Search Results for: the friend

The Friend by Sigrid Nunez

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The Friend

Lyrical on mourning and dogs

A female English professor and writer loses her best friend and sometimes lover to suicide. A few days later she’s asked to take over the care of his dog, an enormous Great Dane. No small ask as the writer lives in a tiny flat in a Manhattan building where dogs are prohibited. This is the plot of the otherwise plotless but strangely mesmerising The Friend by Sigrid Nunez, a story about love, loss and being an artist, which, had my flight not been over, I would have read in one sitting.

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Friend edited by Kate Clanchy

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Friend

Teen/Young Adult

An inspiration for the budding poets in your life

A breath of fresh verse-laden air, Friend edited by Kate Clanchy is a collection of poetry by schoolchildren from a multicultural secondary school in Oxford. At once everyday and exceptional, the poems run the gamut of childhood experience, and as Clanchy notes, gives our families ‘a long cool stare’. Incredibly, the youngest poet is only 11 years old, tentatively dipping a toe into secondary school life, the eldest is of university age. Already so wise, their accumulated stories and love of language will bring a lump to your throat.

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My Brilliant Friend

A vibrant and violent coming-of-age story from a mysterious author

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.

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Christmas 2024

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Our Favourite Books of 2024

2024 has been a good pretty good year for books. We’ve enjoyed a few blockbusters and some experimental fiction, fallen in love with a couple of short-story collections, been educated by non-fiction and travelled back to our younger selves while searching for our favourite children’s books.  We’ve pulled out our top reads and hope this will inspire you to spread the joy. You’ll find the full review by clicking on the titles. Happy reading and Merry Christmas!

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James by Percival Everett

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James

The other side of Huckleberry Finn's adventure

Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn is a classic in American juvenile fiction. Set in 1880s Missouri, it’s the story of the friendship between a young white boy and a black slave, both on the run, from a violent father and a slave owner. Much loved for its portrayal of youthful adventure, Huckleberry Finn, packed with racial stereotypes and the N-word, makes for uncomfortable reading today. In James by Percival Everett, we get the story from the black man’s perspective, and it’s far cry from the charming adventure story so many readers have come to love.

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Murder on a School Night by Kate Weston

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Murder on a School Night

Teen/Young Adult

Hilarious girl-powered whodunnit

Miss Marple once reflected that ‘One does see so much evil in a village’. But even the famously unflappable sleuth would surely have raised an eyebrow at the goings on in the usually somnolent village of Barbourough. Here, teenage friends and Agatha Christie fans, Kerry and Annie, are called upon to investigate a diabolical murder, after their frankly unpleasant classmate, Selena, becomes possibly the only person in history to have been suffocated with a menstrual cup. A laugh-out-loud girl-powered whodunnit awaits in Murder on a School Night by Kate Weston.

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Brutes by Dizz Tate

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Brutes

One for the Netflix hit list

Aptly described as ‘Lynchian’, Brutes by Dizz Tate is a slice of dark-hearted, small-town Americana, centring on a brood of intense and voyeuristic teenagers. At the heart of the novel’s unfolding events in Falls Landing, Florida, their all-seeing eyes note fellow residents every move, in particular their girl-crush, Sammy, the kooky daughter of a local preacher. When Sammy suddenly goes missing, the friends follow the search proceedings with binoculars from their bedroom windows, their gaze torn between ‘the blue streaks of sirens,’ and the silent, still lake beyond. The monsters of Falls Landing are about to surface in Tate’s deliciously febrile debut novel.

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Christmas 2022

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Best Books for Christmas 2022

Here we go again! Christmas 2022 is nearly here. In a year when we all have had to tighten our pursestrings, I can’t think of a better present than a book. It’s relatively cheap, give hours and hours of pleasure (sometimes even years), can be shared and is plastic-free – what more can you ask for? 2022 has been a year of new discoveries for us. Most of the books on our list are by authors we hadn’t heard of before or debutants. We have also dug in the pile of classics – some of which we had read before and wanted to re-experience, others that were new to us. Neither have disappointed. We also have a range of children’s books suitable for different age groups and tastes and there’s loads more in our Young Readers section. So here it is, the list of Bookstoker’s best reads this year. Wishing you all a happy holiday season!

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Concrete Rose by Angie Thomas

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Concrete Rose

Teen/Young Adult

Astute and impassioned prequel to The Hate U Give

Concrete Rose by Angie Thomas is the third novel from this brilliant chronicler of young, urban black experience. Having previously tackled institutional racism and stereotyping, here she turns her gimlet eye on the complexities of black manhood. In this prequel to her outstanding debut novel, The Hate U Give, Thomas presents us with a morally conflicted young man named Mav. Firmly entrenched in gang life, an unexpectedly early fatherhood shocks the 17-year-old into reconsidering life’s priorities. Maybe it’s time for this self-confessed ‘drug-dealing, gangbanging, high-school flunk out’ to go straight.

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Lobster Life by Erik Fosnes Hansen

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Lobster Life

All work and no play make Sedd a dull boy

Not all books are blessed with a brilliant opening line, but Lobster Life by Erik Fosnes Hansen certainly is. His first novel in ten years kicks off with the offhand remark: ‘They had got as far as the cakes when Herr Berge, the bank manager, suddenly slumped down at the table and started to die.’ They turn out to be the young boy Sedgwick and his grandparents, and although Fosnes Hansen’s wit is not as tinkling throughout as it is in that shiny first sentence, Sedgwick’s story turns out highly amusing nonetheless.

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