A gothic crime novel that really wants to be stifling and atmospheric and even pulls it off at times. It ticks all the boxes, to a point that it becomes a bit stifled itself. As many of my recent books this is another one from a subscription box. Unlike many of the other books I …
An eerie and dreamy in one moment only to become very blunt and down-to-earth in another. Madeleine Watts wields the language firmly in her debut novel. It is a tale of crisis, despair, being lost, but also finding one’s way in a world that doesn’t offer much consolation. Personal and climate crises constantly intertwine in …
Can an artist single-handedly impact an entire city? Considering that the city in question is Rome, probably not. But add to the mix an influential politician and you have a recipe for success. Loyd Grossman’s book, The Artist and the Eternal City, charts the path of Gian Lorenzo Bernini through the streets of Rome.
It has been a while since a book annoyed me so much! And yet I could not find a flaw in Harris’ argument. There is nothing more irritating than knowing you disagree with someone’s claim, but not being able to fight their arguments. I still have the niggling feeling there is a fundamental flaw somewhere …
Al-Andalus is the forgotten heritage of the Muslim presence on the Iberian Peninsula. A thriving educational center where the Muslims, Jews and Christians were able to coexist in relative peace for almost 800 years. It is a period of European history that is rarely mentioned and if it is then only briefly. Yet it left …
What happens when the perfect world of a planned community clashes with the messiness of the reals world? Can we really shield ourselves from chaos with a set of rules for living? Can racism be denied out of a community? Little Fires Everywhere asks those fundamental questions in a serious but often also lightly satirical …
My only explanation why I read this classic of sci-fi only now is that I rarely dabbed in the sci-fi space. Recently this has started slowly changing and when someone recommends a book to me I tend to try it and usually with a good outcome. It was the same with this one. A book …
Dive right into the heart of Cuba with this collection of seven short stories.
A collection of quirky short stories, showing how this jewel-like form helps to unleash imagination. You’ll meet nursing home escapees, writers meeting their characters in real life, statisticians winning the lottery, middle-aged witches, and a bit extreme role-play games aficionados. And many many others. I had this book on my shelves for so long I …
What do you do when your taxidermist father shoots himself in the head and your bereaved mother starts making pornographic art using the animals he stuffed? Also, the woman you loved was your brother’s wife and she abandoned both of you. Those are the things Jessa-Lynn Morton is trying to figure out, among few other …
