Look! It is winter in Prague: night is rising in the mother of cities and over her thousand spires. Look down at the darkness around your feet, in all the lanes and alleys, as if it were a soft black dust swept there by a broom; look at the stone apostles on the old Charles Bridge, and at all the blue-eyed jackdaws on the shoulders of St. John of Nepomuk. Look!
Category: Women’s Prize
30 Day Book Challenge: Day 13!
Day 13, unlucky for some perhaps, brings with it a terribly arbitrary category: A book with a colour in the title. And, yes, I am anglicising the spelling of colour. And in my head, I am thinking “correcting” when I wrote “angliscising”! Okay, well let’s generate a list and celebrate the joys of modern technology:…
Snap, Belinda Bauer
It’s that time of year again, the Man Booker Longlist has been released and I do try to keep.up to date with them – as I do with the Costa and Women’s Prize lists. Sometimes they can be a bit hit-and-miss, sometimes a little pretentious, but generally a good addition to my TBR list and…
Home Fires, Kamila Shamsie
With two stories in the news today – Safir Boular, at 18, being the youngest girl to be convicted of terrorism offences; and Alia Ghanem speaking of her son. Osama bin Laden – about terrorism and the legal system and family, the importance and relevance of a book like Home Fire is painfully apparent. The…
Weekly Round Up: 26th June 2018
As we continue to slog through exam marking, the time available for reading has alas dropped and the wakefulness and attention span when the time arrives is also limited! I am continuing to listen to Jessie Burton’s The Muse on the journeys into and out of work and enjoying the characters of Odelle and Olive. It isn’t…
See What I Have Done, Sarah Schmidt
Lizzie Borden took an axe And gave her mother forty whacks. When she saw what she had done, She gave her father forty-one. Oh, Sarah Schmidt can write! What a strange strange thing to start a review with! But there is writing and there is writing and Sarah Schmidt can write! Not only can she create a…
Weekly Round Up 28th May
Okay, so some books are a quicker read than others, sometimes life, children and work get in the way of reading and finishing a book. Half-terms always seem like a good time to catch up on that eternal TBR pile … but then life intervenes and you end up standing in a river in glorious…
The Mermaid and Mrs Hancock, Imogen Hermes Gowar
I do love historical fiction and this is one of the best I’ve read for a while! Intricately plotted, rigourously researched and with vivid and well-drawn characters. And none of those elements displaced by any other. And with just a touch of magical realism thrown in. It doesn’t quite reach the heights of Hilary Mantel…
