Book news, reviews and recommendations
I’ve yet to read anything from this second instalment of June fiction which begins with the one I’m most interested in. Inspired by real events, Heather Clark’s The Scrapbook opens in Harvard in 1996 where Anna meets and falls in love with a German student just before graduation. Visiting Christoph at his home in Germany, […]
Books to Look Out For in June 2025: Part Two Read More »
I’m sucker for author endorsements from favourite writers. Eric Puchner’s Dream State comes with lots of them including Danielle Evans and Andrew Sean Greer, but it was Alice McDermott’s that swung it for me. It’s a doorstopper which takes its readers from wedding preparations in the late twentieth century through to the mid-twenty-first before coming
Dream State by Eric Puchner: ‘Marriage, the only adventure open to the cowardly’ Read More »
I had two reasons to feel a little superstitious about our Ghent trip: firstly, we’d planned to go in March 2020 days before lockdown at home – Belgium got there before us – and secondly the last time I travelled on Eurostar we both caught covid. H and I gathered our courage and set off
Three Days in Ghent and One Book Read More »
I’ve read all but two from June’s first batch of new fiction beginning with a novel I snapped up as soon as it appeared on NetGalley. Boogie was only eighteen when their rackety mother left her two daughters with him in Wendy Erksine’s The Benefactors. He raised them both, never distinguishing between Misty and his
Books to Look Out For in June 2025: Part One Read More »
Six Degrees of Separation is a meme hosted by Kate over at Books Are My Favourite and Best. It works like this: each month a book is chosen as a starting point and linked to six others to form a chain. A book doesn’t need to be connected to all the titles on the list,
Six Degrees of Separation – Rapture to The Gun Room Read More »
May’s first paperback preview was a bit of a mishmash but this one has a marriage/relationship theme running through it, albeit mostly unhappy, beginning with Sarah Manguso’s Liars, one of my books of last year. It’s the story of a broken marriage told from the perspective of Jane whose relationship with John grows out of
Paperbacks to Look Out For in May 2025: Part Two Read More »
I read Jenny Mustard’s debut, Okay Days, back in 2023. Unflashy, perceptive and absorbing, it’s a thoroughly enjoyable novel which made me happy to put up my hand when What a Time to be Alive popped up on NetGalley. A coming-of-age story, it follows Sickan who’s changed her name from Siv hoping to reinvent herself
What a Time to Be Alive by Jenny Mustard: A quietly accomplished, coming-of-age novel Read More »
The blurb for John Patrick McHugh’s Fun and Games came garlanded with praise from a slew of starry Irish literary names, not least Sally Rooney. I often wonder how that might feel for a writer; a kind of euphoric anxiety, perhaps. Set in the summer of 2009, McHugh’s novel follows seventeen-year-old John and his footballing
Fun and Games by John Patrick McHugh: Growing up is hard to do Read More »
I’ve read none of the novels from this first batch of May paperbacks which begins with one that’s impressed several bloggers I follow. I wasn’t as enamoured with Charlotte Wood’s The Weekend as many readers but I’ll be trying again with her new one, Stone Yard Devotional, which sees a middle-aged woman seeking peace and
Paperbacks to Look Out For in May 2025: Part One Read More »
I loved both The End We Start From and The Harpy which made me keen to read Megan Hunter’s Days of Light. She’s a poet whose use of language is often very striking, part of the attraction for me. This third novel tells the story of Ivy, the daughter of a bohemian Sussex family, through
Days of Light by Megan Hunter: A life in six days Read More »
Oliver Lovrenski’s Back in the Day topped the bestseller lists in Norway for months, winning the country’s prestigious Bookseller Prize when Lovrenski was just nineteen. Set in Oslo, his episodic, fragmented novel follows four boys through their school days onto the streets into a life that will likely lead to an early death. argan was