A gentle mix of modern life and ancient fairy tale, this book is about memory and childhood, magic and the mundane. Opening on an adult returning to his childhood home after the death of his parents, it soon slips into the half forgotten story of the man as a young boy. Starting with the suicide …
Continue reading The Ocean At The End Of The Lane by Neil Gaiman
I'm cheekily lumping these two books in together because they're kind of short, and often come in a one volume book. I happened to buy them together too. I'm also not usually a huge proponent of chick lit, but actually, I think the covers on these novels let them down in some respects. Yes, these …
Continue reading Legally Blonde/Family Trust by Amanda Brown
I actually didn't realise that Carlos Ruiz Zafon wrote young adult fiction, but I loved The Shadow Of The Wind, and I think this book has some tonal similarities. Following the death of her father in 1937, Irene moves with her mother and younger brother to a small island where her mother can work as …
Continue reading The Watcher In The Shadows by Carlos Ruiz Zafon
I think what strikes you first about de Bernieres is how human is writing is. It's mundane, describes the ordinary, or perhaps ordinary people caught up in history, in change. While war wages around the sleeping, pastoral island of Cephallonia, for example, goats must still be milked, fathers scolded and meals shared, distant politics debated, …
Continue reading Captain Corelli’s Mandolin by Louis de Bernières
I came across this book via a recommendation on Amazon, based on previous purchases of historical fiction, and I loved the cover, but this tale is not like regular historical fiction, really. It is set in Devon in the mid 1300's during a time of plague, and tells the story of three people: a woman …
This was part of my last years reading list and it's very naughty of me to have only just finished reading it! The final, incomplete and posthumous work of the famous author it was about half complete at the time of Dickens death and much speculation about the ending has amused generations. The book …
Continue reading The Mystery Of Edwin Drood by Charles Dickens
A dark fairy tale for older children or young teens, this one will also appeal to some adults too. With beautiful, dark illustrations, the book follows the story of a boy called Connor whose mother is very, very sick and who is visited by a monster who says it will tell him three stories …
Continue reading A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness & Siobhan Dowd
An interesting story about a teenage girl from America who moves to London to attend a boarding school. As she touches down, someone has started murdering in the same style as Jack the Ripper, and the first murder has occurred right near her new school. As the killings stack up, our heroine Rory starts …
I had a lot of texts to read, and things always get crazy in the lead up to Christmas, but happily, with the temperature dropping & finally nowhere to go & no one demanding time I could curl up with this, the second book in the Tradd Street series by Karen White. Revolving around …
This book tells two stories about two girls. One a child acting out to deal with the loss and change around her, as her physician father moves closer to his work in what she calls a human zoo. The other, a young woman who appears on a road leading to Vienna, naked, beaten and telling …
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