On the cover, John Boyne writes ‘A masterful combination of humour and sadness’ – a statement that beautifully sums up the entire book. Eleanor Oliphant, thirty, lives alone. She has very little to do with the other people in the office where she works in accounts. She eats the same food every day, follows the …
Although this is a German book, I read it in Swedish (hence the Swedish title in first place). Gudrun Pausewang was 17 when WWII ended in 1945, and this small collection of stories contains some of her memories of the Nazi period and its aftermath. In no way is this book a literary masterpiece, it …
A murder mystery set in Iceland and threaded through with stories of witchcraft and sorcery, Last Rituals is an easy-to-read page turner that is likely to have wide popular appeal. That said, the writing itself is nothing out of the ordinary, but whether this is due to Sigurdardottir’s writing style or to her translator is …
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 …