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Category: Historical

Love Is Blind by William Boyd

18/12/2020

Before you rush to hit the “unsubscribe” button, this is very much a one-off. If you are a regular reader of What Cathy Read, I get a mention now and again as “Hubby”, and come across as basically a man of simple tastes, who is most at ease when hitting something with something else, or … More Love Is Blind by William Boyd

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Music and Silence by Rose Tremain

23/10/2020

A few summers ago, Hubby and I took in the capitals of Scandinavia and the Baltic: Vilnius, Riga and Tallinn with their medieval old towns; scenic Helsinki; compact, cultured Oslo; and wonderful, wonderful Copenhagen. I’d had it in my head to go to Copenhagen ever since I was a kid growing up in the 1970’s … More Music and Silence by Rose Tremain

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Every Man For Himself by Beryl Bainbridge

20/03/2020

Hubby and I spent a week in France last summer to celebrate our 30th wedding anniversary. 30 years! Where did they go? When you’ve no kids, you live in a Peter Pan-like bubble where you never seem to get any older and time doesn’t seem to pass until…bam! A significant anniversary hits and it’s hard … More Every Man For Himself by Beryl Bainbridge

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Hopeful Monsters by Nicholas Mosley

20/09/2019

At the time of writing, Prime Minister May is in France to commemorate the 75th Anniversary of the D-Day landings. By the end of the week she will have resigned, after a relatively short premiership dominated by Brexit. At the D day ceremony a 90-something veteran tells a BBC reporter that it took so much … More Hopeful Monsters by Nicholas Mosley

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Theory of War by Joan Brady

15/02/2019

“A war between two people is not all that different from a war between two countries.” My paternal grandfather, William Smith, was killed in action in World War I.  Not long afterwards his wife died of ‘grief’ (malnutrition and exhaustion, in my mother’s view) and their five children were put into homes run by Dr … More Theory of War by Joan Brady

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Days Without End by Sebastian Barry

18/01/2019

My Dad was a big fan of Westerns.  I grew up watching The High Chaparral and A Man Called Horse; by the time I was five I was hooked. I named a teddy bear Blue Boy (after the character Billy Blue Cannon in The High Chaparral) and wrote a letter to Santa promising to be … More Days Without End by Sebastian Barry

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Brooklyn by Colm Toibin

24/08/2018

One summer holiday, as a ‘project’, I decided to research my family. Not my family tree, you understand, but my family. I was ten, I think; eleven at most. I devised a list of fifteen questions and then interviewed all my immediate family members, parents, brother, sister, cousin, aunts, uncle, granddad. (As children go I … More Brooklyn by Colm Toibin

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Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders

04/05/2018

When I was a child, and resisting sleep because I was scared of ghosts – I grew up in a formerly haunted house, but that’s a whole other story – my mother would tell me, as her mother had told her, that good people are in Heaven with God and don’t want to leave, and … More Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders

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The Quality of Mercy by Barry Unsworth

22/12/2017

  The quality of mercy is not strain’d, It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven Upon the place beneath: it is twice blest; It blesseth him that gives and him that takes: The Merchant of Venice, Act 4 Scene 1   At the time of writing I’m not long back from Stratford-upon-Avon and a … More The Quality of Mercy by Barry Unsworth

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Doctor Copernicus by John Banville

24/11/2017

Like most bibliophiles I’m a sucker for a second hand bookshop. The kind where ‘antiquarian’ or ‘vintage’ books rub alongside contemporary offerings, maybe with a smattering of old maps, prints, and postcards thrown in for good measure. The kind with a faint air of fustiness but never of neglect, and where everything is ordered, though … More Doctor Copernicus by John Banville

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Reviews

  • Love Is Blind by William Boyd
  • Celestial Bodies by Jokha Alharthi (translated by Marilyn Booth)
  • Music and Silence by Rose Tremain
  • The Destiny Waltz by Gerda Charles
  • The Bird of Night by Susan Hill
  • Footnotes – A Journey Round Britain in the Company of Great Writers by Peter Fiennes
  • The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt
  • Girl, Woman, Other by Bernadine Evaristo
  • The Testaments by Margaret Atwood
  • Every Man For Himself by Beryl Bainbridge
  • The Accidental by Ali Smith
  • The Reservoir Tapes by Jon McGregor
  • 10 Best Novels of the Decade: 2010 to 2019
  • Reservoir 13 by Jon McGregor
  • Emily Dickinson – poems selected by Ted Hughes
  • The Cut Out Girl by Bart Van Es
  • Hopeful Monsters by Nicholas Mosley
  • Milkman by Anna Burns
  • Somewhere Towards The End by Diana Athill
  • The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas by Gertrude Stein
  • A Life of Picasso Volume 1: 1881 – 1906 by John Richardson
  • Flights by Olga Tokarczuk (translated by Jennifer Croft)
  • Swing Hammer Swing! by Jeff Torrington
  • Theory of War by Joan Brady
  • Days Without End by Sebastian Barry
  • A Good Man In Africa by William Boyd
  • Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
  • The Vegetarian by Han Kang (translated by Deborah Smith)
  • Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman
  • Brooklyn by Colm Toibin
  • Docherty by William McIlvanney
  • Inside the Wave by Helen Dunmore
  • How Far Can You Go by David Lodge
  • Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders
  • A Horse Walks Into A Bar by David Grossman (translated from the Hebrew by Jessica Cohen)
  • Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
  • H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald
  • The Quality of Mercy by Barry Unsworth
  • Doctor Copernicus by John Banville
  • Bluebeard’s Egg and Other Stories by Margaret Atwood
  • The Sellout by Paul Beatty
  • The Diving Bell and the Butterfly by Jean-Dominique Bauby
  • Under the Eye of the Clock by Christopher Nolan
  • How To Be Both by Ali Smith
  • An Artist of the Floating World by Kazuo Ishiguro
  • The Comforts of Madness by Paul Sayer
  • Coleridge: Early Visions by Richard Holmes
  • The Hand That First Held Mine by Maggie O’Farrell
  • The Tent by Margaret Atwood
  • The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan

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