3.5 out of 5 stars

The publisher provided a copy of this, free of charge, in return for an honest review.

Ligeia – Edgar Allan Poe
I wasn’t overly impressed with Poe’s story. It did feel very gothic and had a certain atmosphere, but I felt that the plot was missing a certain something

My Father’s Secret – Anon
I thought that this was a very chilling story and was very Victorian in style and content.

Cruel Coppinger – R. S. Hawker
I liked this short story a lot. It was everything that I expected from a Cornish smuggling tale.

Colonel Benyon’s Entanglement – Mary Elizabeth Braddon
I really didn’t get along with this story at all. Not a lot happens and the plot is a bit vague, until one key scene towards the end of the story.

The Phantom Hare – M. H.
I liked this story. There is a good mix of jeopardy in the plot along with a good dollop of folklore. The plot is not particularly complex, so much so that I even guessed the outcome!

Christmas Eve at a Cornish Manor House – Clara Venn
Who doesn’t love a Christmas ghost story? It is full of swirling mist and noisy ghosts, and I liked this one.

In the Mist – Mary E. Penn
This was another favourite of mine from the collection. There is tragedy and peril and a conclusion that I really wasn’t expecting.

The Baronet’s Craze – Mrs. H. L. Cox
This is a well-thought through story of the grief a father is going through as he mourns the loss of a daughter.

The Coming of Abel Behenna – Bram Stoker
A strange tale of competitive love lost and gained and the duplicity of some men.

The Roll-Call of the Reef – Arthur Quiller-Couch
A story of shipwrecks in a storm and how teo survivors make an unlikely friendship

The Haunted Spinney – Elliott O’Donnell
This has wind howling through the trees. The night is dark and oppressive and then a scream is heard. It isn’t long before a body is found. No one knows who has committed the murder, but perhaps the ghost hunter can find the culprit.

A Ghostly Visitation: A True Incident – E. M. Bray
I though that this was a reasonable ghost story set in a house with a mostly benevolent spirit.

The Screaming Skull – F. Marion Crawford
I though that this story was super creepy. It is full of unnerving moments as the main character tries to understand the screams he hears at night.

The Adventure of the Devil’s Foot – Arthur Conan Doyle
I hadn’t read any Doyle before this short story (I know…) and I actually quite liked it. I can see where the character traits of Holmes in the TV series come from. It did feel that he worked the plotline back from the conclusion though.

The Mask – F. Tennyson Jesse
A story of illicit love and affairs, coupled with murder and further double-crossing. It felt the most Cornish of the stories in the collection, but the accents took a bit of getting used to.

It is not a bad book overall, like with any collection of stories, there were some I liked and others I felt indifferent about. I didn’t feel that there was much horror in the stories within. The Cornish links felt tenuous at times in some of the stories, but other had very strong links. If you are collecting the series then you probably need to get this.

5 out of 5 stars

The publisher provided a copy of this, free of charge, in return for an honest review.

If you are a regular reader of my reviews on my blog or Good Reads, then you’ll know I like spending time in the woodlands. They are cool at the height of summer, stark and still beautiful in the depths of winter, and listening to the susurration of the leaves in the wind in the autumn is as calming for me as hearing the sound of waves of the burbling of a stream.

A wood or coppice can provide in a multitude of ways, food, fuel and timber for structures, poles for barriers for us. But they are a habitat that can support thousands of other creatures, in particular ancient woodlands. They are also home to the entities that inhabit our imaginations and folklore and that liminal space in between.

Menmuir also has a thing about woodlands in the same way that he was attracted to the water as I read about in The Draw Of The Sea. This book does a similar thing to that previous book, he uses it to explore how other people use woodlands in their lives to nourish their souls, provide an income, as a source of materials for the beautiful things they are making and for those that are seeking the otherworldly.

He begins at the trees that his father planted nine years before, in a small village in Wales. He planted them so he could create something that would outlast him, would offer his descendants shade and be his small contribution to address the dramatic loss of biodiversity that we are seeing. Menmuir watches his father and son, who is virtually the same age as the wood, collecting oak galls. He would be finding the gall in pockets and around the house for ages after.

Death is one of the few taboos left in our society, probably because we think if we ignore it, it won’t happen to us and it might go away. Spoiler alert; it won’t… People now have more choice as to what happened to them after death and more are choosing to be interred in a woodland cemetery. The thought of my body benefiting an oak is quite appealing. He goes to visit Ele and Anthony who live in a 27-acre woodland in Cornwall. The day they moved there they buried a lady and another soon followed and before long they were custodians of a natural graveyard. He then heads over to meet Jessie who makes willow caskets and learns of the stories behind their creation and how people make their own and those for their spouses.

He attends a festival of bodgers. These are people who carve wooden spoons and other simple items. He visits a couple of boat builders, one in Cornwall and another in Glasgow. He is lucky enough to visit Japan to see the work of the traditional woodworkers in Takavana and visit a sacred forest.

The spiritual links that people forge with woodlands are well covered in this book. He participates in wassailing, visits the Sycamore Gap before those bastards cut it down, takes a walk through a fictional wood in Shropshire and travels a long way back in time in an ancient yew grove.

Like his previous book about the sea, Menmuir is seeking people whose stories are intertwined with woodlands. He is an engaging writer whose fascination with the things people have to tell him and a desire to learn from others makes this a brilliant book. It is a gentle story too, he writes like he has all the time in the world to discover a new thing about woodlands. I thought it was excellent and can highly recommend it.

4 out of 5 stars

The publisher provided a copy of this, free of charge, in return for an honest review.

Winter is a season people love and hate. Some love the cold bright days and the twinkling of lights in what seems to be an increasingly longer Christmas period. For others this is the worst time of the year, the days are short and grey, the lack of sunlight opening out to depression in the form of SAD.

Personally, I like all of the seasons for different reasons, but do hate what feels like the relentless grey that we sometimes get over the winter. Helen Moat is one of those who hates winter, the relentless gloom causes her severe anxiety. This book is her journey over three winters to see if she can overcome it.

Normally her anxiety builds from October; the long days of summer are over, the heat is fading and soon the clocks will change once again. This October is stranger than most. It is 2020 and I am sure we can remember what happened that year… She has managed to escape with her husband to Wales in their campervan where the lockdown and contact rules dictate who can do what and when. The weather causes them to cut short their break, something they come to regret as the further lockdowns that happen later in the year mean they can’t get away again.

But this year is different, this is the year she wants to break her fear of this season. It is a journey that will take her to Lapland and Japan, finding out how other cultures deal with the season of winter.

Moat learns that the people in the far north rarely suffer from seasonal affective disorder (SAD) even though their day can be as short as six hours long. She is fortunate to get a trip out there as a freelance travel journalist. The -20C temperature will take a bit of getting used to…

She brings back to the UK what she has learnt over there, light from candles and a wood burner helps with the ambience as she learns to celebrate the small things; hot soups, cakes and getting outside into the natural world and adopting the Scandinavian policy of ‘bunkering down’. She uses the dark nights to slow down and reflect and consider how it was starting to work for her.

Mot reached her third winter. The summer had been great and she loved the time she spent with friends on patios drinking wine and watching the bats swoop by. In September her and her husband head to France. She was trying to postpone winter by trying to find the later summer sun, but she knew that she had to face the physical and figurative darkness.

Moat is fortunate enough to get a commission to write about Japanese food, Not only was she going to a place that she had always dreamed of visiting, Japan. Moat has always strived for perfection in her life, but it would be here that she would learn about the Japanese beauty of imperfection – Wabi-Sabi.

Being there is unsettling and alien. Only having three words in Japanese meant that communication was mostly laughing and gestures. She learns so much about the culture, their respect and awe for the natural world, but it also teaches her that all things must change and each season is treated with equal weight. She would bring home mental skills that would help her cope with winter at home.

I thought that this was really good. It is a journey in many senses, but it is mostly about her understanding and coming to terms with winter. She comes to understand why the winter is so hard to cope with and explains the methods she has found to mitigate her worries. Her trips abroad were fascinating and I felt that I had learnt a little more about the places she went to. If you have a thing about the darkest part of the year then I would really recommend reading this. It is worth reading in conjunction with Wintering by Katherine May too.

3.5 out of 5 stars

The publisher provided a copy of this, free of charge, in return for an honest review.

Who doesn’t love a quiz? A well-written one has something for everyone, easy questions to give a little confidence to participants, harder questions for stretch people and the occasional tough question to sort the experts out. Up until now, I hadn’t read Prisoners of Geography, so before starting working my way through this, I read that book. It was eye-opening, but also a reminder of just how fast things can change in geopolitics!

Anyway, to the quiz book. There are about 300 questions, puzzles and word games in total to answer. These have been divided into nine sections below and these are my scores:

Americas – 33 right

Asia – 40 right

Europe – 50 right

Africa – 37 right

Middle East – 33 right

Latin America – 52 right

Oceania – 27 right

The Poles – 43 right

Space – 29 right

Some of them were fiendishly difficult, but thankfully some of these questions are fairly straightforward so most people should be able to score some marks. I did well in some regions and poorly in others. The story of my school life! I did think that I should have done better in America, but then I remembered just how little Americans know about the rest of the world, so didn’t feel too bad then.

I did surprise myself with some of the answers I got right though. Advantage of having read a lot of non-fiction over the years. It would have been nice to know what the total number of marks available per section was, but then I would know just how badly I performed! It was a great bit of fun though.

4 out of 5 stars

The publisher provided a copy of this, free of charge, in return for an honest review.

Some people can’t abide insects or other types of creepy crawlies, but having read this beautifully made book, I can’t understand why they wouldn’t find these types of animals fascinating.

There is one insect or minibeast per week to learn about and the authors have chosen all types from all over the world. There are spiders, ants, bees, butterflies and even a praying mantis. There are details on their lifecycle, the folklore and the way that humans need these animals as part of a complete ecosystem.

I did have a few favourites from the selection; the Hummingbird Hawk Moth, the Dark-Edged Bee-Fly, Rose Chafer and the Peacock Jumping Spider.

I really liked this book. There are lovely illustrations throughout by Lesley Buckingham of each of the insects, but the best bit is being able to scan the QR code to go to the Batsford website to watch a short video of each of the minibeasts in question. Even if you are not into bugs, I would still recommend this, after all none of them in the book are going to bite!

4 out of 5 stars

The publisher provided a copy of this, free of charge, in return for an honest review.

Greece has been the origin of many things that we take for granted now; democracy, philosophy and rational thought are some of them. The culture and people have persisted from ancient times until the modern day, though they have reinvented themselves time and time again. Its wider influence on other cultures was totally undervalued until this slim book by Robert Byron.

At its heart it is a travel book, there are accounts of the places they go to, the people that they meet and the things that they experience on Mount Athos. But this is also far more than travel writing

As the forty miles stretch out, only a shadow in the haze remains, outlined in the silver gleams of the farther sea; spreading then to a farther shadow – the mainland.

In here Byron celebrate the uniqueness of Greek Orthodoxy, the remoteness of the monasteries and describes the characters that he meets that have chosen a spiritual life over a more secular existence. Him and his fellow travellers are really privileged to be able to do this and take photos of these places that were rarely seen by outsiders.

David and Mark are the companions that are with him on this trip, and they are fortunate to also to get to see some of the religious relics that the monasteries are custodians for. Byron is a sharp observer of the landscapes that they travel through, recounting details that most people wouldn’t ever notice. He describes the meals that they have in such a way hat it made me a little hungry when reading it.

All along above the twining river floats a verdian haze. Far away rise the parallel hills, deepest sapphire, sweeping high and regular as far as the eye can see, with the black and white clouds rolling up, and their shadows like foreign armies traversing the plain. In all lurks the colour of light, of the fire of the earth, burning in watered leaf and sodden plough, catching even the sounds as they run hazard through the air, this colour which Greece knows and other lands do not; and which Greeks have bought to rest, not in stone, but paint.

I really liked this book. Byron’s writing has an intensity to it at times, almost like you are being baked in the Mediterranean sun alongside him. Occasionally it felt like an information dump as he writes about a specific monastery and wants us to know all the facts he uncovered in his visit. I can forgive him for that as when he writes well it soars. I will be bumping The Road To Oxiana up the list.