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  Ooof.  This one got me and it's still getting to me now.  I didn't expect to have so much in common with a young woman of Korean heritage, but feelings of grief and loss are universal, and in that, we are all one and the same. My mother died ten years ago when I was in my mid-fifties, but as Zauner observed, we are all children again when our parents are dying.  Mum and I hadn't always seen eye to eye but as she declined, an unspoken truce was called, and we suddenly appreciated what we had in each other and tried to make amends.  As I read through the book, I recognised the desire to demonstrate things I had learnt from her.  Zauner cooked traditional Korean food for her mother and I poached haddock and cut little sandwiches for mine. Even when you know it is coming, nothing prepares you for the death of the parent, and I think Zauner was quite masterful in describing the times both before and after her mother died.  When the final breath is taken, ...

  This was a quirky little find.  The New Books shelf in the library was a bit depleted last Friday so I ventured a little further into the main fiction shelves and picked this up after spotting the word 'Pulitzer' on the cover. The book was shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize in 2012 but it didn't win because nobody won.  No prize was awarded for fiction that year because no book received a majority of the votes from the board members.  The board was under no obligation to give a reason for this, so they didn't.  Some things in life must remain a mystery. It's a novella rather than a full novel, but by the end it feels greater than the sum of it's 116 pages.  Set in the American West in the early twentieth century, at a time when a man looking for employment could find work as a logger or bridge builder, and leave at the end of the summer season with enough money in his pocket to buy a bit of land for himself and his family.  In the book, that man is R...

  This is an outstanding piece of writing and flawlessly brings into focus some of the marginalised communities of Oakland, California. Leila Mottley started writing this book at the age of seventeen, and although it doesn't reflect her personal experience, she lives in Oakland and clearly has an understanding of how some of her fellow citizens are forced to live. The story is based on a real crime that Mottley first heard about when she was 14, and couldn't stop thinking about because it concerned a girl of a similar age.  In 2016 she read horrifying reports of  sexual abuse of a teenager by a network of police officers in Oakland. Mottley was struck by the way the media focused on the impact on the police force and their relationship with the community and not the girl.  What about the girl?  What about other girls like her whose story is never told?   Questions like these planted the seed for this novel and the book made such an impact that it becam...

  Hey! Look at me reading two books in one week and putting up three posts in four days.  That has to be some kind of record for me. To be fair, the last two books have been very short, and I really don't have much to say about this one, so I am clearly padding here.  She and her Cat has a cute cover and it's about cats.  The author is 'the hugely popular anime film-maker of 'Your Name' and he looks very pleasant in his photograph so everything is good so far. Inside the front cover it says that the book 'explores the magic of the everyday',  which seems to be a polite way of warning the reader that not much is likely to happen, and please don't spend too much time looking for the promised 'heart-stopping wisdom and warmth' because that seems to have been cut from the English version. If you like reading a cat's observations on life, then this might be for you, but before I say anything mean, I will just remind you that it has a very nice cov...

I read this book straight after Winnie M Li's novel Complicit and discovered that Small Things Like These is another example of something terrible going on that many people must have known about, but no-one dared challenge.   Imagine a world where women could be locked away for years, or even life, for having sex outside of marriage or even accused of behaving in a flirtatious manner.  Even those raped as under-age girls could be taken from their families and and set to work as slaves in money-making laundries; their babies taken from them and given away to strangers (if they survived). Most shockingly, that world was Ireland where the Catholic Church ran the Magdalene Laundries right up until the 1990's and they only stopped because the nuns accidentally exposed the truth of what was going on behind their locked doors. Claire Keegan's beautifully written book presents the situation as a dark shadow sitting in an Irish community where people go about their business turnin...

  Would you speak up? That is the question the reader must ask themselves time and again. Winnie M Li wrote this book in the wake of the Harvey Weinstein scandal, and subsequent 'Me too' revelations, and she has constructed an intelligent scenario based on detailed research into the film industry.  She has steered away from sensationalist writing, there are no sleazy details, but the emotional cost to individuals is covered at length.  Victims have their lives changed for the sake of one man's momentary pleasure.  He gets to move on and walk away, they do not.  The book takes the form of statements given to an investigative journalist and follows the early career of Sarah, a young woman eager to make her mark as a producer in a small independent film company.  When a wealthy businessman joins the company and helps bring them more success than they ever dreamt of, they discover his 'party lifestyle' is just a means to an end.   Who knew what w...