Redhead By The Side Of The Road joins the long list of novels I’ve read featuring people who are out of kilter with the world and disconnected from the people around them. The focus for this novel is Micah Mortimer, a 40 something-year-old who runs a one-man computer repair service (aptly named “Tech Hermit”) in […]
I’ve yet to read a poor novel by a South African author. Some, like Cry The Beloved Country have joined the list of my all-time favourite books. But my run of success came to an end with Bitter Fruit by Achmat Dangor. Set in the years after the end of apartheid, Dangor’s novel delves into […]
This month’s Six Degrees chain begins with a book that was hard to miss back in 2003. Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation by Lynn Truss seemed to be in every newspaper and all over the internet. It was wonderful to see the issue of punctuation get such visibility but sadly, Truss’s message about […]
i felt bereft when I reached the final book in The Raj Quartet series by Paul Scott. Division Of The Spoils, published in 1975, depicted the final years of British rule in India and the birth of a newly-independent state. It’s a process that Scott once described as ‘the British coming to the end of […]
By the time I’d struggled to the last page of Something to Answer For by P H Newby, there was little I felt sure about any longer. All I could be certain of was that Newby’s novel is set in Port Said and concerns a character called Townrow. He arrives in the city, which is then […]