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
Now, a book about a mermaid might sound a bit ridiculous, but suspend belief and dive into the sumptuous, sexy and exuberant historical novel The Mermaid and Mrs Hancock by Imogen Hermes Gowar and enjoy! Despite its 486 pages and tome-like appearance, I raced through this light, entertaining read and loved every second of it.
In part 2 of our occasional bookish delights series, we’d love to shine a light on the fantastic work of the Little Free Library movement. It’s now almost a decade since Todd Bol created the very first Little Free Library, in honour of his late book-loving mother.
We’re delighted to share with you our top picks of inspiring, visionary female authors of fiction and non-fiction from the blog. Click on the cover to see full review. Happy International Women’s Day!
…Milkman by Anna Burns, the 2018 Man Booker Prize winner. First of all, don’t get turned off by the subject matter – the conflict in Northern Ireland during the 1970s. Sure, it’s serious stuff, but the way it’s presented here, makes it far from dreary. In fact, it’s one of the funniest books I read over the past year. It requires a bit of effort this book – it’s written in a stream-of-conciousness style, with no names – but is all the more rewarding for it. This book made me laugh of loud and admire some truly original, inspiring fiction writing. Go for it!
Read full review of Milkman here.
Set in Tudor England, The Shardlake Series by CJ Sansom is a series of (currently) 7 books featuring the lawyer Matthew Shardlake and a cast of both real and fictional characters. Packed with mystery, murder and intrigue and a wealth of fascinating historical insights, I admit I have become a bit obsessed. Forget taxing literary fiction, here is your new guilty pleasure.
Bart van Es grew up with the knowledge that his grandparents had sheltered a young Jewish girl in the Netherlands during the war. As a middle-aged Oxford don he decides the time has come to find out more. This Costa Book of the Year winning book is the result: a remarkable blend of family history, wartime record and investigative journalism, where the secrets and lies of a family and a country are unearthed. The Cut Out Girl by Bart van Es is an astonishing piece of multi-layered historical writing in which we make the author’s discoveries alongside him, where artefacts and public records are examined alongside an old lady’s memories, and in which we learn anew about both the horrors and the sacrifices that humans are capable of.
Writing about lived experience is nothing new, and yet there has been a recent surge of books that blend aspects of the memoir with elements borrowed from fiction. Examples of such literature, coined ‘autofiction’ by the French writer Serge Dubrovsky, have proved to be highly readable, genre-bending accounts of the author’s life’. Autofiction can also be used to describe autobiographical fiction, a fictionalised narrative that draws on the author’s life and experience, and fictionalised autobiography, which is modelled more closely on real life with some compressed or fictionalised events or characters.
Tara Westover grew up in rural Idaho in a deeply dysfunctional Mormon family. Her fanatical father believed the End of Days was fast approaching, so she and her six older siblings spent every summer bottling hundreds of peaches and every winter rotating emergency supplies in the belief that when the end came her family would survive. Prevented by her parents from attending school, Tara has no birth certificate. She also has no medical records, due to her authoritarian father’s extreme aversion to hospitals and doctors of any kind. As far as the state is concerned, she doesn’t exist. Educated by Tara Westover is the remarkable story of her struggle for self-invention.
Can you properly love someone without first learning to love yourself? I don’t think so. So what better time to start than this Valentine. As you would expect, I’m a great believer in books helping us find the right kind of self-love and have made a selection for The Wildsmith Papers. Curious? Go find out.
