Read (not seen) — June 2020

Events overtook me, but I finally have a picture to accompany June’s reading list (as ever, this doesn’t include manuscripts):

• Act Like It — Lucy Parker.
• The Flowering Thorn — Margery Sharp.
• Marry in Scarlet — Anne Gracie.
• An Afternoon to Kill — Shelley Smith.

Jenny Clement has been filling my arms with interwar women’s fiction and mid-century murder mysteries. The Flowering Thorn (1934) is one of the former, and belongs to that class of books in which wickedly inclined (although never actually very bad) party girls of the 1920s go back to the land and grow stout on fresh food and country living. It’s a story with an ever-smaller compass, and with a firmly held point of view on such things, but it was lovely. An Afternoon to Kill (1953) is one of the latter. It’s fascinatingly nested and does something I’m not even mad about, although I faintly feel that I should be.

All the books will probably show up directly or indirectly in future thoughts & projects.

[Edit 25/1/2021 — I forgot to include Cartographies of Danger: Mapping Risk in America by Mark Monmonier]