I’ve just had a new wooden floor laid (okay, I confess, it’s laminate) in the loft space where I write. I’ve also just been given (with a friend’s cheeky nod and wink) a book called Care of Wooden Floors: A Novel. How could I not read it? Written by Will Wiles, the book is about
This is bliss! There’s a library across the courtyard, there are shelves of good books behind me and above … & … & … & … I have a coffee to sip on that’s mellow and smooth. A quote from Anthony Trollope is painted on the silvery-grey wall of the stairwell. “What on earth could
Cate Kennedy says stories are living, breathing entities that refuse to be corralled by aphorisms. There are 15 short stories in her latest book, Like a House on Fire, and all live and breathe deeply. I’d read a couple of the stories before in other contexts but was pleased to read them again and to
Start the presses! The e-book is losing ground and printed books (especially hardbacks) are proving their resilience according to the Wall Street Journal. This news vindicates my late-adopter-Luddite tendencies (it’s true I have no Kindle or other e-reader) and makes me feel smugly hopeful that all those little bookshops that have hung in there in
Not an exhaustive list but a pretty good summary. Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides (Bloomsbury) What a smashing first sentence. “I was born twice: First as a baby girl on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again as a teenage boy in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan in August of
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