Weird and Wonderful stories from Japan
Silence
Stunning Japanese classic
Tokyo Express
A unique brain teaser
Life for Sale
Darkly comic Japanese noir
Dead-End Stories
Short stories to gladden the heart
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
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Review by Kirstin
Bad Nature
Bold, bizarre debut novel of revenge and resistance
Possessed of a murderous streak, Hester has always known that one day she’ll kill her father. When her 40th birthday is marked by an oncologist’s diagnosis of terminal cancer, she decides to walk away from her outwardly successful life and take a road trip to California: final destination Dad’s house, to deliver a bullet to his treacherous brain. In the fabulous debut, Bad Nature by Ariel Courage, we join Hester on a chaotic journey, accompanied by hitchhiking eco-activist, John, a man intent on saving the world while Hester turns a blind and indifferent eye. Read full Review
Review by Kirstin
Maurice
The love that dares to speak its name
The opening decades of the 21st century have witnessed an amazing boomtime in the world of Young Adult literature. All of life is here in its messy complexity, ripe for exploration and taboo-busting, and with a stroke of genius, Faber & Faber have introduced a classic into the mix, in the form of a YA-friendly edition of Maurice by E. M. Forster. The original text is presented in an illustrated hardcover format, and traces a young man’s homosexual and political awakening in English Edwardian society. Both a commentary on repression and hypocrisy and the tenderest of love stories, this minor classic is ripe for rediscovery.
Review by Kirstin
Vanishing World
Love, sex, and wombs for all
In the vein of her previous gloriously odd books, Vanishing World by Sayaka Murata is one for accidental contrarians, those who don’t set out to defy convention but find themselves unable to flourish within the parameters of societal norms. Here, we meet Amane, a young Japanese woman in an era where marital sex is practically taboo, and children are conceived via artificial insemination for reasons of convenience and hygiene. Amane’s conflict arises from the shameful fact that she, herself, was conceived by the positively barbaric method of sexual intercourse. Navigating her way in this sterile world, Amane has questions to ask and experiments to conduct.
Review by Julie
Farenheit 451
Scarily prescient sci-fi
Enormous TV screens airing game shows all day, a robot with a mind of its own, persecuted academics, banned books, school shootings, communication through earpieces – sound familiar? Written in 1953 during the dark days of McCarthyism, American classic Farenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury is a scarily prescient sci-fi novel that will leave you gobsmacked.
Review by Kirstin
Victorian Psycho
An outrageous unravelling
For those with a deliciously dark sense of humour and a taste for the macabre, Victorian Psycho by Virginia Feito is an unmissable treat. Set in 19th-century England, this is the tale of Miss Winifred Notty, both demure governess and vengeful murderess. Arriving at her new placement with the well-to-do Pounds family, Winifred tells us that in three months time everyone in the house will be dead. Cue a journey into the mind of a female psychopath in a cleverly parodic novel that borrows brilliantly from Victorian literature (with a nod to Charles Dickens, in particular). This sensationally cinematic book is already in the Hollywood movie pipeline.
Nature books anyone?
Birds as Individuals
Flights of joy
Gathering Moss
Small is beautiful
Entangled Life
A fungus for every occasion
The Shepherd’s Life
Eloquence, integrity, and lots of sheep
Review by Julie
There Are Rivers in the Sky
Sweeping multi-narrative
A raindrop falling on the head of King Ashurbanipal in the Mesopotamian city of Nineveh 2600 years ago kicks off the sweeping novel There Are Rivers in the Sky by Elif Shafak. The drop of water resurfaces as a snowflake on the tongue on a newborn baby on the banks of the river Thames in 1840, in a water bottle in Iraq in 2014 and, finally, as a teardrop on a houseboat in London in 2018. Shafak interweaves three stories to make an epic, enjoyable journey through time and geographies.
Review by Kirstin
The Evin Prison Bakers’ Club
Baking for the sisterhood
A unique and intriguing concept, The Evin Prison Bakers’ Club by Sepideh Gholian is both a prison memoir and recipe collection; a celebration of baking, as resistance, therapy, and heartfelt tribute to fellow detainees. Gholian, a human rights activist, is to date, still incarcerated in one of Iran’s infamously brutal prisons. Beaten and tortured, she remains unbowed, having smuggled out the contents of this book in order to tell the world about Iranian repression and to raise a beacon of hope.
Review by Kirstin
Spoilt Creatures
A not so safe space
Newly single, stuck in a mediocre job and back living in her childhood home with a depressive mother, Iris feels defeated by life. When salvation is offered in the form of Breach House, a remote women’s commune and apparent safe haven, she leaps at the chance of healing and renewal. But the sisterhood is not all it promises to be, as mind games and acts of cruelty spiral into a sequence of devastating events. With an undercurrent of niggling dread, Spoilt Creatures by Amy Twigg is a compelling and atmospheric cult story with a difference.
