Tag: Review
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Jamie
I was eagerly awaiting this 2023 release: a middle grade book with a non-binary main character fighting for their rights? Sign me up! I am most happy to report: the book lived up to my hype. Our charming protagonist is at a crossroads. Having come out as non-binary to their friends, parents, classmates and teachers,…
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The Return – Fathers, Sons and the Land In Between, by Hisham Matar
Hardback, Penguin:Viking, £14.99, out now Hisham Matar’s father Jaballa Matar, an active opponent of Muammar Qaddafi in Libya, was kidnapped in Cairo in 1990 and imprisoned in Tripoli’s notorious Abu Salim jail. After 1996, there was no word of what happened to him. This beautifully written memoir concerns not only Matar’s memories of family life…
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The Essex Serpent, by Sarah Perry
Hardback, Serpent’s Tail, £14.99, out now Victorian religion, science and superstition battle it out over a possible giant sea serpent off Essex. Cora, whose abusive husband has just died, sets out with her unusual young son Francis and working class activist friend Martha to investigate. Finally able to explore her own interests, this amateur naturalist…
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Gratitude, by Oliver Sacks
Hardback, Picador, £9.99, out now Gratitude is a final gift from the excellent neurologist and writer of popular science, Oliver Sacks, who died in 2015. These short but beautiful pieces encapsulate all that is best about his writing. Humane, kind, interesting and funny, they offer his reflections on a life well lived from one who…
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The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame
Hardback, £9.99, Egmont ‘Classics’ Kenneth Grahame’s 1908 children’s classic The Wind in the Willows was republished last year in a beautiful hardback edition by Egmont ‘Classics’, complete with an appendix of activities for children, a well-conceived glossary (as some of Grahame’s words are challenging) and E. H. Shepherd’s original and unforgettable pen illustrations. I cannot…
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The Mountain Can Wait, by Sarah Leipciger
Paperback, Tinder Press, £7.99, out now A distracted young man, Curtis, is driving along a mountain road at night. A woman flashes into his headlights, is struck by the truck, and disappears. He keeps driving. Curtis’s single father Tom manages planting for logging in the Canadian Rockies. His teenage daughter, like his son, appears alienated…
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Citizen – An American Lyric, by Claudia Rankine
Paperback, Penguin Books, £9.99, out now This book has been out for ages. It has been in the shop for ages. It won the Forward Poetry prize for best collection last year. So why am I writing about it now? I am writing about it because I can’t stop thinking about it, and because it…
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Ten Days, by Gillian Slovo
Hardback, Canongate, £14.99, out 3 March Martin Luther King said that “riots are the language of the unheard”. Developed from Slovo’s successful 2011 verbatim play The Riots at the Tricycle theatre, this readable novel offers multiple voices and a wholly convincing and gripping anatomy of how a London riot happens. It is a scorching summer,…
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Edna O’Brien, The Little Red Chairs
Hardback, Faber and Faber, £18.99, out now In 2012, in memory of the Sarajevo siege which began in 1992, “11,541 red chairs were laid out in rows along… the Sarajevo high street. One empty chair for every Sarajevan killed during the 1,425 days of siege. Six hundred and forty-three small chairs for the children killed…
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The Neapolitan Novels, by Elena Ferrante
Out now, £11.99 each A woman in her sixties, at home in Naples, receives a call from the middle-aged son of her best friend. His mother is missing. She has disappeared, cutting her image out of photos and removing all her belongings. Her lifelong friend is not surprised, noting it has been thirty years since…
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The Fish Ladder – Katharine Norbury
Bloomsbury Circus, out now Katharine Norbury was abandoned as a baby in a Liverpool convent, raised by caring adoptive parents, and then had a family of her own. The book opens as she starts a series of British nature journeys with her young daughter, prompted by bereavement following a miscarriage. In this nature memoir, Norbury…