And here we go again…
For January we’ve chosen 4 very different books which, I hope, will kick start your reading for 2018. I hope there’s at least one for everyone…
Matt Haig – How To Stop Time
What if there were a tiny portion of the human race who lived for centuries, aging incredibly slowly and being almost invulnerable but weren’t vampires. They were just people. How would you survive people noticing you didn’t age if you were born in the age of witches? How would you make a living? Most importantly, how would you survive without love?
Min Jin Lee – Pachinko
A chunky (700 pages plus) epic span of the story of one poor Korean family living under Japanese occupation in the early 1900s, then moving to Japan just before the war, right the way up until 1989. Full of large and small detail, things I didn’t know, and wonderful painstakingly put together drawings of one normal extended family’s extraordinary journey through a century.
Karl Geary – Montpelier Parade
Sonny is a working class kid in south county Dublin in the 80s working in a butcher’s shop while going to school, his dad does some building amongst other things. Vera is an older (to him anyway) woman who lives by herself in the row of Georgian houses of the title and this is the story of how their lives intertwine after they meet.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn – One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich
This year I’m going to make a greater effort to throw in the odd classic in the best sense of the word. A book that you should have a crack at if you want to broaden your horizons. For me, I read this when I was in college and it was a brilliantly accessible way into the world of 20th century Russian literature. It is, as it is titled, a slim volume of one day in the life of an inmate in a labour camp in the Stalinist Soviet Union.
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