April 2024 reading wrap-up

It’s been a bit of a slower reading month, which isn’t surprising given the sudden spike in the temperatures in Delhi. I don’t know about you, but the start of summer generally throws me off-center. It takes me a while to acclimatize to the return of the oppressive heat.

Anyway, I read quite a mix of genres again this month — historical fiction, mystery and crime, and contemporary fiction. So, let’s dive right in to the April 2024 reading wrap up!

(Click on the book covers to purchase the book on Amazon.)

The Phone Box At The Edge of The World by Laura Imai Messina

When Yui loses her mother and daughter in the tsunami, she wonders how she will ever carry on. Yet, in the face of this unthinkable loss, life must somehow continue. Then one day she hears about a man who has an old disused telephone box in his garden. There, those who have lost loved ones find the strength to speak to them and begin to come to terms with their grief. As news of the phone box spreads, people will travel there from miles around. Soon Yui will make her own pilgrimage to the phone box, too. But once there she cannot bring herself to speak into the receiver. Then she finds Takeshi, a bereaved husband whose daughter has stopped talking in the wake of their loss. What happens next will warm your heart, even when it feels as though it is breaking.

Based on a real-life phone box in Bel Gardia, known as “The Phone of the Wind” and set against the aftermath of the March 2011 tsunami, in which thousands of people lost their lives, Messina’s beautifully written novel is a testament to the human heart’s capacity to heal. While the novel centers around Yui and Takeshi and their unexpected bond, Messina weaves in stories of other visitors to Bel Gardia — creating a complex tapestry of loss and grief and hope and the ways in which we manage to cope and sometimes, even to thrive. Highly recommended!

Homecoming by Kate Morton

Adelaide Hills, Christmas Eve, 1959: At the end of a scorching hot day, beside a creek on the grounds of the grand and mysterious mansion, a local delivery man makes a terrible discovery. A police investigation is called and the small town of Tambilla becomes embroiled in one of the most shocking and perplexing murder cases in the history of South Australia.

60 years later, Jess is a journalist in search of a story. But when she receives word that her beloved grandmother Nora, who raised Jess when her mother could not, has suffered a fall and been raced to the hospital, she drops everything to be at her side. Nora has always been a vibrant and strong presence, but when Jess visits her in the hospital, she is alarmed to find her grandmother frail and confused. When she learns that Nora had been distracted in the weeks before her accident, Jess does some digging of her own. In Nora’s bedroom, she discovers a true crime book, chronicling the police investigation into a long-buried tragedy: the Turner Family Tragedy of Christmas Eve, 1959. It is only when Jess skims through the book that she finds a shocking connection between her own family and this once-infamous crime—a crime that has never been resolved satisfactorily. And for a journalist without a story, a cold case might be the best distraction she can find…

A 60-year old unsolved murder. A skeleton in a family’s closet. The lives ruined due to one devastating secret. All of this makes for an immensely satisfying read. I particularly enjoyed the “book within a book” — we get to read the true crime book, titled As If They Were Asleep, that Jessica finds in Nora’s bedroom along with her. Written by a US-based journalist who was visiting Tambilla around the time of the murders, As If They Were Asleep is written in a narrative non-fiction style that draws you right into Tambilla in the late 1950s and the mystery surrounding the death of an entire family. As both the stories move along, it seems easy to figure out the twist in the tale, but Morton keeps the twists coming and has you turning the pages feverishly to find out what happens next. This was a well-written and immensely satisfying read!

The Dictionary of Lost Words by Pip Williams

Esme is born into a world of words. Motherless and irrepressibly curious, she spends her childhood in the ‘Scriptorium’, a garden shed in Oxford where her father and a team of dedicated lexicographers are collecting words for the very first Oxford English Dictionary. Esme’s place is beneath the sorting table, unseen and unheard. One day a slip of paper containing the word ‘bondmaid’ flutters to the floor. Esme rescues the slip and stashes it in an old wooden case that belongs to her friend, Lizzie, a young servant in the big house. Esme begins to collect other words from the Scriptorium that are misplaced, discarded or have been neglected by the dictionary men. They help her make sense of the world. Over time, Esme realises that some words are considered more important than others, and that words and meanings relating to women’s experiences often go unrecorded. While she dedicates her life to the Oxford English Dictionary, secretly, she begins to collect words for another dictionary: The Dictionary of Lost Words. Set when the women’s suffrage movement was at its height and the Great War loomed, The Dictionary of Lost Words reveals a lost narrative, hidden between the lines of a history written by men. It’s a delightful, lyrical and deeply thought-provoking celebration of words, and the power of language to shape the world and our experience of it.

I know I’m very late to reading this book, but oh my word! If you haven’t read it yet, may I suggest that you pick it up, pronto? This is the best kind of historical fiction — all of the key characters and events associated with the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary are real. Well, except for Esme, of course. It’s also true that in 1901, the word ‘Bondmaid’ was discovered missing from the Oxford English Dictionary. Into the space of this mysterious disappearance, Pip Williams stitched together Esme’s story, imagining a young girl playing beneath the table at the Scriptorium, who doesn’t quite understand the true import of her actions when she picks up and hides away a paper slip that flutters to the floor next to her. From that young age, though, Esme’s life is wrapped up with the Scriptorium, consumed as she is by words and their meanings, using them to make sense of her life. Until she realizes that not all words are equal. That the words written by men are considered worthy to publish, but women’s words are left out of the dictionary. That sets Esme off on a quest to find and collect women’s words. To hold them safe in Lizzie’s wooden case, until the day when they can be let loose into the world. Highly, highly recommended!

The Vanishing of Margaret Small by Neil Alexander

Meet Margaret Small: 75, plain spoken and a Cilla Black super fan. Shortly after the death of her idol, Margaret begins receiving sums of money in the post, signed simply ‘C’. She is convinced it must be Cilla, but how can it be? To solve the mystery of her benefactor Margaret must go back in her memories almost 70 years, to the time when she was ‘vanished’ to a long-stay institution for children with learning disabilities.

This is the second book I’ve read this year about institutions that were designed to lock people away. The first was Only the Beautiful by Susan Meissner, which dealt with eugenics. This one is about people with metal disabilities — autism, ADHD, dyslexia, depression, and other psychiatric problems — who were locked away in institutions. This is the story of Margaret Small, who spent most part of her life in one such long stay institution. She’s now living independently in a small house. She has her money allowance {from the state, I presume} and a caseworker who keeps an eye on her and helps her navigate life outside the institution. When she starts receiving money from a secret benefactor, we learn more about her life in the institution; the small cruelties and the ways in which she coped with the circumstances in which she found herself. That makes her current circumstances and fierce independence all the more endearing. Alexander’s drew much of his inspiration directly from people with learning disabilities and first person accounts of people who lived in long stay institutions, which he heard while working for the UK charity Mencap. Don’t let the subject put you off the book, though. It’s a very well written book, and you will fall in love with Margaret almost immediately. Another brilliant book!

Over to you! What was on your reading list this month?

This post is part of the Bookish League blog hop hosted by Bohemian Bibliophile.