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.
Tag: ★★★★
Read: The High Places by Fiona McFarlane ★★★★ 📚
A quite varied and strange set of short stories. My favourite involved a colossal squid and the ghost of Darwin. There was an eternal mechanical budgie in another!
Read: – The Sleepwalkers by Scarlet Thomas ★★★★ 📚
Quite a fevered read. Story told in fragments, notes, voice memos from different p.o.v. The narrators are all unreliable, even the voice memos, mixed up like an automatically generated transcript. Gothic & gruesome.
Read: Havoc by Rebecca Wait ★★★★☆📚
Collapsing girls boarding school, where the buildings and most of the characters are broken. Illness, hysteria & comedy ensue. Mostly through the eyes of the most normal mistress & Ida, new 6th year fleeing from a Scottish islands scandal. I raced through.
Burnt Sugar by Avni Doshi again
Re-Read: Burnt Sugar by Avni Doshi ★★★★☆ I’ve read this 5 years ago, complete forgot even as I read!
Read: Tell Me Everything by Elizabeth Strout ★★★★☆ 📚
Back reading Elizabeth Strout after a couple of years break. She brings together lots of characters from different books. Olive is still my favourite. The first half of this was a bit too diffuse & simple, but somehow pulled it together so that the second half felt very much in the Olive vein.
Read Show Don’t Tell by Curtis Sittenfeld ★★★★☆📚
Midlife stories from mostly well educated, well off American (USA) women. Often looking back as well as moving forward. Despite being set in such a different world, I was both absorbed & entertained.
I might have enjoyed it even more if I had staked time between the stories.
Read: Has anyone seen Charlotte Salter? By Nicki French ★★★★☆ 📚
30 years cold case, investigative podcast, police procedural and a twisting plot in which I never got near to guessing.
The catch by Mick Heron ★★★★ 📚
Amusing slough house adjacent spy story. Unguessable, by me, twists and turns. John Bachelor Is a sad character, looking after retired spies and making a mess of things.
Read Bitter orange by Claire Fuller ★★★★☆ 📚
I really enjoyed this hothouse of emotion between unlikely characters. An unmoored older Francis is enamoured by her younger glamorous neighbours living a temporary life in an old house in the sixties.