en-US Sun, 06 Apr 2025 08:32:36 -0700 60 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg 49562393
In addition to clear route description and mapping, you'll find a wealth of practical advice covering accommodation and facilities, equipment and resupply and detailed notes on how to get to and from the section start and finish-points. A Swedish and Fell Sámi glossary can be found in the appendix. Although there are plentiful opportunities for wild camping, three of the five trail sections are equipped with huts (many including a shop and a sauna) making them easily accessible to all. The remaining two sections have a more remote feel that will appeal to those intent on finding some solitude. To add further colour, there are seven mandatory lake crossings on the trail with the option of rowing or using the motorised service: full details are provided in the text.

The Kungsleden passes through five national parks, including Sarek. Other highlights include the striking Tjäktjavagge glacial valley and the famous hay meadows of Aktse, perfectly framed by the azure Lájtávrre delta and the sheer chiselled face of Skierrffe. The Kungsleden invites you to step into a new world, and it may well prove to be the start of a long and rich association involving many repeated visits.]]> 272 Mike Laing 1783627808 Chris 0 currently-reading 4.67
author: Mike Laing
name: Chris
average rating: 4.67
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/06
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> 219548785 A stunning, darkly comic and deeply moving debut novel following a teenage boy as he comes of age on the west coast of Ireland, from the author of the acclaimed short story collection Pure Gold.

Seventeen-year-old John Masterson has no idea what he wants. It’s his last summer on the small island where he has grown up and he should be enjoying the weeks until his exam results come through. Instead, he’s working mind-numbing shifts at the local hotel and trying to keep his head down after his mother’s nude sext to another man was leaked to the whole island.

As John joins the local senior football team, gets caught up in fights and parties, and embarks on a tentative relationship with his slightly older co-worker Amber that he feels both proud and ashamed of, he can almost pretend that this summer will last forever. But soon John must face up to the choices before to stay or leave, to stand out or fit in, and whether to love and let himself be loved, despite or perhaps because of, the flaws that make us all human.

Fun and Games is a darkly comic, beautifully crafted debut novel that is full of feeling both harsh and tender. It takes in social class and its firm borders, manhood and its frailties, family and, of course, love.]]> John Patrick McHugh 0008517363 Chris 0 currently-reading 4.00
author: John Patrick McHugh
name: Chris
average rating: 4.00
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/04
shelves: currently-reading
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]]> 20613619
She showed me ways of using these simple things �� our hands, a pen, and some paper �� as both a navigation and expedition device, one that could reliably carry me into my past, deeper into my present, or farther into a place I have come to call "the image world" �� a place we all know, even if we don't notice this knowing until someone reminds us of its ever-present existence.

I wasn't quite 20 years old when I started my first notebook. I had no idea that nearly 40 years later, I would not only still be using it as the most reliable route to the thing I've come to call my work, but I'd also be showing others how to use it too, as a place to practice a physical activity �� in this case writing and drawing by hand �� with a certain state of mind.

This practice can result in what I've come to consider a wonderful side effect: a visual or written image we can call 'a work of art,' although a work of art is not what I'm after when I'm practicing this activity.

What am I after? I'm after what Marilyn Frasca called "being present and seeing what's there."

This book is a collection of bits and pieces from the many notebooks I kept during my first three years of trying to figure out how to teach this practice to my students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison."]]> 200 Lynda Barry 1770461612 Chris 0 currently-reading 4.39 2014
author: Lynda Barry
name: Chris
average rating: 4.39
book published: 2014
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/04
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> 221476456
But as Sara arrives to be monitored alongside other dangerous dreamers, she discovers that with every deviation from the facility's strict and ever-shifting rules, their stays can be extended �� and that getting home to her family is going to cost much more than just three weeks of good behaviour . . .

The Dream Hotel is a gripping speculative mystery about the seductive dangers of the technologies that are supposed to make our lives easier. As terrifying as it is inventive, it explores how well we can ever truly know those around us �� even with the most invasive surveillance systems in place.]]> 333 Laila Lalami 1526687186 Chris 3 Thank you Bloomsbury and Netgalley UK for the ARC.]]> 3.63 2025
author: Laila Lalami
name: Chris
average rating: 3.63
book published: 2025
rating: 3
read at: 2025/04/03
date added: 2025/04/03
shelves:
review:
Lalami knows how to tell a story and how to get the reader invested in the characters. There were a lot of interesting ideas and I enjoyed reading it but the ending felt a bit forced, and there are dystopian books that have felt more exceptional to me.
Thank you Bloomsbury and Netgalley UK for the ARC.
]]> 217245618
In the wake of a catastrophic storm, Cora sets off with her nine-year-old daughter, Maia, to register her son's birth. Her husband, Gordon, a local doctor, respected in the community but a terrifying and controlling presence at home, intends for her to name the infant after him. But when the registrar asks what she'd like to call the child, Cora hesitates...

Spanning thirty-five years, what follows are three alternate and alternating versions of Cora's and her young son's lives, shaped by her choice of name. In richly layered prose, The Names explores the painful ripple effects of domestic abuse, the messy ties of family, and the possibilities of autonomy and healing.

With exceptional sensitivity and depth, Knapp draws us into the story of one family, told through a prism of what-ifs, causing us to consider the "one . . . precious life" we are given. The book’s brilliantly imaginative structure, propulsive storytelling, and emotional, gut-wrenching power are certain to make The Names a modern classic.]]> 336 Florence Knapp 0593833902 Chris 0 to-read 4.34 2025
author: Florence Knapp
name: Chris
average rating: 4.34
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/02
shelves: to-read
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]]> 219343464 Slag. Noun. A promiscuous woman, of cheap or questionable character. Mostly derogatory. Sometimes affectionate.

Takes one to know one��

Sisters Sarah and Juliette are going on a whisky-fuelled campervan road-trip across Scotland to celebrate Juliette’s birthday �� and they’re going to dig up some demons from the past.

Sarah is 15.

SEXUAL 2.5 (one only went halfway in)

GREAT 1 (her English teacher Mr Keaveney, who definitely feels the same way)

Her annoying younger sister Juliette

Her best friend Nessa, boy band 4Princes

Sarah is 41.

SEXUAL Rather not say, but that last one was compellingly awful

GREAT Nope

Millennials like Juliette thinking they’ve got it bad

Fellow Gen X-ers

From the acclaimed author of ANIMALS and ADULTS, SLAGS is a no-holds-barred, frank and heartfelt exploration of sisterhood, friendship and teenage obsession.]]> 288 Emma Jane Unsworth 0008347239 Chris 0 to-read 3.63 2025
author: Emma Jane Unsworth
name: Chris
average rating: 3.63
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/02
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 230300469 “Lily King is one of our great literary treasures.”—Madeline Miller

From the New York Times bestselling author of Writers & Lovers comes an intimate and sweeping new novel of love and friendship—a journey into the heart of youth and middle age, desire and loss, and the intricate bonds that shape our lives

Our bright narrator is a college senior quietly dreaming of becoming a writer when she meets Sam and Yash, best friends and the golden boys of the English Department. Top-of-the-class Honors students, they live at the stately home of a favorite professor on sabbatical and can banter about Joyce and Fitzgerald like a game of rapid-fire tennis. The two nickname her Jordan and invite her into their magnetic world where her college experience is forever altered. As graduation approaches, the lines between love and friendship blur, and Jordan finds herself caught in a life-changing triangle.

Decades later, her writing career is thriving, but motherhood is full of challenges. When she receives unexpected news that brings the past crashing into the present, Jordan returns to a world she thought she left behind. Written with the superb wit and emotional sensitivity fans and critics have come to adore, King explores a tangled lattice of friendship, love, family and uncertainty that celebrates how we love, who we love, and all the complexity a single heart can hold.]]> 288 Lily King 1443477303 Chris 0 to-read 0.0
author: Lily King
name: Chris
average rating: 0.0
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/02
shelves: to-read
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]]> 220647455
His university-bound daughter, Evangeline, wants to change the world but perhaps not at the cost of her own privileged life. His son, Emil, good at maths and not much else, becomes more distant than ever. And his wife, Yara, just wants the doctor to run another brain scan on her husband.]]> Ben Brooks 1398542237 Chris 0 to-read 3.20 2025
author: Ben Brooks
name: Chris
average rating: 3.20
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/02
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 212303241
Strewn with devastating honesty, sparkling humour and steel-sharp wit, these expertly arranged volumes offer a window into the life and work of one of Australia's greatest living writers.

Helen Garner's Collected Diaries span twenty years, with the first volume beginning in the late 1970s just after the publication of her debut novel Monkey Grip. The second volume begins in 1987 as she embarks on an affair that she knows will be all-consuming, and the final volume in 1995, as she fights to hold on to a marriage that is disintegrating around her.

Shockingly relatable and forensically observed, these diaries reveal the inner life of a woman in love and a great writer at work. In doing so, they uncover the messy, painful, dark side of love, the sheer force of a woman's anger, the immutable ties of motherhood and the regenerative power of a room of one's own.]]> 809 Helen Garner 1399606751 Chris 0 to-read 5.00
author: Helen Garner
name: Chris
average rating: 5.00
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/02
shelves: to-read
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]]> 223528300
Their life of idyllic isolation is shattered by the arrival of an outsider with a frightening close at hand, across the border, violence is looming. Hidden in a tiny memory card, Kit unwittingly holds evidence of the world-shattering event that is unfolding, the desperate power-play of a flailing Superpower.

Separated from Lara, with war erupting around them, Helen and Kit are forced to flee through the forest with a band of local children, pursued by a ruthless and determined army. Caught between the struggle of rival powers, Kit must keep his baby daughter alive while protecting the secret that his pursuers will kill to get their hands on.

In The Green Heart is the gripping story of the human cost of individual resistance to the forces of state power. It is a political thriller in the tradition of Joseph Conrad and Graham Greene and a heartbreaking tale of fatherly love.]]> Richard Lloyd Parry 1529929733 Chris 0 to-read 0.0
author: Richard Lloyd Parry
name: Chris
average rating: 0.0
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/31
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 222828632 From a dazzling new international voice, an audacious, darkly funny novel about a young woman whose carefully crafted office persona threatens to crack when she’s forced to attend her company’s annual retreat

On the surface, Marisa's life looks enviable. She lives in a beautiful apartment in the center of Madrid, she has a hot neighbor who is always around to sleep with her, and she’s quickly risen through the ranks at a successful advertising agency. And yet she’s drowning in a dark hole of existential dread induced by the banality of corporate life. Marisa hates her job and everyone at it. She spends her working hours locked in her office hiding from her coworkers, bingeing YouTube videos, and getting high on tranquilizers. When she has the time, she escapes to her favorite museum where she contemplates the meaning of life while staring at Hieronymus Bosch paintings, or trying to get hit by a car so she can go on disability.

But Marisa's dubious success, which is largely built on lies and work she's stolen from other people, is in danger of being exposed when she's forced to go on her company’s team-building retreat. Isolated in the Segovia forests, haunted by the deeply buried memory of a former coworker, and surrounded by psychopathic bosses, overzealous coworkers,��flirty retreat staff, and an excess of drugs, Marisa finds herself acting on her wildest impulses and is pushed to the brink of a complete spiral.]]> Beatriz Serrano Chris 0 to-read 3.80 2023
author: Beatriz Serrano
name: Chris
average rating: 3.80
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/31
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 222043238 Dusk is a sublime novel of loss and redemption, fight and surrender, that left me in absolute awe. Robbie Arnott's prose is incandescent, his storytelling mythic and filled with a wisdom that extends beyond the page. With Dusk, he asserts himself as one of Australia's finest literary writers'
Hannah Kent, author of BURIAL RITES]]> 224 Robbie Arnott 1784745987 Chris 0 to-read 5.00 2024
author: Robbie Arnott
name: Chris
average rating: 5.00
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/31
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 226921275 'Michelle de Kretser is a genius - one of the best writers working today. She is startlingly, uncannily good at naming and facing what is most difficult and precious about our lives. Theory & Practice is a wonder' V.V. Ganeshananthan, Women's Prize-winning author of Brotherless Night

' Theory & Practice blazes with intelligence, passion and wit. I devoured it, greedily, in a single glorious sitting' Sarah Waters

It's 1986, and 'beautiful, radical ideas' are in the air. A young woman arrives in Melbourne to research the novels of Virginia Woolf. In bohemian St Kilda, she meets artists, activists, students - and Kit. He claims to be in a 'deconstructed' relationship, and they become lovers. Meanwhile, a dismaying discovery throws her work on 'the Woolfmother' into disarray.

Theory & Practice is a mesmerising account of desire and jealousy, truth and shame. It makes and unmakes fiction, expanding our notion of what a novel can contain. Michelle de Kretser, one of Australia's most celebrated writers, bends fiction, essay and memoir into exhilarating new shapes to uncover what happens when life smashes through the boundaries of art.]]> Michelle de Kretser Chris 4 4.00 2024
author: Michelle de Kretser
name: Chris
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/25
date added: 2025/03/25
shelves:
review:

]]> 218553007 From internationally bestselling author John Boyne, a contemplative story about one man trying to move forward from the trauma of his youth to become a better father to his son.

Being in limbo, 30,000 feet in the air, offers time to reflect and take stock. For Aaron Umber, it’s an opportunity to connect with his 15-year-old son as they travel halfway across the world to meet a woman who isn’t expecting them.

Unsettled by his past, and anxious for his future, Aaron is at a crossroads in life. The damage inflicted upon him during his youth has made him the man he is, but now threatens to widen the growing fissures between him and his only child. This trip could bind them closer together, or tear them further apart.

In this penetrating examination of action and consequence, fault and attribution, acceptance and resolution, John Boyne gives us a redemptive story of a father and a son on a moving journey to mend their troubled lives.]]> 176 John Boyne 0857529854 Chris 5 4.32 2025
author: John Boyne
name: Chris
average rating: 4.32
book published: 2025
rating: 5
read at: 2025/03/22
date added: 2025/03/22
shelves:
review:
An absolutely wonderful conclusion to the Elements series. Thank you Penguin Random House UK for the ARC
]]> 203047409 Heartwood takes you on a gripping journey as a search and rescue team race against time when an experienced hiker mysteriously disappears on the Appalachian Trail in Maine.

In the heart of the Maine woods, an experienced Appalachian Trail hiker goes missing. She is forty-two-year-old Valerie Gillis, who has vanished 200 miles from her final destination. Alone in the wilderness, Valerie pours her thoughts into fractured, poetic letters to her mother as she battles the elements and struggles to keep hoping.

At the heart of the investigation is Beverly, the determined Maine State Game Warden tasked with finding Valerie, who leads the search on the ground. Meanwhile, Lena, a seventy-six-year-old birdwatcher in a Connecticut retirement community, becomes an unexpected armchair detective. Roving between these compelling narratives, a puzzle emerges, intensifying the frantic search, as Valerie’s disappearance may not be accidental.

Heartwood is a “gem of a thousand facets—suspenseful, transporting, tender, and ultimately soul-mending,�� (Megan Majumdar, New York Times bestselling author of A Burning) that tells the story of a lost hiker’s odyssey and is a moving rendering of each character’s interior journey. The mystery inspires larger questions about the many ways in which we get lost, and how we are found. At its core, Heartwood is a redemptive novel, written with both enormous literary ambition and love.]]> Amity Gaige Chris 3 Thank you Simon & Schuster US and Edelweiss for the ARC.]]> 3.76 2025
author: Amity Gaige
name: Chris
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2025
rating: 3
read at: 2025/03/21
date added: 2025/03/21
shelves:
review:
‘Heartwood�� is a literary suspense novel told from various point of views. I love books about hiking and the wilderness, so plotwise this was right up my alley. The continuous switching back and forth of the POV’s didn’t always work for me though, as it occasionally took the flow out of the story and sometimes I just wanted to stay a bit longer with a character. Still, this was an engaging and fast read.
Thank you Simon & Schuster US and Edelweiss for the ARC.
]]> 217516420
When the Cranes Fly South is a profoundly moving debut about an ageing man’s fight to keep the power over his own life.]]> Lisa Ridzén 1529942225 Chris 0 to-read 4.69 2024
author: Lisa Ridzén
name: Chris
average rating: 4.69
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/19
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 216638889 One woman, the performance of a lifetime. Or two. An exhilarating, destabilising novel that asks whether we ever really know the people we love

Two people meet for lunch in a Manhattan restaurant. She’s an accomplished actress in rehearsals for an upcoming premiere. He’s attractive, troubling, young �� young enough to be her son. Who is he to her, and who is she to him? In this compulsively readable, brilliantly constructed novel, two competing narratives unspool, rewriting our understanding of the roles we play every day �� partner, parent, creator, muse �� and the truths every performance masks, especially from those who think they know us most intimately.

Taut and hypnotic, Audition is Katie Kitamura at her virtuosic best.]]> 208 Katie Kitamura 1529937280 Chris 5 But what exactly is happening? Are there two versions of a life being told? Is there a play being enacted? Is the narrator at all reliable? It doesn’t seem to matter as it’s more about the almost hypnotic reading experience that draws you in. Highly recommended.
Thank you Penguin Random House UK and Netgalley UK for the ARC]]> 4.00 2025
author: Katie Kitamura
name: Chris
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2025
rating: 5
read at: 2025/03/18
date added: 2025/03/18
shelves:
review:
I’m full of admiration and awe of the way Kitamura describes how people think and feel. It’s so precise and feels so right. I loved every sentence in this brilliant novel about truth, subjectivity, identity, and role playing.
But what exactly is happening? Are there two versions of a life being told? Is there a play being enacted? Is the narrator at all reliable? It doesn’t seem to matter as it’s more about the almost hypnotic reading experience that draws you in. Highly recommended.
Thank you Penguin Random House UK and Netgalley UK for the ARC
]]> 223241593 A bold tour-de-force about violence and money, love and desire, and a stand-off with the Devil himself

A woman meets a man on a train in Copenhagen and agrees to visit him in London. While she sits out a two-week Covid quarantine in his apartment, she begins to tell her story. Years ago and desperate for money, she sold herself to a stranger called T. He offered her a suitcase full of money and lavish gifts in exchange for total control of her body. In the bed between them lay a large kitchen knife and the promise of an iconic death.

But at the last moment, she aborted the treacherous game and fled. Now in London, she reflects on the forces - financial and social - that led her to the brink of destruction, and wonders what it would take to believe in love again.

Frank, intimate and dazzling entertaining, The Devil Book is a classic girl-meets-boy-meets-devil story. Taking us from Copenhagen to London to the inside of a mental institution, as well as a fancy apartment block, this unmissable stand-alone novel is the follow up to the critically-acclaimed Money to Burn. ]]> Asta Olivia Nordenhof 1529934567 Chris 0 to-read 0.0 2023
author: Asta Olivia Nordenhof
name: Chris
average rating: 0.0
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/15
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 209194302 The following is an account of an afternoon in June in which we sallied forth and then for the most part back.

By we I mean the cousins who were a varied crew with the normal range of grubby characteristics and while we weren’t great, I’d like your sympathy because of our humanity and also what we’ve lost.]]> 180 Krystelle Bamford 1804951978 Chris 2 I absolutely love the cover of this short novel, I liked the idea of the story, but the writing rambles on and on and I just lost interest. This wasn’t for me I’m afraid.
Thank you Random House UK and Netgalley UK for the ARC.]]> 3.75 2025
author: Krystelle Bamford
name: Chris
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2025
rating: 2
read at: 2025/03/15
date added: 2025/03/15
shelves:
review:
DNF at 29%
I absolutely love the cover of this short novel, I liked the idea of the story, but the writing rambles on and on and I just lost interest. This wasn’t for me I’m afraid.
Thank you Random House UK and Netgalley UK for the ARC.
]]> 211124538
As the guests sip at their drinks and await the actress’s arrival, they are unaware that the narrator, from her vantage point in the corner seat of a white sofa, is silently and mercilessly eviscerating them and everything they stand for. And when the guest of honour finally does arrive, she sets in motion a catastrophic end to the evening, laying bare the hypocritical decadence of the hosts�� vacuous little lives.

Vicious, hilarious, propulsive, and at times unexpectedly tender, Happiness and Love is scintillating in its magnificent cruelty and its monstrous, absurd humanity too.]]> 0 Zoe Dubno 1529930170 Chris 0 to-read 5.00 2025
author: Zoe Dubno
name: Chris
average rating: 5.00
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/14
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 214269374 Remember—words are your weapons, they’re your tools, your currency: a twisty, slippery descent into the rhetoric of truth and power from a "powerful new voice in British Literature�� (The Sunday Times).

Late one night on a Yorkshire farm, in the midst of an illegal rave, a young man is nearly bludgeoned to death with a solid gold bar.

An ambitious young journalist sets out to uncover the truth surrounding the attack, connecting the dots between an amoral banker landlord, an iconoclastic columnist, and a radical anarchist movement that has taken up residence on the farm. She solves the mystery, but her viral exposé raises more questions than it answers, Who wrote it? Why? And how much of it is true? Through a voyeuristic lens, and with a simmering power, the book focuses in on what we say, how we say it, and what we really mean.

The thrilling novel from one of the most acclaimed and incisive young novelists working today, Universality is a compelling, unsettling celebration of the spectacular, appalling force of language. It dares you to look away.]]> 176 Natasha Brown 0593977300 Chris 4 Thank you Random House US and Edelweiss for the ARC.]]> 3.48 2025
author: Natasha Brown
name: Chris
average rating: 3.48
book published: 2025
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/14
date added: 2025/03/14
shelves:
review:
Another great novel by Natasha Brown. Even smarter than 'Assembly' , but very different in style and structure. A wonderful novel about class, privilege and capitalism.
Thank you Random House US and Edelweiss for the ARC.
]]> 217252316 Set over the course of one day, a heart-racing story about a woman facing the unimaginable, determined to find safety

Annie is nine months pregnant and shopping for a crib at IKEA when a massive earthquake hits Portland, Oregon. With no way to reach her husband, no phone or money, and a city left in chaos, she realizes there’s nothing to do but walk.

Making her way across the wreckage of Portland, Annie experiences human desperation and kindness: strangers offering help, a riot at a grocery store, and an unlikely friendship with a young mother. As she walks, Annie reflects on her struggling marriage, her disappointing career, and her anxiety about having a baby. She’s determined to change her life if she can just make it home.]]> 233 Emma Pattee 0008667721 Chris 3 3.84 2025
author: Emma Pattee
name: Chris
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2025
rating: 3
read at: 2025/03/08
date added: 2025/03/08
shelves:
review:

]]> 214986269 A bombshell bestseller in Japan, a provocative, defiant debut novel about a young woman in a care home seeking autonomy and the full possibilities of her life.

Born with a congenital muscle disorder,��Shaka spends her days in her room in a care home outside Tokyo, relying on an electric wheelchair to get around and a ventilator to breathe. But if Shaka's physical life is limited, her quick, mischievous mind has no boundaries: She takes e-learning courses on her iPad, publishes explicit fantasies on websites, and anonymously troll-tweets to see if anyone is paying attention (“If I were to live again, I’d want to be a high-class prostitute��). One day, she tweets into the void an offer of an enormous sum of money for a sperm donor. To her surprise, her new nurse accepts the dare, unleashing a series of events that will forever change Shaka's sense of herself as a woman in the world.

Hunchback has shaken Japanese literary culture with its skillful depiction of the physical body and��unrepentant humor. Winner of the prestigious Akutagawa Prize, it's a feminist story about the dignity of an individual who insists on her right to make choices for herself, no matter the consequences. Formally creative and refreshingly unsentimental, Hunchback depicts the joy, anger, and desires of a woman demanding autonomy in a world that doesn't aways grant it to people like her. Full of wit, bite, and heart, this unforgettable novel reminds us all of the full potential��of our lives, no matter the limitations we experience.]]> 112 Saou Ichikawa 0593734718 Chris 3 Thank you Penguin Random House US and Edelweiss for the ARC]]> 3.57 2023
author: Saou Ichikawa
name: Chris
average rating: 3.57
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2025/03/06
date added: 2025/03/06
shelves:
review:
Strange and provocative novella narrated by a disabled woman living in a care home. As this viewpoint is hardly ever explored in books, I was interested in reading about her experiences, her difficulties, her desires and her want for autonomy. The ending was a bit abrupt though.
Thank you Penguin Random House US and Edelweiss for the ARC
]]> 213712805 The power dynamics of the office are never more obvious than when it comes to food: mandatory lunches with the boss, the colleague who tries to curry favour with home-baked goods, discovering the discarded remnants of someone else's late-night binge . . .

In their Saitama office, Ashikawa is the kind of woman Nitani knows he will likely marry: sweet, obliging, and determined to wean him off his addiction to instant noodles. But he finds himself increasingly unable to respect her �� or the sugary treats she shares around the workplace, winning their colleagues�� affection with baking rather than hard work.

Oshio is bolder and uninhibited �� she is Nitani's drinking buddy. In the oppressive office atmosphere, the pair grows closer, both outsiders struggling with the rigid status quo.

Driven to behave in increasingly absurd ways by the workplace rules that govern their lives, they must navigate the tensions of modern life: between leisure and hard work; indulgence and restraint; the promise of delicious food, and the reality of a lonely pot noodle.]]> 134 Junko Takase 1804947342 Chris 3 Thank you Penguin UK and Netgalley UK for the ARC.]]> 3.03 2022
author: Junko Takase
name: Chris
average rating: 3.03
book published: 2022
rating: 3
read at: 2025/03/05
date added: 2025/03/05
shelves:
review:
An interesting view on Japanese office culture and food. It didn’t grip me as much as I had hoped though.
Thank you Penguin UK and Netgalley UK for the ARC.
]]> 221480935 The desire to walk is something that defines us, bringing joy, connection and freedom. But what happens to all this when we become mothers?

From the author of Wanderers, comes an urgent exploration of what it means to rediscover ourselves through the land we walk and the people we walk alongside.

___


In the wake of the complete metamorphosis of becoming a mother, Kerri Andrews determines to undertake a series of journeys on foot to understand what has happened to her.


Alongside a backpack full of supplies, Kerri carries with her the shadow of post-natal depression and the idea that maybe the hills are no longer for those, like her, who bear the mental and physical scars of childbearing and childrearing.


Yet, what she soon discovers are tales of mother-walkers that have long been neglected or hidden away. From Mary Wollstonecraft and Ellen Weeton to Kate Chopin, here are women whose urgent stories offer new ways of stepping into motherhood.


As Kerri traverses urban, rural and increasingly mountainous landscapes in the North West and Scotland, she is joined by women who have also experienced the profound changes that having children can bring to bodies and minds. Together, they explore the complicated ground of motherhood today �� balancing enormous responsibility and upheaval with ambition, rage and hope �� creating new paths as they go.


___


'Left me itching to lace up my boots and follow the call of the path.' Laura Pashby, author of Chasing Fog

'Bold, brave... I had the feeling, as I read, that Kerri Andrews might be clearing a path for us all.' Helen Jukes, author of Mother Animal

'Powerful and unflinchingly honest' Annabel Abbs, author of Why Women Walk]]> 201 Kerri Andrews 1783968435 Chris 0 to-read 4.20
author: Kerri Andrews
name: Chris
average rating: 4.20
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/05
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 222475661 A darkly epic novel about connection, disconnection and destruction �� from the New York Times-bestselling, National Book Award-winning, Booker Prize-longlisted author of Let the Great World Spin

**The instant Irish Times top 5 bestseller**
**Named a 2025 book to look out for by the Observer, Financial Times, Irish Times and New European**

'Urgent and utterly compelling' KEVIN BARRY

'Twist lingers long after you've put it down' GUARDIAN

'A Gatsby tale for the internet age' ANNA FUNDER

'One of our greatest storytellers' ELIF SHAFAK

'Masterful ... A surprising, electric book' IRISH TIMES

'A powerfully realist novel of men at sea �� It speaks of the brokenness of our time, the successful and unsuccessful attempts at repairs, and the vulnerability of our world' SALMAN RUSHDIE

____________________________________________________

Anthony Fennell, a journalist, is in pursuit of a story buried at the bottom of the the network of tiny fibre-optic tubes that carry the world's information across the ocean floor - and what happens when they break.

So he has travelled to Cape Town to board the George Lecointe, a cable repair vessel captained by Chief of Mission John Conway. Conway is a talented engineer and fearless freediver - and Fennell is quickly captivated by this mysterious, unnerving man and his beautiful partner, Zanele.

As the boat embarks along the west coast of Africa, Fennell learns the rhythms of life at sea, and finds his place among the band of drifters who make up the crew. But as the mission falters, tensions simmer - and Conway is thrown into crisis. A terrible, violent tragedy is unfolding in the life he has left behind on land; and, trapped out at sea, it seems as if the vast expanse of the ocean is closing in.

Then Conway disappears; and Fennell must set out to find him.

As taut and propulsive as a thriller, and a timeless exploration of narrative and truth, Twist is the work of a master storyteller at the height of his powers.

'Electrifying, propulsive ... A masterful exploration of the elemental forces at work just below the surface of all our lives' COLIN WALSH, author of Kala]]> 249 Colum McCann Chris 3 ‘Twist�� is largely a novel about ‘repair��. Repair of a cables, repair of people (Fennell, Conway), and repair of relationships. I enjoyed and raced through the topical story, but had some trouble with the characters. They’re interesting enough, but I felt I didn’t really got to know them. The Conway mystery (why he did what he did) remains mostly unsolved as well, which was somewhat frustrating in the end.
Thank you Bloomsbury and Netgalley UK for the ARC]]> 4.15 2025
author: Colum McCann
name: Chris
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2025
rating: 3
read at: 2025/03/04
date added: 2025/03/04
shelves:
review:
3,5
‘Twist�� is largely a novel about ‘repair��. Repair of a cables, repair of people (Fennell, Conway), and repair of relationships. I enjoyed and raced through the topical story, but had some trouble with the characters. They’re interesting enough, but I felt I didn’t really got to know them. The Conway mystery (why he did what he did) remains mostly unsolved as well, which was somewhat frustrating in the end.
Thank you Bloomsbury and Netgalley UK for the ARC
]]> 205792568
But Mama’s want is stronger than her hunger sometimes, and when a beautiful, white-toothed stray named Eden turns up in the heart of a snowstorm, Margot must confront the shifting dynamics of her family, untangle her own desires, and make her own bid for freedom.

With this gothic coming-of-age tale, novelist Lucy Rose explores how women swallow their anger, desire, and animal instincts—and wrings the relationship between mother and daughter until blood drips from it.]]> 329 Lucy Rose 139961973X Chris 3 Thank you Weidenfeld & Nicolson for the ARC.]]> 4.08 2025
author: Lucy Rose
name: Chris
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2025
rating: 3
read at: 2025/03/03
date added: 2025/03/03
shelves:
review:
This was far darker than I had expected. It’s about female rage and motherhood, about cannibalism, and -what I found most difficult to read- it’s about child abuse and neglect. Well written and original, but often too graphic for me.
Thank you Weidenfeld & Nicolson for the ARC.
]]> 216514790 Under brosteinen, stranden! er en roman om oppdagelsen av en brosteinsformet gjenstand som ved berøring angivelig skaper illusjonen av å erfare et helt liv på bare syv minutter. Med handling lagt til en ungdomsgjeng i Stavanger på slutten av nittitallet, men med betydelige tidsmessige og geografiske avstikkere til steder som Sovjetunionen, Berlin, Warszawa, Akureyri, Shanghai og ikke minst øya Tristan da Cunha på sekstitallet, og befolket av alt fra forstadsungdommer på jakt etter den neste industrielle ventilasjonsviften å varme seg ved om kveldene, kald krigs-spioner med vaklende lojalitet i flere retninger, zapatister på lokalt nivå og marihuanagrossister av tvilsomt mentalt kaliber, unge forelskede og amatørradiofedre som alle er enkemenn, sjøfolk av både den gamle og nye skolen, islandske økoterrorister, suicidale alenemødre og selvplagende klinikkdirektører, psykiatriske pasienter og enkelte som sikkert burde ha vært det, en eventyrlysten meteorolog fra Forus og en astrofysiker med akutt forklaringsbehov om ikke-faglige emner, og med gjesteopptredener av folk som Andrej Tarkovskij og Erich Mielke, utforsker romanen ideen om at tiden kanskje aldri var på vår side likevel.

Dette er en stor fortelling om å vente, på at livet skal begynne, på at ting skal gå over, vente på den rette, vente på døden og vente forgjeves. Det er en roman om Ingmar, Jonatan og Peter. Og Ebba.]]> 970 Johan Harstad 8205600678 Chris 0 to-read 4.14 2024
author: Johan Harstad
name: Chris
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/27
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 32951506 The Lesser Bohemians is a celebration of the dark and the light in love.]]> 320 Eimear McBride 0571327885 Chris 0 to-read 3.99 2016
author: Eimear McBride
name: Chris
average rating: 3.99
book published: 2016
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/23
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 217587183 'Eimear McBride is that old-fashioned thing, a genius.' - Anne Enright
'One of our major novelists.' - Guardian
'McBride's themes and language prove her to be fearless, and her voice is utterly compelling and unique.' - Sinead Gleeson

From the winner of the Women's Prize - an intense story of a passionate love affair arriving at its first test.

A rainy Camden night, December 1996. 20-year-old Eily and 40-year-old Stephen retrace the course of their two-year love affair in search of what's gone wrong. Is it Stephen's reconnection with his long-lost teenage daughter, Grace? Or that he's a well-known actor while Eily's still at drama school? Maybe the autobiographical film he's just made has brought his old demons back to the surface? Or perhaps Eily's youth has led her into a mistake she doesn't know how to fix?

Intimate, experiential, and immersive, this is the story of what happens when it's love beyond question, but trouble comes along anyway.]]> 320 Eimear McBride 0571384218 Chris 5 Thank you Bolinda Audio and Netgalley UK for the audiobook.]]> 3.74 2025
author: Eimear McBride
name: Chris
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2025
rating: 5
read at: 2025/02/23
date added: 2025/02/23
shelves:
review:
I requested an ARC through Netgalley, but since it was declined, I opted for the audiobook instead and I'm so glad I did! I was a bit anxious at first, as I prefer to read rather than listen to literary novels. But Eimear McBride was the narrator and she does a wonderful job here. I loved the way she went about it and I was really drawn in by her storytelling and voice. It's an intense and intimate story about love and the hardships and struggles in life, going back and forth in time. Often hard to listen to, but at the same time beautifully done. Absolutely brilliant and highly recommended!
Thank you Bolinda Audio and Netgalley UK for the audiobook.
]]> 215548433 A propulsive, hypnotic novel about a man who is unravelled by a series of events beyond his grasp.

Fifteen-year-old István lives with his mother in a quiet apartment complex in Hungary. New to the town and shy, he is unfamiliar with the social rituals at school and soon becomes isolated, with his neighbour �� a married woman close to his mother’s age �� as his only companion. These encounters shift into a clandestine relationship that István himself can barely understand, and his life soon spirals out of control.

As the years pass, he is carried gradually upwards on the currents of the twenty-first century’s tides of money and power, moving from the army to the company of London’s super-rich, with his own competing impulses for love, intimacy, status and wealth winning him unimaginable riches, until they threaten to undo him completely.

Spare and penetrating, Flesh is the finest novel yet by a master of realism, asking profound questions about what drives a life: what makes it worth living, and what breaks it.]]> 334 David Szalay 152992684X Chris 4 'Flesh' is a tragic and often sad but fascinating novel about growing up and becoming an adult, coming from poverty and ending up extremely rich. Szalay uses short and direct sentences, which work really well and propel you forward and I read this pretty fast. I wouldn't say I 'enjoyed' reading this book, but I was wat least very much invested in it.
Thank you Jonathan Cape and Netgalley UK for the ARC.
]]> 4.23 2025
author: David Szalay
name: Chris
average rating: 4.23
book published: 2025
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/23
date added: 2025/02/23
shelves:
review:
I finished this more than a week ago and totally forgot to write something about it, so here I go.
'Flesh' is a tragic and often sad but fascinating novel about growing up and becoming an adult, coming from poverty and ending up extremely rich. Szalay uses short and direct sentences, which work really well and propel you forward and I read this pretty fast. I wouldn't say I 'enjoyed' reading this book, but I was wat least very much invested in it.
Thank you Jonathan Cape and Netgalley UK for the ARC.

]]> 211365759 From the acclaimed author of Parakeet, Marie-Helene Bertino’s Beautyland is a wise, tender novel about a woman who doesn't feel at home on Earth.

At the moment when Voyager 1 is launched into space carrying its famous golden record, a baby of unusual perception is born to a single mother in Philadelphia. Adina Giorno is tiny and jaundiced, but she reaches for warmth and light. As a child, she recognizes that she is different: She possesses knowledge of a faraway planet. The arrival of a fax machine enables her to contact her extraterrestrial relatives, beings who have sent her to report on the oddities of Earthlings.

For years, as she moves through the world and makes a life for herself among humans, she dispatches transmissions on the terrors and surprising joys of their existence. Then, at a precarious moment, a beloved friend urges Adina to share her messages with the world. Is there a chance she is not alone?

Marie-Helene Bertino’s Beautyland is a novel of startling originality about the fragility and resilience of life on our Earth and in our universe. It is a remarkable evocation of the feeling of being in exile at home, and it introduces a gentle, unforgettable alien for our times.]]> 336 Marie-Helene Bertino 1250338026 Chris 0 to-read 3.87 2024
author: Marie-Helene Bertino
name: Chris
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/22
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 227863236 Glyph follows Ali Smith's 2024 novel Gliff and tells a story hidden in the first novel. Gliff is set in a near future rife with surveillance, where people can be labelled 'unverifiable' by the state. It follows siblings Briar and Rose as they attempt to survive in a world that strives to crush curiosity and meaning.]]> 240 Ali Smith 0241665590 Chris 0 to-read 0.0 2025
author: Ali Smith
name: Chris
average rating: 0.0
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/19
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 127823311 A wondrous, tender novel about a young girl grappling with her role in a tragic loss—and attempting to reshape the narrative of her life—from PEN/Faulkner Award nominee Claire Oshetsky

Margaret Murphy is a weaver of fantastic tales, growing up in a world where the truth is too much for one little girl to endure. Her first memory is of the day her friend Agnes died.

No one blames Margaret. Not in so many words. Her mother insists to everyone who will listen that her daughter never even left the house that day. Left alone to make sense of tragedy, Margaret wills herself to forget these unbearable memories, replacing them with imagined stories full of faith and magic—that always end happily.

Enter Poor Deer: a strange and formidable creature who winds her way uninvited into Margaret’s made-up tales. Poor Deer will not rest until Margaret faces the truth about her past and atones for her role in Agnes’s death.

Heartrending, hopeful, and boldly imagined, Poor Deer explores the journey toward understanding the children we once were and the stories we tell ourselves to make sense of life’s most difficult moments.]]> 240 Claire Oshetsky 006332766X Chris 4 3.97 2024
author: Claire Oshetsky
name: Chris
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/18
date added: 2025/02/18
shelves:
review:

]]> 216670080
A pregnant woman’s sketches on a seemingly innocuous blog conceal a chilling warning.

A child’s picture of his home contains a dark secret message.

A sketch made by a murder victim in his final moments leads an amateur sleuth down a rabbit hole that will reveal a horrifying reality.

Structured around these nine childlike drawings, every one holding a disturbing clue, this novel invites readers to piece together the harrowing truth behind each and the overarching backstory that connects them all. Strange Pictures is the bestselling international debut from mystery-horror YouTube sensation Uketsu—an enigmatic masked figure who has become one of Japan's most talked about contemporary authors.]]> 236 Uketsu 0063433087 Chris 4 4.05 2022
author: Uketsu
name: Chris
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/17
date added: 2025/02/17
shelves:
review:

]]> 212434611 Is it possible to love under capitalism?

Maggie and Kurt are a couple struggling to hold their marriage together after their only daughter has left home. They live in a old farmhouse in Nyborg but somehow keep missing each other, unable to discuss the events that brought them together.

Decades ago, a passenger ferry called the Scandinavian Star caught fire, killing hundreds of people. The event is still considered a national tragedy in Denmark and Norway. Years later, it was revealed not to be an accident, but the result of an insurance scam gone wrong.

How is the Scandinavian Star disaster connected to Maggie and Kurt's relationship? How does money affect and infect our closest relationships? And is it ever possible to escape? Money to Burn is both a dazzling work of fiction and a true-crime investigation into the unshakeable hold of money, greed and desire on us all.]]> 156 Asta Olivia Nordenhof 1529934516 Chris 4 3.69 2020
author: Asta Olivia Nordenhof
name: Chris
average rating: 3.69
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/14
date added: 2025/02/14
shelves:
review:

]]> 53403847
A shape-shifting trickster on a kung-fu quest for eternal life, Monkey King is one of the most memorable superheroes in world literature. High-spirited and omni-talented, he can transform himself into whatever he chooses and turn each of his body's 84,000 hairs into an army of clones. But his penchant for mischief repeatedly gets him into trouble, and when he raids Heaven's Orchard of Immortal Peaches, the Buddha pins him beneath a mountain. Five hundred years later, Monkey King is finally given a chance to redeem he must protect the pious monk Tripitaka on his journey in search of precious Buddhist sutras that will bring enlightenment to the Chinese empire.

Joined by two other fallen immortals - Pigsy, a rice-loving flying pig, and Sandy, a depressive river-sand monster - Monkey King does battle with Red Boy, Princess Jade-Face, the Monstress Dowager, and all manner of dragons, ogres, wizards and femmes fatales ; navigates the perils of Fire-Cloud Cave, the River of Flowing Sand and the Water-Crystal Palace; and is serially captured, lacquered, sautéed, steamed and liquefied - but always hatches an ingenious plan to get himself and his fellow pilgrims out of their latest jam.

Comparable to The Canterbury Tales or Don Quixote , Monkey King is at once a gripping adventure, a comic satire and a spring of spiritual insight. With this new translation by the award-winning Julia Lovell, the irrepressible rogue hero of one of the Four Great Classical Novels of Chinese literature has the potential to vault, with his signature cloud-somersault, into the hearts of a whole new generation of readers.

This Penguin Classic is performed by Kevin Shen, and was translated by Julia Lovell.

One of the world's greatest fantasy novels and a rollicking classic of Chinese literature, in a sparkling new translation. 720 minutes]]> 339 Wu Cheng'en 0141393440 Chris 4 4.10 1592
author: Wu Cheng'en
name: Chris
average rating: 4.10
book published: 1592
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/11
date added: 2025/02/11
shelves:
review:

]]> 216632263
Whether creeping across the moonlit lawns in her undergarments or gently tormenting the house staff, Winifred struggles at every turn to stifle the horrid compulsions of her past until her chillingly dark imagination breaches the feeble boundary of reality on Christmas morning. Wielding her signature sardonic wit and a penchant for the gorgeously macabre, Virginia Feito returns with a vengeance in Victorian Psycho.]]> 184 Virginia Feito 0008739617 Chris 3 Thank you Fourth estate and Netgalley UK for the ARC.]]> 3.70 2025
author: Virginia Feito
name: Chris
average rating: 3.70
book published: 2025
rating: 3
read at: 2025/02/09
date added: 2025/02/09
shelves:
review:
A Victorian tale of rage and revenge, nicely over the top and pretty funny as well.
Thank you Fourth estate and Netgalley UK for the ARC.
]]> 218005145 Last night i got woke up by marco ringing, and he was crying, he said, he died ivor, he died, and i didnt need to hear who to know, i just hung up.

Ivor and Marco have been getting high since they were thirteen, started dealing at fourteen, by fifteen they were carrying knives. At sixteen years old, they hurtle from one trip to the next, one fight to the next, always watching their backs. Ivor dreams of getting out - finishing school, becoming a lawyer, marrying the girl he loves from the corner shop - but the path he's on only leads one way.

In flashes of firecracker prose, shot through with rare empathy, irrepressible wit and gut-punch pathos, Oliver Lovrenski gives voice to young men growing up in a brutal and chaotic world.]]> 245 Oliver Lovrenski 1405968168 Chris 0 to-read 3.94 2023
author: Oliver Lovrenski
name: Chris
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/07
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 218460339
Nastia and her sister Solomiya are also entangled in the booming marriage industry, posing as a hopeful bride and her translator while secretly searching for their missing mother—a flamboyant protestor who vanished after years of fierce activism against the romance tours. So begins a journey of a lifetime across hundreds of miles: three angry women, a truckful of kidnapped bachelors, and Lefty, a last-of-his-kind snail with one final shot at perpetuating his species. But their plans come to a screeching halt as Russia invades.]]> 352 Maria Reva 0385545312 Chris 0 to-read 4.41 2025
author: Maria Reva
name: Chris
average rating: 4.41
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/05
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 217387664 A soaring, propulsive, and unforgettably poignant novel about two zookeepers at the last zoo in the world, in the vein of Téa Obreht and Charlotte McConaghy

Camille has always preferred animals to people. The wild has nearly disappeared, but as a zookeeper at the last zoo in the world, on Alcatraz Island, she spends her days caring for playful chimpanzees, gentle tree frogs, and a restless jaguar. Outside, resistance groups and brutal cartels fight to shape the world’s future, but Camille is safe within her routines. That is, until a new zookeeper, Sailor, arrives from Paris.

From their first meeting, Camille is drawn to Sailor, who seems to see something in Camille that no one has before. They bond over their shared passions and dream up ways to improve their lives. When Sailor whispers the story of an idyllic, secret sanctuary where wild animals roam free, Camille begins to imagine a new kind of life with Sailor by her side.

Sailor knows all too well the dangers beyond Alcatraz, but she increasingly chafes at the zoo’s rigid rules. She hatches a reckless plan to smuggle one of the most prized animals off the island to freedom, and invites Camille to join her. The consequences if they fail would be catastrophic, and Sailor’s contacts at the sanctuary go dark just as the threats from the cartels grow more extreme. Camille must decide if she’s ready to risk everything for the promise of a better world.

Propulsive and fiercely hopeful, with a heart-stopping final twist, The Island of Last Things is an elegy for a disappearing world and a gorgeous vision for the future.]]> 272 Emma Sloley 1250329248 Chris 0 to-read 4.00 2025
author: Emma Sloley
name: Chris
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/05
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 216407242
Unfolding over geological eons, Under the Eye of the Big Bird is at once an astonishing vision of the end of our species as we know it and a meditation on the qualities that, for better and worse, make us human.]]> 234 Hiromi Kawakami 1803512377 Chris 3 Thank you Granta and Netgalley UK for the ARC.]]> 3.67 2016
author: Hiromi Kawakami
name: Chris
average rating: 3.67
book published: 2016
rating: 3
read at: 2025/02/05
date added: 2025/02/05
shelves:
review:
'Under the Eye of the Big Bird' exists of stories, all set in the same future world and more or less interlinked. Some stories I found really interesting, others not so much. It is well done and the ideas are great and original, but I expected a novel and because of that I probably wasn't totally invested in this.
Thank you Granta and Netgalley UK for the ARC.
]]> 215179228
First published in 1947, Nothing Grows by Moonlight tells the haunting tale of one woman’s soul-shattering love affair. When an obsessive passion for her high school teacher consumes a small-town seventeen-year-old, her life spirals out of control, giving way to pregnancy, poverty and alienation. Here, darkness and light converge, and unrequited love blooms against the shadows of societal injustices, as she fights for over her life, her mind and her body.

Captivating, visceral and brimming with emotion, Nothing Grows by Moonlight is a feminist classic of Scandinavian literature, and an uncompromising ode to female desire.]]> 203 Torborg Nedreaas 180206785X Chris 0 to-read 3.50 1947
author: Torborg Nedreaas
name: Chris
average rating: 3.50
book published: 1947
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/03
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 56991346 Bruce Lee’s daughter illuminates her father’s most powerful life philosophies—demonstrating how martial arts are a perfect metaphor for personal growth, and how we can practice those teachings every day.

"Empty your mind; be formless, shapeless like water."

Bruce Lee is a cultural icon, renowned the world over for his martial arts and film legacy. But Lee was also a deeply philosophical thinker, learning at an early age that martial arts are more than just an exercise in physical discipline—they are an apt metaphor for living a fully realized life.

Now, in Be Water, My Friend, Lee’s daughter Shannon shares the concepts at the core of his philosophies, showing how they can serve as tools of personal growth and self-actualization. Each chapter brings a lesson from Bruce Lee’s teachings, expanding on the foundation of his iconic “be water�� philosophy. Over the course of the book, we discover how being like water allows us to embody fluidity and naturalness in life, bringing us closer to our essential flowing nature and our ability to be powerful, self-expressed, and free.

Through previously untold stories from her father’s life and from her own journey in embodying these lessons, Shannon presents these philosophies in tangible, accessible ways. With Bruce Lee’s words as a guide, she encourages readers to pursue their essential selves and apply these ideas and practices to their everyday lives—whether in learning new things, overcoming obstacles, or ultimately finding their true path.

Be Water, My Friend is an inspirational invitation to us all, a gentle call to action to consider our lives with new eyes. It is also a testament to how one man's exploration and determination transcended time and place to ignite our imaginations—and to inspire many around the world to transform their lives.]]> Shannon Lee Chris 4 4.22 2020
author: Shannon Lee
name: Chris
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/02
date added: 2025/02/02
shelves:
review:

]]> 223886010
An unexpected letter from an old acquaintance brings back a torrent of others she's loved or wanted. Each has been a match and a mismatch, a liberation and a threat to her very sense of self. The ephemera left by their passage �� a spilled coffee, an unwanted bouquet, a mind-blowing kiss �� make up a cabinet of curiosity she inventories, trying to divine the essence of intimacy. What does it mean to connect with another person? What impels us to touch someone, to be touched by them, to stay in touch? How do we let them go? In yet another tour de force of fiction, Claire-Louise Bennett explores the mystery of how people come into and go out of our lives, leaving us forever in their grasp.]]> Claire-Louise Bennett 1804271942 Chris 0 to-read 4.50
author: Claire-Louise Bennett
name: Chris
average rating: 4.50
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/31
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 212923993 A mother and son, estranged but yearning for reunion, reckon at last with the secret that has kept them apart for decades in this highly anticipated novel by "one of the country's most talented writers" (Wall Street Journal��)

At forty, Peter, an asylum lawyer in New York City, is overworked and isolated. He spends his days immersed in the struggles of his clients only to return to an empty apartment and occasional hook-ups with a man who wants more than Peter can give. But when the asylum case of a young gay man pierces Peter's numbness, the event that he has avoided for twenty years returns to haunt him.

Ann, his mother, who runs a women's retreat center she founded after leaving his father, is wounded by the estrangement from Peter but cherishes the world she has built. She long ago banished from her mind the decision that divided her from her son. But as Peter’s case plunges him further into the memory of his first love and the night of violence that changed his life forever, he and his mother must confront the secret that tore them apart.

With unsurpassed emotional depth,��Mothers and Sons��reveals all that is lost by looking away from the past and what might be restored by facing it. In his spellbinding new novel, Adam Haslett��demonstrates yet again his mastery of “a rich assortment of literary gifts�� (New York Times).]]> 336 Adam Haslett 0316574716 Chris 4 Thank you Little, Brown and Edelweiss for the ARC.]]> 3.82 2025
author: Adam Haslett
name: Chris
average rating: 3.82
book published: 2025
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/29
date added: 2025/01/29
shelves:
review:
'Mothers and Sons' is a topical and occasionally upsetting novel about Peter, an asylum lawyer in New York City, and his mother Ann, who runs a women's retreat centre in Vermont. Both are experts at being there for other people, but their own relationship has become almost non-existent. Peter seems only slightly affected by the harrowing stories he hears every day, but once he gets a case of a young gay man he becomes totally undone. Slowly, you discover why this particular case has such an impact on him and why he has been estranged from his mother. A character driven, beautifully told novel about human relationships, full of empathy and insight.
Thank you Little, Brown and Edelweiss for the ARC.
]]> 222925320
Has the illness stolen her mind and given her a new one? Does it mean she’ll get to start over, a chance afforded to few people? The very weave of herself seems to have loosened as time and memories pass straight through her body. “I’m sorry not to respond to your email,�� she writes, “but I live completely in the present now."

Will There Ever be Another You is the brain-shredding, phosphorescent story of one woman’s dissolution and her attempt to create a new way of thinking, as well as a profound investigation into what keeps us alive in times of unprecedented disorientation and loss.]]> Patricia Lockwood 0593718577 Chris 0 to-read 4.25
author: Patricia Lockwood
name: Chris
average rating: 4.25
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/28
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 211603447
An essential, immersive debut from an astonishing new voice, Confessions traces the arc of three generations of women as they experience in their own time the irresistible gravity of the its love and tragedy, its mystery and redemption, and, in all things intended and accidental, the beauty and terrible shade of the things we do.]]> 447 Catherine Airey 1405961546 Chris 4 Thank you Penguin UK and Netgalley for the ARC.]]> 3.95 2025
author: Catherine Airey
name: Chris
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2025
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/27
date added: 2025/01/27
shelves:
review:
Set in the US and Ireland, this is a wonderful debut about three generations of women and their lives, loves, and secrets. Airey’s writing is accomplished and she succeeds very well in getting the reader to care for the characters. I liked the structure of this novel, which forces you to keep paying attention, and the focus on women and their personal struggles. Not always an easy read, but a great read nonetheless.
Thank you Penguin UK and Netgalley for the ARC.
]]> 195444463
Op elegante, onopgesmukte wijze beschrijft Colombe Schneck haar steeds veranderende relatie tot haar lichaam, en dus tot de wereld, in verschillende fases van haar leven. In de geest van Deborah Levy en Annie Ernaux weet ze steevast het persoonlijke iets universeels te geven.]]> 196 Colombe Schneck 9025474497 Chris 3 Niet slecht, maar ik had hier meer van verwacht. Werd bovendien nogal geaffecteerd voorgelezen. ]]> 3.77
author: Colombe Schneck
name: Chris
average rating: 3.77
book published:
rating: 3
read at: 2024/05/24
date added: 2025/01/26
shelves:
review:
Audiobook.
Niet slecht, maar ik had hier meer van verwacht. Werd bovendien nogal geaffecteerd voorgelezen.
]]> 89394574 From the legendary music producer, a master at helping people connect with the wellsprings of their creativity, comes a beautifully crafted book many years in the making that offers that same deep wisdom to all of us.

"A gorgeous and inspiring work of art on creation, creativity, the work of the artist. It will gladden the hearts of writers and artists everywhere, and get them working again with a new sense of meaning and direction. A stunning accomplishment." --Anne Lamott

"I set out to write a book about what to do to make a great work of art. Instead, it revealed itself to be a book on how to be." --Rick Rubin

Many famed music producers are known for a particular sound that has its day. Rick Rubin is known for something else: creating a space where artists of all different genres and traditions can home in on who they really are and what they really offer. He has made a practice of helping people transcend their self-imposed expectations in order to reconnect with a state of innocence from which the surprising becomes inevitable. Over the years, as he has thought deeply about where creativity comes from and where it doesn't, he has learned that being an artist isn't about your specific output, it's about your relationship to the world. Creativity has a place in everyone's life, and everyone can make that place larger. In fact, there are few more important responsibilities.

The Creative Act is a beautiful and generous course of study that illuminates the path of the artist as a road we all can follow. It distills the wisdom gleaned from a lifetime's work into a luminous reading experience that puts the power to create moments--and lifetimes--of exhilaration and transcendence within closer reach for all of us.]]> Rick Rubin Chris 3 3.88 2023
author: Rick Rubin
name: Chris
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2025/01/25
date added: 2025/01/25
shelves:
review:

]]> 58169 Where do ideas come from?

In Catching the Big Fish, internationally acclaimed filmmaker David Lynch provides a rare window into his methods as an artist, his personal working style, and the immense creative benefits he has experienced from the practice of meditation.

Lynch describes the experience of "diving within" and "catching" ideas like fish - and then preparing them for television or movie screens, and other mediums in which he works, such as painting, music, and design. Lynch writes for the first time about his more than three-decade commitment to Transcendental Meditation and the difference it has made in his creative process.

In brief chapters, Lynch explains the development of his ideas - where they came from, how he grasps them, and which ones appeal to him the most. He specifically discusses how he puts his thoughts into action and how he engages with others around him. Finally, he considers the self and the surrounding world - and how the process of "diving within" that has so deeply affected his own work can directly benefit others.

Catching the Big Fish comes as a revelation to the legion of fans who have longed to better understand Lynch's personal vision. And it is equally intriguing to those who wonder how they can nurture their own creativity.]]> 181 David Lynch 1585425400 Chris 0 to-read 3.78 2006
author: David Lynch
name: Chris
average rating: 3.78
book published: 2006
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/17
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 10761641 175 George Hulskramer 9069639491 Chris 0 currently-reading 3.12 2011
author: George Hulskramer
name: Chris
average rating: 3.12
book published: 2011
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/17
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> 205436018 Han Kang’s most revelatory book since The Vegetarian, We Do Not Part tells the story of a friendship between two women while powerfully reckoning with a hidden chapter of Korean history.

One winter morning, Kyungha receives an urgent message from her friend Inseon to visit her at a hospital in Seoul. Inseon has injured herself in an accident, and she begs Kyungha to return to Jeju Island, where she lives, to save her beloved pet—a white bird called Ama.

A snowstorm hits the island when Kyungha arrives. She must reach Inseon’s house at all costs, but the icy wind and squalls slow her down as night begins to fall. She wonders if she will arrive in time to save the animal—or even survive the terrible cold that envelops her with every step. Lost in a world of snow, she doesn't yet suspect the vertiginous plunge into the darkness that awaits her at her friend's house.

Blurring the boundaries between dream and reality, We Do Not Part powerfully illuminates a forgotten chapter in Korean history, buried for decades—bringing to light the lost voices of the past to save them from oblivion. Both a hymn to an enduring friendship and an argument for remembering, it is the story of profound love in the face of unspeakable violence—and a celebration of life, however fragile it might be.]]> 272 Han Kang 0593595459 Chris 5 Thank you Penguin Random House US and Edelweiss for the ARC.]]> 3.88 2021
author: Han Kang
name: Chris
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2021
rating: 5
read at: 2025/01/15
date added: 2025/01/17
shelves:
review:
Interesting, intense, and very impressive but not an easy read. It contains a lot of trauma and awful images that hit you right in the gut. At the same time Kang writes so beautifully and in such a visual way that you can almost sense the snow and darkness around you. I finished this two days ago and just can’t get it out of my head.
Thank you Penguin Random House US and Edelweiss for the ARC.
]]> 218671843 An unexpected��road trip across America brings a family together, in this raucous and moving new novel from the bestselling author of Nothing to See Here.

Ever since��her dad left them twenty years ago,��it’s just been Madeline Hill and her mom on their farm in Coalfield, Tennessee. While she sometimes admits it’s a bit lonely and a less exciting life than she imagined for herself, it’s mostly OK. Mostly.

Then one day Reuben Hill pulls up in a PT Cruiser and informs Madeline that he believes she’s his half sister. Reuben—left behind by their dad thirty years ago—has hired a detective to track down their father and a string of other half siblings.��And he wants Mad to leave her home and join him for the craziest kind of road trip imaginable to find them all.

As Mad and Rube—and eventually the others—share stories of their father, who behaved so differently in each life he created, they begin to question what he was looking for with each new incarnation. Who are they to one another? What kind of man will they find? And how will these new relationships change Mad’s previously solitary life on the farm?

Infused with deadpan wit, zany hijinks, and enormous heart, Run for the Hills is a sibling story like no other—a novel about a family forged under the most unlikely circumstances and united by hope in an unknown future.]]> 256 Kevin Wilson 0063317516 Chris 0 to-read 4.08 2025
author: Kevin Wilson
name: Chris
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/17
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 221133949 The story of a group of wildly different people whose fates are improbably yet inextricably linked, the new novel from the bestselling and prize-winning author.



* A Sunday Times, Guardian and Financial Times ‘Book to Look Out For�� 2025 *




It is summer, and Sebastian is in treatment following a breakdown that has left him with a fragile hold on reality and a persistent hunger to connect with the mother who abandoned him as a child.

His therapist, Martin, is also facing challenges, including his adopted daughter Olivia’s tenuous relationship with her biological mother �� a predicament that makes Sebastian’s struggle feel uncannily close to her own. Olivia is producing a radio series on natural disasters, which itself seems to be running parallel to the events unfolding in her personal life, as her best friend Lucy faces a grave diagnosis and her husband, Francis, pursues his mission of rewilding the world.

Over the course of the next year their fates collide in outrageous and poignant ways, as each of their destinies is revealed in a marvellous new light.

Written with Edward St Aubyn’s trademark wit and inimitable style, Parallel Lines is a novel about connection, love and the cascading consequences of our choices. It is a vibrant, moving celebration of the life of the spirit and the life of the mind from one of our most irresistible storytellers.]]> 352 Edward St. Aubyn 1787335593 Chris 0 to-read 4.00 2025
author: Edward St. Aubyn
name: Chris
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/15
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 42603095 Atomic Habits offers a proven framework for improving—every day. James Clear, one of the world's leading experts on habit formation, reveals practical strategies that will teach you exactly how to form good habits, break bad ones, and master the tiny behaviors that lead to remarkable results.

If you're having trouble changing your habits, the problem isn't you. The problem is your system. Bad habits repeat themselves again and again not because you don't want to change, but because you have the wrong system for change. You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems. Here, you'll get a proven system that can take you to new heights.

Clear is known for his ability to distill complex topics into simple behaviors that can be easily applied to daily life and work. Here, he draws on the most proven ideas from biology, psychology, and neuroscience to create an easy-to-understand guide for making good habits inevitable and bad habits impossible. Along the way, readers will be inspired and entertained with true stories from Olympic gold medalists, award-winning artists, business leaders, life-saving physicians, and star comedians who have used the science of small habits to master their craft and vault to the top of their field.

Learn how to:
-��Make time for new habits (even when life gets crazy);
-��Overcome a lack of motivation and willpower;
- Design your environment to make success easier;
- Get back on track when you fall off course;
...and much more.

Atomic Habits will reshape the way you think about progress and success, and give you the tools and strategies you need to transform your habits--whether you are a team looking to win a championship, an organization hoping to redefine an industry, or simply an individual who wishes to quit smoking, lose weight, reduce stress, or achieve any other goal.]]> 6 James Clear Chris 4 Better than I expected 4.15 2018
author: James Clear
name: Chris
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2018
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/15
date added: 2025/01/15
shelves:
review:
Better than I expected
]]> 221407670
MAX PORTER'S All of This Unreal Time takes this idea—the poetic concept of ‘perfect speech’—and turns it into a wild, psycholo-delic apology rant. Moving with Porter’s peerless linguistic skill between a single speaker’s self-lacerating ‘apology�� to an excavation of family trauma, late-capitalist guilt and rage and the shame that attends—that must attend—modern masculinity. All this is, of course, handled with the usual slipperiness and smarts—where nothing is quite as it seems, pregnant with its opposite, a shape-shifting tour-de-force of voice and concept from our most exciting contemporary writer.]]> 110 Max Porter 1914236475 Chris 5 4.61
author: Max Porter
name: Chris
average rating: 4.61
book published:
rating: 5
read at: 2025/01/14
date added: 2025/01/14
shelves:
review:
Beautifully written and published
]]> 10058194 159 Jennifer Dawson Chris 0 to-read 3.96 1961
author: Jennifer Dawson
name: Chris
average rating: 3.96
book published: 1961
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/12
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 220967744 A portrait of the artist as a young woman in a Berlin that can't escape its history: an electric debut novel about the daughter of Afghan refugees and her year of nightclubs, bad romance, and self-discovery

In Berlin's underground, where techno rattles buildings still scarred with the violence of the last century, nineteen-year-old Nila finds her tribe. In their company she can escape the parallel city that made her, the public housing block packed with refugees and immigrants, where the bathrooms are infested with silverfish and the walls outside are graffitied with swastikas.

Escaping into the clubs, Nila tries to outrun the shadow of her dead mother, once a feminist revolutionary; her catatonic, defeated father; and the cab-driver uncles who seem to idle on every corner. To anyone who asks, her family is Greek, not Afghani.

And then Nila meets American writer Marlowe Woods, whose literary celebrity, though fading, opens her eyes to a world of patrons and festivals, one that imbues her dreams of life as an artist with new possibility. But as she finds herself drawn further into his orbit and ugly, barely submerged tensions begin to roil and claw beneath the city's cosmopolitan veneer, everything she hopes for, hates, and believes about herself will be challenged.]]> 358 Aria Aber 1526679116 Chris 4 Thank you Bloomsbury and Netgalley UK for the ARC.]]> 3.63 2025
author: Aria Aber
name: Chris
average rating: 3.63
book published: 2025
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/10
date added: 2025/01/10
shelves:
review:
This was quite good actually. At first it just seemed to be a novel about a partying girl going to raves and popping pills all the time, but it is really a story about shame of one’s origins, and a search for identity, belonging, and freedom. Well done and I was very much invested in this.
Thank you Bloomsbury and Netgalley UK for the ARC.
]]> 217453570 From a dazzling new talent, the story of a newly divorced young mother forced to reckon with the secrets of her own childhood when she brings her daughters back to the big house where she was raised.

Every parent exists inside of two families simultaneously �� the one she was born into, and the one she has made.

Ten-year-old Margaret hides beneath a blackberry bush in her family’s verdant backyard while her brother hunts for her in a game of flashlight tag. Hers is a childhood of sunlit swimming pools and Saturday morning pancakes and a devoted best friend, but her family life requires careful maintenance. Her mother can be as brittle and exacting as she is loving, and her father and brother assume familiar, if uncomfortable, models of masculinity. Then late one summer, everything changes. After a series of confusing transgressions, the simple pleasures of girlhood, slip away.

Twenty-five years later, Margaret hides under her parents�� bed, waiting for her young daughters to find her in a game of hide and seek. She’s newly divorced and navigating her life as a co-parent, while discovering the pleasures of a new lover. But some part of her is still under the blackberry bush, punched out of time. Called upon to be a mother to her daughters, and a daughter to her mother, she must reckon with the echoes and refractions between the past and the present, what it means to keep a child safe, and how much of our lives are our own, alone.

Warm and generous, unflinchingly human, and ultimately joyful and empowering, SLEEP is about the cycles of motherhood and childhood, the cost of secrets and the burden of love, and what’s on the other side of the world, rich in possibility.]]> 272 Honor Jones 0593851986 Chris 0 to-read 4.09 2025
author: Honor Jones
name: Chris
average rating: 4.09
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/09
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 199635125
Sharply observant and outrageously funny, Rejection is a provocative plunge into the touchiest problems of modern life. The seven connected stories seamlessly transition between the personal crises of a complex ensemble and the comic tragedies of sex, relationships, identity, and the internet.

In “The Feminist,�� a young man’s passionate allyship turns to furious nihilism as he realizes, over thirty lonely years, that it isn’t getting him laid. A young woman’s unrequited crush in “Pics�� spirals into borderline obsession and the systematic destruction of her sense of self. And in “Ahegao; or, The Ballad of Sexual Repression,�� a shy late bloomer’s flailing efforts at a first relationship leads to a life-upending mistake. As the characters pop up in each other’s dating apps and social media feeds, or meet in dimly lit bars and bedrooms, they reveal the ways our delusions can warp our desire for connection.

These brilliant satires explore the underrated sorrows of rejection with the authority of a modern classic and the manic intensity of a manifesto. Audacious and unforgettable, Rejection is a stunning mosaic that redefines what it means to be rejected by lovers, friends, society, and oneself.]]> 272 Tony Tulathimutte 0063337878 Chris 4 Thank you Harper Collins and Edelweiss for the ARC.]]> 3.89 2024
author: Tony Tulathimutte
name: Chris
average rating: 3.89
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/02
date added: 2025/01/03
shelves:
review:
Uncomfortable, sad, smart, often funny, original (interlinked) stories about identity, loneliness, wokism, racism which make you rethink certain beliefs and values. I loved most of the stories, but ‘Main Character' -though often funny- was maybe just too smart for me and too long, and in the end it bored me.
Thank you Harper Collins and Edelweiss for the ARC.
]]> 44626712
Vi for upp med mor är en uppföljare till den hyllade debuten Jag for ner till bror. På ojämförlig prosa fortsätter Karin Smirnoff låta oss stifta bekantskap med glesbygdens olika gestalter, och återvändaren janakippo.]]> 350 Karin Smirnoff 9177951409 Chris 0 to-read 4.18 2019
author: Karin Smirnoff
name: Chris
average rating: 4.18
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/02
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 58973806 Mijn broer is een donker, rauw, gewelddadig en liefdevol verhaal. Het vertelt over hartstocht, straf en opoffering �� en het leert dat het grootste en moeilijkste van alles vergeving is.]]> 336 Karin Smirnoff 9021421569 Chris 0 to-read 3.90 2018
author: Karin Smirnoff
name: Chris
average rating: 3.90
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/02
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 219964008 Do you struggle to stay positive in winter?
Do you dread the long nights and dark skies that come with autumn's clock change?
Do you find endless grey skies, drizzle and cold difficult to deal with?

Nobody can change the weather, but Dr. Kari Leibowitz's groundbreaking How to Winter will help you dramatically shift how you feel about the darkest and coldest of the seasons. Leibowitz is the world's foremost winter psychology mindset expert, and in How to Winter she sets out evidence-based strategies to help you learn not only to accept the chillier months, but even to embrace them.

Drawing on her extensive PhD research, and insight from cultures around the world, Leibowitz offers practical, easy-to-follow advice for transforming your experience of wintertime. What's more, she sets out how techniques used for shifting our mindsets around winter can also be used to cope with times of emotional difficulty.

Whether you suffer from Seasonal Affective Disorder, or simply find yourself in an annual slump, How to Winter will help you learn to thrive in cold, dark or difficult times.]]> Kari Leibowitz 1035007002 Chris 4 4.00 2024
author: Kari Leibowitz
name: Chris
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/30
date added: 2024/12/30
shelves:
review:

]]> 223091818
You couldn't really call the man soon to be christened TonyInterruptor a heckler, but he seems to feel an unquenchable urge to disrupt and interrupt live cultural events. Who is he? What does he want? Why does he indulge in behaviour that violates the social contract?

After just such a public interruption goes viral, a small group of characters determine to find out the answers to these question, and end up learning more than they might possibly like about music, culture, relationships, Art, integrity, each other and their own endlessly disrupted and disruptable selves.

As profound as it is exuberant, TonyInterruptor is a comic masterpiece that traces the aftermath of a single event as it reverberates through the online world and its characters' lives, upending everything in its wake and posing fundamental questions about authenticity, the internet, love and, yes, truth.]]> 224 Nicola Barker 1803512547 Chris 0 to-read 5.00 2025
author: Nicola Barker
name: Chris
average rating: 5.00
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/30
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 217017827 An extraordinary and urgent debut by a prize-winning Irish writer, Nesting introduces an unforgettable new voice in fiction.

On a bright spring afternoon in Dublin, Ciara Fay makes a split-second decision that will change everything. Grabbing an armful of clothes from the washing line, Ciara straps her two young daughters into her car and drives away. Head spinning, all she knows for certain is that home is no longer safe.

This was meant to be an escape. But with dwindling savings, no job, and her family across the sea, Ciara finds herself adrift, facing a broken housing system and the voice of her own demons. As summer passes and winter closes in, she must navigate raising her children in a hotel room, searching for a new home and dealing with her husband Ryan’s relentless campaign to get her to come back. Because leaving is one thing, but staying away is another.

What will it take for Ciara to rebuild her life? Can she ever truly break away from Ryan’s control �� and what will be the cost?

Tense, beautiful, and underpinned by an unassailable love, hope and resilience, this is the story of one woman’s bid to start over.]]> 400 Roisín O’Donnell 1398528528 Chris 4 3,5 4.49 2025
author: Roisín O’Donnell
name: Chris
average rating: 4.49
book published: 2025
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/27
date added: 2024/12/27
shelves:
review:
3,5
]]> 197798168
A semifamous artist announces her plan to drive cross-country, from LA to New York. Twenty minutes after leaving her husband and child at home, she spontaneously exits the freeway, beds down in a nondescript motel, and immerses herself in a temporary reinvention that turns out to be the start of an entirely different journey.

Miranda July’s second novel confirms the brilliance of her unique approach to fiction. With July’s wry voice, perfect comic timing, unabashed curiosity about human intimacy, and palpable delight in pushing boundaries, All Fours tells the story of one woman’s quest for a new kind of freedom. Part absurd entertainment, part tender reinvention of the sexual, romantic, and domestic life of a forty-five-year-old female artist, All Fours transcends expectation while excavating our beliefs about life lived as a woman. Once again, July hijacks the familiar and turns it into something new and thrillingly, profoundly alive.]]> 336 Miranda July 0593190262 Chris 3 I have mixed feelings about this. July's style is uncomfortably hilarious as ever, and the midlife crisis/menopause part was interesting. But the sex got superficial and tiresome in the end.
Thanks Penguin random House US and Edelweiss for the ARC.]]> 3.54 2024
author: Miranda July
name: Chris
average rating: 3.54
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2024/05/12
date added: 2024/12/27
shelves:
review:
2,5
I have mixed feelings about this. July's style is uncomfortably hilarious as ever, and the midlife crisis/menopause part was interesting. But the sex got superficial and tiresome in the end.
Thanks Penguin random House US and Edelweiss for the ARC.
]]> 209567298 Eurotrash is a bitterly comic, vertiginous mirror-cabinet of familial and historical reckoning. Kracht's novel is a narrative tour-de-force of the tenderness and spite meted out between two people who cannot escape one another.]]> 192 Christian Kracht Chris 4 3.62 2021
author: Christian Kracht
name: Chris
average rating: 3.62
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/21
date added: 2024/12/21
shelves:
review:

]]> 220517413 A stirring and impeccably balanced story of self-discovery, Archipelago will appeal to fans of Katie Kitamura, Rachel Cusk, and Deborah Levy.

A story of odyssey and homecoming, Natalie Bakopoulos’s Archipelago is a striking, haunting feat that offers brilliant meditations on the slippery borders of nations, languages, and the self.

In the wake of a carjacking, Archipelago’s unnamed narrator leaves the States for a translation writing residency on the Dalmation coast. Along the way, she has an unsettling, aggressive encounter with a man on a Greek ferry, which sets off a series of strange events. At the residency, she reunites with Luka, an old friend from Croatia. Luka calls her Natalia, the name of a character he’s written that seems to be based on her. The narrator doesn’t correct him, instead allowing this ascribed version of herself to unfold. Un-selfed, she extends her stay, and she and Luka strike up a romantic relationship as she continues her translation work.

The hazy summer stretches on until, after a sudden shift, she reclaims narrative agency and takes a impulsive road trip back to Greece, crossing borders. Spare and lyrical, with subversions of The Odyssey and its Ithaca, Archipelago charts a wending journey back to the narrator’s family home—not simply back to a self, but beyond it.]]> Natalie Bakopoulos 1963108302 Chris 0 to-read 5.00 2025
author: Natalie Bakopoulos
name: Chris
average rating: 5.00
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/21
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 217587106 'Why did people, who lived so briefly in this universe, contain so much time?'

Lina and her father have arrived at an enclave called the Sea, a staging-post between migrations, with only a few possessions, among them three volumes from The Great Voyagers encyclopedia series.

In this mysterious and shape-shifting building made of time, pasts and futures collide. Lina befriends her Bento, a Jewish scholar in seventeenth-century Amsterdam, excommunicated for his radical thought; Blucher, a philosopher in 1930s Germany fleeing Nazi persecution; and Jupiter, a poet of Tang Dynasty China, whose brilliance goes unrecognised by the state. Their stories fuse with those of philosophers from previous Baruch Spinoza, Hannah Arendt and the Chinese poet Du Fu. And as Lina's ailing father becomes less well, he recounts how he and Lina came to reside in the Sea, and what his betrayals cost their family and others.

Exploring the role of fate in history, the migratory nature of humanity and the place of faith in our world, The Book of Records addresses fundamental questions about creativity, and good and evil. A deeply philosophical work of huge originality and heft, it shows a master storyteller writing at the height of her powers.]]> Madeleine Thien 1803510722 Chris 0 to-read 4.33 2025
author: Madeleine Thien
name: Chris
average rating: 4.33
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/19
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 221982535
Living in her childhood home brings its own challenges. While she tries to maintain a normal life �� obsessing over the internet and trad wives, going to work, and minding her own business �� Tom’s return stirs up old memories and the stories trapped within the walls of the old house that looms nearby.

As the violence of the past collides with the mundane reality of Claire’s everyday life, she must confront whether she can escape her history or if she is destined to be immobilized by it forever.

Let Me Go Mad in My Own Way explores layers of violence, the lost voices of women, post-colonial repercussions of that violence and the way it can grip generations. Will the secrets revealed alter the course of Claire’s future, and can love exist in a place of pain?

Praise for Elaine Feeney
'AMAZING, EXCITING, VISCERAL' Marian Keyes
'BURSTING WITH TENDERNESS' Douglas Stuart
‘RIVETING�� Roddy Doyle
‘HEART RENDING�� Louise Kennedy
‘UNFORGETTABLE�� Sinéad Gleeson
‘BURSTING WITH SOUL�� Lisa McInerney
‘BEAUTIFULLY RENDERED AND IMAGINED�� Anne Enright
'THRILLING' Nicole Flattery
‘ABSORBING�� Edel Coffey
'FABULOUS' Kevin Barry]]> 352 Elaine Feeney 1787303470 Chris 0 to-read 4.00
author: Elaine Feeney
name: Chris
average rating: 4.00
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/19
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 209059648
Iedere dag gaat de visser Johannes naar het haventje om naar zijn boot te kijken. Zijn vrouw is al enige tijd dood. Op een ochtend, nadat hij wakker is geworden, is er iets veranderd. Is het het licht dat door het raam naar binnen valt? In de haven ontmoet hij zijn gestorven vriend Peter en samen varen ze uit. Op die tocht beleeft Johannes de belangrijkste momenten van zijn leven opnieuw, zijn ongelukkige eerste liefde, daarna de ontmoeting met zijn vrouw. Bij terugkomst in de haven ziet hij tot zijn vreugde dat zij op hem wacht. Samen gaan ze naar huis. Het is alsof een lang gekoesterd verlangen wordt ingelost.

‘Een meesterlijke kleine roman.��
�� Adresseavisen]]> 112 Jon Fosse 9493290832 Chris 4 4.11 2000
author: Jon Fosse
name: Chris
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2000
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/16
date added: 2024/12/16
shelves:
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]]> 22875179 96 Lao Tzu 0711236496 Chris 4 4.48 -350
author: Lao Tzu
name: Chris
average rating: 4.48
book published: -350
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/16
date added: 2024/12/16
shelves:
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]]> 40623153 “Alan Cohen brings to life ancient wisdom for a new era deeply in need of enlightenment. Fresh insights, practical, easy entry, and immense delight!�� �� Chungliang Al Huang, president-director, Living Tao Foundation, and co-author with Alan Watts of The Watercourse WayMay you live during interesting so goes an ancient Chinese blessing—or some say curse. That wish has come true for us. Now what? In this radically illuminating book, Alan Cohen delves into one of the world’s most venerated wisdom texts for answers and brings the lofty and enigmatic concepts of the Tao Te Ching down to earth in fresh, easy-to-grasp language with practical, personal examples we can use to uplift our daily lives.Most other interpretations of the Tao march through the stanzas one by one. Here Alan Cohen calls forth the ancient verses around themes that are central to our modern lives —from love to work to the lessons we learn from pain. Then he brings each message to life in short vignettes where he imagines himself a student of Lao Tse and interacts with the master directly and intimately. He invites you to join the ancient sage and the contemporary seeker as they wend their way through the challenges and triumphs of the same journey you’re taking yourself.]]> 233 Alan Cohen 1401953638 Chris 4 4.41
author: Alan Cohen
name: Chris
average rating: 4.41
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/15
date added: 2024/12/15
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]]> 19634 Birds of America we share a grown woman’s bittersweet nostalgia for the wildness of her youth.
��
The summer Berie was fifteen, she and her best friend Sils had jobs at Storyland in upstate New York where Berie sold tickets to see the beautiful Sils portray Cinderella in a strapless evening gown. They spent their breaks smoking, joking, and gossiping. After work they followed their own reckless rules, teasing the fun out of small town life, sleeping in the family station wagon, and drinking borrowed liquor from old mayonnaise jars. But no matter how wild, they always managed to escape any real danger—until the adoring Berie sees that Sils really does need her help—and then everything changes.]]> 147 Lorrie Moore 1400033829 Chris 0 to-read 3.84 1994
author: Lorrie Moore
name: Chris
average rating: 3.84
book published: 1994
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/14
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 210680099
From the author of Reese’s Book Club Pick and New York Times bestseller Wrong Place Wrong Time comes an addictive thriller about a new mother’s world upended when her husband commits a terrifying crime. How well does she truly know the man she loves? And what danger does she face if her entire life has been built on a lie?

It is June 21st, the longest day of the year, and new mother Camilla’s life is about to change forever. After months of maternity leave, she will drop her infant daughter off at daycare for the first time and return to her job as a literary agent. Finally. But, when she wakes, her husband Luke isn’t there, and in his place is a cryptic note.

Then it starts. Breaking news: there's a hostage situation developing in London. The police arrive, and tell her Luke is involved. But he isn't a hostage. Her husband—doting father, eternal optimist—is the gunman.

What she does next is crucial. Because only she knows what the note he left behind that morning says...

Famous Last Words is the story of a crime, a marriage, and more secrets than Camilla ever could have imagined. This novel cements Gillian McAllister’s reputation as “the best at putting her characters in impossible situations and making her readers not only contemplate but feel what it would be like to find themselves in those situations.�� (Emily Henry)]]> 402 Gillian McAllister 1405957328 Chris 4 Thank you Penguin and Netgalley for the ARC.]]> 4.10 2025
author: Gillian McAllister
name: Chris
average rating: 4.10
book published: 2025
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/14
date added: 2024/12/14
shelves:
review:
Another great crime novel by Gillian McAllister! It’s smart and thrilling, with interesting characters and unexpected plot twists. I really enjoyed reading this.
Thank you Penguin and Netgalley for the ARC.
]]> 220984498
Through the stories of those who've obsessed over this phenomenon, Helm's extraordinary history is formed: the Neolithic tribe who tried to placate Helm, the Dark Age wizard priest who wanted to banish Helm, the Victorian steam engineer who attempted to capture Helm - and the farmer's daughter who loved Helm. But now Dr Selima Sutar, surrounded by infinite clouds and measuring instruments in her observation hut, fears human pollution is killing Helm.

Rich, wild and vital, Helm is the story of a unique life force, and of a relationship: between nature and people, neither of whom can weather life without the other.]]> 256 Sarah Hall 0571383556 Chris 0 to-read 5.00 2025
author: Sarah Hall
name: Chris
average rating: 5.00
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/07
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 123161695
Hun ringer fra en rasteplads til romanens egentlige fortæller. Men det er kun Hafni, der taler. Hun har planlagt at fejre sin skilsmisse med en såkaldt smørrebrødsrejse fra Roskilde over Ringsted, Korsør, Nyborg, Svendborg, Faaborg, og via Bøjden-Fynshav slutteligt til Gråsten for at indtage det store sønderjyske kaffebord.

Det var hensigten, at turen skulle tage 8 dage.

Den ender med at vare cirka en måned.

Nu ringer Hafni så for at fortælle, hvad der er gået galt undervejs.

Hun siger:

Jeg vil ikke være mig.

Jeg vil lave mig selv om.

Jeg ved ikke, hvordan jeg skal lave mig selv om.]]> 168 Helle Helle 8743406033 Chris 3 3.66 2023
author: Helle Helle
name: Chris
average rating: 3.66
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2024/12/07
date added: 2024/12/07
shelves:
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]]> 217371402 Ants live in communities, where everyone helps out.

Everyone has a task for the community ��
Everyone is needed.
No one has to know everything.

One morning, Emelie can’t get out of bed. Her therapist calls it burnout. Her neighbour calls it the tiny work death. She needs to get away from the brightness of the city lights, the noise of the people, the constant demands, so she goes to the woods, pitches her tent overlooking the lake, breathes. And that’s where she sees them, the

A man with a sad face.
A tall, strong, older woman.
A woman in her forties, squatting to examine an ant hill.
Another woman in her forties, short, long hair, ample bosom, good posture �� the leader?
An extremely beautiful man.
A slightly younger man, in a Helly Hansen jacket and trucker hat.
And a teenage boy, standing a little way from the group.

Who are they? What do they mean to each other? And why do they behave in such strange thanking the fish they eat, sleeping under a tree, singing off key, dancing without music, never letting the boy fully in?

As Emelie becomes more and more drawn to the Colony, she begins to re-evaluate her own lifestyle. Wouldn’t it be nice to live as these seven do? Apart from society and its expectations. But groups always have their dynamics and roles. Which are you? And what if you want to change?]]> 420 Annika Norlin 1761386123 Chris 0 to-read 3.78 2023
author: Annika Norlin
name: Chris
average rating: 3.78
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/06
shelves: to-read
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]]> 205363936 In this electrifying novel, Richard Price, the author of Clockers and a writer on The Wire, shines a light in every corner of New York City.Boom! A June morning on Frederick Douglass Boulevard in Harlem. Suddenly, where a five-story building had stood is nothing but fuming low hills of rubble, the cars parked in front pancaked and coated in ash. Sirens. Havoc. Confusion. Destruction. And people missing.Richard Price, our greatest chronicler of the city today, describes the effect of the disaster on the outer and inner lives of a rich and compelling group of characters. Anthony Walker is pulled from the rubble and, miraculously, survives, to find himself inspired by a religious sense of mission. Royal Lyons, who owns a failing funeral parlor, discovers a new lease on life. And Mary Roe, a hard-bitten NYPD detective, embarks on a personal quest to find a man who is missing.Price's first novel since the bestselling Lush Life presents a bravura portrait of a community on the edge of disintegration. Rich with indelible characters and incredible drama, Lazarus Man is a compelling work of suspense and social vision by one of our preeminent writers.]]> 352 Richard Price 0374168156 Chris 4 Thank you Farrar, Straus and Giroux and Edelweiss for the ARC.]]> 3.46 2024
author: Richard Price
name: Chris
average rating: 3.46
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/06
date added: 2024/12/06
shelves:
review:
Apart from the explosion at the beginning, not a lot happens in Lazarus Man but I was still very much invested. In my opinion it is not really a thriller, more a character driven novel about live in a big city (New York) and it’s a great one. Price writes characters so well with all their flaws, imperfections, reasonings and doubts. This was very good!
Thank you Farrar, Straus and Giroux and Edelweiss for the ARC.
]]> 221228031 A stirring novel from the author of I Couldn’t Love You More and Hideous Kinky: the story of two sisters who couldn’t be more different and the great love that holds them together throughout a tumultuous youth

For as long as Elise can remember, she’s been caught between love for her rootless mother and devotion to her fierce and exacting sister, Bea. From their peripatetic childhood to their restless teenage years—hitching through rural Ireland, the move to a communal house—she’s been forced to make a choice between these two very different ways of approaching life.

But as the girls come of age and embark on their own experiments—in love, drugs, work, motherhood—Bea is at risk of drifting further and further away. Can their loyalty to each other transcend the damages of a past that feels almost too dangerous to examine?

With scalpel-sharp insight, Esther Freud excavates the most intimate relationships of our lives, laying bare the fear and longing, the secrets and mistrust. My Sister and Other Lovers is an irresistible exploration of love, family, and freedom in all its forms.]]> 240 Esther Freud 0063434474 Chris 0 to-read 4.12
author: Esther Freud
name: Chris
average rating: 4.12
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/05
shelves: to-read
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]]> 215500743
In 2020, Anna is teaching nine-year-olds on Zoom, navigating a relationship interrupted by enforced distance, and coping with a teenaged son who cannot leave the house. When an unstamped envelope arrives overnight, the traumatic past she had tried to bury begins to cast its own long shadow on the present.

This is a twisty, heart-racing page-turner and an incisive look at the personal impact of the violence of the state, the police and the villains much closer to home.]]> 384 A.L. Kennedy 1916812287 Chris 0 to-read 3.54
author: A.L. Kennedy
name: Chris
average rating: 3.54
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/02
shelves: to-read
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]]> 205358060 An alternative cover edition for this ISBN can be found here.

When a young man’s girlfriend mysteriously vanishes, he sets his heart on finding the imaginary city where her true self lives. His search will lead him to take a job in a remote library with mysteries of its own.

When he finally makes it to the walled city, a shadowless place of horned beasts and willow trees, he finds his beloved working in a different library �� a dream library. But she has no memory of their life together in the other world and, as the lines between reality and fantasy start to blur, he must decide what he’s willing to lose.

A love story, a quest, an ode to books and to the libraries that house them, The City and Its Uncertain Walls is a parable for these strange times.]]> 464 Haruki Murakami 1787304477 Chris 3 I'm not sure whether to give this 4 or 3 stars... I absolutely loved Murakami's world building; the walled city, the dream library, the fact that there exists a job as a dream reader, the idea that one could exisit in two seperate worlds and could lose one's shadow, the unicorns, etc.
However, this book was also somewhat repetitive and elaborative, and the descriptions of love and the female body were a bit 'cringe'...
Thank you Knopf and Edelweiss for the ARC]]> 3.77 2023
author: Haruki Murakami
name: Chris
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2024/12/02
date added: 2024/12/02
shelves:
review:
3,5
I'm not sure whether to give this 4 or 3 stars... I absolutely loved Murakami's world building; the walled city, the dream library, the fact that there exists a job as a dream reader, the idea that one could exisit in two seperate worlds and could lose one's shadow, the unicorns, etc.
However, this book was also somewhat repetitive and elaborative, and the descriptions of love and the female body were a bit 'cringe'...
Thank you Knopf and Edelweiss for the ARC
]]> 39380380
This graphic-novel version of the�� Tao Te Ching —the poetic classic that is the philosophical and religious basis of Taoism—brings the teachings into a modern light in a completely fresh and unique way. Each of the 81 poem-passages of the�� Tao Te Ching ��is reinterpreted by award-winning graphic novel writer Sean Michael Wilson and brought to life by the artful illustrations of Hong Kong artist Cary Kwok, who sets the text in various contemporary scenes to bring out the modern relevance.]]> 176 Sean Michael Wilson 1611803284 Chris 2 3.22
author: Sean Michael Wilson
name: Chris
average rating: 3.22
book published:
rating: 2
read at: 2024/11/25
date added: 2024/11/25
shelves:
review:
This translation felt off and was simply too clunky, and I’m afraid the illustrations didn’t help either in a better understanding of the Tao te ching.
]]> 220228230
Decades later, happily divorced and newly energized, Edith is living a life of contentment and comfort in Ireland. When her best friend Maebh receives a call from an American man claiming to be her brother, Maebh must decide if she will meet him, and she asks Edith for help.

Ripeness by Sarah Moss is an extraordinary novel about familial love and the communities we create, about migration and new beginnings, and about what it is to have somewhere to belong.]]> 304 Sarah Moss 152903549X Chris 0 to-read 4.18 2025
author: Sarah Moss
name: Chris
average rating: 4.18
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/20
shelves: to-read
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]]> 208895883
Did what happened to Freya as a child one fateful summer influence the adult she would become �� or was she always destined to be that person? Was she born with cruelty in her heart or did something force it into being?

In Fire, John Boyne takes the reader on a chilling, uncomfortable but utterly compelling psychological journey to the epicentre of the human condition, asking the age-old nurture �� or nature?]]> 163 John Boyne 1529916526 Chris 3 Another great book in the elements serie, though I thought both Water and Earth were in the end more convincing. The first half of Fire was very strong and absolutely blew me away, but I had some doubts about the second half. Looking forward to Air!
Thank you Penguin Random House UK and Netgalley UK for the ARC.]]> 4.14 2024
author: John Boyne
name: Chris
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2024/10/04
date added: 2024/11/18
shelves:
review:
3,5 stars
Another great book in the elements serie, though I thought both Water and Earth were in the end more convincing. The first half of Fire was very strong and absolutely blew me away, but I had some doubts about the second half. Looking forward to Air!
Thank you Penguin Random House UK and Netgalley UK for the ARC.
]]> 215553686 The Benefactors we meet Frankie, Miriam and Bronagh - very different women but all mothers to 18-year-old boys. Glamorous Frankie, now married to a wealthy, older man, grew up in care. Miriam has recently lost her beloved husband Kahlil in ambiguous circumstances. Bronagh, the CEO of a children's services charity, loves the celebrity and prestige this brings her. They do not know each other yet, but when their sons are accused of sexually assaulting Misty Johnston, whose family lacks the wealth and social-standing of their own, they'll leverage all the power of their position to protect their children.


From the prize-winning author of Dance Move and Sweet Home, this is an astounding novel about intimate histories, class and money - and what being a parent means. Brutal, tender and rigorously intelligent, The Benefactors is a daring, polyphonic presentation of modern-day Northern Ireland. It is also very funny.]]> Wendy Erskine 1399741683 Chris 0 to-read 3.94
author: Wendy Erskine
name: Chris
average rating: 3.94
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/16
shelves: to-read
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]]> 203166817 A groundbreaking but timeless early work from one of the world's most heralded novelists

A relatively young woman, aged thirty. She married in her early twenties, had two children. It is winter. January and minus 14°C, white, frosty mist around the parked car, around the spruces, the mailbox on its post, but higher up the sky is blue, clear, the sun has come back. She has written in her diary that she is waiting for the heartbreak that will turn her into her true self. She has an impending sense of doom or possibly her own death.

So opens Vigids Hjorth’s ground-breaking novel from 2001, which melds the yearning, doomed potency of Annie Ernaux’s A Simple Passion with the scale and force of Anna Karenina. It asks, can passion be mistaken for love? And proceeds to document the destruction a decade defined by such a misconstruction can yield on a life.]]> 352 Vigdis Hjorth 1839768886 Chris 4 3.37 2001
author: Vigdis Hjorth
name: Chris
average rating: 3.37
book published: 2001
rating: 4
read at: 2024/11/14
date added: 2024/11/15
shelves:
review:
In the beginning, I didn’t think I would finish this. I hated the main characters and couldn’t understand why Ida fell in love with Arnold in the first place and then obsessively wants to continue with the affair, no matter what. It’s strange how this worked, but I got drawn in by the language, the repetition (with slight variations) of phrases, the detailed rendering of obsessive thoughts, and by my astonishment and anger at this toxic, destructive relationship. Not a nice read, but a fascinating one nonetheless.
]]> 55752454 Daisy Johnson Chris 3 3.83 2021
author: Daisy Johnson
name: Chris
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2021
rating: 3
read at: 2024/11/15
date added: 2024/11/15
shelves:
review:

]]> 209335537 From the exceptionally original mind of CWA Gold Dagger Award winner and Booker longlisted author Belinda Bauer comes this sweeping tale of obsession, greed, ambition, and a crime that has remained unsolved for a hundred years.

How do you find something that doesn’t exist?

1926. On the cliffs of Yorkshire, men are lowered on ropes to steal the eggs of the sea birds who nest there. The most beautiful are sold for large sums. A small girl—penniless and neglected by her family—retrieves one such treasure. Its discovery will forever alter the course of her life.

A century later. In a remote cottage in Wales, Patrick Fort finds his friend, Nick, and his mother tied up and robbed. The only thing missing: a carved case containing an incredible scarlet egg. Doggedly attempting to retrieve it, Patrick and Nick discover the cruel world of egg trafficking, and soon find themselves on the trail of a priceless collection of eggs lost to history. Until now.

A taut, wonderfully imagined novel brimming with skullduggery at every turn, The Impossible Thing is a blazing testament to Belinda Bauer’s status as one of our greatest living crime writers.]]> 309 Belinda Bauer 1473562139 Chris 0 to-read 4.41
author: Belinda Bauer
name: Chris
average rating: 4.41
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/14
shelves: to-read
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]]> 217388128 A genre-bending story about breaking―both of the heart and form itself―from the author of Biography of X.

Adrift in the winter of 2021 after a sudden breakup and the ensuing depression, the novelist Catherine Lacey began cataloguing the wreckage of her life and the beauty of her friendships, a practice that eventually propagated fiction both entirely imagined and strangely true. She soon realized that she was writing about her relationship with faith. Betrayed by the mercurial partner she had trusted with a shared mortgage and suddenly catapulted into the unknown, Lacey’s appetite vanished completely, a visceral reminder of the teenage emaciation that came when she stopped believing in God. Through relationships, travel, reading, and memories of her religious fanaticism, Lacey charts the contours of faith’s absence and reemergence. Bending form, she and her characters recall gnostic experiences with animals, close encounters with male anger, griefdriven lust, and the redemptive power of platonic love and narrative itself.

A hybrid work across fiction and nonfiction with no beginning or ending, The Möbius Book troubles the line between memory and fiction with an openhearted defense of faith’s inherent danger.]]> 240 Catherine Lacey 0374615403 Chris 0 to-read 4.09 2025
author: Catherine Lacey
name: Chris
average rating: 4.09
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/12
shelves: to-read
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]]> 200555235 A searing novel about being a wife, a mother, and an artist, and how marriage makes liars out of us all, from the author of Very Cold People and 300 Arguments.

“Painful and brilliant—I loved it.”—Elif Batuman, author of The Idiot and Either/Or

A nuclear family can destroy a woman artist. I’d always known that. But I’d never suspected how easily I’d fall into one anyway.

When Jane, an aspiring writer, meets filmmaker John Bridges, they both want the same things: to be in love, to live a successful creative life, and to be happy. When they marry, Jane believes she has found everything she was looking for, including—a few years later—all the attendant joy and labor of motherhood. But it’s not long until Jane finds herself subsumed by John’s ambitions, whims, and ego; in short, she becomes a wife.

As Jane’s career flourishes, their marriage starts to falter. Throughout the upheavals of family life, Jane tries to hold it all together. That is, until John leaves her.

Combining the intensity of Elena Ferrante’s Days of Abandonment and the pithy wisdom of Jenny Offill’s Dept of Speculation, Liars is a tour de force of wit and rage, telling the blistering story of a marriage as it burns to the ground, and of a woman rising inexorably from its ashes.]]> 272 Sarah Manguso 0593241258 Chris 5 Thank you Random House US and Edelweiss for the ARC.]]> 3.67 2024
author: Sarah Manguso
name: Chris
average rating: 3.67
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/07/14
date added: 2024/11/12
shelves:
review:
This novel is filled with a woman’s (or in this case ‘wife’s��) rage and I thought it was excellent! It’s intense and sad and yes, I can understand that some people will think the representation is too one-sided and/or exaggerated, but I think that’s exactly where the strength of this book lies. It reminded me of the last poems Sylvia Plath wrote, the ones that were published in ‘Ariel.�� Very powerful and impressive.
Thank you Random House US and Edelweiss for the ARC.
]]> 184381316
Mitch and Yonko have drifted apart, but they will always be bound together. Because long ago they witnessed an unspeakable tragedy, a tragedy that they’ve kept secret for their entire lives. They never speak of it, but it’s all around them. Like history, it repeats itself.

Yuko Tsushima’s sweeping and consuming novel is a metaphysical saga of postwar Japan. Wildcat Dome is a hugely ambitious exploration of denial, of the ways in which countries and their citizens avoid telling the truth—a tale of guilt, loss, and inevitable reckoning.]]> 231 Yūko Tsushima 0241649501 Chris 0 to-read 0.0 2013
author: Yūko Tsushima
name: Chris
average rating: 0.0
book published: 2013
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/11
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 1095134 160 Hans-Georg Moeller 0812695631 Chris 3 3.94 2004
author: Hans-Georg Moeller
name: Chris
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2004
rating: 3
read at: 2024/11/10
date added: 2024/11/10
shelves:
review:

]]> 205673381 Franz Kafka meets Yorgos Lanthimos in this provocative new novel from one of America’s most brilliant and distinctive writers

In a speculative future, Abel, a menial worker, is called to serve in a secretive and fabled jury system. At the heart of this system is the repeat room, where a single juror, selected from hundreds of candidates, is able to inhabit the defendant’s lived experience, to see as if through their eyes.

The case to which Abel is assigned is revealed in the novel’s shocking second act. We receive a record of a boy’s broken and constrained life, a tale that reveals an illicit and passionate psycho-sexual relationship, its end as tragic as the circumstances of its conception.

Artful in its suspense, and sharp in its evocation of a byzantine and cruel bureaucracy, The Repeat Room is an exciting and pointed critique of the nature of knowledge and judgment, and a vivid framing of Ball’s absurd and nihilistic philosophy of love.]]> 256 Jesse Ball 1646221400 Chris 4 Weird (in a good way) but also very disturbing.]]> 3.13 2024
author: Jesse Ball
name: Chris
average rating: 3.13
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/11/08
date added: 2024/11/08
shelves:
review:
3,5
Weird (in a good way) but also very disturbing.
]]> 218757391
'There aren't any grown-ups anywhere.'

Orphaned by society, they must forge their own; but it isn't long before the group is split, and their innocent games take a dangerous turn.

'What are we? Humans? Or Animals?'

For the first time, from acclaimed artist Aimée de Jongh, comes the stunning graphic novel adaptation of this classic story, one of the BBCs '100 Novels that shaped our World'.]]> 352 Aimée de Jongh 0571374255 Chris 5 Beautifully illustrated 4.44 1954
author: Aimée de Jongh
name: Chris
average rating: 4.44
book published: 1954
rating: 5
read at: 2024/11/07
date added: 2024/11/07
shelves:
review:
Beautifully illustrated
]]> 219250584 'Absolutely, absolutely incredible.' Karl Ove Knausgård
'A total explosion.' Nicole Krauss
'Unforgettable.' Hernan Díaz
'Breathtaking.' Chetna Maroo


It seems so odd to me now, how one can be so unsettled by the improbable. When we know that our entire existence is founded on freak occurrences and improbable coincidences. That we wouldn't be here at all if it weren't for these curious twists of fate.
The first volume of the poetic, page-turning masterpiece about one woman's fall through the cracks of time.
Tara Selter has slipped out of time.

Every morning, she wakes up to the 18th of November. She no longer expects to wake up to the 19th of November, and she no longer remembers the 17th of November as if it were yesterday.

She comes to know the shape of the day like the back of her hand - the grey morning light in her Paris hotel; the moment a blackbird breaks into song; her husband's surprise at seeing her return home unannounced. But for everyone around her, this day is lived for the first and only time. They do not remember the other 18ths of November, and they do not believe her when she tries to explain.

As Tara approaches her 365th 18th of November, she can't shake the feeling that somewhere underneath the surface of this day, there's a way to escape.
WINNER OF THE 2022 NORDIC COUNCIL LITERATURE PRIZE]]> 166 Solvej Balle 0571383386 Chris 3 Thank you Faber & Faber and Netgalley UK for the ARC.]]> 3.93 2020
author: Solvej Balle
name: Chris
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2020
rating: 3
read at: 2024/11/06
date added: 2024/11/06
shelves:
review:
Really strange, fascinating and mesmerising. But also depressing. And to be honest, I’m not sure I believed in it, that someone would be able to live through the same day again and again and not go mad or kill themselves. Not for me I’m afraid.
Thank you Faber & Faber and Netgalley UK for the ARC.
]]> 9398491 439 Zhuangzi Chris 0 to-read 4.33 -350
author: Zhuangzi
name: Chris
average rating: 4.33
book published: -350
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/06
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 25725150 Van dit fundamentele werk zijn in een recent verleden nieuwe manuscriptbronnen gevonden die op veel punten de tot nu toe bekende tekst verbeteren. Kristofer Schipper, emeritus hoogleraar sinologie (Leiden en Parijs) en een erkende autoriteit op het gebied van het taoïsme, heeft op basis van deze nieuwe gegevens een algemeen toegankelijke vertaling geleverd. Ook schreef hij een uitvoerige inleiding, zowel over de vroege geschiedenis van het taoïsme als over de betekenis ervan voor onze huidige cultuur en samenleving. Teneinde het steeds talrijker aantal mensen dat tegenwoordig Chinees leert of heeft geleerd, tegemoet te komen is de oorspronkelijke tekst, zoals die op de basis van de nieuwe tekstvondsten kan worden vastgesteld, bijgevoegd.


De volledige geschriften van Zhuang Zi, de door Jan De Meyer vertaalde Liezi en de Daodejing vormen samen de klassieke trilogie van het taoïsme.]]> 263 Kristofer Schipper Chris 0 to-read 4.02 2011
author: Kristofer Schipper
name: Chris
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2011
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/05
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 213189480 201 Bettine Vriesekoop 9493319296 Chris 3 3.58
author: Bettine Vriesekoop
name: Chris
average rating: 3.58
book published:
rating: 3
read at: 2024/11/05
date added: 2024/11/05
shelves:
review:

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