I love a novel that provokes me to think hard about what it means to be human.
I’ll be forever haunted by this story about a troubled man who commits an unspeakable act of violence, and the mother of the woman he murdered, who invites him into her home. The story made me rethink everything about the boundaries of love and forgiveness and whether it’s really possible to be at peace with events you can’t change.
Equally haunting is the spare, poetic prose of Em Strang’s writing. From time to time, I open the book just to ruminate on a few of its most stunning sentences.
* A New Statesman Most Anticipated Title for 2023 *
From an award-winning Scottish poet, an unforgettable novel about memory and radical forgiveness
How far would you go to overcome the limits of your own forgiveness?
Quinn is serving a life sentence for a crime he's convinced he hasn't committed. Surely the authorities have got it wrong, and when they find his childhood sweetheart, Andrea, his name will be cleared. His parole is drawing near when he receives an unexpected letter from Andrea's mother, who invites Quinn to share her home.
I loved the rich, luminous writing that brought characters and scenes to life in Maggie O’Farrell’s evocative, emotionally intense portrait of William Shakespeare’s family. The multisensorial detail of the writing made me feel like an omniscient fly on the wall in various Elizabethan households, observing both the routines of daily life and the wrenching apart of those routines by tragedy, the death of a child.
That child is the novel’s title character, Hamnet, Agnes Hathaway and William Shakespeare’s son. But for me, the star of the novel is Hamnet’s free-spirited mother, Agnes, whom O’Farrell conjures into being with few facts and stunning imagination.
I loved this book so much that I recommended it to my book club to have an excuse to read it again and discuss why I find it so enchanting.
WINNER OF THE 2020 WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION - THE NO. 1 BESTSELLER 2021 'Richly sensuous... something special' The Sunday Times 'A thing of shimmering wonder' David Mitchell
TWO EXTRAORDINARY PEOPLE. A LOVE THAT DRAWS THEM TOGETHER. A LOSS THAT THREATENS TO TEAR THEM APART.
On a summer's day in 1596, a young girl in Stratford-upon-Avon takes to her bed with a sudden fever. Her twin brother, Hamnet, searches everywhere for help. Why is nobody at home?
Their mother, Agnes, is over a mile away, in the garden where she grows medicinal herbs. Their father is working in London.
In the maze of books about war I’d been reading all year while researching my next novel, Anthony Doerr’s shone a bright light on the human condition with his complicated, poignant story about two young people caught up in the horrors of war who manage against the odds to preserve their humanity.
The novel’s omniscient narrator allowed me to enter the perspectives and experience the motivations and emotions of a wide cast of characters, not all of them likable, in the vividly imagined setting of occupied France in the latter part of World War II.
It’s a long book, but so mesmerizing I devoured it in three long sittings, saddened when I’d reached the end, eager to read it again.
WINNER OF THE 2015 PULITZER PRIZE FOR FICTION NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER WINNER OF THE CARNEGIE MEDAL FOR FICTION
A beautiful, stunningly ambitious novel about a blind French girl and a German boy whose paths collide in occupied France as both try to survive the devastation of World War II
Open your eyes and see what you can with them before they close forever.'
For Marie-Laure, blind since the age of six, the world is full of mazes. The miniature of a Paris neighbourhood, made by her father to teach her the way home. The microscopic…
My book is a dual-timeline narrative about women who dared to challenge the social norms of their times, risking their reputations and livelihoods for the sake of their passions.
In the twenty-first century, we meet Verity Frazier, a disillusioned professor determined to prove that the artist responsible for the illuminated artwork in Christine de Pizan’s medieval manuscripts was an unacknowledged woman named Anastasia. As Anastasia’s story unfolds against the medieval backdrop of moral disaster, political intrigue, and extraordinary creativity, Verity finds her career on the brink of collapse through her efforts to uncover evidence of the lost artist’s existence.
