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  This is a great book, and I haven't enjoyed reading anything this much since I finished A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles.  It's so good that I wanted to start recommending it to people before I had even got to the end, and when I take it back to the library, I will be sorely tempted to point it out to another reader so they don't miss out.  It's exactly the kind of book I wish I could write myself. It begins in 1919 in a large county house in Dorset where we meet three year old Cristabel wandering around in the woodland surrounding her house.  She is hiding from her nanny her time until her new mother arrives, and she knows that will be soon, as all the uniformed members of staff are assembled outside to welcome home the master of the house with his young bride. Cristabel doesn't remember her real mother, as she died on the day Cristabel was born, but the new mother will soon become the lady of the house and one of the maids has suggested that soon there may ...

  Forgive the state of the cover on this much borrowed library book, but it should be no surprise to find it in this condition as it's almost too heavy to hold.  There are almost 900 pages to wade through, and it took me the full three weeks of library loan time to get through it, but it was certainly worth it. This is the third and last of the books Mantel wrote on the life of Thomas Cromwell, and begins at the time of the execution of Henry VIII's second wife Anne Boleyn, and runs through to the King's divorce from his fourth wife, Anne of Cleves.  All through that period, Thomas Cromwell continued to rise through the ranks of parliament and the royal court until he became so great he was even seen as a threat to Henry's throne.  After five hundred years, it is hardly a spoiler to say that things didn't end well for him and the book ends as Cromwell is executed for treason. Hilary Mantel conveys every detail of life in the court of Henry VIII, and although many of...

  As I had just finished Chris Packham's memoir, I was in the mood to continue on a natural theme so when I spotted Alys Fowler's book on the 'Recommended' table in the library, I decided to give it a go. This one doesn't have the gripping intensity of Packham's book as Alys Fowler has a much gentler tone and there are sections that are so laid back that I almost got the impression that she was hoping I wouldn't notice what she had written. The full title of the book is: 'Hidden Nature, A Voyage of Discovery' and that clearly has the dual meaning of both environmental and personal discovery.  There are two themes running all the way through as Alys takes up paddle boating through the network of canals around Birmingham at around the same time she began to think that she is probably gay. This would not normally be a problem, but Alys was married to a man at the time, and although she still loved her husband, she couldn't deny her changing sexualit...

  It's not very often it happens, but this is likely to become one of those books that I will remember forever.  It challenges the way the reader thinks about nature and the condition of being autistic, and I hope it has a positive impact on everyone who reads it. Over the first few pages, I found the writing style a little clunky, and I wondered why the editor hadn't smoothed the wording over a bit, but then after about 50 pages or so, I realised that the text  has to be left as it is because this is Chris.  The way the language is used is how he thinks and speaks, and I had demonstrated the eternal problem he has with the rest of us when I expected him to change it just to make it better for me! Once I got over myself, I allowed his language to do its job and he let me see the world through his eyes.  Chris has a unique view of the world and he is truly interested in every bird, every creature and every creeping thing.  As a child, he picked up dead thin...

  A slightly different post this time.  Instead of the usual few paragraphs about the books I read, this post is about an author talk I attended this week. The last book I read was Adele Parks' 'Just my Luck', and I'm afraid I thought it wasn't really my type of book and I took it back to the library thinking I wouldn't bother with any more from the author.  Anyway, that was a few days ago, and now I've listened to Adele talk about her writing career, I'm beginning to wonder if I haven't been unduly critical, and maybe I should give her another chance. I turned up to the talk with an open mind because you have to admire anyone who can shift 4.5 million copies across 31 languages, and today's fiction market is a very crowded place.  Adele has written a book a year for the last twenty years, and always has one in progress, one in editing and one to be promoted.  At the time of writing, she was just days away from the publication of her latest book,...

  A friend has invited me to be her guest at an Author Talk at her Women's Institute so I thought I ought to do a bit of homework before I show up to spend an evening with Adele Parks. You will see from the pic of the front cover that Adele Parks is a 'Number one bestseller', but somehow or other I had never read any of her work, even though she has over twenty books to her credit.  Just my Luck turns out to be one of her top sellers so I have to assume it is a good one to read as an example of her writing, and it falls very firmly into the category of Women's Fiction.   It's about a family who win the lottery, and what follows is a disintegration of their circle of friends, and a pretty comprehensive description of what not to do if you suddenly come into a lot of money.  To further complicate matters, up until the week before their numbers came up, the family were in a syndicate with two other families and now the jackpot  of over £17 million has come up,...

  Apologies for the picture quality of this one folks but I made a sudden decision to visit the library to grab another book, and it wasn't till I got there that I realised I hadn't taken my blog pic.  Anyway you can see what it says on the front despite the light glaring off the plastic cover. This was a good one and it makes a perfect summer read.  Not too taxing but very believable and there can't be too many fiction books that cover the subject of crop circles. It's set in 1989 which was a time when we were all obsessed by the mysterious appearance of ever-more complex crop circles that appeared in cereal crops.  No-one knew how they got there, but everyone had a theory.  Some people thought they were caused by freak weather conditions, but as they became more geometrically complex, many people genuinely believed they were created by aliens.   Almost disappointingly, they turned out to be man made, and this book follows the creative excursions carr...