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  Published: 2014, penguin Genre: fiction Themes: adventure, old age, romance, walking, companionship My rating (out of 5): ❤❤❤❤ With another COVID lockdown looming, I made it my business to get down to the library and pick up enough books to get me over Christmas and then a few weeks into the New Year.  I wanted to get something fairly easy going, that didn't require too much concentration and that I could pick up and put down without loosing track of the plot.  Etta and Otto and Russell and James by Emma Hooper fitted the bill perfectly. Don't get me wrong, this book is not fluff and nonsense, but it does read easily and I liked the characters described in the story.  The principal character is Etta who is a lady of 82 who has started to become forgetful and suddenly decides she would like to see the ocean, just once, before it is too late.  This may seem like a simple thing to do, but Etta lives in Canada, and the route she wants to take is 3,232 km and she i...

  Published: October 2019, St Martin's Press Genre: fiction Themes: imprisonment, siberia, gulag, endurance My rating (out of 5): ❤❤❤❤  Cilka's Journey by Heather Morris is one of those books you pick up with trepidation for fear of what horror may be contained within the pages.  Novels based on true stories of unimaginable cruelty are always going to be difficult to read, but it is still important that the truth is told in the hope that we can prevent such things happening again. The book follows the true story of Cilka Klein as she is moved from Auschwitz-Birkenau Concentration Camp into post-war imprisonment in Vorkuta Gulag, Siberia, at the age of eighteen.  She has already spent three years in Auschwitz and has survived by working as a guard in one of the huts where women spend their final hours before entering the gas chambers.  At the end of the war, when the Russians liberate the camp, she is sentenced to fifteen years in the gulag for assisting and slee...

  Published: November 2020, Hodder and Stoughton Genre: Autobiography and biography Themes: family relationships, yorkshire, cricket, television My rating (out of 5): ❤❤ Like Father, Like Son by Michael Parkinson is a new book that feels as though it has been pulled together in haste after an emotional interview on television with Piers Morgan for 'Life Stories'.  During the interview, a now octogenarian Michael Parkinson, was reduced to tears as he recalled his relationship with his father and the strength of emotion that burst forth surprised him as his father has been dead for over thirty years. Michael Parkinson's son Andrew had been pushing for a book about the strong bond between Michael and his father, John William, since the publication of Michael's autobiography, Parky, in 2008 but Michael had always resisted writing such a book.  He felt he had already covered all there was to say about his father in various short pieces previously published, and he wanted ...