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Best Books – Autumn 2020

24 Saturday Oct 2020

Posted by Rebecca Rouillard in Book Reviews

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autumn reads, book recommendations, book review

Just in time for half-term, here are some reading recommendations for the long evenings to come.

Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens

Kya lives with her family in a shack in the marshes on the coast of North Carolina. Her mother leaves when Kya is seven, then one by one the rest of her family leave until, at ten, Kya is left alone to fend for herself. (It’s not a cheerful start.) The story is told on two parallel timelines: in the past Kya hides from the truancy officer and finds a way to provide for herself and find beauty in the natural world around her as she grows up, even as she is viewed with suspicion and derision by the townspeople. In the present: two boys discover a body in the marshes and the Sheriff investigates the murder. Where the Crawdads Sing is a beautifully constructed story, full of loss, loneliness and pain—but also hope, wonder and love. Highly recommended.

Here Is the Beehive by Sarah Crossan

Ana and Connor have been having an affair for three years but suddenly, one day he is gone. Ana must grieve for the relationship in secret, reach some kind resolution with Connor’s wife, and find a way to move on with her own life. First person narration can sometimes sound glib or melodramatic, but Sarah Crossan’s signature style, comprising poetic fragments of thought and memory, is incredibly intimate and authentic, particularly as Ana addresses her thoughts to ‘you’—Connor. Ana’s affair has forced her to keep secrets and compartmentalise her life, and this allows the reader to make assumptions about her and be blindsided by new information as she gradually allows it into her conscious thoughts. From a situation that seems sordid and depressing, and a protagonist who doesn’t evoke much sympathy, Sarah Crossan distils pure pain in a cathartic, lyrical process that is somehow life-affirming and redemptive, as well as devastating. Exquisitely done.

Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me by Kate Clanchy

Kate Clanchy often posts her student’s poetry on Twitter and I am always astounded at how assured and profound it is. (We had the privilege of having her as a guest lecturer at Birkbeck once and I definitely remember her as a warm and inspiring teacher.) In Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me, she writes about some of the children she has taught in her thirty-year career in secondary-schools. It is a heart-breaking, hilarious and profound memoir about the incredible influence a good teacher can have and the power of poetry to give powerless children some sense of control over their circumstances. I’m recommending this to everyone I meet at the moment. Brilliantly, beautifully written.

The Once and Future Witches by Alix E. Harrow

The Once and Future Witches is the story of three sisters in 1893: Juniper, Agnes and Bella, who each separately escape their abusive father, and later reunite in New Salem—drawn together by a vision of a mysterious tower. The cause of the suffragettes inspires them to find a way to empower women by bringing back the forgotten words and ways that were lost when the last witches were burned in Old Salem. Historically, of course, strong independent women have frequently been accused of witchcraft and I loved the idea of the suffragettes being actual witches. This story is not only a fast-paced, thrilling battle between supernatural forces, it is also a richly layered fantasy in which magic is woven into the syntax of rhymes, proverbs and fairy tales, as well as a sensitive delving into the deep currents of the relationships between sisters. An exquisitely crafted and intensely moving book. 

The Midnight Library by Matt Haig

Matt Haig is always reliably entertaining and thought-provoking, and The Midnight Library is no exception. Nora Seed is filled with regret about the opportunities she has failed to take advantage of in her life but when she finds herself in a mysterious library between life and death, she has the chance to experience parallel lives in which she has made different decisions. This is a poignant story about regret and having another go at all the opportunities you missed out on in your life. I thoroughly enjoyed this, and of course I loved the idea of an afterlife library.

American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins

After Lydia’s whole family is gunned down by a cartel at a family barbeque, she has to flee Mexico City with her eight-year old son, Luca, and join the trail of desperate travellers hoping to make it across the border into the US. I’d heard of the controversy surrounding this book before I’d heard of the book itself and I certainly can’t comment on the accuracy of the facts or the right of the author to tell this story. But from my uninformed perspective, it was a gripping, powerful story that kept me hooked and gave me a new understanding of the refugee and migrant experience in Mexico and the US. I don’t think there could ever be too many books like this—books that create empathy for migrants and refugees rather than fear and suspicion. Brilliantly done.

My Dark Vanessa by Kate Elizabeth Russell

Another controversial book: when Vanessa Wye hears about the accusations of sexual abuse her former teacher, Jacob Strane, is facing, she knows that the charges must be false. Because when she was fifteen, she had a relationship with him and it was not abuse—it was love. This is an incredibly gripping but disturbing story as Vanessa recalls her ‘relationship’ with her teacher, in the context of the Me Too era, and gradually, horrifically, begins to see his actions in a different light. The author was hounded into revealing that this story is based on her own life, but it shouldn’t have been necessary for her to justify her right to tell this story—it is too common an experience. My Dark Vanessa is an important, timely read.

The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett

The identical Vignes twins, Desiree and Stella, run away from home at 16 to escape the drudgery of their life in a small town that no one has ever heard of. (An unusual town, where the black people are known to have particularly fair skin.) After they leave, the twin’s lives diverge in very different directions. Ten years later Desiree returns to her hometown, with her black daughter, while Stella lives a completely different life on the opposite side of the country with her white family, entirely cut off from her past. But fate conspires to bring their daughters together. The Vanishing Half is a fascinating story about family, identity and reinvention.

The Empire of Gold (The Daevabad Trilogy #3) by S.A. Chakraborty

The Daevabad Trilogy is an ambitious fantasy series set in the magical world of the Djinn. Nahri is a fortune teller and thief living off her wits and her magical healing abilities in Cairo until the day she accidentally summons a Djinn and is swept away (on a magic carpet of course) into a world she knows nothing about. The Empire of Gold is an epic and satisfying conclusion to an incredibly rich and atmospheric fantasy world populated with brilliant characters. As Dara begins to count the cost of his loyalty to the Nahids in a divided city, Nahri and Ali must look for allies in their attempt to rescue Daevabad from a new tyrant and bring the tribes together in a lasting peace. An absolutely enthralling series—I loved every minute of it.

The Lamplighters by Emma Stonex (March 2021)

I’ve  always been fascinated by the disappearance of the Flannan Isles Lighthouse Keepers, so when I heard about this book inspired by those events, I was excited to see what the author made of the disappearances. The story has been relocated from the Outer Hebrides to Cornwall and the dates have been shifted from 1900 to 1970, but the basic conditions are the same: three vanished lighthouse keepers, a door locked from the inside, stopped clocks and strange entries in the logbook. The life of a lighthouse keeper is a desolate existence and the book beautifully evokes a sense of alienation and loneliness. I thoroughly enjoyed this atmospheric and richly imagined story.

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What to Read this Summer

22 Sunday Jul 2018

Posted by Rebecca Rouillard in Book Reviews

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book recommendations, Book Reviews, summer reads

It’s that time of year again—here’s a list of 14 books I’ve read recently and can highly recommend for your holiday reading.

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Circe
by Madeline Miller 

This is my favourite book of the year so far, from the author of the beautiful Song of Achilles. Circe is the daughter of a titan and a nymph – she is immortal but lacks the power of her father and the beauty of her mother. But there are other ways to have power. When Circe discovers a talent for witchcraft she transforms a rival into a terrible monster – as a result she is banished to the island of Aiaia. Despite her isolation she encounters some legendary characters of Greek mythology: Daedalus and Icharus, the Minotaur, Jason and the Golden Fleece, and of course, Odysseus. Madeline Miller weaves a wonderfully engrossing, epic tale that has many familiar elements but is also strikingly new – a story of a goddess finding her voice. Brilliant!

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I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes with Death
by Maggie O’Farrell

An exquisitely written account of seventeen true ‘brushes with death’. I don’t want to give anything away about the trajectory of the book, except to say that the intention of the stories is not to shock or to horrify, but to affirm life and the joy of living in the face of our (eventual) inevitable death. Powerful and poignant.

 

 

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The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle
by Stuart Turton

I’m trying to imagine the incredibly complicated planning document the author must have created to work out the plot of this book. It has a solid foundation of an Agatha Christie-style closed-house murder mystery that is a clever puzzle in itself – the death of Evelyn Hardcastle, daughter of the house, on the anniversary of her brother’s murder twenty years earlier. But there is so much more layered on top of this – I don’t want to give anything away but imagine a David Lynch story – but with an actual solution. Fiendishly clever and brilliantly imagined.

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Annihilation (Southern Reach #1)
by Jeff VanderMeer 

You might recognise this one from the recent Netflix film of the same name starring Natalie Portman. An unnamed biologist joins a surveyor, an anthropologist and a psychologist on the twelfth expedition into a mysterious wasteland called Area X. The previous eleven expeditions have all ended in disaster, including the most recent one that the biologist’s husband was a part of. It took me a while to get into this, the narration is quite frustrating to start with as it weirdly stilted and seems to conceal more than it reveals but as the biologist explores the mysteries of Area X, more of the mysteries of who she is, are revealed. An intensely unsettling and bewildering reading experience but brilliantly imagined, and I enjoyed the other two books in the series as well. The film veers from the plot of the book quite significantly but maintains the same eeriness and vibrant sense of menace, so it is worth watching, after you’ve read the book of course.

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Less
by Andrew Sean Greer

Less is the kind of book that grows on you, as did the main character, American author – Arthur Less. At first, he seems rather pathetic. He’s not been successful professionally: the critics called him a ‘magniloquent spoony’, his books have never become bestsellers and his publishers have just declined his latest novel. His long-time boyfriend is about to marry someone else so, to avoid having to go to the wedding, he accepts a series of random invitations and embarks on a round-the-world trip. It’s a slapstick setup, but as Less travels and we learn more about the history of his relationships, it transforms into a poignant tale, and Less himself becomes something of a romantic hero. A funny, moving and uplifting love story.

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Homegoing
by Yaa Gyasi

The story of two sisters living on the Gold Coast of Africa whose lives follow very different routes. Esi is sold into slavery and shipped to America in horrific conditions, her descendants must slowly claw their way out of captivity and poverty to freedom. ‘Effia the Beauty’ marries a slave trader and her descendants are inescapably complicit in the slave trade. It’s an incredibly epic and ambitious story and you only get one chapter from each character as the book tracks the generations that follow the two sisters. But somehow, even in one chapter, the author creates characters that feel real and authentic, and each story is engaging and deeply moving. A powerful and compelling book.

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I Still Dream
by James Smythe

1997: 17-year-old Laura Bow develops a basic artificial intelligence that she uses to talk to about her life. She calls it Organon. From then the story checks in with Laura every decade as the world changes and Organon develops. Laura protects Organon and her own privacy fiercely but when society is threatened by other artificial intelligences, not as responsibly and sensitively nurtured, Laura must decide whether to release Organon to the world. Without spoiling it, I loved the cyclical nature of the ending and found it incredibly moving. A brilliant and thought-provoking book.

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Rules of Civility
by Amor Towles

I loved this even more than A Gentleman in Moscow. New York, New Year’s Eve 1937: Katey Kontent and her friend Evelyn are in a jazz bar when they meet Tinker Grey, a chance encounter that will have dramatic repercussions for all of them. The story follows Katey, in particular, for the next few years as she negotiates her career, friendships and relationships. Katey is an endlessly fascinating narrator she’s intelligent, independent, self-aware, ambitious but also pragmatic. Despite the limitations of her own working-class background and other circumstances working against her, she claims her own agency and her right to self-determination over and over again. It’s a book about feminism, class and privilege – wrapped a beautifully stylish tribute to jazz-age New York City. Utterly captivating.

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The Heart’s Invisible Furies
by John Boyne 

Ireland, 1945: sixteen-year-old Catherine Goggin is denounced as a whore, thrown out by her family and cast out of her village by the local priest when they discover she’s pregnant. She escapes to Dublin and, when she gives birth, a ‘little hunchbacked Redemptorist nun’ arranges for her son to be adopted by a couple who can’t have children of their own. Cyril’s adoptive parents, Maude and Charles, treat him more like a tenant than a son and make it clear to him that he is not a ‘real’ Avery. When Cyril is seven years old he meets Julian Woodbead, his best friend and first love. Thus begins the misadventures of Cyril Avery. Against a backdrop of tumultuous Irish history, including IRA kidnappings and bombings in the 50s and 60s, right up until the marriage equality referendum of 2015, Cyril comes to terms with who he is and manages to find love and family, despite unlikely circumstances and some tragic twists of fate. An epic, angry, hilarious and heart-breaking book – I couldn’t put it down.

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The Mermaid and Mrs Hancock
by Imogen Hermes Gowar

Following in the footsteps of ‘The Miniaturist’ and ‘The Essex Serpent’, ‘The Mermaid and Mrs Hancock’ sits firmly in the category of lush historical fiction. (I did buy the hardback as the cover design is stunning.) The story is set in Georgian London but explores the lives of characters that are not usually in the spotlight – courtesans, immigrants, people of mixed-race, merchants, and of course, mermaids. Jonah Hancock is a comfortably-established merchant and widower who lives under the thumb of his elder sister until the unexpected arrival of a mermaid disrupts his existence, thrusts him in a world he knew little about and sets up a fateful encounter with Angelica Neal, a high-class courtesan, in search of a new benefactor. An evocative, beautifully-written piece of historical fiction with just a hint of magical realism.

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A Closed and Common Orbit (Wayfarers #2)
by Becky Chambers

A Closed and Common Orbit follows directly after the events of The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet but focuses on two different characters – Pepper, who we met briefly in the first book, and the rebooted version of the Wayfarer’s AI, Lovelace, now called ‘Sidra’, in her new illegal body, or ‘kit’ as she refers to it. The chapters alternate between Sidra’s experience adapting to life in a body, and flashbacks to Pepper’s traumatic childhood as a genetically engineered human slave and the story of her escape from her home planet. Becky Chambers, once again, creates a fascinating, richly-detailed universe populated with authentic, believable, diverse characters that you can’t help but fall in love with. I thoroughly enjoyed this book. (And Book 3 is out shortly!)

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The Surface Breaks
by Louise O’Neill

Finally, the feminist retelling of ‘The Little Mermaid’ we’ve all been waiting for. I grew up reading the Hans Christian Andersen version of the story which is much darker than the saccharine Disney tale, and The Surface Breaks is based the original but filtered through a contemporary feminist lens – there’s even a sneaky Donald Trump reference in there. It’s a harrowing story, filled with pain and desperation, but the final paragraphs are fiercely triumphant. Brilliantly done. I was torn about whether to let my 11-year-old read it, there are so many important themes but the content is very dark. Of course, after I told her it might be too traumatic for her, she read it immediately and loved it.

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A Skinful of Shadows
by Frances Hardinge

I am extremely jealous of Frances Hardinge’s imagination. Makepeace lives with her mother and her mother’s Puritan relatives in the time leading up to the English Civil War. Makepeace is aware that she is different to other people in that she can see and hear ghosts but her mother trains her to drive them away and protect herself from ever being possessed by them. But when tragedy strikes Makepeace is sent to stay with her father’s sinister relatives and in a moment of weakness she allows herself to be possessed by a wild and brutish spirit. But when Makepeace discovers the awful secret her father’s family are hiding then the ghost is the one who protects her and gives her the strength to escape them. A thrilling, wildly imaginative tale and another fascinating protagonist from Frances Hardinge. (And the 11-year-old couldn’t put it down either.) Brilliant!

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Home Fire
by Kamila Shamsie

This was already on my list of 17 Best Books of 2017 but I thought I’d give it another mention in light of the fact that it has recently won the Women’s Prize for Fiction and that Kamila Shamsie has proved prescient in her unlikely prediction of a Tory Muslim Home Secretary. Home Fire is a timely, topical and beautifully-written retelling of the Greek myth of Antigone. Fortunately, I didn’t remember the details of the story, so it didn’t ruin the ending for me, though I should have realised, knowing Greek mythology, that (spoiler alert!) it wasn’t going to end well.

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Twenty Books to Read This Summer

05 Friday Aug 2016

Posted by Rebecca Rouillard in Book Reviews

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book recommendations, book review, carnegie medal, costa book of the year, man booker international prize, mooncop, my name is leon, my name is lucy barton, nothing tastes as good, one, summer reads, the book of memory, the essex serpent, the girls, the last pilot, the lie tree, the loney, the long way to a small angry planet, the muse, the museum of you, the otherlife, the portable veblen, the vegetarian, this savage song, uprooted, vinegar girl, ya book prize

I’ve done this for the last couple of years on the Writers’ Hub so I thought I’d continue the tradition on my own site. Same format: ten newish books that I’ve read recently and can highly recommend, and ten books I haven’t read yet but are at the top of my To Read list for the summer.

TEN RECOMMENDATIONS:

Essex SerpentThe Essex Serpent by Sarah Perry

This is my top recommendation for the summer—read this book, if nothing else. When Cora Seaborne’s husband dies she retreats from London to Essex with her son Francis where they begin to hear rumours that the mythical Essex Serpent has returned to the coastal parish of Aldwinter. Who knew there was an Essex serpent? I’d only heard of the ‘Essex lion’ which as I recall turned out to be a slightly overweight tabby.

Somewhere in between AS Byatt and Tracy Chevalier, The Essex Serpent is jam-packed with fascinating characters, atmospheric prose and intriguing plotting. It’s a brilliant book about love and friendship, science and faith.

And just look at that beautiful cover—I’m quite sad that I bought the Kindle edition. This will definitely be going on my best book cover design list at the end of the year.

The Book of Memory

The Book of Memory by Petina Gappah

Memory is a black Zimbabwean woman with albinism, on death row for the murder of a white man, Lloyd Hendricks. We don’t know how or why or even if she actually killed him and the details are spun out through the book, from her earliest memories of her childhood with her parents and two sisters, to her life with Lloyd and then later her time in Chikurubi Maximum Security Prison in Harare and then a final heart-breaking revelation. There is a particularly beautiful quote at the end which sums up the book perfectly:

To accept that there are no villains in my life, just broken people, trying to heal, stumbling in darkness and breaking each other, to find a way to forgive my father and mother, to forgive Lloyd, to find a path to my own forgiveness.

Highly recommended—poignant, lyrical and intensely moving.

The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet

The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers

I’m a sci-fi wuss—I like sci-fi-lite, speculative fiction, dystopian fiction, fantasy, but I’ve always found proper sci-fi rather terrifying. (Still traumatised from watching the Lost in Space TV series when I was a kid). And ‘The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet’ is proper, hardcore sci-fi complete with space travel, weird looking aliens and shedloads of impenetrable sci-fi jargon. And yet I completely loved this book and I couldn’t put it down.

The Wayfarer is a tunnelling ship that creates wormhole-type shortcuts through the fabric of space and we meet the mixed-species crew on the day that a new human member, Rosemary, is introduced for the first time. Shortly afterwards they’re offered their most ambitious job yet—to travel to a distant planet inhabited by a particularly belligerent species and create a tunnel home.

Becky Chambers has taken all of the conventions of sci-fi for the structure of this novel but on top of that she has layered some incredibly rich characterization—in particular the distinguishing traits and motivations of the various alien races. (The alien’s perspective of humanity also provides a humorous note). The most poignant piece of characterisation though is the life she instils into ‘Lovey’, the Wayfarer’s AI operating system. Lovey’s personality has developed through many hundreds of hours of interaction with the crew and, even though she doesn’t have a body, they view her as a member of the crew.

The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet is a brilliantly inventive, engaging, thought-provoking read.

The Last PilotThe Last Pilot by Benjamin Johncock

The Last Pilot begins with Jim Harrison, a test pilot in the Mojave Desert in the 1940’s and follows his career through to the peak of the space race in the late 60s. It starts out with a lot of technical jargon about flying and aeronautical engineering but it is very quickly apparent that the heart of the story is the relationship between Jim and his wife, Grace.

I didn’t expect to like this book as much as I did. It’s obviously a compliment to the author’s writing style that he has been compared to Cormac McCarthy, but it does also imply that the book might be miserable and depressing—the blurb even seems to suggest that the book is about failure and tragedy. But it’s not.

The prose does have a kind of sparse realism, but the emotional depth builds up in the spaces behind and between the lines. It is superbly written—beautiful and heart-breaking. Setting Harrison’s personal tragedy against an epic backdrop of space exploration doesn’t diminish it, instead it somehow makes it universal.

Portable Veblen

The Portable Veblen by Elizabeth Mckenzie

The Portable Veblen is a simply lovely book about an incongruous selection of subjects: marriage, familial relationships, medical advertising blurbs, the FDA approval process, and squirrels. The squirrels are the most important bit of course. I particularly enjoyed this bit of wisdom a squirrel imparts to the main character Veblen:

I want to meet muckrakers, carousers, the sweet-toothed, and the lion-hearted…

Don’t we all!

The Lie Tree 2

The Lie Tree by Frances Hardinge

It’s rare to find a book with such a good message that is not at all moralistic or preachy. The Lie Tree, winner of the Costa Book of the Year 2015, is a thoroughly researched and beautifully written piece of historical fiction, woven together with dark and mystical elements and a strong feminist sensibility.

Faith Sunderly is a fourteen-year-old girl, who is, by virtue of her age, gender and the time period she lives in, rendered invisible in society and definitely perceived as less important that her six-year-old brother. Faith’s father is a clergyman and a well-known natural scientist but at the opening of the novel he has just been accused of fabricating some of his most famous fossil discoveries. The family have fled from the scandal to the small island of Vane where Faith’s father has been invited to join a fossil dig.

Faith, a budding natural scientist herself, possesses a passionate curiosity that gets her into trouble but also serves her well as she investigates a suspicious death and explores the properties of the mysterious Lie Tree. Faith is a great character—possessing all of the intelligence and strength of mind you would hope for but combining it with occasional spitefulness and sullenness that just makes her more real.

The Lie Tree itself, a tree that thrives on human lies and yet bears fruit that illuminates truth, is a brilliant invention at the heart of this story. Altogether it’s a beautifully crafted, thrilling, intriguing story and Faith is an inspiring character.

One

One by Sarah Crossan

Winner of the Carnegie Medal and the YA Book Prize in 2016, One is the story of conjoined twins Tippi and Grace told in prose-poetry from the perspective of Grace. It is beautifully written, insightful, gripping and terribly moving—a book that messes with all of your preconceptions about conjoined twins.

This book was actually recommended to me by my nine-year-old, who LOVED it and nagged me until I read it too.

I bought it in hardback and I love the eye-catching turquoise and cerise cover design and the American cover design looks amazing too.

This Savage Song

This Savage Song by VE Schwab

I would read a dishwasher instruction manual written by Victoria Schwab. There seems to be no limit to her imagination, I loved both of her Shades of Magic books, and This Savage Song introduces us to a brand new, brilliantly weird universe.

It all sounds a bit Romeo and Juliet (the Baz Luhrmann version, of course)—the city of Verity is split down the middle and ruled by two families with opposing philosophies, the Harkers and the Flynns. Their children, Kate Harker and August Flynn, start out spying on each other and then end up going on the run together. But of course, there are monsters and this is no simpering romance.

I loved this story, particularly the musical component, and can’t wait for the next instalment.

Uprooted

Uprooted by Naomi Novik

Agnieszka lives in a quiet village in the shadow of a malevolent, corrupted forest—the only person who can keep them safe is a wizard called The Dragon. In return for his help, though, he selects one young woman to serve him for ten years and Agnieszka is convinced that this time he’s going to take her best friend, Kasia.

These days it is fashionable for forests to signify wisdom and goodness, so it was refreshing to encounter a forest-as-creepy-villain, with shades of Tolkien.

Uprooted is a magical, thoroughly engrossing and enjoyable read.

The Vegetarian

The Vegetarian by Han Kang (Translated by Deborah Smith)

Plagued by terrible nightmares, a once dutiful and submissive wife, Yeong-hye, decides to become a vegetarian and seek a more ‘plant-like’ existence. Her husband becomes increasingly sadistic in response, her sister’s husband, a video artist, becomes obsessed with documenting her, but all Yeong-hye wants is to become a tree.

I’m almost hesitant to recommend this one as it is dark and disturbing—not exactly a ‘beach read’, but if you’re not put off by that The Vegetarian is also hauntingly beautiful, uncanny, powerful and intensely moving.

Translated by Deborah Smith, The Vegetarian was also the winner of the Man Booker International Prize 2016.

 

TEN BOOKS ON MY TO READ LIST:

The Muse


The Muse by Jessie Burton

Next up in my Wimbledon book club, I’m sure I don’t need to say much about The Muse because, if you read The Miniaturist, then I’m sure you were planning on reading this one too. Another beautiful cover.

 

The Girls
The Girls by Emma Cline

The viral hit of the summer, as recommended by Lena Dunham amongst others—a Charles Manson-type scenario, set in California in the summer of ’69.

 

Museum of You
The Museum of You by Carys Bray

I loved A Song for Issy Bradley so I’m definitely going to read Carys Bray’s next novel—Clover Quinn curates an exhibition of her dead’s mother’s things to surprise her Dad.

 

My Name is Leon
My Name is Leon by Kit De Waal

Been meaning to read this one for a while—the story of Leon and his little brother Jake and what happens when they have to go into foster care.

 

Nothing Tastes as Good
Nothing Tastes As Good by Claire Hennessy

YA fiction, Annabel is dead and has been assigned as Julia’s ‘ghostly helper’—she’s convinced it’s her job to help Julia get thinner, but is that really what she’s supposed to be doing?

 

The Otherlife
The Otherlife by Julia Gray

Another YA novel I’ve been looking forward to: mystical alternate worlds, Norse mythology and exclusive boys’ school friendships—an interesting mix.

 

Vinegar Girl
Vinegar Girl by Anne Tyler

Part of the Hogarth Shakespeare series—a retelling of The Taming of the Shrew. I’ve never actually read Taming of the Shrew but I loved Ten Things I Hate About You—that’s got to count for something, right?

 

Lucy Barton
My Name is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout

This one has been nominated for all of the major awards and is about a relationship between a mother and daughter. I’ve got Olive Kitteridge loaded up on the Kindle right now, so might just have to read that one first.

 

The Loney
The Loney by Andrew Michael Hurley

Winner of the Costa Books First Novel Award in 2015, this one has an intriguing cover and an even more intriguing name. What or who is the ‘Loney’—I’ll let you know when I find out.

 

Mooncop
Mooncop by Tom Gauld

This one will actually only be published at the end of the Summer but I’m looking forward to it anyway. You may have seen Tom Gauld’s whimsical comics in The Guardian, Mooncop is about the adventures of the last policeman living on the moon—I’m imagining a kind of contemporary Little Prince.

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Rebecca Rouillard

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