As Meat Loves Salt by Maria McCann My rating: 5 of 5 stars How do you write about a book like this? Wait. Let me take a breath. Then a step back. Then another. We begin again. When I read Hanya Yanagihara’s, “A Little Life”, I scarcely believed, I would find another book that moved…
Tag: Literature
Book Review: The Miniaturist by Jessie Burton (spoiler alert)
The Miniaturist by Jessie Burton My rating: 3 of 5 stars “Every woman is the architect of her own fortune.” – says the miniaturist in a mysterious note. How true. For I designed myself to read this book, take it into my home and heart, only to feel utterly let down. Jessie Burton’s The Miniaturist…
Book Review: Circe by Madeline Miller
Circe by Madeline Miller My rating: 5 of 5 stars It is been a long time since I got through a book so quickly. It took me a day. It’s impossible to keep away from this book once you’ve begun it. Madeline Miller is incredible in the way that she spins a yarn. Circe takes…
Book Review: The Great Stink by Clare Clark
The Great Stink by Clare Clark My rating: 5 of 5 stars “In the rotting and inadequate sewers, human excrement mixed with refuse from the slaughterhouses and knacker’s yards and waste from the tanneries and factories. Every day it drained into the Thames. it was not long before the river itself became the great cesspool…
Book Review: Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert My rating: 5 of 5 stars Quite honestly I don’t know how you could give this book a rating of anything less than five stars. It is a classic and deservedly so. For there are very few books that can match the intricacy and insight into human behaviour as the…
Book Review: The Taste of Sorrow by Jude Morgan
The Taste of Sorrow by Jude Morgan My rating: 4 of 5 stars Of course this is fiction. Of course it is. Keep reminding yourself because it’s easy to forget in the thick of Jude Morgan’s The Taste of Sorrow. A fictional account of the life of the Brontë sisters this book is so many…
Book Review: The Garlic Ballads by Mo Yan, Howard Goldblatt (Translator)
The Garlic Ballads by Mo Yan My rating: 5 of 5 stars Brutal, unyielding, and flummoxing in its violent telling, The Garlic Ballads may have been more aptly titled, The Garlic Laments. This book is shocking and nearly absurd in its rampaging cruelty. I spent most of my time reading it with my eyes bulging…
Book Review: Quicksand by Jun’ichirō Tanizaki
Quicksand by Jun’ichirō Tanizaki My rating: 5 of 5 stars This was such an utterly fascinating read. What begins innocuously as a tale of forbidden love between two women quickly unravels into a novel of grand deceit, depravity, narcissism, blackmail, and deliberate wickedness. More than once while reading it I was reminded of Sarah Waters…
After the war
Penelope, twenty years away from you I forget the little things. The toss of your head, the tumble of your breasts as you disrobe. I wake up with a fire in my belly and an ache in my loins. And always, always this perfect thirst. “I miss you,” you say. “I miss you, and…
part-broken, part-whole 