This is a book that’s so lauded that I feel guilty for not really enjoying it that much. The beginning felt like I was having a thousand characters dumped on my head and even with the aid of the table in the front of the book I couldn’t keep them straight. Once we got past the childhood part of the book and the characters reached adolescence I started to find it more entertaining rather than a memory exercise. By the end I’d come around to it and might even read the following books, though I think I’d better not leave it too long or I’ll have to do all that learning over again.

I didn’t expect to read this cover to cover as it’s a collection of essays, but they were well written and flowed from one thing to another that they felt like a whole book and kept me turning the pages. The author is way younger than me but I was nodding away with her all the way through as she threw eloquent feminist light on life experience. A lot of the book is auto-biographical which is why it hangs together so well.

I felt the book improved as it went on though I see many other people think the early essays are better. I felt distinctly called-out in the early pages of the book when she disparaged her child-self for using starry night and pastels when writing her first webpages: those are still two of my three stock goto themes (ssssh, rainbows are the third) and I’ve been putting the web together more-or-less professionally for twenty-five years now. And her teenage reality tv experience write-up was so far outside my experience that I didn’t really know what to make of it, though I enjoyed the reflections of the group of contestants on the experience. I thought that her later explorations of rape and other sexual abuse in academia and the bizarre capitalist phenomenon of weddings were the best bits. It was an interesting read and I’ll be looking out for the author in future.

I enjoyed this book but I’m super surprised to find that it lists about ten different awards and shortlistings on its cover. I would have said it’s the sort of book that I like but I wouldn’t have been at all sure that everybody else would like it too. Obviously I’d have been way wrong.

A tale of two young Irish people and the intertwining of their lives from the end of their school years and through their college lives. It kept reminding me of Iris Murdoch in some kind of weird literary echo. This is a university tale featuring people two decades younger than me; Murdoch wrote about academia way before my time but I read her during my academic years (and have forgotten almost everything but the way the books made me feel, maybe I should read her works again now).

It wasn’t quite what I was expecting, but better.

The strongest outing yet for Captain Sam Wyndham and Sergeant Banerjee, who I noticed he did start to call “Suren” in this book – an abbreviated version of his full Indian name rather than the the anglicisation “Surrender-not” which sounds like a slur to my ears but also sounds typical of the colonial period and the British treatment of anything they couldn’t be bothered to understand.

Calcutta in the 1920s really came to life here; from the grand mansions to the opium dens to the military enclosures to the boatmen on the Hooghly river, and the city is populated by groups from all parts of India, including peacefully protesting followers of Mahatma Gandhi, the ever-present British military and the Prince of Wales (later Edward VIII) is about to visit. What could go wrong?! I like the way the author shows all the diversity within the population, no one’s ever just an “Indian”, you learn all about the different peoples who make up India along the way. I think I said in writing about one of the earlier books that Sam (as a white British man) seems too liberal for his time, but I think it works better than way for the modern reader.

The plot in this book took a bit of getting into, there’s a real web of plot lines being spun and they all get tangled up together very knottily. I liked how Sam covering up his increasingly worrying opium habit was an essential part of the conundrum rather than just period and place specific decoration to the story.

I’m looking forward to the next in the series.

A very holiday sort of a read. I loved that it was set on the ÃŽle-de Ré where I holidayed a few years ago, it’s a place that’s near the top of my list of places I want to go back to. It’s a perfect sort of a place to pick to go and hide out in exile from the world. (Damn, now I’ve told you and won’t be able to hideaway there myself!)

Tabby turns up on the island when she’s near penniless, she was travelling with a boyfriend who dumped her, and she falls in with “Emmie Mason” who it seems is in exile there. The story goes back and narration from Emily explains what happened in her life before this. Tabby slowly pieces together her friend’s background. I loved the first Candlish book I read for its twist that I didn’t see coming, and this one is pretty good at twisting things around too. It’s not like some books where “you’ll never guess the ending” is the whole point and if you do hazard a guess that turns out to be in the right ball park you feel cheated though; I think it’s a good book whether you foresee the twists or not.

I’m intrigued by the cover I can see on goodreads for this book. There’s obviously been a change of marketing strategy for the author at some point. The copy I have has a very dark thriller-ish cover; this one is a brighter chicklit-ish holiday read sort of a cover. The novel is somewhere in between, and I think you’d enjoy it if you like either one of those genres.

I’m the wrong person to ask if this is a good book. I was super delighted to find that there was a new book in this series, the twelfth, it’s been several years since the last one and I’d thought the series was dead. It goes far away from the usual New York setting as Lydia and Bill head to the Mississippi Delta to investigate a murder among distant cousins of Lydia’s. I loved being back with the characters and though I was a bit disappointed that “New York” was missing as a character I think the story worked pretty well, the change of scene added a different dimension, and Lydia and Bill needed some time away.

It was great, and I really hope there will be more before too long.

I’ve really enjoyed some of Susie Boyt’s other books in the past but this one didn’t really do it for me. One of those cases where I think it’s a case of “just me, not the book” though. One of the things I’ve liked about her other books in how realistic the characters are. This one features a marriage guidance counsellor who is rather falling apart and I never quite believed in her, her relationships or the most of the couples whose relationships she was counselling. Everything seemed to be that little bit too overdone.

I’m definitely back into enjoying this series after swearing I was giving up on it a few books back. I’m making no bones about the fact that I’m here for the ongoing soap opera of the central characters and that there are things that annoy me, but overall I really enjoy reading these anyway. The mystery plot here doesn’t really get going for a good long time, and even when it does it’s a bit thin really, but that is all fine by me as well. I have an ongoing problem with Ruth continually putting herself down (though I’ll acknowledge that it’s perfectly realistic for her to do so) and in this book I really noticed how time was taken to show her from other characters points of view where she came over as wise, competent and sexy. I thought that was really well done and nice to see.

This was recommended to me by my partner and I went into reading it without knowing a thing about it or even glancing at the blurb on the back cover. Which was a pretty good way to read it; the actual subject matter dawned on me slowly as I turned the pages. And I don’t want to say a thing about it because I don’t want anyone else to know what it’s about before reading it either. But it’s really good. (I think you can read the blurb if you want, at least on the copy I have it doesn’t give everything away like some books do. Mysteries seem particularly susceptible to wanting to tell you the whole plot for some reason. This isn’t a mystery, just a mysterious book. I’m stopping before I say anything else!)

Fab. I’m dithering over whether to give it four or five stars, but really, it’s only that it’s not Kate Atkinson’s best that’s making me even think about only four stars. But then it does have the same ability to mess with the reader’s sense of what’s going on that her best books have, not just Life After Life which is obvious about it. I remember feeling amazed by the way aspects of the story twisted in Behind the Scenes at the Museum and Human Croquet even though I’ve forgotten so much about those books that it’s probably about time I reread them to be amazed all over again. So, yes, have five stars.

Really the most amazing thing about this book I managed to wait to read it until I fell over it in a second hand paperback shop; which is nice for my bank balance obviously, but I think next time I could happily buy the hardback release. I think I held off this time because a spy story told from the point of view of the girl who transcribes the conversations between a double agent and his sources doesn’t sound that thrilling. But of course there is so much more going on here. If one of the male characters had told the same story it would have been a completely different one, and it might have been quite a good one, but the fresh viewpoint here allowed Atkinson a lot of leeway to tell her story in a different way, and I really enjoyed it. It’s a quick read, but do read carefully!