Milkman by Anna Burns

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World Book Day – If you read one book this year, let it be…

…Milkman by Anna Burns, the 2018 Man Booker Prize winner. First of all, don’t get turned off by the subject matter – the conflict in Northern Ireland during the 1970s. Sure, it’s serious stuff, but the way it’s presented here, makes it far from dreary. In fact, it’s one of the funniest books I read over the past year. It requires a bit of effort this book – it’s written in a stream-of-conciousness style, with no names – but is all the more rewarding for it. This book made me laugh of loud and  admire some truly original, inspiring fiction writing. Go for it!

Read full review of Milkman here.

Autobiographical fiction

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Autofiction – what is it?

Writing about lived experience is nothing new, and yet there has been a recent surge of books that blend aspects of the memoir with elements borrowed from fiction. Examples of such literature, coined ‘autofiction’ by the French writer Serge Dubrovsky, have proved to be highly readable, genre-bending accounts of the author’s life’. Autofiction can also be used to describe autobiographical fiction, a fictionalised narrative that draws on the author’s life and experience, and fictionalised autobiography, which is modelled more closely on real life with some compressed or fictionalised events or characters.

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Cost Award Book of the Year Winner 2019

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Costa Book of the Year 2018

Biography won this year in the competition for the Costa Book of the Year 2018. The Cut Out Girl by Bart van Es is the story of a Jewish girl, Lien, hidden from the Nazis during the Second World War by the author’s grandparents. Van Es own journey in writing the book and befriending Lien, who had fallen out with his family, is a big part of this book. Sounds like a wonderful read which I will definitely add to my towering pile.

The Guardian on the winner.

More about 2018 Costa category winners.

The Testaments by Margaret Atwood

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Books to look forward to in 2019

What an exciting year in books we have ahead of us! Literary treats are virtually queueing up to be read. Highlights for us include Margaret Atwood’s sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, Colson Whitehead’s new novel The Nickel Boys and Ian McEwan’s Machines Like Me. But most of all, we look forward to be surprised by a debut novel from an author we’ve never heard of before.

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Colette film – book lovers porn

If you’re heading to the cinema this weekend, I can highly recommend recently released film Colette starring Keira Knightley and Dominic West as French author Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette and her literary ‘middle-man’ and would-be-author husband Willy. Part of Paris’ wilder circles, Colette and Willy led anything but a conservative life, sharing a mistress, amongst other things. Penniless and desperate, Willy needed a blockbuster to finance his drinking and betting and convinced Colette to ghost-write a book, to be published under his name. The book Claudine à l’École, a raunchy, semi-autobiographical coming-of-age novel went on to become a huge best-seller and was followed by three equally successful books in the same series. After fighting for the rights to her books following their separation, Colette became one of France’s most celebrated female authors. Excellent entertainment.

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Hooray! Sally Rooney wins the 2018 Costa Novel Award

I’m very excited this morning to see Sally Rooney win the Costa Novel Award for her excellent novel Normal People. Rooney, at 27 the youngest winner ever, has pulled off a breathtaking feat in writing a novel about love that will appeal as much to an 18 year old as an 80 year old.

Here are the winners in the other categories. The Costa Book of the Year will be chosen from the list of category winners and announced on the 29th of January.

Best first novel: The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton(Raven Books)

Best biography: The Cut Out Girl by Bart van Es (Penguin)

Best poetry: Assurances by JO Morgan (Jonathan Cape)

Best children’s book: The Skylarks’ War by Hilary McKay (Macmillan)

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Be Kind to Your Local Bookseller this Christmas

I’m sure I’m not the only one to have noticed the many closed-down shops around. Let’s make sure that doesn’t happen to your local bookstore and buy your Christmas gifts from them rather than Amazon. I know it’s tempting to hit that order button, but can you imagine anything worse than a great big gaping hole where your cozy bookseller once was?

For bookish gift ideas see our Christmas post.

Happy Christmas!

 

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Margaret Atwood to publish sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale

No doubt inspired by our times, Margaret Atwood has decided to write a sequel to her dystopian best-seller The Handmaid’s Tale. The Testament will be published in September 2019 and will pick up on the story 15 years after the closing scene of The Handmaid’s Tale. I, for one, can’t wait for this book. If you haven’t already read The Handmaid’s Tale, now is the time, or if you have, how about trying another of her masterpieces, Alias Grace.

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Costa Award short-list 2018

Here’s the short-list selection for the Costa Awards 2018. As usual, there are five categories: Novel, First Novel, Biography, Poetry and Children’s Books. We absolutely loved Sally Rooney’s modern love story Normal People and Pat Barker’s feminist spin on The Iliad in The Silence of the Girls, both nominated in the Novel Award category as well as the strange and wonderful The Colour of the Sun by David Almond in the Children’s Book category. Category winners will be announced on the 7th January and the Costa Book of the Year on the 29th January. Which ones of these have you read?

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