The heart goes last by Margaret Atwood
Living in their car, surviving on tips, Charmaine and Stan are in a desperate state. So, when they see an advertisement for Consilience, a ‘social experiment’ offering stable jobs and a...
26 August 2016
A Wrinkle in the skin by John Christopher
AKA The Ragged Edge. Read for the 2014 Sci-Fi Experience In the 1960s a wave of earthquakes brings destruction around the globe. Isolated off the British coast Matthew Cotter thinks that...
9 December 2013
The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
translated by David Wyllie : Read online at Project Gutenberg Most people are probably somewhat familiar with Franz Kafka. When we hear that something is Kafkaesque we think of the surreal...
5 July 2013
The dollmaker by Harriette Arnow
The world is at war, and the army is stealing away the men, and those that are left are being hauled off to work in the factories in order to assist the war effort. In rural Kentucky Gertie is lucky enough to still have her husband around, he drives the coal truck, but knows that this situation cannot last. He has his date with the army already lined up. But she is preparing as best she can. She has been saving her money and almost has enough to offer on a nearby farm. Without having to pay half what they earn on rent Gertie and her family will be able to plan for the future. But on the eve of her plans coming to fruition all is ruined and she must uproot her family and follow her husband to the city of Detroit.
11 May 2013
The death of grass by John Christopher
Read for the Not just for Stormtroopers sci-fi challenge It is the 1950s, and a devastating virus is sweeping Asia. It attacks grass, and grass feeds the world. Wheat is grass....
8 March 2012
Glister by John Burnside
Teenage boys are going missing in Innertown. Where they go and what happens to them, nobody knows. Some say that they have runaway, escaping the town with its pollution, disease, death...
19 February 2012
A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry
Dina Dalal seldom indulged in looking back at her life with regret or bitterness, or questioning why things had turned out the way the way they had, cheating her of the bright future everyone had predicted for her when she was in school, when her name was still Dina Shroff.
I’m not really sure where to begin with this review. This is a big book, both in the amount of pages and in the amount of ground it covers. Set in an un-named city in India during the State of Emergency after India’s founding it deals with four main characters whose lives intersect in the house of Dina Dalal who hires two tailors and rents out a room to a young student in an attempt to keep her independence.
16 May 2008
The Secret Life of E. Robert Pendleton by Michael Collins
See also: MichaelCollinsauthor.com ; Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind ; Lizzy’s Literary Life The E. Robert Pendleton of the title is a professor struggling to keep his tenure at Bannockburn College...
15 May 2008
The Wars by Timothy Findley
ISBN: 0140050116 See also: The Stay at Home Bookworm ; Wikipedia Prologue She was standing in the middle of the railroad tracks. Her head was bowed and her right front hoof...
21 April 2008
Unicorns and cannonballs, Palaces and piers, Trumpets, towers, and tenements, Wide oceans full of tears, Flags, rags, ferry boats, Scimitars and scarves
TV has been a tad on the depressing side recently. And I don’t mean the boring-ness of Lost, but actual real life programmes. Not the “moan at the stupidity of reality-tv”...
31 July 2006
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