Week three and the reading was easier, although I’m further behind in the German original than I am with the English translation. More of a time issue than anything else. “Chapters” 6/7 The German original calls the chapters “Books” not chapters. In my opinion this is a gross error and robs the English reader of seeing some intertextual links. How…
I made it to the end of week two but this was not without its challenges, either. Read on to find out why. Chapters 3 – 5 What do you make of Döblin’s structuring of the novel? The short summaries at the beginning of each chapter, each section? The montage technique? Initially, I wasn’t a fan of the short summaries…
Daniel Mason’s The Winter Soldier takes a young medical student far from Vienna and into the makeshift world of being a wartime medic in the Galician mountains on the Poland-Ukraine border. Vienna, 1914. Lucius is a twenty-two-year-old medical student when World War I explodes across Europe. Enraptured by romantic tales of battlefield surgery, he enlists, only to find himself posted…
As part of #GermanLitMonth, I’m taking part in the Berlin Alexanderplatz readalong. Week One was not a happy one at the Nut Press, which is why I’m posting this so very late in the month. I’ll let my answers to the discussion questions Lizzy set tell you why that was. Chapters 1-2. Welcome to the #germanlitmonth readalong of Alfred Döblin’s…
Writing under the very Brontë-esque pen name of Bella Ellis, Rowan Coleman has come up with a delicious premise for a new series featuring the Brontë sisters before they became published authors. The Vanished Bride is their first outing as detectors. Yorkshire, 1845. A young woman has gone missing from her home, Chester Grange, leaving no trace, save a large…
Horatio Clare writes with great candour and generosity in The Light in the Dark: A Winter Journal, offering a fierce flicker of hope to others in this illuminating contemplation of his own depression. As November stubs out the glow of autumn and the days tighten into shorter hours, winter’s occupation begins. Preparing for winter has its own rhythms, as old…
Heaven, My Home, the second book in Attica Locke’s Highway 59 series, uses a child’s disappearance to devastating effect in order to explore displacement, reconciliation and just what home means to people. Nine-year-old Levi King knew he should have left for home sooner; instead he found himself all alone, adrift on the vastness of Caddo Lake. A sudden noise –…
Katherine Stansfield’s Cornish Mysteries series moves to the unforgiving North Cornwall coast where Shilly and Anna are to investigate whether The Mermaid’s Call lured a man to his death. Cornwall, 1845. Shilly has always felt a connection to happenings that are not of this world, a talent that has proved invaluable when investigating dark deeds with master of disguise, Anna…
This was my first year taking part in the #20BooksOfSummer challenge run by Cathy over at 746 Books and it proved to be an interesting exercise for me. Not least because while I succeeded in reading more than 20 books (managing 29 in total over the 3-month period), I only stuck to half of my original selection which you can…
Widow’s Welcome is the first book in the Tales of Fenest trilogy, set in a world where elections turn on the stories Realms tell, determining which one rules and when power passes to another. Dead bodies aren’t unusual in the alleyways of Fenest, capital of the Union of Realms. Especially not in an election year, when the streets swell with…