originally published as Vi mot er; translated by Neil Smith Beartown ; book 2 It has been a while since I read this. I think I finished it at the start of the month, but I am only finding the time to blog about it now. I’ve been falling behind lately. Monthly updates are way […]
also published as Beartown I was going to say that I recently read Backman’s breakout novel A man called Over, but then I checked the blog and discovered that it was back in 2015! well I suppose that’s very recent if you are talking about the age of the world. Ove was a book club […]
Translated by Edward G. Seidensticker I have decided that I should try to read more “world literature”, not just modern fiction but books that might be regarded as classics from around the world. And what better place to start, thought I, than with The tale of Genji which may be the world’s first novel. It […]
Eimear McBride’s debut tells, with astonishing insight and in brutal detail, the story of a young woman’s relationship with her brother, and the long shadow cast by his childhood brain tumour. Not so much a stream of consciousness, as an unconscious railing against a life that makes little sense, and a shocking and intimate insight […]
James Fielding was not at all happy when his parents decided to spend the summer in “the wilderness”, his plans had included girls and learning to talk to them, not nature. But once he got over his stubbornness he discovered that he enjoyed the wild. The landscape, the animals. And especially one deer, a magnificent […]
Tyler Caskey is a minister in a small New England town. His wife, Lauren, passed away just over a year ago. Since then his youngest daughter lives with Tyler’s mother, coming up to visit at weekends. His eldest daughter, Katherine, has been almost speechless since her mother died. Only five years old she doesn’t really […]
Does religious belief outweigh the fight for survival? and if the one battling for life is a child, who gets to rule on what is, and isn’t, right? In The Children Act McEwan raises this question. Judge Fiona Maye is called upon to judge the case of a Jehovah’s Witness child who needs a blood […]
ISBN : 9780297870517 When I hear death row I usually don’t think “enchanted”, and I usually don’t look for books set in prisons or about people awaiting execution. But all last year, and before, whenever The Enchanted was mentioned it was usually followed with plenty of praise and good things. I finally got around to […]
When Lula Ann is born her mother is horrified by how dark she is. Sweetness is light skinned. So is her husband. The baby becomes a source of tension, and he leaves them both. Sweetness is determined to protect her daughter from the world and so she intends to make her better, to ensure that […]
Paul and Maureen long for a pony of their own. All year they work with their grandfather taking care of his colts, but every year they are sold off, they’d love one they could keep. So they make up their mind, at the next Pony Penning Day they are going to catch Phantom, and buy […]
Olive Kitteridge would not be regarded by most people as a nice woman. She is stern. Unforgiving. The scariest teacher in the local high school. Her husband is almost her exact opposite. Many people wonder what he ever saw in her, nice, affable Henry Kitteridge? But while Olive is not the easiest person to get […]
I would guess that almost everyone reading this blog is familiar, to some degree, with Harper Lee’s To kill a mockingbird. The classic story of a good man (Atticus) in a bad world, trying to do his best, as seen through his young daughter (Scout’s) eyes. And of course, then there is Boo Radley, the […]