The Centre by Ayesha Manazir Siddiqi: a translator discovers a sinister shortcut ★★★½
‘Translation…is highly mathematical. It’s about retaining the feeling, the thing underneath.’ Anisa spends her days adding subtitles to Bollywood movies, when what she really wants to be doing is translating great works of literature. Her Urdu – her mother tongue – isn’t quite good enough,…
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A richly imagined, unforgettable debut: Olga Dies Dreaming by Xochitl Gonzalez ★★★★½
As Olga Dies Dreaming opens, Olga is preoccupied with high-end napkins. She is in the throes of planning a wedding for the New York elite – a job for which she has little enthusiasm, but from which has built a successful career. She’s turned forty and…
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Beating the backlist in 2023, AKA working my way through an out-of-control bookcase
Surveying my stacks of books that have now spilled out from the bookshelves and into piles, I decided it was time to participate in the Beat the Backlist Reading Challenge. As per the challenge, it is: ‘designed to help you tackle all the books you…
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True Biz by Sara Nović is an exuberant, revelatory story about Deaf culture ★★★★½
‘True Biz’ is an incredibly eye-opening read that introduced me to Deaf culture in all its exuberance. Centuries of marginalisation from the hearing world have led Deaf communities to form a strong cultural identity and myriad ways of successfully navigating the world around them. It’s…
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Book review: ‘The Hop’ by Diana Clarke – a refreshing, propulsive and empathetic story of the modern sex industry ★★★★½
Kate grows up poor, in rural New Zealand, with her unconventional mother, who she adores. To supplement the household income, Kate and her best (and only) friend Lacey start giving kissing lessons at school, and then go to work in the local strip club once…
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Book review: Beth O’Leary’s ‘The No Show’, a charming and wise contemporary romance with emotional heft ★★★★
Meet three women: Siobhan, Miranda, and Jane – all stood up by the same enigmatic Joseph Carter on Valentine’s Day. These three couldn’t be more different – Siobhan is a seemingly self-assured life coach, extroverted and fashion-conscious. Miranda is a tree surgeon who can more than hold…
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10 books on my winter 2021 TBR
Here’s another overly-optimistic list to see me through the dark winter months. ‘A darkly funny, soul-rending novel of love in an epoch of collapse–one woman’s furious revisiting of family, marriage, work, sex, and motherhood.’ ‘A brilliant debut novel that brings to life an abandoned hospital…
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Top 10 Tuesday | Books on my autumn 2021 TBR
I think by now I’ve come to accept that I don’t have the dedication to read all the books I optimistically put on a TBR. Shiny new books pop up on my radar and distract me; life gets in the way. But as I’ve mentioned…
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Book Review | The Road Trip by Beth O’Leary
There’s something just so delightful about Beth O’Leary. You never know exactly what you’re going to get, but you know that it will be equal doses of funny and heartfelt; intensely readable with genuine characters and a solid storyline. The Road Trip doesn’t disappoint. Addie…
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Book Review | Anatomy of a Scandal by Sarah Vaughan
Our lives are inextricably shaped by the material facts of our birth. And for the young men living their gilded youths at Oxford University in the early 1990s, they’re pretty much untouchable. Our narrator describes the ‘smooth, smiling faces’ of ‘men who will sail through…
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9 Titles That Made Want to Buy the Book
This is another Top Ten Tuesday, but since I am at the mercy of these WordPress layouts I’m resigned to just go with 9. Have you read any of these? What books have you bought on the basis of their title alone? Books I’ve read…
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Book Review | Yes, Daddy by Jonathan Parks-Ramage
It’s 2009, and Jonah is a broke and lost aspiring playwright who has recently moved to New York. He’s working for a predatory boss at an upscale restaurant and barely scraping by. Estranged from his deeply evangelical parents who believe being gay is an unforgivable…
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Top 10 Tuesday | Books on my Summer 2021 TBR
Summer TBR? It feels like I just wrote my Spring TBR (and let’s not talk about the fact that I only finished 4 of the 10 and DNF’d 2…) but I can’t resist a list, so here goes… I can’t even pick what I’m most…
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Book Review | The Midnight Library by Matt Haig
TW: depression, suicide Nora Seed is a thirty-something living in Bedford. A few days before she decides to end her life, she walks through the town centre, seeing a ‘conveyer belt of despair’. Feeling that nothing in her life has panned out the way she…
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Book Review | Just Like You by Nick Hornby
There is a nervousness that hums through the pages of Nick Hornby’s latest novel. Set in North London, against the backdrop of the 2016 Brexit referendum, the tension and divisions have never been more apparent. (You know it’s bad when you start to feel a…
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Happy Publication Day | Ghosts by Dolly Alderton
Happy publication day to Ghosts by Dolly Alderton, a charming, funny and heartfelt piece of contemporary fiction. I read and reviewed this back in July, and my full review is here! Nina Dean has arrived at her early thirties as a successful food writer with…
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Book Review | Pretending by Holly Bourne
TW: Sexual violence, PTSD April is thirty-something and jaded. Her work for a relationship advisory charity leaves her exhausted reading and responding to trauma on a daily basis; all her friends who are seemingly happily-married aren’t really that satisfied; and she’s broke from the aforementioned…
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Book Review | Bunny by Mona Awad
Warren, an elite New England University, is home to one of the most exclusive MFA programs in the country. It’s on this program that our protagonist Samantha is studying, along with a clique in her cohort who name themselves the ‘bunnies.’ (Bunnies, finding themselves a…
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Book Review | The Switch by Beth O’Leary
Leena is in her late twenties and working a high-powered job in London. Eileen, her grandmother, is in her late seventies and stuck in a rut after her loveless marriage fell apart. When Leena takes a ‘forced sabbatical,’ they come up with the hairbrained idea…
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Book Review | Ghosts by Dolly Alderton
Nina is in her early thirties, a successful food writer living in London. She’s got just one single friend left, Lola, and everyone else is married and starting families. She caves to pressure and downloads a dating app called Linx. The line-up of potential mates…
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Book Review | My Dark Vanessa by Kate Elizabeth Russell
Vanessa is fifteen years old, attending a seemingly idyllic and prestigious boarding school set in the rolling mountains of Norumbega, Maine in the early 2000s. Jacob Strane is her English teacher, in his forties. And the two, Vanessa insists, embark on a romantic relationship. This…
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Book Review | Olive by Emma Gannon
Childfree Olive is adrift in a sea of her best friends – and a society – obsessed with motherhood. As she turned into a thirty-something, the questions only became more insistent – talk of shrivelling up eggs and the perils of geriatric motherhood. Olive has…
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Book Review | Normal People by Sally Rooney
Marianne is bookish, friendless, and impervious to the opinions of others. Connell is popular, athletic, and preoccupied with his public perception in their small West Ireland town and amongst their other sixth-form classmates. On paper, they’re an unlikely pairing, but there’s an undeniable magnetism that…
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Book Review | The Flatshare by Beth O’Leary
Tiffy needs a place to live. She’s in London, and her meagre Assistant Editor salary isn’t going to get her very far. She also needs to get out of her toxic ex-boyfriend’s flat, finally accepting that things are over between them. And that’s when she…
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Book Review | Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid
Like so many of us, Emira is in her mid-twenties and feeling adrift. She works part time as a typist and the rest of the time as a babysitter – not a nanny – for the wealthy Chamberlain family and their 3-year-old, Briar. She’s about…
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Book Review | Ghosted by Rosie Walsh
Rural Gloucestershire is six thousand miles and a lifetime away from Los Angeles, where Sarah has made her home for the past two decades. But she’s drawn back, every summer, for something of a pilgrimage – returning to the site of a tragic accident that happened…
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NOVELS AND TEACUPS 