book-reviews

Book Club Read: The Paying Guests

11th February 2016 by Gemma Leave a Comment

In an effort to be a bit more social, and read and discover more new books, I thought, “hey, why not join more book clubs?” This was before I got fully immersed in bookstagram over at Instagram, so now I have quite a few books to read that, uh, require a lot of juggling. Eep.

The Paying Guests is the sixth novel by renowned Welsh author Sarah Waters. It is set in Camberwell, south London, in the year 1922. Central to the story is Frances Wray, old enough to be a spinster, who lives with her mother in their sizable family house that they can barely afford to keep in good condition due to extensive debts accumulated and left behind by her late father. They are purported to be comfortably middle class before this, and so in a desperate move to earn money, the Wrays take in paying guests (apparently the polite way to call lodgers), Leonard and Lilian Barber, a young married couple of the ‘clerk class’, who bring something other than money into the Wrays’ lives.

The Paying Guests was published in 2014 by Virago, and was shortlisted for the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2015.

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On The Nightstand: Modern Romance

23rd January 2016 by Gemma Leave a Comment

Modern Romance is a book by American comedian Aziz Anzari talking about contemporary relationships, or lack thereof. The book is not just filled with commentary and conjectures based on popular observation; Anzari worked in partnership with a sociologist, Eric Klinenberg, in collecting data from other sociologists’ and their studies and research, plus interviews they conducted themselves.

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Book Club Read: A Little Life

14th January 2016 by Gemma Leave a Comment

A Little Life is a novel by American Hanya Yanagihara, published in 2015 by Doubleday. It garnered a lot of very good reviews early on, and was shortlisted for the 2015 Man Booker Prize and the 2015 National Book Award for Fiction.

The story starts with a group of four friends — Malcolm, Willem, JB, and Jude — living and making their way in the tough world of New York City after graduating from university (or college, if you’re American). They met in university as roommates, and we get flashbacks interspersed with the present timeline to show us how their relationships with each other are individually, and how they connect as a group. They each get a moment in the spotlight briefly in that less-than-a-hundred-page chapter, then the lens tightens and focuses on Jude, who becomes the central character. This entire novel is a bildungsroman of all four characters, yes, but most essentially of Jude, who has gone to literal hell and is trying to live — just simply live.

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Book Club Read: A Man Called Ove

7th January 2016 by Gemma 1 Comment

A Man Called Ove is a book published in August 2012 in Sweden. The author, Fredrik Backman is Swedish (duh), and the book’s setting is naturally in Scandinavia (one can convincingly infer it is definitely in Sweden, although I can’t quite recall if it was directly mentioned or easily deduced). From what I can find looking around the internet, it would appear that the translated English version — by Henning Koch, who is an author himself and also hails from Sweden; has lived in other European cities like London, Barcelona, and Sardinia — was published in 2014 (paperbacks came out 2015).

As the title obviously suggests, Ove is the central character of the story. He is presented as an ill-tempered man, set on his ways and habits, and will absolutely not deviate from it, modern technology be damned. He feels that all new technology is hogwash; things worked well and better the old way, and everyone else around him is an idiot.