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  This is a biography but I don't think you will find many others like it.  Maggie O'Farrell seems to have had more than her fair share of near-death experiences, and all this trauma allowed for seventeen chapters with a different traumatic event every time. Some of the events are health related, but on several occasions something just happened out of the blue that could have ended her life in an instant.  Obviously she has survived everything that has been thrown at her, but it does make you wonder why some people seem to have so much to deal with when others sail through life with hardly a bump in the road.  She nearly died from a childhood illness and then had to spend a couple of years in a wheelchair and never fully recovered all her muscular tone or brain reaction times.  That residual low level of disability then went on to cause her great problems in childbirth, and on two other occasions she nearly drowned because her brain couldn't calculate how she wa...

This is only a short book but it packs a punch, and if you have teenagers it will probably make you feel quite uncomfortable.  As I have found to my cost, teenagers are capable of the most random acts, and just as you think you have a quiet one, they go ahead and do something you could never have prepared for. Once a person gets to their mid to late teens they have to be allowed to start finding their own way in life, and as parents we must keep our fingers crossed that we have taught them enough to keep them on the straight and narrow but there is no certainty of success.  Even the most mild-mannered teen can suddenly have a mad moment and trigger a series of events that change their lives forever. Anne Tyler has created a cast of young people who are socially awkward for one reason or another, and all most of them want is to find a group of people where they can fit in and become somebody in their own right.  The main character, Evie, is essentially lonely and sets out ...

This is a biography, but after reading it, I feel it is so much more.  It not only covers the lives of Mike Parker and his partner Preds, but also the lives two older men who they were so similar that it was like seeing themselves forty years down the line. The older men, George and Reg, had lived through a period of time when homosexuality was still illegal, but then survived to see state recognition of same sex relationships in 2005.  The new legislation allowed for Civil Partnerships that provided financial security for couples, (same sex marriage followed in 2014) and  George and Reg were the some of the first in their area of Wales to have the ceremony after living together for almost sixty years. Between the two couples, the book covers the history of British attitudes towards homosexual men from the time of the second world war through to present day. Before the laws changed, men lived in constant fear of being 'found out' and imprisoned, and casual use of an endea...

  We all have moments in our lives that we know we are at a fork in the road and the choice of direction we take will shape the person we then become.  Sometimes the road we chose gets tough and then we might start to wonder 'What if...?' and that is the premise for this book. I really enjoyed it as it is set in America in the early 1960s, right about the time of the Cuban missile crisis and the era of J F Kennedy, and everything from the clothes to the way of life is exactly as I remember it.  The story centres on a young single woman called Kitty who works with her best friend running a modest bookshop, and all seems right in her world until she starts to have the strangest dreams.  Every time she goes to sleep she finds herself living a completely different lifestyle as a married woman living in a smart suburban house with her husband and three children. At first, she enjoys the dreams, although she walks through her new found world as a stranger and at first does...

We all have our intellectual limits, and this book turns out to be the point of fail for me.  Reading it felt like peering through a misted up car windscreen where every now and again the wiper reveals something, but before you know it, the mist is back. On the back of the book the blurb says: 'Taking it's cue from the arrest and legally enforced chemical castration of the mathematician Alan Turing, Murmur is the account of a man who responds to intolerable physical and mental stress with love, honour and rigorous, unsentimental curiosity about the ways in which we perceive ourselves and the world.' I was interested to read the book because I have seen the film The Imation Game and came away with a lot of sympathy for Alan Turing who suffered for being a man of his time.  So, that gave me enough background information to be able to cling on to the more straightforward sequences of the writing, but once we got beyond simple memories into hallucinations and dreams, all I cou...

  This looks like a nice nostalgic read with it's watercolour pictures on the cover, but don't let yourself get too comfortable as life in the countryside between the wars was not all pretty flowers and hayricks. It starts off quietly as you get to know the characters, but before long it becomes impossible to put down, and I got stuck in that bind of racing through the final pages but not wanting the story to come to an end.  The author was clearly born long after the period of English history that she writes about, but my goodness, she captures the mood and the feel of what it must have been like to be a fourteen year old girl at that time. I am in my mid sixties, and had relatives living in Suffolk when I was a child and my elderly aunts were living their lives in a way that had seen little change since the turn of the century.  I remember the tiny cottage rooms with no indoor plumbing and jugs with basins set out in the bedrooms to allow people to wash before bed....

  Not sure what I can say about this novel that won't end up making me look a bit dim.  Truth is, I never really got into the flow of it, but I finished it because it was well written and I thought I might learn something - which I did. Paul Griffiths is a scholarly man who has clearly done a great deal of research before writing this novel, but the whole book is full of reminders that he is filling the gaps in historical record with narrative that 'might' have happened, and it would at least have been possible. I don't mind authors making a story out of just a few bare facts, and I imagine quite a few books that I have read in the last year or so fall into that category.  All I need to be told is: 'This is my take on what might have happened...' and then I am quite happy to roll with it for the rest of the book.  Please don't add the could haves.  This is an example from the beginning of Chapter 4 when Beethoven's ship is arriving in Boston: 'How co...