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Be Kind to Your Local Bookseller this Christmas

I’m sure I’m not the only one to have noticed the many closed-down shops around. Let’s make sure that doesn’t happen to your local bookstore and buy your Christmas gifts from them rather than Amazon. I know it’s tempting to hit that order button, but can you imagine anything worse than a great big gaping hole where your cozy bookseller once was?

For bookish gift ideas see our Christmas post.

Happy Christmas!

 

Books for Christmas 2018

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Books are for life, not just for Christmas

People who put up Christmas decorations early are happier and more in touch with their inner child than those who don’t, according to a recent report by psychologists. I love this news as I am a bit of a self-confessed Christmas fanatic. Perhaps it’s the Scandinavian in me, but I just can’t get enough of sweet covered gingerbread houses, candlelit windowsills, roaring fireplaces, the smell of incense and mulled wine. So no surprise then that suggesting books as Christmas presents is one of my absolute favourite things to do.

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Margaret Atwood to publish sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale

No doubt inspired by our times, Margaret Atwood has decided to write a sequel to her dystopian best-seller The Handmaid’s Tale. The Testament will be published in September 2019 and will pick up on the story 15 years after the closing scene of The Handmaid’s Tale. I, for one, can’t wait for this book. If you haven’t already read The Handmaid’s Tale, now is the time, or if you have, how about trying another of her masterpieces, Alias Grace.

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Costa Award short-list 2018

Here’s the short-list selection for the Costa Awards 2018. As usual, there are five categories: Novel, First Novel, Biography, Poetry and Children’s Books. We absolutely loved Sally Rooney’s modern love story Normal People and Pat Barker’s feminist spin on The Iliad in The Silence of the Girls, both nominated in the Novel Award category as well as the strange and wonderful The Colour of the Sun by David Almond in the Children’s Book category. Category winners will be announced on the 7th January and the Costa Book of the Year on the 29th January. Which ones of these have you read?

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Becoming by Michelle Obama

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Becoming

A feel good memoir written with warmth, humour and self-deprecation

The memoir of a First Lady is not usually something I would run to the bookshop for, but in the case of Michelle Obama, I was intrigued. I wanted to know if she really is as kind, warm, intelligent, accomplished, empathic and eloquent as she has come across since the day she set her foot in the White House. And, if this book is to be believed, she is! A feel good book written with warmth, humour and self-deprecation.

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Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata

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Convenience Store Woman

Stinging satire on Japanese society

Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata is a rare book. Imminently readable, absurd, laugh-out-loud funny, yet profound. And it’s the winner of the Akutagawa Prize, Japan’s most prestigious literary award. As a child Keiko, our heroine, is different. Unnervingly so. Particularly in a society where conformity is the ideal. ‘Normal’ is what everyone is striving for and when Keiko starts to work in a convenience store, ‘normal’ seems within reach. But being ‘normal’ eventually involves marrying and having children, which she’s not even remotely interested in. As pressure mounts, Keiko needs to find a solution.

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The Comoran Strike Series by Robert Galbraith

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The Comoran Strike Series

Looking for the perfect audio book?

I find audio books only work for me if they are not too taxing. I want something I don’t need to flick back and forward, something that doesn’t require reading a paragraph over a few times to absorb the point, check one character’s relationship to another, or admire the imagery.  So when I’m gardening slash driving slash ironing, literary fiction or challenging non-fiction is not on the menu. Instead it’s got to be an audio book that is suspenseful and absorbing enough to make whatever I’m doing pass quickly but nothing so deep that I have to concentrate too much – and of course narrated brilliantly. All hail, therefore, the fabulous detective novels in the Comoran Strike Series by Robert Galbraith (aka JK Rowling) and read by Robert Glenister.

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The Forty Rules of Love by Elif Shafak

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The Forty Rules of Love

A book on love to cheer you up

Feeling the winter blues creeping in and in need of an escape? The Forty Rules of Love by Elif Shafak, a gorgeous little gem of a book, will immerse you in an exotic world of heat, colour, love and friendship. ‘Every true love and friendship is a story of unexpected transformation. If we are the same person before and after we loved, that means we haven’t loved enough.’

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