Book news, reviews and recommendations
It’s almost longlist time for the Women’s Prize for Fiction although it hardly seems five minutes since the last one. Wednesday March 4th is the date to add your diary. Only novels written by women in English published between April 1st, 2025, and March 31st, 2026, qualify. I’ve followed the same format as previous years, […]
My Women’s Prize for Fiction 2026 Wish List Read More »
We’re racing towards the end of the year although I spent several weeks of 2025’s last quarter going nowhere very much thanks to plantar fasciitis. Several absorbing novels kept me going, beginning with one which grew out of a social media post during the pandemic. Damian Barr’s The Two Roberts is about Robert MacBryde and
Books of the Year 2025: Part Four Read More »
I snapped up Souvankham Thammavongsa’s Pick a Colour as soon as I spotted it on NetGalley having enjoyed her 2020 Giller-Prize-winning short story collection, How to Pronounce Knife, in which she writes about the immigrant experience. Her new one is a novella set over one day in a nail salon run by Ning. They all
Pick a Colour by Souvankham Thammavongsa: A day in the life Read More »
The second batch of September fiction begins with a novel heading straight to my books of the year list. I snapped up Pick a Colour having greatly enjoyed Souvankham Thammavongsa’s Giller-Prize-winning short story collection, How to Pronounce Knife. Her new one is set over one day in a nail salon run by Ning who, in
Books to Look Out For in September 2025: Part Two Read More »
Not my favourite prize but, for some reason, I can’t resist putting together a wish list for the Booker. To be eligible for this year’s prize all books must be published in the UK or Ireland between 1st October 2024 and 30th September 2025 and have been written in English. The judges usually stick to
My 2025 Booker Wish List 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 – Knife to Any Human Heart Read More »
The second part of March’s paperback goodies starts with three books I’ve already read, two of which were favourites from last year, beginning with Eley Williams’ The Liar’s Dictionary in which a young woman, interning for the publisher of an unfinished encyclopaedic dictionary, fields the threatening phone calls made to its office with monotonous regularity.
Paperbacks to Look Out For in March 2021: Part Two Read More »
Spring saw several uncharacteristic reads hitting the spot for me, quite possibly as the result of seeking more distraction than usual. April got off to an excellent start with C Pam Zhang’s How Much of These Hills is Gold, set in a reimagined American West in the grips of the Gold Rush. Zhang’s novel is
Books of the Year 2020: Part Two Read More »
It was that title that attracted me to this collection of stories about immigrants and refugees, cleverly exemplifying the many idiosyncratic challenges English throws at those for whom it’s a second language. Born in a refugee camp in Thailand, Laotian writer Souvankham Thammavongsa is a poet whose own facility for language is demonstrated throughout this
This second instalment of potential April goodies begins with Kirstin Innes’ Scabby Queen which spans over half a century following the career of Clio Campbell who kills herself three days after her fifty-first birthday whereupon she becomes a posthumous heroine for our age. Taking in the miners’ strike, an anarchist squat, the Genoa G8 protests,
Books to Look Out For in April 2020: Part Two Read More »