The subtitle of this impressively large group biography makes a big claim: 'How Dorothy L Sayers and her Oxford Circle remade the world for women'. The publishers have latched onto the most obviously marketable aspect of the book - the selling power of Dorothy L Sayers' name and life - and thus skewed the reader's … Continue reading Mo Moulton, Mutual Admiration Society
Category: political / social commentary
Isabella Tree’s Wilding and Tim Flannery’s Europe
These two books about European natural processes are curiously connected, though I had no suspicion of this when I bought them. I was obviously in the mood for a sustained period of browsing on ancient species ecology and the prospects for reversing the mass extinctions caused by people. Looking for hope in the face of … Continue reading Isabella Tree’s Wilding and Tim Flannery’s Europe
To the recycling!
Another in my popular series of mini reviews in which I grumble about books on a scale from furious bitterness to indifference. You can read more of these, and find links to others, here. Today I clear out the books on the meh end. Susan Schwartz, Byzantium's Crown I enjoyed the premise for this fantasy … Continue reading To the recycling!
Hong Kong: stories from within
This is not a book review, but a distribution post. A Hong Kong friend has been collecting publicly available blog posts, articles and Tweet threads written by people who have been caught up in the protests in Hong Kong this year. We've presented them here to help spread the word more widely in the anglophone … Continue reading Hong Kong: stories from within
Kathleen Jamie, Surfacing
Kathleen Jamie is a poet, but it's a curious thing: she never speaks about her poetry in her essays. I've read and reread her earlier collections Findings and Sightlines, and I've drenched myself in her new essays in Surfacing now a couple of times, but it's only just occurred to me that if you only come to Jamie … Continue reading Kathleen Jamie, Surfacing
Mary Kelly, The Spoilt Kill
This is a tremendous crime thriller from 1961, that won the Crime Writers' Association Critics' Award for that year. Mary Kelly went on to write more detective novels, but somehow her name has disappeared from sight. Crime fiction historian Martin Edwards says that she stopped writing fiction in her forties, because she chose when and what … Continue reading Mary Kelly, The Spoilt Kill
Christina Dalcher, Vox
Update: Vox won the Goldsboro Glass Bell Award on 16 September 2019! The title of this very good thriller is a little misleading: the word 'Vox' (Latin for the voice of, as in 'vox populi', the voice of the people), doesn't appear anywhere in the novel. I was hoping for some time that it would … Continue reading Christina Dalcher, Vox
