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  Published: October 2016, Hodder and Stoughton Genre: fiction Themes: Ireland, crime, secrets, relationships, family My rating (out of 5): ❤❤❤ I went into the library looking for a book by Graham Norton as I keep seeing positive comments about his books on Twitter, and I felt I might be missing something. Holding seems to be his first book, and the library copy has a Radio 2 Book Club sticker on it, and I think it's fair to say that it's a perfect book for that reading group.  It's a chatty style of writing that I could imagine would be how Graham would recount a tale if he was in conversation with someone, and there are sufficient strong elements to the plot-line to keep it interesting to the end.  When I first started reading I thought it was going to be a bit thin on plot, as much of the story involved character descriptions, and I was starting to wonder how it was going to pull together.  Then the dramatic events began to unfold and, once I could see how everyon...

  Published: 2014, penguin Genre: fiction Themes: adventure, old age, romance, walking, companionship My rating (out of 5): ❤❤❤❤ With another COVID lockdown looming, I made it my business to get down to the library and pick up enough books to get me over Christmas and then a few weeks into the New Year.  I wanted to get something fairly easy going, that didn't require too much concentration and that I could pick up and put down without loosing track of the plot.  Etta and Otto and Russell and James by Emma Hooper fitted the bill perfectly. Don't get me wrong, this book is not fluff and nonsense, but it does read easily and I liked the characters described in the story.  The principal character is Etta who is a lady of 82 who has started to become forgetful and suddenly decides she would like to see the ocean, just once, before it is too late.  This may seem like a simple thing to do, but Etta lives in Canada, and the route she wants to take is 3,232 km and she i...

  Published: October 2019, St Martin's Press Genre: fiction Themes: imprisonment, siberia, gulag, endurance My rating (out of 5): ❤❤❤❤  Cilka's Journey by Heather Morris is one of those books you pick up with trepidation for fear of what horror may be contained within the pages.  Novels based on true stories of unimaginable cruelty are always going to be difficult to read, but it is still important that the truth is told in the hope that we can prevent such things happening again. The book follows the true story of Cilka Klein as she is moved from Auschwitz-Birkenau Concentration Camp into post-war imprisonment in Vorkuta Gulag, Siberia, at the age of eighteen.  She has already spent three years in Auschwitz and has survived by working as a guard in one of the huts where women spend their final hours before entering the gas chambers.  At the end of the war, when the Russians liberate the camp, she is sentenced to fifteen years in the gulag for assisting and slee...

  Published: November 2020, Hodder and Stoughton Genre: Autobiography and biography Themes: family relationships, yorkshire, cricket, television My rating (out of 5): ❤❤ Like Father, Like Son by Michael Parkinson is a new book that feels as though it has been pulled together in haste after an emotional interview on television with Piers Morgan for 'Life Stories'.  During the interview, a now octogenarian Michael Parkinson, was reduced to tears as he recalled his relationship with his father and the strength of emotion that burst forth surprised him as his father has been dead for over thirty years. Michael Parkinson's son Andrew had been pushing for a book about the strong bond between Michael and his father, John William, since the publication of Michael's autobiography, Parky, in 2008 but Michael had always resisted writing such a book.  He felt he had already covered all there was to say about his father in various short pieces previously published, and he wanted ...

  Published: 1996, Jonathan Cape Genre: Fiction Themes: northern ireland, the troubles, family My rating (out of 5): ❤❤❤❤❤ While the library is closed I am re-reading some of the books on my own shelves and I'm glad the lockdown bought me back to this gem of a book. Reading in the Dark by Seamus Deane is such an accomplished piece of writing that it could act as a real deterrent to lesser mortals to ever try to commit a story to paper.  It tells the tale of a family in Northern Ireland who suffer over three generations because of the grandfather's political associations and the true story of a shadowy incident in the past is gradually revealed by his grandson. As I was about to write the paragraph above, I realised I couldn't think of the boy's name, and I turned back to the book to flip through the pages to find it.  It was only then I discovered that the boy is never named but I didn't notice that at any point when I was reading the book. Each chapter is only a fe...

  Published: 2019, Galley Beggar Press Genre: Fiction Themes: stream of consciousness, family My rating (out of 5): ❤ I very rarely give up on a book but I am just about to give up on this one. Ducks, Newburyport is written by Lucy Ellmann and is physically a breeze block of a book.  I borrowed it from the library, purely because of it's size, because I needed a stock of fiction for the impending lockdown, and I didn't want to run out of reading material. The front cover tells me that the book was longlisted for the 2019 Booker Prize, and that gets a tick from me whenever I chose a library book.  There are also very favourable reviews from The Irish Times, The Observer and the Guardian so more ticks for those.  On top of that, almost anyone who had a Fiction Pick list for 2019  included Ducks, Newburyport so after noting all that, what's not to like? Well.... What they don't tell you on the cover is that the book is written in the 'stream of consciousness' ...

  Published: 1996, Simon and Schuster Genre: Fiction Themes: America, marriage, fidelity, crime My rating (out of 5): ❤❤❤ Douglas Kennedy is the writer who gave us The Pursuit of Happiness, and I had high hopes for this novel, but I don't think it works as well. It is the story of a marriage told from the perspective of Hannah Buchan, who we meet as a girl in college, and the story runs up to the present day when she has reached her sixties and has both children and grandchildren.  Hannah grew up in the shadow of her father who made a name for himself as the first professor at the University of Vermont to speak out against the war in Vietnam.  Her friends thought this was cool, but Hannah found his reputation put pressure on her to have her own radical streak, but instead she becomes as conformist as possible. Her mother is a difficult woman, who is blunt to the point of rudeness, and most of the time the family works around her mood swings as carefully as they can, but f...