I picked up this book in my local bookshop last Sunday. It was a toss up between this one and a Philippa Gregory novel Wild…something… I loved the way this book started. “Sorry of my English.” Zhuang is a Chinese language student who arrives in London to attend an English language school in order to [...]
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Ian Rankin‘s book The Hanging Gardenis one of his Inspector Rebus novels. You might have seen the Rebus TV series starring John Hannah? In this book Rebus investigates two crimes. A war crime and some gangster in-fighting. Both complex, both in their way intriguing and somehow inter-related. Rebus is a miserable bugger. Wedded to his [...]
I picked up this book over Easter. One of our teenage guests had read it for school and was writing a paper on it. It’s not a long read – I read it over the course of a morning. Chinese Cinderella is the autobiographical tale of Adeline Yen Mah – you may have seen her [...]
I first heard about Peter Temple on Matilda and then while I was frantically searching for something to read on the plane to Broome, my colleague mentioned him too. So I picked up The Broken Shore and started reading it on the plane. The story is of a broken cop, “retired” in the town he [...]
Rebecca is not the easiest of novels to get into. Opening with a dream scene with heavy descriptive prose in this day and age can be a bit of a chore, but once you get into maybe chapter 3, after all that depressing looking back at Manderley, it’s really worth the effort. Du Maurier sets [...]
This little book by Anna Fienberg is charming. Aimed at 6-10 year olds I guess it has illustrations by the same guy that drew for the Tashi books – Kim Gamble. The book is set in a village which is raided each year by pirates. They take boys aged 12 who endure two years of [...]
Maybe because I’d recently visited the Holocaust museum in Washington DC, I was totally ready for this book set around a rare Jewish book – the Sarajevo Haggadah. The novel travels space and time. We travel the world as Hanna Heath uncovers the secrets of this ancient text and uncovers some unexplored areas of her [...]
Anne Kreamer‘s exploration of one woman’s discoveries about life when you go grey has touched a nerve with me. Sure she is ten years older than me but I have been throwing money at my badger stripe for years now – and sometimes I just wish I could shave my hair off and start again [...]
Coming home from Sydney the other day I picked up The Jane Austen Bookclub by Karen Joy Fowler. I had a five hour journey and I love Jane Austen so I figured it was the perfect match. Settling into my upgraded business class seat (the best use for FF points about to expire) I started [...]
