Mystery, magic and treasured memories
In Sally Hinchcliffe’s bewitching new novel Hare House, a woman decides to leave London when she loses her teaching job, and moves to a remote part of southwest Scotland. Renting a cottage on a scattered estate, she strikes up a friendship with her landlord Grant and his beguiling sister Cassandra. Soon she begins to realise...
Bitter chocolate and the laughter of tears
If chocolate-coated ‘Teffi’ bonbons tasted nearly as good as Nadezdha Alexandrovna Lokhvitskaya’s own prolifically produced literary confections, they must have tasted perfectly delicious: light on the palate and yet a rich mouthful; intriguingly exotic textures and aftertastes enveloping an unadulterated kernel of pure truth. ‘Teffi’ perfume would have been equally alluring, causing men to melt...
Edelweiss on the Black Sea
How it warms the soul to discover – amid naked rock, amid eternal snow, beside a cold, dead glacier – a tiny velvety flower, an edelweiss. In this realm of icy death it alone is alive. It says, “Don’t believe in the horror that surrounds us both. Look – I’m alive.” How it warms the...
