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.
Category: Book of the Month
Book of the Month – A Traveller’s Life
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.
Book of the Month – The House of the Spirits
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.
Book of the Month – The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox by Maggie O’ Farrell
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…..
Book of the month – Fingersmith by Sarah Waters
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.
Book of the month – Runaway by Alice Munro
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.