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Book Review – Small Worlds by Caleb Azumah Nelson
Small Worlds by Caleb Azumah Nelson opens at the beginning of a hot summer that will change everything for our narrator, Stephen, and his friends; school is finished, capturing that moment between childhood and adulthood with all its uncertainty and potential, and the future is both frightening and exciting. By the end of this summer…
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Book Review – A Constant Hum by Alice Bishop
A Constant Hum by Alice Bishop is a collection of short stories that capture the devastation of lives and landscapes, the losses suffered and the voids created, the fear of the immediate future and the hope for healing, following a series of Australian bushfires. The searing heat, the smell of smoke and the taste of…
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Book Review – Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is a moving story of a love tested by time, distance and circumstance, but it’s also so much more than that. At 17 hours audio/around 400 pages, this is a sweeping and epic novel embodying so much and exploring so many themes; love, identity and personal evolution, the different relationships…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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The Resting Willow 