by jillmaclean | Jun 7, 2022 | Book Review, Novels I’ve Read
Ta-Nehisi Coates is an American journalist and award-winning non-fiction writer. The WaterDancer, about slavery in the 1850s, is his debut novel, and it has it all: momentum, density, ahost of interesting and well-developed characters, an impressive level of research...
by jillmaclean | Mar 7, 2022 | Book Review, Novels I’ve Read
The following link gives the context for Old Soldiers Never Die by Frank Richards, of the Royal Welch Fusiliers (Parthian Library of Wales, 2016) www.walesartsreview.org/some-words-on-frank-richards/ Phil Carradice’s BBC blog, largely biographical, describes how...
by jillmaclean | Jan 7, 2022 | Book Review, Novels I’ve Read
Everyone Knows Your Mother is a Witch, by the Canadian-American author Rivka Galchen, is an historical novel that is all-too relevant for our modern world. There are several excellent reviews of the novel (Harper Perennial, 2021) and I recommend the following link for...
by jillemaclean | Nov 30, 2018 | Book Review, Books Other Than Novels, Novels I’ve Read
Is one of the pitfalls of being a writer that you read differently? In the last couple of weeks, I’ve read Sarah Perry’s historical novel The Essex Serpent, two-thirds of Carlo Rovelli’s Reality Is Not What It Seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity – non-fiction,...
by jillemaclean | Nov 15, 2018 | Book Review, Novels I’ve Read
If The Dream of Scipio stirred me up, Days Without End almost wrecked me…what is it about a story that seizes you by the throat and won’t let go? First, a digression. After I heard Michael Ondaatje and Linda Spalding read in Halifax, I reread The English Patient and...
by jillemaclean | Sep 15, 2018 | Book Review, Novels I’ve Read
A friend gave me a copy of Iain Pears’s The Dream of Scipio several months ago because it’s set in Provence, which I’m visiting this year, and it’s partly about the plague of the mid-1300s, a century that has me hooked. I took over a week to read it. In it, the...
