“Fear not: for, behold, I bring you tidings of great joy. For unto you is born this day in the city of David, a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord. And this shall be a sign unto you; Ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger.” Age 6, I … More The Christmas Mystery by Jostein Gaarder
In September, Hubby and I spent a fortnight back-packing in Europe to celebrate my early retirement. Our whistle-stop tour took in Budapest, Bratislava, Vienna, Saltzberg, Munich, Frankfurt and Cologne and provided many memorable moments, some planned (Oktoberfest – or Blackpool on acid as I now call it) and some unplanned (floods in Central Europe). And … More Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck (translated by Michael Hofmann)
A few years ago, finding a scrap of paper on which my father had written his mother’s maiden name, I resolved to find out what had happened to my father’s parents. Evenings would now be spent on genealogy sites searching online records. I requested copies of birth, marriage and death certificates from the GRO, military … More Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks
If you mainlined the Paris Olympics, as I did, you would have seen the controversy around two women boxers, Imane Khalif from Algeria and Lin Yu-ting from Taiwan. Both had been banned from competing in the 2023 Women’s World Boxing Championships by the International Boxing Association (IBA) but were cleared to compete in the 2024 … More Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
So, he who is known only as “Hubby” is making a rare guest contribution to the What Cathy Read blog, but as ever, worry not, Cathy will be back next month. I went to an all-boys secondary school in the late 70’s and early 80’s. It was a time when corporal punishment was routinely used … More The Rotters’ Club by Jonathan Coe
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
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
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