Category Literature

Review: The Girl with the Louding Voice, Abi Daré
These are strange times we are living in, there is no doubt. I, like many people, have sought some comfort and escape in my vast TBR pile and the wonderful world of stories. Thank goodness for online book shops, Kindles and friends who pass you on pre-publication proofs of the biggest upcoming novels. The Girl […]

Review: The Island Child, Molly Aitken
Knowing that I would be writing my dissertation on Daisy Johnson’s beautiful Fen, it was good luck that I recently went to an event at Waterstones on Gower Street (clearly the best Waterstones in London) and heard Molly Aitken talk about her debut novel, The Island Child. Set on a remote Irish island, The Island […]

Review: Girl, Woman, Other, Bernadine Evaristo
It’s taken me a few weeks to gather my thoughts about Bernadine Evaristo’s Booker Prize winning novel. Spanning generations, characters, histories and continents, Girl, Woman, Other follows the interconnected stories of mostly black, mostly British mostly women as they navigate their lives and learn how to accept themselves in different ways. Some characters are firecrackers […]

Review: My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Ottessa Moshfegh
I read My Year of Rest and Relaxation over a couple of days while I was ill last week, and there’s definitely something quite claustrophobic and nightmarish about certainly the story of a woman trying to sleep for a year, while you yourself are unwell and sleeping a lot. I had been wanting to read […]

Review: Fen, Daisy Johnson
It took me a while to get into the stories of Fen by Daisy Johnson, and then it took me a little while to get out of them again. Reading these stories is like getting lost in the blurry, muddy fenland that Johnson is writing about. At some point you begin to question what is […]

What I’ll be reading in 2020
In the gloomy, dark January in which I have been doing Dry-January-Veganuary-No-Planuary (fun!), I’ve been finding myself reaching for a book more often than ever, and making good headway into my 2020 reading plans. Someone I follow on Instagram recently said that they felt like reading could sometimes seem like a competition where everyone is […]

Review: Once Upon a River, Diane Setterfield
I’ve been reading a lot of clever and ‘concentrate-y’ books (read: lit fic?) recently and was really missing the power of a novel of good length and brilliant story. In came Once Upon a River by Diane Setterfield at just the right time. Set in a rural village community upon the banks of the river […]