Beth's Books (and other bits and bobs)
Feel free to judge this book by its cover, it does what it says on the tin
Bookended by two New Year’s Eve parties Ordinary People explores the coming and going and nature of love in a small, apparently unshakeable family. Melissa and Michael move into their new house with their new baby and young daughter. During the course of the year they each struggle to come to terms with the shape …
In a final attempt to cure her mother of her apparent, undiagnosed illness, Sophia moves to Almeria to enlist the help of Doctor Gomez. Once there she learns as much about her mother as about herself. An anthropology student, Sophia turns the small cast of characters into a study. The novel is plagued with searing …
Roy and Celestial are happily(ish) married for a year and a half. Suddenly everything falls apart, how they handle the fallout will come to define who they are as individuals and as a couple. Author: Tayari Jones Title: An American Marriage Press: One World Rating: 8 This was truly beautiful. It’s part prose part epistolary …
Four siblings in New York visit a gypsy woman in her filthy apartment and learn the dates of their deaths. What they hear will change the courses of each of their lives whether they think they believe or not. None of them were prepared for the information they receive. Title: The Immortalists Author: Chloe Benjamin …
Myriam and Paul cannot believe their luck. They’ve found the perfect nanny, their children love her and they cannot imagine their lives without her. But, she will murder them before attempting to kill herself. Author: Leila Slimani Title: Lullaby Press: Faber and Faber Rating: 7 Set in Paris and laced with racial tensions and domestic …
If you don’t already know the premise of This is Going to Hurt then you’re living under an even bigger, darker, more impenetrable rock than I am (or you don’t live in the UK as I assume this has not crossed beyond the borders of our wonderful NHS). Simply it is one junior doctors account …
Jasper understands the world around him by colours and sounds, he cannot recognise faces and he is doesn’t understand why people talk in confusing double meanings and jokes. When Bee Larkham moves in across the street he LOVES her colour. But, no one else seems to agree. When she disappears no one will listen to …
Continue reading "Sarah J Harris: The Colour of Bee Larkham’s Murder"
I was fortunate to pick up a proof from the Bloomsbury stand at London Book Fair in April. Cannot wait to see how it does when it is released in August. Robert Appleyard leaves his northern mining village to walk through the countryside in search of nothing in particular. He sleeps in fields and works …
Edie has left school at fourteen because her father needs her help on the farm. The area is short on men since the end of the war and the depression is beginning to take hold. That summer Edie is missing her sister and finding herself when a tall, intelligent stranger Constance appears. She is kind …
Professor Andrew Griffiths has just made a grand mathematical discovery (far beyond anything I could even begin to understand) but he has also been replaced by an alien. An alien whose mission is to destroy the evidence and to ‘take out’ any other humans Andrew has told of his discovery. This ‘alien’ is confused and …
Beth's Books (and other bits and bobs) 