Sidney Ryan specialises in making documentaries about people who’ve been locked up for crimes they didn’t commit. She begins a documentary about Grace Sebold, imprisioned for ten years in St. Lucia for the death of her boyfriend, but then Sidney discovers that a previous boyfriend of Grace’s died in remarkably similar circumstances, and the story […]
Latest Reviews
The Heart’s Invisible Furies by John Boyne
Ah, you’ve got to read this one. It’s beautiful and occasionally laugh-out-loud funny. The protagonist Cyril Avery, adopted out by his sixteen year old mother to strikingly insensitive parents, has a hard time of it, being gay in Ireland during the 1950’s, 60’s and 70’s. None of his inner circle know of his sexuality until […]
You Think It, I’ll Say It by Curtis Sittenfeld
The only problem with Curtis Sittenfeld is that she doesn’t produce a new book every fortnight. She’s the American Helen Garner, intelligent, perceptive and so full of compassion for all us frail humans. Eligible and American Wife were both astonishingly good books, and so is You Think It, I’ll Say it. It’s a book about grown […]
The Punishment She Deserves by Elizabeth George
This is apparently number twenty in George’s Inspector Lynley series. I hadn’t read any the previous nineteen but it doesn’t matter much. Lynley sounds like a dish; his offsider Detective Sergeant Barbara Havers is his polar opposite in appearance and confidence and class but by golly she’s a good copper and Lynley appreciates her, even […]
The Paris Wife by Paula McLain
Even if you’ve never been able to get through one of Earnest Hemingway’s novels (and I confess I haven’t), this book about his relationship with first wife Hadley Richardson still fascinates. Hadley is neither confident nor glamorous but she is kind and loyal, and she and her husband share an unshakeable belief in his brilliance. This […]
The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan
I was unable to get through Richard Flanagan’s award winning Gould’s Book of Fish, but Narrow Road is much more accessible and all the better for it. In fact it’s a beautiful and profoundly moving war story which I assume stays very close to the facts, and everyone should read it. Enough said.
The Natural Way of Things by Charlotte Wood
Wow. Reading this book is literary equivalent of being being smacked in the face with a frying pan. It is painful. It will make you stop in your tracks. But, unlike a frying pan in the face, it is oh so necessary. Usually I gobble up a book in a few days but with this one […]
Manhattan Beach by Jennifer Egan
Ah, beautiful. How could you not appreciate a book with writing like this: “Eddie felt a lulling possibility of happiness pulling at him like sleep. But rebellion jerked him back to awareness. No, I cannot accept this, I will not be made happy by this……He withdrew, holding himself apart, and in swerving away from happiness, he […]