Mari’s Book Club

When I finished reading Tess of the d’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy, I thought that is the saddest novel ever. When I re-read it some years later, I felt the same. Now Sally Rooney has updated my list: Conversations with Friends is up there with Tess, the saddest tale – though not ‘told by an idiot, full of… Read More

Stranger at St Brides (a school story for grown-ups) is the second in a series by my writing friend, Debbie Young, and here she is really into her stride. Whatever we think of Public (boarding) schools, packed with the local and the overseas offspring of doting parents who can do without their teenage daughters for… Read More

I watched the television adaptation of Normal People before I read the book. If this mistake was shared by a large audience then many, like me, could’ve initially understood the main point of this story as mainly significant looks and glances, and episodes of “having sex”. Most indoor scenes were filmed in half darkness, the… Read More

The book I have just finished reading, Bird Summons, by Leila Aboulela, is unusual, deeply thoughtful, and obviously inspired by the author’s combined knowledge and interest in politics and faith. Aboulela is a practising Muslim, born in Cairo and raised in Khartoum. She now lives in Aberdeen, Scotland. She studied economics at the University of… Read More

‘Living systems are sensitive to very small changes…’ so says Dr Ovid Byron, lead scientist of a group investigating the strange appearance of pretty much the whole population of Monarch butterflies to a farming area of the Appalachians in Tennessee, when they should have flown, as usual, to overwinter in Mexico. I wrote this review… Read More

Here’s another escapade for Sophie Sayers, the young woman who’s recently moved to the Cotswold village of Wendlebury Barrow. This time, the story’s conveniently contained in an envelope-sized format, great for slipping into a birthday card to your retail-therapy friend or old-school-chum (or others!) I recently enjoyed this mini-volume as a relaxing break between two… Read More

This review tries to cover the latest two books I’ve read recently: Where are the Grown-ups and Unsettled. They’re very much not a pair, so don’t expect one to cover both memoir and the challenges of change… Interestingly, I love both these books – which are very different– but disagreed with a great deal of… Read More

It’s a really personal choice: why we read, what we read, and when… Reading the Amazon reviews, I was struck by the number of readers who  said they ‘couldn’t engage with the characters’  Or that ‘the characters all do far too much overthinking,’  or ‘talk too much the same’ or ‘are too articulate about their… Read More

Here’s a relaxing read for any of us who have enjoyed school stories or even wondered how, if not given to the National trust, a stately home can occupy its retirement years. Debbie Young (Author of the Sophie Sayers cosy mysteries) has now created a girls’ private boarding school just a mile or two down… Read More