Grace Lisa Vandenburg gets through her day by obsessively compulsively counting everything around her – the number of minutes it takes her to clean her teeth, the number of strokes to brush her hair, the number of steps between any two places, the number of sprouts on her sandwich. . . Everything must be divisible …
If you only have time to read one book this month or even this year, consider reading A Gentleman in Moscow. This would have to be one of the most beautiful, most perfect books, I have read. The book revolves around Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov, recipient of the Order of Saint Andrew, member of the …
Bernard Cornwell’s account of what happened at Agincourt on the 25th October 1415 is overwhelming, to say the least. This is not a happy read: the descriptions of fighting, slaughter, and torture as well as the cold, the rain, the mud, and the hunger are all exceedingly graphic. Initially I felt that Cornwell was perhaps …
Promoted as The Sunday Times Bestseller, this book is a prime example of what the modern phenomenon of bestseller often implies – an extremely well marketed title and not necessarily a great book. The subject matter – yet another confronting story from the Holocaust – has sufficient ‘pull’ to grab people’s attention and suggest that …
In this book, Tara Westover describes her very dysfunctional family and her path to getting an education. Although the Westovers are Mormons, Tara goes to lengths at the beginning of the book to explain that her book is not about Mormonism: ‘This story is not about Mormonism.’ she writes ‘Neither is it about any other …
Beautifully written, this horrifying glimpse of what the future could hold is a definite page turner. Nothing in the book is impossible; everything that happens has already been experienced, to some degree, somewhere around the world, and it is this that makes the book so frightening. Atwood’s Gilead is not fantasy, it is simply taking …
For me, the quote by Franz Kafka at the front of the book – “There is a destination but no way there; what we refer to as way is hesitation” – beautifully sums up what the book is about. The Scent of a Man is the second part of Pljeijel’s autobigraphy and roughly covers a …
This is definitely no literary masterpiece, but it is an important historical document. Nicola, who was born in Romania at the end of the 1940s, writes about what it was like growing up, and eventually entering the workforce, in a communist country. After tertiary studies he worked for the Romanian Intelligence Service, hoping that it …
This novel is about a man called Frederick Clegg, who takes his butterfly-collecting hobby to the next level. Lonely, uneducated, and somewhat strange, Clegg becomes fascinated by a middle-class art student, Miranda, and as though she is some rare butterfly he decides he wants to collect her. A large win on the pools gives Clegg …
This is a beautifully written book by a man who has spent more than five years on Manus Island, in Australia’s offshore processing centre – a centre that has nothing to do with processing and everything to do with punishment, humiliation, and the annihilation of the spirit. Arriving on Christmas Island, only days after the …