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
Tag: Moscow
Watchlist: April
Series watch: Telly suddenly got good again – I’ve had a splendid April’s viewing – largely thanks to Prime offering a cheap deal on Paramount+ TV (£3.50 pcm for 3 months) which meant subscribing to see the superb adaptation of Amor Towles’ A Gentleman in Moscow was affordable. AGinM stars Ewan McGregor as the Russian Read More
The Translator by Harriet Crawley – blogtour
Anyone who visits my blog regularly will know that spies and secret agents populate my favourite thrillers, and there are plenty in Harriet Crawley’s splendid new novel The Translator. Crawley, fluent in Russian, lived and worked in Moscow for twenty years – but in the energy sector. Who knows if she knew anyone from Moscow Read More
Two excellent thrillers – Moskva and The Ice
Moskva by Jack Grimwood You may know Grimwood through his literary novel The Last Banquet written as John Grimwood, or his fantasy/crime novels written as Jon Courtenay Grimwood. I’ve not read any of them, although I do own The Last Banquet, which I remember was very well received. It’s certainly going up my pile, having Read More
Starting Anna Karenina again
In my teens, around the time of the wonderful BBC adaptation of War & Peace with Anthony Hopkins as Pierre, and ITV’s Anna Karenina with Nicola Pagett as the doomed heroine, I went through a real Russian phase in my reading. We had copies of most of the Russian greats already in the house as Read More
Towles’ entrancing second novel…
A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles Amor Towles’ debut novel Rules of Civility (reviewed here) was one of the best books I read in 2011. Although Towles graduated in English back in the late 1980s, he worked as an investment professional for over twenty years before publishing his first novel. This book was a Read More
Two novels, two different Millers…
This post was combined and republished into my blog’s timeline from my lost posts archive. Snowdrops by A D Miller I bought this debut novel at the beginning of the year. It’s had a lot of interest even before it was Booker longlisted. Trying to ignore the hype, I dove in. It’s a tale of Read More
Child 44 by Tom Rob Smith
This book comes with a bit of baggage. A debut novel, and thriller no less, set in Stalinist Russia. Its publishers gave it a massive publicity campaign, and got it longlisted for the 2008 Booker. Instant controversy – thrillers can’t be literary can they? Well yes they can, you only have to think of John Read More
