Category: My Reading

  • Went to London, Took the Dog – Nina Stibbe

    This is essentially a diary written by the author whilst living in London for a year, on what she calls a sabbatical from her marriage, left behind in Cornwall. Will she return the reader wonders as the days and months pass by. When she wrote this, was she already intending it for publication I wonder. […]

  • The Small Miracle – Paul Gallico

    This is a small review for a small book, that is worth reading nevertheless. I came upon this little hard back whilst doing some clearing out and reorganising. I knew I had read it before but I thought it deserved a second look. It took me less than an hour to read but I am […]

  • All around the year – Michael Morpurgo

    I enjoy reading books about the natural world, the countryside, the landscape etc and I very much enjoyed this one. It is however different in several ways. This is a diary written by Michael Morpurgo of the year 1976 and was never intended for publication. During that year, I actually remember it well: drought and […]

  • George Barker and Much More

    I had never heard of the poet George Barker but I was sent on a Barker odyssey recently by my favourite Sunday Times columnist India Knight. ‘Read Notes from the Henhouse, she said, ‘by Elspeth Barker. She was the wife of George Barker, who was the subject of By Grand Central Station I sat down […]

  • The Cellist of Sarajevo – Steven Galloway

    During the long siege of Sarajevo between 1992 to 1996, a cellist stood at his apartment window. He looked down at the bakery on the opposite side of the road and noticed that a queue was forming. This meant that people had learnt there might be loaves available. The cellist saw friends and neighbours and […]

  • Take Nothing With You – Patrick Gale

    I read a review of this book and decided I needed to read something by Patrick Gale. In the blurb, Stephen Fry calls this book ‘tender and funny.’ He is completely right. This is a Bildungsroman where Eustace moves fairly tortuously through a Weston-super-Mare childhood and his teenage years, helped by the cello and his […]

  • Lessons – Ian McEwan

    It took me some time to get into this lengthy book. The ‘lessons’ of the title are the lessons of life, in particular those of the main character, Roland. We follow his years from a small child through to old age. He has a family story which he grows up thinking is simple and straightforward […]

  • One Afternoon – Sian James

    This is a gentle book and an almost perfect one. I suppose it focuses on the extraordinary goings on of very ordinary people. The main character, Anna, tells her own story of being widowed early and left to bring up 3 small girls. Far too quickly, Charlie (from an earlier life) bursts into their home […]

  • The Lost Bookshop – Evie Woods

    You know when Amazon says: we think you’d like this one! Well, sometimes I ignore and refrain and well, other times I press the button. Evie Woods is an Irish writer of whom I had never heard but I think I was particularly vulnerable to anything with ‘bookshop’ in the title. This is full on […]

  • Brighton Rock – Graham Greene

    This is one of those books that I’ve always been aware of but only recently managed to get around to reading. The adjective that immediately comes to mind is gritty. The story is based in 1930s Brighton and is full of a grey, grimy underclass fighting for power in a gang saturated, gloomy seaside town. […]