It’s always nice to see what the author envisages the non-human characters like in a fantasy book and here, we have a number of illustrations of singers and spren. Which will make more sense if you have read the series!

I’ve mentioned more than once how wonderful this novel is – heartbreaking and lyrical and mythical. And it also does something wonderful with the typeface as Dead Papa Toothwort listens into the village voices.

Footnotes within footnotes within footnotes…. yeah this is a book that does not work electronically! Normally footnotes in, for example, Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, or the Discworld series are manageable, but not with this one!

My Kindle simply refused to open this because of the fonts when I downloaded it when the novel was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.

H(A)PPY is a post-post apocalyptic Alice in Wonderland, a story which tells itself and then consumes itself. It’s a place where language glows, where words buzz and sparkle and finally implode. It’s a novel which twists and writhes with all the terrifying precision of a tiny fish in an Escher lithograph – a book where the mere telling of a story is the end of certainty.

The iconic black page.

The iconic cock and bull story. And one of the best of its kind.

Layered, satirical, meta and literary, this was a dense pleasure to read at University but I seem to have mislaid my copy in the thirty or so years since then and my e-version is just not quite the same…

For similar reasons to Tristram Shandy, Kate Atkinson’s Emotionally Weird is a book I want to pick up in its intended form because it too seems to play with fonts and typography.

I honestly don’t know much more about it than that! But I adore everything by Atkinson and am more than willing to take it on faith!

I mean just look at the deluxe version of this one!

Need I say more? Mind you, there is a £300 price tag!

Just a beautiful, lyrical, wonderful read.

Shakespeare is unnamed and often absent. This is not his story, nor even truly Hamnet’s story, despite his name being on the cover: for me this was Agnes’ story, wife, mother, woods woman… Our first meeting with her runs “At the edge of the forest, a girl…”

Equally wonderful, this is the tale of Cyril Avery whom we meet every seven years from birth to old age – his adoptive family, his birth mother, his loves and lovers and marriage and children, and the evolution of Ireland from extreme homophobia to acceptance and legalisation of same sex marriage.

Hilarious, tragic, poignant and warm, this is a novel we should all read and Cyril will be a companion for a long time after closing the final page.

Being very precise, I’d love the hardback edition – this hardback edition – to match my copies of Bring Up the Bodies and The Mirror and the Light. My copy of Wolf Hall is a paperback version and it just doesn’t look right on my shelf!

A sublime nuanced and ultimately gorgeously gothic detective series: I have The Secret Place and The Likeness in physical form and the others in electonic forms and they loo lonely on the shelf, being neither the start or end of the series.

I have Spring and Summer in this edition as ARCs from the publisher and the books are so beautiful with that Hockney wrap around image. Completing the series with the matching set would be wonderful!

I have heard so much good about this novel and everything about it seems to chime with things I like to read, so I am not sure why I have not read it yet! Except that other novels and work and family keep intruding….

Maybe if I had it physically…

They say that the Thorn of Camorr can beat anyone in a fight. They say he steals from the rich and gives to the poor. They say he’s part man, part myth, and mostly street-corner rumor. And they are wrong on every count.

Only averagely tall, slender, and god-awful with a sword, Locke Lamora is the fabled Thorn, and the greatest weapons at his disposal are his wit and cunning. He steals from the rich – they’re the only ones worth stealing from – but the poor can go steal for themselves. What Locke cons, wheedles and tricks into his possession is strictly for him and his band of fellow con-artists and thieves: the Gentleman Bastards.