I’m telling you stories. Trust me. It has been well over twenty years since I read Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges are not the Only Fruit and Sexing the Cherry in quick succession. I’m not sure why I never returned to her writing, but on the strength of The Passion, it seems that I have been missing…
Joan Lindsay’s Picnic at Hanging Rock, originally published in 1967 is a story which has not only captured the public imagination, but has entered into urban legend. A critically-acclaimed film version by Peter Weir and a recent television adaptation have only added to the allure of this tale of young white women who go missing at…
Aiding and Abetting is a curious little novel. It was Spark’s penultimate novel, written six years before her death, and is a fictionalised account of the fate of the infamous Lord Lucan. In London, in 1974, Lord Lucan — or “Lucky” as he was called by his friends — bludgeoned his children’s nanny to death…
I was reminded that Vendela Vida’s debut novel And Now You Can Go was languishing in the 746 when Susan at A Life in Books recently reviewed Vida’s new novel We Run the Tides, which I thought sounded really interesting. And Now You Can Go explores the emotional fall-out following a traumatic experience, but despite…
Read more No 408 And Now You Can Go by Vendela Vida Book 18 of #20booksofsummer21
I’m sure at some point Ira Levin has written a bad book, but so far, I haven’t read it yet. Following on from my enjoyment of Rosemary’s Baby and The Stepford Wives comes another crime classic, made all the more impressive by the knowledge that this was his debut novel, published when he was just…
Read more No 414 A Kiss Before Dying by Ira Levin Book 5 of #20booksofsummer
In the last few years I have read two books by Gwendoline Riley – First Love and My Phantoms – and have been incredibly impressed by both. My Phantoms was in my top books of 2020. Cold Water is Riley’s debut novel, published in 2002. While it is in no way as impressive as her…
Read more No 415 Cold Water by Gwendoline Riley Book 4 of #20booksofsummer
Claire Messud’s gracefully written novel The Emperor’s Children, is incredibly readable and entertaining but on a formidable scale. Set for the most part in New York City in 2000, it focuses on the social and personal lives of a group of young affluent New York professionals as they navigate a series of personal and political…
I am kicking off Contemporary Novellas week with a little known surrealist gem that explores the relationship between a lonely housewife and an amphibious humanoid sea creature named Larry. Yep, you did read that right but please trust me! Mrs. Caliban is, afirst and foremost, a romance. Dorothy is a depressed and trapped housewife whose…
Shirley Jackson’s best known works – The Lottery, The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived at the Castle – have placed her oeuvre firmly within the Gothic Horror genre. However her writing is more subtle than that label suggests and The Bird’s Nest highlights the difficulty in pigeon-holing her work and emphasises…
The Stepford Wives needs no introduction. Thanks to not one, but two movie adaptations, it has a plot so famous as to have entered cultural discourse – everyone knows what a Stepford Wife is now, but the novel upon which the films are based is a much more interesting and ambiguous affair. It is in…
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