Update: The Seabird's Cry won the Jeffries Prize this week! The subtitle to this stunning book is ‘The Lives and Loves of Puffins, Gannets and Other Ocean Voyagers’, but it really ought to include ‘Deaths’, because I have never read such a moving account about the daily lives and deaths of birds. It’s the accompaniment … Continue reading Adam Nicolson, The Seabird’s Cry
I found this pleasingly hefty but slim volume in The Beaufort Bookshop in Bath, two days after we'd moved (always check out your new city's second-hand bookshops). I do like old editions of nature books, and have a particular keenness for the post-Second World War period, when rationing could be bypassed by going to the … Continue reading The Countryside Companion
Edith Sitwell, Bath (1932) I am now a resident of Bath, in south-west England (or will be in 6 weeks or so, builders permitting). When our old house was being packed I fished Edith Sitwell’s Bath out of the bookcase from the very hands of the packers, so as to have time to read it … Continue reading Three short reading pleasures
Ursula Le Guin has died, and I’m currently living in a different country to all my copies of her books. So I had recourse to my reading diaries to find out what I’d read of her work in the past ten years. Lavinia (2008) This is the only one of Le Guin’s historical fantasy … Continue reading Reading some Ursula Le Guin
Here are short reviews of books I’ve liked recently, for your consideration. Georgette Heyer, Royal Escape (1938) This is not a Regency romance, and it’s possibly the weakest of her historical reconstructions, but I liked it enough to keep reading, simply because I don’t know the history of Charles II's escape from the Battle of … Continue reading These I have quite liked
I bought this imposing Harvill Press hardback on impulse while looking for something entirely different, and it held me enthralled for five evenings of reading. Before this, I didn't know much about the French Revolution, and I knew nothing about the years between the Terror and Napoleon's coronation. Madame de La Tour du Pin's memoirs … Continue reading The Memoirs of Madame de La Tour du Pin
This 1958 novel crackles with foreboding. It is based on the apparently artless retelling by a teenage girl of a summer spent in France with her elder sister and their younger siblings. It seethes with barely understood sexuality, and, in the absence of any reliable and responsible adults, the dangers that Joss and her sister … Continue reading Rumer Godden, The Greengage Summer
