Category: My Reading

This is a slim volume but the story it contains is large and deep and complicated, maybe as in reality are all family relationships. It is a difficult day for Gail. First she is sacked from her job, or did she choose to walk out? She is not entirely sure. Her ex-husband arrives at her […]

When I’m in bookshops in Manhattan, I’m always surprised at how foreign they feel. There will be shelves and shelves of authors I have never heard of and I realise it is only the classics and the seriously top bestsellers that make it backwards and forwards over the Atlantic. Then, just occasionally I find an […]

I have relaxed into these delightful stories over the last couple of weeks. They are numbers 8 and 9 in the series of ‘44 Scotland Street’ and I am way behind numerically. I have commented before about the incredible speed with which this author produces books, as does his Edinburgh neighbour Ian Rankin. Impossible to […]

There has of course long been an immigration route from China over the Pacific to the West coast of America. In the 19th century people were attracted by the Gold Rush and then in a huge area that was asset rich and labour poor, Chinese immigrants were vital in building the miles and miles of […]

I have known Lionel Shriver for years as a journalist writing in a variety of journals, magazines and newspapers. Lionel is female and was born Margaret Ann. At age 15 and already a fledgling writer she changed her name as she felt this would bring her more respect. I find this a little dispiriting as […]

There are modern Irish writers that I greatly admire, particularly Colm Toibin and Claire Keegan, but oh my goodness the melancholy that is involved. I realise that the last 150 years of Irish history is extremely fertile land to be harvested by any writer and the enormous power and influence of the Roman Catholic Church […]

I picked up this book out of sheer curiosity. There are masses of these paperbacks and they are everywhere, from Daunts and Waterstones to Sainsburys. They nearly fill the best seller lists that appear every week in the Sunday Times. Do note these are the bestseller lists, not necessarily lists of the best books! I […]

Well, this slim book is well named. For the vast majority of us it is indeed a conundrum to feel so very strongly that you were born into the wrong body that you are prepared to undergo lengthy, risky and painful surgery to become a member of the opposite sex. Jan Morris was born James […]

I haven’t read any Rachel Joyce for a while. A few years ago I did enjoy The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry (and the subsequent film) followed by Maureen Fry and The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy. Quite a moving trilogy. In Homemade God we are faraway from Harold’s genteel suburbia, instead transported to […]

I have had a couple of months where I have been deeply immersed in detective fiction of one sort or another: Ian Rankin, Mick Herron, Robert Galbraith, just for starters. I needed an antidote … and then it was Valentines Day. My gift was a debut novel by Lucy Steeds; The Artist. A perfect present […]