Category Archives: Recommended

October 24, 2022 · 3:39 pm

The Seven Skins of Esther Wilding – Holly Ringland

The Seven Skins of Esther Wilding – Holly Ringland

I have been reading this book, isn’t the cover beautiful?

It’s a lovely story about women; the relationships between mother and daughter, sisters and friends. And about, finding yourself and owning your truth. There’s lots of talk of fairy tales, tattoos, stars, shells, the sea and plants. It’s rich and beautiful like the cover.

I haven’t finished it yet (almost I am up to the seventh skin), but I think it’s going to be one of my favourite books of the year. Esther, the character, is a bit annoying, but there are reasons for that.

Here’s the blurb …

From international bestselling author of The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart, Holly Ringland, comes a haunting and magical novel about joy, grief, courage, and transformation.

‘On the afternoon that Esther Wilding drove homeward along the coast, a year after her sister had walked into the sea and disappeared, the light was painfully golden.’

The last time Esther Wilding’s beloved older sister Aura was seen, she was walking along the shore towards the sea. In the wake of Aura’s disappearance, Esther’s family struggles to live with their loss. To seek the truth about her sister’s death, Esther reluctantly travels from lutruwita, Tasmania to Copenhagen, and then to the Faroe Islands, following the trail of the stories Aura left behind: seven fairy tales about selkies, swans and women, alongside cryptic verses Aura wrote and had secretly tattooed on her body.

The Seven Skins of Esther Wilding is a sweeping, deeply beautiful and profoundly moving novel about the far-reaches of sisterly love, the power of wearing your heart on your skin, and the ways life can transform when we find the courage to feel the fullness of both grief and joy.

Leave a Comment

Filed under Fiction, Recommended

Tagged as ,

August 29, 2022 · 11:46 am

Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow

Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow – Gabrielle Zevin

A friend recommended this one and as I have read (and loved) The Collected Works of AJ Fikry, I was very keen to read this one.

Here’s the blurb…

In this exhilarating novel by the best-selling author of The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry two friends–often in love, but never lovers–come together as creative partners in the world of video game design, where success brings them fame, joy, tragedy, duplicity, and, ultimately, a kind of immortality.

On a bitter-cold day, in the December of his junior year at Harvard, Sam Masur exits a subway car and sees, amid the hordes of people waiting on the platform, Sadie Green. He calls her name. For a moment, she pretends she hasn’t heard him, but then, she turns, and a game begins: a legendary collaboration that will launch them to stardom. These friends, intimates since childhood, borrow money, beg favors, and, before even graduating college, they have created their first blockbuster, Ichigo. Overnight, the world is theirs. Not even twenty-five years old, Sam and Sadie are brilliant, successful, and rich, but these qualities won’t protect them from their own creative ambitions or the betrayals of their hearts.

Spanning thirty years, from Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Venice Beach, California, and lands in between and far beyond, Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is a dazzling and intricately imagined novel that examines the multifarious nature of identity, disability, failure, the redemptive possibilities in play, and above all, our need to connect: to be loved and to love. Yes, it is a love story, but it is not one you have read before. 

This was a fabulous story and if you are a gamer (I’m not) you’re going to love it. However, you don’t have to be into games to enjoy this novel; the characters, the relationships, the beautiful writing about the games are all fabulous.

A review.

Leave a Comment

Filed under 4, Fiction, Recommended

Tagged as , ,

August 11, 2022 · 9:25 pm

Mother’s Boy – Patrick Gale

Mother’s Boy – Patrick Gale

I saw this in the recommended section at my library, and having read Notes from an Exhibition, I was keen to read this one.

Here’s the blurb

One of the joys of Gale’s writing is how even the smallest of characters can appear fully formed, due to a charming wickedness alongside deeper observations. Irish Times

Laura, an impoverished Cornish girl, meets her husband when they are both in service in Teignmouth in 1916. They have a baby, Charles, but Laura’s husband returns home from the trenches a damaged man, already ill with the tuberculosis that will soon leave her a widow. In a small, class-obsessed town she raises her boy alone, working as a laundress, and gradually becomes aware that he is some kind of genius.

As an intensely privately young man, Charles signs up for the navy with the new rank of coder. His escape from the tight, gossipy confines of Launceston to the colour and violence of war sees him blossom as he experiences not only the possibility of death, but the constant danger of a love that is as clandestine as his work.

MOTHER’S BOY is the story of a man who is among, yet apart from his fellows, in thrall to, yet at a distance from his own mother; a man being shaped for a long, remarkable and revered life spent hiding in plain sight. But it is equally the story of the dauntless mother who will continue to shield him long after the dangers of war are past.

A writer with heart, soul, and a dark and naughty wit, one whose company you relish and trust. Observer

I really enjoyed it, it was beautifully written with lots of detail about all sorts of stuff – laundry, coding, writing poetry, being in the navy.

I have another one from the library A Place Called Winter

A review

Leave a Comment

Filed under 4, Fiction, Historical Fiction, Recommended

Tagged as , ,

August 4, 2022 · 7:58 pm

The Lady’s Guide to Fortune Hunting – Sophie Irwin

The Lady’s Guide of Fortune Hunting – Sophie Irwin

I was looking for something to read on my Kindle that had an audible book and I found this one in my electronic pile.

It was fabulous; the love child of Georgette Heyer and Jane Austen.

Here’s the blurb …

A whip-smart debut that follows the adventures of an entirely unconventional heroine who throws herself into the London Season to find a wealthy husband. But the last thing she expects is to find love…

Kitty Talbot needs a fortune. Or rather, she needs a husband who has a fortune. Left with her father’s massive debts, she has only twelve weeks to save her family from ruin.

Kitty has never been one to back down from a challenge, so she leaves home and heads toward the most dangerous battleground in all of England: the London season.

Kitty may be neither accomplished nor especially genteel—but she is utterly single-minded; imbued with cunning and ingenuity, she knows that risk is just part of the game.

The only thing she doesn’t anticipate is Lord Radcliffe. The worldly Radcliffe sees Kitty for the mercenary fortune-hunter that she really is and is determined to scotch her plans at all costs, until their parrying takes a completely different turn…

This is a frothy pleasure, full of brilliant repartee and enticing wit—one that readers will find an irresistible delight

Currently, this is my favourite read of the year. Well-written, clever and witty.

1 Comment

Filed under 5, Fiction, Historical Fiction, Recommended

Tagged as , ,

July 30, 2022 · 3:37 pm

Five Tuesdays in Winter – Lily King

Five Tuesdays in Winter – Lily King

I know I read about this book somewhere, but I can’t remember where or when I first heard about it. This is my first Lily King book and I was surprised it was short stories (clearly I didn’t read the back before I bought it). I really enjoyed it, all of the stories, not just one or two. My favourite was ‘When in the Dordogne’ (here’s a review of it).

Here’s the blurb …

By the award-winning, New York Times bestselling author of Writers & Lovers, Lily King’s first-ever collection of exceptional and innovative short stories

Told in the intimate voices of unique and endearing characters of all ages, these tales explore desire and heartache, loss and discovery, moments of jolting violence and the inexorable tug toward love at all costs. A bookseller’s unspoken love for his employee rises to the surface, a neglected teenage boy finds much-needed nurturing from an unlikely pair of college students hired to housesit, a girl’s loss of innocence at the hands of her employer’s son becomes a catalyst for strength and confidence, and a proud nonagenarian rages helplessly in his granddaughter’s hospital room. Romantic, hopeful, brutally raw, and unsparingly honest, some even slipping into the surreal, these stories are, above all, about King’s enduring subject of love. 

The writing is fabulous, the characters nuanced – it’s the ordinary made extraordinary. There is a somewhat common theme of alcoholism (more particularly alcoholic parents neglecting their children), but there is love and kindness as well.

This is one of my favourite books of the year. I have since got Euphoria out of the library.

Leave a Comment

Filed under 4, Fiction, Recommended

Tagged as , ,

July 14, 2022 · 3:40 pm

Cloud Cuckoo Land – Anthony Doerr

Cloud Cuckoo Land – Anthony Doerr

For some reason I wasn’t super keen to read this one, and then my book club selected it and Miss A had a damaged copy from work, so the stars aligned and I read it.

Here’s the blurb …

When everything is lost, it’s our stories that survive.

How do we weather the end of things? Cloud Cuckoo Land brings together an unforgettable cast of dreamers and outsiders from past, present and future to offer a vision of survival against all odds.

Constantinople, 1453:
An orphaned seamstress and a cursed boy with a love for animals risk everything on opposite sides of a city wall to protect the people they love.

Idaho, 2020:
An impoverished, idealistic kid seeks revenge on a world that’s crumbling around him. Can he go through with it when a gentle old man stands between him and his plans?

Unknown, Sometime in the Future:
With her tiny community in peril, Konstance is the last hope for the human race. To find a way forward, she must look to the oldest stories of all for guidance.

Bound together by a single ancient text, these tales interweave to form a tapestry of solace and resilience and a celebration of storytelling itself. Like its predecessor All the Light We Cannot See, Anthony Doerr’s new novel is a tale of hope and of profound human connection.

This is one of my favourite reads of this year, I couldn’t tell you which of the stories was my favourite, they were all engaging and compelling. It is long, but (unusally for me) I don’t think it needs editing. I enjoyed All The Light We Cannot See, but I think this one is better.

Another review

Leave a Comment

Filed under 4, Fiction, Historical Fiction, Recommended

Tagged as , ,

June 21, 2022 · 12:46 pm

Klara and the Sun – Kazuo Ishiguro

Klara and the Sun – Kazuo Ishiguro

I have read Remains of the Day and The Buried Giant, both I enjoyed, but they were very different from each other, so I wondered what this one would be like. I found it fascinating, it made me wonder what it meant to be human, and how much I would be willing to do to improve my child’s chances of success.

Here’s the blurb …

Klara and the Sun, the first novel by Kazuo Ishiguro since he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, tells the story of Klara, an Artificial Friend with outstanding observational qualities, who, from her place in the store, watches carefully the behavior of those who come in to browse, and of those who pass on the street outside. She remains hopeful that a customer will soon choose her.

Klara and the Sun is a thrilling book that offers a look at our changing world through the eyes of an unforgettable narrator, and one that explores the fundamental question: What does it mean to love?

Ishiguro is an amazing author who writes well in so many different styles, but fundamentally they are all about the human condition; what it means to be human, relationships.

One of my book club friends put me onto the Adam Buxton podcast and he has a great episode with Ishiguro (episode 153)

Leave a Comment

Filed under 4, Fiction, Recommended

Tagged as , ,

May 30, 2022 · 2:43 pm

Lessons in Chemistry – Bonnie Garmus

Lessons in Chemistry – Bonnie Garmus

Miss A gave this to me for Mother’s Day. Her boss, she works at a book store, made everyone read the first chapter.

Here’s the blurb …

‘Your ability to change everything – including yourself – starts here’ ELIZABETH ZOTT
————-
Set in 1960s California; Lessons In Chemistry is the brilliant, idiosyncratic and uplifting story of a female scientist whose career is derailed by the idea that a woman’s place is in the home – something she most definitely does not believe – only to find herself the star of America’s best-loved TV cooking show.
————-
Elizabeth Zott is not your average woman. In fact Elizabeth Zott would be the first to point out that there is no such thing.

But it’s the 1960s, and despite the fact that she is a scientist, her male peers are very unscientific when it comes to equality. The only good thing to happen on her road to professional fulfilment is a run-in with famous colleague Calvin Evans, legend and Nobel nominee. He’s also awkward, kind and tenacious. Theirs is true chemistry.

But life is never predictable and three years later Elizabeth Zott is an unwed, single mother and star of America’s best loved cooking show Supper at Six. Her singular approach to cooking – ‘take one pint of H2O and add a pinch of sodium chloride’ – and empowering message prove revolutionary. Because Elizabeth isn’t just teaching housewives how to cook, but how to change their lives.

Meet the unconventional, uncompromising Elizabeth Zott 

This is my favourite novel of the year so far. It’s quirky, fun, sad and uplifting. It is the story of Elizabeth, Calvin, Mad and Harriet. It’s about human connection, bad men, good men and choosing your own destiny.

The Guardian review.

1 Comment

Filed under 4, Fiction, Recommended

Tagged as , ,

May 29, 2022 · 10:49 am

Great Circle – Maggie Shipstead

Great Circle – Maggie Shipstead

I should record why I choose to buy books. I can’t remember the reason behind this one. I know it sat in my secondary ‘to be read’ pile for a while. Maybe a friend from book club?

I really enjoyed it – it was an enormous book, but I didn’t want it to end.

Here’s the blurb …

I was born to be a wanderer. I was shaped to the earth like a seabird to a wave

In 1920s Montana, wild-hearted Marian Graves spends her days roaming the rugged forests and mountains of her home. When she witnesses the roll, loop and dive of two barnstorming pilots, she is determined that one day, she too will take to the skies.

In 1940s London, after a series of reckless romances and a spell flying to aid the war effort, Marian embarks on a treacherous, epic flight in search of the freedom she has always craved. She is never seen again.

More than half a century later, Hadley Baxter, a troubled Hollywood starlet beset by scandal, is irresistibly drawn to play Marian Graves in her biopic, a role that will lead her to probe the deepest mysteries of the vanished pilot’s life.

GREAT CIRCLE is an enthralling drama of struggle and submission, of scale and intimacy, of lives lived on the edge. At once a love letter to our fragile planet and a story of bending the world to our will, Maggie Shipstead has delivered an epic of extraordinary depth and beauty that marks her as one of the greatest storytellers of our time.

The story is told from two time frames – Marion’s in the early 20th century and Hadley’s in contemporary times. Hadley is a troubled actress playing Marion in a bio-pic.

There must have been a lot of research involved in writing this (the flying, the war, boot legging), but it just creates a convincing world.

This book is for anyone who likes historical fiction or women’s fiction.

Review from the Guardian.

Leave a Comment

Filed under 4, Fiction, Historical Fiction, Recommended

Tagged as , ,

April 26, 2022 · 3:39 pm

Labyrinth – Amanda Lohrey

Labyrinth – Amanda Lohrey

I can’t remember how I came to have a copy of this one, but I finally got around to reading it. I loved the setting and Erica’s introspection.

Here’s the blurb …

Erica Marsden’s son, an artist, has been imprisoned for a monstrous act of revenge. Trapped in her grief, Erica retreats from Sydney to a sleepy hamlet on the south coast, near where Daniel is serving his sentence.

There, in a rundown shack by the ocean, she obsesses over building a labyrinth. To create it—to navigate the path through her quandary—Erica will need the help of strangers. And that will require her to trust, and to reckon with her past.

The Labyrinth is a story of guilt and denial, of the fraught relationship between parents and children. It is also an examination of how art can be ruthlessly destructive, and restorative. Mesmerising yet disquieting, it shows Amanda Lohrey to be at the peak of her powers

This novel has a great sense of place. Erica’s story and her son’s are revealed slowly. In her shack by the sea (near to her son’s prison), Erica is trying to find a way to live and keep going despite the terrible thing her son did.

There is a great review at the Guardian

1 Comment

Filed under 4, Fiction, Recommended

Tagged as , ,