Mary Letts, Shadows on a Stone Wall (Blaize Bailey Books 2007)
This is a wonderful book, with the humanity of Ian McEwan and the humour of Roddy Doyle. I’m recommending it to everyone I know who likes these authors. Plus it has the added thrill of a murder mystery and a love story.
When her mother dies in a car accident, Julia and her children go home to Spain for the funeral, an ex-pat community in the mountain village where she had spent a painful childhood.
The beautiful view she’d grown up with from the country farmhouse she has inherited is now blighted by the concrete and asphalt construction of Florida-style retirement condos for the new ‘Holidaylandia’, of which her mother had been a vocal opponent.
Then the property developers discover an ancient skeleton buried under a collapsed wall on the edge of her mother’s land—but how ancient? Neolithic? Spanish Civil War? Many villages had guilty secrets under Franco.
Impending interrogation by ‘La Guardia’ livens up the conversations at the local drinking holes, as everyone tries to remember what they got up to back then.
Those were hippie days, a time when parenting had fewer boundaries. Suspicion also falls upon the history of Euro-hippies that ‘showed up’, ‘hung out’ and ‘split’.
Practically everyone in town has some guilty secret, even the children.
The book is beautifully written, and never descends to banality. The plot is good, and the characters are profoundly likeable. The use of dialogue is absolutely perfect.
The children in the story are portrayed lovingly and amusingly, but never patronisingly, and are so real they must surely be taken from real life. They play major roles in the plot, and are multi-faceted in their own right, every bit as interesting as the adult characters.
I truly hope this book is not completely autobiographical, or if it is, that Mary Letts has more than one life story to tell.
Susie Helme 
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