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
A clever imagining of a world in which women (literally) have the power, this Baileys-shortlisted novel blends science fiction with dystopian global politics. Think The Hunger Games meets late Jeanette Winterson with a dash of Malory Blackman, this is a book your teenage daughter will love.
Great choice for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 2017! Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad was one of my favourite new books last year. An American slave story written with imagination and originality. Read the full review here.
Yejide and Akin fall head over heals in love when they meet at university in Ife, Nigeria in the 1980s. Marriage follows soon thereafter as should babies, but none arrive. The humiliation of childlessness (particularly strong in Nigeria) propels Yejide, Akin and the tenacious mother-in-law to go to extreme lengths to fix it, jeopardising their mental health and relationship on the way. I was gripped by 26-year-old Adébáyò’s storytelling, despite her sometimes uneven writing. An easy, accessible novel that should garner many fans.
Michael Rosen’s Sad Book is an understated masterpiece. It takes a look at an aspect of our children’s lives we sometimes overlook, their capacity to deal with heartache. Michael Rosen’s son Eddie, was only 18 when he died. The author’s grief and loss is woven into this exploration of one of our less discussed emotions.
Marking the Bard’s birthday this April, is a new edition of Geraldine McCaughrean’s sparkling re-telling of ten of his best known plays. The aim is to engage younger readers by sloughing off the drier elements of the text, and letting the stories shine through.
Read full Review
Just announced as Waterstone’s Older Fiction category winner 2017, Orangeboy is a maximum impact read. It tells the story of 16-year-old Marlon, who gets sucked into a teen gang vortex of drugs, violence, and ultimately, a dicing with death. Is he strong enough to stand firm against the gangstas who would crush him and those he loves?
Books are piling up next to my suitcase as the Easter holiday approaches. My ever ambitious holiday reading plans rarely match reality but, hey, as long as I have space in my suitcase…
The historian Simon Sebag Montefiore is well known and highly respected for his award-winning non-fiction bestsellers such as Jerusalem, The Romanovs and Stalin. However, this gripping historical novel also proves his expertise as a writer of fiction. A quicker, slimmer read than many of his other works, it is just as involving and darkly exciting.
Hisham Matar’s (author of The Return and In The Country of Men) article in The New York Times perfectly encapsulates why I love reading. I think he’s spot on when he says: ‘the most magical moments in reading occur not when I encounter something unknown but when I happen upon myself, when I read a sentence that perfectly describes something I have known or felt all along […] And the more foreign the setting, the more poignant the event seems. For a strange thing occurs then: A distance widens and then it is crossed.’ A great article.
