A Life in Books

Fly Already by Etgar Keret (Various translators): Stories with personality

18 September 2019 / 10 Comments

I’d scored one Israeli success this year with Ayelet Gundar-Goshen’s Liar when Etgar Keret’s short stories, Fly Already, turned up, looking like another. Made up of twenty pieces, some no longer than a page or two, Keret’s idiosyncratic collection is both funny and poignant, counterbalancing comedy with a sharp observation of human nature. It begins […]

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Books to Look Out for in October 2019: Part Two

16 September 2019 / 14 Comments

October’s first batch of new titles began with several novels bound up with art. This second instalment kicks off with a couple of cinematic connections starting with The Crossed-Out Notebook by Nicolás Giacobone who co-wrote the screenplay for Birdman. An Argentinean screenwriter is imprisoned in a basement by a director determined that his captive will

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Two Days in Yorkshire and a Bit of a Book

13 September 2019 / 31 Comments

Regular readers of this blog will know that I like to travel a bit, flitting off to mainland Europe whenever I get the chance. Truth be told I’m more familiar with Amsterdam and Berlin than I am with many British cities and those that I do know well are in the south. I’m ashamed to

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Books to Look Out for in October 2019: Part One

9 September 2019 / 26 Comments

This October sees a nicely varied selection of tempting new titles on offer including one by an author whose name I’ve been hoping to spot in the publishing schedules for some time. I loved Mary Costello’s quietly beautiful Academy Street, one of my books of 2014. Her new novel, The River Capture, is about a

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Six Degrees of Separation – from A Gentleman in Moscow to Dancer

7 September 2019 / 32 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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Shelf Life by Livia Franchini: A list for life

6 September 2019 / 10 Comments

I’m an inveterate list maker. It’s my way of organizing myself and remembering to do things. And I always make a list before shopping. Who knows what I’d come home with otherwise? Hardly surprising, then, that I was attracted to Livia Franchini’s Shelf Life which tells Ruth’s story through the shopping list she made the

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All Things Consoled by Elizabeth Hay: Families and how to survive them

4 September 2019 / 11 Comments

I was initially attracted to Elizabeth Hay’s memoir for the same reason I read Ann Patchett’s This is the Story of a Happy Marriage: I’d enjoyed several of her novels very much, in particular Late Nights on Air. Truth be told, though, aren’t we all fascinated by other people’s families, perhaps looking for similarities with

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Blasts from the Past: The Seal Wife by Kathryn Harrison (2002)

2 September 2019 / 13 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 into as many hands as I could. There was a time when it was hard to get away from Kathryn Harrison’s name in the books

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Beyond the Sea by Paul Lynch: Cast adrift

30 August 2019 / 10 Comments

I’m not sure how I’ve managed to miss Paul Lynch’s writing but as soon as I finished Beyond the Sea I added his previous novels to my list. Lynch’s prose exemplifies that spare, pared-back style which I so admire, one at which Irish writers seem to excel. In his new novella two fishermen are cast

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The Offing by Benjamin Myers: The summer that changed everything

28 August 2019 / 27 Comments

For some reason I hadn’t got around to reading Benjamin Myers despite recommendations by lots of people whose opinion I trust. The Gallows Pole has been on my TBR list for quite some time but it was the arrival of The Offing which finally kicked me into action. Myers’ new novel sees an old man

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Five Books Translated from French I’ve Read

26 August 2019 / 26 Comments

Since I’ve been blogging my reading habits have changed a little. I’m still reaching for the bright shiny new thing, a habit picked up in bookselling, but it’s now more likely to be short stories or something in translation than it once was. Not that I’m claiming to read as widely as I should but

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