"Work as if you live in the early days of a better world." Alasdair Gray
"Work as if you live in the early days of a better world." Alasdair Gray
Whilst on Furlough 1.0™ I kept seeing this bandied about Twitter and was fascinated by the concept, but the main draw was the stunning cover I kept seeing flashed up on screen. Imagine my delight when I returned to work for that month holiday from lockdown to find it there in the staff room waiting …
Originally on the Indie Bookshops blog After such a great debut I was really looking forward to reading Rónán’s follow up and was lucky enough to get sent a copy from Bluemoose Books to read and review. During a year where we are all just feeling raw, as though our nerve endings feel exposed to …
I had previously read Fish Soup by Margarita Garcia Robayo and thought it was absolutely stunning so was really looking forward to reading this and wasn’t disappointed at all. This sounds simple, and in a way it is but Margarita takes this simplicity and shines it to perfection. An exploration of a couple, Lucia and …
Amazingly I’ve had a copy of Leonard and Hungry Paul sat on my bookshelf for ages, I’ve always loved the premise of it, but for one reason or another I never quite made it past chapter one though I loved the voice in it. I picked it up again recently and a book more suited …
Another book in my classics reading exercise, amazingly enough a lot of the books I’ve read whilst doing this are from Vintage Books. Not only are the editions well-translated or adapted they are beautiful having wonderful covers. Invisible Cities is a fictional set of conversations between Kublai Khan and Marco Polo, where Marco Polo is …
I was so looking forward to Grief is the Thing with Feathers after hearing so much about it. It was such a refreshing change from the works I usually read, prose and poetry combined into a brave journey through grief and the feelings that come from being the one left behind to continue the shared …
Melancholic. This is about the only word that can be used to describe Never Let Me Go, it is there from the start to the end. Always on the verge of crying. This is such a well-crafted elegy to the dead or those about to die. Nothing is clear and the characters see their lives …
If you followed me on my old Twitter account you may have already realised that I love the short story format as a vehicle for delivering beautiful and compact prose, sometimes almost poetic, and Kanishk Tharoor’s debut collection, Swimmer Among the Stars, is one of the best examples of that I’ve read. So apart from …