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ISBN: 1853261955 ‘The rectory struck a chill into their hearts as they entered. It seemed ugly, and almost sordid, with that dank air of that middle class, degenerated comfort which… Read More »DHLawrence – The Virgin and the Gypsy
ISBN: 0192833391 ‘O, full of scorpions is my mind…’ ( Macbeth) If each man kills the thing he loves, then Macbeth’s murder of King Duncan propels him into terminal nightmare.… Read More »Charles Dickens – Oliver Twist
ISBN: 0099734419 ‘Bridges join but they also separate.’ ‘I like the collision between different realities’, she says, as she prepares two mugs of Irish tea. ‘It’s exciting at the level… Read More »Jeanette Winterson – The Passion
ISBN: 0192802380 Elizabeth Bennet teases Darcy and he cannot resist her. ‘Indeed I do not dare…’ I have long regarded this exchange as one of the sexiest in fiction and… Read More »Jane Austen – Pride and Prejudice
ISBN: 978-0755331420 Freud only visited the States once and that was quite enough; though why it was enough remained a mystery until today, when Rubenfeld’s novel explores a possible explanation.… Read More »Jed Rubenfeld – The Interpretation of Murder
ISBN: 978-0140620474 Reading this novel again in 36 degrees of heat in Tunisia was a delightful and slightly unusual experience! As I sat moderately baking in occasional shade, Bathsheba and… Read More »Thomas Hardy – Far from the Madding Crowd
ISBN: 978-0-670-91726-6 I remember reading Katherine Mansfield’s story The Garden Party during a sixth form lesson and finding its indirect, impressionistic style haunting and yet real. Mansfield’s young protagonist Laura… Read More »William Trevor – Cheating at Canasta
ISBN: 978-0330449304 Mendelson takes us to a very special wedding on the first page of this witty and socially incendiary novel. The Rubin family have turned out to see one… Read More »Charlotte Mendelson – When we were bad
ISBN: 0340936681 ‘But there are other kilings that are harder to connnect, the links between them obscured by great distances, by the passage of years, by the layering of this… Read More »John Connolly – The Reapers
ISBN: 978-184724-253-2 Sometimes a day in bed with the aftermath of migraine can yield untold pleasure! This book had been recommended in the most positive terms and had sat by… Read More »Stieg Larsson – The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
ISBN: 46810975 This story tantalises as it slips away from the reader’s grasp at ‘truth’. For where is ‘truth’ in this story? Should we believe the fears of the lonely,… Read More »Charles Dickens – Best Ghost Stories
ISBN: 0340727160 I read this book in the sun and found the lyricism and tenderness of its exploration of relationships, past and present, visible and invisible, beautifully represented through a… Read More »David Almond – Kit's Wilderness
ISBN: 9780747569015 There was a hand in the darkness, and it held a knife. The knife had a handle of polished black bone, and a blade finer and sharper than… Read More »Neil Gaiman – The Graveyard Book
ISBN: 9781444704679 What if you were haunted by a pair of lovers whose desire for your destruction was so strong that it defied both death and time? A defiance whose… Read More »John Connolly – The Lovers
ISBN: 9780802170620 THIS IS HOW is MJ Hyland’s third novel and continues her acute analysis of adolescent—in this case late adolescent— disaffection. Family dysfunction is less prominent than in her… Read More »M J Hyland – This is how
ISBN: 0140026363 “At Swim Two Birds” is a wonderfully convoluted comic novel about a boozy student, clearly drawing on the author’s own practical experiences, who is writing a book about… Read More »Flann O'Brien – At Swim Two Birds
On a whim to show how easy it is to create a story through sensory impressions( Shena Mackay a great example for students in The Orchard on Fire) I wondered… Read More »Jelly babies and visiting spirits!!!
Five miles up, the hush and shoosh of ash, yet the sky is as clean as a wiped slate- I could write my childhood there. Selfish to sit in this… Read More »Silver Lining By Carol Ann Duffy
I fell in love with Tennessee Williams when I was meant to be studying Victorian literature. My tutor Steve Newman was poorly and I could not get overly excited about… Read More »Blanche Dubois’s ‘death speech’ in A Street Car Named Desire by Tennessee Williams
Life rarely leaves us to deal with just one problem by itself. It seems to have little respect for singularity or tidiness!! For as this thing called ‘life’ dismantles some of… Read More »Hopper in David Almond's The Savage.
I had never read Cheever before and this Vintage collection begins with a tale of reunion where a large family are reunited at some decaying holiday place on the coast.… Read More »Goodbye my brother by John Cheever
Would you not like to try all sorts of lives — one is so very small — but that is the satisfaction of writing — one can impersonate so many… Read More »Katherine Mansfield's Journal 1906
In anything fit to be called by the name of reading, the process itself should be absorbing and voluptuous; we should gloat over a book, be rapt clean out of… Read More »From Robert Louis Stevenson's A Gossip of Romance
‘You won’t believe this but it’s true.’ The Savage opens with a kind of challenge, an underlining of the credible incredibility of the story the narrator is about to tell,and… Read More »David Almond: The Savage Four
Blue learns the weight of being irrevocably himself in The Savage. He knows the isolation of the excluded through his grief for his father and his awareness of his new responisbilities… Read More »The Savage by David Almond Three
I remember a wonderful week in my first year at Liverpool University when the trains were on strike and I was mean to be reading Spencer’s epic Faerie Queen. Lewis’s… Read More »DH Lawrence: Sun and Savagery!
I was a very sickly child. Lots of days spent wearing a red felt vest with prest studs to ward off the spectre of possible TB. It wasn’t TB but… Read More »Robert Louis Stevenson: Kidnapped!
Reconciliation is at least a two way movement in The Savage and the exultant dance of ‘triumf’ after the confrontation with Hopper is followed by the Savage’s visit to the… Read More »'The Savage in the night.'
“The threads of a story come from time to time together and make a picture in the web; the characters fall from time to time into some attitude to each… Read More »Robert Louis Stevenson and The Savage: A gossip on Romance
”There are many forms of love and affection, some people spend their whole lives together without knowing each other’s names. Naming is a difficult and time-consuming process; it concerns essences,… Read More »The Savage: Part Two
