Mari’s Book Club

Girl with a White Dog quietly and confidently delivers its message in plain sight, yet never over-dramatically. Author Anne Booth’s choice to refuse the heights of drama in this tale, preferring to use a first person narrative by a year nine (age 13 to 14) student makes for a sensitive account of how it feels… Read More

Another novella by Debbie Young is always welcome light reading! After The Natter of Knitters, (a romp themed around Yarn-bombing in Wendlebury Barrow, the Cotswold village location for her Sophie Sayers cozy mystery series), her Mrs Morris Changes Lanes moves away from this familiar location and group of characters, and extends the kind of social… Read More

A subtle story, weaving in themes of inclusivity, and the validity of not dismissing the value of other people’s cultures…   ‘There’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow’ (William Shakespeare, Hamlet) “ Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? … Yet not one of them will fall to the ground outside… Read More

After Sarah Moss’s three linked, feminist, rather serious novels, (Night Waking, Bodies of Light, and Signs for Lost Children), read in autumn and winter, I have turned to a couple of lighter books. Each author is someone I know: Debbie Young, who introduced me to the Alliance of Independent Authors, and later invited me to… Read More

I’ve recently read a short book, Behind the Crime by Colin Ferguson, who has worked in the Probation Service and after retirement as a Family Mediator.  The author’s intention is to set before his readers what lies behind their criminal behaviour which led to prison sentences, and the part probation can and may play in… Read More

Red Cabbage Blue is a gently told story of enormous tragedy, family secrets, and intergenerational conflict. I don’t do spoilers if I can avoid them, but the book follows a therapy journey: a young girl, Adele, an art student, who turns up in a counsellor’s office presenting unusual symptoms… That is enough to sketch out… Read More

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