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  At almost 800 pages, this is a chunk of a book and reading it is like inviting a whole new family to become part of your life.  This is a fictional family history covering multiple generations and multiple branches of the family tree, but it is so much more than that as it embraces social history and the power of women through the centuries. Honorée Fanonne Jeffers states in the back of the book that this is not an academic history book, but after spending ten years reading countless books as research, it might as well be, as it is historically accurate and delivers an important message on Black feminism.   Despite the amount of pages and the historical references, this book is a compelling read as the extended family comes alive on the pages.  There are people you will love and people you will despise, but the author uses the story line to carefully offer up opposing views - not so much as an excuse for poor treatment of fellow humans, but to offer an in...

  This is good.  So good that I am going to nominate it as one of my all time favourite books, right up there with A Gentleman in Moscow my Amor Townes. It only took me a few pages to realise that I had found a book in an entirely different league to most other novels I read.  It's the kind of book that brings back the joy of reading through cleverly written prose.  I think that is the key to the whole book, it's clever. Set in the early 1960s, it perfectly captures the difficulties of being a woman in a man's world.  If you think the workplace is a hard slog now, you really aren't old enough to remember that time when the kind of office politics that was generally accepted then would see people arrested if the same thing happened today.  Women were always to blame, even if the woman was the victim, and any complaints to the management could easily result in the woman being fired.  Senior men were untouchable. Elizabeth Zott is a research chemist....

  It's not all fluffy lambs and buttercups deep down in the English countryside, and people whose families have farmed the same land for generations can have their own superstitions and traditions that mean very little to anyone else. Andrew Michael Hurley takes us to the remote village in The Endlands, somewhere just south of Yorkshire, where the weather and waterways are harsh enough to kill any animal or person - that is if the Devil doesn't get to them first! The people of The Endlands take the presence of the Devil very seriously.  For the villagers, he lives among them jumping from animal to animal or animal to human and back again.  Tradition leads them to work with him, and in order to keep him away from the houses they have Devil's Day, which is celebrated with the same enthusiasm that we would show for Christmas. Families learn to stick together in self preservation, and sometimes that loyalty takes precedence over everything else.  Wrong doings are covered...

  Originally published in the 1960s, this novel received little attention and then just quietly slipped away, but now it has been reprinted many years later and it is finally getting the recognition it deserves. Set in Ohio in the years following the great depression, the book centres on the tragic life of Percola, a badly neglected twelve year old who has been raped and made pregnant by her own father.  Her mother had never shown her any affection and much preferred the company of the white people she worked for.  Neighbours saw Pecola as a toddler wandering around the streets crying for attention, but somehow she had become a dark warning of everything they dreaded, so she was always shunned, and other children were bought indoors rather than be allowed to play with her. This is not an easy read and shows the frightening inevitability of lasting damage to a person who has been pushed aside by everyone since birth.  Pecola lives in a predominantly black community bu...

  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...