The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo had been sitting on my bedside table ever since I finished Daisy Jones and the Six. Daisy Jones had really enthused me about the writing of Taylor Jenkins Reid and I wanted more. The weird thing is, that once I bought this book, I let it languish. I had […]
In what currently feels like a lifetime ago, I discovered Nina Revoyr and her wonderful novel about life amongst the super elite in LA, A Student of History. It opened up to me an LA that I had no idea existed and that has fascinated me ever since. Although I hadn’t exactly forgotten Revoyr recently, […]
Over the last week or so, I’ve been struggling with quite what to write about The Dearly Beloved by Cara Wall. It’s not really like anything else I have read and yet, in some fundamental way, it’s just like everything I read; really good modern fiction. What makes it different, is that it’s also about […]
Every now and then you read a book that you just love so much, that you wish you could move inside it, inhabiting the very world in which it is set. This is how I felt as I read The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix E Harrow. I actually don’t really know how […]
Over the last few weeks of summer it felt like everything in my life suddenly went tits up. If you are American and reading this, then I should explain that this is our British equivalent of ‘when life gives you lemons…..’, but actually it’s far more coarse and far more aptly describes how things feel […]
My dear friend Ms S advised me to read The Pull of the Moon by Elizabeth Berg. As we find ourselves rapidly pacing through our forties, the daunting fifties seem to be knocking at the door. The kids are growing older and the concerns of young children are no longer ours to share. Who knows […]
For some reason I had it in my mind that Euphoria by Lily King was a first novel, so I went online to see if she had published a second. Much to my delight I found that she had published not one, but three novels previously of which I was unaware. Choices! Choices! I promptly […]
Reasons to Stay Alive is not the kind of book that I would normally pick up. I’m a fiction reader, pure and simple. I only did so because it happens to be written by the wonderful Matt Haig and because it tackles the issue of depression. Over the last few months it feels like a […]
As I read Where the Crawdads Sing, one thought kept going around and around in my mind: what must this novel have done for North Carolina tourism? Honestly, if the The Husband wasn’t such a slave to the office and the kids weren’t constrained by the restrictions of school, I think that I would be […]
Like finding a good man, you sometimes need to meet the right book at the right time. In retrospect and due to a misunderstanding with my good friend Mrs P, I found this book at the wrong time. The House We Grew Up In isn’t really the kind of book that you read when you […]
Nutshell Book Reviews 