Author RSSPoisoned Petals by Andy Crabb
Poisoned Petals by Andy Crabb is a set of over forty short stories, tales with a Spanish flavour. Most are set in Spain, with many featuring locations and people from within the Costa Blanca, where the author lives, works and continually observes. Some ar...
Fragrant Harbour by John Lanchester
Fragrant Harbour by John Lanchester is a novel that is hard to praise too highly. Set in Hong Kong, it presents the stories of four main characters, each of which is an immigrant to this city. Behind them at all times is a culture that rules their lives, ...
The Door by Magda Szabo
The Door by Magda Szabo is a detailed, intimate account of a relationship between two women. Paradoxically, it was the distance between them that generated the intimacy. Presented with behaviour and attitudes she could not identify with or recognise, a yo...
My Life As A Fake by Peter Carey
My Life As A Fake by Peter Carey is a strange, multi-layered journey through a man's past, his artistic inspiration and his products, both illusory and real. Christopher Chubb is Australian and a budding poet. He resents the privilege of a certain littera...
Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter by Mario Vargas Llosa
Mario Vargas Llosa, novelist, Peruvian, is a word painter, an artist of consummate skill, capable of simultaneous intimate ecstasy and detached observation, skill that constantly surprises, titillates and intensifies. Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter is a ...
Cultured Tangos
It may be that in musical retrospect, from a luxury of twenty-twenty critical hindsight, that Astor Piazzolla will be seen as having done in the twentieth century for the tango what Frederick Chopin did in the nineteenth for the waltz. It is perhaps alrea...
Shakespeare by Bill Bryson
At the start of Shakespeare Bill Bryson apologises for the fact that there is not much to tell. Every aspect of the bard's physical presence on the planet seems to be shrouded in doubt and mystery. We don't even know what he looked like. We don't know muc...
Master Georgie by Beryl Bainbridge
At first glance Master Georgie by Beryl Bainbridge suggests it might be quite a light book, an easy read, a period piece set in the mid-nineteenth century. This would be wrong. Master Georgie is no safe tale of country house manners, of marriages imagined...
The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood
Sometimes, when reading a big book, one gets the feeling that the author set out to achieve size, as if that in itself might suggest certain adjectives from a reader or reviewer - weighty, significant, deep, serious, complex, extensive, perhaps. Sometimes...
On The Yankee Station by William Boyd
On The Yankee Station by William Boyd is a series of short stories, the longest of which provides the title for the set. This particular story is a superb piece of short fiction, much more than a short story, confronting, in less than twenty-five pages, s...
The Millstone by Margaret Drabble
Rosamund Stacey is the first person narrator of her own story in the Millstone by Margaret Drabble. Rosamund is a single mother - nothing strange about that, perhaps, at least in a twenty-first century Britain where now half of births are outside of marri...
The Colonel’s Last Wicket by G V Rama Rao
The Colonel's Last Wicket by G V Rama Rao is a delightful novel that uses scenarios and technicalities drawn from cricket to add poignancy to a gentle but moving story. This is not a book about cricket. It's a book about people, about their development, t...
Willie The Actor by David Barry
At one level Willie The Actor by David Barry is a crime novel in which a ruthless criminal commits bank robberies. On another it achieves the feel of dramatised documentary, for its eponymous anti-hero, William Sutton, is not fictitious and lived a real l...
Emperor by Colin Thubron
Emperor by Colin Thubron is a mightily ambitious novel. It describes the conversion to Christianity of the emperor Constantine the Great, the circumstances of which are unknown. But this was an event that changed human history. This single event elevated ...
July’s People by Nadine Gordimer
In July's People Nadine Gordimer presents a scenario laden with fears. Written in 1981, the book presents a South Africa afflicted by near-worst case Cold War disintegration. With rumoured external support, the urban black population has instigated a revo...
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