Last updated 16:52, Thursday, 20 November 2008

AS we head into these dark evenings the book that’s keeping me awake is by an author who, thanks to the National Year of Reading, will be visiting Hexham in December.

The author is Kate Summerscale and the book (which recently won the Samuel Johnson prize for non-fiction) is The Suspicions of Mr Whicher.

This, although a factual account, is an unexpectedly moving thriller that is difficult to put down, an extraordinary and gripping read about the brutal murder of a young child in a middle class Victorian family home and the eponymous detective who uncovers the culprit ‘from within’ the house; one of the eleven members of family and servants there at the time.

The influence of this murder case on Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone and Dickens’s The Mystery of Edwin Drood is a matter of record.

Reading this, we are transported to an England of 1860 on show in minute detail, from the weekly wage of a police constable (£1) to the operation of a country house privy.

Kate Summerscale will be talking about her book at a free event in Hexham Library, Queens Hall, on December 4.

Detail is something essential in its absurdity in the Forum Cinema book group choice this month.

A melancholy and lyrical description of Palestinian history over a 27 year period, Raja Shehadeh’s Palestinian Walks, notes on a vanishing landscape charts the author’s walks through the hills around Ramallah, the Jerusalem wilderness and the ravines by the Dead Sea.

This is a travel memoir that celebrates the real and the ordinary in order to debunk the imagined extraordinary.

Palestinian Walks will be discussed by Hexham Book Group at the Forum Cinema on Tuesday, beginning at 7.30pm.

Susie Troup,

Director,

Hexham Book Festival