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  If you are still wondering which book to take on holiday with you this year, then just go and buy this one and you can thank me later.  It is smart and funny and all those things you would want a book to be if you were going to write one.  If you loved Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus, then you are going to love this too (and if you never got around to reading that, then add it to your holiday reading list right now). There is a paragraph about the author at the front of this book, and the last line tells us that:  'She is a professor of creative writing at Providence College in Rhode Island.',  and when I saw that I was all set to find a style of writing that was grammatically correct but a little short on readability.  Wrong.  If Alison Espach was teaching a writing course anywhere near me, I'd want to be first in the queue to listen to what she has to say.  There is not one thing I want to find fault with in this novel. The protagonist i...

This past weekend the weather has been blisteringly hot and the only thing to do was spend most of the day reading in the shade, and this was the perfect book for the occasion. It's an unashamedly girlie book, set in Ireland, with plenty of colourful characters to add a layer of fun.  I haven't read anything by Marian Keyes before, but the woman is obviously a machine as this book was over five hundred pages long, and she has quite an extensive back catalogue that I suspect are much the same size. It's a love story around the 'will she, won't she' theme, as Anna spends a large chunk of her life alternately falling in love with Joey or hating the very ground he walks on.  Fate brings them together at intervals, and in between their meetings they both have other serious relationships that change everything about their lives, and for these two at least, the path of true love is never straight. I liked the fact that we meet Anna in her late forties, just as she ente...

This is good, very good, but you are going to have to be prepared to give it your full attention if you are going to stand a chance of keeping up with all the names.  I could easily see this becoming a box set on Netflix as there are sufficient twists and turns it would keep you hanging on for the next episode. Susan Lewis has created a very realistic account of a terrible crime where no-one has ever been bought to justice.  Three women were murdered, and a child of one of the victims disappeared on the same day, but the trail of enquiries quickly went cold and the investigation was shut down. The chief suspect was the husband of one of the women, as he didn't have a convincing alibi for where he was on the day, but with no hard evidence to link him to the murders, he had to be released from custody.  Sixteen years later, the team behind a crime investigation podcast called Hindsight pick up the case and quickly find that there is a lot more to investigate than just the m...

Far above us, the International Space Station moves through the sky, and there are always astronauts observing the earth as a single object and not the complex mess of humanity that we really are.  They are there to carry out scientific experiments both inside and outside the craft, and in addition to their daily tasks, they themselves are the subjects of experiments on their bodies. Floating in space for months at a time has a serious effect on the mind and body.  The astronauts exist in a weightless atmosphere where there is no up or down, simply space.  There are no 24 hours days, as the orbit of the space station takes the crew through multiple dawns every day, and if it were not for the sleeping tablets, there would be no notion of night and day. They must eat their food out of pouches, and sleep in sleeping bags that simply hang untethered in the sleeping areas, so normal human life is suspended for the entire time they are on board. There are many descriptions of w...

The writing here could be described as plain and simple.  No excessive use of language, just journal notes written by an un named woman who lives with nuns.  Not a nun herself, but someone who went on a retreat and then just ended up staying because everything seemed right and she found her purpose. Everyone has a backstory, and in amongst the descriptions of her monastic life there a little snippets of memory where she recalls her mother and sometimes her schooldays.  One of her memories is of a member of her class who was generally despised by all the others even though this girl, Helen Parry, was a troubled child whose mother beat her and sometimes left her alone for weeks.  No one ever did anything about it, and even the school turned a blind eye rather than get involved because Helen was always difficult and confrontational. As an adult Helen Parry had also become a nun, but not in the traditional sense where she would be part of an enclosed order and take the v...

This is a wonderful book and I would really like to thank the Surrey Library service for putting it under my nose on the 'recommended' table.  I was surprised to see that it was first published in 1993, as both the author and the title are new to me and it really should be considered a classic that is known by readers everywhere.  Maybe it is and I just haven't been looking in the right direction. The quality of the writing stands out right from the start and there is a gentle humour running through it that demands you read every word with care.  It's set in Austria in the period just before World War Two and we meet the Berger family, who are partly Jewish so suddenly find themselves in great danger.  Most of the family get away to England as planned, but daughter Ruth misses the student transport and is stuck alone in Nazi-occupied Vienna. Ruth is an intelligent girl but much of her personality has been influenced by characters in novels and operatic works and she ...

If there was a literary genre known as 'Entertainment for Boomers in Retirement' then this book would sit right in there along with the Richard Osman Murder Club series and anything else classed as 'heart-warming' by a reviewer.  It's very English and all the characters are either sweet, lovely or eccentric with no true villains to be found. Before you start the book, prepare yourself to go with the flow and remember it's just a story.  There are quite a few points in the plot where you might feel tempted to mutter, 'well I can't see that happening' but just calm yourself and and have another Hobnob.  If you like doing crossword puzzles then you might enjoy trying to solve the one that runs through the story, but if you don't (or can't) then never fear, the answer will be presented a few lines later.  It will even be in heavy type to make sure you don't miss it. The Fellowship of Puzzle Makers begins as a club that meets in a room upstair...