Imi

I'm no rambler. Your legs and knees and hips aren't made to go forever, and you're born with only so many mountains in you.

I picked this up because a thriller set near where I grew up (Cumbria, England) in a struggling farming community, around the time of the foot and mouth outbreak, sounded very grim and dark. And it was. The early scenes of burning, diseased sheep set a very sinister tone (massive trigger warning for graphic depictions of animal slaughter), and what follows is a chaotic spiral of bad decisions. I'm not going to say too much, because although not super plot heavy, I always think these kind of brooding novels need to experienced without too much foreknowledge.

Multiple times I searched for a glossary of Cumbrian terminology somewhere in my ebook copy. I've only just now found out, upon finishing the book, that the chapter names are actually the Cumbrian dialect numbers for counting sheep. (I consider myself as being from Cumbria, but I was not born and bred there, and my family is not in farming, so some, certainly not all, words may be vaguely familiar to me but not really understandable.)

Even without that glossary (and perhaps keeping things a little unclear was intentional?), I love the use of dialect throughout. It really adds to the sense of place in these hostile hills. The prose overall is gorgeous despite some very grim happenings. The characterisation is also very solid.

While I fear being repetitive (because I have definitely said this in reviews of books I have enjoyed before!), I have to say that Tana French fans need to pick this up. The sense of place in a troubled rural community, with realistic and strong characterisation, despite a few bizarre thriller-esque turns, makes it easy to recommend.

I absolutely will be reading whatever Preston writes next!

Review following re-read in 2025

I've just noticed this (which wasn't at all planned!):

You have read this book 3 times in 2011, 2017, and 2025.27 April 2025 to 7 May 2025 (Took 11 days)26 March 2017 to 6 April 2017 (Took 12 days)27 April 2011 to 7 May 2011 (Took 11 days)

The Blind Assassin

Review following re-read in 2017

after being silenced for so long, she found her voice in such a marvellous way.

I kind of wish this wasn't a crime thriller. The town, the characters, and their relationships with one another were all so good. As a coming-of-age novel examining adolescence and lost friendships, there was so much here to love. Unfortunately, the crime thriller aspects bring uneven pacing, too many tropes, and coincidences. I feel like anyone reading this hoping for a good mystery would be slightly disappointed (and maybe that would be a problem with the novel's marketing?), and that's a shame because Walsh is clearly very talented! Constrained by the genre is maybe my feeling here.

Before I say anything else, trigger warning for rape. It's in the blurb, but I almost feel a warning should be on the front cover in big capital letters! This novel was that hard to read and enraging for me, at times.

I cried throughout. It's heartbreaking how authentic it felt, because stories like Jade's are far too common. 

This authenticity is above all, I believe, thanks to the book's incredibly well written characters. Not just Jade, our narrator, (real name, Ceyda, of mixed Korean-Turkish heritage), but her friends, her parents, and boyfriend. All of them are infuriating at times, due to their decisions and actions, but that's what makes it 100% believable.

There also are several different plotlines and conflicts going on at the same time, and none of them are tied up neatly with happy endings for anyone involved. There was only one moment where I scoffed a little at a coincidence (although, I can see why Lee wrote it this way). Other than that one (minor) moment, it almost felt like memoir.

I will definitely be following Ela Lee's career and hoping for more London based, true-to-real-life novels like this in the future! Such a talent.

Second in Tana French's Cal Hooper series (you should definitely read The Searcher first!), this is a book for lovers of character-driven novels, in rural settings. French is so talented at creating believable characters, and related to that, incredible, strong literary friendships, backed up by beautifully witty and fun dialogue.

Trey and Cal may not be my favourite friendship that French has ever written (that would be Rob and Cassie from In The Woods), but it's close. The way they worry about each other, and consequently keep secrets from one another, is masterfully done. Teenage Trey is that little bit older than the Trey of The Searcher, and I very much enjoyed seeing how she's grown, but also been held back by her
life experiences. Trey is convinced she always knows best, and unwilling to see evidence to the contrary, even from adults that clearly care and worry for her.

The plot of The Hunter is less good than its setting and characters. The initial money-make scheme is beyond ridiculous. It does lead to some funny dialogue, so I'll give it pass for that reason, but I just find it utterly unbelievable that so many characters would go along with it for so long. The climax and ending were great, in my opinion, but I can't help feeling it was very disconnected what came earlier.

Another enjoyable Tana French novel. I do like these characters a lot, although I am starting to wonder how many books in this series she will write. I'd like to meet some new characters too.

I'm tired of books that use cancer as a literary device. It's too neat, too conveniently symbolic, to the point that it feels unreal.

The rest of this very short book I quite liked. The simmering, quiet anger of this unnamed protagonist is well written and clear.

I feel. Of course I do.I have emotions.But I try to consider events as if they're happening to someone else. Some other entity. There's the thinking, rationalizing I (me). And the doing, the experiencing, her. I look at her kindly. From a distance. To protect myself, I detach.

This was fantastic. I'm not the biggest Holmes & Watson fan out there, although I do feel like I know them well as characters (how could anyone not?), but I'm just not one of the completionists, someone who has read/watched everything, and knows the characters and their world inside out. Perhaps my opinion doesn't mean much over others' more in the know, but to me this feels both incredibly true, consistent and faithful to the original Conan Doyal stories, while being something entirely new too.

It was a masterstroke from Horowitz to have Watson write this “last” Holmes adventure, years later, from his deathbed, with instructions (due to the horrifying nature of the case) for it not to be read until 100 years after his death. This gave Horowitz a bit more freedom than if he'd decided to have Watson writing the tale at the time it took place. Watson is able to reflect on the time period from a more modern perspective. Indeed, the case is one I really couldn't have seen Conan Doyle coming up with in the late 19th/early 20th century, and Watson himself is far more concerned with the inequalities of London life than he ever would have been in the originals. Horowitz seems to, through Watson, point fun at this:

It sometimes occurs to me now, having witnessed so many momentous changes across the years, that I should have described at greater length the sprawling chaos of the city in which I lived, perhaps in the manner of Gissing - or Dickens fifty years before. [...] And then there was the greatest curse of our age, the carelessness that had put tens of thousands of children out onto the street; begging, pick-pocketing, pilfering or, if they were not up to the mark, quietly dying unknown and unloved, their parents indifferent if indeed those parents were themselves alive. [...]Come, Watson, that's quite enough of this. Get back to the story. Holmes would never have stood for it had he been alive!

(Chapter 6)

A bewildering and frustrating book. I kept reading because I was hoping for some kind of explanation, but I should have known this is not the kind of novel to explain anything.

I should have stopped right near the very beginning when Mr Ryder, the protagonist, met a woman, a complete stranger, and then after meeting her and speaking to her for a while (a loooong while), he suddenly remembers she's his partner and they have a child together (who he also met as a stranger?). I know it's a metaphor for something, but every single event in the book was like this. Meet someone, this person is impressed because Mr Ryder is very impressive, then it turns out they're somehow related to Mr Ryder's past life, then they beg him to travel somewhere with them, Mr Ryder goes, they have a long, pointless conversation, then Mr Ryder remembers he should be somewhere else, leaves, but on the way he gets lost or derailed somehow. Repeat, ad nauseam. 

The writing is dull and repetitive. I think that's maybe the point, but even if there's a “point”, it doesn't make it any more enjoyable to read. I ended up skim reading pages and pages of a single character rambling on and on, thinking none of this makes any sense. Perhaps all these characters are figments of Mr Ryder's nightmare, connected to people he somehow knows from before. Perhaps, time, space and any sort of logic is meaningless. Fine. But just why?

What did I just read? I honestly don't know, but, more importantly, I don't really care either.

The ending to this was strange. A complete tonal shift, at odds with the rest of the novel, which is very, very dark. This ending disappointed me and makes it hard to rate the book as a whole.

I loved that this was a working class story set in Lancashire. It felt very true to Lancaster, Morecambe, Heysham and the surrounding areas. I was very impressed by the details the author added to make the setting realistic and believable.

Laurie, the protagonist, is erratic, unpleasant to many of those around here, and deeply, deeply hurt. The novel should revolve around her relationship with her, now missing, husband Mark, but this is one element that I feel wasn't too successful and led to the lackluster conclusion. There's little believable chemistry between them, even after plenty of flashbacks, and so it's hard to really feel any interest in them solving their marital issues. I was much more intrigued by Laurie's relationships with the supposedly side characters, her coworker Eric, her dad, dad's carer Olena, upstairs neighbour Katrina, and even her mother-in-law, Mavis. All these relationships felt real and complex, so why I do feel so little about the supposed main relationship of the novel?

Maybe, this novel didn't quite live up to its potential, but I was certainly absorbed by it and impressed by the author's style/writing. I'd love to read more from the author in the future.

Review from when first read (23 October 2014):
After a few too many meh reads lately, this was exactly what I needed! The Artic is a really perfect setting for a good ghost story, one that is so utterly absorbing and beautifully atmospheric. In some ways this chilling backdrop was almost more powerful then the true ghost aspect of the plot. Paver's descriptions are so vivid, so expressive, that I could really see Gruhuken, and it was easy to understand Jack's increasing paranoia, in eternal and silent darkness. The plot itself is really very simple, without reliance on unnecessary “shock” moments or graphic descriptions of gore, which is often my problem with a lot paranormal or horror stories (in films as well as books). Paver really understands the power of the old-fashioned ghost story: the atmosphere, the gradual building of tension and suspense, the sense of the inevitable.

On a side note, this has reminded me that I really need to re-read Paver's Chronicles of Ancient Darkness children series. I completely adored them as a child, but I did that awful thing called growing up and forgot about the series before the final book was released, so I never read it.

Review after re-read (13 February 2025):
Just as good as I remember it being. A very simple but effective ghost story. Perhaps one thing I thought about this time, that I don't think I considered the first time, is that is a little strange how much detail Jack puts into his journal. If I was this scared, I don't think I'd be writing this much down!! I don't think I could. But maybe that's more to do with Jack's character... He couldn't talk about his experiences out loud, but somehow writing them down makes more sense to him. I do love how Paver uses the back and forth between the tenses, sometimes in present tense as Jack is writing, then weaving into the past as Jack dwells on whatever has happened in the preceding days. It makes for a frantic sense of pace, especially towards the end.

It's interesting that I picked up two novels in translation very close together that both deal with the massive topic of memory (Time Shelter by Georgi Gospodinov and now this); in particular, memory's ambiguity. It definitely wasn't intentional, but I guess that's where my subconscious is currently at.

While Time Shelter explores first the memory of many different individuals, and then collective memory on a societal scale, Everything I Don't Remember (at least until the very end), seems to be centred on the memories on (not of) a single individual, Samuel, who has died tragically, and now only exists in the memories of those that knew him. An unnamed writer decides to interview these people, with the aim of writing about Samuel's last year of life, and perhaps uncovering whether his death was suicide or not.

The majority of the novel is told through transcripts of these interviews. Each chapter switches, perhaps after a paragraph or two, or perhaps after a few pages, between the spoken words of two different interviewees. For the first couple chapters, this is extremely disorientating. It's hard to even know for certain who is speaking at any particular moment. I encourage you, the reader, to be patient and keep going, because it does eventually get easier to follow, and ultimately this is a really fascinating narrative structure.

Samuel, apparently, has an intense fear of forgetting. He watches his grandma's dementia worsen and already, at his very young age, dreads that something similar might happen, or might already be happening, to him:

 One time Samuel told me that he had called her home phone and when she answered the TV was so loud that she said “wait a second.” Then the TV went off and his grandma tried to continue her conversation with Samuel via the remote. I laughed when he told me that, and Samuel laughed too, but then he added:“It would be funny if it weren't so fucking tragic.”I never understood why he was so upset by his grandma's illness. For me, aging was a natural part of life, you get old, you forget, you need other people to help you. But Samuel seemed to have a hard time accepting it. 

(Berlin, p.46)

(Spoilers of the end of the book:)

Laide asks the writer not to write about Samuel in the first person:

Do you have a plan for how you're going to make it into a coherent narrative? Just as long as you don't try to write Samuel in the first person it will probably work. I don't think it's possible to capture the voice of another person, it would be foolish to even try.

(The Balcony, p.189)

Of course, in the last part of the book, the writer does exactly this, and writes Samuel's death from Samuel's perspective in the first person. But it cannot be real, can it? We also learn that the writer himself is grieving, not for Samuel, who he only met once, but for a close friend who has also died. Unable to write about this friend (would be far too painful?). the writer instead chooses to write about Samuel. But of course, this has to affect the writer's perspective and objectivity. The writer may be writing to process the death of their friend, less than caring about who Samuel truly was, which makes writing Samuel's death in the first person feel all the more surreal and even exploitative.

 “Maybe he [Samuel, the protagonist] is...““Lost in translation.” “Yeah! [...] For everything that people remember, there's so many things they choose to omit. And maybe that's where he really is, in the things that people choose not to remember.” 

(

The Biblio File hosted by Nigel Beale

podcast episode with Jonas Hassen Khemiri at ~36:20)

The Biblio File hosted by Nigel Beale

highly

Review from when first read (27 March 2015):

I can only gush. Really I don't think I am capable of writing a proper review. This is one of the most enjoyable crime mysteries I've read in years, and I love this genre. But this was so much than just a really good mystery: fantastic characters, perfect pacing (nothing too rushed, but still suspenseful), and simply gorgeous writing. I think I'm going to be thinking about Rob and Cassie for a long time and I genuinely feel emotional over what happened between them. Cassie, in particular, was a fantastic female lead and I really hope she turns up again later in the series. (Edit: I've just read the synopsis for the next book and yes Cassie's back!!) Honestly, the one thing that surprised me was how sad this book was. It's quiet, emotional and painfully real, perhaps quite the opposite of the fast paced thriller I was expecting. And I loved every second of it.
Review after re-read (28 January 2025):

Well, I certainly chose the right time to reread one of my favourite books of all time! We were without power for nearly 20 hours due to a bad storm, and just getting absorbed in this 600+ page beauty again while trying to stay warm (even in the dark! Yay for ereader front lights 😆) was a GOOD decision.

Rob and Cassie really are one my favourite fictional friendships of all time. I love how French starts the book making it clear that Rob is a jerk. He is! And a complete idiot (he certainly proves that later on!), but he's also very human. Proof that you don't need to necessarily like a character to understand their motives and root for them in the story. You can feel Rob's pain, still the lost, traumatised child even as an adult detective:

Losing a chunk of your memory is a tricky thing, a deep-sea quake triggering shifts and upheavals too far distant from the epicentre to be easily predictable. From that day on, any nagging little half-remembered thing shimmers with a bright aura of hypnotic, terrifying potential: this could be trivia, or it could be The Big One that blows your life and your mind wide open. Over the years, like someone living on a fault line, I had come to trust the equilibrium of the status quo, to believe that if The Big One hadn't come by now then it wasn't coming [...]

(p.307, Chapter 11)

How can I ever make you understand Cassie and me? I would have to take you there, walk you down every path of our secret shared geography. [...]  ...she was my partner. I don't know how to tell you what that word, even now, does to me; what it means.

(p.285, Chapter 10)

sad

When Hell freezes over and the camels come skating home

"Winters are when people disappear."

Giving a star rating for a short story collection is always tricky, because it's very rare for me to feel strongly about every single story there. This was a quick read, and the theme linking the stories is a wonderful sense of place. Cold and empty Cornwall in off-season winter.

A lot of the shorter stories, especially the ones featuring dialogue only, really didn't work for me. I'm already struggling to remember their contents. An exception to this was ‘One Foot In Front Of The Other'. Extremely short, but very claustrophobic in feel, how it's written, and what happens. As a resident of a different area with lots of farm animals in the surrounding fields, I can, ugh, relate. I also loved how unexplained it was. What was the protagonist running from/to? Who knows!

Actually claustrophobia, or feeling trapped in one's circumstances, is a common theme throughout, and is featured in all my favourite stories in the collection; ‘The Dishes', ‘Flotsam, Jetsam, Lagan, Derelict', ‘The Sing of the Shore' and ‘By-the-Wind Sailors'. These strong stories really made up for the weaker ones, personally, and I can recommend giving the whole collection a read.

And again back to the shelves of books, to convince myself that the world is bound and ordered.

(p.274, Part 5 - Chapter 39)
Well! That was a wild ride. This book is not for those of you who hate non-linear, rambling, chaotic, surreal, fragmentary, stream-of-consciousness type of fiction. The “plot” is pretty insignificant and, by design, nonsensical. It's unsettling and satisfying at the same time. There was a moment in the middle when I thought it really had lost me, but after that ending (incredible!), thinking back, it makes a bit more sense ... sort of! But that's the point, I think.

Time Shelter is all about the human tendency to find comfort in the past. When the present is too incoherent, ominous, foreboding, the past is where  people find their shelter: 

[...] for us the past is the past, and even when we step into it, we know that the exit to the present is open, we can come back with ease. For those who have lost their memories, this door has slammed shut once and for all. For them, the present is a foreign country, while the past is their homeland. The only thing we can do is create a space that is in sync with their internal time.

(p.40, Part 1 - Chapter 11)

When people with whom you've shared a common past leave, they take half of it with them. Actually, they take the whole thing, since there's no such thing as half a past. It's as if you've torn a page in half lengthwise and you're reading the lines only to the middle, and the other person is reading the ends. And nobody understands anything.

(p.196, Part 3 - Chapter 20)

In 1742, a scrappy, leaking, cobbled together vessel lands on the Brazilian coast. The men on board soon become minor celebrities, thanks to the strange tale they have to tell, on being survivors of the shipwreck of the British ship, the Wager, two years earlier. Somehow, these men weren't the only members of the doomed voyage to (eventually) make it back to England, but as it turns out, there are many conflicting narratives on what exactly happened.

I'll be honest, I can sometimes find “survival stories” like this a bit tiresome to read. There's honestly only so many times you can read vivid descriptions of starvation, murder and mutilation, or how isolation and hunger send men insane, or the horrors of scurvy, or how some men simply have a superiority complex, thinking they know better than anyone else, even in a life or death situation, before you just feeling like yelling “Enough!”.

But I did want to read this for many reasons. I wanted an insight into 1700s nautical society, and I was intrigued by the idea that conflicting accounts caused a legal nightmare on their return to England. Sadly, the vast majority of this book was the gruesome, survival tale stuff. I do appreciate how clear Grann was on his sourcing of first hand accounts, and how he even attempted to include people who are usually silenced, those who could not leave written accounts, such as the Kawésqar people. The narrative is clearly incredibly well researched and put together, but it's simply not something I loved reading about it.

After such a detailed retelling of the mens' shipwreck and their stranger-than-fiction returns to their homeland, I was then left surprised at just how rushed the end of the book felt. Simply, the parts I was most excited to learn about, the mens' return to England, the legal aftermath, and views of the burgeoning press, and the views of the wider society, views both on the men themselves and what they went through, felt very glossed over in comparison to the earlier parts of the book. That's a shame, in my opinion, because there was definitely a lot there for those of us that felt a bit deflated after reading about the hundredth gruesome death while castaway on an island. I'm sure there should have been more accounts of this period, not less, so it almost feels like perhaps these areas weren't as interesting to the author, and so he spent a lot less time on them. A shame and a bit of a let down.

I did learn many fascinating facts from this book, however. My favourite being just how many expressions and idioms that we still use today have their origin in this “age of sail”:

 “To “toe the line” derives from when boys on a ship were forced to stand still for inspection with their toes on a deck seam. To “pipe down” was the boatswain's whistle for everyone to be quiet at night, and “piping hot” was his call for meals. [...] To “turn a blind eye” became a popular expression after Vice-Admiral Nelson deliberately placed his telescope against his blind eye to ignore his superior's signal flag to retreat.” 

(Chapter 2: A Gentleman Volunteer)

Reread 12 January 2025

Review from when first read (17 December 2017):

Home Fire is a powerful and deeply empathetic novel, one that has left me reeling. I deeply appreciate that Shamsie has a managed to take inspiration from two highly different sources: firstly, a play on burial rites inspired from Greek tragedy (Antigone); and, secondly, the stories that litter the British media on the “enemies within”, most frequently referring to British-born Muslim and/or South Asian men, “jihadi-brides”, and the families that should have “prevented” or at the very least “not encouraged” terrorism. While Homefire is a retelling of an ancient story, and deals with timeless themes such as family, love, betrayal and forgiveness, it is also exceedingly current as it examines modern-day issues and tensions within both the modern family and society, such as religion, identity, tolerance, politics, and justice.

The novel is split into five sections, each one told by a different narrator. This form of narrative structure can be difficult to get right, especially when the reader feels so at home with the chapters of the early narrators. When I started the last section and realised who would be narrating it, I admit that I was a little apprehensive. I shouldn't have worried. While every section had grown more and more intense, the conclusion that was to follow was phenomenal, a thrilling and overpowering climax worthy of the tragedy from Greek mythology that inspired it. Thinking back to the opening chapters, I believe I appreciate this slow and even innocent beginning even more after the climax. Not that there wasn't an element of tragedy to Isma's perspective. In fact, there is nothing more tragic than the simple, day-to-day reality of British Muslim woman fearing that she will be refused the right to board a plane, as we seen in the very first pages. By the end of the book, considering the novel as a whole, I feel Shamsie was entirely successful in using the multiple perspectives, and this narrative structure only adds to the overall impact of the book.

Without a doubt, Home Fire is the best of the books that I have read which were published in 2017. It may very well be my favourite overall read of the year as well. Kamilia Shamsie has shown her characters of a minority that is sadly villainised by the British media to be more complex, more human and certainly worthy of having their voice heard, despite what we might read in news reports. An unforgettable book demonstrating that the bitter truths and fundamental questions of ancient tragedies still have a place in a modern setting.

Oyeyemi writes beautifully, and I'm always intrigued by the premise, but out of the 4 books I've read by her, this is the 3rd to leave me disappointed. (I must reread White Is For Witching, because that's the only book I gave a high rating and I truthfully cannot remember it in great detail, so I'd be interested to see if I'd feel the same now).

I'm trying to decide if the awful ending has affected my opinion on the rest of the book. Without any exact spoilers, it's a twist that makes absolutely no sense, and for a story that seems to be dripping in symbolism that seems wrong. It's also just plain offensive.

But now I think back, there really were problems with the rest of the book. Boy and Bird were the most developed of the characters, but Bird in particular seemed entirely unbelievable for a 13 year old. Everyone else was one-dimensional, to the degree that I realised at multiple points that I had forgotten the names of some side characters and confused them with someone else. I feel this was a book that was trying to be character driven, but never quite made it.

Of the not-so side characters, Snow is the most important to the story, and she is banished quickly (if you read the blurb, you can probably guess why and by whom) so of course remains thin in terms of characterisation. Arturo is another disappointment, because the main conflict of the story is because of him and his family. It seems a major oversight to have left his character so undeveloped and powerless. 

Honestly, this could have been great. It's such a shame, because the theme of (minor spoiler) a family passing as white in the mid 20th-century America is such a strong one, but I'm left unsatisfied.

Apparently Sands was originally going to write 2 separate books (and the content could have fit many more!), but he was advised to combine them. It's such an achievement that Sands managed to pull this off, and the resulting book is incredible. 

I really loved the contrast between the detailed uncovering of Sands' family history, with the equally tragic and horrifying stories of the lawyers Hersch Lauterpacht and Raphael Lemkin. Their personal stories are written in such a detailed way, so it was a surprise in the second half of the book (about second half I'd say anyway?) when the Nuremberg trials is covered in just as much detail. 

So overall you have 4 separate family biographies (Buchholz/Sands, Lauterpacht, Lemkin and then Nazi governor Hans Frank as well), then a fascinating and similarly detailed history of the international legal concepts that were coming into being at the Nuremberg trials. That is an awful lot of book for only just over 500 pages!!

It's sickening how relevant the core legal conflict described in this book are today. That is, the conflict between the legal concept of genocide with its focus on the group as victim and the crime against humanity with the focus being the individual. I'd never really thought these concepts through in such a way before, and in the ~2 weeks it's taken me to read this book, I've definitely found myself thinking deeply about both these concepts everytime I listen to the news (depressingly, but it's true).

I can't remember how many years it's been since I actually reviewed a book here, rather than just logging/rating, but I feel like I have to quickly write just a few words about this strange, wonderful book. The opening chapters were just weird and disorientating and you think you're heading into the type of fantasy I hate where it's just written in this choppy, illogical style just for the sake of it, but when you finally realise what may be happening here, it's remarkable. It became incredibly gripping at that point and then I suddenly realised it's only ~250 pages. I can't decide right now if I'd want it to be any longer, because maybe I'm just sad to have finished so soon. Go into this without reading too much about it (like I did! I guess one of the benefits of not being as active on GoodReads as before), and that way I think you'll get the most out of it. I personally loved every second of it.

It was only at the very end that I really understood that these 3 tales are completely separate. (Separate universes?) The repeating character names (and themes) tricked me. There had to be a reason for this, right? I think that may have affected my enjoyment somewhat as I was constantly trying to find the links and bridge the differences in the world building. But anyhow, if I accept them as separate pieces, then Books 1 and 3 were spectacular (Book 2 just didn't move me as much), especially when it comes down to world building, as I said before. The endings and lack of full explanations were cruel, but it works and I wouldn't have expected anything less from Yanagihara. (And, sorry, but I have to say I'm glad this was not a repeat of A Little Life! I could not have handled that. And anyway, I love how all 3 of Yanagihara's novels are entirely different.)

I was so incredibly excited by the book's topic. The idea that the senses and abilities of animals' are so different to our own that we can never truly imagine how they perceive the world. Fascinating, and the amount of information packed in here, the vast majority of it all completely new to me, is staggering. It could have so easily been overwhelming, but Ed Yong did fantastic job at presenting all this scientific research in an engaging and approaching way. His enthusiasm for the topic is also crystal clear which only added to my enjoyment. Throughout the book, Yong is careful underline that there should no comparisons or rankings of animal senses. There is no “best”, there is only different. The book highlights how little of “reality” human beings, and any other being, can perceive. It's not that any perception is wrong, it's just not all there is to know. Really incredible to think about and I'm grateful to Ed Yong for introducing me to these ideas.

You know that feeling when you realise you're reading the right book at exactly the right time? This week has been terribly cold and snowy, the week before Christmas, exactly the scene in this emotional little tale. Tom also passes by some places very familiar to me in the Scottish borders, which added to the experience. Such a simple premise, a dangerous drive to pick up a son before Christmas, and such a short book overall. Less is sometimes more though, and this was beautifully done. Loved it.

March 2018 when first adding the book to wishlistI'll be reading Chen's debut [b:Soy Sauce for Beginners 17346827 Soy Sauce for Beginners Kirstin Chen https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1363657440l/17346827.SY75.jpg 24086983] before this (it's on the tbr soon pile!), but I really enjoyed this article about the author's concern on whether she had the right to write the story she was planning for this, her sophomore novel: Am I Chinese Enough to Tell This Story? - https://lithub.com/am-i-chinese-enough-to-tell-this-story/4 years later, July 2022, and I have finally read the book...A really good read and preferred ito her debut from what I remember. Seeing what I wrote above reminds how many good books have been stranded on my wishlist for far too long.

Updated 29/06/15

I want to write a review that really does this epic, breathtaking masterpiece justice. But right now I don't think I can. I've just finished the very last page and all I can feel is perfect...contentment. I'm too in awe to really string any of my thoughts together properly. I loved this novel from start to finish and there is absolutely nothing I would change. I'm astounded that this is Clarke's first novel. How is it possible to create such a detailed, fascinating alternate history of England in a debut novel? The world building is simply remarkable. Although I can see how the footnotes would have annoyed some, to me it was almost like reading a collection of fairy tales and folk stories along with the main plot, which again just emphasised the believability of the world that Clarke has created. Every detail has been impeccably crafted and researched. I've also just realised that all my top 5 reads for the year so far are between 500-900 pages in length. I really think it's incredible that books of such a length can be so captivating and awe-inspiring as Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell that they can make you feel as if it wasn't long enough. Perhaps, I'll write a few more of my thoughts after I've distanced myself a bit more from finishing it, but at this moment all I can tell you is that it is an amazing feeling to have read and experienced this book. Thank you Susanna Clarke.

Update 29/06/15: For anyone who has tried to read this and really struggled with the length, I highly recommend giving the BBC TV series a go. The last episode aired here last night and this series was honestly the most perfect TV to book adaptation I have ever seen in my life. The ending deviated very slightly from the novel Spoiler(from what I remember Stephen Black's story was tied up a bit better, which I would have liked to have seen in the TV series as he was one of my favourite characters. Bit of a shame really.), but they got the gist of it and everything else was perfect. Seven hours of enthralling, immersive story telling with stunning performances from every one of phenomenal cast. I'm just so happy that one of my favourite books has been adapted for the screen so wonderfully, as that so rarely happens. Now off to order the DVD so I can watch it over and over again!

Surprisingly, the title tale was by far my least favourite of the 4. I think it was awkwardly structured, which really took me out of the story. I didn't really understand the narrator's (?) involvement and how he was so knowledgable about it. It was odd, which is shame, because there was a great feeling of tension and dread.

But I still had to give the collection a full 5 stars, because the other 3 are just that good! They are all completely different, and I loved the variety. Alice Baker was definitely my favourite and days later I cannot stop thinking about it. I loved the modern setting of an office, and the sense of camaraderie between the coworkers. The realistic, modern setting made the story all the more eerie and disconcerting. Loved it! Boy Twenty-One is melancholic, probably the least scary. And with The Front Room, I feel like what made it work so well, just like Alice Baker, was the sense of realism (and the mundane?). That's what makes it so chilling.

I just really enjoyed my time with this book.