This first book in Jeffery Archer’s Clifton Chronicles is a big fat serving of good old fashioned brain twinkies. A sweeping tale set in Bristol, it essentially begins with Harry Clifton’s birth in 1919. When he is a baby his father, a dock worker at Barrington’s Shipyards, disappears and is presumed dead. Only this mystery is kept from young Harry and he is told that his father died in the Great War. He and his mother Maisie have a hard scrabble life, constantly under the […]
A kind of serenity
Odile has always been different and stand-offish, with a quicksilver temperament. Just 18 years old, she has left school and lives with her family in Lausanne, aimlessly drifting through life. Her mother is rather severe, hosting bridge parties with an ever-present glass of whiskey in hand and her father is distant, spending his days in his study writing and drinking wine. She does have a soft spot for her older brother, Bob, so when she decides to go to Paris and commit suicide she posts […]
Evil is not a view … it’s an ingredient in us
It seems almost impossible to avoid seeing anything about the new Amazon series “The Man in the High Castle” and it made me curious enough to read the novel by Philip K. Dick, on which it is based. One of my goals with CBR7 was to try new writers and genres and I know PKD was in there somewhere. It wasn’t all that pressing though, so I thought I could take my time and scout around for a used copy of one of the fine […]
Sometimes it was harder to change the past than it was the future
It was a dark and stormy night. Again and again and again. Because Ursula Todd is fated to be reborn again and again and again. I did this thing backwards, because I read A God in Ruins before this, but I don’t think it was a real disadvantage. I did read them some months apart, so there was time for things to settle and for all the other books that I have read since then to crowd in and take the freshness off my memories […]