Here is yet another example of a writer who produced a stunningly good debut novel (Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand), and whose 2nd (The Summer Before the War) and now 3rd novel have been somewhat disappointing subsequently. There are of course many...
““When I say to you that what happened to those girls was the greatest hurt in my life, I am speaking the God’s honest truth” (p141). These are the words of Dr Civil Townsend, in 2016 when she is already...
I am coming to this book a quarter of a century after it won the Booker Prize in 1999. Heaven knows how many years this relatively slim volume has been in my boxes, carried around from house move to house...
I was surprised to see emblazoned across the front cover, ‘The Uncensored Original Edition’, which has apparently been lost for over 80 years (the copy I had is published by Sharp Press in 2003); the original was first published in...
There’s always been (and probably always will be) a housing crisis in New York, but in the early 1900s there was a very particular kind of problem: more women were working, and moving to the city for jobs and fun,...
I was expecting a book of some originality just from my initial browse, and I was not disappointed. This is an unusual read, beautifully crafted, which makes land and landscape the key protagonist. Our human protagonist is Lamentations Callat, sometimes...
~ A History of Burning, by Janika Oza ~ Grand Central Publishing, 2023 He hadn’t seen his family in nearly fifty years. His mother was gone, his middle sister too. These sentences, about 100 pages into Janika Oza’s A History...
~ Toby’s Room, by Pat Barker ~ Doubleday, 2012 ~ Noonday, by Pat Barker ~ Doubleday, 2016 It has been quite awhile since I read a Pat Barker novel, and I wonder why it has taken me so long to...
Set in the 1820 or 1830s, in the Black Country (West Midlands of the UK, previously a coal mining region) this book is about ‘the noble art’ of fisticuffs, or pugilism, or as we know it today, boxing. Most unusually,...
In 1920, a young Englishman called Eric Blair sailed out to become a sahib in the Raj. He was stationed in Burma as a policeman, overseeing the Burmese and Indian ‘natives’ who worked in the teak forests and rubber plantations...
I said these kinds of things were adventures; but he said he didn’t want no more adventures. Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain. Published 1884 So says Huck Finn during the raft journey down the Mississippi in a book that is...
A full-length novel is very satisfying, but even short stories from such an accomplished author are too tempting to pass up. Amor Towles’ A Gentleman in Moscow and The Lincoln Highway were both lovely pieces of historical fiction. They have...
Helen Simonson’s debut novel, Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand, was quite delightful. Her second, The Summer Before the War, had a charming cover but the novel itself did not live up to either its cover or Simonson’s first novel. Has she...
A Town Like Alice drifted across my library page, and having heard it was Australian author Nevil Shute’s most famous book, I thought I should give it a shot. Structurally, the book is a clunker. It’s framed around a solicitor’s...
Growing up in Oxford in the 1880s, Esme is a happy little girl although she has lost her mother young, because she is loved and looked after by her father and other kind friends. Her father’s work is assisting in...
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