“I write less implicitly, more explicitly, if you understand the distinction, but not so well,” writes the main character Frances, an eighty-something novelist, on how her writing style has changed over the years. If Chalcot Crescent is anything to go by the same could be said of Weldon herself. The plot premise is vintage Weldon, … More Chalcot Crescent by Fay Weldon
Bring Up the Bodies won both the Man Booker prize and the Costa Book of the Year in 2012, and is the sequel to Wolf Hall, which itself carried off the Man Booker Prize in 2009. It continues the story of Thomas Cromwell, Secretary to King Henry VIII. Henry is tiring of Anne Boleyn and … More Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel
When I wrote about book groups in my last entry I forgot to say that when they work well you might just discover something marvellous, an unlooked for gem, an unsuspected treasure that otherwise you’d have missed. Grace and Mary is a case in point. Two weeks ago I associated Melvyn Bragg with the South … More Grace and Mary by Melvyn Bragg
I’m not a big fan of book groups. Or rather, like a lot of things, they look good on paper but don’t work that well in real life. Reading and talking about a book are two different skills. Book group members are often good at the former but not so good at the latter, so … More Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks
Liz Jensen is an author I admire, so when in a recent piece for creative writing journal Mslexia she urged subscribers to read Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Adventure of the Speckled Band, I determined to do exactly that. As you might guess it‘s a Sherlock Holmes adventure, the first I’ve ever read, though I’d … More The Adventure of the Speckled Band by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Captain Illiam Quillian Kewley, a Manx smuggler. The Reverend Geoffrey Wilson, a country parson. Jack Harp, an escaped convict. Peevay, a mixed-race aborigine. Dr Thomas Potter, a race-supremacy theorist. Timothy Renshaw, a reluctant botanist. These are just some of the colourful characters that narrate this extraordinary book. Spanning a period of fifty years, from … More English Passengers by Matthew Kneale
When I was 16 I told my mum I liked Lion Bars. I mentioned it once, you understand, as a throw away remark in a casual conversation. My mum, though, treated my ephemeral preference as if Moses had descended from the Mount of Olives bearing a stone tablet inscribed ‘Though Shalt Bestow on Thy … More The Greeks Have A Word For It by Barry Unsworth
This is an ambitious distillation of social history using the rooms of a Victorian vicarage, Bryson’s home, as the ‘hook’, crammed to the rafters with interesting facts. Who knew that the youngest chimney sweep apprentice was aged only three and a half? Or that the boating accident on the Thames with the highest number of … More At Home by Bill Bryson
I bought Tenderness of Wolves because it won the Costa Book of the Year in 2006 but somewhere in my brain the title had become muddled with In the Company of Wolves, so when it arrived I was more than a little thrown to read the blurb and find that the central character was a … More The Tenderness of Wolves by Steff Penney
2013: the story so far… OK, I’ll admit, I’ve let things slide lately but, hey, life can get in the way sometimes. So this and the next four posts are to get up to speed with What Cathy Read since – ooh – November 2012. I have a confession: I like cemeteries. The church I … More Pure by Andrew Miller
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