Category: My Reading

This is an author I really enjoy reading. There is also a really good BBC Imagine programme about him, should you care to look it up. This is a sequel to his book ‘Brooklyn’ which won many prizes when it was published in 2009, indeed it was long listed for the Booker. In Brooklyn, Eilis […]

I don’t know, but I would guess that the pain of losing someone close to you is magnified if the death occurs in a huge, very public tragedy. I’m thinking the Boxing Day Tsunami or the Grenfell Tower fire. The other obvious example is the destruction of the Twin Towers in the 9/11 atrocity in […]

I found this in a bookcase I rarely go to. It was a quick but enjoyable read. There are many examples of people becoming known in a particular field and then thinking they can use that fame to get published. The results are varied and the quality often questionable. However, Dick Francis is someone who […]

I have written about today’s riches of Irish writers, some to my taste and others definitely not but Maeve Binchy was writing of a different Ireland, somewhat contemporary with Edna O’Brien. This is a country still under the iron control of the church when abortion is illegal but illegitimate babies are almost forbidden; women bearing […]

Anita Shreve is one of those East Coast American writers who often seem to be facing out over the Atlantic, very, very taken with historical and political events in Europe. This author had written an impressive list of novels before being thrown into the limelight by Oprah Winfrey who chose ‘A Pilots Wife’ as the […]

Most readers will be familiar with the novel Chocolat from about the year 2000 and the delightful film that followed later starring Juliette Binoche, Johnny Depp and Judi Dench. This was maybe my first foray into magic realism, long before I knew the term and I eagerly lapped up the subsequent books following the same […]

It is always good to have a book recommended by a friend as this was. I looked up the author and discovered she taught creative writing at the University of a Kent in Canterbury. And then I turned to the first page. My friend had not mentioned that this book, primarily about friendship of various […]

I have read several books by Salley Vickers including ‘The Cleaner of Chartres’, ‘Miss Garnet’s Angel’ and ‘Mr Golightly’s Holiday.’ I enjoyed them all: imaginative, well constructed stories. This book is the author’s latest offering and continues in a similar vein, just slightly fey, just a touch of magic realism. ‘The Gardener’ is a novel […]