Our World Book Night choice for this year was popular in the group and also with other readers. Everyone appreciated its combination of warm humanity together with an ongoing undercurrent of menace, while feeling that it covered a lot of issues. If anyone would like to write a sentence or two about the book, please email me janet.bayliss@esneft.nhs.uk – so we can post to the book group part of the ESNEFT book group website.
This was a book eagerly anticipated by readers with its intriguing combination of a young girl’s memories of her childhood in Yorkshire around 1980 and the threatening atmosphere then created by the Yorkshire Ripper murders. Miv (the narrator) doesn’t want to leave Yorkshire and feels that the presence of the Ripper is directly related to her dad’s plans to shift the family down south.
She and her best friend Sharon decide that the best way to prevent this is to solve the Ripper murders and to this end they start to compile a list of suspicious things. The ramifications of this ripple out to Miv and Sharon’s family, friends and neighbours, but all the time there are other ominous issues at hand in terms of racism and the violence that results from people’s fears of the other.
The author was an employee of a FTSE 100 company before writing The list of suspicious things which is her first novel. The book is based on her own childhood memories of growing up in Dewsbury, Yorkshire in the 1970s and is very atmospheric for those of us who can recall that time and in some cases, that particular place.
The group enjoyed the book, but some felt that there were too many issues covered in it and also some lack of resolution in the ending. We were very involved in the theme with Omar the widowed shopkeeper and his son Ishtiaq and their battles with racist attacks carried out by former pupils at the local school. The voice of Miv also felt authentic for that of a girl in her early teens and we liked the characters generally, although there were some plot points that some found a bit mystifying. We were not convinced for example, that a teenage girl would have the wherewithal to call an ambulance when faced with a suspicion of domestic abuse; and the sudden recovery of Miv’s mother from a severe mental illness and self-induced silence did not feel totally credible either. The figure of Sharon, although a pivotal character in the book was also curiously undefined and perhaps a bit too good to be true.
Overall, this book got a big thumbs up from the group along with other readers who tackled it as a result of our great World Book Night giveaway back in April. This is an author to watch, with her second book The barbecue at no. 9 due in February 2026.
One theme in The list of suspicious things was friendship, this was echoed in another book suggested by group members: Klara and the sun by Kazuo Ishiguro, a dystopian novel set in an alternative present where human beings have “artificial friends”.
The most recent Libby “read together” choice: The storyteller’s death by Ann Davila Cardinal was generally recommended by those who had read it, with themes of family and inheritance as eighteen year old Isla discovers she has a special storytelling gift, leading to the uncovering of a murder mystery.
The latest Cormoran Strike detective book, The hallmarked man by Robert Galbraith (J.K. Rowling) was still awaited eagerly by several group members at the time of the meeting.
Several of the above are on Libby, check them out at the ESNEFT Libby pages.