Category: My Reading

Smallish, hardback books are just too tempting for words, especially when they are written by an author that I truly revere. So, finding this book displayed face up on the front table of Waterstones, well, I just knew I was going to buy it. This is planets away from lengthy, family stories such as Brooklyn […]

There are times, not often I admit, when I put the stories, the fiction and the make believe down and pick up something real instead. It might be lyrical landscape writing by Horatio Clare or Robert MacFarland, something more practical and pragmatic by James Rebanks or maybe a  memoir or biography. This time it was […]

I nearly went to Turkey. Once in the late sixties I was on a schools’ cruise ship in the Med. Turkey was on the itinerary but there were tensions about Cyprus between Turkey and Greece, and the captain decided to play safe and refused to dock there. I still haven’t visited and have to admit […]

If you like the minutiae of an Anne Tyler book then you would enjoy reading Elizabeth Strout. There are now several stories about the characters Olive Kitteridge and Lucy Barton and in ‘Tell Me Everything’ they are together in the small town of Crosby in Maine. Lucy and Olive meet every so often and tell […]

I went through a Salley Vickers phase some years ago and decided to pick a couple of the books up again recently. Looking online there are several more now to enjoy should I choose to go further and read her new writing. It is not surprising to find that Salley Vickers is a qualified psychoanalyst […]

If you have read Kate Mosse’s first bestseller Labyrinth which sold in its millions, and the subsequent books: Sepulchre and Citadel, you will be quite familiar with the author’s obsession with the Occitania, that region of south west France the goes down to Carcassonne, shares the mountainous border with Spain and has a language of […]

This was a birthday gift recently, in hard back. I had looked up when the paperback would be released and found that it wouldn’t be until next year, so, my patience ran out and I put it on my birthday list.  The Ghosts of Rome is the second in a trilogy called ‘The Rome Escape […]

Phyllis Dorothy James White is indeed an elegant writer of detective stories. I have dipped into her work before and enjoyed it, particularly the many stories about the police commander Adam Dalgliesh. The author conspires to make us immediately feel empathy for this character, and he writes poetry which definitely works for me. I decided […]

This is quite a quick and easy read but I don’t mean that in any critical way. It is a lovely book: charming, funny, witty and demonstrating the author’s ability to observe the everyday in minute detail. The novel is written in alternating perspectives from 2 middle-aged, divorced and lonely characters: Marnie and Michael. Extrovert […]