Book news, reviews and recommendations
Visitation Street opens in a steamy Brooklyn heat wave. Two fifteen year-old-girls decide to escape their stultifying boredom, floating off into the bay’s greasy waters on a bright pink inflatable raft watched by two young men. Only one girl returns, washed up under the pier and in bad shape. The rest of the novel explores
Visitation Street by Ivy Pochoda: More The Killing than Karin Slaughter Read More »
Hard to beat the satisfaction of reading a book you’ve been looking forward to for months and finding it to be even better than your sky high expectations. I’ve been eagerly anticipating Mr Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore ever since I spotted it in Atlantic’s catalogue way back in January. Set in the near future, it playfully
Mr Penumbra’s 24-hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan: Satisfaction Guaranteed Read More »
From the opening paragraph of Gail Godwin’s Flora we know that things will end badly. Helen, now a writer, looks back to the summer of 1945 when she turned eleven. Her father has gone to work at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, for what is later revealed to be the Manhattan Project, leaving Helen in the care
Flora by Gail Godwin: More Atonement than The Turn of the Screw Read More »
When a book arrives with a press release proclaiming its author to be the new Anne Tyler it sets off alarm bells. Tyler’s fans love her for her wryly witty observations on social manners. Her novels are filled with the kind of characters her readers recognise in themselves, their families and friends. It’s much to
Things We Need by Jennifer Close: If you like Anne Tyler… Read More »
J. Courtney Sullivan writes the kind of long involving books into which you can comfortably sink, surfacing now and again for a cup of tea or whatever you fancy. I thoroughly enjoyed her previous novel, Maine; intelligently written and completely absorbing. The Engagements is structured around the idea of the engagement ring, a ‘tradition’ apparently
The Engagements by J. Courtney Sullivan: A brightly polished gem Read More »
After a disappointing start, it seems I’m back on a reading roll this month – What in God’s Name, Lamb, The Small Hours, The Last Banquet and now, Ethan Hauser’s The Measures Between Us, have all hit the spot. Set against the backdrop of a storm-hit small town just outside Boston, it opens with a
The Measures Between Us by Ethan Hauser: An impressive, eloquently melancholy novel Read More »
Purely coincidentally, I’ve been reading N. M. Kelby’s White Truffles in Winter about the last days of the celebrated chef Escoffier alongside Jonathan Grimwood’s The Last Banquet, set in pre-Revolutionary France. Both are about Frenchmen with a passion for food who love and admire women, both have recipes scattered through them and both men are
It took me a little while to get into The Small Hours – its style seemed a little brittle and the language almost old fashioned – but after a chapter or so it became clear that this was precisely the right tone for Harriet who narrates the novel in an internal dialogue which is at
The Small Hours by Susie Boyt Read More »
Reading in the garden after the two or three washouts which passed as summers over the last couple of years feels like being on holiday. It’s not just the glorious sunshine it’s the absence of distraction allowing you to immerse yourself in whatever you’re reading. I’ve just finished Bonnie Nadzam’s Lamb, much of it read
Lamb by Bonnie Nadzam: An unsettling and brilliant debut Read More »
This is not a post about lascivious, sensual reading matter: instead it’s the title of a list of books many readers have given up put together by Goodreads. Given my recent disappointments mentioned in Friday’s post I headed off to have a look and found many all too familiar titles – Moby Dick, Gravity’s Rainbow
The Most Abandoned Books Read More »
It has been a sad and rather unsettling experience reading The Quarry. Anyone with even the most fleeting interest in the book world knows that Iain Banks died from cancer in early June, a mere few months after being diagnosed, and those who have read the reviews of his final novel know that one of
The Quarry by Iain Banks: Unsettlingly true to life Read More »