Three captivating coming-of-age novels
The Go-Between
Coming-of-age - the brutal way
The Sense of an Ending
Finely chiseled masterpiece
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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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Netgalley Member
News by Julie
David Grossman runs away with prestigious Man Booker International Prize 2017
Israeli author David Grossman and his translator Jessica Cohen has won this year’s Man Booker International Prize for his intriguingly named book A Horse Walks Into a Bar. It’s the story of a stand-up comedian and his on-stage break-down, but is, according to reviews, ‘neither remotely funny nor an easy read’. Rather it’s a parable for dysfunctional people and societies. Not sure if it goes into the beach read category, but I will buy it for my holiday anyway.
Review by Jane
I’d Die for You and Other Lost Stories
‘A basket of many coloured skies’
This is a beautifully produced scholarly edition of 18 of Fitzgerald’s short stories, none published in his lifetime. Varying in length from three pages to thirty, these stories are peopled not so much with the glamorous but damaged Jazz Age characters familiar to us from his novels but with a poorer, sadder, post-Depression cast including drunks, travelling salespeople, hypochondriacs, divorcing couples, movie producers, starlets, has-beens, and – overwhelmingly – the unwell. The best of these stories glitter with the author’s wit and familiar ability to demolish a character’s pretentions in a sentence. The others, more plodding, will appeal nevertheless to Fitzgerald fans for the light they shine on his preoccupations and problems, and for the glimpse they afford into the seedier side of 1930s small-town American life.
News by Julie
Naomi Alderman and The Power wins Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction 2017
The Power by Naomi Alderman was just announced the winner of the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction 2017. The Power is a clever imagining of a world in which women (literally) have the power. Alderman blends science fiction with dystopian global politics, Think The Hunger Games meets late Jeanette Winterson with a dash of Malorie Blackman, this is a book your teenage daughter will love. If you like YA feminist fantasy you’ll enjoy it; but The Handmaid’s Tale it ain’t.
Full review The Power by Naomi Alderman
Bookstoker Young Readers
13 Reasons Why
A contentious handling of teen suicide in the novel of the much hyped Netflix series
New and Collected Poems for Children
An exuberant journey to the heart of childhood imagination
The Private Blog of Joe Cowley: Straight Outta Nerdsville by Ben Davis
Cheerfully asinine teen diary, for the big kids in your life.
Review by Kirstin
New and Collected Poems for Children
An exuberant journey to the heart of childhood imagination
In this 2017 edition, our Poet Laureate presents poems from previous collections, plus a handful of new. A delicious assortment, it honours the fantastical landscape of our children’s inner lives, and tells us that poetry belongs to us all, it is the music of being human.
Review by Kirstin
The Private Blog of Joe Cowley: Straight Outta Nerdsville by Ben Davis
Cheerfully asinine teen diary, for the big kids in your life.
‘Too old for Wimpy Kid? Meet Joe Cowley’. A fitting tag line to lead us into the fourth instalment of this series. 16-year-old Joe and his band ‘Sound Experience’, move to London, in pursuit of stardom and cosmopolitan living. A squirm- inducing comedy of embarrassment is to follow. Do you have a teenage boy in your life who chuckles at flatulence, cringe comedy, and the word ‘knobber’ as a term of insult? If they also happen to be reluctant readers, then the Joe Cowley series could well be an essential purchase.
Review by Kirstin
13 Reasons Why
A contentious handling of teen suicide in the novel of the much hyped Netflix series
Hannah Baker is dead. She committed suicide two weeks ago, shocking her local community. But there are thirteen reasons why she died, and she wants Clay Jensen to know what they are. Her secrets call to him from beyond the grave, and what they reveal blows his world apart. The buzz around 13 Reasons Why has been huge. First published a decade ago, public interest has been reignited by the recent 13-part Netflix series, rocketing it into the bestseller charts.
Read full Review
Fancy a historical fiction novel? Here are some of our favourites.
The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet
If you read one book this year, let this be it
The Quincunx
Lose yourself in this epic historical novel
The Blue Flower
Historical fiction at it's best. A modern classic.
The Leopard
Sensual, sensuous and melancholic Italian classic
Review by Meg
Golden Hill
A brilliant debut novel about New York in its infancy
New York, a small frontier town on the tip of Manhattan Island, 1746. One rainy autumn night, a mysterious, handsome stranger, fresh off the long Atlantic crossing from England, turns up at a counting house on Golden Hill Street in Manhattan. The enigmatic young man has a suspicious yet compelling proposition. From his pocket, he produces what seems to be a promissory note for a thousand pounds that he wishes to cash. An enormous sum of money in 1746, this bill has the power to shake the whole local economy as well as the political establishment. And, amiable and charming though Smith is, he won’t explain who he is or where he comes from, let alone what he is planning to do in the colonies that requires so much money.
