It’s frightening, what happened to the author late one night travelling on a dark road after an exhausting studio session, forced to suddenly stop because of two shadowy figures ahead. (You can read about the event in an article on her UK publisher's site, here.) Simon & Schuster, 2015
You might be tempted to call eight-year-old Egg Murakami enchanting or winsome. Even plucky or spirited. Goose Lane Editions, 2014 Each of these terms does reflect Egg in some sense. But such descriptions suggest something young-Oprah-heroine-esque about her. Egg’s character is too fully rounded to simply select the
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
Raami is "just a spit past seven" in 1975, when the year of the Tiger shifts to the year of the Rabbit. It is the Khmer New Year, and Raami's parents disagree about whether it is appropriate to celebrate when there is so much misery and fighting. Raami is pleased
Emma Donoghue's Room HarperCollins, 2010 (Looking for a swallow rather than a full glass? ORANGE Squirt below.) I’d hoped to re-read Room before writing about it here, in the context of the Orange Prize shortlist, but I still have two fresh reads from this year’s shortlist ahead of me (The
