Having finished my re-read of Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake, the rest of this lovely August afternoon is reserved for other reading. Next weekend, another One Weekend, One Book: I'll be re-reading The Year of the Flood. (Oh, these are so good. Actually, good the first time, and great the
It began when I was a girl, with books like Jean Webster's Daddy Long Legs and Norma Fox Mazer's I, Trissy. These stories invited me directly into characters' private thoughts, via letters written to a trusted recipient and journal entries written for the writer's own eyes. Trans. Katharina Bielenberg
The previous volumes in the Ava Lee series sketched her character as slightly as the silhouette in the striking cover designs* but The Red Pole of Macau takes Ava into new emotional territory; it is a worthy addition to the series and has reignited my interest in this character's adventures.
A cult figure. A "genuine anti-hero; an impossible character yet impossible not to like". Random House Canada, 2012Trans. Don Bartlett That's how the author's site describes Harry Hole, who is at the heart of Jo Nesbø's popular series. 'Hole' is pronounced Hoo-leh, by the way, although the Australians in
Sixteen-year-old "Mouse" Bradford feels like a monster, with her companion, Alice, her humpback. How fitting, then, that there are bars on the windows of Bath Ladies' College, the boarding school to which she is sent in late 1963. "My God! It looks like a prison," her father says, driving up
