I don’t often review books on this blog, and certainly not on anything like the scale of DoveGreyReader who as a result of her industrious and illuminating reviews is on the receiving end of all kinds of publishers’ freebies, but as a result of a couple of posts last year, I seem to have come to … Continue reading Profusion of Pettigrews
Katherine May has a track record of ghost stories, but this tale of a woman whose life unravels after a chance encounter is more haunting than haunted, and for me that’s a good thing. The premise is intriguing. On a visit to her home town, Violet catches sight of a girl whom she sees to … Continue reading Burning Out
One of the fun things about writing a novel is that it takes you to places you would never have gone otherwise, and serves up some interesting reading experiences. While I was writing Landscape I found myself gravitating towards books about maps and spotted Intimate Cartographies by L. A. Alexander on the chucking out shelf at … Continue reading Strange Maps
I confess to playing around with Facebook at work (strictly as a learning experience, of course!) and really like the Virtual Bookshelf feature I found on a colleague’s page. It lets you build a personal library with links through to Amazon, but it has a separate shelf for books you have read, are reading or would like to read. Tried … Continue reading Fun and games
I’m indebted to a writer friend for pointing me in the direction of Mark Mills’ The Savage Garden, which I opened in some trepidation, guessing that the plot might be pretty similar to Landscape. Initially I was certainly unnerved as one early scene bears a remarkable similarity to one of my own, testimony to the amazing power … Continue reading Savaging the Garden
Ali Bacon / Books and Other Things 