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This is one of those books that I didn't want to end.  Turning the last page was like waving goodbye to family after they've been to stay for a while and now I sort of miss the Whitshanks. I'd forgotten that it was Anne Tyler who wrote The Accidental Tourist, which I loved, and now I am wondering why I've left it so long to pick up another book from Anne Tyler.  There's a real familiarity to the people in her books, and not only can I visualise them clearly, but I can sense the atmosphere around them.  In A Spool of Blue Thread, the Whitshanks are an established family living in a home that was built and occupied by Mr Whitshank's father.  This solid home with it's fine wooden porch is integral to the story of the family, and it many ways it represents who they are.  Mr Whitshank Senior originally built the house for another family, but during the construction he fell in love with it and had a sense that he would one day it would be his own. He was able to b...

With more twists than a bag of cough candy, this book will keep you wondering what's happening right to the last page.  It's a dark modern story told through a collection of letters and a few random documents and it tells the tale of a honeymoon that didn't go exactly to plan. The newly married couple, Richard and Evelyn had been gifted a honeymoon stay in a fashionable Turkish hotel by Richard's mother, and at first Evelyn thinks that her biggest problem is her interfering mother in law, but that pales into insignificance once they meet the beautiful Isabella who runs the hotel. The hotel has become something of a local landmark after an elderly couple staying as guests drowned in the sea the previous year.   Isabella tells Richard and Evelyn that the man was sleepwalking and left the room heading for the sea, then his wife ran in after him but they were both swept away by the current.  On the face of things, it is simply a tragic accident, but Evelyn is not sure th...

  This book is the third of three books I was given as Christmas presents and I saved this one until last as it is non-fiction and I didn't feel ready to tackle it just after Christmas. It's a biography of George Orwell and the main focus is the time he spent on the Outer Hebridean Island of Jura.  I must confess that I have only read one of Orwell's books as a set book at school, and I can't say I enjoyed it very much, so I never went on to read 1984 or any of his other works.  The style of writing here struck me as being more of a research paper than a mass market biography as the text is often supplemented with superscript numbers leading to endnotes, and those take up twelve pages at the back.  There are also plenty of quotes from books and letters used to support the narrative and this book is clearly aimed at students of Orwell and other literary types rather than casual readers.    Orwell was born in India in 1903 in the heyday of the British Empire ...