An Unnecessary Woman by Rabih Alameddine

Aaliya Saleh is a 72-year-old bibliophile growing old in Beirut. Divorced and childless, she is considered an ‘unnecessary woman’ by herself, her family and her society, but her secret yearly ritual of translating a novel into Arabic has given her life a ‘private source of meaning.’ For 50 years these translations have provided some blissful…

Fatale by Jean-Patrick Manchette

Remember how Miss Marple always used to find herself in the eye of the triple-murder-in-a-quaint-English-village storm, ingratiate herself into the local well-to-do-circles, work out everyone’s business, make a fool of the local constabulary by solving all the murders just with the power of her blue rinse, and then calmly saunter off to the church fête? Well, imagine…

A Brief History of Witchcraft by Lois Martin

This super book is a ‘Ronseal job’ – it does what it says on the tin by telling the story of how the witch craze swept (mostly Western) Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and claimed the lives of an estimated 40,000 people. It describes the conditions that primed Europe for this irrational obsession,…

The Liebster Award

I was nominated for the Liebster Award by NotablePad, which is very nice to hear indeed! She has a beautifully-presented blog that reviews a wide array of interesting reads, and is well worth a follow. RULES: 1. Thank the person who nominated you, and post a link to their blog on your blog. 2. Display the…

Walden by Henry David Thoreau

Yeah so all it is is that MY COUSIN TILLY IS ON SERIES 3 OF THE ISLAND WITH BEAR GRYLLS, the Channel 4 UK series where 16 men and women are left on an uninhabited island to survive against what one participant described as an ‘uncompromising, terrifying environment.’ If you have had any contact with…