
Back at the start of the year, Mayri at Bookforager set up a Book Bingo challenge complete with bingo card. I decided that I would give it a go.
Continue readingBack at the start of the year, Mayri at Bookforager set up a Book Bingo challenge complete with bingo card. I decided that I would give it a go.
Continue readingThe first Saturday in May is upon us, and here comes Six Degrees of Separation, the book meme hosted by Kate at Books Are My Favourite and Best.
This month, to start us off, Kate has chosen a book that I haven’t read yet by a favourite author of mine.
Continue readingRead 07/04/2022
Rating 4 stars
The Silence of the Sea is a novella of occupation and resistance. It was published in German-occupied France in 1942, not quite two years after the occupation began. Its author, Jean Bruller, wrote it in roughly eight months, publishing under the pseudonym Vercors. I borrowed a bilingual edition from the library that reproduces the definitive French text published in 1964 alongside Cyril Connolly’s 1944 translation into English. Continue reading
Read 14/02/2022-15/02/2022
Rating 5 stars
I’ve had Jean-Patrick Manchette’s Fatale on my Kindle since 2016. It was about time I read it, and I’ve chosen it for the French leg of my European book tour. It follows the fortunes of a young widow who conceals her identity to take on the role of killer-for-hire.
It’s been a busy first weekend in November, which is why I’m a couple of days late for this month’s Six Degrees of Separation. This bookish meme, in which readers link together a chain of books, is hosted by Kate at Books Are My Favourite and Best.
November’s starting point is Sigrid Nunez’s novel What Are You Going Through.
I haven’t read this novel yet, but I have read Kate’s review of it, so I know what it’s about.
Continue readingI’ve been perusing my stack of books that I have yet to read, and have decided that I’m going on another book trip. I enjoyed “holidaying” over the summer via the books I’d bought on recent holidays. As it’s unlikely that I’ll get to Europe for a while (thanks pandemic, thanks Brexit), I thought I’d knock a few titles off the stack that are by European authors and head off on a virtual tour of the continent.
Continue readingRead 16/05/2021-25/05/2021
Rating 3 stars
Blood Wedding is a psychological crime novel by French writer Pierre Lemaitre. It concerns Sophie, a woman with severe memory loss who, at the start of the book, is looking after a young boy on the days and nights that his busy parents can’t be there. When we meet Sophie, disaster has struck. Continue reading
It’s May Day! Beltane, if you will. I wish I’d been clever enough to do a folk horror Six Degrees of Separation this month. Kate, who hosts the meme at Books Are My Favourite and Best, has chosen a children’s classic, Beezus and Ramona, for the first book in the chain. Read on to see how I end up in a submarine with Captain Nemo.
Continue readingRead 28/02/2021
Rating 5 stars
Written in 2005 and first published in English translation in 2014, Marie NDiaye’s hypnotic fictional memoir Self Portrait in Green follows an unnamed narrator, who is a writer, and her encounters with mysterious green women. Continue reading
Read 14/02/2021-21/02/2021
Rating 4 stars
The final installment in Virginie Despentes’s Vernon Subutex trilogy draws together threads from the previous books and has characters zigzagging into one another’s lives, turned there by coincidence and kismet.
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