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
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
M.J. Hyland's This is How (Canongate, 2009) This is not the first of M.J. Hyland's novels that I've read. How the Light Gets In (2004) is the story of a Sydney teenager transplanted into an American family as an exchange student and Carry Me Down (2006) is the story of
I'm so incredibly excited about Persephone Reading Week that I think I'll need to take the week off work to celebrate it properly. That was a temptation when I first heard about the event, and I started thinking "themes" and then spotted a collection of films about wartime England at
