Picador

Room, is a story following a mother and a child escaping a life of confinement and isolation. They live within a 12 x 12 foot shed and ‘Old Nick' comes to visit them in the night. The novel is told through 5 years old, Jack's eyes. He tells the story with innocence and has only a slight awareness of the more sinister goings on.

This is a modern day novel about a man who is found washed up in the Straits of Gibraltar and has no memory of his life, or who he is, but is claiming to be Christopher Columbus. He is therefore taken to an insane asylum in Seville where he forms a close bond to one of the nurses, Consuela, and proceeds to tell his ‘story' of how he sailed the seas five hundred years ago.....

I began to enjoy it very much once I'd read about a third of the book.I like the way the author puts himself into the mind of somebody who is in complete denial of the real world, and the way he relates his story to his nurse Consuela. A poignant book that deals with love and loss and the ability to come to terms with horrendous circumstances but it made me realise how fragile our own lives can be.

I must admit I watched the film before I read the book, so I wasn't able to approach it with fresh eyes and it was difficult not to picture Eamon Owens as Francie Brady (just shows how spot on the casting was on the film!).

A story about two brothers growing up in China which at this time wa emerging from the communist era into the capitalist world.

To begin with I really did not enjoy this book at all, but once I became familiar with the style of writing, and the lavatory humour, I could not put it down! Basically the story is about parental love and the effect it has on the lives of the two brothers - Baldyli and Song Gang.

This book is written in five different parts which I found  difficult to read especially as I couldn't identify with any of the characters, nor could I understand the point he was trying to make. It was the most depressing book that I have ever read. Perhaps I didn't understand the culture of South America or the philosophy.

An unusual and clever approach to depicting and determining the history of the American Wild West.

Another Italian crime writer on the scene, but I must say an intriguing one -  The Paper Moon by Andrea Camilleri has you riveted from start to finish and was translated from Italian by Stephen Sartarelli.

This book a collection of stories and the main story 'The Other Garden' was the winner of a the Whitebread First Novel Prize in 1987.

Cliffhanger really keeps you hanging on to the end, for what really happens in this book!  I loved it from the first page and enjoyed the characters and their partners with all the strange habits that people in little communities seem to gossip about in the community.

I was amazed how one simple simple question Al asks his wife Audrey - Let's go for a walk and blow the cobwebs away up on the cliff - sparks a whole set of crazy incidents arround the village, including the disappearance of his daughter - or did she disappear?