Category: Fiction
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Reading Diary: February – May 2022
It has been a while since I posted here, or was able to write anything. I was ill on and off from December through to the start of April, but finally managed to get myself sorted out with a visit to the doctor and a sort-of diagnosis in the form of the fact that my […]
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Reading Diary: January 2022
Recently I’ve been exploring the role and function of book blogging and how I want to fit into it. For a while I’ve just reviewed each book I read individually, and I think for me that format was getting a little stale, and I wasn’t sure how appealing it actually was to readers – especially […]
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Beautiful World, Where Are You (2021) by Sally Rooney
As I talked about in my previous post, I missed the Sally Rooney hype the first time around in 2017, and it was the release of this novel that got me a little more interested in her. I started with Conversations with Friends, but then decided to dive right into Beautiful World, Where Are You […]
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Conversations with Friends (2017) by Sally Rooney
I’m probably the last book blogger (at least in the UK, who likes this sort of thing, etc…) to read this book. The hype around Sally Rooney has been quite something, and I often have mixed feelings about hype. Often with “popular” novelists, especially female ones, I find that the novels that get the most […]
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The Island (1959) by Ana María Matute
Getting ready to write this post, I realised it’s been three months since I posted on here. I honestly didn’t realise that much time had passed. That is this pandemic life – time has completely changed. Living in this weird in-between state of anxiety and hesitancy with little pockets of “normal life”, with hardly any […]
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Cardiff, by the Sea by Joyce Carol Oates (2020)
This book of four novellas is about women, about what it is like to be a woman, though sometimes through extreme examples. It is not always a pleasant book. Cardiff, by the Sea shows us the worst, most devastating things about being a woman – as well as the exquisite moments of joy that can […]
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My Cousin Rachel by Daphne du Maurier (1951)
I first read this in 2014, which seems like a lifetime ago, and decided to re-read it earlier this year when I was fed up with everything I had on my bookshelves. At some point I put it aside, and I left it for so long, I’m not sure why, that I literally forgot I […]
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Tangerine by Christine Mangan (2018)
Tangerine is one of those novels that got quite a lot of hype when it first came out, and again when it was released in paperback. This usually means that I would avoid it for fear of disappointment/conventionality, but the premise of this one really intrigued me. Ostensibly it’s a story about two friends, separated […]
These Little Words 