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Jan 22, 20231 min read
1043. Jonathan Coe - Bournville
This is very good. A portrait of (possibly Middle) England over the 75 years since the end of WW2 until the anniversary 75 years later....
Dec 24, 20221 min read
1037. James Shapiro - 1599
This is not the sort of book I would normally read. The title is misleading, it is not biographical at all, but a year of events and...
Jan 19, 20221 min read
935. Simon Brett - The Liar In The Library
Very good and very well written – good prose. An old fashioned detective novel with a contemporary setting. The two sleuths are a couple...
Dec 3, 20201 min read
831. Stephen Fay & David Kynaston - Arlott, Swanton And The Soul...
The full title continues ‘of English cricket'. But I couldn’t really work out whether it was a parallel biography of these 2 cricket...
Sep 27, 20191 min read
716. George Eliot - Middlemarch
I think reading 714 in Malaga exercised my reading muscle and perhaps that was why I couldn’t be bothered with 715. I think, on the 3rd...
May 12, 20191 min read
682. William Golding - The Pyramid
A strange book about English provincial life, set unclearly in time, but I think in the 1930’s. The central figure is an adolescent boy...
May 7, 20191 min read
680. Ian McEwan - Machines Like Me
This was a good, big and difficult book. The basic plot premise is that a man buys a humanoid type machine, I believe for £85k. He and...
Mar 11, 20191 min read
666. Simon Mawer - Tightrope
Well, close on the title. Very much the successor to 663 (which I think you would have to have read first) but, for me, less compelling....
Jan 25, 20191 min read
653. C. J. Sansom - Dissolution
Never read any of these before, but very very good. Quasi detective novels set in Tudor England whose heroine/ detective Shardlake is a...
Nov 28, 20181 min read
642. Jonathan Coe - Middle England
A book about Brexit, by the author of The Rotters Club, and a sequel in that some of the characters recur. Quite an angry (I presume)...
Nov 10, 20181 min read
638. Andrew Michael Hurley - The Loney
This is a strange book; Radio 4’s book of the month for November which is where I came across it. The Loney is a bit of actual (or...
Nov 3, 20181 min read
636. Salley Vickers - The Librarian
One of Paddy’s library books; I have never heard of the author (although I think I may have read ‘The Cleaner of Chartres’), but this was...
Jul 28, 20181 min read
613. Craig Brown - Ma'am Darling
A pretty atrocious book about a pretty atrocious person (Princess Margaret). Subtitled ’99 Glimpses of’ her, not one of these was...
Jun 19, 20181 min read
602. Edith Wharton - The House Of Mirth
Not a lot of humour or mirth in this. I enjoyed The Age of Innocence (593) and thought I would try another Wharton. Proved to be (by the...
Jun 14, 20181 min read
598. Sarah Vaughan - Anatomy Of A Scandal
Sensationalist in topic, possibly by analogy to the Cameron era, but not really that good. (Actually better I think). A political aide is...
Mar 20, 20181 min read
579. Graham Greene - Brighton Rock
This is interesting because I first read this in June 2012 (no 19) and hated it! 6 years later I thought it was pretty good; not that...
Feb 4, 20181 min read
570. Charles Dickens - A Child's History Of England
I thought I would read some Dickens, partly because Susan Hill (568) likes him, and chose this as I don’t like the novels. Dickens does...
Nov 4, 20171 min read
546. Kate Atkinson - Human Croquet
Tried to read this years ago (in Oslo I think) and couldn’t get on with it. Enjoyed it much more this time; it is quite a difficult book,...
May 4, 20171 min read
484. Peter Robinson - When The Music's Over
The new Banks novel, based (topically) on Jimmy Saville (the newly promoted Banks investigates and Winsome) and grooming white working...
Jan 31, 20171 min read
464. G F Newman - The Corrupted Part One
I think this guy is also a TV script-writer, but this was very good. Set in the East End post war, a bunch of working class on the...