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 […]
The great thing about having a blog is that I don’t have to be completely objective all of the time or indeed any of the time. Blogs by their very nature are personal, you read my blog because you either share my opinion on books, or you are a friend and maybe want to give […]
Rooms is a very clever book. It has taken me quite a long time to write this review, largely because I really wasn’t too sure when I finished this story what I thought of it. I knew I liked it, but did I really love it? Rooms is a ghost story, but not like any […]
Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng is both unbelievably good and almost unbearably sad. In looking at the lives of one mixed race family in Ohio in the 1970s, Ng cracks open many of the complexities that still haunt America today, whilst also writing one of the great “family” novels of our era. […]
I find reading about exciting book ideas incredibly thrilling and when I found a brief synopsis of The Hundred Year House, I was one hundred percent in. A book where the house is the constant through time, written in reverse, from the modern day into the past? Joy, joy, joy! A friend had warned me […]
As surely as every American of a certain generation knows where they were the night Kennedy died, the same can be said of every Brit on the morning the news broke of Diana’s death. Whether you were a fan or not and yes, public opinion on Diana was very mixed at the time of her […]
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 […]
A friend and I were recently discussing David Mitchell and just what a great career he has had. Her observation was that he was ‘a very male writer’, creative, logical and left of center. Although these characteristics are not only associated with male novelists, I could see what she meant. Many years ago, I read […]
I am straight up going to say it. I loved this book. One of the single best things about my job is the summer holiday. Last Friday I had promised my children a bicycle ride, dog walk and other marvelous things, none of which they actually wanted. I was greeted that morning by Child Number […]
I have been duped and I really hate that feeling. M.R Carey’s The Girl With All The Gifts is the kind of book that I never and I mean NEVER read. Why? Simply put, it’s a zombie tale and I loathe zombie stories. In my mind, and I really do appreciate that readers everywhere will […]
Nutshell Book Reviews 