Lists
Kate Atkinson - Cold Histories
Gripping and incredibly well written. Perhaps too many shadows of 90s lad culture ?Vicente Luis Mora - Centroeuropa
One of the best I’ve read in a very long time. Magical realism in a muddy field in 1800s Prussia.Andrew Michael Hurley - Starve Acre
Grief and isolation and the crimes of the past. Very bleak and atmospheric.Oliver Burkeman - Mediations for Mortals
Essentially 4000 weeks chewed over and formed into daily nuggets. Very good all the same.Ben Gazur - A Feast of Folklore
Nice round up of a lot of peculiar traditions and beliefs. The devil will steal your potatoes!Bae Suah - Untold Night and Day
Loved this. Dream-like is an overused descriptor but this deserves it. Shadows, images, symbols, collapsing in on themselves in a hot Seoul night.
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
I live in Leeds. I like film. And food.