Lists
- Richard Flanagan - Gould’s Book of Fish
- Tasmanian penal colony. Paintings of fish. Great
- Benjamin Myers - The Perfect Golden Circle
- Crop circles in the 90s. Decent
- Donna Tartt - A Secret History
- College weirdos get weirder. Uneven. Great bits
- John Lanchester - Mr Phillips
- Well written but a bit hollow. Dated
- Geraldine Brooks - Year of Wonder
- Plague village. Beautifully written but unrelentingly horrible
- Leonardo Sciascia - The Day of the Owl
- Very short but totally gripping. A murder in Sicily. Does the mafia even exist?
- Pen Vogler - Stuffed
- Totally fascinating history of British food and politics
- Shirley Jackson - We Have Always Lived in the Castle
- Well this was weird. Intense and spooky novella of two creepy sisters and their murderous past
- Toby Litt - Corpsing
- A decent page-turner thriller. Feels a bit early-noughties bloke-lit. Intentionally, I think.
- Elspeth Barker - O Caledonia
- An astonishing book. Gothic and gloomy, but funny too.
- R.F. Kuang - Yellowface
- Nice idea, but waaaay too much social media. Reading about Twitter is boring.
- Kate Atkinson - Shrines of Gaiety
- Post-war Soho drinking dens. Police, dancers, missing girls, dope. Fabulous stuff.
- Angela Carter - Nights at the Circus
- Utterly insane. From music hall to Siberia, with clowns, tigers and shaman.
- Patrick Hamilton - Hangover Square
- Fascinating slice of hard-drinking 30s life. Went on a bit too long.
- Susanna Clarke - Piranesi
- Possibly my favourite book. A whole world of imagination with some very dark twists.
- Susanna Clarke - Jonathon Strange and Mr Norrell
- It’s long! Victorian novel meets magic and fantasy. Very well written.
- JG Ballard - Cocaine Nights
- A re-read. Is it my favourite Ballard? Dystopian Costa del Sol magic.
- Slutty Chef - Tart
- Pretty slight but a fun read. Did not make me want to work in a kitchen.
- Benjamin Myers - Beastings
- Utterly bleak frontier western in Cumbria. Compelling but horrible.
- Ali Smith - Gliff
- A little underwhelmed. Amazing writing (as always) but the dystopia was underdeveloped.
- Oliver Burkeman - Four Thousand Weeks
- Anti-productivity approach to accepting you’ll never magically get everything done.
- Agatha Christie - The Secret of Chimneys
- Utterly ludicrous but quite fun. Where are the Herzoslovakian crown jewels?
- Jules Verne - Around the World in 80 Days
- Really very silly and no hot air balloons at all!
- Georges Perec - The Art of Asking Your Boss For a Raise
- A single sentence across 80 pages of circumperbulation