This was a book group choice. It is the first collection of short stories that I’ve enjoyed in its entirety. They give a fascinating insight into the situations that middle class English women found themselves in during the war. Each story is a little portrait of the protagonist. Although you don’t have long to get to know them in a short story, the characters are believable and their emotions are very vivid. There are a few lines that made me laugh out loud. Yes, I enjoyed this book a lot more than I thought I might.

Unusually for a reading group choice, I really loved this. It’s the story of an Eastern European coming to London to work. There are so many vivid characters and plenty of gripping drama. There are a number of very touching moments, a few shocking ones and humour is scattered here and there. A wonderful book.

I read this for reading group.

I have to admit that this just isn’t my type of book; there’s very little description and it reads a bit like a script. Apart from the shocking gang rape at the beginning there is nothing hugely evocative in this book. Even the explanations in the closing pages of the book didn’t hold my attention. I was lost in the discussions between Jonathan, Georgina and their various interviewees and it was frustrating trying to work out what was truth and what was lies. By the time I got to the end my head was spinning with the various possibilities and I was hoping for a satisfying ending. It was a sad and unexpected explanation but not satisfying unfortunately.

One thing I did like was that the main character was quite unusual – a highly educated, mixed race man who has issues. But that isn’t enough. I think this book would make a good TV adaptation but I wouldn’t recommend it as a book.

I read this when Nat told me that Maddy had read it and I’d already heard about and was interested in it. It’s good. I felt slightly uneasy all the way through the book, even after the ‘surprise’ on p77. I definitely related to the narrator feeling like she was a bit weird that that no one liked her when she was growing up. I enjoyed the humour which contrasted with the sad family situation. This book is different and refreshing.

I read this for book group. Even though I had to look up the meanings of lots of words it’s a fairly easy read. I thought it was good that the two main female characters were written in such a human way; they got irritated, angry, annoyed etc.

What I didn’t like was the way it kept you in suspense over what was going on for more than 89 pages. Also on p56 Lucas tells Eva ‘Never trust anyone’ and I knew then that Lucas was going to betray her, so the book was spoilt for me. Although Eva’s story had a lot more action in it than her daughter Ruth’s I found boring in places and skim read some of it, especially the descriptions of places. Life After Life and The Night Watch invoke that wartime period far better.

In Ruth’s story there are lots of people introduced and storylines that didn’t seem to have any relevance in the end. Actually Ruth (Eva/Sally’s daughter) seemed to have no significance apart from as a vehicle to tell her mother’s story. Her husband’s brother’s appearance had no reason whatsoever. Or Hamid. Or Robert York. None of these people added anything to Ruth’s story. It was supposed to be set in the 70’s but there wasn’t anything there that evoked that period for me.

Overall, I wouldn’t recommend this book.

In this, the third book of the trilogy, I was a little disappointed. I felt that the writing was very simplistic, as it has been throughout the trilogy, but this book didn’t counteract it with the suspense of the other books. I didn’t like Callie Rose and Sephy’s happy ending; thought that was a bit sugary. Jude was beyond a caricature. All that said, I did think the earlier tension between Sephy and her teenage daughter was quite realistic.

This book is beautifully written. I can’t believe that this was written by the same person who wrote Started Early, Took My Dog, which I read recently. KA has a gift for writing from women’s perspectives, no matter what time period they are in.

Aside from the quality of the writing, what kept me reading was wondering whether Ursula would fare any better in the next perumtation. I was utterly gripped. I also loved how the Snow period is revisited and bulked out gradually through the book e.g. we know that Sylvie is given a snowdrop in a vase on her breakfast tray, then later we see how it came to be there.

There are so many characters and permutations that I feel compelled to make some kind of chart to make sense of it all but it looks like someone has analysed it already with an accompanying flow chart:

I think the flow chart is a bit too simplistic though so I’ll be going through the book again, making my own notes.

This is a wonderful book with a well-told story (or should I say stories?). The characters feel very real and the are tragedies enormous and poetic. Ultimately I found this to be quite a sad book but I loved it. I would go so far as to say that it’s the best book I’ve read all year.

This was a book group choice. I’ll be concise.

1) It has so many characters that I got confused.

2) I found it very difficult to believe that a woman who spent 30 years working for the police would buy a child.

3) I didn’t like the rambling thoughts of characters in this book. It was difficult to glean what was relevant. I didn’t feel like I connected to any of the characters and got fed up of Jackson going on and on about his dead sister. He’s done it throughout the series and it’s getting boring.

In its defence, it’s fairly ‘readable’, just disappointing as I liked the first Jackson Brodie novel (Case Histories).