Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine has attracted a lot of hype, including taking the top spot on the Sunday Times bestseller list. And for me, it lived up to that…

It’s hard not to love a book in which Ballarat plays a minor role, but there are plenty of other reasons that made Wimmera so easy to recommend. The first…

I had high hopes for Anything is Possible, after enjoying Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge, and it didn’t disappoint. In both books, Strout beautifully captured intimate moments of significance in the…

It has been some time since I have come across a book that has been so widely read and talked about. There seem to be very few people who have…

There is something endearing about an author who introduces a book by saying that the final story was nothing like he had planned, and he expected it to be a…

Evie Wyld’s All the Birds Singing is like a beautiful dot-to-dot for grownups, tracing the story of Jake’s life back to the distant past in order to make sense of…

Most tourists see a certain side of Italy. There are the rolling hills of Tuscany, fascinating cities and idyllic coastal towns, topped off by warm and friendly locals and some…

I had been told that The Elegance of the Hedgehog would make me cry. For me, the ability to make a reader cry is high praise, and even though the…

There’s a strange sense of synchronicity when an event in the news closely aligns with a book that you are reading. That happened when I was finishing The Bodysurfers by…

Often, family sagas centre on a great love, either thwarted or consummated. While Behind the Scenes at the Museum might be the story of a family, with limbs reaching back…

“Everyone has a chapter they don’t read out loud.” (Anonymous) Bob Dylan’s memoir might be as lyrical as his songs and offer fascinating insights about his arrival on the music…

It can sometimes be difficult to describe what a book was ‘about’. While some might centre on an earth shattering event, others carry on quietly, with the reader bobbing along…

I don’t usually read memoirs, or much non-fiction of any type, but I was curious about reading Bob Dylan’s book after he (controversially) won the Nobel Prize for Literature. At…

I am no modern art lover – at best I am curious and at worst I am bewildered. However, in reading The Museum Modern Love, I found that I have…

Sibling relationships are at the heart of many novels, with Little Women, My Family and Other Animals and The Cement Garden among the most memorable. However, to that list we…

Labelled by some as historical fiction and others as science fiction, Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad is a book that does not slot easily into any one category. I came…

Much has been written about Jane Eyre, and it’s true that it is a hard book not to like. Its protagonist is a feisty, principled woman who was brought up…

Regeneration is a different type of war book to what readers or students might be used to, with the action taking place in a hospital rather than in the trenches.…

Books can either reflect the world as the reader already knows it, but in a new and surprising way, or introduce a whole new world, which is unfamiliar and exotic.…

It feels as if spring has gone on strike, enabling winter to continue until December. The mercury is sluggish and the wind is fierce, and I have been stuck at…

From the popularity of The Bachelor to the amount of paraphernalia surrounding Valentine’s Day, it seems that romance is having a renaissance. And with all the roses, candlelit dinners and…

I usually prefer books that can be described as moving, heartbreaking, uplifting or captivating. I like to be lifted up and shaken when I read, and I love books that…

Oh Billy Pilgrim, you are one of a kind. Has there ever been a character so pitiable, so pathetic, but so likable as the lead character in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse…

Sometimes it is not the spoken but the whispered threat that is the most menacing. So it is with sexism. While important issues such as the gender pay gap and…

It is very difficult to empathise with people we have never met, who lived a long time ago, in a country on the other side of the world. It is…