Bookstoker Young Readers
Different for Boys
A perceptive and empathic LGBTQ+ read
Friend
An inspiration for the budding poets in your life
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
Top 100 Book Blogs
Netgalley Member
Review by Kirstin
A Way of Life Like Any Other
Hilarity with a dash of vinegar
The New York Review of Books Classics series is a marvellous creation, an eclectic mix of fabulously-jacketed titles, invariably accompanied by compelling intros. A recent serendipitous dip into the collection blessed us with A Way of Life Like Any Other by Darcy O’Brien, the story of a young boy in 1950’s Hollywood, his movie star parents and their sordid and absurd descent into has-been territory. Irresistibly described as ‘completely bananas’, we find out what happens after the glitter fades, in a bizarre coming-of-age novel that combines hilarity with a dash of vinegar.
Bookstoker Young Readers
Kids Fight Extinction
Give nature a hand
The Blue Book of Nebo
Survival and renewal in post-apocalyptic Wales
Needle
The hardest word
Review by Julie
Cuddy
A novel about a saint and a historical cathedral might not make you race to the bookshop, but Cuddy by Benjamin Myers turned out to be a lot more riveting that you’d imagine. Meyers novel is a playful medley of forms – poetry, play, diary and prose. In five different parts, he tells the story of Saint Cuthbert, Durham Cathedral and people whose lives were in one way or another touched by it. A moving love letter to Durham and superb storytelling from an author to watch.
Review by Meg
A Little Life
A profoundly moving novel about friendship in the twenty-first century
The hottest play in London at the moment! If you can’t get hold of a ticket. The book will do just fine! Here’s our review. Enjoy.
When I was given a copy of this much-lauded, lengthy book at the beginning of the summer my heart sank slightly. I’d read so much hype about this challenging blockbuster novel that I wasn’t sure if I even wanted to read it. A close friend put me off further by declaring that she had given up half way through as she found it too gruelling and unrelenting. However, relaxing on holiday in sleepy Somerset, I braced myself and began what turned out to be an exhausting and harrowing yet profoundly moving novel.
Review by Kirstin
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.
Bookstoker Young Readers
You Can’t Kill Snow White
Siding with darkness as a way of understanding the madness
Small!
Gleefully bonkers
When the Sky Falls
The London Blitz, a silverback gorilla, and the meaning of love
Review by Kirstin
Old God’s Time
Trauma, memory and radiant love
A novel of rich interiority, Old God’s Time by Sebastian Barry introduces us to the sedate life of Tom Kettle, a retired policeman dreaming away his days by the Irish Sea. His is the ‘little routine of a retired man,’ and the comfort of his beloved wicker chair, where he indulges in cigarillos and contemplation of his late wife, June, and their two children. When unwanted interruption comes in the form of two ex-colleagues and the reopening of a cold case, Tom is compelled to revisit the past, in Barry’s fine portrait of trauma, wavering memories, and radiant love.
Review by Julie
Silence
Stunning Japanese classic
Reading Silence by Shusaku Endo is one of those magical experiences in which you find yourself transported to a completely different time and place. In this case, to a 17th century Japan in the midst of its battle to eradicate Christianity. We follow two young, committed Jesuit priests on their clandestine journey from Portugal to an island off the coast of Japan. Their mission: to keep the Catholic faith alive and to find out what happened to a predecessor who is rumoured to have apostatised. Justly considered a Japanese classic, Silence raises questions around religious colonialism, clash of cultures, freedom of religion and the very core of faith itself while being an absolutely gripping read.
Review by Kirstin
Love Leda
An evocative and unforgettable tale of bygone gay London
Predating the decriminalisation of gay sex in 1967 and never before published, Love, Leda by Mark Hyatt is a lost gem of urban gay literature. By turns, audacious and affecting, Hyatt’s semi-autobiographical novel gives us a handful of days in the company of Leda, depressed narcissist and self-proclaimed ‘social bum’. Leda spends his days (and heady nights) searching for something beyond the greyness of an early 1960’s London that has yet to become groovy. A captivating read, it brilliantly chronicles an unapologetic adventurer and a bygone London.
