Ten Days in May: The Peoples Story of VE Day (Bloomsbury Reader)
But what begins as amusing scattiness starts tipping towards something darker and sadder. Abbs handles the parabola of this real life story with tremendous assurance.
Tyler serves up a sweetly rendered, thoroughly modern love story. Funny, exuberant and courageous, nudging closer and closer to how it might feel to enter the non-human world. Two memoirs have made me laugh and cry: A Memoir Little Toller. Writing that crackles off the page and explodes in the imagination. Sue Brooks, Forest of Dean, Gloucestershire.
It may sound dry and dusty, but it is actually amusing and emotionally gripping, especially for those of us who have travelled a similar route. This collection of essays by 21 BAME writers voices a plea for nuance in our discourse on diversity. Variously funny, poignant, polemical and anger-inducing, the collection is existentially challenging to the status quo. It could not be more timely. These brief yet complex stories, distilled from witness testimony, engage the reader in an eloquent plea for our common humanity. There is nothing more enjoyable than browsing in a bookshop and my choices this year are concerned with them.
Dawn Churchill, Belper, Derbyshire.
As a coping strategy for the events of , rather than hiding under the duvet, I gratefully dip into this collection of essays in which great writers recount their visits to great museums. This is a beautifully produced book with illustrations by Steve Panton. The Museum in Stockholm, so thank you for the music to lift our spirits. This is the revealing story of the birth of Mass Observation.
- Ten Days in May.
- Johnnys Garden?
- Pearls or Dragons.
- Never a Cougar!
- About Ten Days in May.
In the first project of its kind, the anthropologist Tom Harris son took privileged university boys and girls north to late s Bolton, to live in a chaotic terraced house where they studied the lives of the community, much to the amusement of the townsfolk. Tim Winton, best known for his award-winning novels, enhanced his reputation with Island Home: A Landscape Memoir Picador.
This succinct volume is part childhood recollection and part cri de coeur against our rampant addiction to materialism. David Fothergill, Pocklington, Yorkshire. This 1,page chronological survey of the genre includes many freshly translated foreign language stories from countries as diverse as Argentina, Russia and China, and strong feminist and social themes. Richard Gilyead, Saffron Walden.
Readers’ books of the year 2016
At the heart of the novel is a family story that is appropriated by another character — an author — the consequences of which ripple out to every family member. Cora is transported via the metaphorical underground railroad, which the author has transformed into a literal network of secret tunnels and stations across America. A big book like this would have taken the whole year to read if I had followed up every reference that piqued my interest. A compendium of Eurasian trade in goods, technology and ideas over millennia, it really does give a history of the world, up to the present war in Syria.
While stylishly revealing his amazing insights and discoveries, including the concept of ecology, her account portrays a genuinely nice man. This equally compelling but much less salubrious novel is convoluted and complex, revealing the seedy links between the key character, Dr Caleb Maddox, absinthe and derangement. Avoid them in real life but enjoy them in fiction. Kate Johnson, Mirfield, West Yorkshire. Martin Jones, New Barnet, Hertfordshire. This book is not just about a fascinating area of London but, in the era of Brexit, it provides an account of how immigration shaped the history of the UK in every aspect, and how without it we would be a lesser people.
Cruickshank narrates a story of immense change which continues to this day, and calls for a response to the destruction of not only a way of life but of memory by forces that are not benign and affect us all. This is a tender, moving tribute to a great author. A man who repeatedly saves people, but who cannot accept being loved until late in life gives those of us in that age group hope that we may not be completely emotionally and psychologically set. Written by a journalist and survivor of Hillsborough, this is a lucid, honest, captivating and sensitive account of the tragedy in April , its aftermath and repercussions, both for the victims and for football in general.
To be read by everyone, but especially younger people who want to know how the game became, certainly in England, the money-soaked commercial enterprise it is today. Two outstanding transnational histories were published this year: Europe, Allen Lane. A great deal more than the sum of national parts, these multi-layered works impress in erudition and judgment. How apt they should have appeared in the year of the Brexit referendum. Two books by Irish writers helped me see the world with new eyes. It charts the ordinary chaos and joy of early adulthood in an extraordinary fashion.
The author is a doctor , critical of contemporary attitudes, who wants to see death reclaimed from the medics. These letters cover the years from to and provide a fascinating and engaging sort of autobiography full of the charm found in his travel writings. Wonderful to dip into.
Wonderfully illuminating and entertaining. The supporting cast is rich and varied too. Ranks closed to protect him all the way to his trial. Chris Palmer, Doonfoot, Ayr. Stephen Parkin, Godalming, Surrey.
Virginia Woolf - Wikipedia
The small but beautifully formed Mothering Sunday by Graham Swift Scribner , demonstrates both the social hierarchy of the time and how much life can change in a single day. The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy is my favourite book of all time, and I also adore Elif Shafak , whose fiction and essays as well as her talks are outstandingly fresh and insightful. The Earthsea trilogy is absolutely magnificent: She taught me that there is nothing wrong with life or with death: Because you can taste every word.
Mrs Dalloway , elegant and lyrical stream of consciousness that I prefer to Joyce. I would like to put in a word for Virginia Woolf, and especially for the under-appreciated Orlando, where the long-lived protagonist starts out as a young nobleman before becoming a wife and mother. The book runs from Elizabethan England to and says a lot about the position of women while being both clever and funny.
I think hope she will come to be recognised as one of the greatest writers of the 20th century.
Kerry Hudson: ‘Yes, this is “made up” but this is also the most truthful thing I have to give you’
To The Lighthouse, it had a huge impact on me when I first read it. It really made me consider and reconsider how I think and find direction. There are so many books by women that I love, but TTL is my favourite. Pretty much all of Woolf, whom I read voraciously during the late 90s and still dip into now and then for a quick dose of writerly inspiration.
Military History
Hard to pick any one favorite, fiction or non-fiction. I heard of her just a month ago, from a Korean American friend. All I can say about her at this stage is that she knows me better than I do. I am reading The Complete Stories published , which is full of lovely and shocking surprises. I finish one of her stories with a huge grin that lasts all day, another story may leave me arguing with myself She inspires me more than any other author in this second half of my life.
Her uniquely fluid style reveals a mind so perspicacious, so permissively poetic … and utterly radical. Her trademark self-acceptance is so refreshingly robust that I have found myself at times interrupting my reading with whoops of awe and admiration for her freedom of thought and spirit.
I would describe it as transformational because it provided an insight into the reality of what it means to be a young, ambitious, highly intelligent, sometimes single black woman in contemporary America. I was also moved by the story because it touchingly describes the loving relationship between the two central characters, showcasing that neither space nor time can erase love. We usually go back to the same desires and preferences we had as year-olds, and Americanah captures this sentiment.
Ngozi Adichie is a new, powerful and incredibly talented voice; her novel Americanah is the expression of a different African tale, of a continent and its people that have many more magnetic stories to tell, as well as critiques to raise about the so-called enlightened West. She predicted all that is happening today in that book.
Everything about it is scarily easy to imagine. Her descriptions of how women began to be punished for abortions reminds me of legislation happening right now in the USA, for example. White Teeth, by Zadie Smith. Could read it over and over again. On Beauty by Zadie Smith is absolutely brilliant.
Smith is often categorized first by race and gender and thus is never considered the peer of other modern literary fiction writers like Franzen and Rushdie, but she easily beats them at their own style. How many times have I, as a woman, faced being erased — in relationships, in career, in the larger social order?