Swing Time by Zadie Smith
Our narrator first met Tracey when they were young girls nervously waiting for their first dance class to start. Their friendship did not...
top of page
literature book reviews book recommendations reading lists
WELCOME TO MY BOOKSHELF
Search
May 24, 20222 min read
Why Marx Was Right by Terry Eagleton
Why Marx Was Right is Terry Eagleton’s attempt at making Karl Marx’s theory accessible to all and to provide socialists with some...
May 12, 20222 min read
How to Live: A Life of Montaigne by Sarah Bakewell
How to live? Read a lot, forget most of what you’ve read, and be slow-witted! How do you make peace with the fact of death? How do you...
Apr 26, 20222 min read
The Women of Troy by Pat Barker
The Trojan War has left destruction in its wake. The city is defeated, its men have been murdered, and the women enslaved. But the Greek...
Apr 19, 20223 min read
The Lying Life of Adults by Elena Ferrante
“Two years before leaving home my father said to my mother that I was very ugly,” is the brutal opening line of Elena Ferrante’s most...
Apr 12, 20225 min read
If This Is a Man by Primo Levi
What can you say about a work such as this? It has been several weeks now since I read it, and I still feel lost for words. If This Is a...
Mar 23, 20222 min read
Attached by Amir Levine and Rachel Heller
First developed in the 1940s, attachment theory originally dealt with the relationship between infants and their caregivers and is one of...
Mar 17, 20223 min read
Paradise by Abdulrazak Gurnah
Uncle Aziz comes by the house every year. His visits are always a cause for excitement. The wealthy merchant and his men are not only...
Mar 2, 20223 min read
The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
Holden Caulfield has been expelled from his prep-school. Again. Having failed all subjects but English he now has to pack his bags and go...
Feb 15, 20222 min read
Harlem Shuffle by Colson Whitehead
It is hot in this 1960s Harlem summer where we meet Ray Carney for the first time. A respectable furniture salesman, Carney is well-liked...
Feb 8, 20222 min read
Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan
It is a bitter cold winter in Ireland, 1985. We are in a small town, among good Christian citizens and meet Bill Furlong, the coal...
Feb 2, 20222 min read
Conversations with Friends by Sally Rooney
Frances and Bobbi are students at Trinity College, Dublin. They used to be lovers, now they are best friends who perform poetry together....
Jan 25, 20222 min read
Tar Baby by Toni Morrison
L’Isle des Cheavliers is a tropical paradise where the rich American candy manufacturer Valerian Street has chosen to retire with his...
Jan 18, 20222 min read
White Teeth by Zadie Smith
Archie Jones and Samad Iqbal have been best friends since their adventures during World War II, though none of their friends and family...
Jan 4, 20222 min read
Milkman by Anna Burns
In an unnamed city, where two communities live in conflict with each other, where there is a right and a wrong kind of butter, just as...
Oct 26, 20212 min read
Lost in Translation: Life in a New Language by Eva Hoffman
In 1959, when Eva Hoffman was just 13 years old, her family decided to turn their back on the prevalent anti-Semitism in Poland and...
Oct 19, 20213 min read
The Secret History by Donna Tartt
It is late summer in Vermont in the 1980s and Richard Papen has just moved to the East Coast from California to study at the liberal arts...
Oct 12, 20212 min read
The Good Immigrant by Nikesh Shukla
What does it mean to have to change your name for your classmates to be able to pronounce and remember it? How does it feel to be...
Oct 5, 20212 min read
Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi
The family Gifty remembers from early childhood is a family of four, that quickly became a family of three and way too soon was cut into...
Sep 28, 20213 min read
Our Bodies Their, Battlefields by Christina Lamb
Our Bodies, Their Battlefields is a brutal, shocking, devastating read. And it could not be any other way. Christina Lamb, co-author of I...
bottom of page