bruton was one of my favourite reads of the past year. Bruton himself happened to stumble across me talking about it, and very kindly sent me a copy of Hope Never Knew Horizon (2024) – and I loved that one too!

There are three threads to the novel, and it took me a long time to work out how they could possibly relate to each other. If you’d like to maintain that mystery, then maybe skip some of this review – and it wouldn’t have been a mystery to me if I’d properly remembered the note that Bruton sent me alongside the book. I hope he won’t mind me quoting from it.

The genesis was this: “I wanted to write something filled up with hope.” And then…

I stumbled across two people messaging back and forth online, discussing a programme they had seen on the TV about the blue whale skeleton in London’s Natural History Museum and how it had been taken down and restored and rehung; and it had been given a name: the blue whale skeleton was not called Hope!

Then I remembered a poem by Emily Dickinson: ‘Hope is a thing with feathers’ […] And, finally, I recalled a painting I had seen in my early twenties, a painting by G F Watts and it had held me captive for twenty minutes or so when I knew nothing about art, and it was called ‘Hope’.

Three contributions to art or science – three places where the term ‘Hope’ came to the fore. There are no other connections (in reality, at least) between any of the people related to these three creations. But reading them alongside each other forms a curiously moving tapestry of human curiosity, emotion and, yes, hope.

When Ned Wickham is deeper in his cups than any man has a right to be, he tells the story of the Wexford Whale and like I said before he is not ever to be believed. In the weeks and months after, the story grows arms and legs and runs crazy through the streets, hollering with its arms waving above its head. Ned tells how he single-handedly wrestled the whale into submission, up to his knees in the briny, and then took its life with all the heroism fitting of a sabre-wielding cavalryman at the Battle of Waterloo.

Ned is an ordinary, working-class man who knows the sea as well as the land. He does not single-handedly do anything regarding the whale, except he does find it on the shore and is ultimately paid a small amount by the crown for this discovery. It is the first step of many in the whale’s posthumous journey, and it is the only story of the three that is narrated by many different people – starting with a woman who may or may not have a future with Ned.

On we go, through years and years, as the whale skeleton is bought and sold, cleaned and constructed, and hangs high up in the ceiling of the British Museum. Each voice is captured beautifully for however long it is on the page, and Bruton sees so much in the many invisible stages behind a public spectacle.

Next we have perhaps the most famous figure in the novel: Emily Dickinson. Or, rather, we have her servant, Margaret. Her first words are ‘Sure but Miss Emily thinks no one knows’. Dickinson has more than one secret, but the key among them is her deep love for the woman destined to marry her brother. They surreptitiously send letters to one another, and this has a firmer basis in fact than some other elements of Hope Never Knew Horizon, because a volume of letters from Dickinson to Susan Huntington (though not the replies) has been published. It may have been secret from the world, but servants don’t miss anything. What makes Margaret’s perspective so compelling is her investment in the relationship, and in Miss Emily’s happiness, even while she doesn’t fully understand all the implications. She has all the hope that Emily can’t bear.

‘Open me carefully,’ Miss Emily’d written at the bottom of the page. And the letter was to Susan Huntington, ‘Dear and darling Susie,’ she’d wrote. And ‘open me carefully’ and not when anyone is by so that it is a secret just between Miss Emily and Miss Susan, ‘cept now I know and my heart yearns and I look for the postboy now, as much as Miss Emily does, and I wonder where on earth he can be with his dillying and dallying, and I am a little cross when he does turn up and there is nothing for Miss Emily.

Third and final is Ada, an artist’s model known professionally as Dorothy Dene. I will confess that I had not heard of ‘Hope’, the painting by Watts, a detail of which is on the cover. Her introduction shows us the sort of plucky woman she is:

Men’s hearts are so easily won. Just a carefully timed dip of my head, a look that holds his and then lets it go again and a way of shaping the mouth so the lips almost make one half of a kiss, needing only his lips to complete the act.

Ada is another working-class character, making a precarious living in a world of men who are more powerful than she is – yet she holds her own power over them. As with the other characters in the novel, she is on the peripheries of renown and spectacle, though obviously more present than the others by appearing in the painting. But she is very much the subject rather than the artist, despite her self-possession and confidence. Her story becomes one about love and different kinds of love, and what the relationship between artist and subject can be.

Hope Never Knew Horizon would be an interesting novel if it were ‘just’ an unusual slant on three notable moments in British cultural history, told by people (real or invented) whose names are not the sort to be recorded for posterity. But what elevates it above that is Bruton’s extraordinary writing. I do not know how he does it, and I would think it impossible to analyse, but he breathes humanity into his prose with every sentence. That is his special gift: humanity. These are not just characters who are vivid and vital. They are creations whom the author clearly respects, dignifies, and loves.

And, yes, This is somehow a book suffused with hope. There is no heavy-handed moral, or perhaps a moral at all. But I ended it feeling greater hope about the world and the people who populate it. In his note, Bruton wrote “I wanted to write something filled up with hope.” Even after reading two books by him, I can see that that sentiment is quintessentially Bruton. Hope Never Knew Horizon is special and beautiful. If I didn’t have a rule about only including one book by any author on my end of year lists, it would have been a strong candidate for the top 10. I am so looking forward to continuing exploring Bruton’s work, and thankful to have discovered it.

Others who got Stuck into it:

“By the time I started the third story, a mere 22 pages in, I was gripped, transported to that extraordinary utopia of fiction where life is more vivid and meaningful than ordinary reality.” – Victoria

“Douglas Bruton’s haunting writing is the kind that changes you once you’ve read it; this is a truly original and wonderful book and I can’t recommend it enough.” – Karen

“Bruton’s writing is strikingly beautiful, his storytelling captivating and his theme is one close to my heart.” – Susan

The Dutch House by Ann Patchett

StuckinaBook All , , 20 Comments

Sometimes, reading a book that everyone was reading a few years ago can make you feel more behind the times than reading something from a century ago. I knew about The Dutch House (2019) by Ann Patchett, of course, since it won any number of awards and appeared in lots of best-of lists – but I didn’t really know any details, and for some reason it hadn’t appealed. Thank goodness for book group selecting it. Now that I’ve read it, I can certainly see what all the fuss is about.

The first time our father brought Andrea to the Dutch House, Sandy, our housekeeper, came to my sister’s room and told us to come downstairs. “Your father has a friend he wants you to meet,” she said.

“Is it a work friend?” Maeve asked. She was older and so had a more complex understanding of friendship.

Sandy considered the question. “I’d say not. Where’s your brother?”

That’s how The Dutch House opens, and it is our introduction to the family unit living in the house in question. The narrator is Danny, Maeve’s brother, and he is hiding behind the drapes, eavesdropping. The house itself is hard to grasp. I’ve often mentioned that I don’t have a ‘mind’s eye’ for picturing visual descriptions, so I always struggle with that sort of thing, but I struggled here to even have a sense of its size. There are a handful of small bedrooms – but a ballroom on the third floor. It was built for a Dutch family with ornate mouldings and lavish features, but is clearly quite modern and on a street soon crowded with other buildings and a short driveway. I suppose almost all neighbourhoods in America are modern to British eyes.

To go back to that opening, Andrea will eventually be their new stepmother – an unwelcome addition to the household, who seems to make no effort with her boyfriend’s children and see them as an affront on her new position and home. She is young and beautiful, and perhaps that is why Danny and Maeve’s father has chosen to marry her. Danny, the narrator is looking back from several decades in the future, merging his eight-year-old experience with the understanding of a middle-aged man, but in neither iteration is he particularly good at recognising the motivations of others. It often doesn’t seem to cross his mind. Their mother has disappeared – Danny can scarcely remember her – and none of their questions about her whereabouts are satisfactorily answered. They assume she is dead, but if she is alive then her deliberate absence is a kind of death to them.

Much of the first section of the novel is about the unspoken war between Andrea and Danny/Maeve. It is only after two years of Andrea being a regular visitor to the house that they discover she has two daughters of her own, younger than they are.

Nearly two years into her irregular tenure, Andrea walked in the house one Saturday afternoon with two small girls. Say what you will for Andrea, she had a knack for making the impossible seem natural. I wasn’t clear about whether it was only Maeve and I who were meeting her daughters for the first time, or if the existence of Norma and Bright Smith was news to our father as well. No, he must have known. The very fact that he didn’t look at them meant they were already familiar.

This passage is an excellent example of what Patchett is doing so cleverly throughout the novel. As well as some incisive turns of phrase – ‘a knack for making the impossible seem natural’ – it shows how she interweaves Danny’s different perspectives across time. At the forefront is the 10-year-old who thinks his father might not have known about his potential stepdaughters – followed by the older man realising how absurd this remembered confusion is – then followed, again, with a striking memory that supports his more recent understanding of the situation. Patchett is a subtle, sharp writer, and it is extraordinary how she manages to keep the sensibilities of young and old on the page at the same time. All tied together with Danny’s lack of self-awareness. We gradually realise, as the novel continues, how little he truly understands of almost anybody else in his life – regardless of whether he cherishes them or despises them. His flaws are so unspoken that it takes a while – it took me a while, at least – to recognise that is an unreliable narrator. Not because he lies, but because there is so much he doesn’t know, often without realising. (Incidentally, it felt like such a female voice – particularly in the opening chapters, where I had to keep reminding myself that it was a brother, not a sister, narrating. I don’t know why I kept thinking it was a girl speaking, but others at book group agreed.)

I started the novel thinking that it was fine – relatively well-written, ordinary enough. Somewhere along the way I was totally beguiled. Without noticing quite when, I was immersed and filled with admiration. This is the real deal.

Through Danny’s eyes, we see him and his sister grow older. Maeve is away at college – during which, Andrea moves her things into the attic bedroom. Losing her beloved windowseat, and doing so uncomplainingly, is one of the great wounding moments of literature. It reminded me of Jo March’s stories being burned, though Maeve’s response is certainly much more subdued.

Alongside this, Danny is figuring out his future. His father is a property tycoon, buying and selling commercial and residential buildings, and this is the world that Danny longs to join. Maeve clearly has a brilliance with figures, but it is not expected that she shall do significant further education or join the family business. I never worked out the timeline of the novel, but we must be somewhere around the mid-century, or a bit later.

I don’t want to spoil any further events in the novel, but it covers decades of the brother’s and sister’s lives. Tragedy and the selfish behaviour of others shapes the direction of their lives – but their own pettiness and hubris play their parts too. Danny’s marriage and children are a significant part of the latter stages of The Dutch House, but there is one true romance at the heart of the book. ‘Romance’ is probably the wrong word, but I mean it in a sexless way: Maeve is always the focus of Danny’s attention and care. She is the most interesting character in the novel because she is the most interesting character in Danny’s life. He never states it outright, but her wisdom, kindness, and determination are sacred to him.

Which is not to say they never argue. Arguing is their main form of communication. Patchett writes an adult sibling relationship so well in The Dutch House – the sort of relationship that is central to many people’s lives, but seldom addressed in fiction. There is a depth of dependence and trust between them, and a bond that cannot be equalled in any other relationship. It is beautiful, even when it is frustrating and occasionally unhealthy. She captures the sibling dynamic so perfectly in their quippy dialogue, which darts between openness and occasional secrecy. The depth of their care for each other means that some things are kept hidden, for the perceived benefit of the other. And, again, we gradually realise that there is a lot about Maeve that Danny has never truly understood.

I kept thinking that Maeve would be a better title for the novel. She is the narrator’s first and last consideration, even his obsession. She has played sister, father, mother, friend, mentor, and even the cover is a specially commissioned portrait that appears in the novel. But calling it The Dutch House is clever: it keeps the home in our thoughts, even when the narrative moves far from it. It gives the reader an expectancy that the house will return. The legacy of their upbringing is this strange, almost fantastical, home casts a long shadow over their lives. And for reasons they never fully understand, in their 20s and 30s they often return to the house – not to go inside, but to sit in a car outside, smoking and talking.

“This isn’t a stakeout. It’s not like we’re here all the time. We drop by every couple of months for fifteen minutes.”

“It’s more than fifteen minutes,” I said, and it might well have been more than every couple of months.

There is a sharp line later in the book, where Danny realises he is nostalgic not for their childhood, but for the times in the car outside their childhood home. Not for memory, but for memory of memory – filtered through his sister and their conversations.

There is so much in The Dutch House. Whole careers, marriages, twists that wouldn’t be out of place in a murder mystery, but which are played with an almost subdued thoughtfulness. Patchett reminded me of Barbara Kingsolver, or perhaps Carol Shields. Writers who are not reinventing the novel form or taking it into new, shocking directions – but are taking a traditional novel, focusing on characters and their development, and simply doing it with exceptional skill. She elevates the genre. That is Patchett’s real brilliance: to make her creations live so vitally and vividly that it feels important to witness their world.

I hope this doesn’t sound over the top, but few novels convey so successfully how monumental it is simply to live a life.