I ordered The Undertaking by Audrey McGee earlier in the week, having heard her interviewed recently on the radio, I thought it sounded like one of those books that just had to be read. When it arrived in the post from Kennys Bookshop, I started reading it while waiting for the spuds to finish cooking – let’s just say we had rather overdone potatoes for [...]
I read The Book Thief about two years ago and once I had arranged to go and see it in the cinema this week with a friend, I debated about rereading it – would I enjoy the film more if I only remembered the main events? ?Scrap that, I thought, and I reread it last weekend. It was every bit as good as the first time [...]
The Priest’s Wife to me sounded as though it was going to be about a torturous relationship between a priest and either his mistress or a woman that loved him fiercely but he loved God and Rome more. Set mostly in the 1970s, the opening chapter reveals a young nun having to lick spilled salt and pepper off the dusty floor on her 21st birthday as the Mother Superior seems intent on humiliating her as much as possible.
Under the Hawthorn Tree by Marita Conlon-McKenna is a historical novel for children – set at the time of the Great Potato Famine. ?It’s been sitting on our bookshelves for ages but neither of the children had been compelled to read it (Famous Five, Harry Potter, Hardy Boys – all seemed more exciting!) and I hadn’t got around to reading it to them. The children are reading [...]
I wanted to read Jo Baker’s Longbourn once I first heard about it. ?I had been ?disappointed by ‘Death Comes to Pemberley’ and have no intention of reading the modern version of Sense and Sensibility but this novel, the giving voice to the voiceless, letting us know what might have been going through the minds of the servants below stairs, telling us about their working lives, sounded like [...]
