The Sound of Being Human by Jude Rogers

I’ve been a fan of Jude Roger’s writing for ages having followed her from music mags Q and Mojo to the much-missed The Word, where in all of which she was one of the few female voices. She’s also written for the Guardian and freelances, and has a substack column Stop, Look, Listen, which I 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

#TDiRS22 – The Dark is Rising Sequence Book 4: The Grey King

A bit later than originally planned, but I hope you’re still with me as we come to the fourth of the five books in Susan Cooper’s wonderful children’s adventure fantasy series, The Grey King, published in 1975. Catch up with the previous posts here: Introduction Over Sea, Under Stone The Dark is Rising Greenwitch This Read More

An evening with Bethan Roberts

It was off to my favourite place in Abingdon (Mostly Books, where else!) on Thursday for an evening with one of the town’s favourite authors – Bethan Roberts. Born and bred in Abingdon, it was Bethan’s third visit to the bookshop, and for those of us who’ve been to see her talk each time, it’s Read More

John Buchan meets Umberto Eco via Dan Brown

The Pendragon Legend by Antal Szerb, translated by Len Rix OK – so I put Dan Brown into the title of this post to grab your attention! While I totally agree with the rest of the world that the Da Vinci Code is not great literature, there is no denying that however silly the whole Read More

Ten Books that Represent Great Britain

A couple of days ago, Simon at Savidge Reads and Thomas at My Porch created a new meme (Yes Simon, I know you didn’t want to call it a meme, but it is one – a nice one!). The challenge is to pick ten books that sum up your own country geographically but authors from that Read More

New Stories from the Mabinogion: vols 1 & 2

The Mabinogion is a collection of medieval Welsh stories of Celtic origin – they are written very much in the bardic tradition of oral storytelling. The eleven tales as normally collected have the four ‘branches’ of the Mabinogion proper, a set of Native Tales and three Romances;  the Native Tales also include early references to Read More