Category: Uncategorized

Radical Love – Neil Blackmore (Hutchinson Heinemann 2023)

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Neil Blackmore’s latest novel is set in Georgian London.  Radicalism is in the air- spread by seeds sown in the French Revolution.  Established ideas are being questioned, slavery has been abolished, it seems like the start of a new age.

Only it’s not, the rot is still there and hatred and prejudice still prevalent.  William Wilberforce, celebrated for his achievements in ending slavery still placed black dinner guests behind a screen to keep them separate from the white diners.  Main character and narrator John Church has set up his own place of worship, the Obelisk, to preach tolerance in well-attended services which attracts free thinkers as well as those unimpressed by his motives.  For many the limits come with any suggestion of acceptance for homosexuality and yet molly-houses thrive.  John Church accepts an invitation to attend rooms above a pub where he will attempt to alleviate some of the gay shame and self-hatred by marrying any men who wish to be coupled with one another.  Is he beginning a path of greater acceptance in London or is this just a step too far?

What I like very much is this reclaiming of history, of developing the true stories behind the established facts, as certainly here the novel is based upon actual events.  Over the last few years this has been done very successfully by Black British writers. Paterson Joseph and his “Secret Diaries Of Charles Ignatius Sancho” (2022) and Sarah Collins’ “The Confessions Of Frannie Langton” (2019) immediately spring to mind. Neil Blackmore does this to an extent with black experience but particularly here with gay men’s stories.  Tom Crewe has done similar so successfully earlier this year with “The New Life” (2023) and Blackmore attains a high standard with this.

If you don’t already know about John Church (and I didn’t) greater pleasure will be had from this book by not finding out too much beforehand, especially as in his main character the author has created a gloriously untrustworthy narrator.  We can tell from the start that this is a man of contradictions and it is with great relish that these contradictions are brought to life.

This probably comes as close as a novel is going to get this year to being five stars without me actually awarding my top rating.  (I don’t believe that was because the review copy I was sent was so badly formatted that it did affect my reading flow and thus some of my enjoyment, luckily the book rattles on at such a pace the effects of this were diminished) but I think with John Church so central we only see the other characters from his (sometimes) off-skew perspective which doesn’t give them as much chance to shine as I would have liked.  The radical aspects come across strongly, are well balanced and the ideas very accessible (more so than Tom Crewe’s novel, actually, which is set in a repressed Victorian London of the late nineteenth century).  I also feel that, Neil Blackmore is here just like a cat that toys with a mouse for just a little bit too long before going for the kill in his development of his plot.  It is full of appalling hypocrisy, there’s hope and despair but above all a vivid bringing to life of a forgotten man whose attempts to find and bring love to Georgian London produce this extraordinary tale.

Radical Love will be published on 1st June 2023 by Hutchinson Heinemann.  Many thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for the advance review copy.

Lie With Me – Philippe Besson (2019)

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This is a short, (148 pages in the paperback edition) nostalgic, yearning French work in which the narrator is startled by the appearance of a man in 2007 which takes him back to a tale of first love from 1984 before a final section set in 2016.  It’s an enigmatic work, seemingly simple, hiding a depth which the French do so well.  The title here holds a double meaning, which actually it doesn’t have in its original language where it is “Arrete Avec Tes Mensonges” (“Stop With Your Lies”).  The English title niftily gives it seduction as well as dishonesty.

I didn’t know how much it is a work of fiction or whether it strays into autobiography.  The puzzle here is created by the author’s dedication to a real life person who has the same name as the love interest.  Maybe it is all true, maybe purely from imagination, it doesn’t really matter.

What I do know, which is a surprise in itself, is that the English translation is by Hollywood A-Lister Molly Ringwald, star of many an 80’s teen comedy from “Breakfast Club” to “Pretty In Pink” to a main character recurring role as Archie’s mum in “Riverdale”.  I can only assume that she must have loved this book so much in French that she wanted to bring it to an international audience.  Her translation certainly feels authentic, full of French introspection, together with the odd cultural reference I had to look up.

As is common with books of this length, the tale is slight, a love story between two teenage boys kept secret before they go their separate ways after their schooldays.  I became more involved once we got into the two later sections, set more recently.  There’s a bit of a leap of faith plausibility-wise required but get beyond that and it becomes a well-handled study on the directions life takes us and I was drawn in by the sensitivity of it all.

I’m not sure whether I’ve ever really been blown away by an adult novel under 200 pages and this hasn’t changed things entirely.  I think that is more my problem than the author of novellas- perhaps my expectations of what I desire most from a reading experience demands greater length.  I’m still looking for the book to change my mind.  This, however, did have the potential to come close to doing that.

Lie With Me was published in the UK by Penguin Books in 2019.

Seining Along Chesil- Sarah Acton (2022)

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From the upstairs room where I am writing this I have glimpses between the houses opposite of the sea at Chesil Beach.  This extraordinary 18 mile stretch of “storm driven barrier” was the inspiration for Ian McEwan’s tale of doomed love (2007) and JM Falkner’s classic adventure tale “Moonfleet” (1898) and its unique attraction has been celebrated by poets, including Sarah Acton, the author of this non-fiction work.

The fact that this is somewhere special impresses on every visit.  For an eight-mile section within 10 minutes walk from my house it can only be accessed by crossing the Fleet Lagoon, in past times, flat-bottomed boasts known as “trows” helped with this.

As well as being a place of great geological interest (I visited here on a school Geography field trip as it was part of my O Level syllabus) for many, many generations it provided a source of income for Dorset people.  A method of catching the mackerel which at certain points of the year swarmed into the shallows was developed using nets, thrown most often from a specially designed boat, a “lerret”.  This now almost lost form of fishing, “seining”, is the subject of Sarah Acton’s book subtitled “Voices From A Dorset Fishing Community.”

I have never fished and like most omnivores have no real understanding of how the food we eat reaches our plate, neither in the present nor the past but there was something very captivating about Sarah Acton’s study.  It helps that she is a poet and can talk about the Beach as it “roars and stings, silver shoals of memory dart beneath the sea surface like fragments of mirrors, as memory triggers memory”, finding every opportunity to reinforce the uniqueness of this location but she has also produced an oral history, reminiscences of the last generations who attempted to support themselves financially in this way.  These are men and women who lived their lives according to the sea, men who missed the upbringing of their children, youngsters who skipped school, the elderly who chose to spend much of their retirement on the shingle, all hypnotised by the thrill of the catch and the ebb and flow of the sea.

These were people who did not always do things by the book, large catches were unpredictable, the mystique of smuggling had always touched these coastline families and their ancestors.  They spent their hours in the water yet many could not swim.  They talk of individuals whose achievements have become the stuff of legends, of the most successful families, of crafts and activities which are pretty much redundant.  The same experiences are given a viewpoint form different individuals with the repetition in this case enhancing the sense of the oral tradition.  As the demand for mackerel declined their earnings became more sporadic but they lived with one eye on the waters.  There is a perhaps apocryphal story of pall-bearers who abandoned their fisherman friend’s coffin as they got the call of the sea.

It is all a bit of a fish-stew this book as the author is supported by contributions by different authors on the geology, on boat building and the history of the Fleet Lagoon and this all adds to the layering of this location which is very much brought to life here.  I’ve lived in Dorset just over a year and have barely dipped my toe into local history since I’ve been here (see “The Village That Died For England” by Patrick Wright and I have read the very successful 2022 debut novel by Joanna Quinn, “The Whalebone Theatre”).  There is still a huge amount to discover about my local environment and Sarah Acton here makes the history of this particular location very memorable.

Seining Along Chesil was published in the UK in 2022 by Little Toller Books.

The Sleeping Car Porter – Suzette Mayr (Dialogue Books 2023)

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This is award-winning Canadian author Suzette Mayr’s fifth novel and was the 2022 recipient of the Giller Prize for Canadian writing.  Set in 1929 largely on a long train journey from Montreal to Vancouver where the focus is on main character Baxter, a black gay man who has taken a position as a sleeping car porter to help fund his dream to study dentistry.  We see the passengers through Baxter’s eyes as he strives to get tips and avoid complaints which would lead to demerits and being fired.  He is close to his fund-raising goals so this trip is very important for him.

It’s written in the present tense which is never my favourite narrative structure.  I can find it confusing and a little one-note and there is a danger we fall into stream of consciousness territory.  Baxter has to function very much in the moment, responding to demands and crises so it might seem fitting but then this is not actually his narrative, it’s third person.  I can see why it works to a point but I might have liked the author to mix it up a little but admittedly as time goes on and the exhaustion of both staff and passengers brings in surreal elements the layering of event after event does work well.

Baxter is the shining gem of this novel, unable to afford to eat properly and with little rest he is susceptible to hallucinations and his choice of sensational sci-fi reading material in his rare downtimes gives the potential of a nightmarish edge to the proceedings. Attitudes towards race are explored skilfully as the passengers need this man to be both largely invisible and yet answerable to their beck and call- his individuality dismissed by the generic name “George”, which is not his name.  (I didn’t know about this but this was obviously a thing at the time as the author’s bibliography references works such as “Hey Boy! Hey George!: The Pullman Porter”, “They Call Me George” and “10,000 Black Men Named George”).

When Baxter discovers a postcard whilst cleaning we suspect that his route to his dentistry dream will not run smoothly with a creeping inevitability which the author handles very well.  It’s a chilling depiction of the sleeping car porter’s role which was arduous and fraught with a whole range of dangers brought to life in this engaging novel.  Whilst reading this I realised I have read very little Canadian literature and that this particular train journey might just have opened up a whole new reading world for me.

The Sleeping Car Porter will be published in the UK by Dialogue Books on 18th May 2023.  Many thanks to the publishers and Netgalley for the advance review copy.

The Coral Island- R M Ballantyne (1857)

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I was reminded of R M Ballantyne (1825-94) by Christopher Fowler’s “Book Of Forgotten Authors.”  This prolific Scottish writer was most celebrated for this work which was significant as one of the earliest books intended for younger readers with juvenile characters as its heroes. Narrator Ralph Rover, aged 15, alongside two other cabin boys Jack Martin aged 18 and 13 year old Peterkin Gay find themselves marooned on an island in the South Seas and get up to all sorts of adventures.

I remember having a children’s classic version of this but never got round to reading it.  I don’t know whether that version had been edited for tender sensibilities or not I think had I read it I would certainly have remembered the parts where this book veers into dark territory.

It predates “Treasure Island” by some 25 years and Robert Louis Stevenson acknowledged its influence.  Reading both books as an adult Stevenson’s classic was less exciting than I had imagined whereas this was more exciting.  The inspiration here is likely Defoe’s ancient even at the time Ballantyne was writing “Robinson Crusoe” (1719) but the author certainly ramps up the excitement for his audience.

To begin with it is all rather sedate, once the boys are shipwrecked (I’m not plot-spoiling, you knew that was going to happen, surely) it all gets rather cosy as they thoroughly explore their environment, set themselves up domestically and do not appear to miss home too much.  There’s a lot about cocoa-nuts and coral reefs and they go off to see penguins, all of which would be quite a novelty for a Victorian juvenile readership but is not always exactly accurate (criticism which, according to Fowler, saw Ballantyne only writing from direct evidence from then on which may have actually been to the detriment of his other 80+ novels which did not achieve the same lasting success).  However, mid-way through he gives the then very popular Penny Dreadfuls a run for their money as we get Ballantyne’s literary take on piracy, sacrifice and cannibalism.

Of course, none of this is politically correct today but the good-natured heroes in their wide-eyed admiration of their environment feel less Victorian than we might expect (there is one use of the most unacceptable word and that is uttered by a ruthless pirate).  It’s also less preachy and moral than I was expecting for a book aimed at youth- although the value of Christianity does take more precedence as the book progresses it’s not a major issue for our three heroes.  There is a cat involved which always causes me more than a modicum of stress as cats in fiction seem to have a poor survival record.

Given its age and its outdated world view I found myself getting quite a bit from this book.  There were moments of genuine tension, real terror and I also enjoyed the more humdrum domestic moments from these youths.  It’s no wonder this book is seen as a direct ancestor of “Treasure Island”, “Lord Of The Flies” (where the protagonists view of desert island life becomes warped) and also of the Willard Price books beloved by my generation.  And how much I enjoyed it was actually a surprise.  But it is a different perspective which readers might today find too off-putting.  As Christopher Fowler says “it remained a hit for over a century and was translated around the world.  It was considered appropriate for primary school children despite blood-gushing descriptions of death and sacrifice.” I wouldn’t recommend passing this over to a nine year old without reading it first but as a piece of old-fashioned, thrill-seeking fiction this still resonates.

The Coral Island was first published in 1857 and there are many editions out there.  I read it as an e-book Delphi Classic which I recently bought at the excellent value price of £1.99 where it is the second of almost 100 of Ballantyne’s published novels,  novellas, non-fiction and nursery tales in the Compete Works of R M Ballantyne.  Should I choose to do so there is certainly a lot more of this author to discover.

Trespasses – Louise Kennedy (2022)

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As I was reading this it was announced that Louise Kennedy has made the shortlist for the 2023 Women’s Fiction Prize alongside Jacqueline Crooks whose “Fire Rush” I have already read and rated five stars.  On the evidence of these two books this particular judging panel seem to know how to spot a gem.  I think this novel is outstanding and a serious contender for my Book Of The Year (yes, I know it’s only May!)

It caught my attention when it won Novel Of The Year at the An Post Irish Book Awards beating Donal Ryan, whose book I’d loved.  It was also a title which popped up when I was “Looking Around” at what other bloggers had loved at the end of 2022 and Cathy at 746 Books and Karen at Booker Talk and my friend Louise’s recommendations were enough to push this up my To Be Read List.

Set in Northern Ireland in 1974 it is ostensibly a tale of a problematic relationship between a Catholic Primary School teacher who works part-time in her family’s pub and a customer, an older Protestant barrister.  But it is so much more as with a lot of attention to domestic detail the author humanises a world which seemed so alien to those of us who were around then watching the horrors of daily news bulletins in the UK at the height of The Troubles.  As a child then it seemed impossible to me that life could go on as normal there through the barricades, searches, explosions and retaliations but Louise Kennedy brings this time to life.  I recall enough to know that this is subject matter that I would not actively seek out but the author has convinced me otherwise in skilfully recreating this time and location. 

Characterisation is great.  Main protagonist Cushla’s mother copes with the effects The Troubles have had on her family through alcohol and some wonderful one-liners.  Her class favourite, seven year old Danny is such a strong illustration of the resilience of children, her colleague Gerry is a valuable support and there’s a very scary parish priest.

Perhaps the hardest thing to come to terms with was what Cushla sees in barrister Michael Agnew and whether it is worth the trouble it will cause but the author does  not romanticise this attachment.  We see it in its warts-and-all reality but accept that Cushla is experiencing something different.

I felt my involvement which started off very strong deepened more and more as I progressed through this excellent book.  There really has been some exceptional writing coming out of Ireland the last decade or so and this, dealing with very difficult issues and a very difficult time in the country’s history is amongst the very best.

Trespasses was published in 2022 by Bloomsbury.

Small Joys – Elvin James Mensah (Scribner 2023)

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Wooh!, I wasn’t expecting this.  The blog has become awash with five star ratings- we have now had three on the trot and I am thrilled to be knocked for six by this unassuming debut, which I will certainly be promoting as one of the uplifting, feel-good novels of the year.

I know nothing about this author, other than he graduated from Bournemouth University and the indication from his Acknowledgements that there have been struggles with mental health.  Issues on self-worth, self-esteem, gay shame, depression, anxiety and the importance of support networks are central to this novel.  The most uplifting aspect is the notion of friendship, especially a bromance between two unlikely characters.  Harley Sekyere is a young, gay, black man who has found his university course on music journalism too much to cope with.  He is at a very low ebb when we meet him in his first-person narrative and is returning to a house-share in Kent where he has stayed before.   It is set around the time of the London bombings of 2005.  His unlikely friend is Muddy, a rugby-playing, bird-watching gem of a character, full of contradictions and challenges to all manners of stereotypes.  At its most basic this is a glass nearly empty meets a glass almost full scenario.  Muddy’s similar but less well-adjusted mate Finlay and girl friends Chelsea and Noria add to this network which allows Harley with his high-functioning depression to actually function.

It’s heart-warming, it’s funny but it also chilling, especially in aspects of race and sexuality which is handled so well.  At times it reminded me of Paul Mendez’s five-star debut “Rainbow Milk” (2020) and there is obviously a connection as I discovered after finishing this that Paul Mendez is narrating the audiobook.  Here, the scope is smaller, things feel more intense and contained and it works brilliantly because of this.  It is extremely uplifting but throughout it never loses its very brittle edge, as if things can turn suddenly.  These are characters who operate in the modern world and are totally convincing.  Occasionally behaviour is questionable but they have each other to provide balance and support.  As in Jacqueline Crooks’ five star debut “Fire Rush”, music plays an important part and the mid-noughties setting helps this whether it be Muddy’s love for the Gallagher brothers pitched against Harley’s fondness for female rap, to sing-alongs in the car or pub karaoke, music provides an uplift throughout.

Elvin James Mensah is not going to solve this country’s mental health crisis within one novel but Harley’s story provides a pathway which can certainly be seen as inspirational.  There is the odd moment where we momentarily move away for reflection and analysis but the author skilfully allows the characters and their dynamics to illustrate the points being made.  I came away from this novel appreciating a great reading experience and with the awareness that we all could do with a Muddy in our lives.

Small Joys is published by Scribner in the UK on 13th April 2023.  Many thanks to the publishers and Netgalley for the advance review copy.

A Keeper – Graham Norton (2018)

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Sometimes a book completely resonates.  It’s often just a matter of timing- it fulfils all you are looking for in a reading experience at that present time, even if you’re not always aware that is what you’re looking for.  When this happens, these tend to be the books that stay with you.

I wasn’t aware that I was yearning for an Irish-set family saga which dealt in secrets, infused with a nostalgic glow but hiding a tale of darkness but I obviously was as this book had me right from the start and didn’t let go.

I read Graham Norton’s debut “Holding” pre-publication in 2016 and I certainly did not know what to expect and was most taken aback by his understated slice of small-town Irish life.  From the personality on the screen and from his autobiographies I’d made an assumption of what kind of novel he might write. At the time I stated; “It certainly wasn’t the book I was expecting him to write.  I was expecting sharp, brittle humour and a much more glitzy affair.”  I’ve recommended this book to many readers since then, especially when I wanted to shake up people’s perceptions but I hadn’t got round to reading anything else by him.

Now he is a very much established author of four novels with critical acclaim matching his commercial success, especially in his homeland where he has won the Popular Fiction Book Of The Year twice at the Irish Book Awards (but not with this book, although it was nominated as it was for the UK Book Awards ).  I think on the strength of this Graham Norton deserves his place amongst the finest Irish novelists of our time.

We have two interspersing narratives, “Now” and “Then”.  This structure can be hit and miss as readers tend to favour one or the other and rush through to get to the strand they are enjoying the most, I don’t really have that much of a problem with this structure although I have heard readers complaining about it.  For me, it certainly works well here as the “Then” informs the “Now” throughout.  I think the danger comes when you have two seemingly disparate strands and you spend much of the book waiting for them to mesh together.

There’s a prologue “Before” which is a bit enigmatic but just needs to be kept in mind.  I found myself turning back at a couple of points in the novel and re-reading this. 

New York resident Elizabeth Keane has returned to Ireland to sort out her dead mother’s house.  She discovers letters which suggest she does not know her mother’s life at all.  “Then” features Patricia’s story behind those letters.  Seeing the plot laid out like that it doesn’t sound all that original but I think the author handles the plotline skilfully and weaves a tale which really drew this reader in.

His characterisation is strong.  I really enjoyed both “Now” and “Then” and his feel  for the Irishness within the world he creates felt spot-on for his debut and even more so here.  Some of the minor characters are beautifully realised and this reminded me of Donal Ryan, one of the finest contemporary Irish writers.  Norton certainly knows what he is doing within his popular fiction framework to keep the reader involved.  Secrets are revealed unexpectedly, there’s humour, darkness, a strong feel of the environment with the 1970s small-town coastal setting coming across so well in the “Then” sections.  Also, I slowed down towards the end because I was reluctant to finish the experience- another signifier that this book deserves my highest rating.  Once again Graham Norton has surprised me.

A Keeper was first published in the UK by Hodder and Stoughton in 2018.

Death Under A Little Sky – Stig Abell (Harper Collins 2023)

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Although I have never read either of Stig Abell’s non-fiction works and have seen him only briefly on TV I was actually quite excited to read his debut novel- a literary crime thriller.  Stig is without doubt a high achiever – a double first English degree from Cambridge led to him joining the Press Complaints Commission, which doesn’t seem the most natural route to the role of the managing editor of The Sun newspaper and from there he went on to become the editor of The Times Literary Supplement.  He has since been the Launch Director for Times Radio where he presents the Breakfast Show.  I was intrigued by this mixture of the literary and the mainstream – here is a man who is able to put his ideas across and he is equally at home with the academic as popular culture (he’s also quite easy on the eye) and here he is opting to write a novel within the crime genre because of his deep love of detective fiction.  Could this be where he falls flat on his face?  Not as far as I am concerned as this novel is very good indeed.

We meet main character Jake Jackson at the start of the novel getting out of a taxi in the middle of nowhere in an unspecified part of the English countryside.  He walks to a house he has inherited from an uncle where he intends to embrace a solitary, rural life, giving up his career in the police.  As much as it is a crime thriller this is a novel of escaping and of adapting to circumstances, all feeling rather relevant in this post-Covid 19 world.  Jack is going to wing it- he is happy to give up technology, has no transport and no real survival plan.  What he does have is his uncle’s impressive library of detective fiction which Jake believes initially will do.  I really like this man.

However, this is a crime novel and things will not stay quiet, even though for a considerable time the thriller aspect just simmers alongside Jake’s coming to grips with his new life but slowly the author ramps up the pressure and we get a highly satisfactory crime fiction set-up.

As you might expect it is well written and the grounding Jake has in police-work and detective fiction gives the novel a huge respect for the genre which elevates it onto a higher level.  Stig Abell knows exactly what he is doing here- his love and absorption of crime novels and his years of professional analysis of literary works is so evident and has resulted in this first-class example.  Is there anything this man does not excel in?

Death Under A Little Sky is published by Harper Collins on 13th April 2023.  Many thanks to the publishers and Netgalley for the advance review copy.

An Iron Girl In A Velvet Glove- Triona Holden (2021)

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Back in the late 1980s/early 90s I lived in Crouch End in North London where close by a recording studio used by Dave Stewart and Annie Lennox of the Eurythmics was a café called Josie’s. The first time I went in there it was like being in some parallel universe.  Around the café were photos of big stars from two or three decades before with a glamorous blonde woman, not unlike Diana Dors, often photographed in sparkly gowns and leotards.  This lady was obviously the same lady who was now making our coffee.  From the magnitude of the people she was photographed with and the lengthy span when these photos would have been taken this was someone who I clearly should have known, but I didn’t.

Finding out some information nowadays would involve ten seconds on Google but things were different then.  I felt I couldn’t just ask her.  I eventually discovered that this was Joan Rhodes, a long lasting star of variety and the early years of tv, famed as a strongwoman and for tearing up telephone directories and now the subject of Triona Holden’s book published by The History Press, which seems a fitting publishing house for this unique talent who was very much of her time but whose attitudes and qualities will still very much resonate today. 

Joan Rhodes (1921-2010) went down a storm on variety bills, bending nails and steel bars with her bare hands, lifting weights and members of the audience, tearing up phone books, being a one-woman tug of war team and once, famously, tripping and dropping comedian Bob Hope.  Looking very much a showgirl and not overly muscular she was billed as “The Strongest Woman In The World” and “The Mighty Mannequin.” She toured the world, performed for royalty, appeared on the “Ed Sullivan Show” in the USA and latterly ran a café in Crouch End where I encountered her.

The author befriended Joan in 2003.  By then retired and living in the garden flat she occupied for decades in Belsize Park she didn’t let that many people into her close circle but was a fiercely loyal long-time friend to luminaries such as Quentin Crisp, artist Dame Laura Knight, Marlene Dietrich and Larry Grayson.  She had an extraordinary tale to tell, was ripped off through attempting to self-publish an autobiography and so it was left to her old friend to tell this story eleven years after Joan’s death at the age of 89.

It’s a fascinating glimpse into the recent past, where things seem familiar and yet so far removed from today.  Joan did love to tell stories and had amassed large amounts of memorabilia and written accounts of events in her life and yet the author still discovered things she had chosen to hide.  Born into poverty, abandoned by her mother as a toddler, Joan credited the rage this caused within her to be the motivation for her feats of strength.  A street performer who worked her way up the variety ladder into becoming a highly recognised performer much feted by the popular press who loved to print stories about her. 

All this made me feel that I wished I had spoken more to her when I visited the café.  The author does a very good job of putting Joan Rhodes into context for a modern audience, even for those who might not now know what a telephone directory was! The book was inspired partly by the interest of the young production crew of BBC TV’s “The Repair Shop” where the author had one of Joan’s stage outfits she had inherited restored.  This felt both a nostalgic and empowering tale of a very special woman, who lived life on her terms, who used a unique physical talent extraordinarily and who also possessed great warmth, determination and resilience.

“An Iron Girl In A Velvet Glove – The Life Of Joan Rhodes” by Triona Holden was published in 2021 by The History Press.