Let your eyes drop to my score for Maggie O’Farrell’s Costa Book Award-winning-novel, The Hand That First Held Mine, and freak out. Because nearly everyone I know loved it. And when I finished both of her completely immersive historical novels earlier this year (here and here), I expected I would also love it. But I didn’t and I’ll (very briefly) tell you why. Continue reading
Tag Archives: Costa Book Award
Life After Life by Kate Atkinson
I dither writing reviews for books that I absolutely adored. It’s ludicrous. I should be shouting from the rooftops “EVERYBODY! READ KATE ATKINSON’S LIFE AFTER LIFE! IT’S A MARVEL!”
Atkinson’s carefully constructed story follows Ursula Todd, as she lives and dies over and over again. Ursula’s story begins in England, in 1910, when she dies at birth, the umbilical cord around her neck –
The little heart. A helpless little heart beating wildly. Stopped suddenly like a bird dropped from the sky. A single shot. Darkness fell.
And darkness falls multiple times – drowning, slipping off a roof, illness, gas inhalation, suicide. Continue reading
Music & Silence by Rose Tremain
Imagine a good soap opera (that’s not an oxymoron).
Now imagine that it’s set in the seventeenth century.
In Denmark.
And that it’s really, really well written.
You’d be thinking of Rose Tremain’s Music & Silence, wouldn’t you?! Continue reading