Category Archives: Book

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Read: The Power of the Dog by Don Winslow ★★★★ 📚

"That's what you want me to choose? Dope-pushing Contras? Cuban terrorists? Salvadoran death squads that murder women, kids, priests and nuns?" "They're brutal, vicious and evil? Hobbs says. The only worse people I can think of are the Communists."

A decades long thriller & history of the USA drug wars across Mexico & Central America. A strange mix that includes the mafia, drug barons, law enforcement & politicians. Infused with the stink of corruption. Exciting & appalling in equal measure.

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Read: Flashlight by Susan Choi ★★★★★ 📚

Louisa's parents were people for whom things went wrong. The car got lost in the lot, or the driving directions were bad, of the check to the gas company never arrived and the stove was turned off. They misplaced things, or forgot facts, or disagreed on the facts, with each other or with other people.

Louisa is walking with her father Serk on the beach at night. Next day she if found had ground and he has vanished. The book follows various family members across the generations. It took me a while to get started, then I could not put it down.

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Read: The Memory of Animals by Claire Fuller ★★★★ 📚

The satellites will probably remain in the sky for years, circling the earth, taking their power from the sun, continuing to transmit their messages with nobody listening.

A pandemic. A teased out back story via memory & letters to a mystery character both strangely contrived kept me inthralled & thinking.

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Read: Seascraper by Benjamin Wood ★★★★★ 📚

Little waves are shouldering the cart’s tyres, spitting upwards at his face. The sea is patterned by the rain like honeycomb. He’s trying to make the best of it, but he can tell the horse is getting more reluctant.

A wonderful novella. A few days in the life of a young horse & cart shrimper working on a misty flat coast. Beautiful slow description of the daily grind in the cold & wet. The story unfolds slowly into drama, dreams & music.

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Read: Ammonites and Leaping Fish: A Life in Time by Penelope Lively ★★★★ 📚

There is a vogue for ‘life writing’ at the moment, both for publication and as private endeavours. I am all for it, partly because I gobble up other people’s lives, as a reader, but also because it seems to me a productive personal exercise – to stand aside and have a look at your story and try, not to make sense of it, which may be too taxing, but to trace the narrative thread, to look at the roads not taken, to see where you began and where you have got to.

Lovely memoir and reflections on memory, books & old age. The author is continually curious across history, objects, people…

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Read: No Friend to This House by Natalie Haynes ★★★ 📚

What do you mean, you didn't see me there? Well, of course you didn't. It's not a trick, it's grammar. Greek uses the masculine and the feminine, but it prefers the masculine (I know). So no matter how many girls were in a room (just one, in this instance), if boys were there too, the word 'children' takes the masculine ending. And the girls disappear. But yes, in case it's unclear, Medea and Jason had three children, two sons and then a daughter. I was a baby when Jason left my mother; Medea fled Corinth holding me in her arms.

Retelling of the Medusa myth, lots of points of view, female, that are only hinted at. The first half is fragmented but it really picks up when Medusa takes over the narrative. Jason doesn't get much respect.

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Read: And He Shall Appear by Kate van der Burgh ★★★★ 📚

Working class boy is dazzled by Cambridge & his magician, occultist “friend”. Page turner, dark academia.

Some people say we’re our true selves when we think nobody is watching. But how do we know our own identities without others’ confirming gaze? If, like the tree falling in the proverbial wood, nobody is around to hear us, is our story a story at all? And when were different things to different people, what then?

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Read: Little Monsters by Adrienne Brodeur ★★★★★ 📚
A scientist as monster father. Adam’s ego and bi-polar comes to a head his family is exploding in various ways. Alternative chapters written in close third keep some sympathy for all the privileged Cap Cod cast as the family history is dug up. Lots of nature, funny & exciting, I really enjoyed this one.