Bookstoker Young Readers
Long Way Down
Electrifying tale of urban gang life
The Book No One Wants to Read
‘You’re not one of those kids who thinks books are boring, are you?’
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
Celebrating Pride Month on Bookstoker – Our Favourite Queer Books
The Whale Tattoo
Evocative, brutal and strangely beautiful
The Black Flamingo
Validation and freedom in 360 wonderfully poetic pages
This Book is Gay
An honest and illuminating guide for LGBT teens and their families
The End of Eddy
A punch of a book
Less
Playful Pulitzer Prize winner
Young Mungo
A darker, quieter follow up to Shuggie Bain
Review by Julie
Young Mungo
A darker, quieter follow up to Shuggie Bain
Young Mungo by Douglas Stuart follows on from Stuart’s outstanding Booker Prize winning debut Shuggie Bain. Although the setting is very much the same – Glaswegian tenements, dysfunctional families, absent fathers and alcoholic mothers – the story feels different enough to engage even those who’ve read Shuggie Bain. A burgeoning love between Mungo and fellow loner James is at the core of this book, the moving tenderness of their relationship in stark contrast to the rough realities on the street and at home. In true Stuart style, characters and places rise from the page but I felt some of the pace and immediacy of his debut was missing in this book. Still a good read, but not the mind-blower that was Shuggie Bain. Read full Review
Review by Kirstin
The Tenants of Moonbloom
A bizarre epiphany in bygone New York
The Tenants of Moonbloom by Edward Lewis Wallant is an unjustly neglected American gem. A deliciously peculiar novel, comic and melancholic in equal parts, it takes us to a down-at-heel New York at the turn of the 1950’s and the dreary life of daydreamer and rent collector, Norman Moonbloom. Norman’s days are spent chasing rent from hapless tenants, whilst attempting to dodge their numerous demands, complaints, and often riotous domestic dramas. Too sensitive for the world of the mercenary slumlord, he will undergo a quiet epiphany against a disintegrating backdrop of leaking taps and treacherous wiring.
Bookstoker Young Readers
Over to You!
‘Just take the words and run with them.’
Escape Room
A brain-stretching adventure of thrills and spills
Stay Another Day
An essential festive sofa read
Review by Kirstin
All the Lovers in the Night
Melancholy and metamorphosis
When 34-year-old Fuyuko Irie catches a glimpse of herself in a shop window, the drab and defeated figure she sees reflects her shrunken spirit. The only thing that sparks joy in this sad young woman’s heart is the luminosity of Tokyo at night, its dazzling lights a bitter irony when she considers how the monotony of life has extinguished any glimmer of brightness within herself. In All the Lovers in the Night by Mieko Kawakami, we join Fuyuko as she reaches crisis point and a chance encounter shows her the potential for change.
Review by Kirstin
The Shepherd’s Life
Eloquence, integrity, and lots of sheep
In 1804, when William Wordsworth was wandering lonely as a cloud across the Lake District, he couldn’t have envisaged how his work, along with a merry handful of nineteenth-century artists and writers, would shape public perception of this beautiful landscape for centuries to come. In The Shepherd’s Life by James Rebanks, we’re given an alternative vision. This beguiling book describes Rebanks life as a sheep farmer. In it he reveals a traditional world, often out of step with modern Britain, and a unique perspective of his beloved Lake District and the invisible, hardworking families who sustain it. Read full Review
Review by Julie
Elena Knows
Gripping on illness and women's rights
A cantankerous Parkinson’s sufferer is the unlikely heroine of International Booker Prize short-listed novella Elena Knows by Claudia Pineiro. Elena is crippled by Parkinson but that doesn’t stop her from travelling across Buenos Aires to find out if her daughter Rita’s death was murder or suicide. Elena Knows is not a murder mystery, rather, it’s a story about determination, ageing, religious hypocrisy, illness and most of all, women’s bodies. I’ve rarely read a more convincing portrayal of debilitating illness which in this book becomes the very symbol of who controls women’s bodies.
Bookstoker Young Readers
The Last Bear
For the planet and polar bears everywhere
You Don’t Understand Me
Invaluable advice for girls in an uncertain world
The Crossing
Impressive refugee crisis verse novel scoops Costa prize
Review by Kirstin
The Whale Tattoo
Evocative, brutal and strangely beautiful
Death follows Joe Gunner wherever he goes. He knows this because the whale told him so. Washed up on a Norfolk beach on ‘a halo of dirty blood,’ its terrible majesty conveys a personal message. Joe must return to his childhood fishing community, where fisherman and ex-lover, Tim Fysh, still lives and memories wait to be dredged from the shifting tidal waters. A stunning debut, The Whale Tattoo by Jon Ransom gives us a vivid portrait of queer, working class life, in a community riven by repressive conformity and familial trauma.
