Trying to Understand...

...about cults and sects - how they come about, flourish, go rotten from the core like apples - I borrowed a memoir from the local library, and read it, with horrified fascination, in a few days.

Then I read more about the author, and discovered she had written a very highly thought-of novel during our Cambridge days. 

Our library has a pretty rubbish literature section, so I tracked down the novel from my favourite pandemic online second hand bookstore.

It duly arrived a few days ago and I tucked into it this afternoon, wrapped in my bright wool blanket on the sofa.

A chapter or two in I come across a funeral, with hyacinths...and my memory says:

 'you've passed this way before! The funeral is in the autumn, hyacinths don't flower in the autumn. And in the next chapter there is a guinea-pig, in a wheel, keeping the protagonist awake all night (the stuff of nightmares!). And you hurled the book from you, with snorts of contempt for editors...'

So I read on. And there is indeed an accidental giant, nocturnal nightmare guinea-pig...

But this time, I am going to read the whole book - unless I come across a misplaced apostrophe or semi-colon...