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
This is a book that offers an intelligent fictionalised response to the refugee crisis by distilling the unimaginable scale and horror of a worldwide problem to the personal stories of a few people, played out in today’s Berlin. Full of generosity and humanity, it manages to be wide‐ranging and universal and yet astonishingly simple.
Meet Elias Rukla, teacher of Norwegian to a bunch of bored teenagers at Fagerborg Secondary School in Oslo. Elias is about to destroy 25 years of hard work and his reputation, publicly and humiliatingly, in front of the whole school. Why is Elias boiling over? Find out in this darkly funny, captivating deep dive into the psyche of a man who comes face to face with his entire existence.
It’s the 1960s, 19-year-old university student Paul is home on summer holiday. Bored and fed up of by his parents’ suburban conventionality Paul reluctantly goes along when his mum suggests he joins the tennis club to meet a ‘Caroline’. Instead, he meets Susan Macleod, 48-year-old unhappily married mum of two. A beautiful and harrowing love story ensues, one that will dominate the rest of Paul’s life. Julian Barnes fans will want to read The Only Story, if I were new to Barnes, though, I’m not sure this is where I would start.
Our unnamed narrator, the second wife of a successful Wall Street bond trader, is consumed with jealously for the first wife – ‘she’ – in this short novel, where the classic direction of jealousy is reversed. She is composed, blonde, tall and ‘lovely’, a talented musician with two exceptionally bright kids. ‘I’ is everything she’s not. A stirring portrayal of jealousy, emotional neglect and obsession, easily read in one sitting.
As many of you know, Facebook has changed their algorithms to feed you more posts from friends and less from advertising and businesses. That’s probably good news for most of you, but as Bookstoker is technically a ‘business’ in Facebook’s mind this means that you’ll see less of our posts. Not because we post less frequently, but simply because the posts are not fed into your account. If you ‘Like’ our posts Facebook will recognise this and feed you more of them. You can still follow us on Facebook, of course, but a more reliable way is Instagram and Twitter (best if you’re interested in our the articles we link to) or our newsletter (sign up in box below).
Hope to see you soon!
Astrid feels it is extremely important to sing when you’re skiing. Also a fearless ‘sledge pilot,’ Astrid spends many happy hours whizzing gleefully through her home valley of Glimmerdal. But her exuberance masks a brow-furrowing problem. There are no children to play with! Not only that, she lives unfortunately close to the ‘quietest holiday camp in Norway,’ run by an irascible gentleman who despises noisy children. What is the ‘little thunderbolt of Glimmerdal’ to do? Astrid the Unstoppable is Maria Parr’s second novel, and the 2009 winner of several prestigious prizes in her home country of Norway. Finally translated into English, it’s a must-read for fans of feisty girl adventurers.
Ever heard about the App Blinkist? I hadn’t until a friend excitedly told me about it the other day. Blinkist is an App which condenses books into 15-20 minute reads, basically Cliff Notes for adults, only it’s exclusively non-fiction (thank God!). I gave it a try and I’ve now ‘read’ Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth, a book I’ve been curious about for a while. Except I don’t feel I’ve really read it, I only know the definition of ‘the beauty myth’ and have learnt that we women should try to be friends not competitors….it took me 19 minutes.
Some books just scream out for sequels. None more so than Henry James’s 19th century classic The Portrait of Lady which ends with heroine Isabel Archer facing the choice between going back to her adulterous, deceiving husband or scandalising society by leaving him. Brave is the author who picks up James’s pen and continues his masterpiece, but John Banville does it and, somehow, manages to pull it off.
The teenage Pearl and her artistic mother Mia move into a rented house owned by a wealthy family in a smarter area of the same Ohio neighbourhood. The lives of both families become entwined in healthy and not‐so‐healthy ways in a deceptively simple tale about motherhood, belonging, responsibility, and standing up for what you believe in.
Accompanying me over Christmas were three glorious women all of whom, at different points, called a grand palazzo in Venice their home. An eccentric, reclusive countess, a gold-digging seductress and an art-collecting heiress. The Unfinished Palazzo is a hugely entertaining biography which firmly sits in the ‘you-couldn’t-have-made-it-up’ category. If you’re looking to brighten up January, this will do!
