Booker Prize

Book Review – Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo

books, reviews

Rating: 4.5 out of 5.

So, I’m definitely very late to this party but I feel like I needed to wait. There was so much hype around this that I just couldn’t face reading it until now. I put so much pressure on this novel to be good that it became impossible to even look at it. However, I needed a G title for my August Spell the Month Challenge and now seemed like a great time to bust this one out. I also needed something else to read alongside The Unfortunates because that wasn’t the kind of book that I could take to work to read during my lunch. So, I decided to listen to the audiobook version of this one. It is a decision that had mixed results.

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Book Review – The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro

books, reviews

Rating: 5 out of 5.

As much as I enjoyed Klara and the Sun last month, it did leave me with a great desire to reread this beauty. I read a fair few reviews that described the ending of Ishiguro’s latest novel was the most heartbreaking of his career. Yes, it was sad but the most devastating ending? He’s an author who doesn’t think twice about leaving you on the edge of an emotional precipice but I found Klara quite tame in comparison to his earlier work. Particularly this one. I honestly believe that The Remains of the Day has one of the saddest endings I’ve ever read. Yet, it’s a sad ending with hopefulness. This really is quite a book and it was definitely about time that I reread it.

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Book Review – The Wall by John Lanchester

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This is one of those classic cases of me being completely susceptible to marketing. There had been a poster advertising the paperback edition of this book at my train station. So, every morning on my way to work, I saw this book cover. I also saw the quote that described it as 1984 for our times or whatever. Well, it clearly worked because I had a huge urge to read this book. I didn’t really know much about it. But when it popped up in Amazon as a recommendation I had been conditioned enough to click on it. And it sounded great. I mean it took the Wall from Game of Thrones and added it to the modern world. I’m normally wary of dystopian novels because they tend to just be the same as each other. Nobody has written an original dystopian novel in years. I know there are plenty of people out there who will disagree but I haven’t been excited by one for ages.

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