Shrines of Gaiety by Kate Atkinson Continue reading
Tag Archives: French
Sample Saturday – a man, essays, and a daughter
Sample Saturday is when I wade through the eleventy billion samples I have downloaded on my Kindle. I’m slowly chipping away and deciding whether it’s buy or bye. Continue reading
A bunch of short reviews
I am painfully behind in my reviews – the longer they go unwritten, the less likely it is to happen. These reviews hardly do justice to some of the books I’ve read (sorry Magda) but at the very least provide me with a record. Continue reading
The Postman’s Fiancée by Denis Theriault
The Postman’s Fiancée by Denis Thériault is a story about infatuation, love, haiku, and identity.
Tania moves from Bavaria to Montreal to fine-tune her French and fall in love. Waitressing at a restaurant frequented by ‘regulars’, she meets Bilodo, a shy postman who writes haiku and who is passionate about calligraphy.
He came through the door every day at noon, impeccable in his postman’s uniform. He was tall, rather thin and not exactly handsome, but his gentle eyes and timid smile made Tania go weak inside. Continue reading
Sample Saturday – a ‘classic’, a publisher, and families
Sample Saturday is when I wade through the eleventy billion samples I have downloaded on my Kindle. I’m slowly chipping away and deciding whether it’s buy or bye. Continue reading
Sarah’s Key by Tatiana de Rosnay
It’s a terrible thing to compare one Holocaust story with another…. But it’s kind of what we do when we read about a topic that interests us, isn’t it? Continue reading
The Lover by Marguerite Duras
Marguerite Duras’s The Lover is the second book I’ve read in as many weeks that’s a memoir, thinly disguised as a novel (the other being by Lily Brett).
The story is set in Saigon in the 1930s, and describes the tumultuous affair between a relatively poor adolescent French girl and her wealthy, older Chinese lover. Interspersed between details of their clandestine meetings are descriptions of the unnamed narrator’s mother – headmistress of a girls’ high school and prone to bouts of depression, and her wayward brothers. Continue reading
Sample Saturday – a loner, a kiss, and two lovers
Sample Saturday is when I wade through the eleventy billion samples I have downloaded on my Kindle. I’m slowly chipping away and deciding whether it’s buy or bye. Continue reading
Sample Saturday – elves, murders, and a girl grieving
Sample Saturday is when I wade through the eleventy billion samples I have downloaded on my Kindle. I’m slowly chipping away and deciding whether it’s buy or bye.
The Life of Elves by Muriel Barbery Continue reading
My Wish List by Grégoire Delacourt
Can money buy happiness? That is the question at the core of Grégoire Delacourt’s quaint novel, My Wish List.
Jocelyne is middle-aged, has been married to the same man for decades, lives in a small provincial French town and runs her own dressmaking shop. Her life is quite different to what she imagined it might be. In fact, her life is ordinary. And then she wins the lottery. Continue reading