Certain books were a fixture in our house growing up, and I can remember winters by the fire with illustrated editions of various Victorian novels. Amongst my favourites were the Sherlock Holmes series. (I think everyone in my family loves a mystery story, my mum remembered her Grandmother reading Agatha Christie at the breakfast table …
Continue reading 221b Baker Street, London: A visit to Sherlock Holmes house.
McMurphy is a free spirit and gambler who manages to get transferred to a mental asylum to escape the work unit in prison. But he finds that he's bitten off more than he can chew when he takes on Nurse Ratched. Written in the 60's and set in Oregon, the book says so much about …
Continue reading One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
Disarmingly cheerful, witty and bittersweet, this is the story of a woman who finds herself suddenly single, responsible for a deaf child and the winner of a huge lottery. She decides that a road trip to rethink her life is in order. It's an odd book. Characters they meet on the road often give little …
Continue reading Butterflies In November by Audur Ava Olafsdottir
Two intelligent misfits will finds their lives changed when a new tenant moves into their Paris apartment block. One at the end of her life, the intelligent concierge who hides herself in obscurity, and one beginning her life, a bright 12 year old girl who is frustrated with the hypocrisy of the people around her. …
Continue reading The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery
During the political and religious unrest of the dissolution of the monasteries, a commissioner from Thomas Cromwell is murdered at a Benedictine monastery that he was sent to investigate. When Commissioner Shardlake is sent to investigate the murder, he finds murder and corruption, and a race against time to find a killer. But nothing is …
Theo Decker is a 13 year old boy, who ducks into a New York gallery with his ex-model mother on the way to a meeting with his principle about his recent behaviour. But while they're in the gallery, a bomb explodes, killing his mother and knocking him out. Half concussed, he comforts a stranger who …
Natalie is a social worker whose romance is going nowhere. Her boyfriend Carter is head of a group of activists, and although he's lovely, he frequently gets too caught up in changing the world to have time for her. When she follows him to the small town of Angel Landing, she moves in with her …
I loved this book. Loved loved loved it. I think it's because it's so honest and heartbreaking. Wild is the memoir of a 26 year old woman whose life falls apart, and to find herself, she hikes the PCT trail from California to Oregon alone. Four years before the hike, Cheryl lost her mother to …
Collaboration between two of the great imaginations of our age, this book was originally a bet selling novel that has since been made into this great graphic novel. After finding this volume, I discovered that there are a few Stephen King books that have been translated into this format with high success, and I might …
Continue reading The Talisman by Stephen King & Peter Straub
Alice Hoffman mixes the magical with the everyday, the mystical with the mundane. In this story, two women find their lives mixed up when one of them finds out she's pregnant. Rae ran away with her high school boyfriend seven years ago, but finds herself run out on when she turns out to be pregnant. …
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