When the brochure for this year’s Hay Festival plopped onto the doormat, I immediately settled down to spend some time going through it. Living as I do within an hour’s drive of Hay-on-Wye, the book town has a special place in this book squirrel’s heart already. But, for one magical week of the year, it becomes everything that I enjoy…
I am fast coming around to the idea that I should either get my book recommendations from Twitter or work my way through the Avon Imprint titles for the foreseeable future. So far this year, I’ve read two of their books found through the social networking site (the first of which was Miranda Dickinson’s Fairytale of New York, reviewed here)…
Jeremy Northam is proving to be an interesting travelling companion. In 2008, after first splitting our time between languidly idling among the dreamy spires of Oxford and staying at an imposing stately home in the English countryside, we flitted off together for a brief sojourn on the Venetian lagoon, before later wandering the souks of Morocco.
I was fortunate enough to win a signed copy of Miranda Dickinson’s wonderful debut novel Fairytale of New York. The author herself ran a competition on Twitter – I’ve alluded to the wonders of social networking in an earlier post – and, just before Christmas, it arrived, together with a lovely card and some yummy chocolate, which I think ought…
Through the power of social networking, I was recently asked to write a review for Canongate’s wonderful Meet at the Gate website. They are currently running a feature they’ve dubbed their Literature World Tour and when they posted on Facebook that their next stop would be New Zealand,
This is a beautifully written book that vividly imagines the extraordinary life of a remarkable man.
Owen Sheers finds a book in his father’s study which puts him on the trail of one of his distant relations, Arthur Shearly Cripps, also a poet. The journey takes him from the Rhodes Library in Oxford to modern-day Zimbabwe to London as he traces the life of his missionary ancestor, who left England at the turn of the twentieth century for what was then Southern Rhodesia.
At first sight this looks like a lightweight school story about a single 45-minute Greek class at a German Gymnasium in 1928.
The school director comes into the classroom and takes over from the usual teacher, Kandelbinder. He proceeds to test, torment and humiliate not only the students but also Kandelbinder.
It took me a long while before deciding to cave in and read this book because I was convinced that it would turn out to be over-hyped and a disappointment.
This has been on the increasingly towering to-be-read pile ever since Barack Obama’s inauguration in January this year but finally got bumped up the list with his recent Nobel Peace Prize win.
Is it wrong to admit that I wanted a book I haven’t yet read to win the Man Booker prize? If it is, then I apologise (especially to the other five authors, whose shortlisted books I haven’t read either) but I’m nonetheless ecstatic that Hilary Mantel won the Booker Prize for the first time last night. She is such an…