In the small village of Stonesmere in the Lakes District it is the end of term, and the Day One concert performance at the primary school is underway. It is called Day One because it is aimed at the four-year-olds who will be starting school after the summer break; as the headmaster likes to say, …
Miss Barbara Buncle lives in a small English village called Silverstream where nothing much happens and where everyone knows everyone else’s business. She begins writing down observations of her fellow villagers and then decides to develop her observations into a book (with changed names of course). Her publisher, Arthur Abbott, is delighted with his bestselling …
The Moving Finger writes; and having writ, Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line, Nor all thy Tears wash out a word of it. This beautiful book, set in Samarkand, is divided roughly into two parts. The first part tells the story of the 11th …
The sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale after a 35-year gap, The Testaments is both absorbing and well researched. I would imagine that it is possible to read The Testaments without having read The Handmaid’s Tale, but as The Handmaid’s Tale provides the essential background to the story it probably makes sense to read it first. …
Bill Furlong sells logs, turf, coal and anthracite. He lives somewhere near Waterford, is married and has five daughters. His mother was a single mother, taken in by a kindly Protestant woman without whom both she and the baby would doubtlessly have ended up in a workhouse, or worse. Now in his forties he is …
A beautiful but completely devastating book where the first few chapters are similar to entering some rambling old mansion by a side door. After losing oneself in endless corridors and a variety of rooms, both large and small, one finally reaches the main staircase, and suddenly everything slots into place. Covering the period from the …
Winner of the 2023 Booker Prize, this is an amazingly beautiful, yet completely devastating, book; a book that latches on to you and cannot be put down until the last page. It will remain with you, altering the way you look at conflict and tragedy, forcing you to step into those war-torn places that previously …
From heights close to the moon to the darkness of the Underworld, this is a beautiful book about love, life and death, Barnes writes at the very beginning: ‘You put together two things that have not been put together before. And the world is changed. People may not notice at the time, but that doesn’t …
This is a beautiful, if very unusual, book about life and the importance of stories and love. At its centre is an old, mouldy, ancient text supposed to have been written by Antonius Diogenes. The text came into being when Diogenes discovered, hidden in a chest in a tomb in Tyre, a strange anecdote about …
An easy-to-read page-turner, split between the past and the present, A Keeper fulfils many of the requirements of light, non-confronting literature. It does not have a deep message, and none of the characters are particularly well developed. It took me a few chapters to ‘get into’ this book. The introduction is interesting but not overly …