Notes from a Small Island – Bill Bryson

This long-overdue ‘booket-list’ read is Bill Bryson’s 1995 farewell to the UK before moving back to the USA. After a two-decade sojourn in Britain, during which he married and started a family, he picks an eclectic mix of places to visit. Using mainly public transport and low-budget accommodation he zig-zags north from Dover to John O’Groats before returning to his home in the Yorkshire Dales.

En route he exercises his wit and erudition in recounting his travels, the places he goes and the people he meets. Corporatisation of the town centres, decline of resorts, illogical transport connections, and rude people all get a withering tongue-lashing. But he also waxes lyrical on the delightful eccentricities, the charm, and beauty that he finds in the country that, he finally admits, he likes very, very much.

As always with Bryson it is funny, with laugh out loud lines, but also insightful and interesting.

Ripeness – Sarah Moss

Edith (73) lives alone on the west coast of Ireland. Alone but not lonely. She has friends, like Gunter (with whom she has benefits) and Meabh (with whom she swims and drinks coffee). Gunter is an incomer like her, but Meabh is local born and bred. It’s a good life, settled in the wild, windy and wet landscape.

When Meabh confides in her that an unknown, unsuspected, illegitimate half-brother has tracked her down and wants to visit from the US and connect with his past, learn about his birth mother, it brings to Edith’s mind another illegitimate baby parted from its mother over fifty years previously.

Seventeen-year-old Edith, had her plan for a gap year in Europe (a place awaiting at Oxford) amended to take in a trip to Lake Como where her elder (by some years) sister, Lydia, is holed up to have her baby away from prying eyes. Edith, armed only with A-level Italian and experience of birthing lambs on the family hill farm in Derbyshire, rolls up her sleeves and pitches in.

Lydia is a ballerina in a top company; the pregnancy is an inconvenient interruption in her career; the baby, when it comes, is to be shipped off immediately through a convent network to a “good home”.

Edith’s two narratives, half a century apart, are related in Moss’s unfussy prose that beautifully captures the distinctive landscapes of the two locations. The character of Edith, in youth and experience is finely drawn and provides for a thought-provoking and elegiac read.

May Contain Nuts – John O’Farrell

Alice and David Chaplin, and all their friends, know what is best for their children – a good education, in a good school, where good children are pushed to excel, complemented outside school by good extra-curricular activities such as ballet, music, French conversation, museums and theatre. It’s a bubble, a comfortable middle-class bubble. But it is about to burst for the Chaplins.

Their daughter, Molly, is due to leave her private prep school, Spencer House, and start secondary education. The ‘only’ place to go is the exclusive, fee-paying, Chelsea College. But it has high standards to maintain, and an entrance exam needs to be passed. Now, Molly is bright and intelligent and has, in common with all her friends, a private tutor to boost performance, but she has a ‘problem’ with exams. She does poorly in a mock test and continues to flunk practice papers at home. With her whole future on the line (according to Alice), and Battersea Comp beckoning, drastic measures are needed.

Alice’s plan is a recipe for disaster, and O’Farrell charts the unfolding chaos with characteristic humour, all the while taking mocking swipes at the helicopter parenting of the middle class.

It all works very well, treading the fine overlap between the farcical and the credible. And, being O’Farrell, the moral message comes through by the end to provide a funny and feel-good read.