The Loss Adjustor - Aifric Campbell

Rather bleak novel about a woman trapped and isolated by memories of a teenage tragedy and the resulting loss of her first love. A compelling read, but I found it strangely difficult to connect with one of the main characters because of the author's careful refusal to label her "difference" (eventually revealed as autism on page 228) which had me confused at times as to whether she was perhaps just younger than the others, or simply a "difficult" personality, and prevented the central relationships from coming fully into focus for me.

The Hours - Michael Cunningham

Having found Mrs. Dalloway itself a little inaccessible, I was delighted to find that this re-imagining did a great job of capturing its essence and interpreting it for a modern (lazy?) reader. It is a powerful novel in its own right, beautiful and full of vivid characters, but also full of echoes of Mrs. Dalloway, and a mark of its success for me was that it made me feel that I could go back to the original novel and get more out of it after reading this. Most memorable - and unsettling - for me were the sections about the 40s housewife Mrs. Brown, describing the sense of unreality that can come with being alone at home with a small child: "Alone with the child, though, she loses direction. She can't always remember how a mother would act.".

Mrs Dalloway - Virginia Woolf

I read this as preparation for reading Michael Cunningham's 'The Hours', and must confess that it took so much concentration that it felt a little like doing homework... Virginia Woolf is an author that I've always wanted to like, but never really managed to. I'm not even sure exactly why - perhaps because her approach has been so influential that it no longer has the same impact? I suspect that as someone who often picks up a book in order to be immersed in someone else's world to drown out my own inner monologue for a while, I just find it too challenging to be confronted with other people's! Strangely, for me the book started to feel less depressing at around the point that the shell-shocked Septimus committed suicide.

The Queen's Sorrow - Suzannah Dunn

This fed my new-found hunger for historical fiction perfectly - a really gripping story that kept me hooked right up to the terrible (but totally satisfying) conclusion, combined with lots of atmospheric period detail as London under Mary Tudor is described by a sundial maker just arrived from Spain. I believed in the characters and in their (sometimes shockingly naive) choices, and I also came away wanting to find out more about the real Queen Mary.