For my birthday this year, Mr BIP arranged for me to have a cake with a sentence from an Alice Munro story iced onto it: “The world would be grand, if it weren’t for the people.” It’s an interesting quotation in a year when the pandemic has made everyone
When you have 8,409 books on your TBR list, the smallest detail can boost a handful of them to the top of the stack. Which feels tremendously specific. And terrifically random. So when Karen and Simon chose 1965 as their next reading year inspiration, a few books presented themselves
Having stories narrated by - or assembled via - a number of voices is a popular way of world-building. Each of the following books plays with this technique, allowing different perspectives to combine and create a more credible space for readers to inhabit. Just as in Meg Wolitzer's The Position, the matriarch
Random House, 2013 The slippery question of time is often posed on the page. And with books, it’s different. In music, listeners are engaged at a pace dictated by the composer’s notation, beats counted as the bars pass, the audience arriving synchronously at the end of the piece.
Nothing like a good mystery. Some serial fun, with Giles Blunt, Ian Hamilton, Louise Penny, or my most recent discovery, the Nina Borg series by Lene Kaaberbøl and Agnete Friis. But one can find a good page-turner in the standalone novels on the fiction shelves too. Take Claire Cameron's freshly published The Bear, longlisted
