April was an excellent month for reading! Favourites of mine were The Safekeep and The Boy from the Sea but I've written a short review of them all which might help with choosing your next book.
The Safekeep - Yael van der Wouden
In summary:
POST WAR LIFE - PASSIONATE RELATIONSHIPS - SECRETS
Isabel’s abrupt and seemingly emotionless manner suits the life she leads, living alone in her family home in rural Netherlands. She is a meticulous creature of habit and resistant to change while her two brothers - one flighty and one in a gay relationship - have moved on from the Second World War that ravaged the country 15 years previously.
Louis, the eldest brother, who will one day inherit the family home, Isabel’s home, decides that his new girlfriend, Eva, will stay at the house with Isabel over the summer while he moves away to work. Eva is loud and sociable, the antithesis of Isabel, who detests her and the intrusion into her life equally. As small things go missing about the house, Isabel’s suspicions become obsessive and the close eye she keeps on Eva slowly turns into desire. But there are things connected with Eva and the house itself that shock and disturb and I will not spoil them for you here.
The Safekeep offers the reader a superb story, passion and romance, and many uncomfortable revelations. It is Yael van der Wouden’s debut novel and won the 2025 Women’s Prize for Fiction and it is so brilliantly written with well-crafted characters and perfectly paced, it is one of my favourite books of the year so far. I loved it!
The Correspondent - Virginia Evans
In summary:
LETTER WRITING - LIFE PAST AND PRESENT - LOSS AND SORROW
Another debut, this epistolary novel takes the reader into the mind and life of Sybil Van Antwerp, an intelligent and likeable lady in her 70’s who writes letters, lots of letters to people she has worked with, her friends and family, even famous people as events in her life move on. There’s one letter that she continuously adds to throughout the book and never sends and that mystery is revealed towards the end of the book. The Correspondent is about relationships, of looking back on life as well as continuing to live in the moment and Virginia Evans has written it beautifully; there is lots of humour at times too.
For me, this book throws out the question of personal legacy, of what we will leave behind now that we write everything electronically. No more dusty letters found in attic spaces, kept in family archives, or just everyday thoughts put to paper.
Do they even still teach cursive handwriting in schools anymore? Have we as a collective become awful at penmanship and lost the use of those muscles, or the interest? It’s such a shame but I read recently that there has been a resurgence in writing to pen pals so there is a small chance that letter writing will not become lost forever, just remain incredibly niche.
The Book of Days - Francesca Kay
In summary:
LADY'S PERSPECTIVE - HISTORICAL INTEREST - RELIGION AND BELIEFS
It’s the 16th Century and a man is dying. He happens to be a lord of the manor and at a time when religious faith ran through every thought and action, he wants to build a chapel where people can pray for his soul and that of his family (his first wife, his children and his second wife) in perpetuity. For perspective, this is a time in history when religion was controversial. The upheaval of the Protestant Reformation transformed church architecture from a symbol of communal faith into a political and theological battleground. Catholic traditions and the rise of Protestantism provoked violence through the country, especially over the role of imagery and church authority and building a new chapel at that time was a very public statement of allegiance to the catholic faith.
This book is a quiet book of observation by the lady of the house, Alice. She describes seasons passing, the progress in the building of the chapel, a magnificent stained glass window and of the expectations of her role as a young wife to the lord and stepmother, her thoughts on having lost a child and having not produced an heir.
I found it to be an interesting and insightful book and I liked observing the world through Alice’s eyes, but there were pages that I found tedious and skimmed over them; I think you have to accept the slower pace of the lives described and in reading this book to get maximum enjoyment from it.
The Boy from the Sea - Garrett Carr
In summary:
IRISH FAMILIES - SIBLING RELATIONSHIPS - RAW, FULL OF HEART
“We didn’t go on about it, but this was the boy who caused us, for a while at least, to feel a helpless wonder that we had never forgotten.”
A baby boy in a foil-lined barrel is washed up on the shore of Killybegs, a small fishing village in Donegal and no-one knows where he came from. He is taken in and eventually adopted by Ambrose and Christine Bonnar, but growing up, Brendan is treated differently by the community, like a modern day Jesus, and hated from the moment he is brought into their family home by older brother Declan. The real life extremes of a working class village in 1973 Ireland is central to this book, how easy it is to fluctuate between having and not having and how Ambrose (a wonderfully written character, full of heart and life), adapts to the changing fishing industry.
This is a book about relationships - with family, within a community and with the sea - and how an unknown boy brings with him a sort of mythical aura that impacts the lives of everyone. What Garrett Carr has written here is a gem; it is enchanting, humorous and heartbreaking. Yet another superb Irish writer of beautiful fiction. Read it, gift it, treasure it!
Agnes Grey - Anne Brontë
In summary:
CLASS DIFFERENCES - VICTORIAN GOVERNESS LIFE
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is a book I often rave about and feel Anne is the most underrated Brontë sister, so hopefully you can imagine how much I was looking forward to reading Agnes Grey! Especially as I knew that it was partly inspired by Anne’s real-life experiences as a governess and I’m very curious about any insight into the lives of the Brontës so I’m not happy to write that I struggled with it and have had to put it aside for now. Anne writes with sensitivity and feeling, I really find her style beautiful to read, but the spoiled rich children that Agnes has to deal with in this book - yet given no power to discipline - are incredibly irritating. I’m half way through and Anne is still describing their awfulness. It’s too much! I will return to it with more determination to finish but for now, it’s a DNF.
The Little Stranger - Sarah Waters
In summary:
GHOST STORY - CLASS DIFFERENCES - PSYCHOLOGICAL SUSPENSE
The fortunes of the Ayres family are in freefall post WWII and their Georgian mansion Hundreds Hall is falling apart, despite all efforts to stem its decay. Mrs Ayres tries to retain some of her previously dignified upper class aura, her son Roderick is trying to balance the books and deal with his debilitating wartime injuries and then there’s plain-but-smart Caroline, mucking in where necessary to keep the estate running.
When their young maid Betty falls ill, the doctor is called and Dr Faraday finds himself remembering childhood visits to the Hall when his mother worked there as a governess. Betty believes that there is something eerie that wants the house all for itself and this kick-starts the book proper with strange goings-on that begin to escalate throughout the book culminating in several tragedies for the whole family and Faraday.
This is a slow-burn ghost story and one where the logical medical man becomes increasingly intertwined with the lives of the emotional Ayres family. Tension is built as the story develops but it all takes so long and the strange obsession Dr Faraday has with both the Hall and the Ayres family is borderline stalking. I was expecting a shocking twist at the end and some sort of explanation which didn’t come, so it isn’t one I would recommend. Such a shame because I love the storyline of Fingersmith and found it much more suspenseful.
