The Existential Detective – Alice Thompson

Bear with me for a minute – you’re not in the wrong review, I promise. Holiday reading = crime fiction and so I recently read the novel that T.S Eliot proclaimed “the first and the best detective novel” – Wilkie Collin’s The Moonstone. A review may be forthcoming at a later date, so I’ll reveal only that I did find myself [...]

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Homage to Barcelona – Colm Tóibín

There’s something about reading a book in situ, isn’t there? Beaches are not my usual habitat but my travelling companion’s blistered feet did insist on some respite after we had walked the length and breadth of Barcelona, down the Ramblas,  around the Gaudi buildings and parks, the Picasso Museum and the Miro foundation.  While she sun-worshipped, [...]

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Vamos a Catalonia!

The suitcase is packed and I’m ready for the off.  I’ve never been to Barcelona and everyone – but everyone – who has spoken to me about it has positively raved.  I have polished up my schoolgirl Spanish with that all important phrase – un vino tinto con soda, por favor – and read a [...]

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The Sweetness of Life – Paulus Hochgatterer

“Who could do a thing like that? Wieck said.  “Who kills bees?” …. “Someone who has a problem with the sweetness of life,” he said, astonishing himself with his own words, because it was unlike him to tolerate such fanciful turns of phrase. Indeed the animal kingdom does not fare well in Paulus Hochgatterer’s 2006 [...]

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TSS: A Picture Paints A Thousand Words

  Summarise your reading tastes in a picture without books challenged Simon from Stuck-in-A-Book.  This picture from Pink Carly on Flikr does this perfectly. All Sorts!  Take a look at my category list on the right.  Literary fiction, translated fiction,classics, contemporary fiction,  crime, thrillers, cross-over novels,  historical fiction, science fiction and increasingly non-fiction.  I could eat read the [...]

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The Daughter of Time – Josephine Tey

If you have access to a British history school text (which I don’t), would you please look up Richard III and let me know in comments whether it reports him as the murderer of the Princes in The Tower.  In The Daughter of Time Josephine Tey – or rather one of the characters – claims [...]

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The White Woman on the Green Bicycle – Monique Roffey

Gallavanting round London, taking part in photography challenges and a bank holiday weekend in the Highlands and a month has passed since I read Monique Roffey’s 2010 Orange shortlisted novel.  Got to admit it’s fading a little now. Fortunately I took some notes. It’s always a risky move when novelists choose to write in reverse chronological sequence.  Why set themselves [...]

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