Tag: books
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Nightshade by Annalena McAfee
Eve Laing is an artist who works in her London studio on works based around very accurate reproductions of flowers. But she is perhaps most famous as the muse of another painter, and for moving in the same circles in the sixties and seventies as a number of other more successful artists. She did find…
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The Absolute Book by Elizabeth Knox
The Absolute Book is a complex and sprawling fantasy novel of a very unusual sort. And it’s all the better for being so. To try to even describe the plot would be foolhardy, but it starts in a contemporary world, mostly in the UK, but with excursions to Canada and New Zealand, and tells the…
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How to Avoid a Climate Disaster by Bill Gates
A year or so ago I read The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells, which laid out in often horrific details, the kinds of things that would happen to the planet if we didn’t change our ways. Bill Gates goes for the much more practical, “So what can we do about it now?” approach. This book…
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Earthlings by Sayaka Murata
Having previously read and enjoyed Convenience Store Woman, it wasn’t a hard decision to pick up Earthlings. As with the previous novel, this is a story about someone who finds society quiet alienating. Indeed our protagonist, Nutsuki handles life initially by imagining she has magical powers. Beginning as a girl, we follow Nutsuki’s life as…
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Where Ravens Roost by Karin Nordin
I love a good Scandi-noir, and this doesn’t disappoint with an entertaining tale about a slightly-disgraced Swedish detective who feels compelled to visit his long-estranged father in the rural countryside. He heads to the home where for years his father has kept ravens in a barn, but is now suffering from dementia and is talking…
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Just Like the Other Girls by Claire Douglas
This is a twisty little tale where you’re never quite sure where the story is heading. Una has just got a job as a live-in companion to the wealthy, but cold Elspeth. But the money is good, and she’s willing to put up with the fact that Elspeth’s daughter Kathryn really doesn’t take to her.…
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The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman
Richard Osman’s first novel is as delightful as it is unexpected. Writing a crime novel didn’t seem like the obvious next thing for Richard Osman to do, and I always get a little nervous when celebrities turn their hands to something outside their previous career. Are they just being published because they’re famous? Well that’s…
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The Chalet by Catherine Cooper
The Chalet is a debut thriller, and it’s a great ride. Told from several vantage points, and from two timelines, we are taken to an Alpine ski resort. In the present day, a wealthy group has gathered in a luxury chalet, and of course there are secrets. Ria has come with her husband Hugo, who…
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Just Like You by Nick Hornby
This is the first Nick Hornby novel I’ve read in a while, although I’ve certainly read most of his more famous work. I couldn’t quite put a handle on why I’d stopped reading him, but I definitely enjoyed this new work. Lucy is a white school teacher in her forties who’s getting over a breakdown…
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Reading in a Time of Covid
Since the world went to the dogs earlier in the year, and many of us have been stuck largely in our homes, our lives have basically been turned upside down. For me, work continued. I can work remotely. I have my work laptop, and a vaguely agreeable space in which to set it up. So…
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Uncanny Valley by Anna Wiener
I knew that I wanted to read this book almost as soon as I heard about it. There were at least three podcasts featuring Wiener in my queue, and at least a couple of newspaper features I’d come across. But I’ve yet to listen to or read any of them, because I knew that I…
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Good Omens by Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman
Good Omens is one of those books that has somehow slipped past me for thirty years… until now. The book was published in 1990, and at that point I’d read both comics written by Neil Gaiman, and at least the first Discworld book. So I knew who the writers were, and I shoe have been…