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
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Review by Julie
Anatomy of a Disappearance
Quietly moving on a brutal kidnapping
Nuri is 14 when his father disappears under mysterious circumstances. Abdu, an ex-minister in an unnamed country’s government and a confidant to the fallen King, is kidnapped from his mistress’ flat, never to be seen again. Nuri is left with no family except young step-mother Mona, whom Nuri has a crush on, and more questions than answers. Anatomy of a Disappearance by Hisham Matar is a beautiful and quietly brutal coming-of-age story, dealing with loss and father-son relationships.
Review by Kirstin
Dead-End Stories
Short stories to gladden the heart
An offbeat and lovely addition to the world of short story collections, Dead-End Stories by Banana Yoshimoto is, in essence, a tribute to hope, light, and resilience. The women in each of her five stories experience episodes of emotional pain or trauma, from the extremes of abuse and murder, to the heartbreak inflicted by an inconstant lover. In Yoshimoto’s tender hands, ultimately these events will not be allowed to warp and embitter, as each character is set on a path towards acknowledgement of life’s random cruelties and a final blessing of solace and clarity.
Review by Kirstin
Entangled Life
A fungus for every occasion
If thoughts about fungi ever flit through your mind, chances are it’s in reference to last night’s truffle risotto dinner, or perhaps, less fortunately, a bout of Athlete’s Foot or spreading spores on your bathroom ceiling. The splendid Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake is here to bedazzle your uninformed brain, as both a scientific exploration and all-round appreciation of fungi as ‘regenerators, recyclers, and networkers that stitch worlds together’. From medicinal aides to mind-controlling zombie types, there’s a fungus for every occasion; they are sophisticated, problem-solving survivors and our world would collapse without them.
Review by Julie
Long Island Compromise
Screamingly funny satire on wealth and privilege
When Carl Fletcher, styrofoam factory owner and one of Long Island’s richer residents, is kidnapped from his driveway one morning, life changes forever for the Fletcher family. Carl is returned unhurt, at least physically, in exchange for a large pile of cash placed on a baggage carousel at La Guardia airport, but the kidnapping still reverberates decades later. His three children have turned out deeply dysfunctional, each in their own way. Long Island Compromise by Taffy Brodesser-Akner is an extremely funny satire and deep dive into privilege, Jewish identity and a spot-on comment on how we live now.
Review by Kirstin
Held
What will survive of us
A poetic gem on this year’s pleasingly eclectic Booker Prize Longlist, Held by Anne Michaels explores the many ways that the dead walk alongside us. Spanning time and space, her haunting and humane novel portrays four generations of one family and how their choices, traumas, and loves resonate through decades, if not centuries. From a World War I soldier hovering between life and death on the battlefield, to his granddaughter’s career as a war medic and her own bequeathal, Michaels threads their lives together in a meditation on mortality and inherited history.
Review by Kirstin
Brian
Herzog, Truffaut, and Brian from Kentish Town
We’re big fans of London publisher, Fitzcarraldo Editions, and their championing of innovative and enduring fiction, enfolded in elegant Yves Klein Blue covers. Brian by Jeremy Cooper is the third of his works they’ve launched into the world, and a novel of rich interiority. It chronicles several decades of the sedate life of Brian, loner, Camden Council employee, and cinephile. Carrying past trauma and a lifelong sense of being different, in Cooper’s inspired melding of bittersweet fiction and film criticism, Brian is set to find solace and belonging at the British Film Institute on London’s South Bank.
Review by Kirstin
Death in Spring
Cryptic Catalan tale of tyranny and submission
In an isolated village in the Catalan mountains, an adolescent boy goes for a dip in the local river, swimming downstream to the nearby forest. Here, in the leafy half-light, amidst an ominous clustering of butterflies and bees, he witnesses his father carve open a tree and fold himself into it, in anticipation of certain death. A highlight of the marvellous Penguin European Writers collection, Death in Spring by Mercè Rodoreda is a bildungsroman unlike any other, a surreal tale of oppression, ritual and exile, with a nod to the darkest folklore.
Review by Julie
Broken Threads
An illuminating and compulsive read
I confess to being a complete ignoramus on the history of the partition of India. Luckily, the brilliant Broken Threads by Mishal Husain has come along to change that. Husain – fiercely intelligent BBC Radio 4 news presenter, feared by British politicians for her razor-sharp interviews – has written the memoirs of her grandparents and parents. In Broken Threads, she weaves together the political and the personal to create an insightful and moving account of their lives as well as India and Pakistan’s fraught shared history.
News by Julie
Top Ten Summer Classics
Is there anything better than a summery read to get you into a sunny mood? Or a summery novel to read on your holiday? To get you into the spirit, we have chosen our top ten summer classics.
