During junior school I became obsessed with Enid Blyton’s Famous Five novels. My classmate, John, was equally obsessed and we started competing to see who could collect all 21 books in the series. This was more of a challenge than it might sound. Neither of us had enough spare money to buy the entire collection … More Spies by Michael Frayn
translated from French by Anna Moschovakis My two granddads fought in World War One, my maternal granddad in Belgium, my paternal granddad in Iraq (where he died; there’s a Memorial at Basra commemorating him and the other 40,000 casualties of the Mesopotamia campaign). A generation on, my dad fought in World War Two in North … More At Night All Blood is Black by David Diop
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
“A happy man has no past, while an unhappy man has nothing else.” Dorrigo Evans, age 77, is a surgeon, a war hero; a celebrity of sorts, made famous by a television documentary about his time as a POW in a Japanese camp on the Burma Death Railway, using his medical skills to save what … More The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan
I’ll hold my hands up: with Day it was a case of third time lucky. I tried to read it twice and gave up twice before finally making it all the way through from the beginning to the end. Admittedly both the failed attempts were made in the small hours of the morning through the … More Day by A L Kennedy (what Cathy read when she broke her shoulder – part 1)
whatcathyread 