0561 | Carry me Down | M. J. Hyland
M. J. Hyland’s novel of a young Irish boy growing up in domestic turmoil is poignant, moving, and well-written. If, like me, you suffered similar domestic turmoil in your own childhood,…
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0560 | Love in a Cold Climate | Nancy Mitford
Semi-autobiographical, this is the story of people who have nothing much better to do than worry about their social position in the upper echelons of the British class system. Yawn….
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0559 | The Life of Lazarillo de Tormes | Anonymous
What better way to follow a weighty picaresque novel that was incredibly influential with a very light one that is credited with inventing the genre itself. Someone, and we have…
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0558 | The History of Tom Jones | Henry Fielding
Anyone with a modicum of experience reading literature knows that a “very influential novel” from nearly 300 years ago will consist of pretty much every stereotypical literary device that could…
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0557 | The Life and Death of Harriett Frean | May Sinclair
This is a very short novel but that doesn’t stop Sinclair constructing a complex character who spends her life bound by moral boundaries. Harriett grows up with parents who ensure…
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0556 | Tropic of Capricorn | Henry Miller
Following on from recently finishing Tropic of Cancer, Mrs Arukiyomi picked this one out for me. I thought I was in for the same rollocking ride that Miller took me…
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0555 | Sexing the Cherry | Jeanette Winterson
This is a tricky book to read and understand. Obviously, Winterson is a leading apologist not only for feminism but also lesbianism so you can expect that to feature to…
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0554 | Gabriel’s Gift | Hanif Kureishi
Oh my… but this was so profoundly awful on every level that I can hardly believe I read it, let alone that for some unfathomable and criminal reason, it was…
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0553 | An Artist of the Floating World | Kazuo Ishiguro
This is a beautifully written novel filled with pathos and written with immaculate prose that describes accurately not only Japan and not only the Japanese character but also the post-WW2 Japanese…
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0552 | The Bell Jar | Sylvia Plath
From the very first classic opening line through to the end, this is a page-turner. Plath wrote this very quickly and it shows in the effervescence of the prose. However,…
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0551 | Billiards at Half Past Nine | Heinrich Böll
This was an interesting novel to pick up a few days after finishing Cat and Mouse by Günter Grass. There are a lot of parallels in the prose of Grass and…
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0550 | July’s People | Nadine Gordimer
I’ve read a fair few books from South Africa that deal (unsurprisingly) with the issue of relationships between the black and white communities. Nadine Gordimer’s novel is, sadly, not the…
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0549 | The Human Stain | Philip Roth
This is Philip Roth in his element, cruising along drawing on contemporary themes in public and political USAnian life and distilling them through the lens of a single individual who,…
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0548 | Cat and Mouse | Günter Grass
I know, I know, I should have read The Tin Drum before this as that’s the first of the trilogy and this is the second book. But, charity store book beggars…
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0547 | The Art of Fielding | Chad Harbach
No, no, no, no…. NO! This is absolutely NOT the kind of novel we should be seeing on the 1001 list. Absolutely not. This is not a novel anyone needs…
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0546 | Adam Bede | George Eliot
The only reason that this got a “good” rating from me and not “okay” was the legacy of the novel in terms of its depiction of country life at the…
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0545 | Slow Man | J M Coetzee
What at first seems like a fairly straightforward novel about a guy dealing with the loss of his leg takes a quite unexpected turn when a character turns up to…
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0544 | Justine | Lawrence Durrell
Nope. This didn’t quite do it for me. Don’t get me wrong, Durrell can write beautiful prose, and I honestly thought that this would completely entrance me and that the…