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.
Tag: ★★★★
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.
Read Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie ★★★★☆📚
The story of a girl from a wealthy Nigerian family. Without being at all preachy the book covers colonialism, politics, feminism, family & religion.
Read Close to Home by Michael Magee ★★★★☆ 📚
Sean, returns to his Belfast roots after uni. Joins in with pals drinking & drugging. Drags himself out to be a writer. Trauma from violence, class, the troubles echo through everything.
You’re stuck in this hole with the same three or four faces for the rest of your life, drinking, taking gear, hanging around the local until there’s no one left to talk to.
Read The Ecliptic Benjamin Wood ★★★★☆ 📚
Strangely framed story of an abstract artist, from Clydebank, in a Sixties London art world. I was completely absorbed by the central section describing her life & art. The frame, a colony for troubled artists on a Turkish island not quite so much.