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
Two pages into The Porpoise by Mark Haddon (The Curious Incident Of the Dog in the Night Time) I was utterly hooked and only emerged bleary-eyed a day later after what felt like a roller-coaster ride. The book interweaves a contemporary story with one from antiquity, and whereas that might turn some of you off, it really shouldn’t. The Porpoise is first class, breakneck paced storytelling. A sort of literary Mission Impossible.
The Wall by John Lanchester is an eco-dystopian novel set in the near future, this is a dark and mesmerising vision of what happens when borders become walls, when the world is divided into ‘us’ and ‘others’, and when the young despise the old for what they allowed to happen on their watch.
Machines Like Me by Ian McEwan is set in London in the 1980s, only these are not the 1980s we know, but rather a sort of Sliding Doors variant of the that time. Thatcher is in power but has lost, rather than won, the Falklands War. Computer genius Alan Turing, the breaker of the Enigma code, has not committed suicide, as he did in real life, but is alive and well. He has invented the world wide web, solved some unsolvable scientific conundrums and taken the world way past 2019 in terms of technological advances. McEwan, always with his finger on the pulse of the world we live in, has noble ambitions with this novel. Sadly, it just doesn’t work.
Set in a crumbling gothic mansion at the edge of a forest on the night of a glittering ball, a beautiful young woman is about to be murdered. Using established tropes from 1920s murder mysteries, The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton, winner of the Costa First Novel Award 2018, is a very modern take on the genre. It’s an intricately plotted, disorientating, dark and immersive read that will keep you guessing right until the end.
With a new exhibition on at the British Museum entitled ‘Edvard Munch: Love and Angst’, the English publication of So Much Longing In So Little Space: The Art of Edvard Munch by Karl Ove Knausgaard is timely. The book was written when Knausgaard was co-curating the exhibition ‘Mot Skogen’ (‘To the forest’) at the Munch Museum in Oslo in 2017, a task he took on despite acknowledging that ‘my only qualification was that I liked looking at paintings and often browsed through art books.’
Max Porter’s books are wonderfully strange things. They are novels, but occasionally seem to wander into the realm of poetry. The language is sparse, distilled down to the very essence of what he wants to communicate. The sentences twist and turn; literally, in this case. The first few pages of his new book were incomprehensible to me, but somehow Porter lures you in and doesn’t let you go. Lanny by Max Porter is set in a quintessential English village, where Lanny, an exceptionally creative, talented boy, his banker dad and author mum have just moved. But becoming part of this closed community is not a smooth ride. I’m not sure I liked Lanny as much as Porter’s first book, Grief is the Thing With Feathers, which I loved, but still think it’s a worthwhile read.
Writing can be therapeutic and for Emilie Pine, who has had her fair share of problems, it was the only way to deal with them. Notes of Self by Emilie Pine, were meant to remain just that, but then her partner found them lying around and convinced Pine to bring them to a publisher. The result is this strangely addictive little collection of essays. It’s a brave and brutally honest book dealing with the raw reality of Pine’s father’s alcoholism, her struggles conceiving and her teenage rebellion. Sounds depressing? You bet, but there’s also something hopeful and optimistic about these stories which teach us something about human resilience.
In a faraway country torn apart by civil war, two men are paving a new road that will reunite the north and south. The job is dangerous, employees of large international companies are attractive targets for kidnappers, so the men are known by their code names Four and Nine. They are polar opposites as far as personality goes. Four is a risk-averse pedant, Nine a careless hedonist. The stage is set for chaos. I’ve always enjoyed the way Eggers throws characters into unchartered territories, a fertile ground for comedy, and here he does it again. The Parade by Dave Eggers is not his best book, but as a light, funny read it’s very enjoyable nonetheless. (The Parade will be published in the UK on 21st March.)
Now, a book about a mermaid might sound a bit ridiculous, but suspend belief and dive into the sumptuous, sexy and exuberant historical novel The Mermaid and Mrs Hancock by Imogen Hermes Gowar and enjoy! Despite its 486 pages and tome-like appearance, I raced through this light, entertaining read and loved every second of it.
Set in Tudor England, The Shardlake Series by CJ Sansom is a series of (currently) 7 books featuring the lawyer Matthew Shardlake and a cast of both real and fictional characters. Packed with mystery, murder and intrigue and a wealth of fascinating historical insights, I admit I have become a bit obsessed. Forget taxing literary fiction, here is your new guilty pleasure.
