dittybox

  I picked this one up because I thought it was written by David Mitchell the actor and when I got home and looked at it properly I realised it wasn't the same Davis Mitchell and I was a bit disappointed.  However, that disappointment did not last very long as I only had to get a page or two in before I was totally absorbed in it. Black Swan Green is a fictional village in Worcestershire and home to young Jason who is thirteen and living comfortably among a group of friends who all go to the same secondary school.  The book is set in the early 1980s, which is close enough to the 1970s when I was at secondary school, for me to find everything very familiar.   Back then, no-one was very interested in the mental health of teenagers and bullying was largely accepted as a fact of life unless it tipped over into something really noticeable.  Jason has a stammer which he is able to conceal most of the time by swapping out difficult words for something else, but if...

  An historical novel where the story takes place in the Spitalfields district of London in the second half of the 1700s.  At that time, Spitalfields was known for its silk weaving and the population was made up mostly of journeymen weavers and silk merchants.  In the years leading up to this time the silk they produced was considered to be some of the best in the world and commanded a very high price, but suddenly cheaper fabrics such as calico became available and many of the silk weavers were struggling to find work. The story follows a young woman called Sara who has been sent to London by her mother in the hopes that she will meet up with a cousin and make a good life for herself.  As Sara steps down from the cart that bought her in from the country, she is clearly alone and lost in the unfamiliar streets, and it isn't long before she is lured away by an older woman who claims she will look after her. Sonia Velton has done a good job of conjuring up the mix of e...

  This had me gripped from the very first line.  A woman has been admitted to to an Intensive Care Unit with breathing difficulties, and to complicate matters, she is thirty three weeks pregnant and her condition is deteriorating rapidly. What follows is a detailed account of all the tests and treatments the doctors carry out on Karin to try and establish what is happening.  Her partner Tom is also present and the book is written entirely from his point of view.  This is not the first time that Karin has been seriously ill, but none of her symptoms seem to be related to her past medical history, and just a few hours earlier she had nothing more serious than flu-like symptoms and a bit of a cough. I am always fascinated by anything related to medicine and I was impressed by the level of detail that the author managed to get into the narrative without making it seem like pages ripped from a medical textbook.  The tension is so real that it felt as though harm woul...

  I didn't find this a comfortable read.  Whereas some books make you feel as though you are sitting in front of a warm fire all wrapped up in a blanket, this is more like sitting in a cold outbuilding where you can never gather in any warmth. The review from The Times on the front states: ' This book demands to be savoured ' but right from the start I wasn't sure if I even wanted to read it.  It's set in the 1930s when many areas were plunged into poverty due to pit closures and the world-wide depression, and the British Government was setting up schemes to try and kick-start the economy and give people from deprived areas some form of employment. One of the schemes was set up by the Land Settlement Association that bought up farmland across Britain and then trained specially selected families how to work the land and make a profit.  The book tells the story of Lettie and Tommy who have come down from the north to take up a tiny piece of land in Essex.  They mo...

  A book about an American businessman living his comfortable modern life in a flat in Tokyo.  He appears to have everything a man could want but two things bother him.  Firstly, he is divorced from his American wife, and because of the vast continental distance between them, he doesn't see as much of his teenage daughter as he would like.  Secondly, he previously had a brief relationship with an elegant but mysterious Japanese woman, who he lost contact with, and now he is prepared to go to great lengths to find her again. After much negotiation, his wife agrees to allow their daughter to stay with him in Tokyo for an extended visit during which she will attend school in the city and broaden her experience.  Unbeknown to all of them, a troubled young man with a background of belonging to a disturbing sect has taken a deep interest in the daughter and begins tracking her life both online and in the street. With the father distracted by his quest to find the Japa...

  Finding a new book by Elizabeth Strout is like receiving an invitation to some kind of reunion, because once you open the pages, old friends appear.  There's Lucy Barton and Olive Kitteridge and good old Bob Burgess and before you know it you feel as though you'd never been away. Olive has reached the grand old age of ninety one in this novel, and although she doesn't have the lead in this story, she still manages to make herself the most  important character just by letting other people come and tell her things.  Olive has heard that the novelist Lucy Barton has moved nearby, and knowing that she is a writer, Olive invites her to visit her in her retirement home to hear a story that may be of interest.  Lucy is happy to come along and Olive is pleased to find that she seems genuinely interested in her story. Not many people know how to properly listen to someone's story, but those that do ask questions to show they have absorbed the information and are keen t...

  Elizabeth O'Connor is clearly a clever woman with a great talent for putting words together and I found myself reading this book as though I was watching the people through a lens.  It's more of a social observation than a gripping tale but it's interesting to see how island people lived around the start of the second world war and the characters are very believable. The book is told from the perspective of an eighteen year old girl called Manod and it begins at a time when a dying whale washes up on the beach.  The whale is too big for anyone to move so the islanders are unable to save it and nature is left to deal with the problem.  The time of the whale fall coincides with the arrival of two university people who come to observe the old island customs before they are lost and Manod spends a lot of time with them translating Welsh into English. Old traditions were still observed on the island as most inhabitants had very little interaction with the mainland, so u...