American Dirt begins with a bang, literally, a violent and shocking scene that nearly put me off.
If I’d been reading on the page, I think I might not have continued, as I don’t enjoy violence, but, as I was listening on Audible, I gave it a bit longer. And soon I was utterly, almost uncomfortably, hooked. The gripping need to continue listening hardly let up for an instant all the way through to the satisfying and nuanced ending.
As well as being a truly compelling story, this novel really opened my imagination to the plight of people who are forced to flee for their lives – in this case a woman and small child fleeing a Mexican cartel for the perceived safety of the USA. It’s a tense, urgent, utterly gripping novel, enhanced for me in audio form by the Mexican accent of the reader.
*NOW A BBC RADIO 4 BOOK AT BEDTIME* 'Breathtaking... I haven't been so entirely consumed by a book for years' Telegraph 'I'll never stop thinking about it' Ann Patchett
FEAR KEEPS THEM RUNNING. HOPE KEEPS THEM ALIVE.
Vivid, visceral, utterly compelling, AMERICAN DIRT is an unforgettable story of a mother and son's attempt to cross the US-Mexico border. Described as 'impossible to put down' (Saturday Review) and 'essential reading' (Tracy Chevalier), it is a story that will leave you utterly changed.
Yesterday, Lydia had a bookshop. Yesterday, Lydia was married to a journalist. Yesterday, she was with everyone she loved…
I was reluctant to read this novel because it’s partly set in a POW camp during WW2, where Far East Prisoners of War slave on what is often called the Burma Death Railway. My dad was one of these prisoners and, even though I’ve written about it before, the more I know of what he went through, the more disturbed I feel.
However, once I’d given in and began to read, I was utterly gripped. The main character, a surgeon is wonderfully portrayed, flawed yet deeply sympathetic. I was as horrified and disturbed as I feared, but also fascinated, and moved by the dynamics between the characters. And there is an excellent – and quite erotic – love story threaded through.
Forever after, there were for them only two sorts of men: the men who were on the Line, and the rest of humanity, who were not.
In the despair of a Japanese POW camp on the Burma Death Railway, surgeon Dorrigo Evans is haunted by his love affair with his uncle's young wife two years earlier. Struggling to save the men under his command from starvation, from cholera, from beatings, he receives a letter that will change his life forever.
This is a story about the many forms of love and death, of…
I was excited by this little book; it’s utterly different from anything I’ve read before. Rather than the usual developed paragraphs, this writer has told her story in short, simple sentences, always starting with the subject, which is very often the main character, Minna.
For instance: ‘Minna is on Facebook. Minna isn’t a day over forty. Minna is a composer.’ Each of these is presented on a separate line so that the pages have the look of poems. What’s surprisingly wonderful about it is how with so few words – you could read it in an hour – so much is implied about the very sympathetic and funny Minna and her plight – she’s been dumped by text message.
It’s a fresh experience to read, funny and moving, and I enjoyed every word.
Minna is feeling desperate. Lars has just dumped her by text message. Her friends are constantly flaunting their lovers, children and dogs (with Facebook as their cruel accomplice). And her neurotic sister is everywhere she turns. Minna needs security, and a place in Copenhagen to practise her music. Minna wants a child. Minna needs to stop being answerable to everyone. So, with only Ingmar Bergman for comfort and company, she decides to take a trip away from it all.
In this highly original, playful, poignant yet funny novella, Dorthe Nors explores our struggles to find love, relate to others and…
Little Egypt, once a well-to-do house in the north of England, is now derelict. It stands on a scrap of land between a railway, a dual carriageway, and a superstore, and although it looks deserted it isn’t. Nonagenarian twins, Isis and Osiris, remain in the home of their birth, and from which, in the 1920s, their obsessive Egyptologist parents left them to search for the fabled tomb of Herihor, a search from which they never returned. Isis and Osiris have stayed in the house, guarding a terrible secret, for all their long lives until a chance meeting between eccentric Isis and a young American anarchist, Spike, sparks an unlikely friendship and proves a startling catalyst for change.
