Category: My Reading

  • 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. […]

  • Seth Rhyming with Plate

    As I walked into the kitchen, Petroc Trelawney, my favourite Radio 3 presenter was talking about a book called An Equal Music, by Vikram Seth. However, he didn’t say Seth as I had been pronouncing it i.e. the Biblical Hebrew way. Instead he said Sate, as I said, rhyming with plate. In India this is […]

  • The Farmer’s Wife – Helen Rebanks

    I have read 2 books by James Rebanks, the husband of the above author. ‘The Shepherd’s Life’ and ‘English Pastoral’ are both excellent reads, written in a cogent and pleasing style and mainly autobiographical. Both books though do have an agenda that the author wants to communicate and that is concerning sustainable farming and our […]

  • The Last Remains – Elly Griffiths

    When you are selling many copies of your books, they are applauded by literary columnists and your readers wait avidly for the next instalment, it seems very brave to say: this is the last one. ‘The Last Remains’ is the 15th Dr. Ruth Galloway book and the last one in the series. I find that […]

  • Life of Pi – Yann Martel

    This 2002 Booker prize winner is one of the strangest books I have read. The sobriquet Booker prize winner does not always mean it will be a book that I enjoy. Some I haven’t even attempted to complete but this was quite an easy read. A zookeeper’s son, Pi finds himself adrift in a lifeboat […]

  • Landlines – Raynor Winn

    I think most readers will have heard of this author. This is her third book, following on from The Salt Path and The Wild Silence. The Salt Path was a publishing sensation chronicling as it did the walking of the South West Coast Path by Raynor and her husband Moth. Impressive enough to walk the […]