The Keeper of Lost Things by Ruth Hogan – subject: first novels.
This was a light read, but with some thought provoking short stories included in the text, although perhaps the book is rather less than the sum of its parts.
If anyone would like to write a sentence or two about the book, please email me janet.bayliss@esneft.nhs.uk
This book has a clever idea and some good things in it: Anthony Peardew is an author who is mourning a lost love and connected with this, has spent much of his life collecting lost objects which are stored in his house. He leaves the house and its contents to his personal assistant Laura, asking her to try to reunite the lost things with their owners.
Much of the book is Laura’s very complicated story; but interleaved with it is the earlier narrative of Eunice who becomes secretary to a publisher nicknamed Bomber and his dreadful sister, would-be novelist Portia. There are also short stories around the lost things themselves; some of which we found rather more interesting than the main plot strands. There is a moral to each tale and the whole book tends to divide humanity into good and bad with its drawing of the characters involved: there is little room for shades of grey. Overall, the style of the book is engaging, but above all, a “light read”.
We had some questions about aspects of the plot and were not sure whether Anthony’s death was suicide or not; we also found some of the characters rather simplistic and not believable. This might be because this is a first novel: Ruth Hogan has at various times been a local government officer and a receptionist for an osteopath, but only started writing seriously in her thirties. The keeper of lost things arose while she was having chemotherapy for cancer, which kept her awake all night and drove her writing forward. As with the novel’s main figures, she lives in a Victorian house, with several dogs and likes collecting things. She has written 3 other novels since: the most recent being Madame Burova.
We thought about novels with a strong sense of place: The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Annie Barrows and Mary Ann Shaffer, is very good on what it might have been like to live in the Channel Islands during the Nazi occupation. We also felt that the Cormoran Strike series of books by Robert Galbraith were very solid on place: this being Whitstable, Kent. Some book group members are still working their way through The running grave – the latest in the series.
We are also still looking at the Seven Sisters book series by Lucinda Riley – which also evoke a sense of place very well. Another possible novel in the vein of capturing an idea of a place is The shadow of the wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon, which described a unique library in Barcelona and is also one of a book series.
Possible suggestions for future book group books included Normal rules don’t apply by Kate Atkinson – a volume of short stories by a distinguished writer; and Yellowface by R.F. Kuang, an offbeat thriller with the fascinating premise of what happens when a white author steals her dead Asian colleague’s manuscript and publishes it under her own name; while at the same time the book covers issues around racism in an original and disturbing way. Check the books out further when we read them over the summer.
Several of the above may be on Libby, check them out on the Libby app. Head over to our Libby page to find out more.