Ann lent me this after I was intrigued by her review of it earlier this year. It’s the story of the discovery of the Anglo-Saxon burial ship at Sutton Hoo in 1939 but rather than being a factual account, it’s dramatised by the author in novel form. Normally, I’m not keen on this kind of [...]
Feeling the need for something brainless yet racy, something with inch-high gold letters and words like protocol in the title, I snuck into to the boyf’s office and pulled this off the shelf. It’s the new Robert Harris novel, the second I’ve read, and on balance I prefer it to the first, Pompeii. Somehow it’s [...]
Crushed by the misery of Red Dust, I turned, halfway through, to Thurber for some light relief. But not just any Thurber: My Life and Hard Times is regarded with breathless awe by the Tozer family. We’ve read it countless times, we know some bits by heart, we quote it to each other at gatherings [...]
The boyf was off to Shanghai and wanted something Chinese to put him in the mood. I suggested this and ended up rereading it myself. It’s part-travel journal, part-lament for the author’s country and its people and, although it takes the reader on a journey through late-20th century China, in many ways it could have [...]
This is the third Alison Weir book I’ve read. She tends to cover the period of European history I’m most interested in i.e. Medieval and Renaissance and to write about women who have, if not disappeared, then faded in comparison with the men who were shaping events around them. Very little information survives about Katherine [...]
As Shane has mentioned, we had a 26 Books meet-up recently and swapped books. I got this from Akela himself and was excited about reading it because it’s so different from the kind of thing I usually go for. Having said in my second review that Blue Sky July was a woman’s book, my first [...]
If you’re wondering why I’m only reading this now, it’s because I’ve been collecting the series in paperback and the last one only came out this summer. I’ve been a year behind since the start which is why I was champing at the bit to find out ‘the ending that everyone else knew’. So what [...]
OK, I’m not proud. On holiday on a friend’s yacht in the Med, I was feeling somewhat superior in the face of said friend’s shelves and shelves of brainless crap (inch-high gold letters, words like protocol in the title) whilst ploughing my way through a worthy historical tome about Katherine Swynford (John of Gaunt’s mistress [...]
This quartet of love stories by the Czech author and political essayist Ivan Klíma shows a writer at the top of his game. When I compare it to the ten short stories by up-and-coming European writers I read in Decapolis earlier this year (Cathy’s Book 3), I despair for the art. Published twenty years earlier [...]
This is contemporary teen fantasy fiction and it’s a good example of the genre. Poison is a feisty 16-year-old whose dull and unpleasant life in the Black Marshes is changed forever when the phaeries – more specifically, an evil phaerie called The Scarecrow – swap her baby sister for a changeling. In order to find [...]
