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  As well as being a keen reader of fiction, I have a bit of a side hustle with current affairs and politics.  Usually I gather my information from magazine articles and news feeds, but when I saw this new book displayed in the library, I decided I felt up to a deeper dive.   I was drawn to this title because in recent years there has been a noticeable shift to the political right in a number of countries, and some hard-won societal changes are at risk of being taken away again.  Since the end of the Second World War we saw a global shift towards social liberalism, and most people saw that as a good thing, and embraced a more equal society with greater levels of acceptance of minority groups.  However, it turns out that not everyone is prepared to accommodate such rapid change and now some sections of society are looking for a way to not only put the brakes on, but to crash the gears into reverse and slam their collective foot down ...

A cold chill creeps from this book.  There is no warmth in the tone and I found the main characters cold and selfish.  For twelve years Aina and Whitney have been in exile on an island for a crime they committed together.  They have been left in a croft with a pill dispenser that releases a pill for each of them every eight hours.  If they fail to take their pills at the correct time, they will die within a few minutes because of the toxic bacteria that rises from the island. The Warden collected them from the mainland and took them for processing, then they were blindfolded and taken by boat to the island where they must stay for twelve years before they will be eligible for parole.  After that time there will be an assessment that takes the form of a test of their loyalty, and the tests are different for everyone, so they will never know what is part of the test and what isn't. It's not badly written, and it has been selected as one of the books for Betwe...

  How is it that we all have the same words available to us, but some people can select and arrange these words into something that is more than just writing?   Burntcoat is sculpted from the language in such a way that Sarah Hall produces a piece of work that has a primal strength but also a real sense of human vulnerability. We trust our bodies to perform as we intend them to, but sometimes the unexpected happens and a sudden medical episode can change us forever.  Edith is ten years old when her mother suffers a devastating stroke and everything they know about living has to be re-learnt.  Edith relies on her creativity to distract her from her responsibilities and she teaches herself to put together huge pieces of art using whatever she can find in the land around their cottage. Wood is what she loves best, not processed planks, but wild chunks of wood with the grain raised and intact.  As a student she discovers the Japanese art of charring wood t...

  If I had been set a challenge to put together a stack of books under the hashtag 'Books that make you go Hrmm', then this one would certainly be in the stack.  I would probably also throw on a few of Alice Hoffman's Magic series and anything I could find with the phrase 'the hundred year old who....' in the title. The definition of an Hrmm book is anything that could have rung the bell at the fair but somehow didn't hit the target hard enough.   This story is about a young woman called Kya who was abandoned to live alone in a run-down shack hidden away in the marshlands of Carolina some time in the 1960s.  First her mother walked out because she could no longer live with her drunken and abusive husband, then Kya's siblings drifted away and finally her father disappeared without trace.  Kya is not even in her teens at this point but she manages to find ways to feed herself and generate an income that will allow her to continue to live out of the reach of p...