Tower and Town, March 2026 (view the full edition)A Good ReadI read a book recently because I felt I should. Not 'should read a book' you understand, just 'should' read that particular novel. Best seller, glowingly reviewed, garlanded with praise and prizes, altogether tremendously literary. Well, dear reader, I slogged my way through it, teeth gritted, aware that it was, objectively, a very good, well written thing, just not enjoyable. I'm not going to tell you what it was, I don't want to be inundated with people telling me how wrong I am. But it was all about unhappy people being unpleasant, with a twist in the narrative which turned out to be, if not exactly predictable, not tremendously surprising either. The author kindly gave us sex scenes of industrial-laundry-steaminess, during which none of the participants seemed to be having fun, and altogether I was left feeling tired and glum, and vindicated in my view that Literary Prizes are often the kiss of death. Another book full of unkind or suffering people is The Rush by Beth Lewis. However, I enjoyed this, because here the unkind people are actively relishing their villainy, and then receive their comeuppance, and the sufferers are taking steps to amend their sorry states. Set in Dawson City in the Yukon in 1898, the 'rush' of the title is of course for gold. Three women are, initially unknowingly, linked by their connection to a murdered fourth. The country is dangerous, the work is dangerous, the men are mostly desperate and violent. We're given descriptions of the extraordinarily unforgiving landscape and the risks involved in travelling through it, let alone trying to exploit it. Landslides, fires, bar fights, tarts-with-hearts and a murderous local Mr Big all feature. It's exhausting and alarming but entertaining, not bleak and dreary. The Mitford Sisters - amusing, unpleasant, trivial, tragic - delete as appropriate. The industry around this self-mythologising and far-from-dreary family is still going strong. Troublemaker by Carla Kaplan is about renegade Jessica ('Decca') who rejected her aristocratic upbringing and the (extreme) right wing politics of her family. She became an activist, dissident, investigative journalist, and thorn in the side of the 'Establishment' on both sides of the Atlantic. As an American Kaplan is able to take a dispassionate view of her subject's British background, and drawing on interviews and a vast archive of letters concentrates on Decca's role in opposing and reporting injustice in the USA in the second half of the C20th. It's a full and celebratory biography of a relentlessly committed, energetic and probably infuriating character. Debby Guest |