Everyone in Shaker Heights was talking about it that summer: how Isabelle, the last of the Richardson children, had finally gone around the bend and burned the house down. In the placid, progressive, carefully constructed suburb of Shaker Heights, everything is just as it always had been; the kids, parents, neighbours and communities all knew…
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Captivated by a university professor’s politics and poetry, the narrator of When I Hit You falls in love with him and agrees to marry him with more feeling than thought. But what she assumed would be a life full of love and new adventures soon turns sour, as he starts to force her into the box…
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“A missing girl. A hope never lost. A killer never found.” Having heard great reviews about Slaughter’s writing, I was keen to pick one of her novels up; after reading it, I can see why! This is not a short novel, in fact, at 533 pages it’s a bit of a commitment, yet I seemed…
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After devouring The Keeper of Lost Things earlier this year, I was really excited to get into Ruth’s second book, The Wisdom of Sally Red Shoes, in the hopes that her writing would be just as fabulous. After finishing the novel, I have mixed feelings about it… Our protagonist Masha is learning to live after…
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Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again… Rebecca had sat on my shelves for about 3 years before I got round to actually reading it. Every time I looked at it, I thought “I would love to read that at some point but not right now”, and reached for…
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A Man called Ove by Fredrik Backman, translated by Henning Koch “Ove is almost certainly the grumpiest man you will ever meet. He thinks himself surrounded by idiots – joggers, neighbours who can’t reverse a trailer properly and shop assistants who talk in code. But isn’t it rare, these days, to find such old-fashioned clarity…
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I tend to find that the summer and autumn a very birthday-heavy seasons and I love taking the opportunity to give my friends not only something that I love, but also something that I think they’ll love. With that in mind, I’ve made a list of 10 books that I would give, have given or…
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One woman’s search for everything A writer’s honest and humble memoir of her travels to Italy, India and Indonesia as she sets out to find pleasure, spirituality and balance… Divided into three sections, totalling 108 short chapters (for some meaningful reason which I’ve forgotten since reading about it), this non-fiction read starts at the beginning…
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“In a world where women have no rights, one wrong move could cost them their lives” I’m not afraid to admit that I love a bit of YA, especially when it’s a series, and why should I be? They’re fast-paced, well-written and allow me to escape back to my teenage years (when life was a…
Read More“A renaissance artist of the 1460s. A child of a child of the 1960s. Two tales of live and injustice twist into a singular yarn where time gets timeless, knowing gets mysterious, fiction gets real – and all life’s givens get given a second chance.” Split in to two distinct sections, this book follows George,…
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