My attention was drawn to this 2025 title by a relative who spotted it in a Kent bookshop and thought I might be interested. So – you know me – three clicks and I was in.

And it’s fascinating to read a non-fiction book of this sort when we’re all still trying to make sense of the The Salt Path debacle. David Whitehouse puts his authorial cards firmly and unequivocally on the table. He tells us he has changed some, but not all, names – as we all have to when writing about real people and situations –  but that otherwise his book is the unvarnished truth. Towards the end, he also explains, within the narrative, that he has had to fictionalise not only the name but other details about one individual because she is famous and identifying her would compromise other people’s right to anonymity. Fair enough.

A woman named Caroline Lane lived in a mansion block in Margate. Then, unaccountably, in 2009 she vanished. Her flat was as she left it. The neighbours were puzzled and concerned although Caroline had always – with her forthright ways – been seen as  standoffish.  A few days before her – departure? death? kidnapping? – she had, according to the minutes, upset several people at a residents’ meeting. What on earth had happened to her?

Whitehouse stumbled across this story while having his hair cut in a very ordinary Margate salon at a time when he needed a new project. So he decided to investigate Caroline and her disappearance. He is very good at Margate itself, a town whose fortunes have gone up and down dramatically in the last 40 years or so – from the trendy Turner Contemporary and the coffee shops of the old town, to the run-down immigrant-housing hotels and the lacklustre town centre, long since deserted by most big name retailers. Like Whitehouse, I have long associations with Kent. I lived for nearly 40 years in Sittingbourne. I know the places he writes about well and admire the way he brings them to life as he talks to residents and uses all his research skills to trace Caroline, whose flat is eventually compulsorily purchased and her belongings disposed of.

Saltwater Mansions is a subtle mixture of memoir and reportage because woven into the mix is Whitehouse’s own family background. It is sub-titled “The Woman Who Disappeared and Other Untold Stories” and it does what it says on the tin. His long suffering wife Lou with whom he has two sons, tries to be patient with his Caroline obsession but it sometimes wears thin. Like many of us, he wishes desperately he’d coaxed his own father to talk about the past and the little he knows becomes  one of the book’s “untold stories”. The concept also gives him the scope for several fascinating digressions into the histories of some of the people he meets along the way. Beth and Jon, for example, who are the eventual new occupants of Caroline’s flat have a moving “back story”.  Beth’s mother Rosa, was a single parent, a professional singer and afflicted by cystic fibrosis which she managed to defy for many years. Her daughter had a rackety, penurious childhood which eventually took them to Margate because it was cheap. There, while still a teenager, she met Jon. It’s a powerful amd moving sub-story in which Whitehouse gives sympathetic heft to all characters.

In the end he does “find” Caroline – sort of. But this is reflective non-fiction not a novel so there is no tidy conclusion. It is, however, a beautifully written page turner. I enjoyed it very much, just as my neice-in-law, a fellow bibliophile,  guessed that I would.

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: A Lonely Man by Chris Power

Last month I spent a pleasant weekend in North Yorkshire, staying with an old friend. The night before my arrival she had been to a talk in a Thirsk bookshop at which Carol Drinkwater promoted her new novel.  And my friend talked quite a lot about the event over the weekend. She had, naturally, also bought a signed copy of One Summer in Provence which was lying on her coffee table. I then ordered it because it looked like an entertaining summer read.

Now for those of you who are – ahem – too young to remember: Carol Drinkwater was the actor who played Helen Herriot in the early episodes of the BBC’s adaptation of All Creatures Great and Small in the late 1970s and early 1980s. And given that James Herriot’s semi-fictionalised Darrowby was really Thirsk, she could hardly have been in a more appropriate place when my friend heard her.  Married to a French TV producer, Carol Drinkwater has lived in Provence for many years.

And I was right about this novel. It is comforting without being cloying, presents characters you really care about and I liked the celebration of family – irrespective of the form it takes.

Celia, a former actor, and her playwright husband, Dominic, have a small but successful wine-producing estate in Provence. Yes, to some extent, Drinkwater is clearly drawing on her own experience and , of course, she really knows the vegetation, views, smells, sounds and people of the place she’s writing about. It’s a richly convincing and stunningly beautiful backdrop – even when storms and rain cause serious damage to the grape crop and injure two people. But this isn’t a Katie Fforde-style romantic escape, there is a dark undercurrent which keeps you turning the pages. The prologue, which lurks at the back of your mind as you read on, signals that all cannot possibly be as it seems.

At the heart of this story is a parentage revelation. And if that isn’t one of the seven stories we’re told dominate all fiction then it must be the eighth because it crops up so often in all literary genres and periods. It’s what I call “sua madre, suo padre” after that hilarious moment and ensuing aria in The Marriage of Figaro when Figaro learns who his parents are. Of course there are many variations on the theme – one of which is the sustaining thread in this novel – when David contacts Celia and brings his daughter to stay on her estate. Is he who he says he is? Dominic, in particular, is sceptical.

We also long to know what exactly happened to Celia and Dominic ten years earlier before they left London. Tantalising hints lead, eventually, to our finding out and understanding why Celia remains so edgy. And then eventually … but I’ll spare you the spoilers.

It’s a novel with a large and memorable cast.  Gillian, David’s daughter, is a gloriously colourful character – rude, vulnerable, feisty and artistically very talented. Tom, the musician who comes to provide casual summer labour is a delight. So is Henri, an elderly local who keeps bees and refuses to retire. And Dominic is a complex man:  an intelligent realist, tending to irrascibilty but deeply in love with Celia and very excited when he suddenly gets a big Netflix job.

Two parties, one at the beginning in the garden when Celia’s anxious bustling about beforehand reminded me of Mrs Dalloway, and the other towards the end on the beach, bring people together which is convenient for the plot.  They also allow Drinkwater to evoke the Provencal ambience – and she excels at that.

It’s a good read. Put it on your pool/beach/garden pile.

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: Saltwater Mansions by David Whitehouse

Apart from a short story, called The Verger which used to appear in school collections so I shared it with students, I don’t think I’d ever read any W Somerset Maugham (1874-1965). Time to put that right.

I started with Liza of Lambeth, partly because it was Maugham’s first novel and partly because there was a copy on the whole-wall bookshelves in my sitting room – not sure how it got there. Books have lives of their own sometimes.

It was published in 1897, just two years after Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure but Maugham is about as far from Hardy, whose work he loathed, as could be. Interesting though that both books, from very different standpoints, tackle the vexed, Victorian sex- outside-marriage issue.

Liza is a cheerful South Londoner who works hard, looks after her appallingly self-centred, querulous  mother and would quite like to have a good time. The prospect of marrying the decent but dull Tom, who adores her, does not appeal much. Then she meets the older Jim and there’s instant chemistry. Unfortunately he already has a wife and children and neither Liza nor Jim is very good at concealing what’s going on from their tight-knit, crowded community. So it all ends in tears.

There’s much casual violence amongst these people who are inclined to talk with their fists. Maugham trained at St Thomas’s with a view to practising medicine and the authenticity of some of the fights – along with the inevitable consequences of Liza’s affair – are testament to that. In the event he published Liza of Lambeth, achieved success with it and his career was launched on a different path.

This succinct novel, almost a novella, came as a refreshing relief after the prolixity of Herman Melville. It’s warmly readable and the characterisation is engaging, if a bit stereotyped. One of the most enlightening, horrifying and perceptive sections is the conversation between Liza’s mother and her neighbour at the end. I wish though, that Maugham hadn’t opted for crude phonetic spelling to indicate the accent his characters are using. George Bernard Shaw does it too. So does DH Lawrence. It was the custom of the day but ,over a century later, it’s tiresome to read  because it forces the reader to stop and sub vocalise. You could so easily have them speak (written) standard English with the occasional signal in the speech tags.

My mother-in-law (born 1922) used to wax lyrical about W.Somerset Maugham. I suppose the novels and short stories were fairly current when she first read them or more likely her mother (another reading enthusiast) passed them on to her. I shall read Cakes and Ale (1930) soon not least because I like the title taken from Shakespeare cf Murder Most Foul, Brave New World and The Darling Buds of May.

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: One Summer in Provence by Carol Drinkwater.