This series is an adaptation of something I saw on Twitter – people were posting 26 books in 26 days, each title beginning with a different letter of the alphabet. However, I’m planning on taking around 26 months to get to Z. Each month I’ll post a newish book I’ve enjoyed, plus a children’s book and an older book.

This month, we’ve arrived at ‘V’:

A Jayne Sinclair Genealogical Mystery

What would you do if you discovered you had a brother you never knew existed?
On her deathbed, Freda Duckworth confesses to giving birth to an illegitimate child in 1944 and temporarily placing him in a children’s home. She returned later, but he had vanished. 

What happened to the child? Why did he disappear? Where did he go? 
Jayne Sinclair, genealogical investigator, is faced with lies, secrets, and one of the most shameful episodes in recent history as she attempts to uncover the truth.
Can she find the vanished child?

Every childhood lasts a lifetime.

This book is the fourth in Martin Lee’s Jayne Sinclair Genealogical Mystery series, but they can easily be read as standalone novels. I read this one a couple of years ago, and I was gripped. Unimaginable that this happened to so many children in our recent history.

The most popular fiction series ever written about the nursing world…

Sue Barton, now a fully qualified nurse, goes to work in the city slums as a Henry Street Visiting Nurse. She puts her engagement to Bill, a young doctor, to one side while she concentrates on all the demands of her job. Here in the city, Sue has never been needed so desperately, and fired with enthusiasm, she tramps the streets of New York.

I loved the Sue Barton books when I was a child. This one is the third of six, and they’re all still in my bookcase today. They’re one of the reasons I went in for physiotherapy – and the underground corridors in my training hospital had cockroaches too, just like in the first Sue book!

“Villette! Villette! . . . It is a still more wonderful book than Jane Eyre.” George Eliot

Villette recounts the true story of Brontë’s unrequited love for a married schoolmaster through the adventures of her novel’s heroine, Lucy Snowe, who, after disaster strikes, travels to the fictional French town of Villette to teach at a girls’ school.

Villette is a moving tale of repressed feelings and subjection to cruel circumstance and position, borne with heroic fortitude. Rising above the frustrations of confinement within a rigid social order, it is also the story of a woman’s right to love and be loved.

This isn’t my favourite Brontë book, but it’s still fascinating. I haven’t read it for years, but having watched the excellent film To Walk Invisible since then, I’m gong to have another read of it someday.

Next time, it’s the ‘W’ books – I’m sure you can guess what the children’s book will be!