Harold Fry has been languishing on my shelf for years, just waiting for me to get around to meeting him. I was expecting a charming, sweet story of personal challenge and growth. I was expecting something heart warming and deeply emotional. What I got was… not exactly that. This book has a simple story

  A book that will take you into an often overlooked or hidden part of American history during WWII, and one that desperately needs to be brought to light, shared, talked about, and faced. This is the story of a group of young Japanese-Americans who live in San Francisco, in a community of immigrants (and

  I picked this one up because my Dad was reading it and said it was amusing him. I’d been meaning to get to it and just not getting around to it for a while. It’s a comedic journal of a diffident man who likes to write witty poetry. The diary follows him through various

  The main reason I picked this book up was that it was nominated for the Women’s Prize for Fiction this year, and it was one of the few books on the list available in audiobook format from my local library. I didn’t really know anything about it going in, and there were a few

  The title of this book is the first thing that drew me in. Who is this redhead? What are they doing by the side of the road? Why are they there? How did they get there? It fascinated me, and I wanted to find out the answers – turns out the explanation isn’t anything

  This book caught my attention when it first came out – the premise is timely and interesting, and I was curious to explore the mixture of fiction and non-. This novel is about a man called Akhtar (like the author), a playwright who has reached some acclaim (like the author). The novel traces his

  This is another book I wasn’t sure if I wanted to read, for a few reasons. First, I’m not well versed in religion. Christianity is, for me, a bit of a mystery. I’ve heard some of the more pervasive references (Noah, Kane and Abel, the story of Jesus’ birth and that of his death,

  Shuggie Bain has been hard to avoid over the past year. It’s a debut novel, but seemed to emerge fully-formed, and wowed pretty much every reader it was put in front of. It was nominated for multiple literary prizes, and won the The Booker Prize. It’s interesting to me that Shuggie seems to have

  I only read this book because it was on the BookTube Prize longlist, and it was one of the list that was available as an audiobook from my digital library. I started listening to it having no idea what I was getting into – I hadn’t even read the blurb. So you can imagine

  I’m a huge fan of Emily St. John Mandel. The first book of hers I read was Station Eleven, which I went into with no expectations, and which completely wowed me. It was delicate, thought provoking, had beautiful imagery and also terrified me to the depths of my soul. I then went on to

  I didn’t get along with Susanna Clarke’s most popular book, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, at all. I’ll say that up front. I tried, I really did. I tried reading the book (twice), I tried listening to the audiobook, and I even tried watching the TV show. None of them got very far at

  I’ve never read any Lily King before, though I’ve had her novel Euphoria on my TBR for ages. This book appealed to me – partly because of the books on the cover, partly because of the title, and then a little bit because of the blurb. Having meant to try Lily King, this seemed