The Confessions of Frannie Langton

Read 24/06/2019-25/06/2019

Rating 3 stars

A friend recommended The Confessions of Frannie Langton to me ages ago, so I reserved it at the library. Everyone else in Manchester wanted to read it, apparently, so it took weeks and weeks and arrived just when I already had an armful of library books to read. When I finally got to it, I only had two days left in which to read it. Fortunately, it’s a page turner, and I managed to whip through it.

The story of Frannie Langton is a feisty one. She begins her tale as a prisoner on trial for murder, but not even she is sure whether she did it or not. Her lawyer asks her to write down anything she remembers that will help her case, and so she writes her life story.

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The Shape of the Ruins

Read 18/05/2019-29/05/2019

Rating 5 stars

The Shape of the Ruins is the story of the writer Juan Gabriel Vásquez and his involvement with two men who are obsessed by the assassination of Jorge Eliécer Gaitán in 1948. Gaitán is real. Vásquez is real. I don’t know whether Carlos Carballo or Dr Francisco Benavides, the man who introduces Vásquez to Carballo, are real. It’s a novel about truth and the multiple truths of history. It’s a novel about how politically charged events can have decades of reverberation, affecting the lives of those who are unaware of the origin moment. It’s a novel of connections obscured by the twists and turns in their paths. Ultimately, it’s a novel about power and its influence over truth.

My Sister The Serial Killer

Read 17/05/2019

Rating 4 stars

What do you do when your sister keeps killing her boyfriends? You become her Cleaner. This is the situation Korede finds herself in when her sister Ayoola kills three of her boyfriends on the trot.

Omens

Read 19/02/2019-27/02/2019

Rating 3 stars

I like to read widely, and Omens was a definite change in pace and style from what I’ve been reading recently. It’s a book that found me through LibraryThing’s take on Secret Santa. The first year I did SantaThing, my Santa bought me two books by Kelley Armstrong. I read one of them, City of the Lost, quite promptly and enjoyed it. For some reason, I left the other waiting. I think I knew what it would be like, just from the cover.

HER PARENTS ARE KILLERS NOW SHE’S THE TARGET

Six Degrees of Separation: from The French Lieutenant’s Woman to The Essex Serpent

 

Happy New Year everyone. I’m starting my 2019 blogs with the January Six Degrees meme, sticking with my tradition of being slightly late. (Resolutions to do better are pointless, don’t you think?) This month we’re starting with The French Lieutenant’s Woman by John Fowles.

Touch

Read 07/12/2018-22/12/2018

Rating: 2 stars

Touch is the second novel by Claire North, one of the pen names of Catherine Webb. I hadn’t heard of her in any of her guises, but a colleague saw me reading one of the Wayfarer series of books and thought I might like Claire North.

Its 423 pages took longer to read than they deserved. It was a grind at times. The central character has the sort of transient existence that makes it hard for them to have anything they care about, and the things North decided they would care about didn’t grab my attention.

Vernon Subutex 2

Read 25/11/2018-01/12/2018

Rating 4 stars

I read the first book in Virginie Despentes’s trilogy about a down-on-his-luck former record dealer earlier this autumn. I enjoyed its mercurial plot and its shallow characters enough to ask my local library to buy volume two.