BookwormBy John Andrews
Now that holidays for most of us are over, the time has surely arrived for some serious reading, and in this respect I will not disappoint Newsletter readers, for I have two treats for you this month.
The first recommendation is a brilliant history of the Verney family of Claydon House, written by Adrian Tinniswood and published this year by Jonathan Cape. The Verneys lived through all the turbulent events of the seventeenth century but, if it had not been for the good fortune of a young guards officer Sir Harry Calvert inheriting the Claydon Estate in Buckinghamshire in 1827, the full and intimate history of these remarkable people may well have been lost.
Sir Harry had inherited Claydon from a distant cousin, and assuming the surname Verney by royal licence, he proceeded to delve into all the hidden corners of the vast house. In a wainscoted gallery locked away at the top of the house, he came across more than 100,000 family and estate papers bundled up into heaps on the floor, stacked against the walls and on trestle tables. There were playbills and rent rolls, newsletters and note books, medieval charters and Georgian verse and, perhaps most interesting of all, bundles of private correspondence that were later found to amount to more than 30,000 private letters.
It is mostly from these sources that Tinniswood gives us a personal insight to this remarkable family which he calls ‘A true story of love, war and madness in seventeenth-century England’.
Read and enjoy, and perhaps you will come to the same conclusion as me, that Buckinghamshire is not such a dull county after all!
The second book I have for Newsletter readers this month is Half of a Yellow Sun, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
This beautifully written book concerns three lives that intersect within 1960s Nigeria both before and during the civil war. Ugwu, a poor but highly intelligent boy from a simple village, works as a houseboy for a university professor. Olanna, a young and beautiful woman, has abandoned a life of privilege to live with her lover, the professor. And then there is Richard, a shy Englishman who falls for Olanna’s twin sister.
As the war approaches, the loyalties of all five characters are severely tested and it is through the skill of Adichie’s narrative that we are immersed into the enormity of it all. As Margaret Forster said when reviewing the book “I couldn’t bear to let go… magnificent”.