Book news, reviews and recommendations
This instalment leapfrogs over June, much of which was spent on a lengthy railway jaunt which took me from Amsterdam to Warsaw. July saw the start of a long and lovely British summer, and two excellent debuts beginning with Jen Beagin’s smart, funny, Pretend I’m Dead, about twenty-four-year-old Mona who cleans houses for a living, […]
Books of the Year 2018: Part Three Read More »
Spring, which seems so far away now, was a particularly good reading time for me hence this bumper post. March began with Donal Ryan’s From a Low and Quiet Sea, a carefully crafted, moving novella which explores love, loss and connection through the stories of three very different men, bringing them neatly together at its
Books of the Year 2018: Part Two Read More »
Looking back at 2017’s books of the year posts, I see I started with the state of the world and the need for distraction from it. If anything, things seem to have got worse out there but, as ever, books have provided both escape and enlightenment. H and I are still steering clear of politics
Books of the Year 2018: 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 other books to form a chain. A book doesn’t need to be connected to all the others on the
Six Degrees of Separation – from A Christmas Carol to The Bird Artist Read More »
This is the kind of book I’d have had stacked up at till points back in my bookselling days, aiming it squarely at the Christmas stockings of the bookish. It brought to mind Jorge Carrión’s Bookshops which I reviewed here a few years ago but Browse is much more of a book to dip into.
Browse: Love Letters to Bookshops Around the World edited by Henry Hitchings Read More »
I’m delighted to tell you that we’ve chosen Imogen Hermes Gowar’s The Mermaid and Mrs Hancock as our shadow panel winner for this year’s Young Writer of the Year Award. You can visit the award’s site here to read their announcement. Here’s a reminder of the shortlist with links to my reviews: The Mermaid and
Flames is not an easy book to write about. It’s quite some way out of my usual literary territory, steeped as it is in fantasy and folklore, but I’m delighted that I overcame my prejudice and jumped in. Tasmanian writer Robbie Arnott’s debut begins with the reappearance of Edith McAllister, two days dead. The McAllister
Flames by Robbie Arnott: Love trumps all Read More »
December’s not the shiniest of months for new titles but there are some potential treats to be found if you look hard enough. One such is Tom Barbash’s The Dakota Winters, set in 1979 New York where twenty-three-year-old Anton Winter returns home after a stint in the Peace Corps to be greeted by his father
Books to Look Out for in December 2018 Read More »
I used to read a lot of travel writing before it was taken over by authors carting kitchen appliances round with them as a gimmick. I blame Bill Bryson: enjoyable as his books were they seemed to foster a demand for comedy in the genre, not an accusation to be made of Adam Weymouth, I’m
With two Young Writer Award dates in the diary, H and I decided to make a weekend of it, arriving on Saturday morning when London was looking its beautiful best in glowing autumn sunshine. I went off to the bloggers’ event at the Groucho Club after lunch where the four shortlisted authors were introduced by
Two Days in London and Four books Read More »
Fiona Mozley’s Elmet has already snagged the attention of several literary prize judges: it was longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction earlier this year and shortlisted for 2017’s Man Booker Prize. Set on the fringes of what was once a mining village, it’s about Daniel and Cathy whose father has built a house on