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  I have read all sorts of books over the years, and very few of them have stuck in my memory, but the two that I had read by Cormac McCarthy (No Country for Old Men and The Road), remain in my head.  There is something about his story telling that is so compelling, that it's very hard to put the book down, even when the text makes for uncomfortable reading. McCarthy's books are earthy and raw and All the Pretty Horses is no exception.  It's the first book of a trilogy, and just a few days after starting it I was heading back to the library to pick up volumes 2 and 3 to make sure I could read them all back to back. The story is set in the early 1930s and sixteen year old John Grady and his friend Rawlings secretly leave their comfortable homes in Texas and set off across the open country heading for Mexico.  They are both experienced with horses and have a level of maturity that helps them manage the challenges of the terrain, but everything changes when a young lad ...

The backdrop to the story line in Don't Make Me Laugh is the stand-up comedy circuit, but do n't go into this expecting a laugh a minute just because the characters include a (fictionally) well known comedian.  There is a serious message in here, and anyone who doesn't understand that an abusive relationship can be emotional as well as physical, really ought to read it. We have all seen the big story-lines on the news that involve internationally recognised personalities who have used their industry clout to seduce vulnerable women, but this kind of abuse can happen in any level of society and women need to know what to watch out for. In the book, radio producer Ali Lauder is just over thirty and has got herself in a bad relationship with a married man.  When that affair is found out and comes to an end, Ali is emotionally vulnerable and responds to flattery from one of the big-name comedians who is in middle age but seems comfortable and unthreatening.  Once he has her c...

  I'm not sure how someone can write a book that is both sensitive and brutal at the same time, but somehow Alana S. Portero has managed it.  It's a debut novel so she has dived in at the deep end by telling the story of a young boy convinced that he is really a girl. The book has been translated from Spanish and has become an international best seller since its first publication in 2023.  I said it was both sensitive and brutal and that is because the young person is dealt with gently, but the family home is in a run down area of Madrid in the 1980s and some people in the neighbourhood are cruel and judgemental.  The apartment blocks are filled with people from all walks of life, and violence within families is commonplace, so no-one particularly takes any notice of cries in the night - unless the crying turns to screaming.  It is mind boggling to imagine how much pain and suffering some people have to endure before anyone does anything to help them. The singer...

This book is politically relevant at the start of 2025, although Valeria Luiselli began writing it in 2014, and it was first published in 2019.  Children from Central America and Mexico try to get to America to start a new life, but if they are captured by the immigration authorities, they are deported on chartered planes that fly out from remote airfields in the desert.  Some try to escape by running away, but with nothing to eat or drink they quickly succumb to the heat of the desert. The story of the Lost Children is told through the voices of one family who are making their own journey from New York to the Mexican border.  The four members of the family are not given names until they give themselves nicknames some way along the road, and as they travel onwards, the reader only knows the children as 'the boy' (10) and 'the girl' (5).  Their parents work on projects relating to creating archives of sound and that involves recording ambient noise as well as conversa...