Book news, reviews and recommendations
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 – Beach Read to A History of the World in 10½ Chapters Read More »
Given I’m limiting my air travel, I suspect my single visit to New York City will be my first and last. Perhaps that’s the reason I’m drawn to travel there through fiction. Below are five novels that transport readers through time as well as distance, all with links to reviews on this blog. Jonathan Lee’s …
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 Second Place to Wait for Me, Jack 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 What I Loved to A Life of My Own Read More »
I seem to have read quite a few novels that either revolve around the art world or have art as a significant theme. Perhaps there’s been a trend over the past few years or perhaps it’s because art interests me so much, regularly flexing my National Art Pass at exhibitions back before the pandemic. Whichever, …
February’s packed with enough paperbacks to stave off the miseries of a Northern hemisphere winter, several of which I’ve already read and can heartily recommend. I’ll begin with Siri Hustvedt’s Memories of the Future, a slice of metafiction in which a writer comes across the notebook she kept in 1978, the year she arrived in …
Paperbacks to Look Out For in February 2020: Part One Read More »
Another year, another Man Booker Prize longlist in the offing, except this year its reverted to the Booker Prize, thanks to a change of sponsorship with Crankstart stepping into the funding breach as of June 1st this year. To be eligible for the prize all books must be published in the UK between October 1st …
If you’ve been following this blog for any length of time you’ll know that I’m a Siri Hustvedt fan. Sixteen years after I first read it, What I Loved remains one of my favourite contemporary novels. It’s more accessible than the complex, intensely cerebral The Blazing World, her last novel published five years ago. Memories …
Memories of the Future by Siri Hustvedt: ‘One story has become another’ Read More »
The longlist for my favourite UK literary award, The Women’s Prize for Fiction, is due to be announced next Monday. Only novels written by women in English published between April 1st 2018 and March 31st 2019 qualify. Over the past few years I’ve failed miserably in predicting what took the judges fancy but truth be …
My Wish List for the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2019 Read More »
This first March instalment has its feet firmly planted in the US beginning with a title I’m both eagerly anticipating and slightly apprehensive about. Siri Hustvedt’s What I Loved is one of my favourite pieces of contemporary fiction. Her last novel, The Blazing World, was bursting with ideas and erudition. Expectations are sky high, then, …
December’s always a thin time of the year for new titles – publishers have long since assembled their choicest wares for the Christmas trade – but there’s usually something worth looking out for. This year three very disparate novels have snagged my attention. The first comes from an Australian publisher, Text Publishing, who seem to …