Burnt Sugar – Avni Doshi #BookerPrize 2020

'And even now, when I am without her, when I want to be without her, when I know her presence is the source of my unhappiness - that learned longing still rises, that craving for soft, white cotton that has frayed at the edge.' This is an unsettling read, one which charts the intense relationship …

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The Silk Merchant’s Convenient Wife – Elisabeth Hobbes

With The Silk Merchant’s Convenient Wife, Elisabeth Hobbes has shown that she is just as at home writing a Victorian romance as she is with the Medieval period. In this, her tenth novel, we meet Jonathan Harcourt and Aurelia Upford. Both of them have their own reasons for wanting a purely business-like marriage, and Hobbes …

Ali Smith’s Summer

‘Summer’s like walking down a road just like this one, heading towards both light and dark. Because Summer isn’t just a merry tale. Because there’s no merry tale without the darkness.’ And so we come to the final instalment of Ali Smith’s seasonal quartet, a collection I have loved so much. Once again, I’m left …

Expectation – Anna Hope

This is probably one of my most enjoyable reads of the summer. At times incredibly moving, elements of this novel resonated strongly. On the topics of female friendships, motherhood, and aging, there were so many times I felt that surge of recognition, when a book seems to have been written just for you. When we …

Dangerous Ages – Rose Macaulay (British Library Women Writers)

Waking on her 43rd birthday, Neville takes a moment to herself. And as most women know, it is these snatched moments of quiet which restore, however briefly, a sense of one’s own identity. ‘Swimming, bread and marmalade, sitting high in a beech tree in the golden eye of the morning sun – that was life. …

The Borrowed Boy – Deborah Klée

I raced through this novel in one sitting, so desperate was I to find out what happens to Danek, the 'borrowed boy', in Klée's story. Angie Winkle, aging and alone, knows she has cancer and probably doesn't have long to live. Her life has been unsatisfactory and she has decided to revisit an old seaside …