Tag Archives | book review
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How to write a book review

Just saw a nice post on Read.Learn.Write which goes into the methodology of writing book reviews, using my novel On the Holloway Road as a model. I’ve never really thought about a method for writing reviews before – I tend to just give my response to the book in whatever form seems natural. That’s probably [...]

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Another good review

On the Holloway Road just picked up another excellent review in the book blogging world, this time from Vishy. I haven’t been thinking about the book very much recently – I’m now two books ahead, working on my third novel! So it’s great to have been reminded of On the Holloway Road recently, first by [...]

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Great review for On the Holloway Road

Nivedita Barve has just posted a really insightful review of On the Holloway Road – click here to read it. And I don’t call it insightful only because it’s positive  She describes the book well, and makes some very interesting points about the characters and themes. I really like the way she describes the tension [...]

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“The Brothers” by Asko Sahlberg

The Brothers, by Finnish writer Asko Sahlberg, is the first in Peirene Press’s series of the “Small Epic”. The publisher also draws comparisons with Shakespeare and William Faulkner. No pressure, then. Surprisingly the book did not disappoint. It’s only 122 pages but does pack in a lot of story, including among other things warring brothers, family [...]

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The Problems of Philosophy

“The Problems of Philosophy” by Bertrand Russell

This book is pitched just at the right level for me. I am interested in philosophy, but don’t have enough knowledge of it to be able to understand some of the more complex works. I tried Wittgenstein recently, for instance, and it didn’t take. But this short introduction to some of the basic problems of [...]

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“C” by Tom McCarthy

Well, that was a bit different. Don’t come to this book expecting plot, character development or anything like that. The main character, Serge, is like a conduit for signals from the radio that his father is experimenting with when he’s born and that he himself develops a fascination with as he gets older. He’s not [...]

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Cover of Half Blood Blues by Esi Edugyan

“Half Blood Blues” by Esi Edugyan

This book has it all: a compelling story, a great setting (black jazz musicians in Nazi Germany and occupied Paris), lyrical prose that perfectly captures the voice of the bass-player narrator, Baltimore-born Sid Griffiths, while also weaving in elements of the music it describes. It has jealousy, betrayal, a nice twist in the ending, and [...]

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Cover of The Flanders Road by Claude Simon

“The Flanders Road” by Claude Simon

Not an easy read, this. The style is experimental, with prose that mimics the way we think rather than the way we’d normally tell a story. So there’s a lot of jumping around from memory to memory by association rather than logic or chronology. The sentences are often long and winding, with digressions and then [...]

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“The Sense of an Ending” by Julian Barnes

I bought a signed copy at Highgate Bookshop, took it home and read it from cover to cover without stopping. That’s partly because it’s a short book (150 pages, with fairly large type and liberal use of white space) but also because it really drew me in and made me want to read more. The [...]

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New review for On the Holloway Road

On the Holloway Road picked up a good review from Emma over at Book Around the Corner yesterday. I don’t normally tell you about every review, but I wanted to highlight this one particularly because of a beautiful description of my main characters, Jack and Neil. Emma compares them to Sal and Dean in Kerouac’s [...]

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