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  This book came at a good time for me as I needed something that was easy to read and not very complicated after a couple of weeks of personal trauma.  It's a book about friendship and family, and Nina Stibbe has an amusing way with words so that helps make it a pleasant read. Susan and Norma have been friends for years but its an odd sort of relationship where neither seems entirely satisfied with the other.  Norma is an academic woman and they met at university, but Susan dropped out without finishing her course after she found she was pregnant and decided to marry Roy.  Norma was very much against this choice as she felt that Susan was throwing her life away, but they remained in contact despite their disagreements. After she has had the baby, Susan asks Norma to be godmother to her daughter Honey, but Norma refuses as she doesn't want to be bothered with children, and this becomes another bone of contention that Susan can never entirely forget.  At times th...

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...

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...

You know how it is when someone gives you a paperback as a gift; you are never sure if you are going to like it, and if it happens to be translated form Norwegian and have a title relating to The First world War, then there is every reason to have a few doubts. But my doubts quickly faded after I started this book and it wasn't long before I was absolutely glued to it and resented every task that took me away from the next chapter.  If someone had told me that this book had won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction I would have believed them, it's that good.  Why is the cover not plastered with little rosettes from Prize giving organisations?  Lars Mytting has won prizes for his non-fiction work but he deserves more - and Paul Russell Garrett deserves another prize for a translation that doesn't in any way feel like one. The story follows Edvard Hirifjell through his quest to discover what really happened back in 1971 when his parents were killed in an accident and he was report...

 I'm not really sure where to start with reviewing this book as it is complicated and disturbing and I think only a person who has suffered some kind of trauma themselves could have written it. It begins in the early 1960 where we meet Isabel who lives alone in a house in the Netherlands that her family came to when she was young.  Right from the start it is clear that Isabel has issues.  She is obsessive and doesn't enjoy any kind of social interaction although she does occasionally meet up with her two brothers and their partners.  Isabel is keeping the house exactly as her mother kept it and she has taken on some of her mother's mannerisms as a way of navigating through certain situations.  She employs a young girl to come and cook and clean for her but she offers no friendship to the girl who has to deal with Isabel constantly checking on her. It is very hard to like Isabel as she has a mean side to her and will deliberately say things to hurt other people....

  I picked this one up because I thought it was written by David Mitchell the actor and when I got home and looked at it properly I realised it wasn't the same Davis Mitchell and I was a bit disappointed.  However, that disappointment did not last very long as I only had to get a page or two in before I was totally absorbed in it. Black Swan Green is a fictional village in Worcestershire and home to young Jason who is thirteen and living comfortably among a group of friends who all go to the same secondary school.  The book is set in the early 1980s, which is close enough to the 1970s when I was at secondary school, for me to find everything very familiar.   Back then, no-one was very interested in the mental health of teenagers and bullying was largely accepted as a fact of life unless it tipped over into something really noticeable.  Jason has a stammer which he is able to conceal most of the time by swapping out difficult words for something else, but if...

  An historical novel where the story takes place in the Spitalfields district of London in the second half of the 1700s.  At that time, Spitalfields was known for its silk weaving and the population was made up mostly of journeymen weavers and silk merchants.  In the years leading up to this time the silk they produced was considered to be some of the best in the world and commanded a very high price, but suddenly cheaper fabrics such as calico became available and many of the silk weavers were struggling to find work. The story follows a young woman called Sara who has been sent to London by her mother in the hopes that she will meet up with a cousin and make a good life for herself.  As Sara steps down from the cart that bought her in from the country, she is clearly alone and lost in the unfamiliar streets, and it isn't long before she is lured away by an older woman who claims she will look after her. Sonia Velton has done a good job of conjuring up the mix of e...

  This had me gripped from the very first line.  A woman has been admitted to to an Intensive Care Unit with breathing difficulties, and to complicate matters, she is thirty three weeks pregnant and her condition is deteriorating rapidly. What follows is a detailed account of all the tests and treatments the doctors carry out on Karin to try and establish what is happening.  Her partner Tom is also present and the book is written entirely from his point of view.  This is not the first time that Karin has been seriously ill, but none of her symptoms seem to be related to her past medical history, and just a few hours earlier she had nothing more serious than flu-like symptoms and a bit of a cough. I am always fascinated by anything related to medicine and I was impressed by the level of detail that the author managed to get into the narrative without making it seem like pages ripped from a medical textbook.  The tension is so real that it felt as though harm woul...

  I didn't find this a comfortable read.  Whereas some books make you feel as though you are sitting in front of a warm fire all wrapped up in a blanket, this is more like sitting in a cold outbuilding where you can never gather in any warmth. The review from The Times on the front states: ' This book demands to be savoured ' but right from the start I wasn't sure if I even wanted to read it.  It's set in the 1930s when many areas were plunged into poverty due to pit closures and the world-wide depression, and the British Government was setting up schemes to try and kick-start the economy and give people from deprived areas some form of employment. One of the schemes was set up by the Land Settlement Association that bought up farmland across Britain and then trained specially selected families how to work the land and make a profit.  The book tells the story of Lettie and Tommy who have come down from the north to take up a tiny piece of land in Essex.  They mo...

  A book about an American businessman living his comfortable modern life in a flat in Tokyo.  He appears to have everything a man could want but two things bother him.  Firstly, he is divorced from his American wife, and because of the vast continental distance between them, he doesn't see as much of his teenage daughter as he would like.  Secondly, he previously had a brief relationship with an elegant but mysterious Japanese woman, who he lost contact with, and now he is prepared to go to great lengths to find her again. After much negotiation, his wife agrees to allow their daughter to stay with him in Tokyo for an extended visit during which she will attend school in the city and broaden her experience.  Unbeknown to all of them, a troubled young man with a background of belonging to a disturbing sect has taken a deep interest in the daughter and begins tracking her life both online and in the street. With the father distracted by his quest to find the Japa...

  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...

  The take-away from this book is that bad things can happen to good people and none of us should get too comfortable in life as you don't always end up where you expected to be. Faith and religion are tricky subjects to tackle in a novel, but Elizabeth Strout understands her subject, and her portrayal of a young Christian Minister in his first church perfectly captures how theological expectation does not always survive contact with real people. Tyler Caskey is an idealist who has to learn that not everyone's moral compass is set in the same way, and even his young wife surprises him sometimes when she makes judgemental remarks about people in the congregation.  He is also aware that the women in town like to gossip and the slightest hint of scandal is enough to get their telephones ringing as there's nothing they like better than building something out of nothing.   Tyler doesn't like to correct people individually and hopes to get his teaching across through thoug...

  As you get older you start feeling a responsibility to preserve what you know about family history and this is why Michael Palin felt he he had to write the story of his Great Uncle Harry.   Some years ago an elderly cousin of his father passed on to Palin a box of photographs and papers that had come from down from her grandparents (his great grandparents), and as she had no children, she gave it to him to keep it in the family.  For a long time everything just sat in a box as there were other more pressing projects to deal with, but when working on a documentary about the last days of the First World War, Palin found his great uncle's name carved on a memorial at the site of the Somme battlefields.  When he discovered that there was no grave to visit and Harry's final resting place was 'Known Only Unto God', he knew he had to know more. Writing a book like this is a lot harder than it looks because the old family notebooks and papers only gave the bare outli...

When I started reading this I thought it was a translation because there was something about the writing style that reminded me of translated books by Isabel Allende.  Turns out the author is American, and when I think about it, the first name 'Dave' is probably not a traditional Spanish or Basque name so maybe that should have given me a clue. There are great swathes of history that I know nothing about, so the title Guernica meant nothing to me, although many of you may be aware that the Spanish town in the Basque region was heavily bombed by Hitler's German Air Force acting in support of General Franco in 1937.  There was no specific military purpose for destroying the town and many innocent civilians lost their lives during the prolonged raid. The Spanish artist Picasso (who I have heard of) was outraged by the bombing and within the same year produced a large mural as an anti-war statement.  Picasso and his painting 'Guernica' are mentioned many times and a rev...

  It's 1954 and a young mother has been brutally murdered.  There is only one suspect and that is her mother-in-law who had been staying with the family.  It's a terrible crime and the newspapers make much of the fact that the accused is a Greek woman from Cyprus who speaks no English and therefore requires an interpreter to help her throughout the court proceedings. The interpreter, Eva, is also Greek and the police come to her as and when she is needed, but she has never dealt with a case as serious as this one and it requires her to spend a great deal of time with Zina Pavlou who has been sent to Holloway Prison while awaiting trial.  During their time together Eva becomes quite protective towards Zina but feels powerless to do anything to help as she is only there to record what has been said and must not interfere. The plot-line is based on a true story and it becomes quite gripping as we learn more about Zina and her past life back home in Cyprus.  The aut...

  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, ...

  The Dark Island of the title is Orkney, which in reality is an archipelago of islands just off the northeast coast of Scotland.  Here in the UK we are familiar with TV detective series (based on the books written by Ann Cleaves) set on the Sheltland Islands in the North Sea to the north of Orkney, and in this book we have a similar backdrop but the main character is a journalist not a detective.   The author Daniel Aubrey wanted to write a book about autism, so the young reporter Freya Sinclair has autistic traits, although she doesn't have a firm diagnosis as she is waiting for the outcome of her assessment.   All through the story-line Freya's behaviour is very challenging for everyone around her as she is driven by her own issues and her colleagues see her as unreliable, unpredictable and self absorbed.  She doesn't follow instructions, she disappears without warning and she ignores her phone when everyone is worried sick about her.  The auth...

  This book didn't look like much when I picked it up but by the time I finished it I came to realise that I have met quite a few Gypsies over the years and hadn't cottoned on at the time. Gypsy surnames include Boswell, Lee, Penfold, Locke and Midgely and they are likely to deal in scrap metal, scaffolding, road surfaces burger vans as well as the traditional fairground rides.  When a group of workers came to do the block paving on our drive, I thought they had said they came from Romania but now I've read the book I realise they must have said they were Roma - Gypsies - and they were the hardest working men I have ever come across.  They were all related and their name was one from the book. Gypsies originally came from Egypt and spread upwards through Europe and on to the UK.  They have always preferred to keep to themselves and still use the Romani language, partly to keep up the tradition and partly because the rest of us don't know what they are talking about. ...

  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...

When author Martin J. Sherwin first signed a contract to write a biography of Robert Oppenheimer in 1979, he knew he was taking on a big project and thought it would take four to five years to complete.  In the end, his estimate was out by about twenty years, even after enlisting the help of Kai Bird to assist with the writing during the last five years. As he began to interview people who had known Oppenheimer, more and more information came to light, including over ten thousand pages of information taken from the FBI alone.  There were so many sources of information to consider that Sherwin quickly realised that the study was widening to take in far more than 'Oppie's' life story, and would have ramifications that shed light on the state of America during Oppie's time. As work on the book progressed, many other American institutions and foundations got involved and provided both financial and research assistance to help create a document that was to be a definative ac...