Delectable food, but insipid novel
~ The Paris Novel, by Ruth Reichl ~ Penguin Random House, 2024 Ruth Reichl was the restaurant reviewer for the New York Times for almost a decade in the 1990s. Many of her readers must have been like me: a...
Fiction
Like Switzerland, Big Swiss is a neutral read
~ Big Swiss, by Jen Beagin ~ Scribner, 2023 From the very outset, this book made me smile. It is humorously written, and it is clear the author is the type who likes to surprise her reader, usually by extending...
Theater of Espionage
~ Karla’s Choice, by Nick Harkaway ~ Penguin Random House, 2024. Take a perfectly reasonable city and make it impossible: think of Venice, with every second calle or sottoportego opening not on onto another road but a canal, and only...
Missing on the Tube
~ No One Saw a Thing, by Andrea Mara ~ Bantam, 2023. There have been many novels written about children who are abducted, who have gone missing, who are held captive say in a school building, and all of these...
Ripples in the lives of the Red River Valley
~ The Mighty Red, by Louise Erdrich ~ Birchbark, 2024. Louise Erdrich is a national treasure. I’d read only two of her books, The Round House and LaRose, and both were gorgeous, deeply emotional without being sentimental, suffused with the...
Crimes on the Reservation
~ Tony Hillerman’s Leaphorn and Chee Books ~ 1970 – 1996. The southwest wind picked up turbulence around the San Francisco Peaks, howled across the emptiness of the Moenkopi plateau, and made a thousand strange sounds in windows of the...
Runaways living off the land, in the wilds of Scotland
~ Sal, by Mick Kitson ~ Canongate, 2018 It is hard not to be charmed from the outset at the telling of the story by a precocious 13 year old, who is super protective of her 10 year old sister,...
A Life re-made…again and again
~ 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...
Suspense, stoicism and survival in wartime Britain: two novels by Pat Barker
~ 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...
Jackson Brodie, at 60.
A new Kate Atkinson novel! And that too, featuring the inimitable Jackson Brodie, who I feared had retired forever at the end of Big Sky ! The opening of Atkinson’s latest, Death at the Sign of a Rook, was a...
Coal Barger’s (Adopted) Daughter
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,...
A functionary in the Raj
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...
Wickedly funny satire
In the introduction, Lynne Truss calls this novel a masterpiece, and so it is. Truss however does not agree with common opinion that it is necessarily a parody of Mary Webb’s rural novels which were popular in the 1920s and...
Intimate and revealing conversations
It is with great pleasure I now know of yet another wonderful writer and storyteller, Nathan Hill. This is the first book of his that I have come across (Wellness is Hill’s 2nd novel), and after this, I fully intend to read...
Solvitur Ambulando
“It is solved by walking” — attributed to St Augustine, circa 400 AD Rachel Joyce’s first novel is one of those quintessentially British, slightly quaint, gentle, a tad sentimental, but still charming stories. It is described as being about ‘an...
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