Book Review Archives | Page 3 of 4

My Month in Books: December 2021

This month I’ve chosen two novels which both look at ideas about family, marriage and masculinity, though in very different settings. The pairing is accidental: when I started reading them …

My Month in Books: November 2021

This month I’m looking at two novels, one set in a very ordinary world about “a very ordinary” life, and the other in a fantasy world about far-from-ordinary people. Both …

My Month in Books: October 2021

Both of the books I’ve selected this month look at different societies – one imagined in the future, the other real and in the past. For fiction there’s Octavia Butler’s …

My Month in Books: September 2021

This month it’s vampires and classicists – two groups I don’t usually mix with! – with Nicole Jarvis’s exciting historical fantasy The Lights of Prague, and Mary Beard’s autobiographical enquiry, …

My Month in Books: August 2021

The books I enjoyed most this month were Dreaming of Rose: A Biographer’s Journal by Sarah Lefanu, which shares insights into the process of writing a biography, and Monica Dickens’s …

My Month in Books July 2021

My reading highlights this month are a look back at Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp in Greenham Common:Women at the Wire, and fantastic adventures in thirteenth-century China in Jin Yong’s …

No Surrender: Constance Maud and the Suffragette Novel

Constance Maud’s 1911 suffragette novel No Surrender tells the story of a group of suffragettes, particularly Jenny Clegg, Lancashire mill girl, and aristocratic Mary O’Neill. It’s unashamedly a propaganda novel, …

My Month in Books June 2021

My selected books for June took me from the beauty and culture of the Morris home at Kelmscott House, London in May Morris: Arts and Crafts Designer, Anna Mason et …

My Month in Books: May 2021

The two books I’ve chosen to write about this month are Sylvia Townsend Warner’s The Corner That Held Them, and the non-fiction Welsh Legends and Fairy Lore by D Parry-Jones, …

My Month in Books: April 2021

I’ve picked out two very different books from the titles I read this month. First is Suzie Grogan’s beautiful study of the poet Keats: John Keats: Poetry, Life and Landscapes. …

My Month in Books: 2021

I’ve picked out two of the books I read this month which look, in their different ways, at issues around women’s agency in a patriarchal society. First is The Invader, …

My Month in Books: February 2021

It’s been a women’s-history themed month for both my non-fiction and fiction reading with Wendy Moore’s Endell Street: The Trailblazing Women Who Ran World War One’s Most Remarkable Military Hospital …