I hated it, I loved it, I didn‘t get it, I couldn‘t put it down. Not at all what I was expecting; this scared me to death and made me do some eye rolling at the same time. Everyone was awful, most of them quite probably lying, and it was increasingly compelling. It certainly shakes up the psychological thriller genre (and me, yes I did check under the bed before I turned the light out…)

I‘ll admit, when we picked this for our book club read this month I wasn‘t sure. 1970s Sci-Fi; I‘m not sure that‘s my thing. How wrong I was. I loved it. Such accessible, modern writing. Such an incredibly powerful story about slavery, power, race and so much more.

A maternity ward in the midst of a pandemic, overwhelmed staff and the fear of a nation. 2020? No, this is historical fiction based on the Spanish flu of 1918. I really enjoyed it; a short beautifully written book set over just 3 days entirely within the “maternity fever” ward; it perfectly captures the fear and claustrophobia of the situation, with a touch of Republicanism and suffrage, and a truly heartbreaking/heartwarming story.

What a lovely, gentle, sad and funny book. I made the mistake of finishing it on the train, there were tears. We meet Daniel as a young boy, anxious and stressed by his transient life with his young mother Eve. They fall into friendship with new neighbours and they have hopes for the future, then suddenly it‘s over again, they‘re moving on. We meet Daniel again then at 40 and, well, no spoilers so I‘ll leave it there, but please read this!

Continuing the daft will-they-won‘t-they theme of the previous two books. Still completely loved it. Still not sorry.

Translated Japanese fiction exploring what it is to be a woman, a mother, a parent; touching on career crises, financial stalemate and being overlooked in the workplace due to age? Yes please! I didn‘t always “get” some elements of this, but I‘m loving exploring contemporary Japanese women-authored fiction. I love the pared-back writing style. I also have lots of love for this cover.

This was easy reading and in general I quite liked the main characters‘ differing perspectives and the view offered of life in Afghanistan. That said I didn‘t particularly like the lightness of the writing, and never fully understood the presence of the British/American characters. I wanted more from Yazmina and Halajan and the very real hardships they faced, and maybe a little less of the sweetness. Not a particularly memorable read overall.

I loved this; an epic family saga, the ups and downs of family life, the bond between four sisters living in the shadow of their parents‘ seemingly perfect relationship. I was constantly changing my perspective on each character‘s motivations as the story switched through time. The writing was perfection; my only complaint is this was perhaps a little too long and there‘s only so many times I can read about how much those parents love each other.

I‘m so disappointed I didn‘t love this. As with other romance books I‘ve read I just couldn‘t do the overblown writing and metaphors (“like a concrete slab that‘s just been snapped in half, only to realise my insides never quite set”) and the unrealistic motivations of the main character. I spent much of it eye rolling rather than swooning and guessed the plot early on. Not for me, yet I feel disappointed in myself that I couldn‘t just enjoy it!

The Farm, where surrogates live in luxury whilst they bear the babies of the wealthy for a healthy bonus. Or do they? This was immediately gripping and gets darker and darker. You think it could be some dystopian future, but I suspect it‘s very much not. Scary and timely.

“Murder, treason and illicit embraces…chases, battles and perilous high-seas skulduggery…international espionage, a whisper of witchcraft, and a cast of orphans, rogues and redcoats.” I admit the chases, battles and skulduggery lost me at times but at it‘s heart this was Goody‘s story, and what a heartbreaking yet hopeful story it is “…recognising that I felt most comfortable neither as woman nor man, but in the space between.”

Psychological dramas are not my favourite genre and I was feeling smug that 100 or so pages in I‘d figured this one out. Or had I? Turns out I hadn‘t at all. The writing was great, and I like that it got me!

Through 1939, 1960 and 1991 we follow Aoife, Rosaleen and Kate from Ireland to London and back again. This is all of their stories but predominantly is the sad but moving story of Rosaleen‘s pregnancy at nineteen, and the Convent which was her only way out yet the source of so much pain. The writing was initially a little confusing due to shifting timelines, but overall this is a beautiful story of mothers, daughters and secrets.

A really moving and compelling story of Alethea, who is subject to domestic abuse and sees no way out. Despite the difficult subject matter I found this this a warm and uplifting story and loved the writing.
And there we have it, I‘ve read the Women‘s Prize shortlist and am feeling quite pleased with myself! What a brilliant range of books.

Oh I loved this. The awkward, uncertain love stories, the complicated parents, the love and friendship between Alice and Eileen. The distant third person writing style. I wasn‘t quite so sure about the existential angst of Alice and Eileen‘s back and forth email exchanges, but they fitted perfectly into the whole. The person who dislikes TV adaptations is now eagerly waiting to see if the BBC are going to treat us to this one.

Sunny weekend reading bliss. A folk music festival in 1969, the start of a music career for Janie Q and The Breakers under the shining star of established musician Jesse Reid, this is fiction loosely based on Joni Mitchell. Think Daisy Jones & The Six/A Star is Born/Greatest Hits. Loved it. Might have cried.

A snapshot of the lives of three women; one Indian, one Sicilian and one Canadian. Their lives are entirely different, they never meet, yet a connection slowly emerges. A short, sweet story.

I‘ve got mixed feelings. Whilst I liked and sympathised with the main characters, to me their story was one of a spiral into grief and mental ill health and for much of it I struggled to understand the talking inanimate objects and just felt frustrated I wasn‘t getting it. The last 100 pages turned it around and left me feeling surprisingly teary and nostalgic for a book I just finished and hadn‘t really enjoyed! The great weirdness of reading!

Louise Erdrich is a new-to-me author, and at first I wasn‘t sure her writing was for me; it made me feel fidgety and I couldn‘t settle to it. But I stuck with it and am so glad I did. Extremely current, the story spans prisons, Covid and lockdown, George Floyd and Trump, Native Americans and protests…and also ghosts. At heart though this is Tookie‘s story, and the story of a bookshop and its books. The characters were so good, and a great story.

Volume two of the Cazalet Chronicles doesn‘t disappoint. The focus this time is the Cazalet grandchildren as they navigate WWII and the change in family dynamics that comes with it. I loved that the child‘s-eye view gave us only snippets of what was going on with the adults we met in volume one. The writing is just so relaxing; comfortingly old-fashioned, yet not dated. Perfect comfort reading.

My family were quite perturbed seeing this one lying around! I‘ve had a disjointed couple of weeks reading due to the distraction of a new job; this one fit the bill perfectly. Easy to pick up, amusingly snarky and with a nice little twist.

You know those stories where someone makes a bad decision, then everything that follows just gets worse and worse, with more bad (and sometimes here, implausible) decisions? I just can‘t cope with those stories. I never get the reason for the escalating bad decisions and the control freak in me is just wanting to sort it all out. I was hoping for a family saga with this one, but instead just got stressed!

I spend my reading life searching for books like this one. Books that completely consume me and I can‘t put down. Marian Graves is our main character; an aspiring aviator in the 1930s, who has a complicated and troubled background. Her story is interspersed with that of film star Hadley who is to play Marian in the biopic of her life. That little summary doesn‘t do the epic scope or intensity of the story and characters justice; I loved it!

And now for a complete change! Well it is the Jubilee after all. I thought I knew what I was getting with this, a fictional take on the story of Marion Crawford, Governess to the Queen and Princess Margaret, but was surprised to find unexpected feminism, suffrage, poverty and an aspiring Communist in the first few chapters! Nothing groundbreaking here but overall quite an interesting read.

Just what I needed; a gossipy page turner/family saga, which in parts was unexpectedly sad. The writing was a bit melodramatic at times , and for me it didn‘t live up to Daisy Jones & The Six which I loved, but I‘m being picky, this is a great holiday read.

I‘ve read every novel Maggie O‘Farrell has written, and credit her with getting me started as an adult reader, but I read her early ones such a long time ago I don‘t remember them. So, I‘m doing a reread - this one first! What‘s interesting is I didn‘t love this one now - I found the story a bit odd and the writing overdone - but remember loving it all those years ago in 2003. (2003! There‘s smoking in pubs, and landlines!)

I enjoyed the story of Klara, an Artificial Friend, as she finds a home with Josie and helps her navigate illness and growing up. We hear only Klara‘s perspective and she‘s the perfect unreliable narrator. I liked that we don‘t really know the full story of what is going on in the world - whether this is an alternate reality or a more dystopian future - but just see snippets as Klara sees things.

A novel about motherhood, marriage and loss of identity set against a Tokyo background, with a sweet but forbidden love story slowly developing. I really enjoyed this; for its sharp (and very truthful) insights and melancholy sadness as well as being quite funny too. I‘m loving Japanese and Korean fiction right now.

A sobering yet not sensational or judgemental story of those in and around Buchenwald “model camp”, how they bought into what they were being told from those in charge, and from propaganda. Told from the perspectives of Greta and Dietrich, an officer at the camp, and Dr Weber who is of distant Jewish descent, this is extremely well done historical fiction that still, unfortunately, felt timely today.

There‘s been so much fuss about this one that I nearly did that annoying thing I do of avoiding it completely only later to realise I missed out. Anyway, I read it. I went in sceptical; came out in love. Near perfection in the writing and the portrayal of such beautiful relationships against the background of mental illness. And I cried on the tram through the whole Peregrine section.

Winnie moves to Saigon to teach. She feels an invisible outsider and then she disappears. Winnie‘s story is told in a fragmented timeline interspersed with the stories of numerous others which slowly come together. There is lots of vomit and, erm, hair. There are snakes, ghosts and mysterious smoke. It can be unsettling and unpleasant, and at times it veers into horror. Overall it wasn‘t for me, but was very clever 👇

This starts out as a dramatic Antarctic disaster then very quickly we‘re back home with Doc. He‘s had a stroke and is struggling to communicate. We hear from his wife, Anna, of the unexpected taking over of care responsibilities. The fact Doc came back, but also didn‘t. There is such a sense of frustration and claustrophobia. I think I‘ll read anything Jon McGregor writes; the prose here was just hypnotic

A sweet sad love story set amongst war ravaged Cyprus, which is in part narrated by a fig tree (this is not as weird as it sounds!) I enjoyed it yet for some reason it didn‘t quite capture my heart, not even that beautiful fig 👇

Nope. Not for me this one. The characters were all despicable and parts of the plot made me very uncomfortable. Moving on!

This semi-dystopian fiction takes place during just a few days in which a group of neighbours find themselves seeking shelter in the former home of Thomas Jefferson after a rampage by white supremacists. This group of people are fighting for their lives and futures whilst the main character also struggles with seeking refuge in the place where her ancestors were kept as slaves. Short, sharp and compelling 👇

I didn‘t find this very exciting, but I really don‘t think I was the target audience. I struggled with the main character‘s intense introspection and self-analysis and yet her failure to do anything about what she disliked about her life. It was wry and amusing at times though and it slowly grew on me. Younger me may have read and appreciated this completely differently I suspect.

A spare, simple novella. An unnamed woman in an unnamed Italian city talks of fragments of her daily life chapter by chapter; her local cafe, her office, an encounter with a potential lover, her loneliness yet desire for solitude. We never learn much about her but she does tentatively dip into her childhood. Nothing like the other books I‘ve read by this author (I loved The Namesake in particular), this was both sad and strangely soothing.

The blurb made this sound like too light a take on a difficult subject, however whilst it was extremely readable - I raced through it in two days - it is a beautifully written story of Bess, in long term foster care, who finds herself pregnant and not knowing where to turn. It made me incredibly sad and at times angry, but Bess offers an important and ultimately hopeful voice, taking control perhaps for the first time in her life.

One I‘m still puzzling over! Taki is maid to the Hirai family in Tokyo in the lead up to WW2 and looks back on her life with them in their little house with the red tiled roof. I‘ve been enjoying some Japanese fiction in translation and loved the premise of this but initially found it falling oddly flat. Yet then in the final third things start to be explained and almost another story emerges, leaving me feeling quite emotional.

Music and film weave their way through this story which is told in the second person and without naming the main characters. Initially I felt somewhat distanced from what I was reading, yet was then pulled into this intimate and at times devastating story of a love, and of life as a young Black man in London. Our unnamed protagonist is desperate to be seen, yet terrified also. This is short, difficult but overwhelmingly a beautifully intense read

Vera and Nadezhda face a battle of wills against their elderly father‘s young new wife Valentina. What follows is a story that is in turns darkly funny, a little bit crazy, terribly sad, and then also hopeful. The history of Ukraine and issues of immigration and memory weave through what is at heart a family story (confession: I skipped the excerpts about the tractors).

I do love stories like this; a small cast of characters in a small town, all with a dramatic event hovering over them, their lives intertwining. It‘s a quiet story despite the drama in the background and I think I‘d had a good book cry by page 11. This put me in mind of Anne Tyler, and I do love Anne Tyler. Also, the cover 💙

The first book in the Cazalet Chronicles introduces us to a huge cast of characters, but the beautifully written vignettes of each one means you feel you know them in no time. Perfect comfort reading with four more books awaiting me 📚

An unexpectedly good book to follow Unsettled Ground; we know from the outset that Roderick Macrae has murdered a neighbour. What happened and why is then told by way of statements from neighbours, his own memoir and coverage of his trial. A novel dressed up as true crime, this is a sad story - again of rural poverty and the powers and whims of landowners, albeit this time in the 1860s. Who is telling the truth? Is Roddy insane? I enjoyed this.

This was a very intense read. One I didn‘t always look forward to reading but was gripped by once I picked it up. A story of love, friendship and motherhood amidst the trans community; it made me uncomfortable at times, but feeling uncomfortable reading about something that is not your own experience is no bad thing.

What a book. It starts off with some drama but quietly done, and I thought I knew where this was going, but then the blows kept on coming. I was completely riveted and couldn‘t put it down, my heart in my mouth, raging with anger, and maybe some ugly crying. A snapshot of rural life that is far from the bucolic idyll but more a battle against lack of regular work, poverty, prejudice, cruelty and the whims of landowners. Sad, yet quietly uplifting

I had high hopes for this one, but I‘m not sure what I just read! The narrator, having left a stressful job, works her way through five “easy” jobs, each becoming more odd as we go along. I enjoyed the prose and style of writing as I have done with other translated Japanese fiction and there were parts I really liked, but overall this was a slow read for me and although the ending was quite satisfying it came too late to completely win me over.

I‘m determined to read more lighter books this year, and to try authors I‘ve never got around to, starting with Marian Keyes. First thoughts: great writing and good fun, yet tackling quite big, serious issues. Yet, this was a great big book, and I didn‘t quite love it. Still pondering over why…

Mixed feelings about this one; the coming of age story of Kirabo, which begins with her desperate longing to find her mother, and dips back into the lives of her grandparents. I found parts entirely gripping, then parts which struggled to keep my attention and I‘m not entirely sure why. I did however love the exploration of feminism in a patriarchal society and the strong women who fill the story.

Utterly daft with eye rolling will-they-won‘t-they storyline. Loved it. Not sorry.