The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest
In a recent blog, Martin Edwards referred to the rather old-fashioned habit of putting a list of characters at the beginning of crime novels. I could have done with one recently when I read THE GIRL WHO KICKED THE HORNETS’ NEST, the last of Stieg Larsson’s trilogy. These novels, in particular the last two, are […]
Snow
After I wrote about SICK HEART RIVER in last week’s blog, I got to thinking about other works of fiction that deal with the intense cold, not least because we’ve had a bit of that ourselves and have been snowed in. I realised that some of the most memorable books I’ve read have dealt with […]
John Buchan and others
A friend who reads my blog asked me, ‘How do you manage to read so much?’ I don’t read nearly as much as I have done at some periods of my life, but still . . . ten minutes sometimes over an early morning cup of tea, half an hour over lunch, always at bed-time, […]
The Pattern in the Carpet
Margaret Drabble’s book is subtitled A PERSONAL HISTORY WITH JIGSAWS. It is partly a history of jigsaws (a little too much of this for me) and partly a memoir, focusing on her Aunt Phyl with whom she shared a love of jigsaws. Aunt Phyl was a key person in Drabble’s childhood. Drabble remarks that it […]