Archive for August, 2010
In my mailbox this week
“In my mailbox” is a weekly meme hosted by The Story Siren in which people share the books that they have acquired that week. I continue to defy the book embargo, although not quite as spectacularly as last week as I have come home with a more moderate ten books this week. I have switched [...]
Review: ‘A Clockwork Orange’ by Anthony Burgess
Title: A Clockwork Orange Author: Anthony Burgess Published: William Heinemann Ltd. for the Independent’s Banned Books series, 2007, pp. 158 Genre: Dystopian fiction Blurb: It’s the near future. In an unnamed city (London? Berlin? Prague?) Alex and his teenage droogs are on the prowl, spending their evenings looking for ultra-violence, rape, even murder. There’s a price [...]
Review: ‘Lady Oracle’ by Margaret Atwood
Title: Lady Oracle Author: Margaret Atwood Published: Virago Press, 1990, pp. 345 Genre: General fiction Blurb: From fat girl to thin, from red hair to mud brown, from London to Toronto, from Polish count to radical husband, from writer of romances to distinguished poet — Joan Foster is utterly confused by her life of multiple [...]
In my mailbox this week
“In my mailbox” is a weekly meme hosted by The Story Siren in which people share the books that they have acquired that week. They don’t have to have come arrived through the mail (or post if, like me, you’re English), and most of mine have come from second hand book stalls. It sounds more [...]
Review: ‘Birds, Beasts and Relatives’ by Gerald Durrell
Title: Birds, Beasts and Relatives Author: Gerald Durrell Published: Fontana, 1971, pp. 220 Genre: Autobiographical wildlife fiction Blurb: All Gerald Durrell’s books are extremely enjoyable. My Family and Other Animals is the best, spun from his family’s five-year sojourn, before thewar, when he was in his early teens on Corfu. In Birds, Beasts and Relatives, [...]
Review: ‘Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day’ by Winifred Watson
Title: Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day Author: Winifred Watson Published: Persephone Books, 2008, pp. 234 Genre: Early twentieth century fiction Blurb: Miss Pettigrew is a down-on-her-luck, middle-aged governess sent by her employment agency to work for a nightclub singer rather than a household of unruly children. Over a period of 24 hours her life [...]
Review: ‘The Stone Book Quartet’ by Alan Garner
The four books which make up this volume were first published individually. “As the stories grow into one story, so one’s awareness of the emblems and symbols deepens! Garner binds the reader to him and he shows us the author working with language to make his book as his characters worked with stone and iron. [...]
Review: ‘Death and the Penguin’ by Andrey Kurkov
Victor is depressed: his lover has dumped him, his short stories are too short and the light has gone off in his dingy apartment. His only companion is Misha, the penguin he rescued from Kiev’s Zoo, when it couldn’t feed the animals anymore. Misha is the silent witness to Victor’s despair. Misha joins in his [...]
Review: ‘The Cigarette Girl’ by Carol Wolper
Elizabeth West is twenty-eight, which means she’s just entered The Zone–that seven-year span in a woman’s life when the pressure to find Mr. Right is at its most intense. For Elizabeth, however, the quest is not about Mr. Right so much as it is about Mr. Maybe. And on some nights, all she’s looking for [...]
Review: ‘Mrs Shakespeare’ by Robert Nye
Writing her memoirs seven years after her husband’s death, Anne Hathaway reminisces about her now-famous husband, recalling in particular that week in April, 1594, when the still-struggling poet and playwright invited her to London to celebrate his thirtieth birthday, and what happened to her in a certain strange bed in his lodgings above a fishmonger’s [...]