Three years ago I reviewed four very different books. November being a month of commemoration, I started with the classical novella The Loved One by Evelyn Waugh that is love story as well as satire on the funeral business in California of the late 1940s. Moving from the radiant American west coast to a poor Afro-American community in Ohio some years earlier, The Bluest Eye by en-Nobel-ed Toni Morrison drew me into the dire life of a teenager from a dysfunctional family who despises herself for being ugly. The scene of The Guest Cat by Hiraide Takashi is an old Tōkyō neighbourhood about forty years later where a childless married couple grows attached to a furry visitor belonging to their neighbours. And finally, I followed the true story of the rise of a French silk merchant’s daughter to the Queen of Sweden fictionalised in Désirée by Austro-Danish author Annemarie Selinko.