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 …
This is such a weird year! I’m so out of kilter with where we are in terms of time that I completely missed the beginning of the 20 Books of Summer! That’s a first. So here I am jumping on the bandwagon mid-course. Cathy at 746Books is our wonderful host and she is doing an …
Dive right into the heart of Cuba with this collection of seven short stories.
Short and sweet like a short story, here are a few quotes from Jigs&Reels by Joanne Harris A change of costume here, of location there: stories do not die, but are simply reincarnated every generation or so into a different time and idiom - from Fule’s Gold I cried at the unfairness of it all: …
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