dittybox

Another American novel that has a lot going for it.  It has been a number one New York Times bestseller and also been featured in Reese Witherspoon's book club, so seemed like a safe bet when I was choosing a book in the library. It's about a husband and father who suddenly disappears, and shortly afterwards a few things happen that suggest to his wife that he may not have been the man she thought she married.  Hannah is Owen's fairly recent second wife, and also step mother to his sixteen year old daughter Bailey, so there is a whole section of both their lives that she knows very little about.  They have all been living together on a house boat in Sausalito, Northern California, and before that Hannah had been making a living as a wood turner making bespoke pieces of furniture for wealthy clients in New York.  She made the move over to California just before her marriage to Owen, and he told her that before he moved to the houseboat he and Bailey had been living in...

You could not make this novel any more Irish unless it came with a free pint of Guinness with a shamrock stuck in the top.  It was even awarded the Irish Novel of the Year by the Kerry Group earlier this year, and they are only interested in books written by Irish authors so they know their subject. It's beautifully written in that slow and moving lyrical style of classic Irish literature, so if you are looking for something to skim read on the plane you had better put this down and move on to a wodge from David Baldacci.  The plot in this book will not be hurried, but I promise you it is worth hanging on in there as you will feel the cold and rain along with the community of Faha gathering around you. Set in 1962 during the run-up to Christmas, it centres around Dr Jack Troy who is the much respected village doctor.  Back in the early sixties there was only one doctor for each village, and they stayed in post long enough to see several generations and knew everything the...

  This great lump of a book (600+ pages) was Min Jin Lee's first published novel and was the product of years and years spent learning the craft of writing.  The author says in the front of the book that she wanted to be sure to hone her skills before putting a book together, and seems to have taken a very scientific approach to understanding form and construction. You have to admire anyone who can work through a book of this size, however long they have been writing, and she neatly brings together Korean and American cultures and explores the different ways of thinking.   A Korean immigrant family living in New York is at the heart of the book and the eldest daughter, Casey, is testing the limits of what her father will allow as she reaches an age when she can either continue her studies or go out and get a job.  Her family run a dry cleaning business and Casey's father is desperate for his two daughters to get a solid American education and go on to do greater...

This book is translated from Icelandic and has a distinct chill in the style of writing, but don't let that put you off as this is a very cleverly constructed story. Right from the outset you know that a young woman has been murdered and her body concealed in one of the volcanic fissures that are a feature of the landscape, but you don't know who is responsible for this crime. For her family, Isafold has simply disappeared, and after two weeks of silence, her sister Arora travels from England to try to discover what has happened to her. The two sisters are both half Icelandic so Arora is familiar with the country and knows who she can to speak to to get some leads.  The block of flats where Isafold lived with her boyfriend is home to a number of people who each have their reasons for staying out of the police investigation, preferring to keep quiet rather than share what they know. As the book progresses more characters come into the story, adding layers of complexity to the pl...

  Jean Kennedy lives in dublin, Ireland as the second eldest in a growing family.  A lot is expected of her as the eldest girl and her mother relies on her to help look after the little ones.  Her story is told in her own words and we get to know her from the age of three up until her late teens.  Jean is a good girl who works diligently at school and does as she is told at home, but life doesn't always behave fairly and from a young age she discovers that you can get into trouble no matter how good you try to be. Her parents have their own problems as her Momma struggles with her mental health, which is made worse by post-natal depression, and her father who she always refers to as HE or HIM, often makes matters worse with his judgemental attitude.  Things take a bad turn for Momma and when she is not really coping at all, HE brings home a young local girl to live in and help.  All the little ones love this girl Tilly but Jean and Momma are not sure about ...

This is not a book you would want to read if you were feeling low and looking for something to lift your spirits.  It's a bit like reading the Book of Job from the Bible as the trials and tribulations that beset the young girl in the story are harsh and unrelenting. It is set in the time when the earliest settlers were making their way across the Atlantic to America, and the girl in the story is an abandoned Dutch orphan who had been sent to a minister's family to work as a servant when she was still only four years old.  After a few years of working in the household, the girl is told by her mistress that the family would be closing up the house and sailing to America and they would be taking her with them.  It was a dreadful journey where the ship was almost lost in a storm and when they arrived at their destination the Dutch settlers were already starving and unhappy to have more mouths to feed. I won't give away the circumstances, but after a while in the new land, the...

  Finding a new book by Elizabeth Strout is like receiving an invitation to some kind of reunion, because once you open the pages, old friends appear.  There's Lucy Barton and Olive Kitteridge and good old Bob Burgess and before you know it you feel as though you'd never been away. Olive has reached the grand old age of ninety one in this novel, and although she doesn't have the lead in this story, she still manages to make herself the most  important character just by letting other people come and tell her things.  Olive has heard that the novelist Lucy Barton has moved nearby, and knowing that she is a writer, Olive invites her to visit her in her retirement home to hear a story that may be of interest.  Lucy is happy to come along and Olive is pleased to find that she seems genuinely interested in her story. Not many people know how to properly listen to someone's story, but those that do ask questions to show they have absorbed the information and are keen t...

  Elizabeth O'Connor is clearly a clever woman with a great talent for putting words together and I found myself reading this book as though I was watching the people through a lens.  It's more of a social observation than a gripping tale but it's interesting to see how island people lived around the start of the second world war and the characters are very believable. The book is told from the perspective of an eighteen year old girl called Manod and it begins at a time when a dying whale washes up on the beach.  The whale is too big for anyone to move so the islanders are unable to save it and nature is left to deal with the problem.  The time of the whale fall coincides with the arrival of two university people who come to observe the old island customs before they are lost and Manod spends a lot of time with them translating Welsh into English. Old traditions were still observed on the island as most inhabitants had very little interaction with the mainland, so u...

  Last week I read A Town Called Solace by Mary Lawson and one of my comments was that it 'wasn't a stand-out read for me', and difficult to see how it had made the Booker Longlist.  This week I feel more justified in saying that because Held by Anne Michaels has such a high quality of writing and thought-provoking content that from the first page I felt as though I was reading something special. When I am reading, I particularly like it when an author gives me something to read that causes me to stop for a moment and consider what is being said.  The opening line of this book is: 'We know life is finite.  Why should we believe that death lasts forever?' The whole book is divided up into small segments as though we are turning the pages of a photograph album that gradually reveals who the people are from crumbs of information left for us to follow.  The segments are within sections that move across generations and the thread that binds them is the idea that we...

  This book has attracted a lot of attention, and appeared on the Booker Longlist for 2021, but I have to say that it was not that much of a stand-out read for me.  It's an easy to read with a gentle build to the plot but just not a real page turner that I couldn't wait to get back to.  Maybe it suffered for being the book I read straight after Boy Swallows Universe . It centres around a man called Liam who has unexpectedly been left a small property by a woman who his family lived next door to when he was a very small child.  He barely has any memory of her so it is all a bit strange, but he is at a crossroads in his life having recently split from his wife, so he heads north through the forests of Canada to live there for a while. When he arrives at the house he finds it fully furnished with all the old lady's possessions exactly as she had left them when she went into hospital, but that doesn't bother him as he won't be staying long.  People notice that the h...

  Before reading this book I wouldn't have thought it was possible for a story to be both shockingly dark and then whimsical within a few paragraphs.  This novel is one of a kind and despite all the bad stuff going on all around, it is really a story about love. Love allows for difference, and the lead character, twelve year old Eli, accepts people for how they are in the present moment and looks for the good in their heart and soul.  Sometimes there is no good to be found, and on those occasions an enemy is made, but some people with serious criminal records can have good in their hearts if you care to look for it.  Eli's brother August has been mute since they were both involved in a serious accident which nearly killed both of them. They were travelling in the car with their father when the vehicle left the road and went over the edge a dam, plunging them into the water.  The boys were hauled out lifeless, but by some miracle they were both revived and in tha...

  I loved this book as it is the work of a real story teller.  This is the first sentence: 'She is twelve years old, and she will be married in the morning.' Who would not be instantly drawn in by that?  Shocking by today's standards, but in India in 1900, this happened, and it didn't always turn out to be a bad thing. A marriage broker had arranged the marriage and the groom is a man of forty whose first wife died leaving their baby son with no-one to look after him.  By marrying again, the man will immediately have found a nursemaid, cook and housekeeper and the bride's mother (who is a widow) wants to give her daughter the security she cannot provide herself.  The bride and groom have not set eyes on each other before the wedding, and the man is shocked to find his bride is just a child and he storms away from the altar.  He is only persuaded to return after being persuaded that the shame of being left stranded on her wedding day will mean that no-one el...

  I am sixty six so I guess you could say that I have already mastered this subject, but when I saw this in the library I thought I might see how someone else is handling it. It's not exactly a Haynes Maintenance Manual, more a re-telling of the events that led to Lyn Slater becoming known as 'The Accidental Icon', and you may have seen her blog or her posts on Instagram.  She's very stylish and when she became accidentally famous she was living in Manhatten and already had a keen interest in fashion.  I was only a few pages in when I decided that I probably wouldn't ever wear Japanese deconstructed clothes from high fashion brands, so I must confess I just skimmed through the rest of the book.  We don't need lessons in how to be old because it creeps over you like fog in the night and all you can do is stay healthy and don't get tempted to follow any light. I often hear people say that they don't feel any different inside than when they were teenagers, ...

  If you are expecting your first baby then I would suggest you give this novel a good wide swerve as Claire Kilroy takes you right to the messy heart of motherhood with all the tears and sleepless nights that go with it. If you've already done the baby thing, it's the kind of book that brings it all back, and it's interesting to note that not much has changed over the years.  These days you might be able to tap in to Mum's Net at three in the morning, but the bottom line is that you will still be awake at three in the morning and you will never know tiredness like the kind you feel during the first year of your baby's life. Relationships are tested to breaking point, and never mind discovering the personality of the new life you have produced, you quickly find out a whole lot more about yourself.  When you are that tired the gloves are off, and it won't just be the baby that ends up crying.  Nothing can ever prepare you for the seismic shift into the world of m...

  ' Everyone sees what you appear to be, few experience what you really are.'                                                                                                          Machiavelli  Not a quote from the book, but a line that kept coming to mind as I read on through the life of Mrs Bridge.  All those of you who think that our lives have never been put through such scrutiny should spare a thought for the Country Club classes living in Kansas between the wars. The picture on the cover is very apt because the story is told through a collection of short accounts that gradually develop into a detailed personality portrait of India Bridge.  Throughout...

  This is about family, or more specifically three generations of Irish women, who have to work out how to deal with the men who weave in and out of their lives.   Nell is the youngest of the three, just starting her independent life after college, and her mother is Carmel who has never told Nell who her father was.  Carmel's mother was Terry who was married to, and then abandoned by, a (fictional) well-known Irish poet, Phil, whose work is referenced throughout the book.   In each case, the women link up with men who they imagine to be better than they are, and so form relationships with a vision of a man rather than the reality.  Men come and go throughout the book, but it is the women who remain in their places and each generation carries on as best they can. Women carry the weight of the family despite all the squabbles and personality clashes. Anne Enright is a master of fine detail that can be unexpected and all the more powerful for that: 'Ronan...

  There are some books that seem to have more to tell than just the story, and this is certainly one of them.  It's set in a remote part of highland Scotland, and there are three stories about the inhabitants of Glen Conach, separated by centuries, but happily running concurrently in the book. The land is known as Glen Conach after a religious man who lived in a cave on the hillside, and had been known to perform miracles.  The legends associated with Conach were passed down verbally for many years, but there was also a written account of his life held in the library of the local Laird who lived in the middle of the nineteenth century.  At that same time, a young man called Mr Gibb wrote to the Laird to ask if he could come and make a transcript and a translation of the document, which was written in Latin, and he was invited to stay for a summer to complete his work. Jumping up to the present time, the highland scenery is much the same, and the older villagers can s...

  At almost 800 pages, this is a chunk of a book and reading it is like inviting a whole new family to become part of your life.  This is a fictional family history covering multiple generations and multiple branches of the family tree, but it is so much more than that as it embraces social history and the power of women through the centuries. Honorée Fanonne Jeffers states in the back of the book that this is not an academic history book, but after spending ten years reading countless books as research, it might as well be, as it is historically accurate and delivers an important message on Black feminism.   Despite the amount of pages and the historical references, this book is a compelling read as the extended family comes alive on the pages.  There are people you will love and people you will despise, but the author uses the story line to carefully offer up opposing views - not so much as an excuse for poor treatment of fellow humans, but to offer an in...

  This is good.  So good that I am going to nominate it as one of my all time favourite books, right up there with A Gentleman in Moscow my Amor Townes. It only took me a few pages to realise that I had found a book in an entirely different league to most other novels I read.  It's the kind of book that brings back the joy of reading through cleverly written prose.  I think that is the key to the whole book, it's clever. Set in the early 1960s, it perfectly captures the difficulties of being a woman in a man's world.  If you think the workplace is a hard slog now, you really aren't old enough to remember that time when the kind of office politics that was generally accepted then would see people arrested if the same thing happened today.  Women were always to blame, even if the woman was the victim, and any complaints to the management could easily result in the woman being fired.  Senior men were untouchable. Elizabeth Zott is a research chemist....

  Originally published in the 1960s, this novel received little attention and then just quietly slipped away, but now it has been reprinted many years later and it is finally getting the recognition it deserves. Set in Ohio in the years following the great depression, the book centres on the tragic life of Percola, a badly neglected twelve year old who has been raped and made pregnant by her own father.  Her mother had never shown her any affection and much preferred the company of the white people she worked for.  Neighbours saw Pecola as a toddler wandering around the streets crying for attention, but somehow she had become a dark warning of everything they dreaded, so she was always shunned, and other children were bought indoors rather than be allowed to play with her. This is not an easy read and shows the frightening inevitability of lasting damage to a person who has been pushed aside by everyone since birth.  Pecola lives in a predominantly black community bu...