Showing 1-16 of 79 Results.
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I was totally blown away by this collection of the new new new journalism, or however many "news" we’re up to these days. I think I like it as much – at times, even more – than Foster Wallace’s A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never do Again. And that, for me, is saying a lot.
Zadie Smith - 10/08/2012 |
The first great novel of the 21st century uses the sinister beauty of the American Tax Code as a springboard from which to launch into a genuinely serious discussion of the origins and importance of civic responsibility amidst the hazy, blurred stupidity of a country in quick decline. Contrary to many reviews, I don't think it's about boredom, and it's certainly not boring. Another posthumous editor-to-manuscript resuscitation, the book hangs heavy with the clotted spectre of Wallace's suicide, which makes the writing glow all the more painfully through it.
Chris Ware - 02/10/2012 |
A captivating biography that reveals Sweden’s greatest writer as a peculiarly lovable polymath.
John Banville - 18/06/2012 |
Now a movie, the book is better. A quite extraordinary series of disconnected yet connected stories stretching across space and time. One of the most remarkable books I have ever read.
Richard Madeley - 07/06/2013 |
I love the lyrical quality of the writing against the tightly constructed narrative.
Lauren Kate - 15/06/2012 |
One of the sweetest, most delicately-written stories I've read in a long time. One man's walk along the length of England to save the life of a dying woman. Each chapter describes a different encounter along the way, with a definite nod to Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. Philosophical, intriguing, and profoundly moving.
Richard Madeley - 07/06/2013 |
Humour and heart in the same breath, on every page.
Lauren Kate - 15/06/2012 |
Vladimir Nabokov; Mary McCarthy |
Maybe the strangest thing about this book is remembering that it accompanied a BBC TV series in 1972. They don’t make ‘em like this anymore…. I’m fond of it because my father always kept it with him, wherever he lived, in flats or old people’s homes, long after he’d been divorced and had only about five books to his name. I think it represented to him a time when there was a stronger desire, in the culture, to bring complicated ideas to the masses. Anyway it’s a moving and polemical essay about property and art, seeing and owning.
Zadie Smith - 10/08/2012 |
This was one of the first novels where I remember being genuinely aware of the brilliance of the writing as I was reading it – there are sentences and paragraphs that still take my breath away now, despite the number of times I’ve read it. It’s a long, slow, relentless novel – a beautifully drawn mystery woven through a painfully moving story of class, classics and what it means to belong, carried along by a group of the most unforgettable characters you’ll ever come across.
Will Hill - 15/03/2012 |
My first memory of The Tiger who Came to Tea is hearing it at story time in nursery school. I love the way that Sophie and her mother treat the arrival of the tiger as they would a neighbour by politely inviting him in. At four I was fascinated that the tiger managed to drink ‘all the water in the tap’. Judith Kerr’s illustrations and storytelling are full of charm. Definitely a classic.
Emily Gravett - 10/11/2011 |
Corbett’s second novel is a haunting high-wire voice novel performed with brio. The on-the-run Traveller Anthony Sonaghan is a remarkable act of consciousness. In his plaintive, touching tone, he eats into your soul: so humble, so sad, so trapped, so true. I love his honest simplicity, his street poetry, his frustrated urge to break out of an enclosed life and how the book remains true to the narrowness of opportunity. The book’s form is its philosophy — that life is a patchwork of mess and regret and trying, but yet somehow we must live on. A contemporary Irish classic.
Paul Lynch - 09/05/2013 |
Barbara Pym; Alexander McCall Smith Barbara Pym has been described as the Jane Austen of our times, and I would concur with this view. She created a whole world of people living rather mousy lives, illuminated with poignant detail. She is extremely funny in an understated way.
Alexander McCall Smith - 28/07/2011 |
The story of Mary Lennox, the unloved, unloveable orphan warmed to life along with her secret garden, gave me one of my first female heroes. They should try moving her from the kiss-of-death Children’s Classics shelf, let her slug it out with the newcomers and see what happens.
Moira Young - 09/08/2012 |