Welcome to Bookstoker!
We’re here to help you find that book that you can’t put down, the book you’ll push on all your friends, the book that’ll change your life.
We read literary fiction, non-fiction, classics and children’s books, all genres and styles embraced in our aim to share the love. You’ll also find fabulous Bookstagrams and literary news.
A world of bookish delights!
Kirstin and Julie
Our unnamed narrator, the second wife of a successful Wall Street bond trader, is consumed with jealously for the first wife – ‘she’ – in this short novel, where the classic direction of jealousy is reversed. She is composed, blonde, tall and ‘lovely’, a talented musician with two exceptionally bright kids. ‘I’ is everything she’s not. A stirring portrayal of jealousy, emotional neglect and obsession, easily read in one sitting.
The teenage Pearl and her artistic mother Mia move into a rented house owned by a wealthy family in a smarter area of the same Ohio neighbourhood. The lives of both families become entwined in healthy and not‐so‐healthy ways in a deceptively simple tale about motherhood, belonging, responsibility, and standing up for what you believe in.
The story behind The Moon is Down by John Steinbeck World War II novel is as fascinating as the book itself. Steinbeck, a world famous author by the start of the war, was deeply concerned about the rise of Fascism in Europe. He’d noticed the Fascists’ clever use of propaganda and urged the precursor to the CIA, for whom he worked, to create their own. In 1941, Steinbeck wrote The Moon is Down, which is largely based on conversations with people who’d fled their occupied countries. The book would become one of the most read underground novels of the war, with thousands of copies printed clandestinely in France, Denmark, Norway, Belgium and the Netherlands. Judging by its success, it must have played a role in mobilising resistance and keeping up morale.
Well, here’s something utterly different. A book with a cacophony of 166 different voices portraying the Bardo (a temporary state in between death and re-birth in the Buddhist faith) of President Abraham Lincoln’s 11-year-old son Willie. It’s an unusually structured and challenging book, and a moving portrayal of death and grief (and you’ll never walk through a cemetery at night in quite the same way).
4321 by Paul Auster is a novel about Archie Ferguson, American grandson of a Jewish immigrant. Born in 1958 to hard-working parents, he grows up, negotiates adolescence, plays baseball, gets to know his extended family, lives through the major events of the 20th century. So far, so predictable. But because this is Auster, there is a twist: this is not one linear narrative; it is four stories, four lives in one. Same boy, four different childhoods, four different paths. Remarkably broad in scope yet fantastically rich and detailed, this is Paul Auster’s post-modern version of The Great American Novel.
Cassandra and Judith Edwards are identical twins. Both brilliant and beautiful; one happily engaged to be married, the other severely depressed. This 1960s psychological drama is an intense read that will bring you into the psyche of both protagonists and show the devastating effects of depression not only on the depressed, but also those around. Brace yourself for something much darker and a great deal more profound than the title suggests.
I’ve just been through one of the longest good book ‘droughts’ in my reading career. In the end I decided to reach for a classic, sometimes the only way out, and grabbed hold of John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row. It’s a short book that is more like a portrait of a community than a linear narrative, but within it are sublime little stories, descriptions of people, places and atmosphere that only an old hand like Steinbeck can conjure up.
This is a beautifully produced scholarly edition of 18 of Fitzgerald’s short stories, none published in his lifetime. Varying in length from three pages to thirty, these stories are peopled not so much with the glamorous but damaged Jazz Age characters familiar to us from his novels but with a poorer, sadder, post-Depression cast including drunks, travelling salespeople, hypochondriacs, divorcing couples, movie producers, starlets, has-beens, and – overwhelmingly – the unwell. The best of these stories glitter with the author’s wit and familiar ability to demolish a character’s pretentions in a sentence. The others, more plodding, will appeal nevertheless to Fitzgerald fans for the light they shine on his preoccupations and problems, and for the glimpse they afford into the seedier side of 1930s small-town American life.
Yes, the Booker Prize winning The Sellout is a funny book, a book that makes you laugh (sometimes guiltily), a stinging satire devoid of political correctness that goes to the heart of America’s race relation problems. Sadly, it’s also a novel that somehow lacks direction; that appears to go nowhere, in which the author occasionally seems to revel in his own jokes. It’s packed with cultural references that I struggled to understand and I suspect I’m not the only one. For the last reason alone, it’s a puzzling choice as the first American winner of the British based Booker Prize since their rules were changed to include American books a few years ago.
What a disappointment! I usually devour Dave Eggers’ books, but this story about a woman running away to Alaska with her two young kids in an RV was just plain lifeless and boring, with a plot seemingly going nowhere. I forced myself to read 80 pages, didn’t laugh once and simply gave up. Read Dave Eggers’ The Circle or A Hologram for the King instead.
Heroes of the Frontier by Dave Eggers is published by Hamish Hamilton, 400 pages.
