REVIEW: Sandstone in my suitcase

If you read writer and Artyness columnist Barbara Henderson’s column this week in our entertainment supplement Here & Now in the Inverness Courier, Ross-shire Journal, Strathspey Herald or John O’Groat Journal – and now online on whatson-north.co.uk, you will find she is asking three North publishers about facing these tough times.

One of those is Sandstone Press managing director Robert Davidson who suggests it would be great if people could keep buying books and maybe consider doing it directly from the publishers themselves.

It was something I had seen him tweet earlier this year.

And having watched Sandstone grow from small beginnings into an award-winning and innovative Highland-based publisher with a commitment to bringing quality, life-enhancing reads to the world, I was suddenly terrified that the stresses and strains of Covid and its lockdowns – and now pressures on people in the cost of living crisis to push books way down their shopping lists, might threaten the continued presence of this local publisher in our lives.

So I went to their website and picked out a few of their titles I had been meaning to catch up with, spent some birthday money I had earmarked for books, and a few days later, they arrived. It felt good to know that – even in a small way – I had supported the team behind the titles and one of a number of small enterprising publishers you can find all over the north these days.

I put the new books straight into my suitcase as a treat to enjoy later in the year on the first holiday since well before Covid struck.

Luckily, three of the titles went into my hand luggage when I couldn’t decide which one to start reading first, so when our suitcases went missing somewhere in Heathrow and took five days to arrive in Greece, I had plenty to read!

Sparkling sunshine and the gentle rhythm of lapping waves make it easy to immerse yourself in a story.

From a Mediterranean island, I was transported to Romania and Moscow in spy thriller The Starlings Of Bucharest by Sarah Armstrong.

Then, Stephen O’Rourke’s The Crown Agent rewound the world back to Victorian Edinburgh to meet the good doctor, Mungo Lyon, his reputation tarnished by a tenuous connection to the Burke and Hare body-snatching scandal. But he is hired to investigate the mysterious death of a lighthouse-keeper and that mission takes him across the Atlantic.

Making Space by Sarah Tierney brings you back to contemporary times and the rainy streets of Manchester, as an adrift twentysomething tries to reboot her life by having a massive clearout that has consequences which power a twisty plot.

It seemed that both The Starlings Of Bucharest and The Crown Agent would have other books featuring the same characters, so, not the end.

But physically, my travels with these three books is now over.

Meeting a fellow traveller who was a regular visitor over the years to the village we were both staying in, talk quickly turned to books and she revealed many people left behind the ones they had read at a little library in the back of a local restaurant, as everyone shared and swapped.

Always finding it a wrench to let go of books, I had a pang as I handed them over at the end of the holiday.

But now, back home, it’s nice to think of other hands lifting my books off the shelf and all the pleasures that lie ahead for readers I will never know. And it feels good that these Sandstone titles will be discovered, possibly in first encounters with the publisher, thousands of miles away …

Reviews of these three books below:

The Starlings Of Bucharest by Sarah Armstrong (Sandstone Press, £8.99)

There is another book in this series – and, in fact, this is the second one.

But reading The Starlings first shouldn't impact on enjoyment of companion read The Wolves Of Leninsky Project.

It's the early 1970s when we meet Ted, a film magazine reviewer by default, waiting in the Romanian capital Bucharest for an important interview with a film producer, while his minder Vasile badgers the young Englishman to gift him a pair of his Western trousers.

The communist reality of constant surveillance in those times and the shameless push to recruit Ted to the regime's cause creates a surreal black comedy, as Sarah Armstrong powerfully paints Bucharest and the dowdy London of bedsits and the almost penniless Ted's life working in his employer's backstreet office.

Ted wanted to be a 'real' journalist reporting news, but his humble background and his family's life in fishing – a life he is desperate to escape – make him vulnerable to temptation.

An assignment to a Moscow film festival brings another warning chat with sinister stranger Mr Attridge.

But trouble has its way of insinuating itself into Ted's world as he makes friends and lets his heart challenge what his head is telling him not to do.

Sarah Armstrong is adept at creating an authentic atmosphere of such a different time from our own and we are caught up as Ted courts danger in a story the writer weaves then unfurls with a flourish.

The Crown Agent by Stephen O'Rourke (Sandstone Press, £8.99)

I've spent a great deal of time this year adventuring through history, both fiction and non-fiction, living lives that work in very different ways to how they do in my own time (including two books I can highly recommend by North writers, The Bookseller Of Inverness by SG MacLean and Daughters Of The North by Jennifer Morag Henderson).

Convincingly, The Crown Agent makes the textures and what we now call workflows of the 1820s as fascinating and thrilling in their own ways as the story the book tells – an old-fashioned adventure, with plots and spies, detecting and noticing, and challenging Dr Mungo Lyon's talents, sometimes as surprising to the character forced to test them out in extremis as they appear to the reader. We are taken to places in a heartbeat we may never have been before – or want to go – climbing a roof with a murderer trying to grab your ankle or finding yourself moving at top speed across a bleak, rainy moor in the dark with a bad ankle, a suit of wet tweed and a violent pursuer.

"This is a classic adventure that calls to mind Stevenson and Buchan..." one of the book's soundbite cover lines accurately claims for what was hoped would be the first in a series by Stephen O'Rourke about his doctor hero. Not allowed to practise medicine, the Edinburgh man finds himself tasked with an unusual mission for the Crown – to investigate the murder of a lighthouseman, the disappearance of a Customs officer and the baffling fate of a triple-masted schooner with ragged sails and a dead crew haphazardly weaving across the Firth of Clyde.

Back more slowly than it should have been returning from Jamaica with a cargo of sugar, the Julietta sails through this story with Mungo trying to solve the mystery and track down forces unknown behind a double-headed eagle symbol.

It's a journey that takes Mungo from Campbeltown and Greenock to Port Royal in Jamaica before he is done.

And this book was only to be the beginning.

The writer convincingly sketches out landscapes, creates unforgettable characters and devises a plot that just keeps adding new knots to unfankle as the sometimes satisfyingly impetuous doctor finds himself having to learn new skills – and call on his medical knowledge in emergencies – cutting-edge for the times – on patients in danger for their lives.

The beginnings of modern medicine is just one of the developing sciences O'Rourke treats us to.

It is surprising that Mungo has time to attend to matters of the heart, but a feisty fellow agent of the Crown becomes irresistible as their paths cross, and with the superior code-breaking skills of Mungo's sister Margaret, women are brought to the heart of the story.

The doctor's courage and the fortitude of this Victorian Bond-in-the-making are a prescription for a new addiction in this action-packed adventure.

At the end of this book, a second in the series is trailered. But the sad news is that tragically the author died at the end of 2021.

Making Space by Sarah Tierney (Sandstone Press, £8.99)

'Your house is full, your life is empty'

Lead character Miriam in this novel is having a crisis but doesn't know it till she takes a temping job at the City Business Services company, an organisation that pretends to be something it's not – a bit like Miriam – until she decided to clear out her tiny room and get rid of almost everything in her life, including books from her TV production degree which has failed to deliver the job she was hoping for.

Add the discovery at the company of a damningly unimpressed assessment of Miriam's character, and life seems bleak.

But Erik, a new client for the company, needs someone to help him clear out a room in his home to make space for his student daughter.

Miriam is volunteered and the two launch into the process which tests the boundaries of a client-business arrangement. But the task forces both to confront the reality of their lives.

For the reader, it's a chance to enjoy the deft characterisation that makes Miriam and Erik spiky but achingly careful with each other, only revealing big hurdles in their lives reluctantly. Psychological insight offers undeniable truths about life's dangerous moments and how people cope in their responses.

It's all packed into this story of everyday excesses, small but important victories and defeats – and hope:

We spent the morning working through the gossip mags ...

'Look at this typeface,' he said, turning a copy of Heat around so I could see. 'I need these for a sculpture I am thinking of making of a magpie.'

MC

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