Tag: Bestseller

Land – book review

Land, by Maggie O’Farrell

Firstly, what an incredibly beautiful cover! The colours of rich earth and moody sky and deep wells in the Irish landscape that a reader might fall into and never find their way back as happened to several characters in this book, though we’ll never really know why. This is a novel dripping with the mist of superstitions, damp with hidden meanings, fractured with the bones of ancestors lying under the soil. A worthy successor to Hamnet, then, and absolutely ripe for those happy to believe in the hocus pocus of sacred springs and gollum-like fish. Judging by book sales, that’s a great many of us. ‘Give me the ring, it says’ (the fish).

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The Paper Palace – book review

The Paper Palace, by Miranda Cowley Heller

This felt like an over-crafted book from the start. We get the climax scene (haha, literally) and then, in dribs-and-drabs, the day that builds up to it and the day that follows, jabbed through with a long (and perhaps irrelevant?) history of the protagonist, her mother, her grandmother, her father – so many back-story characters slowing down the read. I just wanted to skip over them and get back to the main plot.

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