London can make poetry out the simplest things: “They say very still as darkness filled the room.” It’s such a pleasure to read her prose that it hardly matters what the story is about. The Good Parents does, however, contain a compelling mystery: the disappearance of eighteen year old country girl Maya, whose parents find her gone when […]
General fiction
The Help by Kathryn Stockett
Love this one. A fascinating look into the lives of black maids and their white employers in Mississippi in 1962.
The Book Thief by Markus Zusack
This is one of those books everybody else seems to love more than me. Sure it’s interesting to have a book narrated by Death and there’s a lot of interesting parts in it, but somehow it just doesn’t move me.
The Hypnotist’s Love Story by Liane Moriarty
Hypnotist Ellen O’Farrell’s new love interest has a stalker. She finds it wildly interesting at first, but as times goes on it is less so, until she comes to fully understand the shocking damage stalking can do. At some point when reading this novel you will be shouting at Ellen’s new boyfriend to call the […]
The Husband’s Secret by Liane Moriarty
Wow, what a can of worms. This is number five of Moriarty’s stand alone novels, and she’s just so humane and so good. She splays open the minds of women with such a gentle, delicious touch. No one is totally evil and no one entirely good; they’re just doing the best they can. Well worth […]
What Alice Forgot by Liane Moriarty
This is my favourite of Moriarty’s, along with Big Little Lies. Alice gets a bump on the head during gym class; when she comes to she has lost ten years of her life. Her brain has reset to when she was 29, in love with her husband, about to have their first child. In reality she is […]
Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks
Good historical fiction is rarely so dramatic, but Brooks just about manages to pull this one off. We all imagine the Black Plague of 1666 was brutal but this story of widowed Anna Frith losing her two sons and her village plunging into barely restrained chaos brings it all home. Brooks is not quite as […]
March by Geraldine Brooks
Who hasn’t read Little Women and wondered what the girls’ mother thought of the father, leaving her and three girls to struggle in straightened circumstances while he went off to chaplain the soldiers in the American civil war? March answers that question: the mother was not impressed. This novel is about his journey and it’s fine historical […]