Becoming Bindy Mackenzie / Jaclyn Moriarty

  
When I read YA fiction, and like it, I find that I am either transported back to fifteen, utterly absorbed as my younger self, or I read it from a distance, aware of how much more I would have enjoyed it without all those pesky years getting in the way. This is the third [...]

Read Full Post »

Rosy Thornton: More Than Love Letters

More Than Love Letters is a strange beast. It has a twenty-something heroine, a contemporary setting, romance and humour, all bound in a somewhat chick-lit-ish cover – but it’s also a political satire with feminist under- and overtones, and an epistolary novel of multiple voices, told in letters, emails, newspaper reports and other documents.It also [...]

Read Full Post »

Under the North Star; Ted Hughes/ Leonard Baskin

It is no secret that the children’s poetry section is the Biafra of most bookshops. Neglected and betrayed, it is a shadow of its former shelf. The starvation of the imagination is heart-breaking, the little aid in the form of yet another ‘burps and bogeys’ book or well-meaning charity/sleb collection may well do more harm [...]

Read Full Post »

Ask the Dust, by John Fante

Ask the Dust is the short, unsentimental and very funny story of a struggling writer – set in 1930s LA. The ‘plot’ is slight – tracing the shaky start to narrator Arturo Bandini’s literary career and his pursuit of Camillia – a Mexican waitress who is in turn, in love with another writer – the [...]

Read Full Post »

On Chesil Beach, by Ian McEwan

I’ve heard a few people moan about Ian McEwan lately, and I’ve been struggling to fathom why. The most outrageous claim so far has been that On Chesil Beach “wasn’t long enough” to deserve the Booker. Now, really. The Prince, A Room of One’s Own and The Great Gatsby are all relatively short works, but [...]

Read Full Post »

Death Is My Trade/ La Mort est mon métier (1954) by Robert Merle

Maybe it’s a little bit of a cheat to review a book that is, as far as I can tell, no longer in print in its English version but if I do here it’s because I stumbled over this book and, against expectatations, found it exceptional. Its impact on me has only increased since I [...]

Read Full Post »

Timothy, or Notes of an Abject Reptile by Verlyn Klinkenborg

Timothy, or Notes of an Abject Reptile by Verlyn Klinkenborg is a unique book. Told from the unusual viewpoint of a Greek tortoise which actually lived at the home of amateur naturalist Rev. Gilbert White in the late 1700’s and is memorialized in the Reverend’s diaries. Those diaries were filled with new ideas on plants [...]

Read Full Post »

Verdigris Deep by Frances Hardinge

How lovely to be able to tell you all about books that I have picked off the shelves.  Books whose covers have captured my imagination or whose blurbs have sparked an interest or maybe even ones I have found whilst on my daily trawls through cyberspace.
The first book I have chosen to share with you [...]

Read Full Post »

Tove Jansson: The Summer Book

It may make me a Bad Finn, but I’ve never properly read the Moomin books. As a child I was uninterested; as a teenager, I found them creepy. (Yes, I was a wuss of a teenager.) Only now in my twenties I’m beginning to discover Tove Jansson, the National Treasure, through her novels for grown-ups [...]

Read Full Post »

Nail and Other Stories by Laura Hird

I have never written a book review before so I have just made up some rules to help me to do it. I will read some books I was going to read anyway and then if I have anything to say about them I will write it down and put it on this blog.I [...]

Read Full Post »