A friend’s daughter wants a Prosecco bottomless brunch to celebrate her eighteenth birthday later this year. (For anyone who doesn’t know this is fixed-price brunch with unlimited drinks for a set time, typically ninety minutes or so). The standard for eighteenth celebrations was much lower in my day. On my eighteenth, I went for a … More The Old Jest by Jennifer Johnston
Spoiler alert! If you don’t want to know the whole plot, then scroll straight to the rating at the bottom of the page. In 1844, a satirical historical novel by William Makepeace Thackeray entitled The Luck of Barry Lyndon was published in Fraser’s Magazine, later republished in 1852 under the title The Memoirs of Barry … More Flesh by David Szalay
When I was a little girl, my mum used to sing me to sleep at night, mostly with popular songs from the 1920s – 1940s. (I know a ridiculous number of songs by Cole Porter, Gene Autry and The Andrews Sisters for someone my age.) One bedtime favourite was ‘Ol’ Man River’ from the musical … More I Married A Communist by Philip Roth
January: a momentous month, synonymous with fresh starts and good intentions, clean slates and new chapters, New Year’s resolutions and the triumph of hope. If, like me, you spent most of December eating too much, drinking too much, and moving too little, you might be spending January in thrall to the triple tyrants of Diet, … More Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
So: another year over and another about to begin. But however 2025 has treated us and whatever 2026 has in store for us, there will always be another book to read! My favourite read of 2025 was American Pastoral by Philip Roth – you can access my review here – so it’s perhaps unsurprising that … More Goodbye 2025, Hello 2026!
If it wasn’t for my friend Sara, I might never have discovered this gem of a writer. Sara loaned me Waterlog: A Swimmer’s Journey through Britain by Roger Deakin. Deacon’s journey was inspired by Cheever’s short story ‘The Swimmer’. I wasn’t that fussed about Waterlog but was instantly captivated by the idea behind ‘The Swimmer’, … More ‘Christmas is a Sad Season for the Poor’ by John Cheever (from his Collected Stories).
In July, Hubby and I spent a week in the city of Cork, Ireland’s second-city (though with a population of only 300,000 it feels more like a large town). I love exploring new places. Aside from the joy to be had from the main sights, there’s the thrill of simply wandering around a strange city, … More Fools of Fortune by William Trevor
If you follow my blog you’ll probably realise that I mostly read prize-winning books. That’s not because I think prize winners are the only books worth reading (sometimes I don’t even rate them all that highly). No, I read the prize winners because I get to read books that I wouldn’t otherwise pick up – … More Heart Lamp Selected Stories by Banu Mushtaq translated by Deepa Bashti
Earlier this year I was on a walk with my friend Hal when he brought up my blog post on Orlando. If you read my post, you might remember I confessed to not liking Woolf’s major novels, Mrs Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927) and The Waves (1931). (I did acknowledge I might have been … More To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
If you’ve read my blog post about Bart Van Es’s biography The Cut Out Girl, you’ll know that during World War Two, The Netherlands (Nazi-occupied at the time) was so efficient at rounding up its Jewish population, that the death rate was the highest in Europe, higher even than in Germany. I highly recommend Van … More The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
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