Josephine Cox hails from Blackburn and she has built a career as a highly successful novelist, frequently being cited as one of the top three most borrowed authors from public libraries. In this story from 2012 eight-year-old Casey’s mother Ruth is a cruel woman, with an appetite for other women’s husbands. His father is quiet […]
At Sunday School in The Channel Isles about 150 years ago I was taught to sing ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful‘ the opening verse of which is: ‘All things bright and beautiful, All creatures great and small, All things wise and wonderful, The Lord God made them all’. Mrs Phillips, our teacher, didn’t mention the
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard Read More »
This is a thoroughly researched history of the drug trade showing that all the efforts of governments and law enforcement are futile against global trafficking and desperation to escape the nightmare which is human experience. Spanning five centuries and several continents in a sweeping portrait of addiction, The Pursuit of Oblivion (2001) traces the history
The Pursuit of Oblivion by Richard Davenport-Hines Read More »
In 1914 Vera Brittain (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vera_Brittain) was 21 years old, and an undergraduate at Somerville College, Oxford. This is the memoir of an upper middle class woman who volunteers to become a nurse in World War 1, and finds her attitudes to herself and her society completely changed. Yet this is not just her story. As she herself writes,
Testament of Youth Read More »
Brilliant, witty and zestful memoirs from this writer and TV presenter. Full of acute analyses. Originally published 2001. 560 pages in Picador paperback edition. ISBN 978-0330418812
This is a multi-award winning biography of the poet who voiced the concerns of the Victorian era. Tennyson (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tennyson) was Poet Laureate for an astonishing 42 years. Originally published 1980. To go with this, listen to the BBC Radio 4 ‘In Our Time’ 45 minute episode on Tennyson’s In Memoriam. Available from the link http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0124pnq
Raskolnikov, a destitute and desperate former student, wanders through the slums of St Petersburg and commits a random murder without remorse or regret. He imagines himself to be a great man, a Napoleon: acting for a higher purpose beyond conventional moral law. But as he embarks on a dangerous game of cat and mouse with
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky Read More »
‘… None of us can ever express the exact measure of our needs’, Gustave Flaubert (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flaubert) observes in what must be the Madame Bovary’s most celebrated quotation, ‘or our ideas, or our sorrows, and human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we beat our tunes for bears to dance to, when we long to move the
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert Read More »
This novel tells the story of Oscar Hopkins, the Cornish son of a Plymouth Brethren minister who becomes an Anglican priest, and Lucinda Leplastrier, a young Australian heiress who buys a glass factory. They meet on the ship over to Australia, and discover that they are both gamblers, one obsessive the other compulsive. Lucinda bets Oscar that he cannot
Oscar and Lucinda by Peter Carey Read More »
