nice all read

Thirty-two-year-old Hetty Greengrass is the star around which the rest of her family orbits. Marriage, motherhood and helping Dan run Sunnybank Farm have certainlykept her hands full for the last twelve years. But when her daughter Poppy has to choose her inspiration for a school project and picks her aunt, not her mum, Hetty is left full of self-doubt. Hetty’s always been generous with her time and until now, her biggest talent – baking deliciously moreish shortcrust pastry pies – has been limited to charity work and the village fete. But taking part in a competition run by Cumbria’s Finest to find the very best produce from the region might be just the thing to make her daughter proud . . . and reclaim something for herself. Except that life isn’t as simple as producing the perfect pie. Changing the status quo isn’t easy – and with cracks appearing in her marriage and shocking secrets coming to light, Hetty must decide where her priorities really lie . . . I have read all of Cathy Br...

Fiction A witness to change THE LIGHTHORSEMEN: A Novel of Indian Territory By Jack Shakely 214 pp. Strider Nolan Reviewed by Bob Sanchez The Creek Indian Billy Mingo murders a man who he says really “needed killing.” The year is 1895, and the law catches up to him. Mingo surrenders to the Lighthorsemen, the Creek Nation’s law enforcement, and he admits his guilt. Creek judges sentence him to death, but according to custom they tell him to go home and be with his family for most of a year and “return on the first Saturday in August 1896 to be executed.” Mingo complies on the appointed day, and in the audience the journalist Edward Perryman watches the man’s death by firing squad. Perryman is deeply impressed by the murderer’s honor and bravery, and by the system of laws that command such respect even from a convicted criminal. Perryman decides to become part of this honorable Creek legal system, first by becoming a Lighthorseman and eventually a lawyer to protect his people. The execut...

Nonfiction Stoking our daydreams TEN MOVIES AT A TIME: A 350-Film Journey Through Hollywood and America 1930-1970 By John DiLeo 407 pp. Hansen Publishing Group Reviewed by Rebeca Schiller Back in the mid-1990s I lived with an economist who cursed his choice of careers. His dreamed of writing novels, but he had one problem: he wasn’t a natural-born storyteller. To find his muse, he decided to watch 100 films in one month. I went along with the idea, but mentioned we needed some viewing guidelines that covered genre, directors, country of origin and so on. Out of those 100 films, I watched 84 from the opening to the ending credits. That averaged out to three movies a day while he cheated and fast-forwarded the remaining 16 films. The outcome of that challenge? He’s still an economist, and I’m the writer. And that leads me to John DiLeo’s Ten Movies at a Time. DiLeo, the author of five other books on films, is a contributing book reviewer for the Washington Post , a weekly regular on...

--> Fiction Murder and sins of the flesh BABYLON BERLIN By Volkner Kutscher Translated from the German by Niall Sellar 423 pp. Picador Reviewed by Alan Goodman I like this book as much for the style of writing (even in translation, not an easy accomplishment) as for the development of the story and characters. This is a story that keeps you turning pages until you run out of pages, at which time you wonder how you’ll find another book that will keep you similarly engaged. Volkner Kutscher, the author, is a man who has apparently not bothered with the apocryphal shortest book in the world, “A History of German Humor.” Amidst the grimness of creating entertainment from the cruelest human activity one might imagine, Mr. Volkner manages to reveal a sense of humor – if not always for the characters themselves, then in a quite subtle manner for the march of human activity in general. Here is one such moment describing a pornography bust by the Berlin Vice Squad: The man was faintly r...