The Resting Willow

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  • March 21, 2023

    Book Review – Trespasses by Louise Kennedy

    Book Review – Trespasses by Louise Kennedy

    Trespasses by Louise Kennedy is, at its heart, a story about an ill-fated love affair but its beauty and strength is that it becomes so much more than that, painting a rich and vibrant portrait of a whole community beyond our two lovers. This story is about an unexpected and forbidden love between young Catholic…

  • March 7, 2023

    Book Review – Devotion by Hannah Kent

    Book Review – Devotion by Hannah Kent

    Why do men bother with churches at all when instead they might make cathedrals out of sky and water? Better a chorus of birds than a choir. Better an altar of leaves. Baptise me in rainfall and crown me with sunrise. Devotion by Hannah Kent begins in 19th century Prussia, in a small community of…

  • March 5, 2023

    Book Review – Fire Rush by Jacqueline Crooks

    Book Review – Fire Rush by Jacqueline Crooks

    This is our dancing time. It’s 1978, and Yamaye and her friends live in a small, industrial town on the edge of London, once a site of pagan rituals, where they dance with the dead. This town of cemeteries and ghosts is brought to life at the weekend by the dub reggae beats in an…

  • March 1, 2023

    Book Review – Your Driver is Waiting by Priya Guns

    Book Review – Your Driver is Waiting by Priya Guns

    Your Driver is Waiting is a razor sharp and darkly comic vision of a contemporary city, viewed through our RideShare driver Damani’s eyes as she cruises through it, its inhabitants’ lives flashing before her. This unnamed city is heaving with people, simmering with an undercurrent of threat, and wracked with protests and riots. Driving long…

  • February 27, 2023

    Book Review – The Colony by Audrey Magee

    Book Review – The Colony by Audrey Magee

    It’s the summer of 1979, and an English painter and a French linguist both travel to a small island off the West Coast of Ireland where Irish remains the primary spoken language. What follows is a beautifully written and layered exploration of the idyllic and mythologised view they each hold of this place, versus the…

  • February 5, 2023

    Book Review – A Spell of Good Things by Ayòbámi Adébáyò

    Book Review – A Spell of Good Things by Ayòbámi Adébáyò

    A Spell of Good Things by Ayòbámi Adébáyò is a novel that illuminates and explores, with great candour and heart, two very different sides of modern Nigeria. Wúràolá, a young doctor from a wealthy family, is weighed down by the punishing hours and strained environment of her job, and the pressure from her family and…

  • February 2, 2023

    Book Review – The White Rock by Anna Hope

    Book Review – The White Rock by Anna Hope

    The White Rock by Anna Hope is an epic journey bringing us backwards and forwards in time through four different story lines, unfolding decades and centuries apart, loosely bound together by the powerful Mexican landscape within which they take place, and by the echoes that run through them. The Writer (2020), the Singer (1969), the…

  • January 28, 2023

    Book Review – Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh

    Book Review – Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh

    I preferred to wallow in the problem, dream of better days. It’s 1964 in wintry New England, and Eileen does not have it good. Living in a run-down house with her alcoholic father – a bully she mostly despises but remains dutiful too – Eileen is a young woman who drapes and drowns herself in…

  • January 15, 2023

    Book Review – Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World by Haruki Murakami

    Book Review – Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World by Haruki Murakami

    Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World is a story of two parts and two worlds, a story that encapsulates two very different sides of Haruki Murakami’s writing. One part: a Tokyo muchly similar to contemporary Tokyo but with a cyber twist, where our narrator lives a life typical to all Murakami’s male narrators…

  • January 14, 2023

    Book Review – Ghost Girl, Banana by Wiz Wharton

    Book Review – Ghost Girl, Banana by Wiz Wharton

    Ghost Girl, Banana by Wiz Wharton is a dynamic and compulsive multigenerational story that moves back and forth in time and place, between mother Sook-Yin and daughter Lily, between Hong Kong and London, spanning four decades from the 1960s to 1990s. It’s a story of love and betrayal; of the struggles of dual-heritage identity; of…

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