All in all an enjoyable book and I really felt like I connected to the characters especially with Jean. I had all sorts of emotions through it from laughter to frustration to sadness and sympathy! The only thing for me was the ending which I wasn’t 100% on but I don’t want to say too much about it and spoil for new readers to the book and regardless of this I would still most definitely recommend.

I really enjoyed this and found the focus on this was done so precisely. The main narrative was twisty and turny and this had a fantastic element that was both a mystery but also had a soft and gentle tone to it. The epilogue chapter left me with my mouth open in shock as what happened was so expected and i should have seen it coming due to when it was set but it just slipped my mind. The characters were interesting and complex and i loved how they were all fleshed out so well. This was exactly what i wanted from it and i wasn't dissapointed.

This is a beautifully written, character focused novel that really let impressed me. The initial premise was fascinating and built to a satisfying conclusion. The ending featured a twist that I didn’t see coming but ultimately made perfect sense. Well worth a read.

This novel has been highlighted all over Social Media (which is a great place to find top reads, by the way!) and it is a beautifully set story that really transports the reader back to England in 1957. Cars needed a huge amount of preparation to travel even short distances, meat was heavily consumed and women knew their place in society. Except Jean Swinney, working as a journalist at the North Kent Echo, has a quiet determination to find some happiness in her fairly dismal life – she is a woman of middle age, with a degree of sad history, who lives with her mother, a rather cantankerous and controlling woman. She is tasked with producing a column for women, advocating domestic tips for the discerning homemaker (take an old Mackintosh and cut off the hood which now doubles as a vanity bag and the remaining carcass can line a suitcase, should the container get wet at any point!). It isn’t very fulfilling but nothing else is really on offer. Then Jean discovers Gretchen Tilbury’s story who claims that her daughter Margaret came into the world as a virgin birth. Jean is on board to get to the bottom of this curious story and is soon welcomed into Gretchens’ family – her older husband Howard took on both mother and daughter after the birth. Jean soon bonds with young Margaret, and Gretchen, who is a dab hand at dress making, soon freshens up Jean’s dull wardrobe. It all seems companionable and easy. Jean’s research takes her across the south east, back to St Cecilia’s, a convalescent home where Gretchen was recuperating and where conception occurred. She talks to fellow patients and carers and the more she unearths, the more she wonders – as indeed does the reader! We know that what Gretchen claims to be true is, in fact, impossible, and yet…. This is a story with a very odd premise at its heart and yet it works really well. It is so well observed, it conjures up place and era and does so with humour, panache and poignancy. There is sadness, too. The characters have a flesh and blood quality, which makes it is a joy to spend time with them. Recommended.

I first discovered Clare Chamber's work when I picked up a copy of In A Good Light in a second hand bookshop. I adored it, and years later it is still one of my most reread novels so I was delighted when, after a 10 years wait, a new book by the author was released. Small Pleasures is a poignant love story and an intriguing and curious mystery which calmly and cleverly unfolds stealing your heart and quietly breaking it. There is a quiet joy in the author's writing, a love of the small inconsequential everyday moments that hold the big things together. But like the swimming of swans and the buzzing of bees there is a tremendous sense of unseen forces moving behind the scenes. With another six novels waiting to be read this is an author that everyone should discover.