Category: My Reading

  • Tell Me Everything – Elizabeth Strout

    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 […]

  • The Gardener / The Cleaner of Chartres – Salley Vickers

    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 […]

  • The Winter Ghosts – Kate Mosse

    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 […]

  • The Ghosts of Rome – Joseph O’Connor

    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 […]

  • Adam Dalgliesh – PD James

    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 […]

  • You Are Here – David Nicholls

    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 […]

  • The Years – Annie Ernaux

    I don’t think I have read too many works by Nobel prize winners in literature but here is one example. It took me a little time to get into this book maybe because in the beginning I thought I was going to be reading fiction. This is not a story in that sense but it […]

  • Time To Keep Silence – Patrick Lee Fermor

    Some people are so much larger than life that they seem to be fictional. TE Lawrence, Lawrence of Arabia, comes to mind, and, in the same mould, Patrick Lee Fermor. One reviewer of his work described him as a cross between Indiana Jones and James Bond. As a baby he was left with a random […]

  • The Woman in the Fifth – Douglas Kennedy

    My Douglas Kennedy shelf is in the bookcase in my hall. That row of books is quite full of itself. There are many hardback books and even the paperbacks are large. Somehow this seems quite suitable as these are big stories with a capital B. It also seems apt that they are written by an […]

  • A Paris Novel – Ruth Reichl

    My granddaughter and I were enjoying a wander around Barnes and Noble. I was telling her how much I had liked being in Florence the previous year and reading fiction based in that city. I was about to spend a few days in Paris and was wondering what I should read there. We wandered some […]