“You cannot pretend to read a book. Your eyes will give you away. So will your breathing. A person entranced by a book simply forgets to breathe. The house can catch alight and a reader deep in a book will not look up until the wallpaper is in flames.”This lovely (and so true) quote is from “Mist...
In tango, there are no wrong turns. But every dance begins with a backward step.Taking his cue from the tango, the acclaimed author of Mister Pip has written a thrilling and sensuous novel about how we fall in love.Ranging from rural New Zealand during the final days of World War I to Buenos Aire...
This was so well written that I thought was a travel documentary until I read the Afterword.Jones visited Albania in 1991 and in his book he tells of the frightening country that had been produced during the 40-year reign of the country’s megalomaniac dictator Hoxha. Every citizen had their own B...
There had been others— one thinks of Roman galleys pulling on oars out to the wide ocean The Crusaders come to mind And those in sailing ships peeking around hillsides of ice Worlds bound by the same elemental fear & wonder. So what of memory? What sticks? Thirty years after the tour ends, in...
She appears matronly, in a man’s jacket, a thick plaid skirt and flat shoes. We are a little wary of each other at first. Gjyzepina begins by running through the morning newspapers. In one paper a cartoon has Albania separated from its borders with Greece, Macedonia and Montenegro, merrily sailin...
My mother, Alice, sometimes, but only if I am desperate since I also have to accept that she will give stuff away to old people, her cronies, and leave it to me to discover a hole in the stock. Usually it doesn’t amount to much, an armchair or a lamp, mostly things of a practical value, heaters, ...
The Irish trip had left a strange echo in his head, and the old simplicities had gone. He seemed to be two people now: the old Lou, whom he still mostly liked, and a new Lou, malevolent and cunning. He seemed to be morphing, and symptoms included an insecurity with scale and perspective. Was he a...
Big life-shattering breaches went unexplained or were distilled down to a Punch and Judy line: Well, she had to choose between him and me, and in the end she chose him. But things don’t ever just happen. Things occur in a particular way and for a reason. Mum never did see inside the folder held i...
When she told me she had killed her husband I assumed it was an accident. ‘No,’ she said, ‘I meant to kill him.’ She drove a pair of scissors into his armpit. The point penetrated his heart. She could no longer stand his lies. Lies about other women. She rang the police and told them what she had...
Couldn’t sleep a wink all night, tossing and turning. Worst days of my life, everything out of kilter. Big space in the bed too after Wendy went. Couldn’t cope with it, needed someone to cwtch up to. No mucky business mind, don’t go in for that sort of thing. Never had the chance to do anything e...
It’s a package deal, since we cannot befriend the Laurensons without the Kerrs or vice versa. Right now Jude is standing at the window. Since I came into the kitchen she has supplied me with a blow-by-blow account of the shovels and picks and backpacks shoved in the back of the Laurensons’ Pajero...