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Aug 9, 20231 min read
1084. Marghanita Laski - Little Boy Lost
Another very good book, although completely different. Set just after the end of the 2nd World War, Hilary Wainwright is an ex-British...
Sep 21, 20221 min read
1014. Mick Herron - Spook Street
So nice to read a book with a coherent narrative plot, after struggling with Joyce. Have read this before, it is the one where River goes...
Jan 12, 20221 min read
933. Olivier Norek - Turf Wars
This is pretty low grade. From the writer of the French TV serial 'Spiral', which we enjoy. This is just violent turf wars and political...
Nov 15, 20211 min read
915. Sebastian Faulks - Charlotte Gray
This is a brilliant book. I am not sure I had ever completed it before (the left had side of the spine is suspiciously unbent) and I had...
Jul 19, 20211 min read
878. Sadie Jones - The Snakes
One of P’s. I quite enjoyed this and it was original in that the two central characters Dan and Bea (Dante P suggested?!) are both dead...
Jan 15, 20211 min read
842. Émile Zola - Madeleine Ferat
Contemporary with 'Thérèse Raquin', this is not that interesting. Set in French 19th century bourgeois society, a story of a rather dull...
Dec 26, 20201 min read
838. Mara Timon - City Of Spies
I enjoyed this, despite being irritated at times. Quite a big canvass for a debut novel. Set mainly in Lisbon in the middle of the 2nd...
Dec 24, 20201 min read
837. Émile Zola - Thérèse Raquin
I am reading these in chronological order as I find the complete works pretty un-navigable on my kindle. I have read this before, but...
Dec 19, 20201 min read
835. Emile Zola - The Mysteries Of Marseilles
No. 3 in my unnavigable Complete works. If I was writing a critical summary of Zola’s novels, I would say that this is a much longer...
Dec 13, 20201 min read
834. Emile Zola - The Dead Woman's Wish
I think 833 is the first book; this is the 2nd. Much more plot and characterisation, a dying woman entrusts her adopted son to care for...
Dec 12, 20201 min read
833. Emile Zola - Claude's Confession
I read this as a not very good Bildungsroman. About a young Provencal man who has come to Paris and ends up living in pretty abject...
Sep 6, 20191 min read
711. Sebastian Faulks - Paris Echo
Brilliant. As the blurb/a reviewer says, partly a hymn to Paris, but also via the alternating and very different narrators, an...
Nov 30, 20181 min read
643. Albert Camus - L'etranger
Inspired I think by no. 641 to re-read this as the books are thematically quite similar, in that both have an obscurely motivated murder...
Oct 4, 20171 min read
535. Mick Herron - Spook Street
This is a brilliant book; he seems to be really maturing into his Slough house characters, whose subtle and often very funny interactions...
Nov 17, 20161 min read
445. Charles Cumming - A Foreign Country
The first of a series of novels featuring Thomas Kell, a disillusioned and cynical ex MI5 officer, who has been suspended in disgrace...
May 27, 20161 min read
403. Helen Stevenson - Love Like Salt
P’s book of the year so far, but not mine. The memoir of a woman who has a daughter with cystic fibrosis, who goes to live in France with...
Sep 20, 20151 min read
338. Sebastian Faulks - Charlotte Gray
Took this to Spain for aeroplane reading. I had remembered it mainly as a ‘French resistance’ novel with the dropped in British heroine,...
Jul 24, 20151 min read
322. Émile Zola - La Faute De L'Abbé Mouret
I didn’t read it in French, but don’t like the English translation (‘Abbe Mouret’s Transgression’ which misses half of the point) in my...
Jun 17, 20151 min read
315. Émile Zola - The Fortune Of The Rougons
The first in the huge cycle of novels about this family and their antecedents. Thematically, this is the end of republicanism and...
Jan 10, 20151 min read
276. Émile Zola - Thérèse Raquin
I enjoyed 'Germinal' hugely and 'La Terre' quite a lot, but this, at best was like an early Shakespeare if you had started with say 'King...