This is a short but fascinating book. Written in 1992 it details the growth of hard-line right-wing religious individuals and organisations and their efforts to keep Ireland Catholic. I’ll admit that the blurb sounds fairly conspiracy theory “Probes the shadowy world of the right-wing forces that plotted the 1983 referendum on abortion and the 1992 […]
Based on the true story of Grace Marks, an infamous murderer in Canada in the 1840’s, Atwood’s book uses different narrators to tell the story, as well as interspersing the story with extracts from other works. From poems, fiction, newspapers of the time, and other sources. Although this is based on the real story, Atwood has, of course, fictionalised a great deal of the novel.
The two narrators are Grace herself, who tells her story in the first person, past tense, and Simon Jordan, the doctor investigating her claims of insanity or innocence. His parts are told by a third person narrator, and are in the present tense.
The French trilogy ; 2 Set before, during, and after World War 1 Birdsong tells the story of a young Englishman. Staring before the war in France where he starts a passionate affair with a married woman. There is a jump in time and we meet Stephen in the trenches, and that storyline is then […]
Change or die. These are the only options available on the planet Jeep. Centuries earlier, a deadly virus shattered the original colony, killing the men and forever altering the few surviving women. Now, generations after the colony has lost touch with the rest of humanity, a company arrives to exploit Jeep–and its forces find themselves […]
The Steerswoman series ; 2 I read the first book in this series, The Steerswoman because it was recommended by Renay. This book follows on from book one, so I would highly recommend that you read the first book first. I mean, you could pick this up and follow along with no clue as to […]
Good Omens is one of my all time favourite books. I’ve read it and reread it so many times. But it has been quite a while since I picked it up. But considering there is to be a televisual adaptation sometime in the near future I decided that it was best to read it again. […]
Fifteen years ago, Susan Morrow left her first husband Edward Sheffield, an unpublished writer. Now, she’s enduring middle class suburbia as a doctor’s wife, when out of the blue she receives a package containing the manuscript of her ex-husband’s first novel. He writes asking her to read the book; she was always his best critic, […]
ISBN: 0330323334 In 1950, Katherine Proctor leaves Ireland and her family for Barcelona, determined to become a painter. There she meets Miguel, an anarchist veteran of the Spanish Civil War, and proceeds to build a life with him. But Katherine cannot escape her past, as Michael Graves, a fellow Irish emigre to Spain, forces her […]
So last week on twitter I spotted this tweet : Anna Who for me – and I know @oneilllo is a fan too! I'd love to see some of the Attic Press titles back in print. https://t.co/57VGAZB25c — Sarah Webb (@sarahwebbishere) October 2, 2015 And so I took a look on our catalogue and there […]
When you read that a series of books are “brilliant and heartbreaking and made of awesome sauce and everybody should read them but go into them blind or you won’t get their full impact” (MartinWisse on Metafilter) well then you simply have to give the first book a try, don’t you? Well, I did and […]
The fourth novel of the Jaran The closer I got to the end of this book the slower I found myself reading. I just didn’t want it to end. First of all it is the final published book in the Jaran series, and I didn’t want to leave that ‘verse. But also, the series itself […]
I hate writing recaps of follow up books in a series. I never know what to give away about the previous book so I’ll just copy and paste the blurb from the author’s website : In An Earthly Crown, the nomadic tribes of the jaran are uniting the settled cities of their homeland one by […]