When I looked back on my reading for 2024, I found that I’d tried quite a few new authors. Some of them I liked so much I read two or three books. I tried 65 books in 2024, only ditching a handful. Here are my reading highlights of the year.Continue Reading
My Top Reads of 2023
My Book of the Year
I might as well say straightaway that my Book of Year is Das Achte Leben by Nino Haratischwili. It won hands down. There were other great books, but this one stole my heart. And much of my time! It’s incredibly long, but divided into parts, so you can read it in sections, a bit like a series. But it isn’t a series, it’s a single novel following the fortunes and (more often) the misfortunes of a Georgian family throughout the turbulent history of the twentieth century. It was recommended to me by a friend when I asked her for a good book in German. I read it in the original German, but it has been translated into English as The Eighth Life. Despite the vividly portrayed horrors of living in Stalin’s Soviet Union, the story is narrated by Niza with a lightness of touch that makes the book very readable. It’s harrowing but also warm-hearted, gripping, and occasionally funny. It deserves to become a classic.Continue Reading
My Favourite Books of 2022
These are the books I’ve most enjoyed in 2022.Continue Reading
A Long Way From Warsaw
A Long Way From Warsaw is a novel that tells the story of Poland in World War II through the eyes and experiences of the fictional Nowak family living in Warsaw. I’m interested in the way that ordinary people are forced into extraordinary circumstances when confronted with traumatic events, such as war. Although the family in my story is fictional, what happens to them happened to many such people in Poland during this turbulent time.Continue Reading