Sadie Jones' Small Wars Knopf, 2009 All three of 2010's Orange Prize nominees discussed here already (Lorrie Moore's At the Gate of the Stairs, M.J. Hyland's This is How, Rebecca Gowers' The Twisted Heart) were relatively quick reads for me. Sadie Jones' Small Wars? It took me a full week
Marina Lewycka's We Are All Made of Glue Viking - Penguin, 2010 Typically, I plucked this library loan off the stack just two days before it was due back. It had been sitting there for 19 days along with the other xx library books (now come on, you can't expect
Sandra Scoppettone's Happy Endings Are All Alike (1978) Deborah Hautzig's Hey Dollface (1978) Madeleine L'Engle's Meet the Austins (1960) Sara Ryan's Empress of the World (2001) Just as I found that many of my favourite early reads about family and relationships featured bookish heroines, so did the next phase of
What struck me about this challenge is connected with a question that an acquaintance asked me the other day: where do I find the books that I read. It's the kind of question that reminds me just how innate reading feels to me, whilst it's unfamiliar territory for a lot
If you read Rebecca Gowers' first novel, When to Walk, you've been introduced to Ramble: she's not easy to know but she's at the heart of Gowers' debut so you'll have made her acquaintance. Those readers who want to make friends with the characters they're reading about, likely didn't even
