Days without number by Robert Goddard, 2003.

Robert Goddard is a very popular and bestselling author and this book is in a long line of successful titles. Plotline is the most important aspect of the story with the characters, perhaps, lightly delineated, but the complex twists and turns of the story are deftly handled as one would expect from an expert.
The story is set mostly in the present day but there are some flashbacks to the early life of the main protaganist, Nick, and also to ancestors possessing his rather unusual surname of Paleologus. The story begins with the assembling of Nick and his siblings in Cornwall on a mission to try to persuade their father to sell his rambling old house, Trennor, for an amazingly lucrative amount. The old man is found dead at the bottom of the cellar steps shortly after the family meeting. As the bodies begin to pile up Nick learns how the house is involved in the local history of the area and is a possible 17th century hiding place for the famous Doom Window from nearby St Neot's church.
This is a very readable story which has references to the Holy Grail, King Arthur's (supposed) castle at Tintagel, the Knights Templar and the Crusades thrown in for good measure. It would probably make a good tv drama or film with the unexpected incidents and intricate plot making gripping viewing.

The memory keeper's daughter by Kim Edwards, 2006.

This book is set in multiple time periods beginning in the 1960s and 1970s and tells the story of the birth of twins to successful couple, David and Norah. The girl twin is born with the obvious physical expression of Down's Syndrome so David, himself a doctor, takes a split second to tell his wife that the second baby had died and sends her away to an institution to be looked after. The person who is given the task is Caroline Gill, an associate of David's, but she decides to keep the child and moves away from the area to claim her as her own.
The lie told by David to his wife festers and, unknown to her and their son, ruins their life together . It changes David's personality so that he begins to grow away from his wife and son. The memory keeper of the title is David who becomes increasingly obsessed with photography and the effort to capture infinitesimal fragments of time, his daughter is Phoebe.
An interesting, and unusual, story about the importance of honesty and the alternate lives that could have been lived which also highlights the different attitudes to Down's Syndrome in the 1960s and 1970s.

The house at Riverton, Kate Morton, 2007 (warning: spoilers)

This is the story of a house in Essex and the Hartford family that lived there: Lord Ashby and his wife Lady Violet; their two sons, Major James and Mr Frederick; James's wife, Jemima, and their one child, Gytha, born late in the marriage; Frederick's children (his first wife is not named): David, Hannah and Emmeline. It is also the story of Grace, a housemaid and her mother who was formerly a housemaid but now lives in the village. Grace's father was also Frederick Hartford.
The chronological story begins in June 1914 when Grace, aged 14, starts work as a housemaid at Riverton. Although she does not know it, the three children of the house: David, Hannah and Emmeline are her half siblings. For the reader it is quite easy to guess this from the clues in the text quite early on but Grace herself does not realise until quite a way through the book. In the First War some of the characters are lost whilst others return but are not the same.
The novel is constructed in the present and the past: mostly in June 1914 and the summer of 1924 and the years in between. Grace, now an old lady, is contacted by a young woman named Ursula, a distant Hartford relative from America, who wants to make a film about the Hartford family, the house at Riverton and Robbie Hunter, a young poet known by the family who died tragically in the summer of 1924.
Grace slips between the present and the past in her mind as she recalls the incidents leading up to 1924. She is worried about her grandson, Marcus, who is trying to cope with tragedy in his own life and has disappeared. It gradually becomes evident that her part in the story is crucial as is the lie that she tells Hannah in the early part of the book. The lie festers and Grace never corrects it so that Hannah, who loves secrets, believes that they have a secret between them.
The author's note at the end of the book sums up the themes and includes some titles, both fiction and non-fiction, for further reading. The historical setting is portrayed with a sure but light touch with just enough, but never too much, detail. With Emmeline we witness the downhill spiral of parties, alcolhol, jazz and fast cars; with Hannah we sympathise with women's struggle for independence and with their father Frederick we see the inevitable decline of his businesses.
The triumph of the novel is surely the plotting which is confident and skilled with all the loose ends tied up by the end, concluding with the final twist in Hannah's letter on the last page. This novel is recommended to lovers of historical fiction and a deft plot line.

Kept by D J Taylor, Harper Collins, 2008.

This is a substantial novel of nearly 500 pages which has been written in the style (or several styles) of a typical Victorian novel. The author also includes pastiches of newspaper reports, local guides, letters and other types of account which contribute to this nineteenth century tale. The author takes on various voices as he attempts ventriloquism for many of the characters that teem through these pages.
The story starts with report of two deaths which occur within several years of each other: that of Mr Henry Ireland, caused by an apparent fall from his horse, and that of Mr James Dixey who has had his throat torn out, seemingly by some wild beast. The two individuals are connected by family ties and, more importantly by Mrs Ireland, the widow. She has been gradually sinking into mental instability following the death of their only child and it is Mr Ireland's stated wish in his will that she should be kept at Mr Dixey's decaying home in the remote Suffolk countryside upon his death. This wish is carried out but the one thing that Mr Dixey, an amateur naturalist and ornithologer, lacks is ready money to carry out any repairs or maintain his estate.
A cast of minor characters appear before the reader: William, Mr Dixey's footman, and Esther, a newly arrived maid. Mr Pardew, a debt collector, and Mr Crabbe, a crusty old lawyer. Then there is Dunbar, a jack of all trades who acquires rare birds eggs for Mr Dixey, and Dewar, a down at heel former grocer whose wife is dying of consumption, who helps him out.
These various characters are connected by tenuous, and not so tenuous threads, and as the plot slowly and meanderingly plays itself out all their connections are explained. The vast stage and cast of characters is typical of several major nineteenth century novelists, most obviously Dickens and Wilkie Collins, as the author acknowledges in his epilogue.
The book is worth a read but may require a second reading to appreciate the full complexity of the story. It joins an impressive canon of historical novels, including A S Byatt's Possession (which I prefer, I have to say) which can take the reader on a convincing journey into the past and tackle subjects without some of the constraints of modern times.

The Meaning of Night by Michael Cox. John Murray, 2006

This 600 page novel took the author 30 years to complete and was eventually finished when the author was diagnosed with cancer and feared that he would lose his sight.  The text is a supposed confession by Edward Glyver to the killing of two men and the story that led up to the events. One man was a totally innocent stranger whilst the other was a lifelong enemy.
The story is narrated mainly in first person by Glyver and interspersed , here and there, with letters and quotations by various others. Glyver's academic future is ruined at an early stage by a schoolfriend who sets him up for the theft of a book causing him to be expelled and leaving him with no chance to continue to university. The schoolfriend is A P Daunt, son of a rector at a stately home called Evenwood, seat of the 26th Baron Tansor. This connection is to have strange repercussions in Glyver's future life but for the time being he travels to Heidelberg to study there and spends some time abroad. He is able to do this due to the mysterious legacy of 200 sovereigns in a box from an old friend of his mother's who he recollects visiting them.
During Glyver's travels he gains an interest in antiquarian books but returns to England when his mother dies and sets himself the task to sort out and put into order his mother's papers and household records. His mother had earned a living as a writer working under a pseudonym. As he workd through the papers he is puzzled by some references to an earlier incident involving his mother and a friend of hers and a journey to France. Gradually it becomes clear to him that he is not who he thought he was and there are many secrets waiting for him discover. The mystery is intricate and complex and it is the coincidental employment he gains with a solicitor, Mr Tredgold, in London that helps him to unravel the story. But this unravelling sets him on an obsessive and doomed course.
Full of atmospheric Victorian details from London's underworld and elsewhere we compulsively follow Edward Glyver on his fateful journey. This book was shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award and received with critical aclaim

'An engrossing and complicated tale of deception, heartlessness and wild justice, one that touches on nearly every aspect of Victorian society' [Washington Post]

'a refreshing dedication to the art of storytelling' [Time Out]

'[Edward Glyver] is an outstanding creation: bibliophile, corporate spy, opium addict, he teeters on the brink of sanity, yet remains frenetically eleoquent. Cox lovingly recreates the atmosphere of the period' [Daily Mail]

The Lake House by Kate Morton, 2016.

Long and complex novel set in multiple time periods and various locations: Cornwall 1913, 1914, 1931, 1932 and 1933; London 1911, 1931, 1941, 2003 and 2004; Oxford 2003. 

The story plays out over three generations: Constance deSheil and her husband Henri; their daughter, Eleanor and her husband, Anthony Edevane and their daughters, Alice Edevane and her sisters, Deborah and Clementine. In more up-to-date times (2003) a modern life detective Sadie Sparrow, on enforced leave from her job, decides to investigate a cold case whilst staying with her grandfather, Bertie, in Cornwall. The case involves the tragic disappearance of a little boy in the summer of 1933 in a house not far from her grandfather’s home. The house is called the Lake House and exists in a state of suspended animation where everything was left as it was when the family left that long ago summer. The little boy was the only son of Eleanor and Anthony and Alice’s brother.

Alice Edevane in 2003 is a very successful writer of detective stories living in London, has never married and has a personal assistant called Peter. Alice, even at 86, has to let the self-deception that has clouded her vision all her life, roll away so that she can see the past clearly as a startling truth about her mother is revealed to her.

Alice’s mother, Eleanor, is the emotional and moral centre of the novel as the reader realises when the story is finished and the plot unravels. She ultimately decides on the right thing to do after considering everybody involved, indeed the main perspective of the book is a female one.

 Eleanor’s mother, Constance, and the death of her first baby, by the tangling of the umbilical cord round its neck, provide a sub-plot; and the role of Mr Llewellyn and his connection to the family is explained toward the end of the novel. He writes a book about Eleanor as a child called ‘Eleanor’s Doorway’. Apparently the author only realised how the story would end when she was two thirds of the way through the book. 

The main themes of the novel are: missing children (in both senses of the phrase); abandoned houses; abandonment generally; dogged determination and the role of the detective; mistaken identities; adolescence (Alice and her sisters); effects of the war (shell shock and deserters); the hidden depths of family histories. There is also a helpful librarian who provides Sadie with newspaper article, maps and plans during the initial stages of her investigation. 

It is not surprising that this book, usually described as a page turner, has been just as successful as the author’s previous work.

Desire for Chocolate by Care Santos; translated by Julie Wark, 2016.

This novel won the Ramon Lull Prize in 2014 for its author who writes for children as well as for adults and previously studied law.

The book is cleverly constructed with three separate stories about chocolate makers in different epochs linked by a porcelain chocolate pot which was made in the eighteenth century on the command of Madame Adelaide, the fourth daughter of King Louis XV of France. The story is told back to front with the 21^st century story of Max, Sara and Oriol first and begins with the accidental smashing of the pot into smithereens and its painful piecing back together again by Max. The pot belongs to Sara who bought it an old antiques shop in Barcelona many years before. The pot has a chipped spout, no lid and lacks its swizzle stick which would have stirred the chocolate.

The second story is of the illegitimate kitchen maid Aurora who works for a local Barcelona family, the Turulls, and is of the same age as their daughter, Candida.  Aurora  makes a surprisingly good marriage to a local doctor who has a great fondness for opera, whilst Candida Turull marries into the Sampon family. The chapters in this section are named after the operas which Aurora and her husband go to see where, in one of the boxes, is Antoni Sampons, esteemed chocolatier, and his daughter and we learn more about the scandal that surrounds them.  Aurora, accidentally, comes into possession of the chocolate pot which she tries to return to the rightful owners. Small incidents about how the pot comes to be damaged are sprinkled throughout the novel

The third story is about the Marianna, wife of Fernandes, the most famous eighteenth century chocolate manufacturer, who supplies the French court with chocolate and invents a chocolate mill. Marianna is based on the real life figure of Eulalia Gallisans who singlehandedly ran a chocolate shop in Barcelona after her husband died and ran into trouble with the Guilds. She is visited by French representative of Madame Adelaide, Victor Guillot, another historical character. And so we arrive back in time with Madame Adelaide at the court of Louis XV.

There is a helpful list of characters at the end of the novel; also helpful notes explaining some of the technical chocolate terms.

Review copy sent to me by Alma Books