Author Archives: Beth Wren
Review: Because You’ll Never Meet Me, Leah Thomas
Ollie and Moritz are two teenagers who will never meet. Each of them lives with a life-affecting illness. Contact with electricity sends Ollie into debilitating seizures, while Moritz has a heart defect and is kept alive by an electronic pacemaker. If they did meet, Ollie would seize, but turning off the pacemaker would kill Moritz. […]
Review: The Versions of Us, Laura Barnett
What if you had said yes . . . ? Eva and Jim are nineteen, and students at Cambridge, when their paths first cross in 1958. Jim is walking along a lane when a woman approaching him on a bicycle swerves to avoid a dog. What happens next will determine the rest of their lives. […]
POETRY CORNER | POEM #7: Force of Nature
Because you cannot choose the way you are anymore than you can choose your own blood. And maybe I’m biased, but a monsoon beats a drought any day.
Review: Eat, Pray, Love, Elizabeth Gilbert
It’s 3 a.m. and Elizabeth Gilbert is sobbing on the bathroom floor. She’s in her thirties, she has a husband, a house, they’re trying for a baby – and she doesn’t want any of it. A bitter divorce and a turbulent love affair later, she emerges battered and bewildered and realises it is time to […]
Returning to Yorkshire
Coming back to Yorkshire was like a homecoming for me. I lived in York for three years whilst at university and after a year away, it’s fair to say that I was missing – as the people of Yorkshire proudly put it – God’s own country. I can’t quite explain how much beauty and culture […]
Review: The Wise Man’s Fear, Patrick Rothfuss
There’s really nothing like dipping into a book feeling returning to an old friend. Comfortable, comforting, like it’s an old story you know and love. Reading The Wise Man’s Fear was like continuing on a long journey with people and places I was already very intimate with. It took a very long time (nearly 1000 pages), we got a […]
Reflecting on Reflection
I’ve been pretty busy lately – working two jobs, saving money for travelling, trying to find a social life somewhere, becoming the ultimate cliché of a struggling writer; altogether forgetting how to switch off and shut down. During times like these you’re so busy being busy, putting yourself on automatic just to get through the days […]
A Day in Brighton
Can we just talk about how amazing Brighton is? It’s like a magical land somewhere at the bottom of the country which doesn’t feel like it even belongs with the rest of the UK. The weather was warm, I had a Saturday off and I was with my favourite travel buddy. We wandered along the beach and […]
Review: On Chesil Beach, Ian McEwan
On a weekend trip to London when I had lent my Kindle to my brother and needed something to read, I picked up On Chesil Beach for sheer superficial reasons: it was thin and would fit into my already over-brimming backpack. Plus, you know, it’s so pretty. I had read it previously during my post-Atonement Ian McEwan phase, but […]
Manchmal Träum’ Ich Nur Von Dir
After having panic-bought flights as soon as I had arrived back in the UK, returning to Germany two months later was somewhat of a surreal experience. I had to take two weeks off from my new job with raised eyebrows of you were just there for seven months, why are you going back? And it was a good […]
Bethany Wren 