“Maybe This Time” by Alois Hotschnig
I'd thoroughly recommend this book to anyone who's looking for something a little weird and disturbing and different.
“The Year of Magical Thinking” by Joan Didion
“You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.” This book has simple sentences like this scattered through it. They’re things you know, but forget. Your loved ones will die, so make the most of the time…
“The Generation Game” by Sophie Duffy
An interesting premise: the book starts with a woman in hospital talking to her newborn baby girl. She starts to tell the story of her life, beginning with her own birth in St Thomas’s Hospital in 1965 and going right…
“Book of Clouds” by Chloe Aridjis
A very quiet, meditative book about a Mexican woman adrift in Berlin. Tatiana is alienated from her family and her friends, cut off from the rest of the city, uninterested in forming a relationship with anyone. She gets a part-time…
“Brenton Brown” by Alex Wheatle
Brenton Brown is a follow-up to Alex Wheatle’s famous debut Brixton Rock, which was set in the early 1980s. We catch up with the characters of that book about 25 years later in contemporary Britain, and those who read the…
“Homage to Catalonia” by George Orwell
Homage to Catalonia is many books in one. It is a piece of journalism – Orwell initially went to Spain in the 1930s to report on the Spanish Civil War. It is also a war memoir, because Orwell was immediately…
Giveaway: “The World’s Wife” by Carol Ann Duffy
I picked up a free copy of this in New Beacon Books – there was a stack of them left over from World Book Night earlier this year. It says inside the back cover that I’m supposed to pass it…
“Too Loud a Solitude” by Bohumil Hrabal
The narrator of Too Loud a Solitude is an idiot. His boss despises him, others laugh at him. He drinks beer all day, and works in a cellar compacting wastepaper. He has been compacting wastepaper in the same cellar with…
Summer reads
Nice list of summer reads posted by largeheartedboy, linking to all the “books you must read this summer” lists. I like lists, so a list of lists is even better. It’s a US-centred list – wonder if someone has done…