contemporary

Top Ten Tuesday: 2016 Releases I Meant To Read (But Didn’t Get To)

10th January 2017 by Gemma 4 Comments

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly bookish meme created and hosted by The Broke and the Bookish. More information, plus future topics can be found on this page. This week was ‘2016 Releases I Meant To Read’.

I thought I’d do these prompts at least once (or twice?) a month since I seem to fare better at having one on instagram. Maybe it’ll make me a more regular blogger!

So I kept my ears quite close to the ground last year when it came to new book releases, and I have more than a handful of books published in 2016. Unfortunately, I still haven’t figured out how to balance reading with bookstagram and blogging, so I didn’t manage to read most of them (although I’m sure most readers always feel they haven’t read as much as they would have wanted in a year). I have to re-think my book purchases for this year, which is a post for another day!

Anyway, here are some of the books that were published in 2016, and I will hopefully get to tick them off the TBR list before the end of this year. …

From the Publisher’s Desk: This Must Be The Place

17th May 2016 by Gemma 2 Comments

This Must Be The Place is the seventh novel by Irish author Maggie O’Farrell. Her novels are renown for their delicate exploration of relationships, whether it be familial or romantic, and her elegant prose adds more to the charm, making her novels well-loved by readers.

Unfortunately, I have been living under a rock — I have never read a Maggie O’Farrell novel before this one. The big initial sell of This Must Be The Place for me was that it involved travelling, and I was only too happy to delve into a book that contains my other favourite activity. The fascinating premise supplemented my interest: it purports to be a book that “crosses continents and time zones [..]” and “at its heart, [..] an extraordinary portrait of a marriage, the forces that hold it together, and the pressures that drive it apart.”

The primary characters are Daniel Sullivan, an American linguistics living in a remote corner of Donegal, Ireland, and his wife, Claudette Wells, a famous ex-actress who had disappeared from the public eye at the height of her popularity, and is since determined to live a hermitic life with her children. The novel details their present lives, their lives in their youth before they met, how their marriage came to be, and the challenge of keeping it together compounded by past history and personal demons.

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Book Club Read: The Versions of Us

28th April 2016 by Gemma 2 Comments

The Versions of Us is the first novel by art journalist and theatre critic Laura Barnett. Pegged as ‘Sliding Doors meets One Day’, it tells the story of Jim Taylor and Eva Katz who meet by chance in 1958 while they are students in Cambridge. A bicycle accident brings them together, and from there three different stories unfold, three disparate worlds where they got married in one, initially started off as strangers in another, and fallen in love but circumstances kept them apart in the third. These three narrations are different but have similarities, and there are instances where the plot converge on life occasions, such as birthdays or relatives passing away.

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From the Publisher’s Desk: Shtum

6th April 2016 by Gemma Leave a Comment

Jem Lester is a former journalist and secondary school English and Media Studies teacher. Shtum is his first novel, and is a result of his experience of being a parent to a severely autistic son, also named Jonah¹. It is marketed as “perfect for fans of David Nicholls, and anyone who loved The Shock of the Fall, The Rosie Project, and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time². A friend who has read it sang praises about it, and even said it made her cry.

Everything in that previous paragraph actually made me feel disinclined to read this book. The only David Nicholls novel I’ve read is Us, and I wasn’t a big fan. I quite enjoyed The Rosie Project, but it was not heartbreaking, nor did I feel like shedding tears at any part of that book. I have not read The Shock of the Fall or The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time so I have a half-informed impression. Most of all, I know autism can be heartrending, and it is not a topic that I think of lightly. But read it I must, and with a reluctant heart, I soldiered on.

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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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