Hello! Merry Christmas Eve!! Hope you’ve got the treats out ready for Santa when he drops off all your bookish gifts in the morning!! I have!! Just hope he got my list!!
And talking of books, it’s been a good bookish week as I’ve been trying to catch up on some unfinished books to clear the backlog! So 6 books got finished this week, 4 new books arrived in the post – so it’s all go on the book front! Isn’t it always?! But 0 on the Netgalley front so that’s good!
Here’s my look back…
BOOKS FINISHED
THE GREAT CHRISTMAS COOK OFF by HELEN BUCKLEY – 5 STARS
RECIPE FOR MR PERFECT by ANNI ROSE -5 STARS
CAPTURED BY A SCOTTISH LORD by MARIE LAVAL – 5 STARS
RECIPE FOR MR SUPER by ANNI ROSE – 5 STARS
A LITTLE CHRISTMAS PANTO by ANGELA BRITNELL – 5 STARS
HAPPY CHRISTMAS EVE by JACKIE LADBURY – 5 STARS
BOOKHAUL
Had a little spend up at Galley Beggar Press and got a lovely Tote bag as a free extra! Ooh I do love a Tote!
INSIGNIFICANCE by JAMES CLAMMER
JOSEPH is trying to focus on a plumbing job he is doing for his wife’s friend, but is distracted by the terrible things that have been happening within his family.
Joseph believes that his son has tried to kill his wife.
Joseph is afraid his son will try again.
Joseph is also terrified that his wife is going to leave him. And that he himself may not get through the day.
Insignificance, James Clammer’s first novel for adults, unfurls over the course of a single day. Placing the reader right inside the head of its struggling narrator, it works double time, both as an act of empathy – a taste of the uncertainty and awkwardness of one vulnerable man, and his relationship with the world – and also as a tense, emotional and gripping drama.
Exploring the burdens of mental health as well as family life, as well as a particular illness called Capgras Syndrome (a condition in which someone comes to believe that a person close to them has been replaced by an imposter) – Insignificance is a deeply human story, a novel that portrays the thoughts of one working man on his own terms, without artifice or condescension… and a novel that takes us ever closer to the edge.
AFTER SAPPHO by SELBY WYNN SCHWARTZ
“What did we want? To begin with, we wanted what half the population had got by just being born.”
IT’S 1895. Amid laundry and bruises, Rina Pierangeli Faccio gives birth to the child of the man who raped her – and who she has also been forced to marry. Unbroken, she determines to change her name; and her life, alongside it.
1902. Romaine Brooks sails for Capri. She has barely enough money for the ferry, nothing for lunch; her paintbrushes are bald and clotted… But she is sure she can sell a painting – and is fervent in her belief that the island is detached from all fates she has previously suffered.
… In 1923, Virginia Woolf writes: I want to make life fuller – and fuller.
Told in a series of cascading vignettes, featuring a multitude of voices, After Sappho is Selby Wynn Schwartz’s joyous reimagining of the lives of a brilliant group of feminists, sapphists, artists and writers in the late 19th and early 20th century as they battle for control over their lives; for liberation and for justice.
Sarah Bernhard – Colette – Eleanora Duse – Lina Poletti – Josephine Baker – Virginia Woolf… these are just a few of the women (some famous, others hitherto unsung) sharing the pages of a novel as fierce as it is luminous. Lush and poetic; furious and funny; in After Sappho, Selby Wynn Schwartz has created a novel that celebrates the women and trailblazers of the past – and also offers hope for our present, and our futures.
ENGLISH MAGIC by USCHI GATWARD
English Magic moves through fields and parklands, urban estates and empty beaches, upmarket art galleries, scuffed corner shops. It lands at Heathrow Airport, takes a taxi to the suburbs, finds emptiness and oppression. It strikes out for the countryside on May Day to where there are maypoles and fire blazing haybales, and where blessings sound like threats. It takes a train to the sea. The rain powers down. The beach is damp. Balloons pop. It in a flat, drags itself out of half sleep… and there something tapping behind the gas fire. Scraping and flurrying. What is it? In her debut collection of short stories, the prize winning author Uschi Gatward takes us on a tour of an England simultaneously domestic and wild, familiar and strange, real and imagined. Coupling the past and the present, merging the surreal and the mundane, English Magic is a collection full of humour and warmth, subversion and intoxication a and announcing the arrival of a shining new talent.
THE PERCEPTION OF DOLLS by ANTHONY CROIX
And from Fahrenheit Press Book Subscription is this newbie
“It’s almost as if history is trying to erase the whole affair.” – Anthony Croix
The triple murder and failed suicide that took place at 37 Fantoccini Street in 2001, raised little media interest at the time. In a week heavy with global news, a ‘domestic tragedy’ warranted few column inches. The case was open and shut, the inquest was brief and the ‘Doll Murders’ – little more than a footnote in the ledgers of Britain’s true crime enthusiasts – were largely forgotten.
Nevertheless, investigations were made, police files generated, testimonies recorded, and conclusions reached. The reports are there, a matter of public record, for those with a mind to look.
The details of what took place in Fantoccini Street in the years that followed are less accessible. The people involved in the field trips to number 37 are often unwilling, or unable, to talk about what they witnessed. The hours of audio recordings, video tapes, written accounts, photographs, drawings, and even online postings are elusive, almost furtive.
In fact, were it not for a chance encounter between the late Anthony Croix and an obsessive collector of Gothic dolls, the Fantoccini Street Reports might well have been lost forever.
CURRENTLY READING
WRONG SORT OF GIRL by HELEN BRIDGETT
HAPPY CHRISTMAS READING!!!
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Books and Me! 
