This book is deeply engaging and charts a dysfunctional family unit and the pitfalls and consequences of poor or distorted communication.
This beautifully enjoyable novel helped me to think differently and more positively about ageing, the loss of independence that accompanies it, and the impact this has on the individual.
Chantal Akerman, one of the most significant women filmmakers of the 20th and 21st centuries, and one of the monumental figures of feminism film theory and criticism, is coming to […]
This is a great book to dip in and out of, ideal for reading on trains or in coffee shops, and a perfect introduction to Edna O’Brien’s beautiful writing.
A Traveller’s Life by Sheila Stewart is a life’s story we should know about. The joys, tensions and traditions of a member of one of Scotland’s best known Scottish Traveller families provides a welcome antidote to the negative press reports of Traveller conflicts with settled or ‘scaldie’ communities such as the long running Dale Farm dispute and of the extravagances displayed in Channel 4’s My Big Fat Gypsy Weddings.
This is an ambitious tale of one family’s fortunes and sorrows over three generations. Set in Latin America, this is an exotic landscape full of superstition and religious fervour, and old ways of life that are resistant to the changes that are slowly taking place.
Last week we had a lovely visit from a group of graduate library students from the University of Missouri. They’d been touring around different places in the UK, exploring the […]
Following a family bereavement, a young girl called Esme Lennox arrives in Edinburgh from India. She is wild spirited and as she grows up she rebels against the social codes of how women of her class should behave. She is labelled as troublesome and a series of traumatic events lead to Esme being cut off by her family and erased from their collective memory. This is the vanishing act…..
This is a splendid read, Sarah Waters creates some unforgettable characters, and we are kept in suspense as the truth and lies mingle in this wonderful book full of thieves and ladies, fraudsters and innocents, madwomen and murderers.
Runaway is a mediation on a variety of themes, most obvious being that of flight or escape. Her characters flee in a variety of ways – successfully, unsuccessfully, with large rebellion and small. Munro perfectly captures small town life in all its difficulties and beauty.
