The Orchid House: Avril Joy

I made a resolution quite a while ago to read (and hopefully review) one self-published e-book a month.  This month my chosen read is Avril Joy's 'The Orchid House', with its luscious cover -  positively inviting you to pick it up.  Sadly on Kindle it comes up as black and white - but maybe soon Kindle will get its act together and discover full colour!

If you love romantic fiction with a darker undertow, gardening and garden history then the Orchid House will please you.   There's a lot of (very good) sex in the book too - and it takes real talent to write about sex well.  Gardening, when you think about it, is all about sex - breeding plants, fertilising seeds, earth, nurturing fruit and flower.  I have to say that this is one of the most erotic novels I've read for a while.  From the steamy tropical ambience of Sri Lanka to the hot-houses of Trescombe in England, the reader is treated to sensual prose unfolding a plot that is both tragic and compelling.

The heroine, 27 year old Roma, has just lost her lover, who drowned  while body-surfing in rough seas off the coast of Sri Lanka.  She returns to England, unable to move on with her life, until she takes up a project, illustrating the 19th century diary of the head gardener at Trescombe - a stately home in Cornwall.  She begins to make a relationship with Will, the current head gardener, though neither of them seem able to commit to each other.  He is curiously withdrawn, and his real passion is for rare orchids, the most beautiful and mysterious of plants, and he spends a great deal of his time in the hot-houses where they grow.  But the orchid house conceals a terrible secret, and there has been another death by drowning ......

Into Roma's emotional twilight comes the sadistic Max, owner of Trescombe, and sexually irresistible to both men and women.  The whole situation becomes explosive and the lives of Roma, Will and Trescombe itself are all put in jeopardy.  But, of course, as a romance, all is healed in the end, the heroine gets the right hero and all is well.   I really didn't know how it was all going to work out and was very happy with the way the story was  concluded.

This is Avril Joy's second published book - the first was The Sweet Track, published by Flambard Press and very well received.   The story of  how it got into print and the reasons why she decided to publish her second novel herself are told on Avril's blog here.   The Orchid House nearly made it to Headline and Bloomsbury.  You have to ask yourself why they didn't take the plunge, since this is a very good read that's pleasing many people at the moment (8 four or five star reviews on amazon).   Are publishers going mad at the moment?  Or just lost in the new landscape of BookWorld?  They do seem to be turning down some very good reads. 

For me, there's only one little niggle - as with most Kindle books (even - alas - the top publishers) there are a few typos and formatting errors,  but these are easy to overlook when the story is so good.  What all e-published authors need is a good editing service at an affordable price - it's quite a different art to the usual kind of copy-editing.  Having fallen foul of the conversion process myself, I'd be first in the queue to sign up!


Avril talks about her life as a writer in prison 'Twenty Five Years Behind Bars',  and her writing, over on the Authors Electric Blogspot. 

Snowdrops: A.D. Miller

This was my first Kindle book and, because I bought it after seeing a review on a Book-blog, it seems to epitomise everything about the New Age of publishing. We publicise on the internet, we buy in the cyber-sphere and we read on the electronic page.

Initially I downloaded the book onto my computer via the free’Kindle for PC’ application that Amazon offer - it was perfectly readable on my net-book, but when I bought Neil a Kindle for his birthday present the novel became something different. For one thing I could read it outside in the sun; secondly I could read it without glasses because you can select a comfortable text size; and thirdly, it’s easier to hold than a book if, like me, you have Writer’s-Wrist syndrome.  (I'm not being paid to advertise Kindles, just in case anyone is wondering!)

I had a lot of worries about the electronic read, but it was very enjoyable - page turning in an instant and automatic book-marking (am I going to miss those random train tickets, envelopes, post-cards etc that fall out of the books on my shelf as mnemonic surprises?)

The title - Snowdrops - comes from Russian slang for the bodies that reveal themselves when the snow begins to melt after the long winter.  The novel itself is well constructed, with a strong narrative voice - a thirty something male lawyer called Nick, in Moscow at the height of the post-Glasnost feeding frenzy that created the new class of oligarchs. Nick is engaged in facilitating finance for an oil project headed by an ex KGB entrepreneur, and learning to cultivate the required level of moral blindness, when he meets two beautiful Russian girls, Masha and Katya, in the Metro. He is instantly attracted to Masha, the older of the two. Lonely, although he can’t admit it, he is easy prey for what he thinks are two innocent girls using him only for some great nights out and uncomplicated sex.

But neither are what they seem, and his habit of not asking questions means that he is soon morally compromised, plunging deeper and deeper into what he eventually realises is a dangerous game involving the murder of an innocent citizen.

The book is written in the first person, as a confession to the woman he is about to marry. It contains some of the most evocative descriptions of Moscow I’ve ever read, and conveys the heady, morally confused atmosphere of post Glasnost Russia with complete credibility.

The hero sins (as most of us do) by omission, and the message is that weakness can do more harm than positive action because it can facilitate evil. Not that any of the characters can be said to be evil - they are fully rounded individuals all looking after their own interests at the expense of everyone else in direct contrast to the old Soviet ideal.

Andrew Miller was a foreign correspondent for the Economist in Moscow for several years, so he knows the world he’s writing about. I will definitely be watching out for more books from this author.

The E-Book creeps in .....

I have done something quite earth-shaking - I have just bought my first Kindle book.   I saw a review of a thriller on DoveGreyReader's book blog and really fancied reading it.  When I looked at the price online it was going to cost me almost ten pounds with postage for the paperback, but the Kindle price was only £2.39.   As I consume thrillers like chocolates (and pass them on to the charity shops) I didn't think I could justify the price of the paperback.  But I don't own -   can't afford  - a Kindle!  
Then I noticed that you can download the Kindle software 'for PC' free from Amazon.  So I did just that, downloaded the book onto my little netbook and now I can read it on the sofa, in bed, or on the train.  Don't know how easy it will be on the eye, but it's an experiment.  Oh, and I got three free e-books from Amazon at the same time.  Great!
And The Book?  It's called Snowdrops, by A.D. Miller, set in Russia.  Apparently he was a journalist - correspondent for the Economist in Moscow, so knows his subject.   Had a peek at the first pages before I bought and it looks good.