Category: Book Review

  I first read this book when I was a teenager. I think it was shortly after I had discovered the travel memoir genre thanks to Frances Mayes’ Under the Tuscan Sun, Bill Bryson’s In A Sunburned Country and Peter Mayle’s A Year In Provence. I loved the armchair exploration of places and cultures I READ MORE

  Salman Rushdie had been living under threat of assassination for more than three decades when he was finally attacked on stage in the summer of 2022. A man with a knife ran up to the stage and stabbed him multiple times before he began speaking. He survived the attack, but was left with some READ MORE

  Ever since my own diagnosis, I’ve been on the hunt for books by and about other women who also have ADHD – especially those who, like me, went most of their lives with absolutely no idea they had it. It’s a special type of trauma to spend your life feeling like all the things READ MORE

  Maggie O’Farrell is quickly becoming an author who I just know, before I even read the blurb, will deliver. I’ve only read three of her books so far, and each has been completely different (first was Hamnet which is a fictional novel about Shakespeare’s family, then Instructions for a Heatwave which is about a READ MORE

  I was intrigued by the blurb of this book, because I’ve really been enjoying memoirs written by women who are around my age who are writing about what it means to be a mother, and further to that, what particular challenges are thrown down for mothers in this day and age. Jamison dives head-first READ MORE

  Thanks to the 90s TV show, it feels as if Seinfeld has been part of the backdrop of popular culture for most of my life. I wasn’t an early devotee to Seinfeld – I saw the odd episode here and there, I knew who Kramer and George Costanza were, but I didn’t go out READ MORE

  I love this new genre of books written by mothers – often middle-aged ones – that tell the nitty gritty truth of what it’s actually like to make, birth, and raise tiny humans in today’s world. Spoiler alert: not easy. In this collection of essays, Jessi Klein explodes the cult of silence that has READ MORE

  I always find it interesting to read memoirs by people who have dealt with – or are dealing with – medical issues. Particularly if they’re debilitating and, as the name of this book says, chronic. One of my favourite such book was The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating, which I have read one READ MORE

  I enjoy books about pretty much any kind of pursuit that works with part of nature in a respectful way. Whether it’s gardening, homesteading, farming, wilding, or – as in this case – raising chickens for eggs. It all started with a modest backyard brood of hens. Manageable, not too difficult to care for, READ MORE