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Announcing 20 Books of Summer ’22: Add your links here!

June Miscellany!

In A Strange Room by Damon Galgut: Book 4 of #20booksofsummer22

Damon Galgut’s In a Strange Room is difficult to categorise. Melding fiction, travel-writing, linked short stories and memoir, it is structurally fascinating and quietly powerful. The book is written in three sections of around 60 pages, which feature a self-contained story about a journey undertaken by the narrator, who, like the author, just happens to…

No 372 The Missing by Andrew O’Hagan: Book 3 of #20booksofsummer22

Andrew O’Hagan’s fascinating debut defies simple classification. Ostensibly, this work of non-fiction is an exploration of missing persons however to call it just that would be to do it a disservice. It is also an autobiography, a piece of social history and a memoir of time spent travelling up and down the UK, in search…

746 Books: The Halfway Point!

I felt it appropriate during all my 20 Books of Summer madness to take a moment and mark the momentous occasion of me reaching the halfway point of my 746 books challenge! A well-ordered life is like climbing a tower; the view halfway up is better than the view from the base, and it steadily…

No 373 The Hours by Michael Cunningham, Book 2 of #20booksofsummer22

The Hours was the original working title which Virginia Woolf used for Mrs Dalloway and in this beautifully affecting novel, Michael Cunningham uses this as a springboard to explore a day in the lives of three very different women, all of whom are linked in some way to that book. In 1923, Virginia Woolf is…

No 374 Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned by Wells Tower: Book 1 of #20booksofsummer22

Wells Tower’s Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned is one of the best collections of short stories that I have read in a long time. His unsentimental, often brutal yet always brilliant stories lay bare the lives of ordinary people, all trying to do the right thing is a world of alienation and hopelessness. Written with a…