Search Results for: grace

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Alias Grace

A chilling true-life murder mystery

Hot on the heals of a successful TV adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale comes a Netfilx adaptation of Alias Grace, another of Atwood’s best-selling novels. I’d take any excuse to re-read this excellent book, which is still as good today as it was in 1996. It’s based on the true story of Canadian domestic servant Grace Marks who in 1843, at the age of 16, was convicted of murdering her employer Mr Kinnear and fellow housekeeper Nancy Montgomery. Atwood’s interest in the case go beyond the murder, of course, and into the dark depths of women’s, particularly poor women’s, standing in society; the prejudices held against them, the sexual abuse and innuendo, the back-street abortions and the assumption that they are all liars. An absolutely riveting read.

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Penance by Eliza Clark

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Penance

A gripping debut novel on true crime obsession

Penance by Eliza Clark is not a read for the faint-hearted. It tells the story of Joan Wilson, a teenager tortured and burnt to death by three other schoolgirls on the night of the Brexit vote. Joan Wilson is, mercifully, not a real person. Clark has produced what one reviewer describes as an untrue – that is to say, made-up – true crime story. The character Clark invents to tell this tale is Alec Z. Carelli, a disgraced journalist on the hunt for a scandal sensational enough to fill a whole book and to help him rebuild his career in the true crime universe.

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A Little Life

A profoundly moving novel about friendship in the twenty-first century

The hottest play in London at the moment! If you can’t get hold of a ticket. The book will do just fine! Here’s our review. Enjoy.

When I was given a copy of this much-lauded, lengthy book at the beginning of the summer my heart sank slightly. I’d read so much hype about this challenging blockbuster novel that I wasn’t sure if I even wanted to read it. A close friend put me off further by declaring that she had given up half way through as she found it too gruelling and unrelenting. However, relaxing on holiday in sleepy Somerset, I braced myself and began what turned out to be an exhausting and harrowing yet profoundly moving novel.

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Failosophy for Teens by Elizabeth Day

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Failosophy for Teens

Teen/Young Adult

Candid and kind

Practical, empathic and relatable, Failosophy for Teens by Elizabeth Day takes its lead from Albert Einstein’s assertion that failure is, in fact, success in progress. Hard enough to accept as an adult, for teenagers grappling with the challenges of life in our 21st century Insta-perfect world, learning to be at peace with failure is a big ask. Day’s toolkit includes practical exercises and advice ranging from zen philosophy to the scientific. ‘Failure just is,’ and this empowering guide aims to both defuse and soothe.

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Duveen by S.N. Behrman

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Duveen

The Story of the Most Spectacular Art Dealer of All Time

I’ve always wondered how so much priceless European art from the Renaissance onwards made its way to major American museums. In the engrossing Duveen by SN Behrman, we learn how. The greatest art dealer of all time, Joseph Duveen, courted and cajoled American robber barons into spending millions of dollars on old master paintings, most of which eventually ended up being donated to museums. The story of Duveen is absolutely fascinating, even if you’re not passionate about art.

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Light Perpetual by Francis Spufford

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Light Perpetual

Stories of lives not lived

It’s London 1944 and a German bomb is about to hit a Woolworths shop where five young children are shopping with their mums. The first chapter of Light Perpetual by Francis Spufford describes, in harrowing detail, the moment of impact. What would have happened to those five kids if they hadn’t turned to ‘dust’? This is what Spufford want us to imagine in Light Perpetual, a gripping tribute to lives not lived.

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Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens

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Where the Crawdads Sing

Hauntingly beautiful novel set in mid-century Carolina

Kya Clark lives with her family in a shack in the North Carolina marshes until her siblings and parents leave one by one and she is left at the age of 7 to raise herself. Abandoned to this solitary life with just herons and gulls for company she learns to cook, grow vegetables and eek out a living, but she has few friends and shuns society. Some years later a handsome young man is murdered and The Marsh Girl is the obvious suspect. Unfolding slowly in dual timelines, Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens is an immersive and captivating summer read.

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Dreaming of going to France?

Seems like travelling this summer is going to have to happen in your head, so to help you go places we’ve collected a list of books that will take you to your favourite holiday destinations. We’ve been to Greece, Italy, and Spain already. France today!

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Addictive reads

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Take-your-mind-off-coronavirus books

We thought a list of utterly addictive, read-while-you’re-brushing-teeth, stay-up-all-night books might be called for at this point. Here are our top ten:

 

Fingersmith by Sarah Waters

North Water by Ian McGuire

Rebecca by Daphne de Maurier

The Mermaid and Mrs Hancock by Imogen Hermes Gowar

The Porpoise by Mark Haddon

The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton

And then There Were None by Agatha Christie

Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood

The Shardlake Series by CJ Samson

The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver

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Booker Prize 2019

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Booker Prize 2019

It’s the season for literary prizes and hot on the heels of the Nobel Prize for Literature comes this year’s Booker Prize. Unusually, and in breach of their own rules, the committee decided to split the prize between Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments and Bernadine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other. I would have loved to be a fly on the wall during those discussions.

I’m an ardent admirer of Atwood (see reviews of Alias Grace, The Handmaid’s Tale) but I’m not convinced The Testaments is amongst her best books. Sure, it’s a timely novel touching upon momentous issues such as totalitarianism, religious extremism and feminism, but the literary aspects of this book are by no means perfect. Atwood has won before, 19 years ago, for the The Blind Assassin.

Bernadine Evaristo is the first black woman to win the Booker (high time!) for Girl, Woman, Other, 12 intertwining stories about black women’s lives. It sounds like an energetic, different book and we’re reading it as I write. Watch this space!

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