Reviews

All the names by Jose Saramago is a tantalizing novel about boredom, curiosity and memory

The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett is a humane and engaging exploration of a contentious subject: passing for white.

Box 88 is the latest book by Charles Cumming, described by the Financial Times as ‘an ambitious coming-of-age story combined with an enthralling spy thriller’. The library has a copy of Box 88 and four other titles by Charles Cumming.

Fatal Flight by Bill Hammack recounts the dramatic story of R101, the last great British airship, which crashed on its demonstration flight to India in 1930. 

I started reading this ‘moving’ memoir and found, rather like a happy restaurant critic, tiny fizz-pops of pleasurable recognition on my metaphorical tongue: a Scottish childhood, sherbet dabs, Colville’s Steelworks, heading out into what passed as country to escape town-ness and so on.

Two books which are in a sense linked as both offer reflections or meditations on aspects of life including loss and suffering, and art features prominently in both.

Edvard, the first person narrator, who has grown up on a remote Norwegian farmstead, sets off on a voyage in search of the truth about what happened to his parents, who died in France when he was three. The backdrop to this voyage embraces different places and times, as the beautifully constructed plot weaves its way across the twentieth century.

A fascinating compendium of fishermen’s tales, losses at sea, wartime exploits, comic anecdotes, family histories and articles and photos of historic buildings, mostly in Pittenweem.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is part biography, part science writing. It was published in 2010 and garnered an array of awards. Henrietta Lacks was a young vivacious African-American tobacco farmer, a mother of five, who died in poverty in 1951 and was buried in an unmarked grave.

Meet Me at the Museum, a novel in the form of letters, published in 2018. It was Anne Youngson’s first novel. Written when she was already 73 years old, it became an international bestseller.