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.
Tag: ★★★★
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: 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: 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.
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.