The Conductor by Sarah Quigley

The themes of her latest work suggest that New Zealand author Sarah Quigley has been communing with the artistic and historical ghosts of Berlin, her home for the past decade.

The Conductor is extraordinarily ambitious, and for the most part it succeeds. Its conceit is the survival, and importance, of artistic pursuits under extreme duress – how the human urge to make and create can triumph over the dark desire to dominate and destroy.

Quigley has chosen as her setting not the German capital but Leningrad, in the grim months of 1941 and early 1942, as the Third Reich conducted the fateful Operation Barbarossa to conquer Russia.

Her people – who grow smaller both literally and figuratively, as the enemy approaches and the siege of the city and the starvation of its citizens begins – are a small, endearing coterie of artists, some historical figures and some inventions.

She presents the Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich as a mid-30s workaholic who obsesses over his symphonies at the expense of his young family. At this time, Shostakovich was writing his renowned Seventh Symphony (nicknamed Leningrad), and combining periods of compulsive creativity with rest breaks in which, by Quigley’s description, he would down vodka with his close friend Ivan Sollertinsky, a professor at the Leningrad Conservatory and the competitive, egoistic artistic director of the city’s Philharmonic Orchestra.

A more fleeting appearance is made by Yevgeny Mravinsky, who by the time the novel begins has cemented the Philharmonic’s reputation as one of Europe’s greatest. Quigley glosses over the flight from the falling Leningrad of Mravinsky and his principal orchestra, choosing instead to devote much of the narrative to the superhuman efforts of Karl Eliasberg, who was left behind with the ailing members of the reserve orchestra and conducted the premiere of Shostakovich’s symphony.

Another plotline is more personal, following the travails of Eliasberg’s lead violinist, a widower who believes his young daughter, a talented cellist, to have died on her way to a safe haven outside the city.

At times, the intensity with which Quigley evokes her characters’ inner lives is reminiscent of the visceral, portentous prose of Edgar Allan Poe: unable to sleep for fretting over his professional responsibilities and the destabilization of Europe, Shostakovich, “his mind stretched as tightly as rope”, hallucinates the sensation of a rat running across his face – “rasping claws, a dragging leathery slither, a foul breath mixing with his.”

Later, she neither shies away from nor glorifies the horror of the siege, as food supplies run out and survival becomes a matter of cunning and a willingness to consume what others will not. Nikolai’s suspiciously healthy-looking neighbours are revealed to be capturing and cooking rats, while human bodies in the street, once disinterred from the ever-present snow, are found to be missing their fleshiest parts. These have been removed and eaten by others.

While the nature of the completed symphony is not Quigley’s concern – it was celebrated at the time as an impassioned, defiant response to Nazi militarism – her homage to the beauty and power of art, and to the value of courage, is her own, deserved triumph.

3.5 / 5 stars: A New Zealander’s account of European artistry and war.

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Hanging Hill by Mo Hayder

Disclaimer: I adore Mo Hayder’s writing – her twisty but never implausible plotting, her gimlet-eyed view of her jaundiced casts – and can’t claim to approach her work with a lack of bias. She is particularly noted for grisly frankness, which even by crime thriller standards is unusually confronting (her second novel, 2001’s The Treatment, had themes of paedophilia and other child abuse), and perhaps it is this, combined with the lack of self-conscious or artifice in her writing or characters, which makes her so compelling.

Unlike 2010’s Gone, part of her Walking Man series featuring several recurring characters, her new work Hanging Hill is a stand-alone novel which centres on the murder of a pretty young high-schooler in the historic English city of Bath. The girl’s body is found shortly after her failure to return from a daytime shopping trip. She is discovered with a tennis ball wedged into her mouth; two messages are scrawled on her bare torso in bright lipstick. The motive for the killing is unclear.

While this crime drives the plot, the real story, set up in a cryptic prologue involving a conversation at a funeral, is about two adult sisters, Zoe and Sally. As the tale unfolds, it emerges that Zoe and Sally have been estranged since childhood, following an event so traumatic that the girls’ parents determined it would be best to separate them forever, starting with different boarding schools.

The separation stuck, though the two remain in Bath, averting their eyes when they see each other in the street and keeping abreast of each others’ lives through the chance comments of mutual acquaintances. Zoe knows of Sally’s recent divorce – though not that its cause was her husband’s affair with their blowsy Australian au pair, with whom he now has a new baby – and Sally tracks Zoe’s career with the Bath police.

Both women bear heavy emotional and practical burdens. Zoe copes with the pressures of her job and a tentative affair with a colleague by self-harming, while Sally’s lack of financial acumen has her hovering just above penury. Both women are led by their choices and circumstances towards one another and, more precipitously, in the direction of Bath’s dark underbelly and some miscreants who have fetched up there (including a delightfully repellent big-time pornographer who inadvertently becomes a vivid fulcrum of the narrative).

The investigation of the initial murder is what first snares the sisters and may bring them freedom. Zoe is part of the investigating team, and the dead girl was an acquaintance of Sally’s daughter Millie. The two teenagers had several friends in common, some of whom become suspects (in the loosest sense of the term – there is a dearth of vim and vigour in Hayder’s version of the Bath constabulary) thanks to some criminal profiling that is more convenient than accurate.

Hayder has a particular knack for character creation, and for even-handedness, drawing out the good as she does the bad. It is all too easy in crime writing to set up a couple of red-herring, paint-by-numbers villains, while artfully concealing the diabolical sociopathy of that nice, nondescript chap who’s been under the reader’s nose the whole time.

This writer never does so, instead constructing her story so craftily, with such sleight of hand, that the mysteries of the chapters seem to unfold for her just as they do her reader. She is indisputably one of the greats.

4 / 5 stars: Menacing and masterful.

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Taste of a Traveller by Brett McGregor

For a time-honoured way to navigate the globe from your armchair, nothing beats the humble cookbook. Whether delving deeply into the cuisine of a single nation, region or culture (a la Julia Child), or hopscotching from pillar to post in search of favourite delicacies and little-known specialties (Anthony Bourdain has ingeniously parlayed drug-fuelled stove slavery into lucrative culinary tourism), chefs can, as they say, take the reader on a journey.

 Brett McGregor, winner of the first season of New Zealand’s version of Masterchef (the second is screening currently), has produced Taste of a Traveller, a luscious, diverse and user-friendly collection of recipes based on his travels in southeast Asia, Spain and Morocco, and his homeland. The chapter on the latter begins with a recipe, ‘The old lady’s cheese scones’, that is sure to prompt a smile from any Kiwi with a hint of British lineage.

Other recipes in the New Zealand section range from the inventive to the comforting, with lashings of kai moana and many nods to the new New Zealand – tarakihi with mint, orange and macadamia salad, various fritter iterations, ‘Mrs Patel’s crayfish curry’, roast chicken and lamb, Middle Eastern-inspired spiced chicken wings – all characterized by the absence of fussiness or complexity.

Indeed, if you knew McGregor solely from the book, you’d gather that his cooking mantra is simplicity. Regarding of which dish or type of cuisine he is describing, no method given requires more than a dozen steps beyond the basic preparation of ingredients. (Ironically, this contrasts with last year’s Masterchef New Zealand The Cookbook: Volume One, where the high-end restaurant calibre of the dishes puts faithful reproduction of recipes beyond the inclination or capability, or both, of most home cooks.)

Though Asian food is a good example of straightforward cooking, devoting nuance and complexity to flavour rather than method of preparation, the chapter on Spain, in which McGregor writes of his fondness for the siesta and tapas bar, is perhaps the best example. He says his six-ingredient Catalan tomato bread now commonly features in his own breakfast, and presents a one-pot chicken and chickpea stew that looks like a rewarding result for strikingly little effort.

In Morocco we have the classics – harissa, chermoula, preserved lemon and chicken tagine, couscous, mint tea – and some fusion, with kumara falafel and lamb kebab prepared three ways.

There is little he doesn’t know about the food of Thailand, Vietnam and Cambodia, and his love of Thai cuisine is such that he dedicates a spin-off chapter just to curries. Fortunately for those with more to learn, McGregor writes with just as much clarity as he cooks.

Taste of a Traveller is an ode to McGregor’s passion for food, travel, and his beloved wife and son, whose constant companionship is evident in the travel snaps dotting the pages. It’s substantial, recipe-heavy and devoid of filler: the gracious foreword is by food writer and Masterchef judge Ray McVinnie, and there are brief lists of basic staple ingredients at the beginning of each new chapter.

And if anyone were apt to be misled as to McGregor’s provenance by the multinational character of the compilation, they need turn only to the final chapter, ‘Sweets’, for redirection, and find, in the first two entries, recipes for chocolate fudge and ‘never-fail’ pavlova. Kiwi as.

3 / 5 stars: User-friendly gastronomy for travel lovers.

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The Red Queen by Philippa Gregory

Young girl (criminally so, if this weren’t the royal family) is married off to indifferent, wildly ambitious swordsman and widowed before delivering a son. Is remarried to a much nicer and more sedate man, but forced to relinquish custody of son and heir to late husband’s brother, for whom she feels inappropriate emotional stirrings. With departure from mortal coil of Husband #2 she makes a canny choice of third spouse, but comes to suspect she is being double-crossed in her endeavours to install her child on the British throne and fulfill her life purpose.

Such is the stuff of the early to mid-life story of Margaret Beaufort, protagonist of the stirring The Red Queen, the second installment in Gregory’s new series, The Cousins’ War, which focuses on the time of the Wars of the Roses. The first book in the series, last year’s The White Queen, depicted in the author’s usual vivid style the bloody machinations that characterized the tussling for the throne of England back when real power was at stake.

Where the first novel traced the story of Elizabeth Woodville, the widowed mother of two who became a loving and fecund wife to Edward IV and the mother of the ‘Princes in the Tower’ and Elizabeth of York, the second introduces the girl who will become her arch-rival and who in 1453 at age 12 is tasked with producing the heir to the throne and advancing the House of Lancaster over that of York.

It’s all rather confronting for a barely pubescent, pious child whose sole dream is to become an abbess and who fantasizes about emulating the deity-driven acts of valour of Joan of Arc.

However, Margaret proves to possess a stronger instinct for survival than her idol, and becomes one of the most remarkable women of her day. Gregory depicts her as near-obsessive in her drive to see her son, Henry, take England’s throne, and her own name written as Margaret Regina.

Gregory, an historian by trade, has been clear since her earliest forays into writing historical fiction of the Tudor period that her novels are the result of extensive research and literary sleight-of-hand. There are conversations, recollections and interior musings that, absent the detailed diaries of all concerned, cannot be verified.

Thus she can apply a certain amount of poetic license: in telling the story of Margaret Beaufort she omits mention of an annulled first marriage (which took place when Margaret was seven and which she herself never recognized) and takes some liberties in exploring the relationship between Margaret and her former brother-in-law, an intriguing complication which, along with the traumatic depiction of Henry’s birth and his mother’s subsequent longing for her son, lends emotional weight to a story which risks overdoing the plotting and scheming.

It’s a fine balance, and one that Gregory, whose preeminence in her genre is long established, strikes perfectly. Her knowledgeable approach to writing of the royal women of mid-millennium England, and the deft, empathetic manner in which she unlayers their inner lives, is at the core of her appeal.

The next in the series, The Lady of the Rivers, examines the life of a woman who has played a background role in each of the first two novels, and whom Margaret Beaufort loathed and suspected of practicing the dark arts: Jacquetta of Luxembourg, mother of Elizabeth Woodville.

3 / 5 stars: From tween to Queen.

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The Land of Painted Caves by Jean M Auel

It’s a long time between drinks for fans of Ice Age epic-novelist Jean M Auel. For three decades, the Oregon-based writer has been painstakingly composing her Earth’s Children series, in which her new novel, The Land of Painted Caves, is billed as the final installment.

Auel has rightly been hailed for her commitment to researching the period, 25,000 years ago, in which her characters lived and died. For a 2002 Time article, ‘Romancing the Stone Age’, the reporter trailed Auel on an archaeological dig and exploration of caves in the Dordogne region of France – the present-day territory to which Ayla, the heroine of the series, travels with her husband Jondalar from her starting point in the Eurasian steppes, where she was adopted as a five-year-old Cro-Magnon child by a Neanderthal tribe known as the Clan.

Like the five previous books in the series, which began with 1980’s megaselling The Clan of the Cave Bear, this work is laden (at times, overly so) with detail and depth. Scenes in which Ayla’s spear skills are called upon, for hunting or tribal defence, are somewhat belaboured and will be all too familiar to readers of the earlier books. 

For newcomers, however, Auel strikes a helpful balance, finding natural lulls between action scenes and long marches to flash back to key moments in the series and flesh out Ayla’s biography.

Possibly the most unexpected element of The Land of Painted Caves is how fundamentally similar, in Auel’s eyes, the lives of Ice Age humans were to our own.

The author uses the deepening relationship of Ayla and her husband, and the weighty responsibilities she faces as a Zelandoni acolyte, to make the surprising point that the guilt of the working mother is nothing new; leaving your small child in the primary care of others while you go to work (or undertake rigorous and dangerous training) is just as stressful for a Cro-Magnon woman in prehistoric Europe as for a frazzled professional woman in 2011 New Zealand.

What’s more, Ayla’s exceptional competence sets her apart. Her role as the medicine woman / shaman of her tribe, treating everything from morning sickness to measles and life-threatening compound bone fractures thanks to knowledge gained from the Clan, vastly improves the lives of others but also engenders suspicion and mistrust.

A gal can’t win, and the strain on Ayla is compounded by evidence that Jondalar – of whose masculine appeal Auel leaves readers in no doubt – may have been playing away in her absence, which in turn is complicated by the fact that though couples are commonly ‘mated’ to one another in a formal ritual, there is no cultural expectation of monogamy, and therefore no such concept as jealousy. New mates should be accommodated into the existing family unit in order to maintain stability and preserve tribal harmony.

But Auel’s creation is no ordinary woman, and it wouldn’t be (in part) an Ice Age bodice-ripper if she were to turn the other cheek: the famed sex scenes are as improbable and breathlessly Mills-and-Boonish as ever, and the chiselled abs and tawny manes of hair (on both humans and animals) would inspire a body-builder. The painted caves of the title are merely the backdrop.

3 / 5 stars: Cro-Magnon competitiveness. Click here to view more Easy Mix Book Reviews.

Live Wire by Harlan Coben

Harlan Coben owed me. Last year, in the wisdom of any publishing house sitting on a gold-mine of an author, Coben’s New Zealand publisher reissued his 20-year-old first novel, Play Dead, and sent review copies far and wide to get the publicity ball rolling.

Having read and enjoyed several of the New Jersey-based writer’s later works (particularly The Woods and Caught), I was all set for a rough-and-ready version of his polished recent thrillers. What I got was a confused, hyperkinetic pile of suspenseless mush, which was only redeemed by the delightfully apologetic foreword by Coben, who appears as conscious as anyone of how far he has come.

Naturally, I wanted him to make it up to me with a stonkingly clever, unpredictable and scintillating story, all the better if it contained razor-sharp one-liners and hermetic 80s glam-rock stars.

Who knew he would produce just that? What he has arrived with, in 2011, is perhaps his best production yet, not only in the near-flawless structure (the arcs, both character and plot, cry out for film adaptation), but also in tone, with the return of his stalwart protagonist and star of 10 of his 20 books to date, Myron Bolitar.

Bolitar, with his steel-trap mind and similarly unconquerable nerve, is like the brother-by-another-mother of Lee Child’s staunch hero Jack Reacher: both men are prone to bouts of fierce loyalty, though never to the point of foolishness, and skilled at finding creative ways out of trouble when their gift of the gab proves insufficient.

In Live Wire (the titular pun becomes amusingly apparent toward the end of the book), the set-up demands the best of Bolitar’s skills as a sports agent, friend, and investigator. A former tennis star, Suzze T, and her rock-star husband Lex Ryder (half of 80s duo Horse Power) are expecting a baby. Happy news, you would think, but when Suzze visits her former agent Bolitar, upset over an anonymous Facebook post questioning the baby’s paternity, it becomes clear that not everyone connected with the couple is thrilled by the prospective miracle of birth.

Bolitar’s loyalty reflex kicks in, leading him into the heart of one of the most gripping, cleverly paced and downright funny suspense stories I have read in many months.

Among the well-drawn cast that appears in the course of Bolitar’s probes are his sister-in-law Kitty, his nephew Mickey, his priapic and erstwhile business partner Win, assorted villains who find themselves uncomfortable recipients of Bolitar’s unique sense of justice, and two men conspicuous by their absence – Lex Ryder’s former musical partner, Gabriel Wire, who hasn’t been seen in public since the mystery-shrouded death of a young woman in his company many years ago, and Bolitar’s brother, from whom he has long been estranged.

It’s a rollicking story that in the hands of a lesser writer could swing right off its axis, but the Coben of Play Dead bears no likeness at all to today’s master.

I did wonder whether the satirical suspense writer Carl Hiaasen, should he read Live Wire, might object to the tonal similarities between this novel and the best of his own work, but I suspect like most readers he’ll be grinning too hard to care.

4 / 5 stars: Top contender for thrilling piss-take of the year. Click here to view more Easy Mix Book Reviews.

The Villa Girls by Nicky Pellegrino

It is a premise so desirable and plausible that it has spawned, virtually, a sub-genre of its own, comprising both fictional and factual accounts: that of a woman, of varying ages and in myriad positions of life stasis, fleeing to an exotic (but not too exotic) country in which love, solace and redemption may be found as easily as a ripe olive is plucked from a tree.

British-born Kiwi Nicky Pellegrino, with her Italian ancestors, is as qualified to spin such a yarn as Elizabeth Gilbert or Frances Mayes. In last year’s Recipe for Life, she drew on a painful event in her own past to tell the story of a young woman, listless and lost in London, who decamps to a friend’s Italian villa for the summer and finds vigor, purpose and amor.

The Villa Girls has Pellegrino tapping this vein once more, with the girl in this case, Rosie, having lost both parents in a car accident. An only child, she is left with no one but a cheerless aunt and uncle, and finding herself unwelcome in their home, lives in a depressing rented basement, the gloominess of which reflects the twilight world she has stumbled into.

The bossy Addolorata hoves into view, and more out of a sense of pity than genuine friendship invites the waif-like Rosie on an Italian-villa holiday with her two girlfriends. The experience proves such a revelation for all four that they vow to return to Italy again in three years’ time – but don’t manage to stay away that long.

The story is on the thin side; while Pellegrino has a natural way with words and evident passion for her characters, what the reader savours most are not the outcomes of the chance meetings and accidental eavesdroppings but the descriptions of sumptuous feasts and fetes.

Among the most amusing passages are the meals shared by Addolorata’s family (at the first, Addolorata has to warn Rosie not to accept seconds of her father Beppi’s lasagna – it is only the first of several courses), and the evolution of Rosie’s relationship with food, as she learns to cook at Beppi’s elbow and falls in love with the flavors of Italy as surely as she does Enzo, the heir to an olive fortune whose family harbors a dark secret.

Of the four ‘villa girls’, only Rosie and Addolorata approach the fully-fleshed – Lou and Toni serve primary as plot function (it is Toni who, uncovering that secret, makes a phone call that tips the narrative from the lazily dreamy to something approaching tragedy) or redemptive tale (will Lou be able to conquer her dependency on drink?).

In the end, whatever plot or people flaws might be perceived don’t matter – in a Pellegrino novel, ambience is all. To trail Enzo through a grove of olive trees or listen to his Nonna hold forth, with all the passion of a Mediterranean matriarch, on the purity of the Santi family oil, is to be transported. The Villa Girls is worth the trip.

2.5 / 5 stars: La dolce vita at the villa. Click here to view more Easy Mix Book Reviews.

Love You More by Lisa Gardner

Few things are more satiating to a bookworm than a thriller that delivers even more than its substantial promise – which comprises, among other elements, front-cover testimony from Tess Gerritsen that Lisa Gardner’s Love You More is a “heart-pounding tale” from which she couldn’t tear herself away. So far, so good set-up.

In classic thriller style, Love You More opens with an italicized, breathless two-page prologue in which the two participants are unnamed. The kitchen of a family home; a repeated challenge (‘Who do you love?’); a loaded Sig Sauer within arm’s reach; a protagonist’s reflection on her husband and six-year-old daughter.

(As an aside, I have observed that American writers are more fond of this kind of intro: the Europeans, and particularly the Scandinavians, prefer a slower, slyer entrance to the story. Americans, by and large, don’t care to waste time with philosophical musings or unnecessary meanderings, and with Gardner, nary a sentence is wasted.)

Chapter One opens with the lead cop in the new case, Sergeant Detective DD Warren (a recurrent Gardner character) heading to the crime scene. Brian Darby, the aforementioned husband, is dead on his kitchen floor from three well-placed gunshot wounds to the torso, and daughter Sophie is missing.

His wife, State Trooper Tessa Leoni, called it in, and though the long-time law enforcement officer is clearly shocked and grieving, something doesn’t ring true. Warren is certain that Leoni is withholding information and knows more than she claims to about the whereabouts of her daughter and the circumstances of her husband’s death, and when an autopsy reveals that Brian Darby’s body was put on ice for some hours after his death, and then staged to appear freshly dead for the arrival of the police, the hounds are set loose on Tessa Leoni.

So ensues a battle of wills and cop-intellect in which two complex and unusual females – both Leoni and Warren defy simple descriptors – are forced to witness and confront what a mother will do for her child. Though it seems so of-tread a theme as to be tiresome, Gardner’s skill at teasing out the freshness and humanity from her jaded cast is to be admired.

What is also commendable is her rabbit-from-a-hat dexterity with story, and I don’t expect to find a more compelling scene in any thriller this year than the episode in which Leoni, leading investigators to her daughter’s burial site, stages an audacious, violent deception that spins the plot on its axis.

Some readers may grow weary of the taste of red herrings in Love You More – flashbacks that we are later encouraged to distrust, hints that Leoni could be something more sinister than a grieving wife and fearful mother – but there are none that stretch the boundaries of plausibility, and all serve the purpose of heightening the suspense.

Love You More possesses every requisite of a good thriller, and several of a great one. Lisa Gardner should take a bow.

3.5 / 5 stars: A story to satiate the most demanding thriller fans. Click here to view more Easy Mix Book Reviews.

The Summer Without Men by Siri Hustvedt

Siri Hustvedt is one of those writers whose work gives the impression that they had no choice about their vocation. Her writing is speckled with references to the greats – on to a single page of The Summer Without Men she squeezes Blake, Rilke, Schelling, Hegel, Heidegger and Kierkegaard; she is the daughter of a professor of Scandinavian literature; she is married to a noted writer; the topic of her PhD thesis was Charles Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend.

It is a fortunate thing for lovers of words that Hustvedt became a wrangler of them, for The Summer Without Men is a treat. Hustvedt, who has published her poetry, tracks her poet protagonist Mia Fredricksen through an initial, infidelity-prompted psychological crack-up, then watches with eagerness as Mia deftly manages a class of catty teenage girls, a coven of elderly female rest-home residents, her adored daughter, and a series of fraught email exchanges with her erstwhile husband, who has left Mia for a young Frenchwoman.

The husband did not say, upon his departure, whether it would be permanent, but simply asked Mia for “a pause” in their 30-year marriage; with typical wryness, she thinks of her rival as The Pause. Over the ensuing summer, Mia confronts the beauty, the unsightliness and the particular vulnerability of girls and women when among their own kind, and starts to see her own identity anew.

(It’s a theme I came across recently in Lisa Genova’s absorbing Left Neglected; the tendency of women to see themselves through the eyes of others and, when faced with a sudden loss of purpose, to find they’re happier without their ostensible reason for being.)

Hustvedt skillfully blends the narrative with the contemplative, not shying away from allusion or from her role as a literary insider. Nor does she fear coming across as obnoxiously well-read. One passage in particular brought a smile to my lips: “Excitement usually comes at a clip. Agitation in one corner is often mirrored by a similar hubbub in another. There is no rhyme or reason to this. Correlation is not cause. It is just “the music of chance,” as one prominent American novelist has phrased it.” The novelist concerned is Hustvedt’s husband, Paul Auster.

Her writing, so erudite, thoughtful, and laden with literary references as to be, at times, intellectually exhausting – in this regard, the book’s 216-page brevity is considerate – is balanced by the energy Hustvedt gives to the philosophical question of why she does what she does, and who benefits from it.

In a passage that must have been born of the passion of the long-time writer of fiction, Mia ponders the concept of the book club, and the widespread view that novel-reading is a womanly pursuit.

“Lots of women read fiction. Most men don’t. Women read fiction written by women and by men. Most men don’t. If a man opens a novel, he likes to have a masculine name on the cover; it’s reassuring somehow. You never know what might happen to that external genitalia if you immerse yourself in imaginary doings concocted by someone with the goods on the inside.”

Read another way, ‘the summer without men’ could sound like a threat, or a sinister promise.

4 / 5 stars: A fine-spun novella from a commanding writer. Click here to view more Easy Mix Book Reviews.

Daughters-in-Law by Joanna Trollope

If you’ve sensed a more sinister undertow in Joanna Trollope’s recent work, you are not alone; several of her readers have lately observed that her stories have been growing darker in tone and theme. It’s not an unpleasant evolution. It gave rise last year to the complex and thoughtful The Other Family, in which a middle-aged musician dies suddenly, leaving behind his long-term partner and their three daughters . . . and at the other end of the country, his son and the wife he never got around to divorcing, who has all manner of legal rights conspicuously unavailable to his ‘current’ family.

This kind of splendid, slightly saucy set-up has long been Trollope’s stock in trade, with her stories, centred as they are on the torments of the middle class, once earning the nickname ‘Aga saga’. Though she remains a devotee of the domestic drama and familial interactions in nearly every form, she never seems to be repeating herself: every Trollope adventure is a fresh one.

So to Daughters-in-Law, the title alone perhaps sparking a frisson of anticipation in any woman who’s ever married into a family and wondered how on earth these flawed and fallible individuals could be related to the spouse she loves.

Anthony and Rachel Brinkley are the parents and in-laws – living peaceably and affluently in contemporary Suffolk, they have produced three strapping sons, all now adults. The elder two, Edward and Ralph, are married, to women of whom Rachel is fond; the wives, Sigrid and Petra, are smart and self-possessed but biddable, and have made grandparents of Rachel and Anthony.

As the novel opens, the last son, Luke, is marrying Charlotte, a woman much younger than her sisters-in-law, and beautiful, privileged and utterly in love. Rachel finds herself, as they say, ‘acting out’, unable to quell her fear and hurt as she watches all three sons forming homes of their own, thinking now of their childhood home as simply the place where their parents live. It’s not an un-close family, but even regular contact is not enough for this matriarch, and her misguided desire to redraw the boundaries, and thus reclaim her sons, is almost primitive.

Matters come to a head at a family dinner when, in a grievous display of rage and spite, Rachel fulfills Anthony’s unspoken prediction that her reaction to the third marriage would ultimately become something akin to volcanic.

It might be surmised that it is not only empty-nest syndrome that sparks Rachel’s visceral reaction to the entrance of Charlotte; the ‘loss’ of her children to other women brings into harsh relief the extent of her husband’s affectionate detachment. The spectre of Luke and Charlotte’s mutual adoration may be the last straw for a woman learning that some of the passion she has invested in her sons might have been better directed elsewhere.

Daughters-in-Law, with its slow-burn approach to the familial and its examination of the complexities of relationships within a single family, is some of Trollope’s best work yet. (A particularly absorbing element of the novel is the author’s drawing back of the veil on each marriage.) Long may she linger at the Aga.

3 / 5 stars: Another fine drama from an authority on fraught families. Click here to view more Easy Mix Book Reviews.