By the end of the first page, we are immediately immersed into the unconventional mind of Janina, dismissed by everyone around her as merely a mad old woman, yet endlessly insightful and imperfectly attuned to the world around her. This comic tale of death and vengeance is richly philosophical and oddly humorous, written in witty, melancholic prose, it is an ode to anyone whose sanity is questioned purely because they refuse to conform to society’s ‘norm’. Read More
“In the windowless back offices of a designer furniture showroom, women stand in a circle, stuffed into ill-fitting black jeans, grey jeans, olive jeans […] One of them is explaining something from her real, nonwork life, something about returning something she bought online – the frustration and indignity of the experience”. So begins Halle Butler’s […]Read More
The past is funny place. For some of us, it’s good. For some of us, it’s bad. For some, it sits in the middle, simply bordering on whether it needs to be spoken about or not. For Florence Claybourne, the past is an almighty landscape of confusion, betrayal and bewilderment, offset by a man called […]Read More
I really tried to avoid the never ending stream of tweets on my timeline obsessing about Conversations With Friends. I already fell victim to the online chatter about the profundity of Anna Burns’ 2018 Man Booker Prize winning novel, Milkman. The prose was so dense it was like trying to read treacle, and I gave […]Read More
I’ve always been an optimist. Glass half full? Absolutely. Do your best and that’s all that matters? Of course. There’s a bunch of books currently on the market that promote this sort of thing, from well-being and mindfulness to the benefits of practicing yoga with your dog or a glass of rosé. Not many boast […]Read More
Just before Christmas in 2015, a shocking attack took place in a suburban street somewhere in Glasgow. The journalist Russell Findlay was attacked by a hitman posing as a Royal Mail delivery man. The hitman, William ‘Basil’ Burns threw acid in the investigative reporter’s face and intended to stab him to death with a knife, […]Read More
BBC 4 Presenter Jenni Murray, who has run Women’s Hour since the late 1980s, has recently channelled her feminist persona within a new literary medium, A History of Britain in 21 Women. Thomas Carlyle once claimed “the history of the world is but the biography of great men”. Murray has put this theory to bed in […]Read More
Love; it’s one of those high-frequency words that are commonplace in modern culture but one can’t help but wonder if we, the progressive generation, have forgotten the depth of emotion, intimacy and true individuality that lies behind this word. For example, when I speak of my love of doughnuts, it does not conjure up images […]Read More
The Light Between Oceans is a novel exploring grief, tragedy and the grittiness of reality. Tom Shelbourne returns from the horrors of France in WWI to settle for an idyllic, simple life. He falls in love with captivating the Isobel Graysmark while in Point Partageuse, whom he takes to Janus Rock while he fills the […]Read More
Christmas 2016: I received four books from the bestselling/ new fiction Waterstones collection. All The Light We Cannot See was respectively first on my to-read pile. A New York Times number one bestseller and winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction 2015, I was really keen to start reading. Anthony Doerr has essentially crafted a […]Read More
What is it about the Cornish coast that instils such a sense of inspiration within the writers of 20th century literature? Is there something hidden within the serenity of the windswept beaches or the hard, rugged coastline that, without exception, enraptures all that pass upon them? The book follows the unlikely heroine, Mary Yellan, who, […]Read More
Having never read an Agatha Christie novel or any detective fiction before, I was pleasantly surprised at how crafted this novel proved to be. Albeit, I was rather sceptical; my idea of Agatha Christie was naive and tainted by an impression that only an older audience would enjoy her writing. I couldn’t have been more […]Read More
A Spool of Blue Thread cracks open a window to peer into the sprawling, diverse lives of a ‘regular’ family. This beautifully written novel gently enthrals, coaxing the reader to wonder about the story behind each wonderfully individual character. The fact that the story begins with emphasis on a ‘normal’ family shows that there is, […]Read More
I wish I could somehow travel in time, so that I could have a conversation with myself between the ages of around 9 to 13. I would then attempt to convince the stubborn, Nintendo DS-obsessed child Caitlin to read more, to buy all the books I was interested in and to make time for literature. […]Read More
I have long felt an outcast in the world of literature. While I have always frequented the likes of Jane Austen and Daphne du Maurier – and revelled in the depths of knowledge that I have discovered within the pages of their books – my true indulgence comes in the form of less prestigious and […]Read More
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