Contemporary Irish
~ Grace After Henry – Eithne Shortall ~ I must admit that this is a novel which caught my eye because of its title. It is exactly what it says on the tin – the story of Grace’s life after...
Lisa
Evolving Friendships
~ The Burning Girl, by Claire Messud ~ Published in 2017, this is the most recent of Messud’s novels. I had enjoyed her other novels previously, particularly The Woman Upstairs, but this I think is quite Messud’s best – the...
Lively memoir of a colonial childhood
~ Gweilo: Memories of a Hong Kong Childhood, by Martin Booth ~ This is Martin’s Booth memoir written at 64 years of age, about his childhood spent in Hong Kong. His father, an Admiralty civil servant, was posted there when...
Exquisitely crafted
~ The Virgin Suicides, by Jeffrey Eugenides ~ This was an early novel of Eugenides’, written in 1993 (his famous Middlesex was written in 2002; The Marriage Plot and Fresh Complaint in 2011 and 2017 respectively). It is actually quite...
ISIS Women
Guest House for Young Widows, by Azadeh Moaveni The title is not apt, regretfully, for all its intriguing promise, because the guest house for widows actually only plays a very tiny part in this quite lengthy volume. The guest house...
Transitions
~ Light on Snow, by Anita Shreve ~ The novel opens with 12 year old Nicky (Nicole) taking her daily afternoon walk with her father, and stumbling across an abandoned baby. They rush the baby to the hospital, and are...
Curiously familiar colonial expats
~ Woman of Cairo, by Noel Barber ~ [This review would make better sense if the reader first read my review of Noel Barber’s Tanamera] Despite being set in Cairo – where Tanamera was set in Singapore – both novels...
Rollicking Irish charm
~ The Godforsaken Daughter, by Christina McKenna ~ McKenna writes novels set in Ireland, and The Godforsaken Daughter is one in a trilogy; the other two are The Misremembered Man and The Disenchanted Widow. Her writing is charming – she...
Decorum and Emotion
~ Fall on Your Knees, by Anne-Marie Macdonald ~ This novel is set around the Piper family, migrants to New Waterford, Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, Canada, in the early 1900s. James Piper (whose mother tongue is Gaelic) is a...
Alienation, at home and abroad
~ Signs for Lost Children, by Sarah Moss ~ This is 1880, Falmouth, Cornwall, where two rather extraordinary people for their age and time live, Tom and Ally (Alethea). They are extraordinary people in their own right, and an extraordinary...
Grace and Courage
~ The Stars are Fire, by Anita Shreve ~ We start this novel with Grace and Gene in a pretty little house on the coast of Maine, with their toddler Clare and baby Tom. It seems a perfect little family...
Colonial Singapore
~ Tanamera, by Noel Barber ~ When I first saw this title, I didn’t recognise it straightaway, being more accustomed to reading it as 2 separate words: ‘Tanah Merah” – Merah is red, and Tanah is soil, land, even territory....
Biting Satire
~ At Last, by Edward St Aubyn ~ This is the last book in Melrose series, based on the dysfunctional, charming, devastated and devastating Patrick Melrose. The cover blurb calls it a “masterpiece of glittering dark comedy and profound emotional...
The Food of Love
~ The Music Shop, by Rachel Joyce ~ Another charming love story from Rachel Joyce (author of the Harold Fry and Queenie novels, and Perfect), this time, set within the backdrop of music. Frank is our protagonist, a large, dear...
Understated Excellence
~ Abide With Me, by Elizabeth Strout ~ Even from the opening lines and pages of this novel, it was immediately clear why Elizabeth Strout has such an excellent reputation as a writer. The narrative is beautifully unfolded and paced,...
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