Was this the original baggy monster of a novel? It's huge, and quite baggy, and has no place on my shelves now that I've read it, because its vastness is not matched by re-readability. However, some parts are very good indeed, so it's a patchy reading experience. I found myself skipping the rather tedious romance … Continue reading Arnold Bennett, Imperial Palace
This novel was hypnotically uncomfortable to read, but also so rich in detail, colour, life, event, that I couldn't help but keep going. I know a great deal more about modern Cairo than I did before, and I think I understand more of the horrific nature of Egyptian social and political corruption that brought about … Continue reading Alaa Al Aswany, The Yacoubian Building
Update: The Seabird's Cry won the Jeffries Prize this week! Further update: it also won the Wainwright Golden Beer Book Prize for 2018! 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 … Continue reading Adam Nicolson, The Seabird’s Cry
This excellent book is the missing link (though obviously it hasn’t been missing at all to those who’ve known it for thirty years), between Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, and Mary Beard’s Women & Power. Published in 1983, it is a perfect blend of feminist insight and great intellectual clarity, and is a … Continue reading Joanna Russ, How to Suppress Women’s Writing
Inez Holden was a journalist, and a friend or a colleague of most of the literary giants of the middle of the twentieth century, as well as a former lover of George Orwell. I’ve been reading her Second World War writing, and have been thoroughly intrigued by her novel There’s No Story There (1944), which … Continue reading Inez Holden, There’s No Story There
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
There is no book being reviewed this week because I am moving house. All my books are in boxes, waiting to be delivered (tomorrow!) from a depot somewhere near Corsham, to our new house just outside Bath, in the west of England. I am so tired from garden wrangling, tradesman supervision, long-distance driving, listening to … Continue reading hang on
