JoV's Book Pyramid
British writers
Pao by Kerry Young
This book Pao was left in my shelf for a long time. I vacillate between returning without reading or keeping it. The only reason I read it was because I haven’t read a book set in Jamaica before, moreover about a Chinese man in Jamaica, how unique is that? Kingston, 1938. Fourteen-year-old Yang Pao steps … Continue reading
NW by Zadie Smith
It was in the summer of 2010 that I first took the journey from Reading to North West London. Destination: Willesden Green, for a preliminary discussion of a job interview. I got off at Dollis Hill station walked towards graffiti-laden walls next to a basketball court. Group of youth loitering outside the tube station. I … Continue reading
The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce
Harold Fry was a tall man who moved through life with a stoop, as if expecting a low beam, or a screwed-up paper missile, to appear out of nowhere. This is the story of recently-retired Harold Fry, who sets out one morning to post a letter to a dying friend called Queenie. Quite unexpectedly, in … Continue reading
Toby’s Room by Pat Barker
What it is: Toby and Elinor, brother and sister, friends and confidants, are sharers of a dark secret, carried from the summer of 1912 into the battlefields of France and wartime London in 1917. When Toby is reported ‘Missing, Believed Killed’, another secret casts a lengthening shadow over Elinor’s world: how exactly did Toby die – … Continue reading
The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim by Jonathan Coe
Maxwell Sim is the kind of person who, in our darkest nights of the soul, we all dread becoming: unloved, unsuccessful, doesn’t like himself very much. He is an after-sales customer liaison officer in a London department store, he has been taking leave off work because of depression for six months; his wife, Caroline, and … Continue reading
Frenchman’s Creek by Daphne Du Maurier
When I say this book contains pirates, what would you expect from it? Something similar to the movie Pirates of the Caribbean? Swashbuckling adventure? Romance? Deception? This book has it all! 29- year-old Lady Dona St. Columb is beautiful, headstrong – and bored. Desperate to escape the pomp and ritual of the Restoration Court, she … Continue reading
The Clothes On Their Backs by Linda Grant
The year was 1977, Vivien spends a quiet childhood encapsulated in the present, sealed off from the past by her timid refugee parents by self immolation, so Vivien quipped. She’s ten when she finds out that she has a relative that her parents tried to shield her from. To the horror of Vivien’s father, her … Continue reading
Sister by Rosamund Lupton
I wasn’t going to take any more books out from the library last Friday. Not for the short loan book that require reader to finish them within a week or bring it back for re-stamp. By strange reason, this book drawn me to it. I read the first page, then second and I knew I … Continue reading
3 cosy mysteries reviews series (2): The Case of the Missing Servant by Tarquinn Hall
Meet Vish Puri, India’s Most private investigator. Portly, persistent and unmistakably Punjabi, he cuts a determined swathe through modern India’s criminal cases. Aided by nick-named employees in his work – there’s FaceCream, Flush, TubeLight, DoorStop and HandBrake all named for a reason. Then there’s Puri’s wife Rumpi, his mother “Mummyji”, his secretary Elizabeth Rani, the … Continue reading
When I Lived in Modern Times by Linda Grant
I first came across this book at Vishy’s Blog and when I saw Granta 2011 edition of the book sitting on the featured library shelf, I borrowed it without second thought. Set in Israel April 1946 – then British-controlled Palestine – just after the Second World War, the novel follows a young Englishwoman Evelyn Sert, … Continue reading
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Reading, after a certain age, diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking. - Albert Einstein (1879 - 1955)
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