Havoc at The Heronry – 01 August 2025

I wrote last week with recommendations for entertainment over the summer holiday. But it is back to school and lacrosse sticks at dawn in Rebecca Wait’s new novel, set in a boarding school comparable to St Trinian’s in disorder, derangement and exam results ranking.

Welcome to St Anne’s. Avoid the fish pie, if you can. Don’t take any advice from the English teachers. Do break a leg in the school play – it’s the safest way out. It is mayhem. It is chaos. It is Havoc.

The History teacher has died doing what she loved, preparing for a lesson on the Diet of Worms, and her replacement is dubious. The governors are unbothered by the perilous state of the roof but Environmental Health might have something to say about the (poisonous and possibly haunted) laburnum tree. Mary Hughes has not been seen since she got lost on the way to Geography last term. And Ida has just arrived, the lucky holder of a Sixth Form scholarship, to see that, ‘Before her was a large manor house that looked as if it had been caught in the act of falling down and was now doing its best to hold itself together until you look away again.’

Havoc is a splendid labyrinth of a novel, much like the school itself. Ida is there to escape the hatred of the tiny island community in which she was living. But can she feel at home here with a roommate keen on starting fires and pushing girls out of windows? And a mysterious illness seizing hold of the pupils? And the headmistress, a Miss Christie, obsessed with preparing for a nuclear attack?

Oh and did I mention poison? I did. But that’s not why you will want to avoid any comestibles offered by Miss Stoker, who is unfortunately the cook.  

In Beartooth by Callan Wink, Thad and Hazen’s house is crumbling about them too. Thad hasn’t told Hazen about the letters threatening the loss of their home due to the debt from their late father’s medical bills. In fact, he has torn the letterbox out of the front yard. Problem solved. Leaky and approaching derelict, the house is all they have, all they can hope to have and a haven for all their memories.

The brothers live in the breathtaking Beartooth Mountains in Montana. But the grand setting, evoked so beautifully by Wink, the imposing landscape they know well, has become an opponent. They are doing their best, breaking their backs over honest work and drawn inevitably into less honest dealings. The setup could be that of a heist but Wink’s novel becomes something else, subtle and raw.

At the fiction book club this week we discussed The Children’s Bach by Helen Garner in which a home filled with (poor) piano-playing and (hearty, imperfect) singing begins to disintegrate. I am in awe of this novel and find new depths in the slimmest sentences each time I read it.

Turning to Garner’s non-fiction I read This House of Grief, which follows the trial of a man accused of killing his children. It begins, ‘Once there was a hard-working bloke who lived in a small Victorian country town with his wife and their three young sons,’ as if the author were going to tell a simple story, even a fable.

As Garner watches the trial unfold, the book quickly becomes an intelligent and complex exploration of how we judge our own actions and other people’s, of how to untangle the truth when people hardly know if they are lying themselves, of how to respond to horror as individuals and as a community. Why read such a story of someone else’s grief? Garner’s response and her care in writing it makes for a convincing answer.  

This House of Grief has inevitably been compared with Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, another account of a trial in which monsters turn out to be human. I read recently The Difficult Ghost by Leila Guerriero, published in a few weeks’ time, which follows Capote to Palamós on the Costa Brava where he went to try to finish the book.

Guerriero wants to find the rooms where Capote wrote (or failed to) over the course of a trip that stretched to three years, see the view that he did as he unpacked four thousand pages of notes, touch the same door handles, taste the same air. I’m fascinated by this search for a concrete place and how it only reinforces all the ways in which boundaries are slippery and biographers become haunted.

Two poetry collections build and pull down edifices in surreal and affecting phrases. In Hôtel Amour by Deryn Rees-Jones a woman checks into a room in Paris, located in a quiet street resounding with the voices of everyone who has visited this shifting space. Down to the placement of each word on the page, Hôtel Amour is an extraordinary construction.

In Eurydice in the Ruined House by Anna Saunders, the house of the title continually transforms as the poet explores the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, the lover who looks back, the lover who is blamed and the search for sanctuary in a place or a person.

Anna is reading in the shop on 16 August and we would love you to join us to celebrate her latest collection.

Houses hold secrets and sometimes those are crying out to be revealed, as Cecily Sawyer and twins, Merry and Spike, know all too well.

In Cecily Sawyer: How To Be a Spy by Iona Rangeley, Cecily’s home is the hotel her parents run. But when they go missing, she and her pet mouse, Mrs Maple Syrup, discover rooms even they had not known of before. And certain histories too. Her parents, always insistent that she should stop reading books on espionage, don’t seem to be ignorant of that profession themselves…

In Twice Upon a Time by Michelle Harrison, Merry and Spike are constantly on the move with their mother whose work restoring paintings has now brought them to Fox House, a rundown estate with some mysterious planning decisions, including the indoor well in the kitchen and the maze which has been altered over the years.

The twins are identical, born either side of the turn of the new year and strange things seem to happen around them when they’re near a clock. Awkward then to find themselves in an old house full of such antiques… Oh and did I mention poison? It’s havoc and mayhem here too.

May your weekend be pandemonium,
Lizzie