The Silence of the Girls: The greatest war story in literature, retold by our greatest living storyteller on war - in the voice of the forgotten woman who lived through it. Queen Briseis has been stolen from her conquered homeland and given as a concubine to a foreign warrior. The warrior is Achilles: famed hero, … Continue reading The Silence of the Girls and The Women of Troy by Pat Barker
Books from Abroad
Book Review: Mayflies by Andrew O’Hagan
About the Book: A heartbreaking novel of an extraordinary lifelong friendship. Everyone has a Tully Dawson: the friend who defines your life. In the summer of 1986, in a small Scottish town, James and Tully ignite a brilliant friendship based on music, films and the rebel spirit. With school over and the locked world of … Continue reading Book Review: Mayflies by Andrew O’Hagan
Book Review: Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney
About the Book: Alice, a novelist, meets Felix, who works in a distribution warehouse, and asks him if he'd like to travel to Rome with her. In Dublin, her best friend Eileen is getting over a break-up, and slips back into flirting with Simon, a man she has known since childhood. Alice, Felix, Eileen and … Continue reading Book Review: Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney
Book Review: The Heart Principle by Helen Hoang
About the Book: A woman struggling with burnout learns to embrace the unexpected - and the man she enlists to help her - in this heartfelt new romance by the bestselling author of The Kiss Quotient, Helen Hoang. When violinist Anna Sun accidentally achieves career success with a viral YouTube video, she finds herself incapacitated … Continue reading Book Review: The Heart Principle by Helen Hoang
Book Review: The Echo Chamber by John Boyne
About the Book: From the author of The Heart's Invisible Furies and powered with Boyne's characteristic humour and razor-sharp observation, The Echo Chamber is a satiric helter skelter, a dizzying downward spiral of action and consequence, poised somewhere between farce, absurdity and oblivion. What a thing of wonder a mobile phone is. Six ounces of … Continue reading Book Review: The Echo Chamber by John Boyne
Book Review: The Magician by Colm Tóibín
About the Book: When the Great War breaks out in 1914 Thomas Mann, like so many of his fellow countrymen, is fired up with patriotism. He imagines the Germany of great literature and music, which had drawn him away from the stifling, conservative town of his childhood, might be a source of pride once again. … Continue reading Book Review: The Magician by Colm Tóibín
Book Review: Freckles by Cecelia Ahern
About the Book: Five people. Five chances. One woman’s search for happiness. Allegra Bird’s arms are scattered with freckles, a gift from her beloved father. But despite her nickname, Freckles has never been able to join all the dots. So when a stranger tells her that everyone is the average of the five people they … Continue reading Book Review: Freckles by Cecelia Ahern
Book Review: People Like Them by Samira Sedira (trans. Lara Vergnaud)
About the Book: Winner of the Prix Eugène Dabit There are no monsters. Only humans. Anna and Constant Guillot and their two daughters live in the peaceful, remote mountain village of Carmac. Everyone in Carmac knows each other, leading simple lives mostly unaffected by the outside world – that is until Bakary and Sylvia Langlois … Continue reading Book Review: People Like Them by Samira Sedira (trans. Lara Vergnaud)
Book Review: Velvet Was the Night by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
About the Book: 1970s Mexico City: while student protests and political unrest consume the city, Maite seeks escape from her humdrum life in the stories of passion and danger filling the latest issue of Secret Romance. She is deeply envious of her neighbour, a beautiful art student apparently living the life of excitement and intrigue … Continue reading Book Review: Velvet Was the Night by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
Book Review: Whereabouts by Jhumpa Lahiri
About the Book: The new novel from the Pulitzer Prize-winning, Man Booker Prize-shortlisted author: a haunting portrait of a woman, her decisions, her conversations, her solitariness, in a beautiful and lonely Italian city. The woman moves through the city, her city, on her own. She moves along its bright pavements; she passes over its bridges, … Continue reading Book Review: Whereabouts by Jhumpa Lahiri
