The project began last year with one hundred books. By the end of the year forty books had left the premises last year, and so I’m adding forty more for 2012.

I’m introducing the books ten at a time, and so here are ten more.

Do let me know if I have a book that you’ve loved and I’ll try to make it a priority. Or a book that you’ve hated and I should think twice about.

Behind Closed Doors by Susan R Sloan

Valerie O’Connor comes from a large, close- knit, working class family in Vermont. At the age of eighteen, she marries twenty-five-year-old Jack Marsh. He is a handsome, dashing Korean War veteran, but he is also a damaged man who cannot keep himself from taking his fears and insecurities out on his wife and his five children. To make matters worse, Jack takes Valerie away from her family, and all the way across the country, isolating her from the very people who know her and care about her the most. Too proud to ask for help or admit her failure as a wife and mother, Valerie is unable to protect either herself or the children. One by one, pushed to the extreme, the children escape, in one fashion or another, until they are all gone, even Ricky, the youngest and perhaps the most troubled, and there is only Jack left, and Valerie must face the reality of her marriage and her life. And then, as if out of the ashes, another generation begins. Will history repeat itself? The answer is a message for us all.

Seven years ago I moved home to Cornwall. It was definitely the right decision, but I did worry about bookshops. Small local shops, good though they are, can’t offer the same range of books as big London booksellers and I feared that I would miss great books. And so I made regular trips to Waterstones in Truro to discover new books. This was one of them. Fortunately I discovered LibraryThing and book blogs and so I have discovered more books than I ever would have by visits to bookshops alone.

The Ingenious Edgar Jones by Elizabeth Garner

In nineteenth-century Oxford, an extraordinary child is born – Edgar Jones, a porter’s son with a magical talent. Though his father cannot see beyond his academic slowness, his abilities as a metalworker and designer are quickly noticed, and become a source of tension within the family. When Edgar comes to the attention of a maverick professor at work on a museum of the natural sciences, Edgar is at once plucked from obscurity and plunged into the heart of a debate which threatens to tear apart the university. Edgar’s position is a dangerous one – will he be able to control the rebellious spirit that fires his inventiveness, but threatens to ruin him, and to break up his family once and for all?

I borrowed Nightdancing, Elizabeth Garner’s first novel, from the library and loved it. I meant to wait for this one to appear in the library too, but I saw it discounted, it had a lovely cover, and so I bought a copy.

Scottsboro by Ellen Feldman

Alabama, 1931. A posse stops a freight train and arrests nine black youths. Their crime: fighting with white boys. Then two white girls emerge from another freight car, and within seconds the cry of rape goes up. One of the girls sticks to her story. The other changes her tune, again and again. A young journalist, whose only connection to the incident is her overheated social conscience, fights to save the nine youths from the electric chair, redeem the girl who repents her lie, and make amends for her own past. Stirring racism, sexism, and anti-Semitism into an explosive brew, Scottsboro is a novel of a shocking injustice that reverberated around the world.

This one caught my eye when it was longlisted for the Orange Prize a couple of years ago. I ordered it from the library, but there was a queue of people waiting behind me and so I had to take it back unread. I meant to borrow it again but it went out of my head until someone requesting one of my books on ReadItSwapIt was offering it. I took the book rather than forget it again!

Mr Toppit by Charles Elton

When the author of The Hayseed Chronicles, Arthur Hayman, is mown down by a concrete truck in Soho, his legacy passes to his widow, Martha, and her children – the fragile Rachel, and Luke, reluctantly immortalised as Luke Hayseed, the central character of his father’s books. But others want their share, particularly Laurie, who has a mysterious agenda of her own that changes all their lives. For buried deep in the books lie secrets which threaten to be revealed as the family begins to crumble under the heavy burden of their inheritance.

I loved the sound of this when I read about it, and when I saw a very cheap copy in a supermarket I bought it. I started reading straight away but I wasn’t too enamoured, and so I pushed it to one side. I’ll try again, and I hope I like it more than I did the first time, but if I’ll accept it isn’t a book for me.

Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer by Steven Millhauser

Martin Dressler is the son of cigar maker, born in late 19th century New York. As Martin approaches manhood, it is rapidly clear that his ambitions stretch far further than inheriting his father’s shop, as he moves first to take a job in a hotel, then to open a restaurant, and rapidly ascends to become a builder of hotels of his own. He is a classic entrepreneur, a young man who has the audacity to make his dreams – and the American Dream – come true on the grandest possible scale. But when Martin sets out to build the Grand Cosmos, a hotel that rivals Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast in its scale, and aims to rival the world itself in its scope, this mesmerising novel finally exposes the ambiguity of the American dream and the perils and wonder of human ambition and human imagination.

I must confess than I can remember buying this one in Books Etc in Charring Cross Road before I moved out of London, which means it has been waiting to be read for more than seven years. It does still appeal, but it has never quite been the book of the moment. Yet…

Heart-Shaped Box by Joe Hill

‘Buy my stepfather’s ghost’ read the e-mail. So Jude did. He bought it, in the shape of the dead man’s suit, delivered in a heart-shaped box, because he wanted it: because his fans ate up that kind of story. It was perfect for his collection: the genuine skulls and the bones, the real honest-to-God snuff movie, the occult books and all the rest of the paraphernalia that goes along with his kind of hard/goth rock. But the rest of his collection doesn’t make the house feel cold. The bones don’t make the dogs bark; the movie doesn’t make Jude feel as if he’s being watched. And none of the artefacts bring a vengeful old ghost with black scribbles over his eyes out of the shadows to chase Jude out of his home, and make him run for his life . . .

This is a new book but I really don’t remember where it came from. And that’s unusual. My thinking is pull it out now so that its ready and waiting for this year’s RIP Challenge.

War Damage by Elizabeth Wilson

London in the aftermath of WW2 is a beaten down, hungry place, so it’s no wonder that Regine Milner’s Sunday house parties in her Hampstead home are so popular. Everyone comes to Reggie’s on a Sunday: ballet dancers and cabinet ministers, left-over Mosleyites alongside flamboyant homosexuals like Freddie Buckingham. And when Freddie turns up dead on the Heath one Sunday night there is no shortage of suspects. War Damage is both a high-class thriller and a wonderful evocation of Britain staggering back to its feet after the privations of the War. And in Regine Milner it possesses a truly memorable heroine. She’s full of secrets – just what did happen in Shanghai before the war?

My fiance picked this up for me at a book sale that I had to miss because I had work commitments.

Zoology by Ben Dolnick

Henry likes to think of himself as a promising jazz musician. The truth, however, is slightly less glamorous. At 18, he’s dropped out of university, lives at home with his bickering parents, and spends most of his time with the family dog. The outlook, it seems, is bleak. So when his brother offers to put him up for the summer in his New York City apartment, Henry leaps at the chance to start living the life of his dreams! But jazz gigs are not immediately forthcoming so Henry lands a job at the Central Park Children’s Zoo. Over weeks spent chopping vegetables and shovelling dung, his world gradually expands to include a motley crew of zoo keepers, doormen and animals of every description. Amongst these, the undisputed star is Newman, the zoo’s stoic Nubian goat, in whom Henry confides his growing love for Margaret, the girl upstairs, like him in town for the summer. As the months unfolds in a haze of jazz bars, ill-advised romance and hard truths about family, Henry learns what it is to love – and to lose.

Another impulse buy, but this time from a charity shop. I wonderful cover caught my eye and I liked the blurb enough to bring the book home.

The Unseen by Katherine Webb

England, 1911. When a free-spirited young woman arrives in a sleepy Berkshire village to work as a maid in the household of The Reverend and Mrs Canning, she sets in motion a chain of events which changes all their lives. For Cat has a past – a past her new mistress is willing to overlook, but will never understand . . . This is not all Hester Canning has to cope with. When her husband invites a young man into their home, he brings with him a dangerous obsession… During the long, oppressive summer, the rectory becomes charged with ambition, love and jealousy – with the most devastating consequences.

I bought this in a library sale not long after it was published, but it got stuck on the bottom of a pile of books and I never quite got to it. I really must!

The Weed That Strings the Hangman’s Bag by Alan Bradley

‘I was lying dead in the churchyard…’ So says eleven-year-old Flavia de Luce – but soon a murder provides a gruesome distraction from her own death… A travelling puppet show arrives in the sleepy English village of Bishop’s Lacey, and everyone gathers to watch a performance of Jack and the Beanstalk in the village hall. But a shadow is cast over proceedings when a shocking murder takes place during the performance – a murder which strangely echoes a tragedy that occurred many years before. For Flavia, undoing the complex knot that ties these strands together will test her precocious powers of deduction to the limit – and throw a revealing light into some of the darker corners of the adult world…

And another one from the library book sale that I never quite got to …

******

And that’s it for this batch. Any thoughts?

p.s. I’ve had a busy week – a three day course and a car to get serviced, MOTed and taxed – so I’m running behind with a few things. I’ll catch up with myself one day …

“I exist in the eye of the storm, the calm in the centre of a perpetual hurricane of cars and lorries heading for the M6, the north and Scotland, or south to Penzance and Land’s End. I sometimes wonder if they don’t go on the motorway at all, that I hear the same vehicles circling endlessly, a kind of multiple Flying Dutchman, doomed to travel for ever. I don’t regret for one minute that I am no longer one of them.

I call my caravan Dunromin, in the solid tradition of all those semi-detached streets that form the vertebrae of the country, because that’s exactly what I’ve done. Stopped roaming. I’ve anchored myself in the middle of one of the few patches of land where no one goes, among well-established birches, ashes, sycamores, surrounded myself with nettles and claimed sanctuary …”

A story about someone who has steeped to one side of society. That’s something that Clare Morrall writes about so very, very well, and I was eager to read on.

Quinn Smith lived quietly, in a caravan in the middle of a roundabout, close to a motorway service station that offered all of the simple amenities that he needed.

His old-world charm, his unassuming nature, and his inbred politeness  won over the staff.  And so he was able to take advantage of  the washroom,  dined on unfinished meals and rejected produce, and read abandoned newspapers and magazines.

It was a simple, quiet life, but it was knocked off kilter by an eager young reporter from the  local newspaper. She wanted to write a series about unusual people. And wouldn’t the man whose history nobody knew, the man who lived such an unconventional life,  be a wonderful subject?

What she didn’t know was that Quinn had been a child star.

His mother had been a writer. A hugely successful writer of children’s books, starring her children, Quinn and his triplet sisters, Hetty, Fleur and Zuleika.

She had twisted her children’s lives into fantastical shapes.

The books were still loved years after they were written. Academics wrote about them. And visitors flocked to family’s childhood home, turned into a tourist attraction by the National Trust.

The stories were idyllic, and the reality should have been. But it wasn’t.

But Quinn’s mother had little time for her children, or for the fourteen foster children who passed through their lives. There were definite echoes of Enid Blyton …

The consequences – some positive and some negative – of the newspaper story change Quinn’s life, and make him realise that he must look for the answers to questions about his childhood that have troubled him for a long, long time.

The story mixes Quinn’s past, present and future together nicely.

The writing is as beautiful and as perceptive as I had expected, and full of intriguing characters, charming stories, lovely details and bittersweet emotions.

Fascinating questions are thrown into the air. About how we view the past and how it shapes the present. About where the line between fact and fiction lies. About the importance of home and family. And about other things that I can’t quite put into words.

Sometimes the story rambled. Sometimes it became a little too fanciful. And I notices a few loose threads.

But its strangeness and charm kept me holding on. I had to finish a novel that shone such a wonderful light on humanity

The ending was bittersweet and exactly right.

And now I have forgotten the wrong notes and I am happily remembering the notes that rang true.

This is wonderful, and not at all what I was expecting from a historian turned novelist.

This is deliciously dark Victoriana.

I was pulled straight away into 1840, into the dark, crowded, dirty streets of East London.

The Man of Crows, a serial killer who has done terrible, terrible things to earn that soubriquet walks the streets and the city lives in fear.

Catherine Sougeil lives with her uncle in Spitalfields and she is troubled. She remembers a happier time when she lived with her parents in the country and she fears that she attracted the evil that brought that time to an end. She wonderful why Grace, her maid, has left her and why the Belle-Smiths were so willing to part with her. And she broods on The Man of Crows, sure that she understands what drives him to kill. Sure that she could, should do something …

Catherine is such a complex, intriguing character.

The narrative twists together her present her past, and the world around her.  A complex puzzle becomes not clear, but maybe a little less opaque.

This is not a straightforward narrative. It move through time. Perspectives shift. Threads appear and disappear. Reflecting maybe the confusion in Catherine’s head.

The atmosphere is wonderful: unsettling, dreamlike, sinister …

The prose is rich with period detail, with vivid descriptions.

I walked the streets of Victorian London. I looked into hearts and minds. I saw, I heard, I smelled, I touched, I tasted so many extraordinary things.

Evocative is, I think, the word I’m looking for,

I turned pages backwards and forwards, reading and re-reading, trying take everything in, trying to solve the puzzle.

There was always something to infuriate and something to intrigue.

Finally there was a resolution. Of sorts.

There were things that I didn’t understand. Questions left unanswered. Missing details.

I had to let them go.

The Pleasures of Men is a strange novel, and it is flawed, but there is much to hold the interest and attention, much to delight the senses.

And it is an intriguing debut novel.

I’m luckier than many, living in the family home and with savings to tide me over, but I still want to be careful while the future is so uncertain.

And there is treasure to be found in charity shops and second-hand bookshops for very little money.

Look what I found last week:

I’ll take things from the bottom up, as that’s pretty much the order that I found them.

The name Eudora Welty caught my eye, and I found an intriguing book. One Writer’s Beginnings. An American book that somehow found its way over the Atlantic to Cornwall. A book drawing on three lectures delivered at Harvard University in 1983, about listening about learning to see, about finding a voice. Doesn’t that sound wonderful?!

I borrowed London War Notes: 1939 to 1945 by Mollie Panter-Downes from the library, but I wanted a copy of my own. And I found one - ex library but in pretty good condition. It really should be in print and would sit nicely along the author’s short stories from the same period in the Persephone list …

My fiance spotted Concerning Agnes: Thomas Hardy’s ‘Good Little Pupil’ by Desmond Hawkins first. I know nothing about Agnes but I love Hardy and so this book, from a local press, seemed well worth the investment of £1.50.

If I’d been working I would have rushed out to buy the new Vintage Stella Gibbons reissues, and so I snapped up a charity shop copy of Westwood as soon as I spotted it.

And finally, Pamela Frankau was a name I recognised as a Virago author. I have yet to read any of her books but I have read a lot of praise as so when I spotted a title I didn’t recognise in a blue numbered penguin I had to take a look. I Find 4 People seems to be autobiography written as fiction, with the author writing about herself in the third person. I was charmed, and so the book came home.

An exceptionally good week, and an excellent haul for less than £10.

There are so many wonderful books in the world, so many wonderful books still to come that I want to only hold on to the very best. The books that I want to pick up again and again, the books inspire an emotional reaction whenever I see or think about them.

So I selected a hundred books from the ridiculous number that I had unread. Books I wanted to read but probably didn’t need to keep. Those books went into my home library, to be read or rejected, and then passed on for others to read.

Forty books left the premises last year, so I’m adding forty more for 2012.

I realised when I chose them that I was getting closer to my goal: having the books I wanted to keep on shelves, and reading books that I wanted to read but not keep promptly before letting them go.

But I’m not there yet.

I’m introducing the books ten at a time. Do let me know if I have a book that you’ve loved and I’ll try to make it a priority. Or a book that you’ve hated and I should think twice about.

Who Saw Him Die? by Sheila Radley

Cuthbert Bell, the village drunk, has been killed by Jack Boodrum in a road accident. In unravelling Jack’s and Cuthbert’s past, Inspector Quantrill and Sergeant Hilary Lloyd uncover secrets that shatter the peace of the little Suffolk town.

I picked this one up a couple of weeks ago. A charity shop had three books for a pound. There was one I wanted, one my fiance wanted, and so I looked for a third. This was the one that caught my eye.

Mother Love by Domini Taylor

When Angela Turner marries Kit Vesey she is drawn into a web of lies and deceit, with horrific results for her and her family. For Kit’s mother, Helena, is divorced from her husband, Alex, a prominent conductor, and Kit has been leading a grotesque double life … It is only when Alex is knighted that Helena comes to realise the extent of Kit’s betrayal and the rage of an abandoned wife and neglected mother is unleashed …

A very tatty copy appeared in a bargain bin and it reminded me of the tv series, so I had to pick it up.

Tom Brown’s Body by Gladys Mitchell

When an unpopular teacher at a private boy’s school is found murdered, only Mrs. Bradley can solve the mystery in this classic crime caper from the redoubtable Gladys Mitchell.

I read one book by Gladys Mitchell years ago and I always meant to read more but I never did. So when this appeared in the art gallery book sale for less than the price of a library reservation it seemed sensible to buy it. But as Gladys Mitchell wrote so many books I daren’t keep it after reading in case I’m tempted to start a collection!

Hothouse Flower by Lucinda Riley

As a child Julia Forrester spent many idyllic hours in the hothouse of Wharton Park estate, where her grandfather tended the exotic flowers. So when a family tragedy strikes, Julia returns to the tranquility of Wharton Park and its hothouse. Recently inherited by charismatic Kit Crawford, the estate is undergoing renovation. This leads to the discovery of an old diary, prompting the pair to seek out Julia’s grandmother to learn the truth behind a love affair that almost destroyed Wharton Park. Julia is taken back to the 1940s where the fortunes of young couple Olivia and Harry Crawford will have terrible consequences on generations to come. For as war breaks out Olivia and Harry are cruelly separated . . .

I loved ‘The Girl on the Cliff’ and so I picked up this one too. But I passed that book on and so I think I must let this one go once I’ve read it as well.

The Hidden Child by Camilla Läckberg

Crime writer Erica Falck is shocked to discover a Nazi medal among her late mother’s possessions. Haunted by a childhood of neglect, she resolves to dig deep into her family’s past and finally uncover the reasons why. Her enquiries lead her to the home of a retired history teacher. He was among her mother’s circle of friends during the Second World War but her questions are met with bizarre and evasive answers. Two days later he meets a violent death. Detective Patrik Hedström, Erica’s husband, is on paternity leave but soon becomes embroiled in the murder investigation. Who would kill so ruthlessly to bury secrets so old? Reluctantly Erica must read her mother’s wartime diaries. But within the pages is a painful revelation about Erica’s past. Could what little knowledge she has be enough to endanger her husband and newborn baby? The dark past is coming to light, and no one will escape the truth of how they came to be…

I’ve borrowed all of Camilla Läckberg’s other books from the library, but there was a long queue for this one and so when I saw a copy in a charity shop I grabbed it. Which doesn’t make too much sense, because I would have reached the front of the library queue by now and I haven’t picked up my copy.

The House at Midnight by Lucie Whitehouse

When Lucas inherits Stoneborough Manor after his uncle’s unexpected death, he imagines it as a place where he and his close circle of friends can spend time away from London. But from the beginning, the house changes everything. Lucas becomes haunted by the death of his uncle and obsessed by cine films of him and his friends at Stoneborough thirty years earlier. The group is disturbingly similar to their own, and within the claustrophobic confines of the house over a hot, decadent summer, secrets escape from the past and sexual tensions escalate, shattering friendships and changing lives irrevocably.

I love big house books and I read some great reviews of this one. I meant to wait for it to appear in the library, but when I saw I charity shop copy I picked it up.

The Pleasure Dome by Josie Barnard

Belle is bright, funny – and a hopeless mess of self-doubt. A situation not improved by having a glamorous television presenter for a mother. In a bid to shock her mother and hijack some attention for herself, she gets a job as a dancer at the Pleasure Dome, a glitzy champagne strip joint in Soho.

Pokerface, Josie Barnard’s first novel, was cleared from the decks last year. A great book but I was happy to pass it on. So it made sense to add this one in this year. I must confess that it has been waiting for so long that I really can’t remember where I came from.

The Harlot’s Press by Helen Pike

London, 1820: George IV is to be crowned King at last. But will his estranged wife Caroline be allowed to join him as Queen? The city is in turmoil, as her radical supporters rally to her cause and threaten to overturn the government… Into this tumultuous world is thrown Nell Wingfield, a gutsy seventeen-year-old printer of political pamphlets. Nell has recently returned home after a six-month absence that she would rather not explain. After her mother s death, she was duped into working at one of the Houses of the Quality , the brothels on St James s, turning tricks with men at the heart of the English establishment. When one of them a key protagonist in the plot to keep Caroline from the throne – was found dead in his bed, it was time for Nell to leave. But, back on Cheapside, she finds that the family print shop, far from providing a sanctuary, has become a hotbed of dangerous radical activity. Nell’s troubles, it seems, have only just begun…

My fiance is a volunteer gardener, and he found a bag of books dumped among garden waste. This was one of them.

The Diviner’s Tale by Bradford Morrow

Cassandra Brooks is a single mother-of-two, a schoolteacher and a water diviner. Deep in the woods as she dowses the land for a property developer, she is lost in her thoughts, until something catches her eye and her daydream shatters. Swinging from a tree is the body of a young girl, hanged. But when she returns with the authorities, the body has vanished. Already regarded as the local eccentric, her story is disbelieved � until a girl turns up in the woods, alive, mute and identical to the girl in Cassandra’s vision. In the days that follow, Cassandra’s visions become darker and more frequent as they begin to take on tangible form. Forced to confront a past she has tried to forget, Cassandra finds herself locked in a game of cat-and-mouse with a real life killer who has haunted her for longer than she can remember.

This one came from the bag in the gardens too.

A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini

Mariam is only fifteen when she is sent to Kabul to marry Rasheed. Nearly two decades later, a friendship grows between Mariam and a local teenager, Laila, as strong as the ties between mother and daughter. When the Taliban take over, life becomes a desperate struggle against starvation, brutality and fear. Yet love can move a person to act in unexpected ways, and lead them to overcome the most daunting obstacles with a startling heroism.

This came from the LibraryThing Secret Santa a couple of years ago. If I hadn’t been given a copy I would have borrowed it from the library rather than buying a copy, and I think I should be fine letting this one go.

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And that’s it for this batch. Any thoughts?

“Walking back along the promenade after a trip to the library, Rose stopped to watch the sea, standing a safe distance away from where it was sweeping up over the railings. It was a high tide, the water choppy but topped with a clear azure sky. Further down children screamed as they tried to dodge the spray but failed. A pair of herring gulls perched on the railing, their heads into the wind. They flew off, drifting into an air current until the dog that had run towards them scampered past, then they returned to the same piece of rail. “

That’s my library and my promenade, where a certain dog always runs to see off the gulls. Janie Bolitho captured my hometown, as it was back in 1999, absolutely perfectly.

And she  created an engaging heroine, who I could quite happily believe is still living just a little further around the bay.

Rose is a youngish widow who is gradually picking up the strands of a new life. She has good friends, she earns a living as a photographer, and she has taken up painting - always her first love but not the easiest way to earn a living - again.

A new artist friend encouraged Rose to go back to painting with oils, and Rose decided that a crumbling mine shaft would be a good subject.

That’s why she was out alone in the country when she heard a scream.

Rose called the police, but they found nothing. DCI Jack Pearce accused her of wasting police time, but Rose was certain of what she heard.

The situation was uncomfortable. Rose and Jack were friends who might have become something more but she pulled back. And he didn’t.

Then there was a murder. A young artists’ model was found dead. Suspicion soon fell on the  ex-lover she wanted back. And on Rose, who had a friendship with him that could easily turn into something more.

A second body was found. In the mine shaft.

As the police investigated, and Rose tried to work out what had happened, it became clear that the community of artists had many secrets and jealousies.

This a simple and uncomplicated mystery, built on traditional lines and brought to life by interesting and eminently believable cast of characters.

It was lovely to drop back into Rose’s life for a while, and to see my hometown through her eyes.

Jane Bolitho once again caught Cornwall and the Cornish perfectly, and I can feel the love with which she wrote.

I have to say that this isn’t her strongest story.

I have no problem with the main plot strand. I worked out quite early on who the murderer must be, but the mystery was solid, I was happy to watch events unfold, and there was a nice little twist at the end.

But I did have a problem with the explanation of what happened at the mine shaft.  There was rather too much contrivance.

Without that I could have read an account of what happened in the local paper and believed it. Utterly.

I’m not rushing back to the library to pick up the next book in the series, but I will be reading it. Not so much for the mystery, but because I want to follow Rose’s life, and because I love seeing my world through her eyes.

“The drizzle was gentle on her face and misted her hair as she walked up Market Jew Street. At the top she turned into Chapel Street and was cheered by a lively conversation with Tim and Katherine who ran the bookshop where she called to collect the two hardback novels she had ordered as a Christmas present to herself .”

We still have that drizzle. And we still have that lovely bookshop …

I pulled from the shelves one hundred books that I was confident I wouldn’t want to keep after reading to create my own home library. I would borrow books from the stacks and then return them to a charity shop, thus clearing the decks.

The project worked – 40 books have gone and just 60 remain – better figures than I hoped.

But I only read 9 of those books. 31 I decided I didn’t want to read.

Once they were off the shelf I realised that I didn’t need to read them. Because other books would always be there calling me more loudly. Because my reason to read them have been lost since I bought them home.

Those 31 books should not take offence. They are all I’m sure good books, but they aren’t the books for me any more.

Almost every day I discover a new book I want to read, or I think of an old book I want to read again. And so I have learned that I have to be selective, to read only the books that I am confident I love, the books that will offer me what I need.

So now I only buy books that I can’t order from the library and books that I am quite certain I will want to keep.

And I am going to keep clearing the decks.

I’m sure that I have other books that I can read, write about, and then pass on. And others that I can simply let go.

So watch out for 40 more joining the project!

How do you capture just what makes them so very, very magical?

Diving Belles is one of those books.

It hold twelve short stories.

Contemporary stories that are somehow timeless. Because they are suffused with the spirit of Cornwall, the thing that I can’t capture in words that makes the place where I was born so very, very magical.

Lucy Wood so clearly understands what it is about the sea, what it is is about the moorland. The beauty, the power, the mystery… I don’t have the words, but she does.

And she threads all of this through scenes from contemporary life. She catches turning points, moments to remember, stories that should be retold.

There’s a pinch of magic too.

So one woman may travel in a diving bell to bring home a husband lost at sea. And another may be called back home when spirit of the sea permeates her inland home.

It feels strange, it feels other-worldly, and yet it feels utterly real.

I was unsettled and I was enraptured.

I turned the pages back and forth, not wanting to leave, and because there was something elusive that I couldn’t quite hold on to.

Such lovely writing, and such a wonderful spirit.

An extraordinary debut.

I am struggling for words but, make no mistake, I am smitten.

And so when I saw Do No Harm, her second novel I was torn. I was intrigued, but I was also a little scared.

In the end, of course, I had to pick it up. I found a very different book, but those four words still applied.

Dark. Disturbing. Flawed. Extraordinary.

Do No Harm is the story of a doctor.

Virginia Denham is a doctor at the very top of her profession: she is a consultant in obstetrics and gynaecology in a big London hospital.

Her patients were reassured by her interest and understanding, and by her professionalism.

Her colleagues and her staff were equally impressed by her professionalism, and by her intelligence and skill.

But she had a secret life, and she guarded her privacy ferociously.

A stunning opening chapter revealed a model professional, and a deeply flawed and disturbed woman. An accident waiting to happen.

The chapters that followed moved backwards and forwards through time to build a detailed picture of Virginia’s difficult life.

She was an extraordinary character: complex and frighteningly real.

I wanted to understand that character, to know what made her, and the suspense was palpable.

In the end something did go wrong. And it was devastating.

I’m deliberately holding back details.

Because this is a novel driven by characters rather than plot. And to tell any more than I have would, I think, be telling too much.

A disturbing story of a consultant in obstetrics and gynaecology is not for everyone, and I half wished that I hadn’t picked it up.

The writing, the characterisation, the suspense – so much in this book was brilliant. I had to keep reading; I had to know.

I just felt that the balance was a little off: the balance of plot and character.

A flaw, but not a fatal flaw.

Because I really can’t think of another author who deals with such difficult subject matter with such insight and intelligence.

And now I am torn between pushing such dark books away and wondering what Carol Topolski will write next …