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Book Review – The Thing Around Your Neck by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
I’ve loved everything I’ve read so far by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, a writer who weaves captivating and compelling stories of great strength, populated by characters so vividly brought to life that we find ourselves really feeling with them. From the devastating effects of political and social unrest on everyday families to traditional religion and culture…
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Book Review – My Husband by Maud Ventura
My Husband, the debut novel by Maud Ventura, translated from the original French by Emma Ramadan, is a slow moving, intense and deliciously dark psychological portrait of a marriage and domestic dynamic; a marriage of games and rules, offences and corresponding punishments, of hypothetical drama… all in our narrator’s head alone. The novel opens strong,…
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Book Review – Weave by Oein DeBhairduin & Deirdre Sullivan. Illustrated by Yingge Xu
Weave is a stunning work of literary art; a collaboration between writers Oein DeBhairduin and Deirdre Sullivan, and artist Yingge Xu. Containing eight stories inspired by the eight festivals in the wheel of the year, the flip reverse format – one side of the book starts with Sullivan’s stories and to read DeBhairduin’s you flip…
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Book Review – Cat’s Eye by Margaret Atwood
Cat’s Eye by Margaret Atwood is the story of Elaine, a painter who, on returning to her childhood city of Toronto for her grand retrospective exhibition, finds memories of her past flooding back to her – but happy memories they are not. The novel opens in a really clever and intriguing way – Elaine is…
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Book Review – Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus
Elizabeth Zott is a chemist, and a pretty great chemist at that, but a series of enraging and tragic events leave her with no choice but to take a job hosting a TV cookery show. However, it comes as no surprise, having come to know Elizabeth, that this is not going to wind up like…
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Book Review – Five Little Indians by Michelle Good
Five Little Indians by Michelle Good tells the stories of Kenny, Lucy, Clara, Howie and Maisie, taken from their families as young children to be placed in a church-run residential school. Eventually discharged at different times and sent away on the cusp of an adulthood they are in no way prepared for, their journeys converge…
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Book Review – Cocktail Bar by Norah Hoult
Cocktail Bar by Norah Hoult is a collection of short stories first published in 1950 and, while the language, and social and historical references, sometimes clearly place this in times gone by, there are aspects of the social commentary, and meditations on young love and community dynamics, that could be much more recent. And this…
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Book Review – Burial Rites by Hannah Kent
Based on historical facts, Burial Rites by Hannah Kent is the story of Agnes Magnúsdóttir, the last person to be executed in Iceland in 1830. Condemned to death for her part in the murder of two men, with no prisons in Iceland at the time, Agnes is sent to wait out the time leading to…
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Book Review – Florida by Lauren Groff
Florida by Lauren Groff is a strange, atmospheric, unsettling and absolutely captivating collection of short stories. While the book blurb says it’s the landscape, climate, history and state of mind of the titular American State that binds these stories, the overarching element permeating most of this collection is Florida’s extreme weather, terrain and wildlife, used…
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Book Review – Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Fresh off listening to Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, which I loved, I downloaded the audiobook of Half of a Yellow Sun, which won her the Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2007. This was also read by Adjoa Andoh, who read the last one so beautifully. Half of a Yellow Sun, set in 1960s Nigeria,…
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The Resting Willow 