Published by Ace Books / Gollancz / Corgi, 1990, 368 pages. This delightfully subversive look at the Apocalypse and everything that went before is one of my favourite books. Aziraphale, an angel, and Crowley, a demon, have been living on Earth since the beginning. Crowley, who starts out as the serpent in the Garden of …
Continue reading Good Omens: Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett
Photo by Pancholp (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0) Some of you have asked for books you can read during this time of lockdown and the threat of pandemic. Nothing too grim, something that will make you laugh or that will help you escape. So here is a far from exhaustive list, mostly, though not entirely, from my …
Published by Little, Brown / Abacus, 2013, 336 pages. “Do not go gentle into that good night. / Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”Dylan Thomas Guy is dying and has no intention of going gentle into the good night. He summons his best friends to his crumbling house by the quarry by telling …
Published by John Murray / Hodder & Stoughton / Dial Press / Knopf Canada, 2007, 272 pages. Set on the island of Bougainville in Papua New Guinea, this book tells the story of a young girl, Matilda, who is 13 when we first meet her. The story takes places mostly in the 1990s, during the …
Published by Counterpoint / Granta Books, 2009, 320 pages. “It is quite hard to remember which came first—the freedom of solitude or the energy of silence. … I became less driven, more reflective and great deal less frenetic. And into that space flowed silence: I would go out into the garden at night or in …
Translated from Japanese by Stephen SnyderPublished by Vintage, 2019, 288 pages. Original version published in 1994. “‘Things go on disappearing, one by one. … It doesn’t hurt, and you won’t even be particularly sad. One morning you’ll simply wake up and it will be over, before you’ve even realized. … People gather in little groups …
Published by OWN IT!, 2017, 336 pages. “And in the end, we are all looking for the same place: somewhere to call home. Home is somewhere we know, somewhere we trust. … Home is where your heart is, home is where you rest your head, home is where you never feel alone. For me, there …
Continue reading No Place to Call Home—Love, Loss, Belonging: J.J. Bola
Translated from French by Allison M. CharrettePublished by Restless Books, 2017, 500 pages. Original version published in 2016. This is the first novel from Madagascar to be translated into English. It tells the story of Rafa, a young woman, and Tsito, the boy her father buys her for a slave. Their relationship is closer than …
Published by Corgi / Black Swan, 1992, 256 pages. “To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child. For what is the worth of human life, unless it is woven into the life of our ancestors by the records of history?” This quote by Marcus Tullius Cicero sets …
Published by Corsair, 2018, 384 pages. “Marsh is not swamp. Marsh is a space of light, where grass grows in water, and water flows into the sky. Slow-moving creeks wander, carrying the orb of the sun with them to the sea… . Then within the marsh…true swamp crawls into low-lying bogs, hidden in clammy forests. Swamp …
Talking About Books 