“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…
“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…
“Irma Voth” by Miriam Toews
I enjoyed this tale of a young Mennonite girl marooned on a claustrophobic family compound in rural Mexico. At 19 she has already been through a lot, marrying a non-Mennonite Mexican guy called Jorge and getting ostracised by her family…
“Tomorrow Pamplona” by Jan van Mersbergen
A road trip taken by two men across Europe to the bull-running at Pamplona. The set-up appealed to me: it’s quite similar to my own novel, with two men on a road trip, exploring the strange relationship between them and…
“Letter to D” by André Gorz
D is André Gorz’s 82-year-old, terminally ill wife, and this short book is a letter written to her about a year before they both committed suicide at the same time, unable to bear the thought of being parted. Letter to…