dittybox

  Love can be a tricky emotion as it can so easily drift into a desire for possession.  Love may be blind to start with, but after a while we seek commitment and a return of our invested feelings, otherwise that love can morph into something destructive.  Very few people could agree to share the object of their affections but what if that was the only way to keep them? This story begins in the 1950s and could only ever exist in that period of time.  A time when women were expected to marry in their late teens or early twenties and single men were treated with suspicion.  Companies and organisations chose family men for promotion and homosexuality was very rarely referred to.   Marion is a schoolteacher besotted by her friend's handsome brother Tom and, at 22, she now sees him as her only chance to be rescued from a life 'on the shelf'.  She and Tom are friends, and meet regularly, but there are no outward signs of romantic love and he seems conten...

  Set in the same period as Jane Austen's novels, this book tells the story of two women who were not part of the Assembly Room crowd.   Two women with dirty hands and ruined gloves who spend their days grubbing about on the beach at Lyme Regis looking for fossils. Not a suitable way for a gentle lady to spend her days, but Elizabeth Philpot is resigned to her fate of being a life-long spinster and has long since given up on doing the social rounds looking for a suitable husband.  At the start of the book, Mary Anning is a young girl who pushes her way into Elizabeth's life after she discovers that Elizabeth has started to collect fossils.  Mary and her brother spend their days picking up ammonites and 'devil's toenails' (gryphaea) from the beach and selling them to passing tourists to try and earn enough to keep the family from the workhouse, and she has never met a woman of Elizabeth's standing who was prepared to do such a thing.  Under any other circums...

  Here are two people, who were destined to meet, but circumstances allow them only a short time together before they must part and never meet again.  They don't know each other's histories and won't know what will happen to the other after they walk away in different directions, but that brief connection is key to both their lives. The book begins in the years leading up to the Second World War and the story follows two children; Marie-Laure who is blind and lives with her father in France and Werner who is an orphan living with a kindly woman in Germany.  The chapters are short and the story flips between the two characters until we know who they are and how they learnt their moral values. When the war comes they are swept up into the conflict and policy dictates they must be enemies, but in peacetime they would have shared a common interest and become friends.  Choices are taken away from them and each finds themselves tested both morally and physically.  I t...

  Fine is a funny sort of word isn't it?  Used in this context, it's one of those words that is only ever used as an answer.  We never go up to anyone and ask them if they are fine today, but almost everyone will use the word if they are asked how they are.  It's a word that is heavily dependent on the preceding words (or lack of them) to determine the full meaning.  If someone answers, 'Oh, you know, I'm fine.' they may be keeping a little something back, but there's no cause for alarm; if they just say 'fine' rather sharply, then their significant other had better watch themselves; and if they say they are 'completely fine' then it means the exact opposite and you are expected to shut up and go away. This book tells what happens when someone refuses to just shut up and go away and choses to stick around and be there for someone who could really use a little friendship.  There are not many people in the world who know how to show that kind o...

  People all over the world are being displaced by war, famine and disease and many countries are experiencing a rise in numbers of migrants seeking a place of safety. Here in the UK, thousands of people have arrived on small boats and every news bulletin tots up the cost of finding them somewhere to stay until they have been processed.  The numbers are overwhelming the official process that was designed to help them, and because there are so many, it is easy to forget that each individual person has a terrible background story that has bought them such a long way from home. The Beekeeper of Aleppo reminds us that the migrants just want somewhere safe to live, and most of them would probably have preferred to stay in their own country, but sometimes there is simply no choice.  You either run or you die and you have to be desperate to even contemplate journeys such as these. The author, Christy Lefteri, does not preach about the politics but simply tells a story of one man...

  Keith Ridgeway is apparently a writer in the 'modernist tradition in Irish Fiction' (whatever that means), but this is not like any other Irish writing I have come across in my (admittedly limited) experience.  There are no farms, no endless cups of tea, no mean auld Mammys driving all fifteen children to drink/drugs/atheism, and not even a mention of mashed potatoes (well, I don't remember any anyway).  This is a collection of short stories about a group of people living their lives in suburban London.  They have their jobs and when they come home they potter about.  There is a lot of pottering about doing all the stuff people do at home - including the private stuff that they wouldn't want you looking in on - but there you are peering into their lives as though you have a set of binoculars trained on their windows.  The writing style is conspiratorial and you keep watching and watching until you are lulled by the normalness of it all and then you get th...

  This is another non-fiction book that caught my attention amongst the display of new books in the library.  This one is a mix of biography, diary and travel journal by the award winning Danish writer, Dorthe Nors. The 'Line in the World' that the title refers to is the west coast of Denmark, stretching from the northern tip down to where the Wadden Sea meets Holland, (and for those of us who are not terribly familiar with the area, there is a nice little map in the front of the book).  Generations of Nors's family have lived on this coastline, and after many years living in cities, she decided to take a year to explore her homeland and delve into it's history. Denmark is not all that far north in the great scheme of things, but the weather along the west coast can be ferocious. For hundreds of years great storms have ripped into the land and in some cases have claimed the lives of thousands.  The very worst storm in 1362 is known as the Great Drowning of Men, which...