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The writing in this book is solid as a rock and the style fits perfectly with the harsh life of farming families in the hills of the Welsh borders.  There is a masculine tone to the narrative as the story is mostly told through the experiences of Oliver, the son of a sheep farmer, whose family have lived in the same property for multiple generations. The book begins in 1941 when Oliver is a young boy at school.  He's a big strong lad with a swarthy look to him, and one day other boys taunt him that he looks like a gypsy and not his father.  There have always been rumours about him, but his mother has never agreed to talk about it, so Oliver learns to put up a fight and takes on anyone who hits him first. The farm they live in is barely changed from a century before as Oliver's father Idris prefers the old ways and resists modernisation.  He still farms using a plough with a horse and refuses to have electricity connected to the house.  Winters are terrible with ...

Sunbringer is the second book in The Fallen Gods Trilogy, and if you haven't read the first book, Godkiller, then you will not get the full experience with this one.  The first book introduces the concept of multiple gods existing alongside, and sometimes even within the people, and the setting has some parallels with medieval times in Britain. Gods can rise and fall in strength depending on how many followers and offerings they have, and if they become too strong, they can manipulate armies and alter the balance of power in the land.  Most people are helpless against the gods, but a group of people known as Veiga have special powers that allow them to become godkillers and fight back when necessary.   The godkiller Kissen is a strong woman with a fearless mind, and although she lost a leg many years ago, that has never held her back and she fights alongside knights, matching their fighting skills at every turn.  Her prosthetic leg is made from briddite, which i...

  It's a shame, but I didn't feel that this one completely hit the mark for me.  It started off in a promising way, and I was totally onboard with Gail Baines as a somewhat dowdy woman in her early sixties who was trying to prepare herself for her only daughter's wedding, but somewhere around the middle of the book, it all seemed to veer off course. School teacher Gail lives alone in a small house that she bought for herself after her divorce.  Her ex husband lives miles away, but he will of course be attending the wedding, and she finds herself getting irritated just remembering how messy he is and how annoying he could be.  At this stage it is easy to picture Gail as she struggles with the idea of making herself presentable for the wedding and doesn't even want to go to the expense of buying something new to wear. As the title suggests, the book covers three days in June, and those three days are the wedding day, the day before and the day after.  Everything t...

  This one was a bit of light relief after ploughing through A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara for the previous two weeks, and I was glad to be able to rest my nervous system.   Evelyn Hugo is a Hollywood icon who has provided plenty of column inches for the movie press over many decades.  By the age of fourteen she was already turning heads and it didn't take her long to realise that her generous curves and striking looks could help her get whatever she wanted in life.  While she was still a teenager living in Hells Kitchen, New York, she persuaded a young man to marry her after she heard he was headed to Hollywood to work as a grip in the movie studios.  She later said that she traded her virginity for a ride. Once she got to Hollywood she wasted no time in re-inventing herself, and out went dark haired Evelyn Dias of Cuban heritage, and in came a blond bombshell with heavy dark eyebrows and a dramatic style all of her own.  While her husband was ...

  Where do I even start with this? It's disturbing, heartfelt, emotional, yet intelligent, and probably one of the most difficult to read books that I have ever picked up.  For the first few pages, I seriously considered not pushing on with it, but then slowly I felt myself getting sucked in to the narrative, and once I was fully immersed in the story there was no getting out. At seven hundred and twenty closely typed pages, this book is a commitment, and in some ways this reflects the life of the characters.  Central to everything is Jude St Francis, who was found in a rubbish bag as a new born baby and then raised in an orphanage run by Catholic monks.  His experiences as a child are nothing short of horrific, but somehow this is not just another one of those misery novels where all suffering is gratuitous and written in the cause of making money.  Hanya Yanagihara delves so deeply into the psychological impact of long-term trauma that I feel certain that the ...

  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...