Book news, reviews and recommendations
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. Iain Banks was one of those writers talented enough to excel in at least two genres. Not being […]
Blasts from the Past: The Crow Road by Iain Banks (1992) Read More »
I was attracted by the blurb for Colleen Hubbard’s Housebreaking which suggested a satisfyingly dysfunctional family set up. It also seemed appropriate given that I had a houseful of builders when I read it, thankfully doing the opposite of Hubbard’s main protagonist who hits on a novel way to prevent the family she detests from
Housebreaking by Colleen Hubbard: Tearing down the house Read More »
Amanda Craig’s The Golden Rule is the latest in a series of loosely interconnected novels which explore the state of my particular nation. I’m a sucker for this kind of fiction and have enjoyed several of Craig’s contributions to it including The Lie of the Land, a Brexit novel that, for me, was very much
The Golden Rule by Amanda Craig: ‘Do as you would be done by’ Read More »
There’s something irresistible about a state-of-the-nation novel, even if that nation has shifted cataclysmically since the novel was conceived. This isn’t the first book in that vein Amanda Craig has written – I remember enjoying Hearts and Minds which explored the lives of immigrants in London a few years back. Two characters from that novel
The Lie of the Land by Amanda Craig: Something nasty in the woodshed… Read More »
Such a striking cover for this debut, and entirely fitting given it’s set in the English countryside although animal lovers may get a bit more than they bargained for in this novel about a young Slovakian woman who leaves London to work as an au pair for a couple at Fairmont Hall, the house which
English Animals by Laura Kaye: An outsider’s view… Read More »
There’ve been a few exchanges in my booky little Twitter corner recently about commercial and literary fiction, how one is thought to be more worthy of serious attention than the other. I haven’t been joining in partly because I’m not sure what I think about it. I do know that my own reading would be
It has been a sad and rather unsettling experience reading The Quarry. Anyone with even the most fleeting interest in the book world knows that Iain Banks died from cancer in early June, a mere few months after being diagnosed, and those who have read the reviews of his final novel know that one of
The Quarry by Iain Banks: Unsettlingly true to life Read More »