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
There’s an avalanche of new exciting books coming our way over the next few months, many by authors we haven’t heard from in a while and one from an author we haven’t heard from in half a decade!
It’s hard to recommend classics to your teenage children without running the risk of turning them off forever (just the fact that it’s coming from you might be enough…). The Guardian has a clever answer: a list based on the ‘If you liked…’ principle. Well worth a look.
The Well-Read Teenager by The Guardian
I cannot recommend this Spanish classic highly enough. The House of Ulloa is funny, clever, progressive and colourful, written by the feisty and daring Emilia Prado Bazán in 1886 and, luckily, reissued in English recently. We meet the gentle, devout chaplain Julián who’s been asked by Don Manuel, a prominent noble, to clean up the sinful House of Ulloa, the country estate of his unruly nephew, Don Pedro. This hilarious meeting of polar opposites takes place amidst magnificently described Galician landscapes and decrepit aristocratic homes.
I’m not sure how I’m going to convince you to read this book. Most of you will, understandably, want to look the other way. There are details about dying in Being Mortal by Atul Gawande that will make you shudder and stories about elderly people’s lives that will make you want to cry. But, for me, this book was an eye-opener and surprisingly reassuring, despite it’s grim subject matter. Gawande is an Indian/American surgeon, health-care researcher, a Harvard professor, author, journalist, in short: a brilliant man whose books on health care issues regularly climb to the top of non-fiction bestseller lists.
The Guardian has made a very good list of children’s books that promote tolerance. Authors range from Malala and Amnesty International’s collection of short stories to Michael Morpurgo and Benjamin Zephaniah and there is something for every age range.
The Guardian – Books to breed tolerance: what children can read after the terrorist attacks in Paris
I’m a huge admirer of James Wood, the New Yorker’s book critic and one of the English speaking world’s most influential reviewers. His thoughtful and intelligent reviews never disappoint. Here are his top picks from 2014.
What better way to kick off 2015 than with an excellent book by a mysterious writer? Italian author Elena Ferrante, whose real identity nobody knows, creates a perfect microcosm of childhood and adolescence in her book My Brilliant Friend, the first in a quartet. It’s a vibrant and violent coming-of-age story and a portrait of an intense friendship between two girls.
