Living in northern California, close to San Francisco, I seldom have reason to ever really consider what life in Los Angeles must be like. In the last ten years, beyond the amusement parks that litter the LA suburbs, I’ve never had reason or need to visit. As a backpacking European in the 1990s, a friend […]
Many years ago, when Child Number One was very small and I still lived in London, my dear friend Ms S and I used to frequent any number of playgrounds to occupy our children and to fill our days. This was in an era long before the iPhone became ubiquitous, when it was still possible […]
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 […]
Whatever weekend plans you have, cancel them. I’m serious. They simply cannot be better than sitting down and giving a day to Gabrielle Zevin’s The Storied Life of A.J.Firky. I absolutely adored this novel, in fact along with Victor Lavalle’s The Changeling, which is a very different kind of book altogether, it’s my favorite book […]
I at once loved Dept. Of Speculation by Jenny Offill and had to acknowledge that I had never read anything quite like it. It’s so beautiful and well done that frankly it has rendered me bereft of words to describe it. To tell you what this story is about, hardly seems to do it justice […]
The idea of a story centered around a perverse concept of ageing or death is not in itself new. Certainly in recent years the film industry has shown us Brad Pitt ageing backwards in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Blake Lively frozen in time in the beautiful Age of Adaline. Clare North gave […]
It’s the oddest thing, but sometimes I ‘save’ an unread book. Maybe it’s as simple as knowing that I have a trip coming up, or maybe it’s more complicated and I know that there will be a point when I just need to really lose myself in a book. All The Light We Cannot See, […]
Would you go to a hen night/bachelorette party of a woman that you hadn’t seen since school? Nora does. Would you go even if you knew that you weren’t being invited to the wedding? Nora does. Yes it sounds implausible, but in the masterful hands of Ruth Ware, this horrendous social scenario becomes utterly plausible […]
As with a silent companion, this book snuck up on me. I finished it two nights ago and have been thinking about it ever since as, just like a Henry James novel, I’m not entirely sure what I just read. Was it a descent into madness, was it a ghost story, a betrayal? What? What […]
I’m enjoying one of the most fantastic things life has to offer, the ‘excellent book roll’. To date this summer has been glorious, as I’ve moved from The Nightingale to The Perfect Stranger, on to the Magpie Murders, from there to How to Stop Time and then to Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine. Oh Eleanor! […]
Nutshell Book Reviews 