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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Looking back, I’m pretty sure that over the years I have read umpteen Jojo Moyes novels, most enjoyably The Last Letter from Your Lover and Me Before You, which unquestionably took the her career into the stratosphere and really is a book that you should read if you haven’t already. Her rise as the doyenne […]
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 […]
Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk, by Kathleen Rooney, is a tough book to write about. I finished it over the weekend and I look back on it and smile, but equally, it’s a book that I almost abandoned several times. It came to me via the trusted source of book recommendations that is Ms M, […]
The Curious Charms of Arthur Pepper, by Phaedra Patrick, is just the most gorgeous novel. I read it at a time when I really wasn’t happy and when I most profoundly needed an emotional lift. It tells the story of Arthur Pepper a sixty-nine year old man, living in York, England. A widower for nearly […]
Of the two Emma Straub novels I have read, I like this one the best. Laura Lamont’s Life in Pictures is a novel about understanding who we are, as we travel through the different stages of our lives. Laura Lamont, movie star, begins her life in Door County, Wyoming as Elsa Emerson the daughter of […]
I want to start this review by saying that Life After Life also by Kate Atkinson is probably my favorite book of the last two years and may even be in my personal Top 5 of all time. It’s an epic tale of one woman, Ursula Todd, who is born over and over again into […]
Nutshell Book Reviews 