Books Greatest Hits

Old Filth, and all that.

This post is seven years too late. A perverse and quite irrational sense of anti-nepotism, for want of a better term, has prevented me from becoming acquainted with Jane Gardam‘s beautiful writing before this year. We are not related (sadly!); even if we were, since Gardam is Jane’s husband’s surname, I couldn’t even claim shared […]

Books

Three new reviews

After an absence whose days were full but not fertile, here are Kate Forsyth’s Bitter Greens, Playing House by Amy Choi, and the wonderful Adam Johnson’s The Orphan Master’s Son. Astute (one may say time-fortunate) readers may note the newish and natty little quote hanging around recently added reviews. This quaint folly is my editor’s […]

Books Writing

Quandry

I’m all in a dither over this latest review. Already, it’s taken much longer to write than usual. It has been written, deleted, rewritten a few times. The book was poor. I disliked it on a number of levels: starting with the macro, I think the genre of “memoir” can do without half-life scratches from […]

Books

Work in hand

The latest review copy arrived yesterday. A novel for young adults. A teenage girl’s dying mother reveals that her father is not really a deceased war hero; rather, he’s a Hollywood action hero. And she has a bitchy half-sister. Kill me now.