Pittenweem Library reviews
Coincidentally I was reading this thriller as Holocaust survivors and the world marked the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. I found this a sobering coincidence. The action (the murder of an upper middle class young Englishwoman living in Germany to learn the language) is set against the sobering backdrop of 1935 Munich and the world of Brown Shirts…
Just lately bookshops seem to have been invaded by a host of titles about . . . bookshops. Many of these novels are Japanese but some originate closer to home, such as Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Bookshop (1978) and Shaun Bythell’s Diary of a Bookseller (2017). However a hundred years before that, in 1917, Christopher Morley published his take on the…
Lesley Glaister doesn’t pull her punches and the reader’s attention is grabbed from the get-go as we stand in the exhausted shoes of Clementine, a nurse struggling to keep sleep at bay in a Casualty Clearing Station and dealing with body parts during the horrors of the First World War. After the war, Clem tries to keep her memories of…
‘It’s time to talk about dying,’ Kathryn Mannix writes. She has worked in palliative care for many years, and this book is a compendium of encounters she’s had with hospice patients and their families. It is by no means a sad book, though it aims to be a challenging one, to make us think ahead for when those times come,…
Anyone who has read Flanagan’s Man Booker Prize-winning novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North will know how intensely he researches his subject, how he draws the reader into his narrative and how one is left considering the subject matter long after the novel is over. His writing is uncompromising and often heartbreaking, but his observation of human nature I find…
I have so many unread books already in the house and so many books that I want to read that it can be rather irksome when a book group choice is something you have already read, and you need to read it again. (Although not as irksome as when it turns out to be something you have already read but…
One of my Christmas presents was a slim volume called Queen Macbeth, written by Val McDermid, published in 2024. In the author’s notes at the beginning, she says that we know very little about the real Macbeth, or Macbethad, and that Shakespeare's play bears no relation to the few facts we do know. She felt this gave her the freedom…
Al Murray is a highly successful English stand up comedian who created the comic character The Pub Landlord, a bombastic opinionated oaf whose message is ‘England is the best, all foreigners are rubbish’. Of course it is satire, with laughter the best form of criticism. But the real Al Murray was head boy at a leading public school and a…
Murder! Mayhem! Revenge – ! – ending in a glorious absurd climax. A feminist tract taken to its ultimate hilarious finale. Brilliant! This is another of the Storybook ND (New Directions) books, this time written by Rachel Ingalls. This one has 60 pages six lines and two words. It was dropped off in my front porch by the usual invisible delivery man and I…
‘Can you remember any artwork produced in the hospital that stays in your memory. Something so different, something quite unique, that you have never forgotten it?’ Joyce Laing defines ‘art extraordinary’ as ‘extremely rare and possesses that powerful quality which impinges itself on the memory, for nothing quite like it will have been seen before. It is arresting, beautiful and…