There is something I find comforting about novels that explore the intricacy and detail of everyday life. I enjoy books that are no less eventful than the lives of the majority of people, but which shine a light on the universal truths hidden inside. What strikes me most about Anne Tyler’s writing is the extent…
Read more No 413 Saint Maybe by Anne Tyler Book 7 of #20booksofsummer
When I saw that Annabel was hosting a week long celebration of the work of Iain Banks, called BanksRead, I was very keen to join in. Iain Banks was one of my Dads’ favourite writers and his suggestion that I try The Wasp Factory when I was sixteen, has probably had quite the influence on…
Read more No 421 Canal Dreams by Iain Banks for #BanksRead2021
Dear Committee Members contains two of my favourite literary tropes, mixing a hint of the campus novel with an epistolary structure. The novel is a hilarious mix of irascibility, disillusionment, and frustration, narrated in the form of a years worth of letters of recommendation from one Jason Fitger, a harried professor of creative writing and…
You Are Not A Stranger Here was Adam Haslett’s debut, written in his early twenties while he was studying law at Yale. For a debut, the maturity and complexity on display here is impressive, coupled with a sensitive and intelligent handling of difficult subjects. Haslett doesn’t put a foot wrong across these nine stories, which…
Read more No 445 You Are Not A Stranger Here by Adam Haslett
I reviewed Attica Locke’s debut novel Black Water Rising back in 2014 and wasn’t particularly impressed at the time. The Cutting Season, her second novel is a more accomplished and enjoyable crime novel. Almost all the action of The Cutting Season takes place in a historic Louisiana mansion called Belle Vie, once a working sugar…
Homer and Langley by E L Doctorow is a moving and elegiac novel, based on the real life Collyer brothers. The Collyers were wealthy New York bachelors who lived a reclusive life together in their four-story brownstone in New York. They were compulsive hoarders of all kinds of useless items and were found dead, buried…
By Crooked Cat author, Val Penny
Energy with Positive Purpose
There is nothing more satisfying than reading a book while sipping a hot cup of tea.
A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say. – Italo Calvino
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