claire_fuller_writer's reviews
1030 reviews

Interesting political drama told from the point of view of two (male) friends. Politics is really only the backdrop - this novel is about relationships and old friendships gone bad. Stiastny's writing is beautifully unfussy, and full of lovely detail.

I loved this, everything about this. The characters, the time jumps, the poignancy of characters that were gone in the future sections and how memories of them became blurred and changed, and how ultimately they were forgotten, as we all will be. And the one character whose memory was threaded through the book became someone else from the real man. Very clever. The only negative thing to say is about the cover - I really don't like it.

This took me a while to get into probably because I was suffering from a book hangover from The Stranger's Child by Alan Hollinghurst. But maybe a quarter of the way through I was hooked. A sad tale of lost love and how even our closest relatives don't know what we're really like. Claudia, the main narrator, and protagonist is difficult to like, but that did make it interesting, and make me question my own responses to the book.

I read half of Celine (I think if you're going to write a review you have to have read a substantial amount of a book), and I can't finish it. It just isn't for me. Heller is trying too hard to be cutesy, and I'm not enjoying the authorial voice commenting on everything. I've just got to a section where Celine (a 65ish PI) comes across a girl crying on a bench. 'Break-up?' Celine says, and then sits beside her and gives her all sorts of folksy wisdom which the girl laps up. I think Heller knows exactly what he's doing - he has set out to write this kind of book and he's achieving it well, it's just not the kind of book I like to read.

3.5 stars. I much prefer Trevor's novels that are completely set in Ireland. They have a lovely tone which I thought this one was lacking. It is about an Irish girl, but most of it is set in England when she comes over to search for the father of her unborn child. She finds all sorts of (creepy) people along the way. The quotes on the back talked about a 'plot twist', which I didn't find very startling, and I had trouble really believing in Felicia as a character until the very end.

I loved this. Laing follows the river Ouse from its source to its mouth on the Sussex coast. Along the way she details the plants and the animals, the people she passes (and their verbatim conversations - which were great), and has many digressions into the history of the places she passes, including lots of information about Virginia Woolf (who drowned in the Ouse), and her husband. All of it fascinating. The only bit that dropped a little for me was the industrial mouth of the river - I found it hard to visualise from Laing's descriptions. Perhaps she's better at countryside descriptions, although I've also read The Lonely City and loved that too. Laing is an amazing writer.