Book news, reviews and recommendations
With luck you’ll be awash with book tokens by now and if you haven’t managed to spend them all already, here are a few paperbacks worth keeping an eye out for, starting with one I wasn’t at all drawn to when it was first published but I’ve seen so many good reviews I think it’s […]
Paperbacks to Look Out for January 2017: Part Two Read More »
Lots of lip-smacking paperbacks piled up on bookshop tables to tempt you this January, all ready and waiting for those Christmas book tokens we’ve been given, or hope we’ll have been given. Top of the list is a book I took some persuading to read when it was first published but Harry Parker’s Anatomy of
Paperbacks to Look Out for January 2017: Part One Read More »
The first part of January’s preview roamed around the world taking in Pakistan, Poland, Estonia, Ghana and the UK – home for me. This second part has its feet firmly planted in the US, beginning with a debut which has caused quite a stir in my neck of the Twitter woods. Emma Flint’s Little Deaths
Books to Look Out for in January 2017: Part Two Read More »
For those of you fed up with picking over the bones of 2016, I’m delighted to say that 2017 is starting with a literary bang. So many enticing books out in January that this will be a two-post preview, something not warranted for several months. My first choice – the subject of a good deal
Books to Look Out for January in 2017: Part One Read More »
This final books of the year post leapfrogs from August to October. Not sure what happened in September but I suspect it may have something to do with riding the Central European railways for several weeks. October’s reading made up for it starting with Ann Patchett’s Commonwealth, to which I had been looking forward a
Books of the Year 2016: Part Four Read More »
Just one July favourite this year although August brought an embarrassment of riches with five splendid novels. July’s title was Jane Rogers’ Conrad and Eleanor, a nuanced portrait of a marriage in which traditional male/female roles are upended. Eleanor is engaged in medical research as is Conrad but while she is a star in her
Books of the Year 2016: Part Three Read More »
After a stonking start to my reading year, the second instalment of 2016 favourites covers the four months from March to June with just eight books, beginning with a rediscovered American classic. First published in 1967, Thomas Savage’s The Power of the Dog requires a strong stomach to get through the first page but the
Books of the Year 2016: Part Two Read More »
Here we all are, hurtling towards the end of another year. Out there in the world, 2016 as proved to be pretty dreadful for liberals like me what with Brexit and Trump, not to mention the utter misery of Syria which surely touches us all. The reading world has been a much more comfortable place
Books of the Year 2016: Part One Read More »
I can’t say I embraced the prospect of Wally Lamb’s new novel entirely enthusiastically: I’d read his first, She’s Come Undone, which was praised to the skies by all and sundry but left me cold, and the blurb mentions ghosts which I found distinctly off-putting. You might wonder, then, why I decided to read it.
I’ll Take You There by Wally Lamb: Men can be feminists, too Read More »
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. If you’re a regular visitor to this blog you may have noticed that I’m a huge fan of
Blasts from the Past: Talking to the Dead by Helen Dunmore (1996) Read More »
If you’re looking for a bit of escapism in the wake of the worrying upheavals in the big wide world over the past few months, best look elsewhere. Billed as a psychological thriller, Wytske Versteeg’s novel is an unsettling study of what can happen to vulnerable children even when adults have the best intentions for
The Boy by Wytske Versteeg (transl. by Sarah Welling): Not one of us Read More »