Six Degrees of Separation: Born to Run by Bruce Springsteen

First Saturday of the month, time for the super monthly tag Six Degrees of Separation, which is hosted by Kate at Booksaremyfavouriteandbest,  Six Degrees of Separation #6degrees picks a starting book for participants to go wherever it takes them in six more steps. Links to my reviews are in the titles of the books chosen. This month Read More

Beautiful Shining People by Michael Grothaus – blogtour

I must admit that reading the first few pages of this novel, by American author Grothaus, I thought 372 pages of this… will I make it to the end? Something I would do my best to do because I’d signed up for the blog tour. Well something clicked and I couldn’t put the book down. Read More

Reading Ireland Month – Trespasses by Louise Kennedy

My second book for Reading Ireland month hosted by Cathy, I’m really glad to have read this superb novel, which has recently been longlisted for the Women’s Prize. It is set in County Down at the time of the Troubles in the early 1970s, and tells the story of two star-crossed lovers – one Catholic, Read More

Reading the Decades #5: The 1950s

I haven’t done one of these posts for a while now. I am more often than not devoted to contemporary fiction, the shiny and the new. But I do read some older books too. The metrics in my annual reading stats include the number of books I’ve read published before I was born in 1960 Read More

Watchlist: Feb into March

Theatre: The Tempest – Shakespeare’s Globe I went with our Year 8s to a special Schools Production of The Tempest at the open air Globe in London. Cut down to ninety minutes. So we got Prospero and Ariel’s magic, Miranda and Ferdinand’s love story, the drunken antics of Trinculo, Stefano and Caliban (the latter in Read More

The Institution by Helen Fields

Last autumn I read a superb standalone thriller by Helen Fields – The Last Girl to Die – and loved it. Set on the Isle of Mull, it involved a missing girl, and lots of witchy lore and had a real sense of place and atmosphere. Having discovered this author, I couldn’t say no to Read More

Squeaky Clean by Callum McSorley – blogtour

I’ve had problems before with Glasgow dialect in novels, spending so much time deciphering it that I lost the enjoyment of reading the text. I really crossed my fingers that Squeaky Clean would be readable, and my heart fell slightly when we met some of the characters that frequent the car wash that makes the Read More

Two shortish reviews: Dusapin and Clare

The Pachinko Parlour by Elisa Shua Dusapin Translated from the French by Aneesa Abbas Higgins Dusapin is a Franco-Korean author who won the 2021 National Book Award for Translated Lit for her first novel Winter in Sokcho, which followed the life of a young woman working at a hotel at the town near the Korean Read More

Two short books for the Japanese & Irish Reading challenges

While I hope to squeeze in more books for the Welsh, Irish and Japanese reading months that happen in March, here are two short reviews of two short novellas, one from Japan, one from Ireland… Star by Yukio Mishima Translated by Sam Bett This was my first experience of Mishima, one of those sightly intimidating Read More

Six Degrees of Separation: Passages by Gail Sheehy

First Saturday of the month, time for the super monthly tag Six Degrees of Separation, which is hosted by Kate at Booksaremyfavouriteandbest,  Six Degrees of Separation #6degrees picks a starting book for participants to go wherever it takes them in six more steps. Links to my reviews are in the titles of the books chosen. This month Read More

The Hand That Feeds You by Mercedes Rosende – blogtour

Translated from the Spanish by Tim Gutteridge This is the first novel I’ve read by a Uruguayan author. It was superb, and given my recent diet of mainly Argentinian literature when I’ve ventured to South America to read, it had a different feel to books from its neighbour – Uruguay is sandwiched between the northeast Read More

Catching up with Shiny linkiness…

I’ve had several reviews posted at Shiny New Books lately, so I shall take the opportunity to plug them here as well. Bournville by Jonathan Coe I’ve read nearly everything that Coe has published and reviewed four of them for Shiny (see here). He has favoured themes: many of his most-celebrated novels are concerned with deciphering Read More

The Other Half by Charlotte Vassell

Debut author, Charlotte Vassell, set herself a hard task for her first novel, to make her readers engage with a set of young toffs in London, mostly not working much or very hard, splashing the cash, narcissistic and not caring about the hoi polloi, but she succeeds on several levels. Firstly, the horror of the Read More

The Forcing by Paul E Hardisty – blogtour

Canadian, Hardisty is an engineer, university professor and climate change scientist as well as author of six novels. I’ve not read any of the previous five, but his sixth is an urgent clarion call to us all. If I had to do an elevator pitch for it I’d say… JG Ballard’s The Drought meets Logan’s Read More

January into Feb watchlist

At the theatre: Stewart Lee – at the Oxford Playhouse You either get Lee, or you don’t. He’s unashamedly literary and intellectual for a comedian and I’ve been a fan for years of his TV shows (a couple of his shows are available on BBC iPlayer), but this was the first time I’ve seen him Read More

A One-Session Read – The Chase by Ava Glass

You all know how much I adore spy thrillers, don’t you? Whether on the page or screen, the twisty double or triple-bluffing, the danger, the tradecraft, the rivalry between secret government agencies, the mind games and living on your wits that are the life of the secret agent combine to tick all the thriller boxes Read More

Dead Man’s Creek by Chris Hammer

A Cross-Generational Australian Thriller Chris Hammer’s first three thrillers featured journalist Martin Scarsden; full of complicated, twisty plots that get tied up in the end. All good reads, if a little long, I reviewed the second one, Silver, here. With his fourth novel, Opal Country, Hammer introduced two new protagonists, police investigators this time. Experienced Read More

Book Group Report: The Promise by Damon Galgut

This was our pick from the final decade of the Big Jubilee Read, which we’ve worked through decade by decade of her late maj’s reign. In recent years, our book group has steered clear of most of the big prize-winning books–The Promise won the Booker in 2021–but we were all keen to read this one. Read More

Six Degrees of Separation: Trust by Hernan Diaz

After a couple of months where I was so busy to plan ahead, I’m back for the First Saturday of the month, time for the super monthly tag Six Degrees of Separation, which is hosted by Kate at Booksaremyfavouriteandbest,  Six Degrees of Separation #6degrees picks a starting book for participants to go wherever it takes them in Read More

You Will Never Be Found by Tove Alsterdal – #NordicFINDS23

Translated by Alice Menzies It’s fitting to end my Nordic reading for January with this Swedish crime novel – for it was published today! You Will Never be Found is the second in a series featuring Police Assistant Eira Sjödin. I very much enjoyed reading the first volume, We Know You Remember last year, set Read More

And the Wind Sees All by Guðmundur Andri Thorsson, #NordicFINDS23

Translated by Andrew Cauthery and Björg Árnadóttir I come in off the sea and slide along the spit, and soon I will have vanished with the mist. I am the afternoon breeze; I visit at around half past four and an hour later slip away to my dwelling, made of the past: of the grass that stirred a Read More

Dirt by Sarah Sultoon – blog tour

I must confess, I know very little about the kibbutz movement at all. My knowledge is coloured by the media portrayal in the 1960s and 1970s of Utopian communes of hippy farmers which belies the hard work that farming actually is. Wikipedia tells me that the kibbutz volunteering phenomenon took off in the mid-1960s, peaking Read More

The Chestnut Man by Søren Sveistrup #NordicFINDS23

Translated by Caroline Waight I’ve had this book recommended to me by so many Scandi-crime afficionados, that it seemed a good choice to pick for a #NordicFINDS23 readalong… Hmm, maybe not such a good decision: for not only is it nasty, it is so twisty that it was nearly impossible to tweet as I went Read More

Trouble by Katja Ivar – blogtour #NordicFINDS23

I’m today’s stop on the Random Tours blogtour for Trouble, the third novel by Katja Ivar featuring Finnish detective Hella Mauzer. Set during the early 1950s, in the first novel, Evil Things, Hella was a sergeant in the Helsinki police; in the second, Deep as Death, she’s left the police to become a private investigator Read More

The True Deceiver by Tove Jansson #NordicFINDS23

Translated by Thomas Teal When I read The Summer Book for last year’s Nordic FINDS, I was overwhelmed by the unsentimental but understated beauty of Tove Jansson’s prose, so I had to read another book by her this year. I chose her 1982 novel The True Deceiver which she wrote when she was 68, again Read More

Our Man in Kuwait by Louise Burfitt-Dons – Blogtour

The town of Ahmadi in Kuwait was only established in 1946 after the discovery of oil there, and the town built up around the operations of the Kuwait Oil Company (KOC) – it remains the KOC’s headquarters today. Many British and American ex-pats settled there and worked for the oil company, and entertainment centred around Read More

The Birds by Tarjei Vesaas #NordicFINDS23

Translated by Torbjørn Støverud and Michael Barnes I discovered the beautifully observed novella The Ice Palace by Tarjei Vesaas (reviewed here) during last year’s Nordic FINDS, it was as much a hit with me as everyone else who had been reading it since Penguin brought out their new Modern Classics edition. Penguin followed up with another Read More

This Should be Written in the Present Tense by Helle Helle #NordicFINDS23

Translated by Martin Aitken Susan recommended this novella to me last year (her review here), so I acquired a copy – thinking ahead for this year! What an odd book this is. Our narrator, Dorte, chronicles her everyday life for us and remembers previous relationships – that’s it. It is simple, yet hypnotically compelling. The Read More