01. The Now or Never Festival has become one of my favourites (still thinking about a stunning installation I saw at last year’s festival). We spent a night looking at all of the free events, including: Continue reading
Tag Archives: Peter Wohlleben
Things that are making me happy this week
01. I’m a little late posting, but that’s because I finished last week and started this week in Anglesea, for two days of surfing with the kids. It was glorious. Continue reading
Sample Saturday – forests, pain, and a funeral home.
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
Nonfiction November – Book Pairings
It’s Nonfiction November, this week hosted by Sarah’s Book Shelves. The task? Pair up a nonfiction book with a fiction title.
I had so much fun with this topic last year and although I feared I’d exhausted my ideas, I’ve managed a few more pairings –
Ireland divided – Lost Lives by David McKittrick / Across the Barricades by Joan Lingard Continue reading
Autumn non-fiction reads
Three non-fiction books I’ve read in the last two months – Continue reading
Six Degrees of Separation – from Memoirs of a Geisha to Howard’s End
It’s time for #6degrees. Start at the same place as other wonderful readers, add six books, and see where you end up!
This month we begin with Arthur Golden’s international bestseller, Memoirs of a Geisha. I took this book on holiday with me to Far North Queensland and have fond memories of sitting on the beach and by the pool, absorbed in Golden’s sumptuous story. Continue reading
From a Low and Quiet Sea by Donal Ryan
In his latest novel, From a Low and Quiet Sea, Donal Ryan has taken three very different characters – Farouk, whose country has been torn apart by war; Lampy, a broken-hearted boy from Ireland; and elderly John, whose past sins are haunting him – and created something special.
The novel is structured simply – a short, stand-alone story for each character and a fourth concluding story that brings the three characters together. The danger of drawing a number of disparate stories together is that the overall result can seem contrived. Somehow, Ryan has avoided this – nothing in From a Low and Quiet Sea feels forced or out-of-place. The connections between each story, once revealed, are surprising but also make perfect sense. And the best bit? I didn’t see any of it coming. Quite a feat. Continue reading