Friendship is born at that moment when one man says to another: "What! You too? I thought that no one but myself . . ."”

Crooked Heart by Lissa Evans | Goodreads

I fell in love with Noel. Noel is a witty, charismatic boy with uncanny intelligence. The wisdom lent him by his godmother before she past has left him with a problem solving nature. He uses his first encounters with strangers to observe without interruption. This leaves people to think he may be slow or something. Noel is anything but slow! Vera, or Vee, is a bit hard to take at first. Once I learned her story it made sense that she would not welcome a strange child into her world. The two of them together is really magic. We get to learn a lot about Donald in this story as well. By venturing into places he shouldn’t, Donald gets himself into a whole mess of trouble. The characterisation in Crooked Heart, is just superb – and it occurred to me while reading how visual this novel is (if that makes sense). The author quite obviously binging her experience of working in film and television to her writing. The chaotic, semi-feral teaming up of Vera and Noel is as sparky and funny as ‘Cold Comfort Farm’ and as charming and touching as ‘The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry’, but then every now and again comes the vertiginous feeling of peering into something unutterably, dangerously sad. Everybody, and I mean everybody, is getting this for Christmas. Louisa Young, author of ‘My Dear, I Wanted to Tell you’At around this time I began to write the poems which formed my first poetry collection, The Apple Fall, and to publish these in magazines. I also completed two novels; fortunately neither survives, and it was more than ten years before I wrote another novel. I was born in December 1952, in Yorkshire, the second of four children. My father was the eldest of twelve, and this extended family has no doubt had a strong influence on my life, as have my own children. In a large family you hear a great many stories. You also come to understand very early that stories hold quite different meanings for different listeners, and can be recast from many viewpoints. It spoke so very well about the lengths people will go to survive; about our need for love and support; and about how people can take you by surprise.

The Crooked Hearts (TV Movie 1972) - IMDb The Crooked Hearts (TV Movie 1972) - IMDb

During this time I published several collections of poems, and wrote some of the short stories which were later collected in Love of Fat Men. I began to travel a great deal within the UK and around the world, for poetry tours and writing residences. This experience of working in many different countries and cultures has been very important to my work. I reviewed poetry for Stand and Poetry Review and later for The Observer, and subsequently reviewed fiction for The Observer, The Times and The Guardian. My critical work includes introductions to the poems of Emily Brontë, the short stories of D H Lawrence and F Scott Fitzgerald, a study of Virginia Woolf’s relationships with women and Introductions to the Folio Society's edition of Anna Karenina and to the new Penguin Classics edition of Tolstoy's My Confession. Regardless, I still remain a devoted fan to Helen Dunmore. My favorite book written by her is Talking to the Dead (1996). Her more recent titles include Counting the Stars (2008) and The Betrayal (2010). I'm so glad I read this novel Thanksgiving week, as it's been quite a while since I was emotionally invested in a book's characters enough to feel a profound gratefulness to the power of love. So many books on World War II and London's Blitz are sentimental and tired, but Lissa Evans's is beautifully moving because the war is second to the desperate characters. Parts of the book are funny, while other parts provoke anxiety on behalf of a little boy named Noel who is preternaturally intelligent and sadly abandoned. For children, she has written Small Change For Stuart, shortlisted for the 2011 Costa Award for Children's fiction, the 2012 Carnegie Medal, and the 2012 Branford Boase Award. [4] Small Change for Stuart was published in the United States as Horten's Miraculous Mechanisms, and the sequel, Big Change for Stuart ( Horten's Incredible Illusions in the U.S.) was published in 2012. Another book for children, Wed Wabbit, was published in 2017 and shortlisted for the 2017 Costa Book Awards and the 2018 Carnegie Medal.Noel's mourning his godmother Mattie, a former suffragette. Wise beyond his years, raised with a disdain for authority and an eclectic attitude toward education, he has little in common with other children and even less with the impulsive Vee, who hurtles from one self-made crisis to the next. The war's provided unprecedented opportunities for making money, but what Vee needs - and what she's never had - is a cool head and the ability to make a plan.

With Your Crooked Heart by Helen Dunmore | Goodreads With Your Crooked Heart by Helen Dunmore | Goodreads

Unfortunately for Vera (known as Vee), not all her ploys – even her legal ones – work out as she hopes. For example, having taken out an insurance policy on the life of a very elderly and frail-looking neighbour, Vera is frustrated to find the old lady continues to enjoy rude health. As Vee reflects, “That was what happened when you tried to do something straight: the world simply laughed at you.”

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Paul & Louise are married and childless for 10 years before Louise conceives Anna by an illicit affair with Paul’s younger brother Johnny. Paul is a successful businessman; Johnny runs with the criminal element. Louise becomes an alcoholic because she gained weight with Anna and couldn’t stand being ‘fat’. Because she’s an alcoholic, Paul eventually gets custody of Anna. But not far. The evacuation train takes them only to St. Albans, an old Roman city 20 miles north of central London, and closer still to the northern suburbs in which Noel had been living. Being an awkward-looking boy, Noel is not taken by any of the more desirable foster-parents, and ends up with a widow named Vee Sedge, who leads a precarious existence in rented accommodation with her young adult (but militarily unfit) son Donald and semi-invalid mother, evading landlords and rate-collectors and trying to devise schemes for making money by inventive but dodgy means. (Unknown to Vee, Donald also has money-making schemes, rather more profitable than hers, but also more dangerous). Two more different people than Noel and Vee could hardly be imagined, but nonetheless, they manage to bond. Well, Noel leaves them one day to be an evacuee. All the other children in his group are fostered. And at last Vee, a dim-witted woman, takes him just for the money. But she soon realizes that this wise child with a limp could work to her advantage in the game of getting by in London circa WWII. They are sort of a Pinky and the Brain duo. Only one thing puzzles me: Dunmore uses the phrase “it’s not Nova Scotia” twice in the book. As in: This is a beautifully written novel in a light and easy prose. I’m full of admiration for writers who simply let their period stories fall into place and flow naturally without the intrusion of sanctimonious modernist social commentary from afar, which for me, only succeeds in emotionally disengaging me from events. Any research in this novel is seamlessly interwoven. The recently deceased Anne Perry was another who would simply let her stories do the talking.