Book news, reviews and recommendations
Bryan Washington’s Lot comes garlanded with praise from all manner of people not least Max Porter, whose own writing has caught the eye of a multitude of reviewers, but it was Jami Attenberg’s description of it as her ‘favourite fiction debut of the year’ which piqued my interest. Billed as a collection of short stories, […]
Lot by Bryan Washington: No place like home Read More »
Henry Beston’s The Outermost House is something of an American nature classic, an account of the year he spent living on a beach near Eastham, Massachusetts not far from the very tip of Cape Cod in the 1920s. This new edition comes with charming illustrations by Pete Smith who also designed its beautiful jacket. An
The Outermost House by Henry Beston: A Year of Life on the Great Beach of Cape Cod 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. Crossing to Safety is one of those novels I came across in my early blogging days when I
Blasts from the Past: Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner (1987) 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 The Tiger in the Tiger Pit to And the Wind Sees All Read More »
Argentinian writer Selva Almada’s The Wind That Lays Waste is published by Charco Press, a small publisher set up by Carolina Orloff and Samuel McDowell to champion Latin American literature in the English-speaking world. Orloff’s a translator which is perhaps why Chris Andrews’ name appears on the book’s cover, just as it should. I wish
The Wind That Lays Waste by Selva Almada (transl. Chris Andrews): Spreading the word Read More »
Naomi Wood’s The Hiding Game has been on my radar since I discovered it was about the Bauhaus, the German art school whose designs I’ve long admired. It’s one of a multitude of books published to celebrate the movement’s centenary this year. I still have my eye on Theresia Enzensberger’s Blueprint which looks promising but
The Hiding Game by Naomi Wood: Love, jealousy and betrayal in the Bauhaus Read More »
I follow a couple of Canadian bloggers whose recommendations often hit the spot for me – Naomi at Consumed by Ink, in particular. Frustratingly, many of the books she reviews aren’t published here in the UK. I know I can get them via Amazon but I’ve sworn off them until they treat their staff like
Five Canadian Novels I’ve Read Read More »
A Nail, A Rose is introduced by Faith Evans who first translated Madeleine Bourdouxhe’s stories thirty years ago after meeting the author then in her early 80s. Evans puts the eight pieces comprising this collection in their historical, political and stylistic context, explaining that in the main they were written in the shadow of the
A Nail, A Rose by Madeleine Bourdouxhe (transl. Faith Evans): Stories about women Read More »
Anna Hope’s new novel is very different from Wake and The Ballroom, her first two, both of which I enjoyed and both of which were set in the early twentieth century. Expectation opens in 2004 and has the kind of structure that I find irresistible, exploring themes of friendship, motherhood, love and feminism through the
Expectation by Anna Hope: Testament of friendship Read More »
After a tempting array of new August titles I’m sorry to say that only a handful of paperbacks appeal, two of which I’ve read already. I was far from convinced that I’d like let alone love Robbie Arnott’s Flames which is quite some way out of my usual literary territory but it ended up as
Paperbacks to Look Out for in August 2019 Read More »
I’m beginning to wonder if I’m undergoing a similar conversion to historical fiction that I did with short stories having read several books over the past year which fit that description, not least Imogen Hermes Gowar’s The Mermaid and Mrs Hancock. Truth be told, many of the novels I read are not bang up to
The Warlow Experiment by Alix Nathan: The rights of man Read More »