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Your local bookshop needs your love!

More than ever, this is the time to be there for your local bookshop. However tempting it might be to just click the buy button on Amazon, please think twice. Can you imagine emerging from your house in a few weeks/months time only to find it gone? You can make a difference right now by buying online from them. Here’s a photo of one of mine – Daunt on Holland Park Avenue in London ([email protected]). Get in touch with yours and see if they take online orders. Here’s a local bookshop finder if you don’t have a favourite yet LocalBookShops.co.uk

Story of a Marriage by Geir Gulliksen

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Story of a Marriage

An unflinching study of lost love and intimacy

The 2020 Dublin Literary Award would have announced its shortlist on 2 April, but has since been postponed due to the outbreak of COVID-19. Among the many big names on the extensive long-list was Story of a Marriage by Geir Gulliksen, which caused a stir in Norway upon publication in 2015. Many viewed it as the latest example of so-called virkelighetslitteratur – reality literature – a strand of life writing that seemed to expose the private lives of real people under the guise of fiction.

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Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier

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Rebecca

An extraordinary psychological thriller

Can’t think of a better escape right now than the 1938 novel Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier, a glorious cocktail of jealousy, obsession, opulence and mystery. Our modest, unglamorous heroine works as a companion to a well-healed woman on holiday in Monte Carlo. There she meets the wealthy, dashing widower Max de Winter and an unlikely relationship begins. They marry and return to Manderley, de Winter’s palatial estate in England, where the ghost of de Winter’s dead wife Rebecca and the ghoulish housekeeper Mrs Danvers rule. An extraordinary psychological thriller.

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Addictive reads

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Take-your-mind-off-coronavirus books

We thought a list of utterly addictive, read-while-you’re-brushing-teeth, stay-up-all-night books might be called for at this point. Here are our top ten:

 

Fingersmith by Sarah Waters

North Water by Ian McGuire

Rebecca by Daphne de Maurier

The Mermaid and Mrs Hancock by Imogen Hermes Gowar

The Porpoise by Mark Haddon

The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton

And then There Were None by Agatha Christie

Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood

The Shardlake Series by CJ Samson

The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver

Kim Jiyoung Born 1982 by Cho Nam-Joo

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Kim Jiyoung Born 1982

#MeToo South Korean style

Kim Jiyoung Born 1982 by Cho Nam-Joo shook South-Korea to the core when it was published there a few years ago, unleashing a fierce #MeToo debate. It chronicles the life of Kim Jiyoung from birth to motherhood to mental breakdown and is written in the form of a psychiatrist report. The cold clinical way her case is described is, of course, a reflection of the way she, as a girl and a woman, is treated. That South Korea lags behind in women’s lib possibly doesn’t come as news but this little book still had the power to surprise and move.

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Books about plagues

Personally, I’m a bit of an escapist, but for those of you who feel like reading about it here are some of the best books featuring plagues. From Daniel Defoe’s memoir from the 1665 bubonic plague to Stephen King’s The Stand where no less the 99% (!) of the population dies there should be something for every brave reader here.

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