Book news, reviews and recommendations
This is my penultimate review for 2021 and it’s an unusual one. Recently published in paperback, Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s A Ghost in the Throat made quite a splash back in 2020, winning three awards and shortlisted for several others. Having read it, I can see why. A memoir of obsession, literary detection and motherhood, it’s […]
A Ghost in the Throat by Doireann Ní Ghríofa: ‘This is a female text’ Read More »
We’re on the final straight which is chock full of novellas crammed into October and November thanks to my new found (relative) freedom which included a week in Edinburgh and another short break in London. I was in two minds about accepting my first October pick. Lauren Groff’s Matrix is a reimagining of the life
Books of the Year 2021: Part Four Read More »
By May, things were looking up on the out-and-about front. H and I squeezed two holidays into three months, beginning with one in London in mid-May and Sussex at the beginning of July, which may explain the number of novellas in this post beginning with Ailsa McFarlane’s Highway Blue. When Cal turns up two years
Books of the Year 2021: Part Three Read More »
By March I’d usually have been talking about spring but even my perennial Pollyanna tendencies had been flattened by a pandemic winter, dank and dreary with few bright days to enjoy. One of the novels that kept my mind of things was Claire Fuller’s Unsettled Ground which explores the darker side of rural life through
Books of the Year 2021: Part Two Read More »
Not such a strange year as 2020 but far from back to normal either. There’ve been many more outings and much more socialising but reading and blogging continued to keep me going through the more difficult parts of 2021. Perhaps partly as a result of that, I’ve failed to get my books of the year
Books of the Year 2021: 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 – From Ethan Frome to When God Was a Rabbit Read More »
I take occasional digs on here at the hype which pervades Twitter where every book is super fabulous but it has to be said I’m often grateful when a book is flagged I might have otherwise missed. Huma Qureshi’s Things We Do Not Tell the People We Love is a case in point. Comprising nine
It was its structure that attracted me to Neil Bartlett’s Address Book. It’s a set of seven loosely linked short stories each of which takes place in London in different times and different situations, all sharing the themes of home, belonging and love. I usually pick out the best of the bunch with short story
Address Book by Neil Bartlett: Seven stories of love and belonging 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 into as many hands as I could. The pleasures of reading fiction are many and varied but broadly speaking they tend to fall into two
Blasts from the Past: Eucalyptus by Murray Bail (1998) Read More »
I spotted Kevin Wilson’s Tunneling to the Centre of the Earth on Netgalley, reminding me of how much I enjoyed his novel, Nothing to See Here. It’s a new edition of his first short story collection comprising eleven pieces. Knowing that many of them were written when Wilson was a student, my expectations weren’t particularly
Tunneling to the Centre of the Earth by Kevin Wilson: ‘I don’t think I belong here’ Read More »
This is one of those instances when, rather than reading the novel by an author sitting unread on my shelf since I can’t remember when, I plumped for their bright, shiny and new book, although bright might not be the best way to describe Sofi Oksanen’s Dog Park. Opening in Helsinki in 2016, Oksanen’s novel
Dog Park by Sofi Oksanen (transl. Owen F. Witesman): Fertility for sale Read More »