Category: Book of the Week

To be honest, I quite enjoy publications that really toy with the reader. Whether that be with all their self-awareness, their great humour, their ability to bait and switch, or just some amusing quality that makes them unique. The problem is that producing a piece of fiction that doesn’t completely fumble this is rather challenging,…

Modern gothic, anyone? It seems to be a genre that is largely dead, but Johanne Lykke Holm’s novel Strega is one of the few modern-day examples of the genre. I suppose that makes the genre ‘modern’ gothic all the more fitting. The story of Strega centres on nine young women who are sent to work…

Murakami, Murakami, Murakami… how I, we, almost everybody, adores his literary works. Personally speaking, I tend to indulge in one of his novels roughly once or twice a year, as if to savour them. Slight tangent aside, The Elephant Vanishes isn’t actually a novel, but rather a 2005 collection of seventeen short stories the long-praised…

After mentioning Philip Larkin a few weeks ago, I figured I may as well showcase another collection of poetry that I have an interest in (and haven’t yet read). Night Sky with Exit Wounds is not only a rather mellow and pained sounding title, but the name of Ocean Vuong’s 2016 collection of poetry that…

Hard to believe I’ve been running this Friday series for half a year already, but the calendar doesn’t lie. So, to celebrate this small milestone for this series I started mainly due to a random impulse, I want to cover something by an author that has really grown on me across the last months: Sally…

Throughout the final days of 2021, as well as the first days of 2022, I quite enjoyed Ben ‘Yahtzee’ Croshaw’s comedic and creative portrayal of an apocalyptic situation in his novel Jam. However, Mogworld, to my knowledge, is his very first literary work. The whole story takes place within the setting of a massively multiplayer…

Like last week, let me break some new ground on Book of the Week by covering a book I read a few dozen pages into before chucking it into the local charity shop some months later, having left it long untouched. George R. R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones should not really even be on…

This week, I want to feature something different by touching on what is probably my favourite collection of poetry from everybody’s most marmite of poets, Philip Larkin. I am also breaking new ground for Book of the Week by covering something I have read, but have yet to review. The Whitsun Weddings is one of…

I must confess that this book lured me in with this particularly pretty cover, but the content of Night Train to the Stars is rather fantastical. Although the compilation bears the name of Miyazawa’s best-known Night Train to the Stars, this whole book is full of the author’s Japanese fairy tales. In particular, these fairy…

Modern novels with slightly meta titles can be rather hit or miss (especially debut works), but I think Really Good, Actually is a solid hit from what information I can source online about it. This humorous novel follows twenty-nine-year-old Maggie, a woman whose marriage ended after 608 days, or roughly 1.6 years. Now facing an…