You are thirteen; standing in front of your locker at school one morning and the next thing you know you wake up in an austere white room and are informed you’ve been ‘rebirthed’ into Heaven, although it’s not called Heaven it’s called Town. For most 13-year-olds this would be fairly traumatic but for Oliver, the protagonist in Neil Smith’s Boo it’s not altogether unexpected. ... Read More...
The Buried Giant: A Novel
The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro begins as a tiny tale set in a drab village that amounts to little more than huts huddled around a rabbit’s warren of cave dwellings but grows into an epic tale set in the ashes of King Arthur’s reign. The land is quiet now after the decades of battle between the Saxons and the Britons but, while the peace is a welcome one, it ... Read More...
Rooms: A Novel
People, Caroline thought, were like houses. They could open their doors. You could walk through their rooms and touch the objects hidden in their corners. But something—the structure, the wiring, the invisible mechanism that kept the whole thing standing—remained invisible, suggested only by the fact of its existing at all. Richard Walker has died and the country house ... Read More...
Bitter Greens
Charlotte-Rose de la Force is a most unfortunate woman for her times. Unmarried and subject to whims of Louis XIV she has provoked his ire once too often with her acerbic writings about the Church and has now been consigned to a nunnery. For a woman who loves her fine silk dresses and elegantly styled hair to be shut away, wearing burlap with shorn hair and no writing ... Read More...
The Bone Clocks
David Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks begins in 1984 with sixteen-year-old Holly Sykes running away from home in a fit of rage over her mother’s refusal to let her move in with a man she loves and then finding that man in bed with her best friend. While on the road Holly meets a very old woman who asks her if she will give her refuge if she needs it. She says yes and unknowingly ... Read More...
The Ocean at the End of the Lane
I saw the world I had walked since my birth and I understood how fragile it was, that the reality I knew was a thin layer of icing on a great dark birthday cake writhing with grubs and nightmares and hunger. I saw the world from above and below. I saw that there were patterns and gates and paths beyond the real. I saw all these things and understood them and they filled me, ... Read More...
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