The Glass Books Trilogy – an awfully fun adventure!

The Glass Books Trilogy by G W Dahlquist Bantam in the USA, reputedly paid début novelist Dahlquist an advance of $2,000,000 for the first two installments in this series. Although the first was well received, apparently they lost shedloads of money on the deal. Penguin, the books’ publisher in the UK, also published the first volume with a Read More

You shall go to the ball …

Republished into its original timeline from my lost posts archive Invitation To The Waltz by Rosamond Lehmann Rosamund Lehmann is another of those authors from the middle decades of the twentieth century that I’ve been meaning to read for ages. Invitation to the Waltz, her third novel, was published in 1932.  Set in the 1920s, Read More

Scenes from a humorist’s life …

Our book group is having a short story July, concentrating on two authors renowned for their wit: Saki and Thurber.  I’m working my way through Saki, so I’ll deal with him in another post; here I’ll talk about my first experience of reading James Thurber. My Life and Hard Timesby James Thurber James Thurber (1894-1961), Read More

It brings it all back …

I’ve waxed lyrical about my favourite musicals before – Oliver! in particular. It still is, I think, but the musical that lead me into a rockier direction was Jesus Christ Superstar. I’ve been sparked off to post about it because, belatedly, I’ve started watching Superstar – Andrew Lloyd-Webber’s current TV search for a singer to Read More

Art, Love and War

Waiting for Robert Capa by Susanna Fortes, trans from the Spanish by Adriana V Lopez This novel is a fictionalised account of the true story of Gerda Taro and Robert Capa, two of the foremost photojournalists who reported on the Spanish Civil War. The story begins in Paris though, when young Jewish German refugee Gerta Read More

Medieval Iceland – a place of cod wars even then…

On the Cold Coasts by Vilborg Davidsdottir Transl Alda Sigmundsdottir At the heart of this novel is the tale of Ragna, a young Icelandic woman from a family with property in Greenland which she will inherit. Still a young teenager, yet betrothed to Thorkell, Ragna becomes unmarriageable when she becomes pregnant by an English sailor Read More

Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me. Or can they?

The Flame Alphabetby Ben Marcus Before Beryl Bainbridge Reading week, I posted about how I’d essentially bought this book on the basis of its cover alone which is rather stunning, and how it would be the first book I read after Beryl. Now, I’ve read it and the question is did it live up to its Read More