I live in Hoylake, on the north-western tip of the Wirral peninsula. I used to spend an hour or more on trains each week travelling to work and if possible would read for the entire journey, which is how this blog came into being. I changed jobs a few years ago and don't travel to work by train anymore but I'm sticking with reading and blogging. Old habits die hard.
June 2016. Hubby and I dutifully cast our votes in a once-in-a-lifetime referendum offering a simple, binary choice: Leave or Remain. We knew we were going to vote different ways and our votes would cancel out. In effect, we might as well not have bothered – but we both agree that voting is important. I … More Middle England by Jonathan Coe
Wind the clock back twenty years or so, and you’d find me trying to bash out a novel. It was a dystopian number called Embryo Song that owed more than a little to Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. I managed 50,000 words (about 200 pages) before I ran out of ideas and energy and now, … More Prophet Song by Paul Lynch
When I was a small child we lived next door to an old woman. Her name was Mrs Billington, and some nights she’d roam the street like a ghost, in slippers and a long, white nightgown, her white hair loose around her shoulders, looking for her mother. Mrs B gets ‘confused’, my mother told me. … More Time Shelter by Georgi Gospodinov
Have you ever dreamed you’re running away from something, though you’re not quite sure from what or whom? Or that you’re lost in a forest? Or where you see yourself and in the dream you look totally different, but you know it’s you? This is pretty much where the protagonist of The Seven Deaths of … More The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton
Clocks in the UK jump forward by one hour at 1 am this Sunday (don’t forget!) as they do every spring, shifting us from Greenwich Mean Time into British Summer Time. With that in mind, it seemed a good time to read Mean Time by Carol Ann Duffy.I don’t read much poetry – and the … More Mean Time by Carol Ann Duffy
Each August, Hubby and I spend a long weekend at Edinburgh Fringe festival. A few years ago we saw comedian Simon Evans at Assembly George Square. His stand-up show, the Work of the Devil, began with a rant about identity politics before neatly segueing into a personal revelation: a DNA test had shown him to … More Unsettled Ground by Clare Fuller
During my school years I was lucky enough to be taught by some brilliant English teachers, the kind who fostered a love of language and literature. There was Mr L in Year 5 who made a game out of memorising Tennyson’s The Lady of Shalott (“From either side the river lie / Long fields of … More The Moor’s Last Sigh by Salman Rushdie
I thought I’d give a sneaky-peak at some of the books I’ll be reading and reviewing next year. The Moor’s Last Sigh by Salman Rushdie. Won the Whitbread Novel prize in 1995. A birthday present from Hubby. Unsettled Ground by Clare Fuller. Won the Costa Novel prize in 2021, the 50th and final year of … More 2024 and all that!
At the time of writing it’s only two days ago (with Hubby on a boys-night out) that I binge-watched Series 5 of Ghosts on BBC iPlayer – the British series, not the US version. If you’ve never seen it, the premise is that a young couple, Alison and Mike Cooper, live in the huge, run-down … More Beyond Black by Hilary Mantel
I was introduced to the concept of fasting at an early age. My mum and older sister would fast (or ‘abstain’ from food) for the hour before we went to mass on Sunday. In church we’d sing hymns with lines like “help me to mortify my flesh”. Lent was book-ended by fasting on Ash Wednesday … More The Wonder by Emma Donoghue
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