Book after Book

Can a mirror somehow hold traces of all the people who have looked into its glassy surface - whether for a quick glance or a longer inspection?  John must have seen himself a thousand times in this mirror – going out of the front door in the morning, on his way upstairs like she was just now. It must have an image of him locked away somewhere in its depths. Why, then, when what she wants more than anything else in the world is a glimpse of him, does it refuse to give her anything but her own, blank face? - after you'd gone , by Maggie O'Farrell The extractor fan whirrs while I polish the mirror my mother probably looks in every morning – does she still look, I wonder? And if she does, does she recognise herself there? My own face is close to the glass as I work. I breathe on the mirror, then rub it with my cloth to shine it. Is there something of Mum’s reflection left behind the glass? Or inside it, maybe? Merging with mine now as I rub and rub? - The Weaning , by Hanna...

By Maggie O'Farrell Published by Headline Review Synopsis: A distraught y oung woman boards a train at King's Cross to return to her family in Scotland. Six hours later, she catches sight of something so terrible in a mirror at Waverley Station that she gets on the next train back to London. AFTER YOU'D GONE follows Alice's mental journey through her own past, after a traffic accident has left her in a coma. A love story that is also a story of absence, and of how our choices can reverberate through the generations, it slowly draws us closer to a dark secret at a family's heart. How did this book end up in my hands? This is another one of those books that have been moving home with me for a good few years so I don’t actually recall how it’s ended on the shelves. Was it a page-turner? Not in the beginning but as I kept learning more and more about the women of the Raikes family, I could hardly put it down. I just needed to know what would happen to...

By Maggie O’Farrell Published by Headline Review I finished reading The Hand That First Held Mine , Maggie O’Farrell’s fifth and latest novel, on the same evening that it was awarded the Costa Novel Award and I couldn’t agree more with the jury’s choice. In fact, I am surprised that it hasn’t won all the literary prizes available. Yes, it has made a lasting impression on me! The narrative of The Hand That First Held Mine , a novel whose subtitle could be “on forgetting and remembering”, is divided into two skilfully crafted storylines at the centre of which are two very strong female characters living in the same city but at different times. In the 1950s we see Lexie Sinclair leaving her family home in rural Devon and looking forward to an exciting future in London. Through her acquaintance with the mesmerizing Innes Kent, editor of an emerging art magazine, she plunges into the Bohemian life of Soho. Love soon follows but tragic events loom on a not too distant horizon. In present-day...