Reminiscences and Book Talk from Tea with Tales

As we ate cheese scones with a cuppa, we told stories about famous people we had met.

Our book reading was from The Novel in the Viola by Natasha Solomons, an historical novel set in England in World War Two. Jewess Elsie is sent to England to work as a parlourmaid despite having lived a life of privilege in Vienna. With little English she doesn’t fit with either the staff or the landed gentry.

Almost everyone read a book that had been previously recommended with differing results. Those that read Miriam Margolyes’s biography This Much Is True found her descriptions of her earlier life and take on the Gaza conflict very interesting but thought much of the narrative was included just to shock the reader.

Richard Osman’s Thursday Murder Club series has been much enjoyed by several of the group but they didn’t find the new series We Solve Murders nearly as good.

Continuing with the Gabriel Allon’s series; Daniel Silva’s A Death in Cornwall  is another mystery for the master art restorer and Israeli spy to solve. The affluent art society depicted gives the book an unreal feel thought one of our readers.

Several members read historical novels. The wartime attitude of men towards women was highlighted in Mr Churchill’s Secretary by Susan Elia MacNeal. The protagonist Maggie Hope proves herself up to the task of uncovering an assassin’s murder plan.

Racism in Australia is the subject of Bryce Courtenay’s Jessica. Unbelievably good was the verdict of our reader who also recommends Courtenay’s novel Whitethorn, set in South Africa during the lead up to World War Two.

Another Australian author much enjoyed is Di Morrissey. The Silent Country is set in the Northern Territory, Sydney and Italy and travels from the 1950s to today.

The remaining biographies are set in the Second World War and couldn’t be more different. Sonia Purnell’s A Woman of No Importance: the untold story of the American spy who helped win World War II tells the story of Virginia Hall. Rejected from foreign service because of her gender and her prosthetic leg, she talks her way into the French resistance, becoming the first woman to be deployed in occupied France.

Mary S Lovell’s biography The Mitford Girls: the biography of an extraordinary family describes the privileged life of the six Mitford daughters, including author of Love in a Cold Climate Nancy. Our reader described the sisters as both amusing and mad as hatters.

Tea with Tales, a book group for the sight-impaired, takes place on the first Monday of the month at 10:30 at Hastings War Memorial Library.

Posted by Miss Moneypenny

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