I feel like I have hit some kind of jackpot, as after months of trying to find a book to read that I found interesting enough to finish, I found two back-to-back. I just finished and wrote about Small Pleasures a few days ago, so when I picked up The Second Mrs. Hockaday by an author I had never heard of, I was more than prepared to give up on it after a couple of chapters. After all, what were the chances of me liking it so soon after finding a book I enjoyed, given that I had become so hard to please lately as far as reading was concerned? Also, the book is set during the American Civil War in the 1860s, a time period that — as I was not born in the US — feels quite remote, and, dare I say at the risk of sounding parochial, not particularly interesting to me.

In short, I was fully prepared to pass on the book after a couple of chapters. But much to my surprise, I was hooked and read it all the way through to the end in two days.

The story centers on a 17-year-old girl, Placidia, who falls in love with and marries a man and comes to back with him to his 300-acre farm in South Carolina, all within the course of a couple of days. It is a testament to the immediate attraction that she feels for the man, a Major Hockaday, and he for her. But they have barely a day to enjoy being newly-weds before he is called off to fight in the Civil War, leaving Placidia on her own to manage the farm as well as his infant son from his deceased first wife.

When Major Hockaday returns after two years, he learns that Placidia has borne a child in his absence and that this child is now dead. He feels so betrayed — the baby could not have been his — that he brings criminal charges against her. She is accused of murdering the baby she bore and is jailed. Placidia does not deny that she had a child and that it is now dead. However, she claims that she did not kill the child but that it died of illness. Also, she refuses to say who the father of the child was or how it happened. Did she have an affair or was she raped?

It is, of course, this mystery at the heart of the book that makes it so compelling and such a propulsive read. However, it was not just the suspense, it also how beautifully it was written. The story is told entirely in the form of letters, diary entries, and inquest reports, all of them capturing the details, the mood, the dialogue, the social norms, and the etiquette of that time period. The horrors of the Civil War, as experienced with full force by Placidia in the form of looting, intimidation, and violence, are also vividly portrayed. And then, of course, there was slavery, which at that time was in full force, especially in the South where the book is set. Not surprisingly, it forms one of the key plot points of the book.

The Second Mrs. Hockaday is Susan Rivers’ debut novel, which may be why I had never heard of her. But I am so glad to have found this book and its amazingly talented author.

The Second Mrs. Hockaday
Author: Susan Rivers
Publisher: ‎ Algonquin Books
Publication Date: November 2017

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Contributor: Lachmi Khemlani is a fan of the written word.

I was surprised that I had not come across any books by Clare Chambers before, given how much I ended up liking this book. The blurb at the back of the book said that its style was reminiscent of Ann Patchett and Kazuo Ishiguro – both of whom are authors I greatly admire – and while book blurbs are often exaggerated, this one wasn’t. Not only did I find myself completely engrossed in the story, I was also able to enjoy the actual telling of it, to savor the quality of the writing rather than racing through it to get to the end. This is despite the fact that it is a mystery – of sorts.

Small Pleasures is set in England in 1957, and it takes two real-life events and blends them together into a story that is so compelling that it is almost hard to believe. The main event was the search for a “virgin mother” that a popular British tabloid undertook in 1955, based on the recent discussion of a scientific concept called “parthenogenesis.” This is a form of asexual reproduction that occurs naturally in some plants and animals. Could it also be possible in humans? That was the idea behind the search, and in the fictional world of Small Pleasures, there is actually a woman who seems to have had a baby while she was still a virgin, with the baby being conceived at a time and place — bedridden in a hospital with severe rheumatoid arthritis — where she could not have had sex with a man.

Of course, for those of us who have seen the TV show, Jane the Virgin, we saw how Jane got pregnant by being accidentally artificially inseminated with a man’s sperm, but the book, Small Pleasures, is set in the 1950s, long before such a technology existed. And yet, there is Gretchen Tilbury, who claims that her daughter, Margaret — now ten years old – was born without the involvement of a man.

It is a claim that falls to Jean Swinney — who works at the newspaper that raised the question of whether parthenogenesis is possible in humans — to investigate. While the mystery of the “virgin birth” is, of course, very intriguing and keeps us riveted, the focus of the book is really on Jean and on her growing friendship and emotional attachment to Gretchen, Margaret, and Gretchen’s husband, Howard, whom Gretchen married after she found out that she was pregnant. Jean herself is close to forty, unmarried, and is a dutiful caretaker to her cantankerous widowed mother, so her life is far from joyful. This is why her deepening friendship with the Tilburys becomes a source of great personal happiness for her – making for the “small pleasures” of the book’s title. However, it also eventually brings her into conflict with her professional obligations of investigating Gretchen’s claim.

The second real-life event that the author skillfully weaves into the story is a horrendous rail accident — one of the worst in Britain’s history — that happened in the 1950s, in which two trains crashed in dense fog in south-east London, causing the deaths of 90 people and injuring many more. Although the train crash was briefly mentioned in the beginning of the book, we forget all about it as we get caught up in the lives of Jane, the Tilburys, and the mystery of the virgin birth. But then, suddenly, the tragedy befalls one of the key characters in the book, and it comes as a complete shock.

It is so devastating that, by then, we don’t even care any more about the mystery of the virgin birth that the book started with — even though it does get solved by the end.

Small Pleasures
Author: Clare Chambers
Publisher: ‎ Mariner Books
Publication Date: October 2021

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Contributor: Lachmi Khemlani is a fan of the written word.