I bet you’ll have come across one at some stage when you were growing up: the kid in the class who had no friends and was always alone. The kid who other kids avoided because they just weren’t right, somehow. The kid who even adults didn’t like, never asking why we didn’t invite them to … More The Children of Dynmouth by William Trevor
If you’re a regular reader of my blog you’ll know I usually open each review with a story or an anecdote. This time I’m going to break with tradition and pitch straight in. The Chip-Chip Gatherers is set in Trinidad and centred on the Settlement, a collection of “mean huts and houses clinging despairingly to … More The Chip-Chip Gatherers by Shiva Naipaul
Biographies are like busses, you wait for one for ages then three come along at once… My Uncle Bobbie died earlier this year just under two weeks before his 96th birthday. It seems strange to refer to the death of a nonagenarian as a shock, but it was, because he wasn’t ill. On the morning … More Somewhere Towards The End by Diana Athill
Sometimes I read a book that I really wish I’d written; Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine is one. Really it was down to luck that I read it at all. I switched on the radio to take my mind off paying bills and updating my budget (yes, I really am that boring), and the programme … More Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman
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
Last month I went with hubby to see comedian Richard Herring perform his F**k I’m Fifty stand-up show at Liverpool’s Hot Water Comedy Club. In one bit of the routine Herring compared being a child to being on the beach with your back to the sea. Then when you’re older, … More Inside the Wave by Helen Dunmore
My RE teacher relished moral dilemmas. She’d take a Commandment, thou shalt not kill, or thou shalt not bear false witness, say, and then question us to explore their outer limits. Would you murder one person to save the lives of many? Would you lie to hide a painful truth? Faith Sunderly, the teenage heroine … More The Lie Tree by Frances Hardinge
My hubby’s Gran once told me that as you grow old you don’t regret the things you’ve done as much as you regret the things you wish you’d done. She lived well into her 90s so I guess she knew what she was talking about, although her philosophy does tend to assume that the wished-for-but-not-done … More Life After Life by Kate Atkinson
When Instructions for a Heatwave appeared on my book club’s reading long list, I made sure it got shortlisted. O’Farrell had won the Costa Novel award in 2010 with The Hand that First Held Mine and the blurb for Instructions appealed to me: it’s set in July 1976 and although I was only nine at … More Instructions for a Heatwave by Maggie O’Farrell
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
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