Susan Osborne, at A Life in Books

Cover image for The Tyranny of Lost Things by Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett

The Tyranny of Lost Things by Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett: Communes and how to survive them

6 July 2018 / 9 Comments

I was looking for a novel to get stuck into having just given up one I’d been eagerly anticipating but which proved to be disappointing. Set during the 2011 London heatwave, Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett’s debut, The Tyranny of Lost Things, neatly filled the gap. No one’s warned Harmony about the unearthly shrieks of the elderly […]

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John Betjeman statue (St. Pancras International)

Four Days in Amsterdam, Fourteen Days in Central Europe and Three Books

4 July 2018 / 22 Comments

We’d already decided on another central European railway jaunt this year then Eurostar announced its new London to Amsterdam service. The idea of arriving in a city dear to both of us without setting foot on a plane was irresistible so we decided to extend our holiday to include a few days there. John Betjeman

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Paperbacks to Look Out for in July 2018

2 July 2018 / 8 Comments

Two titles were in tight competition for the top of this short list of July paperbacks, so tight that I’ve decided to take them in alphabetical order. Chloe Benjamin’s The Immortalists is one of those books surrounded by the kind of social media brouhaha that so often promises the world but delivers a pale imitation.

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Books to Look Out For in July 2018

29 June 2018 / 14 Comments

Back from my travels (more of which next week) with a look at July’s nicely varied bunch of new titles taking in Native American culture, Indonesian customs and genre-defying Icelandic fiction to name but a few disparate themes. Quite some time ago, having spent several holidays in the Four Corners area of the US, I

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He Is Mine and I Have No Other by Rebecca O’Connor: Secrets and Lies

8 June 2018 / 8 Comments

This seems to be the year of the novella for me helped along by Madame Bibi who devoted the whole of last month to the form. Set in a small Irish town, Rebecca O’Connor’s He Is Mine and I Have No Other may be short on pages but it’s devastating in its revelation of tragedy,

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Meet Me at the Museum by Anne Youngson: Never too late to change

6 June 2018 / 30 Comments

I wasn’t at all sure that I was going to read Meet Me at the Museum. I thought it might be a little too sentimental for my cynical literary heart but a blow to the head which landed me briefly in A & E and left me with a several stitches, a few staples and

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Blasts from the Past: The Next Step in the Dance by Tim Gautreaux (1998)

4 June 2018 / 11 Comments

This is the latest in a series of occasional posts featuring books I read years ago about which I was wildly enthusiastic at the time, wanting to press a copy in as many hands as I could. The Next Step in the Dance is one of those novels that inexplicably – to me, anyway –

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Six Degrees of Separation – from The Tipping Point to Killing Me Softly #6Degrees

2 June 2018 / 24 Comments

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 other books to form a chain. A book doesn’t need to be connected to all the others on the

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You Think It, I’ll Say It by Curtis Sittenfeld: Appearances can be deceptive

1 June 2018 / 21 Comments

I read Curtis Sittenfeld’s The American Wife on holiday quite some time ago and found it hard to drag myself away from. Those who’ve read it will know that the titular wife is loosely based on Laura Bush which certainly added spice to the reading but the quality of Sittenfeld’s writing would have kept me

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Happy Little Bluebirds by Louise Levene: A Hollywood romp

30 May 2018 / 12 Comments

I reviewed Louise Levene’s The Following Girls here just over four years ago. I loved it – a pitch-perfect satire on ‘70s schoolgirl life whose period detail rang more than a few bells for me. I can’t vouch for the authenticity of that detail in Happy Little Bluebirds, set in Hollywood just over a year

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Paperbacks to Look Out for in June 2018: Part Two

28 May 2018 / 6 Comments

This second batch of June paperbacks begins with a book from a favourite author. Comprising nine stories, two of them pleasingly lengthy, William Boyd’s The Dreams of Bethany Mellmoth ranges from a philandering art dealer who gets his comeuppance to a novelist fleeing eviscerating reviews who bumps into one of his worst maulers and spots

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