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Bristol best of 2014: Books
1. The Fair Fight by Anna Freeman
The best Bristol book of the year is set in the city in 1799 within a brothel on Frog Lane. Plain Ruth leaves a life of prostitution to become a female fighter for merchant, Mr Dryer. Dryer’s wife Charlotte has lost her family to small pox and is bitter at her powerless position. Freeman’s characters come alive in a setting that covers poverty among the dirty centre and the rich families in Queen Square.
2. Daughter by Jane Shemilt
Bristol GP turned author Shemilt’s debut novel has been much loved by the Sunday Times and Richard and Judy’s autumn book club. When a teenage girl goes missing her mother discovers she doesn’t know her daughter as well as she thought. One year later – Naomi is still missing. Jenny is a mother on the brink of obsession with her family falling apart. Will the truth set them free of force them further apart? A haunting story.
3. Heartman by MP Wright
Heartman is a story so well written and researched that it could be a major piece of evidence in the case for time travel. It is 1965 and ex-cop Ellington is forced to flee Barbados in tragedy and finds himself in Bristol. Unemployed among his family’s community in St. Paul he is forced to take on a private investigation. What starts off as a way to make money ends up with a race to save the life of a vulnerable young woman.
is needed now More than ever
4. The Monogram Murders by Sophie Hannah
Hercule Poirot has been revived by Hannah in a style so authentic that you are landed right back to the golden age when a pompous Belgian with superior intellect solves a dastardly mystery. This is the first Hercule mystery to be published since Christie’s death in 1976. The Bristol-wed author married at Emmanuel Church in Clifton in 1914. The church is now flats for the elderly with only the tower still standing.
5. The Black Eyed Blonde by Benjamin Black
Former Bristol Western Gazette journalist Raymond Chandler was not well known for his reporting but his hard hitting private eye characters have been immortalised on the screen by actors as legendary as Humphrey Bogart. Now it’s the turn of Booker Prize winning author John Banville, writing as Benjamin Black, to reprise a classic character.
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