This book was an absolute surprise to me. It's not really like anything else I've read before although it absolutely has notes of other books I've loved including Wally Lamb's She's Come Undone, Meg Mason's Sorrow and Bliss and Emily Austin's Someday Everyone in this Room Will Be Dead.

Gillian McAllister is a pretty cool cucumber. I first discovered her on instagram where she has a significant presence now, updating followers on both her daily writing life and the walks she takes with her dog Wendy in the countryside near her home. She talks openly and often about how she left her job as a lawyer to be a full-time writer and outlines in detail how hard she worked to make this a reality.

Unexpectedly one of my top reads of 2021, I requested this book on Netgalley because I’ve also been writing a novel about a young woman obsessed with dying and I was keen to compare and learn. Of course, because Everyone in this Room will Someday be Dead (let’s ‘shorten’ this to EITRWSBD) starts in such a well written and attention grabbing way I instantly lost the will to write my own novel.

In Iceland there’s a Christmas tradition called Jolabokaflod, which apparently translates to Christmas Book Flood. I’m sorry, did you hear that? CHRISTMAS. BOOK. FLOOD.

AJ Pearce’s Dear Mrs Bird was one of my favourite reads of 2019. The tone is wonderfully WW2-era British jolly hockey sticks, it takes a fun look behind the scenes of an agony aunt page at a fictional women’s magazine before shifting delicately into a darker, sadder reality of war.

I usually can’t wait to put together my reading wrap ups at the end of each month but for the last few months, around May onwards, I’ve had an absolutely terrible few months reading wise.

Meg Mason’s Sorrow and Bliss is not a book that has arrived quietly. Although Mason herself says she wrote it pretty much in secret, it has been received with enthusiasm from reviewers and fellow authors to the extent that, despite a self-imposed book buying ban and a general dislike for heavier, more expensive hardbacks, I was desperate to read it.

As I mentioned in a previous blog post I’ve found the last couple of months challenging. Oddly enough it’s this period in the pandemic when I should be imbued with optimism that I feel most helpless and overwhelmed. I mention this only to explain why I’m doing a May/June culture wrap up rather than a monthly one which is that I’ve really just not been reading much.

I read a piece recently by Jenny Lawson - AKA The Bloggess - in which she said that when she was anxious she read more voraciously but that when she was in the midst of deep depression she didn’t read at all. Reading for me, like for Lawson, like for many other people, is an escape and a distraction when most needed.

With fiction you’re able to seamlessly blend reality and imagination to produce some kind of truth without the reader knowing quite how much of the actual you they’ve encountered. With memoir, so we assume, everything is as close to truth as it can be.

This month was a delightful one for reading. I found myself constantly engrossed in a one book or another and ended the month with my nose still in about three different novels!

I read True Crime Story without knowing much about it and I think probably that's useful with this book. So, if you think you'll read it, while I'll attempt as always to be spoiler free, I'm not sure how possible/helpful that is in this specific case and you might perhaps want to stop reading this for now.

I loved Emily Henry’s debut adult fiction book Beach Read last year, so I was delighted when her publishers sent me an advanced Netgalley copy of her new one!

Another month, another wrap up! March has heralded the glacial opening up of our world! That, accompanied by an improvement in weather, has meant that my life of being near constantly glued to a screen or book is, well not over, but certainly adapted. Still, some delightful culture has been consumed and enjoyed. Here we go!

Although there’s no need to play favourites, in my January reading wrap up I popped this multi-generational family saga in the number one spot and I have to admit it’s still standing strong two months on.

If I were writing in the before times the blog would be chock a block with theatre trips or stand-up comedy nights.

Right. It may have felt like it lasted forever but January is finally over! It has been…okay!

I have no idea what genre Leave The World Behind is except the ‘excellent novel’ genre that I now hereby award it. I read this for January’s Chapter Chat Book Club but even before that it was already on my list.

Ooooh this book! I’m going to be so careful how I review this because I really loved launching into this novel with a fairly limited idea of what to expect within the pages.

It wasn’t until Stephen King published his non-fiction work On Writing that it occurred to me to read some of his fiction.