Bookstoker Young Readers
The It-Doesn’t-Matter Suit and Other Stories
Delightful storytelling from a literary icon
Goodnight Stories for Rebel Girls 2
Inciting joyful rebellion
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
Four Books On Love Gone Sour
The Days of Abandonment
A 'sudden absence of sense'
Dept. of Speculation
Snapshots of a marriage
Sisters
Torn apart by jealousy
The Only Story
Endless love?
Review by Julie
The Wonder Down Under – A User’s Guide to the Vagina
All the things you never dared ask
It’s time to demystify the female genitals. Oslo-based medical students and sex educators Dr Nina Brochmann and Ellen Støkken Dahl have decided to lift the veil. With frankness and humour, Brochmann and Dahl tackle periods, discharge, douchebags, contraception, fertility and sex, in all shapes and forms, plus a host of other issues. A breath of fresh air from two hugely inspirational young women, The Wonder Down Under – A User’s Guide to the Vagina has been translated to 33 languages and sailed straight onto the German and French best-seller lists. Is Britain ready for it?
Three books about strong girls on International Women’s Day
Astrid the Unstoppable
A resilient heroine sparkles in this prize-winning Norwegian tale
Ruby Redfort: Blink and You Die (Book 6)
Inspiring a new generation of super-cool girl spies
The Girl of Ink & Stars
Waterstones prize winner captures the power of myth in this inventive tale
Review by Jane
Go, Went, Gone
A hauntingly beautiful novel about one of the most important issues of our time
This is a book that offers an intelligent fictionalised response to the refugee crisis by distilling the unimaginable scale and horror of a worldwide problem to the personal stories of a few people, played out in today’s Berlin. Full of generosity and humanity, it manages to be wide‐ranging and universal and yet astonishingly simple.
Review by Julie
Shyness and Dignity
A Norwegian Stoner
Meet Elias Rukla, teacher of Norwegian to a bunch of bored teenagers at Fagerborg Secondary School in Oslo. Elias is about to destroy 25 years of hard work and his reputation, publicly and humiliatingly, in front of the whole school. Why is Elias boiling over? Find out in this darkly funny, captivating deep dive into the psyche of a man who comes face to face with his entire existence.
Review by Julie
The Only Story
Endless love?
It’s the 1960s, 19-year-old university student Paul is home on summer holiday. Bored and fed up of by his parents’ suburban conventionality Paul reluctantly goes along when his mum suggests he joins the tennis club to meet a ‘Caroline’. Instead, he meets Susan Macleod, 48-year-old unhappily married mum of two. A beautiful and harrowing love story ensues, one that will dominate the rest of Paul’s life. Julian Barnes fans will want to read The Only Story, if I were new to Barnes, though, I’m not sure this is where I would start.
Bookstoker Young Readers
The 1,000-year-old Boy
Who wants to live forever?
Things a Bright Girl Can Do
For bright young feminists everywhere, celebrating 100 years of Votes for Women
Life Doesn’t Frighten Me At All
25th anniversary edition of this poetic guide to a fearless heart
Review by Julie
Sisters
Torn apart by jealousy
Our unnamed narrator, the second wife of a successful Wall Street bond trader, is consumed with jealously for the first wife – ‘she’ – in this short novel, where the classic direction of jealousy is reversed. She is composed, blonde, tall and ‘lovely’, a talented musician with two exceptionally bright kids. ‘I’ is everything she’s not. A stirring portrayal of jealousy, emotional neglect and obsession, easily read in one sitting.
News by Julie
More than Hay
The Hay festival in Cartagena, Colombia took place a few weeks ago (25-28 January) and I’m sick with envy. I’ve long been wanting to go, maybe next year will be the year? The Hay Literary Festival, Britain’s most famous literary festival once described by Bill Clinton as the Woodstock of the Mind, is a lot more than a week in Hay-on-Wye in Wales at the end of May, although that’s where it all started.
