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  This is about family, or more specifically three generations of Irish women, who have to work out how to deal with the men who weave in and out of their lives.   Nell is the youngest of the three, just starting her independent life after college, and her mother is Carmel who has never told Nell who her father was.  Carmel's mother was Terry who was married to, and then abandoned by, a (fictional) well-known Irish poet, Phil, whose work is referenced throughout the book.   In each case, the women link up with men who they imagine to be better than they are, and so form relationships with a vision of a man rather than the reality.  Men come and go throughout the book, but it is the women who remain in their places and each generation carries on as best they can. Women carry the weight of the family despite all the squabbles and personality clashes. Anne Enright is a master of fine detail that can be unexpected and all the more powerful for that: 'Ronan...

  I had another birthday this month (66 in case you were wondering - finally got my bus pass!) and this fine book arrived in the post.  I thanked several members of the family for it before I identified my brother as the sender, but he hadn't immediately sprung to mind as he's not generally known for reading anything that was written after the Edwardian era.  When I spoke to him on the phone he said he had been to lunch with the author, and after investigating her work, decided this book sounded fun and would make a great birthday gift.  Now, his idea of fun might possibly include The Canterbury Tales so one has to take his use of the f word with caution, but in this instance we were on the same page and it was fun.  Set in Los Angeles between the wars, the story follows a private detective, Philip Marlowe, at the point he is called in to find a wealthy heiress who has gone missing right after her engagement party.  Marlowe doesn't normally do business with...

  There are some books that seem to have more to tell than just the story, and this is certainly one of them.  It's set in a remote part of highland Scotland, and there are three stories about the inhabitants of Glen Conach, separated by centuries, but happily running concurrently in the book. The land is known as Glen Conach after a religious man who lived in a cave on the hillside, and had been known to perform miracles.  The legends associated with Conach were passed down verbally for many years, but there was also a written account of his life held in the library of the local Laird who lived in the middle of the nineteenth century.  At that same time, a young man called Mr Gibb wrote to the Laird to ask if he could come and make a transcript and a translation of the document, which was written in Latin, and he was invited to stay for a summer to complete his work. Jumping up to the present time, the highland scenery is much the same, and the older villagers can s...

  Set in Sarajeyo, Yugoslavia, in the spring of 1992, this book tells the story of one woman's experience of the war-torn city after she finds herself alone. Zora, a Serbian artist teaching students at the university, lives in a high-rise bock of flats with her husband and her younger daughter.  Her elder daughter is married to an Englishman and has gone away to live in Suffolk and when war seems inevitable the elder daughter pleads with her family to pack their bags and join her while they still can.  The rest of her family make the journey but Zora decides she will be safe enough, and feels she needs to keep working and can't just abandon her students.   Once the others have gone, the war quickly escalates and it isn't long before the shelling begins and all electrical power is lost.  Zora has to rely on food parcels to get anything to eat and has no way of contacting her family in England to let them know she is still alive.  At first she is coping ...

  I'm still working my way across the table of recommended books at the local library and I often find it leads me to read books that don't immediately appeal to me.  This is exactly the kind of cover that I usually skip right over, but I noticed the line at the bottom that says it has been made into a mini-series, so I decided to give it a go. It's the kind of book that I imagine businessmen picking up at the airport before a long-haul flight, as there's a good pace to the way the story develops, and events and places are described in plain language that doesn't stray from the point. Alex Hoffman is a computer nerd with Harvard University and a position at CERN on his CV, and after pushing the scientists out of their comfort zone with his work on Artificial Intelligence, he takes his talents into the financial sector and earns more money than he can keep track of.  His AI tool, VIXEL, scours through the Internet picking up detail from countless websites, then autom...

  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....