Search Results for: grief is the thing

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Grief is the Thing with Feathers

Glorious on grief

I have no idea why I haven’t picked up this gorgeous little book sooner. It’s the story of a young dad with two boys who loses their wife and mother in a freak accident. As they struggle to digest the loss, enter Crow, a giant black eyed, yes, crow, who stirs up everything, who pecks and shits and who refuses to leave or to be ignored, just like grief itself. Crow, a potent symbol in Ted Hughes’s poems (the dad is a Hughes scholar), is here to stay – ‘I won’t leave until you don’t need me any more’ – but as time moves on, straight-talking Crow becomes less of a nuisance, more of a therapist, helping them overcome their loss. Rarely have I seen grief been described more lyrically.

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Grief Angles by David Owen

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Grief Angels

Teen/Young Adult

Loss, friendship, and the male teen psyche

‘I googled if it’s normal to hallucinate manifestations of your grief. Unsurprisingly it’s not. ‘Owen’s dad died four months ago, since when he’s been haunted by visions of ominous skeletal birds. Struggling at a new school, Owen feels overwhelmed by grief. Until fellow student, Duncan Cyman, comes into his life. In the striking and unusual Grief Angels by David Owen, we visit the domain of the male teen psyche, interwoven with an intriguing strand of magical realism.

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Grief Works

Compassionate and constructive on mourning

I confess to approaching this book with trepidation. Bereavement will happen to all of us, some more tragically than others, but it is still the kind of bad news that most people would rather not read about. In the event, I was wrong to worry. Renowned grief psychotherapist Julia Samuel has 25 years of experience and you can tell. It’s almost as if you can feel her presence in this book. She’s compassionate, interested and non-judgemental and writes about death and mourning with a comforting yet pragmatic voice. Read full Review

Shy by Max Porter

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Shy

Mesmerising portrayal of troubled boyhood

It’s 3 am, one haunted night in 1995, and Shy is escaping from a home for ‘psychologically disturbed’ juveniles. With a tape in his Walkman and a spliff in his pocket, he’s creeping into the ‘atrociously bare and quiet’ world beyond, bound for the garden pond with a rucksack full of rocks on his back. A lyrical and immersive read, in Shy by Max Porter, we share a few hours with a lost boy as he navigates a strange liminal space between memories, ghosts, and an unimaginable future.

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The Friend by Sigrid Nunez

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The Friend

Lyrical on mourning and dogs

A female English professor and writer loses her best friend and sometimes lover to suicide. A few days later she’s asked to take over the care of his dog, an enormous Great Dane. No small ask as the writer lives in a tiny flat in a Manhattan building where dogs are prohibited. This is the plot of the otherwise plotless but strangely mesmerising The Friend by Sigrid Nunez, a story about love, loss and being an artist, which, had my flight not been over, I would have read in one sitting.

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Where to start on the Booker Prize long-list 2019?

The Booker Prize long-list 2019 of 13 books was published yesterday and the question is, as always, where to start, if at all…We’ve reviewed a few of them and thought we’d share our views. The big unknown – although entirely unsurprising – entry is The Testaments, Margaret Atwood’s much-anticipated sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, out in September. The Booker judges, bound by strict non-disclosure agreements, can’t say a word about what happens in the book, so we’ll have to take their word for it.

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Lanny by Max Porter

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Lanny

Another puzzle from Max Porter

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.

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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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‘A book is a gift you can open again and again…’ – Bookstoker’s Christmas present ideas

As much as I love Christmas, I’m not so sure about the shopping part of it. My heart sinks when I look at the number of Christmas presents I need to buy over the next few weeks. I do enjoy buying books for people though, and there’s nothing quite as satisfying as finding the perfect book for someone you love. We’ve been trawling the bookshops and the newspapers to find the most interesting or beautiful (or both) books out there, and hopefully help you find the perfect book for someone.  Here’s what we found.

Merry Christmas!

Michele, Meg, Jane and Julie

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Best audiobooks 2016

As many of will know, we here at Bookstoker are big consumers of audiobooks and we know that many of our followers are as well. There’s nothing like a good audiobook for killing time stuck in traffic, while out walking or doing housework. And with Amazon’s great invention Whispersync for Voice, you can switch seamlessly between reading on your Kindle and listening on Audible. Your Kindle or Audible will automatically pick up where you left off. Genius!

From old classics to popular new publications we’ve enjoyed these audiobooks for being brilliant books, perfectly narrated.

Our top 10 this year are…

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