Read: The Bean Trees by Barbara Kingsolver ★★★★ 📚
You can see some of the roots of Demon Copperhead in this tail of a poor Kentucky girl. Published in 1988 the refugee sub story is still pertinent.
Category Archives: Book
Read: Ripeness by Sarah Moss ★★★★ 📚
Edith in her 70s in 2023 and 17 in the 70s in alternative chapters, the echos of the holocaust, family, belonging to a place, refugees & friendship. Excursions into Irishness & ballet.
Mike’s friend Phineas in Dublin is a sound engineer, hears whole orchestras of weather, traffic, birds that for her are only ambient noise. Sound and signal, she thinks, meaning in every atom and cell if you remember to look and listen. And Dennis the chef, eyes half-closed as he attends to his tongue, names each herb and the provenance of the oil in a salad, and the perfumery up the hill here, every note in a scent, they say, music the metaphor for smell, all of everything, everywhere.
Read: Now We Shall Be Entirely Free by Andrew Miller
After The Land in Winter, this turned out to be quite different. Reminded me of Kidnapped! An atrocity in Spain, an English solider, running from another sent to kill him, heads for the Hebrides. Excitement & sympathy for all the characters.
Below them, the last of the drinkers had perfected himself and swum away into the summer night. One by one, the landlady’s breath put out the stars.
There were tears on his cheeks. He hoped the doorkeeper, this woman whose name he had failed to learn, might notice them
Read Golden Child by Claire Adam ★★★★★ 📚
Engrossing & troubling story. Set in Trinidad, with a strong flavour of place & family. Twins, one very bright, the other, Paul, “slightly retarded”. Told from several view points, Paul’s was particularly strong. Father Clyde values both children in different ways loving & being embarrassed by Paul.
Read: One Good Turn by Kate Atkinson ★★★★☆📚
I think the author was trying to see how many seeming unrelated treads she could tie up. Good fun, subtitled A Jolly Murder Mystery, set in Edinburgh during the festival.
Read Bel Canto by Ann Patchett ★★★★★ 📚
Probably the cutest terrorists in fiction. I thoroughly enjoyed the mixture of emotion, love, fear and boredom. Gives a good account of the joy of opera too.
Read: Winter Ali Smith ★★★★★ 📚
Amazing book, floats between time and characters, dreams & hallucinations. Funny too.
Her sister Iris is making nothing of her life. Sophia thinks of their mother, when Iris worked at the filling station, telling anyone who asked how her daughters were doing that Iris had a good position in an oil company.
The Distance Between Us by Maggie O’Farrell ★★★ 📚
I enjoyed the telling very much, clever switching between characters, time & location. The whole story didn’t really move or gel with me much though.
Read: Bringing the House Down by Charlotte Runcie ★★★★ 📚
Great fun. Critic makes a right mess of mixing review & life in the most selfish way. The criticised act tears him apart. Online cancelling follows.
Burial of Ghosts by Ann Cleeves ★★★ 📚
Convoluted telling of a convoluted mystery. I enjoyed the twists and turns without any idea of the solution. An unstable narrator who recalls fragments of her past at different times.