The Booker Prize 2022 #1: Oh William! by Elizabeth Strout
I’m starting my series of posts about this year’s Booker Prize longlist with a double review as I squeezed in Elizabeth Strout’s My Name...
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- Sep 19, 2022
- 3 min
The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
I finally listened to everyone telling me this was their favourite book and read The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov. Does this...
- Sep 1, 2022
- 2 min
For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway
In For Who the Bells Tolls Hemingway takes us back to another European war: this time the Spanish Civil War. His hero, the American...
- Aug 9, 2022
- 2 min
This is Your Mind on Plants by Michael Pollan
Michael Pollan is one of my favourite discoveries of recent years. This is Your Mind on Plants is his most recent book, consisting of...
- Aug 2, 2022
- 2 min
Without Warning & Only Sometimes by Kit de Waal
Without Warning & Only Sometimes author Kit de Waal’s childhood memoir. She up with an Irish mother who, as a Jehovah’s witness forbid...
- Jul 5, 2022
- 2 min
The Echo Chamber by John Boyne
BBC talk show host George Beverly and his family live a comfortable life in their London home – until the trolls and woke people on...
- Jun 28, 2022
- 1 min
When Panic Attacks by Dr Áine Tubridy
Panic attacks affect millions of people and can be debilitating. Depending on the severity of the disorder, and the frequency of the...
- Jun 21, 2022
- 2 min
Climate Crisis and the Global Green New Deal by Noam Chomsky and Robert Pollin
Climate Crisis and the Global Green New Deal is a conversation between linguist and philosopher Noam Chomsky and economist Robert Pollin...
- Jun 14, 2022
- 3 min
Swing Time by Zadie Smith
Our narrator first met Tracey when they were young girls nervously waiting for their first dance class to start. Their friendship did not...
- Jun 8, 2022
- 2 min
Dottie by Abdulrazak Gurnah
Dottie Badoura Fatma Balfour is seventeen years old and has just become the head of her small family in London. Her mother has just died,...
- May 24, 2022
- 2 min
Why Marx Was Right by Terry Eagleton
Why Marx Was Right is Terry Eagleton’s attempt at making Karl Marx’s theory accessible to all and to provide socialists with some...
- May 12, 2022
- 2 min
How to Live: A Life of Montaigne by Sarah Bakewell
How to live? Read a lot, forget most of what you’ve read, and be slow-witted! How do you make peace with the fact of death? How do you...
- Apr 26, 2022
- 2 min
The Women of Troy by Pat Barker
The Trojan War has left destruction in its wake. The city is defeated, its men have been murdered, and the women enslaved. But the Greek...
- Apr 19, 2022
- 3 min
The Lying Life of Adults by Elena Ferrante
“Two years before leaving home my father said to my mother that I was very ugly,” is the brutal opening line of Elena Ferrante’s most...
- Apr 12, 2022
- 5 min
If This Is a Man by Primo Levi
What can you say about a work such as this? It has been several weeks now since I read it, and I still feel lost for words. If This Is a...
- Mar 23, 2022
- 2 min
Attached by Amir Levine and Rachel Heller
First developed in the 1940s, attachment theory originally dealt with the relationship between infants and their caregivers and is one of...
- Mar 17, 2022
- 3 min
Paradise by Abdulrazak Gurnah
Uncle Aziz comes by the house every year. His visits are always a cause for excitement. The wealthy merchant and his men are not only...
- Mar 2, 2022
- 3 min
The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
Holden Caulfield has been expelled from his prep-school. Again. Having failed all subjects but English he now has to pack his bags and go...
- Feb 15, 2022
- 2 min
Harlem Shuffle by Colson Whitehead
It is hot in this 1960s Harlem summer where we meet Ray Carney for the first time. A respectable furniture salesman, Carney is well-liked...
- Feb 8, 2022
- 2 min
Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan
It is a bitter cold winter in Ireland, 1985. We are in a small town, among good Christian citizens and meet Bill Furlong, the coal...
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