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
Working-class boy, István, rises from poverty in communist Hungary to join London’s super rich in Flesh by David Szalay. The road there is far from obvious and has little to do with István’s skills or intelligence and everything to do with a series of random coincidences. The prose in Flesh by David Szalay is as sparse as István’s emotional life but as addictive as any of the drugs consumed in London’s nightclubs.
A slow-burning Chilean tale of power and class, Clean by Alia Trabucco Zerán is an exceptional novel and one of our stand-out reads of the year to date. It tells the story of Estela, a housemaid implicated in the death of her employers’ young daughter. From inside a locked room or perhaps cell, Estela addresses us, her potential jailers, before we can interrogate her. She is, apparently, attempting to set the record straight, recounting her years of drudgery and isolation in the frigid bosom of a wealthy family in Santiago, and how a series of interconnecting events have led to the death of her charge, seven-year-old Julia. An unsettling and atmospheric mystery unfolds.
What happens to a plot of land over time? How does it change? Who lives and dies there? How do they live and die there? In North Woods by Daniel Mason, we are brought to a forested corner of Northern Massachusetts and, over four centuries, follow the fortunes and misfortunes of the people who inhabit a little yellow house on a small piece of land. Now this might sound like a disjointed premise for a good novel, but trust me when I say that Mason magically turns this hard-to-nail down idea into an highly addictive read.
Nila is nineteen, fizzing with hormones and the desire for an artistic life. She seeks sex, highs, beauty, and most of all, liberty. But as the daughter of Afghan refugees, Nila’s childhood has been marred by discrimination, poverty, and cultural expectation. In a hypnotic debut novel longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2025, Good Girl by Aria Aber recounts a pivotal year in Nila’s life, as feeling othered and misunderstood, she searches for self and freedom amongst the famously hedonistic denizens of the Berlin art scene.
Celebrating fifty years since publication, the exquisite modern classic, Turtle Diary by Russell Hoban, is a bittersweet story of loneliness, ennui and renewal in 1970’s London. It’s told through the alternate diary entries of soon-to-be acquaintances, William and Neaera, a forty-something bookseller and children’s author respectively. Both lead quiet, solitary lives, enlivened by regular visits to London Zoo, and both are drawn to its giant sea turtle aquarium, a wretchedly confining ‘glass box of second-hand ocean’. Compelled to set them free, they join forces and embark on a touching and richly metaphorical mission to release them into the open sea.
A doting Nonna, a bewitchingly beautiful girl on the balcony across the street and the ‘pit of the dead’ below the courtyard. This is the world of Mimi, our 9-year-old hero in The Mortal and Immortal Life of the Girl From Milan by Domenico Starnone. First love, death, class and Neapolitan passion mix up beautifully in this coming-of-age story set in 1950s Italy.
Garlanded with glorious reviews and European literary awards, Danish publishing sensation, Money to Burn by Asta Olivia Nordenhof, is a strikingly unique proposition. The first in a planned septology, this ambitious and courageous novel is essentially a denunciation of late capitalism, told through the prism of a real-life tragedy (The 1990 arson attack on the Scandinavian Star ferry, which killed 159 people but was never satisfactorily explained). In this inspired tale, Nordenhof imagines the lives and loves of a middle-aged Danish couple, interlaced with a journalistic dissection of the disaster. How the two may be connected makes for galvanising reading.
There’s something special about novels based on real events, particularly when the story is crazy as that of the The Visit of the Royal Physician by Per Olov Enquist. It’s the late 1700s and the time of absolute rulers. In Denmark, a German doctor is hired to take care of the 16-year-old mentally disturbed King Christian VII. Within months, Struensee becomes the Queen’s lover and de-facto sovereign while living alongside King Christian. How was this possible? And was this Struensee’s intention all along? A wild journey into the madness of 18th century court life, revolutionary ideas and an absolute treat of a novel. Read full Review
It’s the Roaring Twenties and Patricia is living the Jazz Age dream in New York. Hers is a cosmopolitan life of smoky nightclubs and cocktail parties, with the added bonus of a sexually liberated husband. But at the age of just twenty-four, Patricia finds herself unglamorously dumped, after her ‘theoretically modern’ husband, Peter leaves her. Apparently, any agreed sexual freedoms had applied only to him, and so, when Patricia reveals an amorous liaison, she is spurned and forced to build a new life as a not-so-merry divorcée. Labelled scandalous and sensational upon publication in 1929, Ex-Wife by Ursula Parrott portrays a generation eager for a permissive society but mired in double standards.
Originally published in German in 2021, it’s taken years for Eurotrash by Christian Kracht to make it into English translation, and mere weeks to bag a place on The Times Best Books of 2024 list. Witty, reflective, and frequently disturbing, Kracht’s semi-autobiographical tragicomedy stars the man himself, as a middle-aged Swiss writer embarking on a road trip around Switzerland with his elderly mother. Recently released from a mental institution, and potentially on her last legs, it could be both their final holiday together, and Kracht’s only chance to get her to confront the implications of their family’s Nazi past.
