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  I have read all sorts of books over the years, and very few of them have stuck in my memory, but the two that I had read by Cormac McCarthy (No Country for Old Men and The Road), remain in my head.  There is something about his story telling that is so compelling, that it's very hard to put the book down, even when the text makes for uncomfortable reading. McCarthy's books are earthy and raw and All the Pretty Horses is no exception.  It's the first book of a trilogy, and just a few days after starting it I was heading back to the library to pick up volumes 2 and 3 to make sure I could read them all back to back. The story is set in the early 1930s and sixteen year old John Grady and his friend Rawlings secretly leave their comfortable homes in Texas and set off across the open country heading for Mexico.  They are both experienced with horses and have a level of maturity that helps them manage the challenges of the terrain, but everything changes when a young lad ...

The backdrop to the story line in Don't Make Me Laugh is the stand-up comedy circuit, but do n't go into this expecting a laugh a minute just because the characters include a (fictionally) well known comedian.  There is a serious message in here, and anyone who doesn't understand that an abusive relationship can be emotional as well as physical, really ought to read it. We have all seen the big story-lines on the news that involve internationally recognised personalities who have used their industry clout to seduce vulnerable women, but this kind of abuse can happen in any level of society and women need to know what to watch out for. In the book, radio producer Ali Lauder is just over thirty and has got herself in a bad relationship with a married man.  When that affair is found out and comes to an end, Ali is emotionally vulnerable and responds to flattery from one of the big-name comedians who is in middle age but seems comfortable and unthreatening.  Once he has her c...

  I'm not sure how someone can write a book that is both sensitive and brutal at the same time, but somehow Alana S. Portero has managed it.  It's a debut novel so she has dived in at the deep end by telling the story of a young boy convinced that he is really a girl. The book has been translated from Spanish and has become an international best seller since its first publication in 2023.  I said it was both sensitive and brutal and that is because the young person is dealt with gently, but the family home is in a run down area of Madrid in the 1980s and some people in the neighbourhood are cruel and judgemental.  The apartment blocks are filled with people from all walks of life, and violence within families is commonplace, so no-one particularly takes any notice of cries in the night - unless the crying turns to screaming.  It is mind boggling to imagine how much pain and suffering some people have to endure before anyone does anything to help them. The singer...

This book is politically relevant at the start of 2025, although Valeria Luiselli began writing it in 2014, and it was first published in 2019.  Children from Central America and Mexico try to get to America to start a new life, but if they are captured by the immigration authorities, they are deported on chartered planes that fly out from remote airfields in the desert.  Some try to escape by running away, but with nothing to eat or drink they quickly succumb to the heat of the desert. The story of the Lost Children is told through the voices of one family who are making their own journey from New York to the Mexican border.  The four members of the family are not given names until they give themselves nicknames some way along the road, and as they travel onwards, the reader only knows the children as 'the boy' (10) and 'the girl' (5).  Their parents work on projects relating to creating archives of sound and that involves recording ambient noise as well as conversa...

This is the first of two books I was given for Christmas, and once I started reading it, it was never far from my side.  Adam Kay shares some of the notes that he wrote while working as a junior doctor in obstetrics and gynaecology (OB GYN), and his experiences range from slapstick comedy to heart-breaking stories when things go wrong. Most men have a real aversion to anything to do with OB GYN, so it is all the more interesting to read how a male doctor coped in this field.  The upside of the job is working on the maternity ward with the joy of delivering healthy babies to healthy mothers, but female anatomy does not always work in the ways we expect it to, and the OB GYN doctor may be called upon to save the day (and two lives), several times during one shift.  The doctors also have to deal with all the problems that can occur in our plumbing when we are not giving birth, and many of these are not for the faint hearted.  Some of the tools of the trade look as thoug...

I'm always pleased to find a different title written by a favourite author, and this book by Sebastian Barry does not disappoint.  It's set in rural Ireland in the late 1950s at a time when modern comforts were just creeping in to Co Wicklow and many people were still living their lives as their ancestors would have done a century before. Annie Dunne is a spinster woman of sixty one who already considers herself an old woman, and as she has no close relatives to look after her in her old age, she has gone to live with her cousin Sarah on a small farm.  Before she moved to the farm, Sarah had been living with her sister Maud and her family because Maud was bedbound and unable to look after her own children.  Annie assumed she would always live there, but after Maud died, her brother in law made it clear that she was no longer welcome.  After that she had very little to do with the family until her two nephews had children of their own and one of the boys suddenly aske...

We travel back to the 1960s with this book, and into a period of time that many people my age look back on nostalgically as 'simpler times', but by the time you get to the end, you realise that a smaller world does not always bring happiness. Helen is an art therapist in a psychiatric hospital in Croydon, and for a couple of years she has been having an affair with Gil, who is not only one of the doctors but turns out to be part of her extended family through marriage.  Helen was taken in by Gil's charismatic personality but after the arrival of an extraordinary patient, she starts to view life differently. The patient is William who is 37 years old but has not left his house for around 25 years.  He had been raised by his aunts who kept him out of sight 'for his own safety', but as they grew older and less able to take care of him, William's condition deteriorated badly, and by the time he was discovered, he was vey much under weight and his hair and beard were...