Category: Reviews
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Sunstruck
by William Rayfet Hunter This is one of those slowly unravelling books – it starts with decadence, desire and a playful summer lightness, before descending into the complexities of class, privilege and family trauma. The first half of Sunstruck has a vivid, honeyed setting, which I felt as mesmerised by as the protagonist does. The…
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Taiwan Travelogue
By Yáng Shuāng-zǐ (Translated by Lin King) A warm, charming, yet sharply critical postcolonial novel that also turns out to be a clever metafiction – a bold attempt to interweave fiction, history and translation into the whole multi-dimensional novel. Set in late 1930s, a Japanese writer, Aoyama Chizuko, with tremendous passion for good food and…
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Dream Count
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Paperback ‘Does it help to know that the world is full of people who are sadder than you?’ ‘But I am not sad, I just dream.’ I rarely underline or highlight my books, and yet for some reason I had to mark a lot of the passages in Dream Count, as to…
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How Lucky Am I
by Christian Watson Many of my favourite books are unclassifiable. Shelved here at Riverside initally in our horror section (because skeleton) and then humour (because strange), How Lucky Am I will live hereafter in the staff picks section, possibly forever. This would both avoid the classification problem and reflect how much I like it. How Lucky Am…
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Harriet Tubman: Beacon of Hope
by Patricia Pete with Ryan G. Van Cleave “Every great dream begins with a dreamer. Always remember, you have within you the strength, the patience and the passion to reach for the stars to change the world”. – Harriet Tubman This inspirational new biography of Harriet Tubman is perfect for middle grade readers (perhaps 7-10…
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Superheroes in the Park
by Ian Eagleton and Hayley Wells I was put on to this gorgeous picture book by the excellent booksellers at Letterbox Library, expert champions of inclusive children’s books. Dad and Daddy take their little one to the park, but they are too worried about accidents and keep stopping adventurous outdoor play. But the little one…
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The Trembling Hand: Reflections of a Black Woman in the Romantic Archive
By Mathelinda Nabugodi Paperback The Trembling Hand is a rich and thought-provoking discussion of the Romantic writers in the context of enslavement. I found that I was thinking about Percy and Mary Shelley, Byron, Keats and others differently, and that this was both hard and relevant. Nabugodi’s explanation of historical contexts of their lives and…
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Light and Thread
by Han Kang (Translated by Maya West, e. yaewon & Paige Aniyah Morris) With profound spaciousness, Light and Thread offers Han’s rich embodied knowledge as a writer. Not merely being writing about writing, it is an attentive collection of poems, essays, images and diary entries; they shine a light on how we can keep asking…
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Having Spent Life Seeking
by Kae Tempest If you haven’t already, I really highly recommend listening to and reading Kae Tempest’s work. He creates music and poetry as well as novels and you can feel his poetic, magnetic energy and rhythm in Having Spent Life Seeking. It is at times a desperately sad novel about characters who have been…
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The Story of Birds
An Evolutionary History of the Dinosaurs That Live Among Us Steve Brusatte Steve Brusatte knows a great deal about dinosaurs, fossils and evolutionary history, but also has an uncanny ability to communicate what he does know to those who, like me, know very little. It was very much evident in his previous two books –…
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Anxietyland
By Gemma Correll Funny, moving and brilliantly told, this is a memoir of a life lived with anxiety. Correll shares her low moments and her achievements, her experiences of different forms of anxiety, and what has worked in helping her deal with it. Fans of her comics and cards will recognise her signature style (I…
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It Might Never Happen
By Emily Slapper Paperback The cover and the first page of this book drew me in because I suspected it would fit into the same niche as Sally Rooney and Naoise Dolan – and having read it, I think it does – but it has something a little different. Slapper’s writing is more visceral, more…
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Is This a Plum?
By Dan and Finn Ojari Paperback £8.99 Is this a plum? No, it’s… something else! Laughs in this excellent picture book start from the very first page. Cut outs in the pages reminded me of firm favourites The Very Hungry Caterpillar and Under the Same Sky, but they are used in different way. The result…
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Heap Earth Upon It
By Chloe Michelle Howarth Goodness me. This is certainly a book. And it’s definitely not a coincidence that it’s coming out at Halloween. The back of my proof copy says: “A creeping story of sibling rivalry and dangerous obsession”, and I’d say that’s one of the most accurate descriptions of a book I’ve ever read.…
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Jacob’s Transition Goals
by Arthur Webber, illustrated by Ang Hui Qing Hardback, £12.99 This is a bright and exciting picture book that tells an important and moving story, aimed at children aged 3 and up. Jacob is a young boy who is trans and loves football. He moves from the girls’ to the boys’ football team, and after…
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Beyond: a Story of Love and Grief
by Katie Cleminson Hardback, £12.99 This beautiful picture book is exactly what is says it is: a story of both love and grief. I read it as a story about the loss of a baby, the transformative nature of profound grief, and everlasting love for a lost child. I found out later that Cleminson wrote…
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Lifeboat at the End of the World – a Volunteer’s Story
By Dominic Gregory “Do you really think all lives are worth saving?” This is the question that Dungeness lifeboat volunteer Dominic Gregory faces from a man on the beach when he and his crewmates return from trying to rescue strangers from some of the most dangerous seas on earth. This extraordinary book gave me an…
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Counterattacks at Thirty
By Won-pyung Sohn Paperback I started reading Counterattacks at Thirty a week after turning thirty myself, and it has been a while since I have felt a strong connection with the main character of a novel. Kim Jihye is at the early stages of her career (read: internship); she lives in a poorly lit flat…
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