claire_fuller_writer's reviews
1027 reviews

I was lucky enough to hear Tessa Hadley speak about this book and her writing in general before I read it, but I don't think that influenced what I thought about it. It's quite a simple story about some siblings and their children coming together in an old family house to decide whether they are going to keep it or not. Another house features too - an old cottage in the countryside. Everything - the house, the countryside, the characters are described perfectly, beautifully. Relationships move, blend and shift during the story, people bumping up against others, nothing terribly shocking, but the book is all the better for that. We get inside nearly all the characters heads - shifting paragraph by paragraph which works surprisingly and exceptionally well. And at the end some things are suggested that help with a resolution, but they aren't laboured.
It's the kind of book I wish I could have written. I don't understand why it hasn't won any prizes.

A friend lent me this after we had a chat about 84, Charing Cross Road, which I love. I didn't even know that this equally short and lovely sequel even existed. Hanff has such a open and honest tone of voice, and it was wonderful to see London in 1971 from an American's point of view - especially one who loved it.

This was a re-read for me. I was asked by a book blogger to provide a list of my favourite novellas and this was on the list, although I hadn't read it for many years. I remember loving it, and telling lots of people to read it. Re-reading it my feelings were exactly the same. It is a perfect little book: kind of sad, kind of warm.

An enjoyable book, with plenty of characters to root for, but I felt the writing style was patchy. Some passages were lovely - clear and sharp. In other sections it made me wince a little at the cliches - drinks were 'nursed', the town was 'abuzz', and girls looked 'resplendent'.

Probably 3.5 stars. Very quick, very short - a novella really. I liked how it was often unclear what was happening to Peter, the narrator. Peter is in a catatonic state after a childhood trauma and while he is aware of everything going on around him is either unable or chooses not to enter back into the world. Peter has to piece together where he is being taken, what plans people have for him and we have to do the same. And generally it is all bad, although Peter seems removed from all his pain and suffering - unsurprisingly. But that distance, also distanced me, aside from the very end when he gets his first proper visitor.

Beautiful, quiet book about the relationship between three generations of women living (or having lived) in a remote cottage. Wonderful language about the river and the weather. Not a strong narrative, but that didn't matter (too much).

Lovely pared back prose, but also slightly odd omniscient narration. Only odd because it isn't done so much now, and it took a while to get used to being so removed from the characters. I liked how some of them only touched on each other's lives obliquely, and the descriptions of the people's work, the landscape and the animals, and I liked the structure of the novel - short chapters about one or two characters. This is the second Haruf novel I've read in a short time, and although I thought it was beautiful I'm not certain I'll search out a third - something about not enough happening, although I don't need a lot to happen in a novel.

Not quite a memoir, nor a biography, nor autobiography, or perhaps all of these, and a detective story. I'm finding it difficult to work out why I found it compulsive reading, but I did. Jeremy Gavron doesn't really remember his mother, Hannah, - she kills herself when he is four - and only many years later does he finally decide to go looking for her. He tracks down everyone (it seems) who knew her and interviews them, and the resulting book is meticulous and moving. As it approached the end I was worried that Gavron wouldn't be able to come to any conclusion about why she committed suicide, or that he wouldn't be able to find the one person who might have some answers. But the ending is handled really well - of course he can't be conclusive, but he makes some logical guesses and he does meet the man. And then right at the end, there's a little unexpected twist.
My only niggle is the snippets of letters Hannah writes to her friend when they were both girls. Even Gavron at one point says they don't add much - they are the letters of one school girl to another. For me, they didn't add anything.

I really enjoyed this quick, easy, witty read.

I loved the first four books in the Cazalet series - so easy to read, all the characters and their times so interesting. I'm not so sure about this one. I kept being thrown out of the story by unnecessary repetitions, lots more 'telling' rather than 'showing', and some rather clunky writing. I still wanted to read it, wanted to know what happened to them all, it just wasn't as good as the rest. Perhaps it's just that it was written so long after them.