Lots of us had been waiting for Connie Willis’ new book for years. And not in a “I wonder if she will write a new book?” type of way - we knew there was a book about time travel to the Blitz being written for YEARS. So when I found out that it had been split into two books, and that the second half wasn’t coming out until October, I had a cruel ( Read more... )

Unlike The mill on the Foss, Kazuo Ishiguro’s The remains of the day certainly didn't feel over-long. I loved this book. Though I’m sure I have seen at least some of the movie in the past (it’s entirely possible I'm remembering another similarly cast drama), I had no idea of the plot or that it centred so tightly around one character. Stevens is ( Read more... )

Although I haven’t yet read this year’s Booker winner Wolf Hall- which sounds like a very readable historical fiction - I have enjoyed two of the shortlisted novels.

I was very excited when AS Byatt’s The children’s book came out. The setting amongst Bohemian society of England in the late nineteenth century, with a children’s fiction writer as a ( Read more... )

I've been struggling with writing lately, even at work which is unusual. But I've decided one paragraph reviews are better than not talking about books at all, so am using my super-handy reading log to spark my memory about what I've been reading ( Read more... )

When we went to Wales at Easter we stayed in a very small town near Snowdonia called Gwytherin. You reach it over winding narrow roads and when you get there the sense of isolation is reinforced by the lack of television and mobile phone signal (unusual in the UK in my experience). ( Photo of valley )

A recent happy discovery has been Flora Thompson’s Lark Rise to Candleford, which is made up of three books. The first describes Thompson's childhood in her small Oxfordshire hamlet of Lark Rise in the 1880s, whilst the second and third include elements of the wider world in the form of the village of Candleford Green and the town of Candleford. ( Read more... )

Although I’ve obviously never lived in South Carolina of the 1960s, Sue Monk Kidd’s The secret life of bees gave me the sense that it did a wonderful job at evoking the time and place. Prompted by the abuse of her family’s black servant, 14 year old Lily runs away from home in search of her dead mother’s past and ends up living on a bee farm run ( Read more... )

I've started pulling my best of 2008 list together (if it's done in Jan I'll be happy) and thanks to my handy dandy list I kept I am finding lots of good books I never blogged about. In order to keep the best of post to a reasonable length, I thought I'd start making up some of the holes ( Read more... )

On the weekend I had a treat - a new book by Eva Ibbotson! The dragonfly pool is a children’s book set in Europe just before world war two. There are lots of elements in the novel that felt like classic Ibbotson to me. A young heroine who is kind and thoughtful and adored by her family. A wacky school where students are allowed to wear what they ( Read more... )

The daughter of Time by Josephine Tey* is yet another book I read and enjoyed ages ago, but didn’t blog about it. I was reminded about it when I read Sovereign (by C.J. Sansom) last week as they have similar subject matter.

At first glance The daughter of time would seem to have a fairly standard basis for a mystery novel - a bored cop solves an ( Read more... )