I have sat on this book for a while since finishing reading it – partially as a result of workload; mainly because it, like The Heart’s Invisible Furies and many others, is a book that deserved some time to settle and be absorbed before launching into a review. The novel revolves around a single character,…
Category: International
Top Five Saturday: Books with Maps
Top Five Saturday is a meme hosted by Devouring Books to discover and share books that all have a common theme. Previously, the focus has included witches, werewolves, thrillers, faeries, fairy tale re-tellings, high fantasy and many more. This week’s theme is books with maps in them and there is one obvious and iconic mapped…
Teaser Tuesday: 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in this Strange World, Elif Shafak
The Teaser Nostalgia Nalan believed there were two kinds of families in this world: relatives formed the blood family; and friends, the water family. If your blood family happened to be nice and caring, you could count your lucky stars and make the most of it; and if not, there was still hope; things could…
Teaser Tuesday: The Fountains of Silence, Ruta Sepetys
Teaser Tuesday is a weekly bookish meme hosted by The Purple Booker. If you want to join in grab your current read, flick to a random page, select two sentences (without spoilers) and share them in a blog post or in the comments of The Purple Booker. I am shamelessly stealing this from Ali’s blog iwuvbooks because –…
The Man Who Saw Everything, Deborah Levy
Disclaimer: Received from NetGalley and the publisher, Penguin, in exchange for an honest review. There are some novels which flow fluidly like a river. Others are curved and twisted. Others are very linear taking a route from inciting incident to resolution without a deviation. Others are shaped like a tree, branching and dividing but never…
The Rosie Result, Graeme Simsion
I’m not a person with autism any more than I’m a person with lesbianism. I’m lesbian. I’m autistic. When I get a cold, I have a cold; I’m a person with a cold and I want to get rid of it. Medical help appreciated. But being autistic and lesbian—that’s who I am, and I’m not interested in anyone trying to cure me of who I am.
Kafka on the Shore, Haruki Murakami
There are some books you want to love so much, but which – for some reason – you cannot. There’s a barrier between you and what you think you should feel about the book. And this is one of those books. There is so much about it that chimed wonderfully with all the things I…
My Sister, the Serial Killer, Oyinkan Braithwaite
Next up, from the Women’s Prize Longlist came Oyinkan Braithwaite’s My Sister, the Serial Killer, an interesting parallel to Akwaeke Emezi’s Freshwater. It is an intriguing little novel – a mere 240 pages, for those for whom that is relevant, not much more than a day or weekend’s read – and remarkably effective in the…
30 Day Book Challenge: Day Five!
Day Five is such a strange strange week at work! Surreal does not begin to cut it! Anyway, back to the challenge and, today, we are looking for Favourite classic novel. Oh Lord! Again, just one? One? And what exactly is a “classic”? Ask a thousand readers and you’ll probably find a thousand definitions, but…
Reading Update: 14th October
Oh the books. The piles of books. The new books coming out. The unread books still waiting. So, this week I have found myself with four books on the go, simultaneously: waking and alert, I’m continuing Daisy Johnson’s Everything Under and as I drive I’m listening to Esi Edugyan’s Washington Black from the Man Booker Shortlist; and…
