Whitcoulls Recommends: Yesteryear and London Falling

Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke. Natalie Heller Mills drifts into marriage with a real loser, and in a last desperate attempt to help him make something of himself, gets her father in law to fund them onto a remote ranch in Idaho where she raises a brood of kids, embraces a traditional way of life, and sends it all via Instagram to a rapidly increasing audience. The trouble is, Natalie doesn’t entirely subscribe to the situation she finds herself in - and when one day she wakes up in the year 1855, in exactly the environment she’s been emulating, the things she’s been espousing and pretending to live like suddenly become all too real. This is terrifically well done - full of side-eye and quips to the reader amid a situation from which there is no escape.

London Falling by Patrick Radden Keefe. He’s the author who gave us the wonderful Empire of Pain a few years ago. This is about a young man whose fall from the balcony of a high end apartment block beside the Thames was filmed by MI6 cameras across the river. Zac Brettler always wanted more, and passed himself off as the child of a Russian oligarch which ultimately resulted in him getting in with the wrong crowd. Despite the footage, the Metropolitan Police refused to investigate and when Radden Keefe got involved he found a great deal to answer for. This is fascinating, investigative writing of the highest order. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:06):
You're listening to the Sunday Session podcast with Francesca Rudkin
from News Talks.

Speaker 2 (00:11):
Ab Joan mackenzie headbook bar at Wickles joins me now,
good morning.

Speaker 3 (00:16):
Hello.

Speaker 2 (00:17):
Okay, let's start with Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke.

Speaker 3 (00:22):
This is terrific. It is a tradwife story, and a
lot of listeners will know about the tradwife movement that's
been sweeping parts of the world recently. In this novel,
Natalie Halla Mills drifts into marriage with a guy who's
a bit of a loser, and she finally manages to
get her father in law, sorry his father, to fund

(00:44):
them onto a remote ranch in Idaho, where they raise
a brood of kids and embrace a traditional way of life.
And she sends it all via Instagram to her rapidly
increasing audience, who all watch and marvel at the way
that she manages to live this extraordinarily traditional life in
the middle of nowhere and do everything and still stay sane.
But I loved the side eye that she's got on

(01:06):
herself in this book, because she gives comments and decides,
and she shows this rage to the reader that you know,
she knows that you know about and it's all just
for show. It's really clever. And then one morning she
wakes up and it's eighteen fifty five and she's been
sent back into the world that she's claiming to currently

(01:28):
represent in the modern age, and she's there with a
brood of kids that she can hardly relate to. She's
got the really hard work of the nineteenth century to
deal with, and a husband who's even less use than
he was before. I couldn't put it down. I loved
the commentary that she gives the reader as she goes
through these two kinds of lives that she has. It's very,
very clever, and I didn't see the end coming, but

(01:50):
with retrospect I probably should have.

Speaker 2 (01:52):
It reminds me of that I cannot remember the name
of the title that fantastic book that the woman wrote
about the time travel and how we brought people from
the past to the future in the Ministry of Time.

Speaker 3 (02:01):
Yes, Yes, Time, I love Brilliant.

Speaker 2 (02:03):
Yeah yeah yeah. And the latest from the fabulous Patrick
rad and Keith London Falling.

Speaker 3 (02:09):
He is a whit Cale's favorite. I hope that a
lot of listeners have read Empire of Pain. I just
want to say If you haven't, you really should. This
new one is extraordinary. It's about the life and death
of a young nineteen year old London man called Zach Brettler,
who really wanted to have more than he had, and
he wanted to be more than he was. He came

(02:29):
from a pretty well off family they went wealthy, but
he started putting it about that he was the son
of a Russian oligarch and as a result he got
into a lot of very bad company and one night
he was caught on footage from CCTV cameras which Air
I six have on the outside of their building alongside

(02:50):
the Thames. These cameras caught images of this young man
pacing a balcony on a high end apartment block just
across the river and eventually throwing himself over the side
into the river, which was a fall that he did
not survive. The police weren't interested and said, well, it
was clearly a case of suicide. But when Patrick Radden

(03:11):
Keith got involved, which he did by meeting some family
members at a party in London purely coincidentally, and he
started to investigate, he found that the way that the
oligarchs and the Russians have been able to infiltrate UK,
particularly London Society, without any guard rails or safeguards for
the local people, and how the institutions and the people

(03:33):
who should have been the adults in the room and
the guys in charge simply failed the society. It's fascinating.

Speaker 2 (03:40):
Thank you so much. Join Those two books were Yesteryear
by Carrow Claire Burke and London Falling by Patrick rad
and Keith.

Speaker 1 (03:48):
For more from the Sunday session with Francesca Rudkin, listen
lived to News Talks they'd be from nine am Sunday,
or follow the podcast on iHeartRadio.