I first heard Simone Mansell Broome read her poems at a poetry magazine launch in 2009. Hers were the poems that stood out for me that night because they spoke of real life events that I could identify with but they were also delivered with a healthy dose of humour, real warmth, empathy and a highly-perceptive understanding of human nature…
I loved this book. I don’t know about Turning the Tide but it certainly kept me Turning the Page. I had only meant to read a couple of chapters before bed but, each time I tried to put it down, I thought I’d just read the next chapter and then couldn’t put it down until I finished reading it at…
I knew I had to read this book as soon as I saw its gorgeous cover. It promised the irresistible lure of adventure on the high seas and more than delivered on that. Set in 1732, Trade Winds tells the story of roguish and handsome Killian Kinross who is forced to leave his native Scotland and forge a new career…
I am thrilled to welcome D.J. Kirkby to The Nut Press today. D.J. is here as part of a blog tour to promote her debut novel Without Alice. I was lucky enough to meet D.J. Kirkby at a book launch* in May. Since then, I’ve read D.J.’s first book, From Zaftig to Aspie, which is an incredible sensory memoir filled…
You know that feeling you sometimes get when you step off an aeroplane in a Mediterranean country? When the warm air envelops you like a deep sigh? Your whole body relaxes and that’s the moment when you realise that you’re in a foreign country, and now properly on holiday. That’s how it feels to open the pages of Like Bees to Honey and start reading.
Chance. Luck. Fate. Destiny. Choices. Reactions. Timing. Much like Jack’s coin, my head is still spinning days after reading Nicola Morgan’s excellent Wasted. But this is a good thing. The book throws up a lot of questions and ideas and it’s made me look at some of these with fresh perspective.
I always thought one of the benefits of becoming proficient in a foreign language would be that I’d be able to read another country’s literature in the original language, rather than in translation. (In fact, if I chose the language wisely, I’d be able to read that of more than one country.) I never thought for a moment that it would enable me to read a novel set in England, originally written in English by an English author but which has, so far, only been published in translation.
Please see pic for Exhibit ‘A’ – Della Says: OMG! – a book that I would not normally pick up to read the blurb on the back cover, let alone buy and read cover-to-cover in one sitting. Why? We-ell, there’s shocking pink and fluorescent green on the front cover, for starters, the book title contains text speak (even though, yes, I use it myself. Guilty as charged) and it’s a book aimed at the teen market.
I’m hoping that Bernhard Schlink’s thought-provoking novel The Reader doesn’t become a footnote to Kate Winslet’s Oscar success in the film adaptation. It is a book that deserves far more that the sorry footnote of simply becoming the book of the film.
I don’t know about you but I’ve always wished there was a little bit more magic and some of that ever-so-helpful fairy dust in my life from time to time. But Catherine Ryan Howard had bigger dreams than this.