I was making my way through The Radiant Way by Margaret Drabble, thinking I was really enjoying it, when I realized on about page 75 that it was utterly failing to hold my interest. I couldn’t figure out why, because I generally love these kinds of books–portraits of women rooted in a time and [...]
Popularity: 22% [?]
Tags: British Literature · On Reading
Synopsis:
A long ago summer idyll at a manor-turned-commune ended in tragedy, and the recent discovery of the bones of a woman and a baby threaten the secrets carefully guarded by the young man who inherited the home.
Review:
It may be a lesser Barbara Vine, but A Fatal Inversion is still an above average read.
Popularity: 56% [?]
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Popularity: 56% [?]
Tags: British Literature
Synopsis:
Harry Potter braces for his final battle with evil Lord Voldemort, knowing that only one of them will survive.
Review:
My biggest criticism of Harry Potter has always been his passivity. In the first few books especially, he spends most of his time being rescued or protected, simply because he’s “The Boy Who Lived.” And [...]
Popularity: 54% [?]
Tags: British Literature
Synopsis:
Upon discovering that she has a great-aunt who’s been in a mental institution since the age of 16, Iris has to decide how much she’s willing to allow her life to be changed.
Popularity: 54% [?]
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Popularity: 54% [?]
Tags: British Literature
Synopsis:
After a supremely sheltered childhood, a young woman finds herself without her mother for the first time in her life, and tells her new lover the story of the crime that led to her emancipation.
Popularity: 51% [?]
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Popularity: 51% [?]
Tags: British Literature
My review is up at Blogcritics.org–here’s the first paragraph:
It’s tough to make intellectuals sexy, but Natasha Mostert, a London-based South African novelist, pulls it off in Season of the Witch, her newest novel and a tour de force of Gothic eroticism that seduces from start to finish without reprieve.
Popularity: 37% [?]
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Popularity: 37% [?]
Tags: British Literature
Synopsis:
A woman haunted by the uncertain onset of a genetic disease sees a woman from her past, and struggles to fill in the gaps between truth and lies from a time in her life marked by violence and murder.
Review:
House of Stairs is yet another knockout from Barbara Vine, the British crime writer who pens the [...]
Popularity: 64% [?]
Tags: British Literature
Synopsis:
A young man on the verge of university is blinded in a freak accident.
Review:
Henry Green’s later books Loving, Living, and Party Going were referenced quite a bit in Francine Prose’s Reading Like a Writer, but I chose to start with Blindness because it was listed in the infamous 1001 Books to Read Before You Die. [...]
Popularity: 37% [?]
Tags: British Literature
Synopsis:
After the death of the tortured aunt who edited her grandmother’s best-selling diaries, a second-generation Danish-British woman seeks to find out the truth of her aunt’s parentage, which may be linked to an infamous murder case.
Review:
The complexity of Anna’s Book (originally published as Asta’s Book) is reminiscent of A Dark-Adapted Eye, and both books are [...]
Popularity: 59% [?]
Tags: British Literature
In honor of a rather silly book I read about a high school girl with a crush, I give you this article on the journey Lewis Carroll’s classic took in the Soviet Union. A choice excerpt:
Popularity: 30% [?]
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Popularity: 30% [?]
Tags: British Literature · On Reading
