Bewilderment – Richard Powers

I got the 'this-will-be-amazing' tingles as I started this novel, and so it was - I will forever remember finishing reading Bewilderment in a beautifully sunny Somerset park on our way home from Cornwall, emotionally stunned by the ending and completely unaware of my surroundings and those physically around me. To read a book where …

A disrupted summer of reading

This summer we've moved house and jobs. I feel like I've been packing and unpacking for months. Annoyingly, the things that's gone (apart from a million books - we've downsized considerably on our shelving) is my time to read. I've also ignored the blog for so long that I've started to dread coming back to …

The Lady in the Veil: The Talbot Saga – Allie Cresswell

I've really enjoyed the first two novels in the Talbot Saga - House in the Hollow and Tall Chimneys - and so I knew I was in for a treat with this new addition to the tale based on the Talbot family. This time, the house itself features only in the background; most of the …

Kate Atkinson – Big Sky; a Jackson Brodie novel

Finishing this novel left me with that fizzy feeling, the one which makes you want to buy all the other books in the series and binge-read until May. Quite how I am so late to the Jackson Brodie party, I have no idea. It’s not like I haven’t read loads of Atkinson’s other novels and …

In Darkling Wood – Emma Carroll

To be honest, Carroll had me at ‘darkling’. As Alice, her teenage heroine, says, there’s something spooky about it, ‘It’s a funny word. Old-sounding.’ And then it was the marvellous cover. Fortunately for my high expectations, the rest of the book was brilliant. Alice has come to stay with her spiky and solitary grandmother at …

John Steinbeck’s East of Eden

I’m divided on this one, I have to confess. He’s one of my favourite writers, I was fairly gripped by the plot… but there’s also much about this novel I didn’t like. Beginning in the 1860s, the story follows two families new to the Salinas Valley, the Trasks and the Hamiltons. The latter have been …

70 Reviews: 10. A Taste of the Unexpected – Roald Dahl (Pocket Penguins)

This is the second set of short stories I’ve read from the pocket Penguin collection in a week, and I have to confess that, self-confessed literary snob though I am, I preferred the Dahl collection to the Borges. I’d taught The Landlady a couple of times, and so the construction felt more blatant – prior …

70 Reviews: 8. Nothing Bad Ever Happens in Tiffany’s – Marian Keyes (Pocket Penguins)

I'm a firm believer in every book having its day. I'd started this series of reviews back in June 2018, keen to work my way through Penguin's boxed 70th Birthday collection that doubles up as a doorstop. It's a brilliant set of reads, usually from longer books, that draws upon Penguin's long and varied history …

The Mirror and The Light – Hilary Mantel

I waited a long time to witness Thomas Cromwell’s death – after all, Mantel’s trilogy concerns a period in which such deaths were public spectacles – and when it finally came to it (that is surely not a spoiler), it was heart-wrenchingly tragic. I’m still experiencing that sense of loss that follows the end of …

The Vanished Bride – Bella Ellis #TheBronteMysteries

Taking as its premise the idea that the Brontë sisters embarked on brief careers as crime-fighting ‘detectors’ in 1845, the period between Charlotte and Emily returning home from Brussels and the three sisters becoming published authors a year later, this novel offers us a delicious new version of the famous siblings, superbly reimagined by Bella …