Burn. The sight of beauty sets me on fire. I once read of the burning tremor of fear which the lover will suffer when the eye perceives a likeness of eternal beauty. Burn. To read Daniela Cascella …

I don’t quite know what it is about September, but it always seems to whizz past; maybe because I’m always back to work after the summer break and so things are frantic, with a lot of c…

Back in January I shared my thoughts about a wonderful book which I’d received as a Christmas gift from lovely Jacqui – “Souvenir” by Michael Bracewell. The book was basical…

I’ve been a keen reader of the British Library Crime Classics series since they first started reissuing Golden Age Crime back in 2012, and it’s been fascinating to watch the development…

I’ve been a keen reader of the British Library Crime Classics series since they first started reissuing Golden Age Crime back in 2012, and it’s been fascinating to watch the development…

Despite having overflowing bookshelves and a mountainous TBR, I still always seem to amass multiple copies of individual titles, and today’s book is a good example of that. Back in the 1990s …

MY VERDICT: A gripping, fast-paced dive into Erle Stanley Gardner’s science-fiction short stories!

Sophie Anderson’s ‘Scheherazade’ (ca 1870), The New Art Gallery Walsall. ‘The Kiss’ (1977), ‘Our Lady of the Massacre’ (1979) and ‘The Kitchen Child&…

Prior to 2014 I didn’t keep any kind of record of when I bought books, where they came from or anything like that; and the list I’ve kept since then has been very useful! However, one t…

Raw, unflinching and razor-sharp are just some of the descriptions that come to mind when I think of Penelope Mortimer’s fiction. Mortimer has an innate ability to portray how easy it is for an int…

Orava Castle, Slovakia, engraving by G A Troitzsch after Ferdinand Laufberger. The Castle by Franz Kafka. Das Schloß (1926) translated by Anthea Bell, introduction and notes by Ritchie Robertson. O…

If there’s ever a book which had me wanting to rush off to northern climes, it’s “An Island Rooing” by Joan Grigsby! The latest release from Michael Walmer in his Northus Sh…

My second read for Short Story September is a book I picked up fairly recently after seeing it pop up on a number of blogs I follow; it’s by an author I’ve read before and was a recent …

Sometimes a book crosses your path at exactly the right time, and that happened to me recently when I was browsing in a British Heart Foundation charity shop. As I mentioned in my August round up, …

Books continue to lead to other books (my recent Kafka reading being a good example), but I’m also continually being influenced by online mentions and commenters here on the Ramblings. A case…

One of the books I picked up last month when we were having our little shop to celebrate mum was by an author I’ve read before – Seishi Yokomizo. Back in 2020 I reviewed his “The …

It’s been a little while since I picked up a book from my my various casual and ongoing reading projects; however, I recently felt the need for something familiar and which I knew I could pro…

You’d be forgiven for thinking that the mythology of vampires began with Bram Stoker’s “Dracula” published in 1897. However, as “Vampire Tales”, a fantastic new …

August has obviously been quite a difficult month for me, so inevitably I spent as much time as I could with my regular coping mechanism, books. Drowning myself in words has always been very therap…

While I was reading Kafka’s “The Castle” recently, I checked out the bibliography in the back and saw mention of an interesting sounding title – “Kafka’s Other T…

A short post today to share a recent arrival in the form of another poetry pamphlet from the poet laureate, Simon Armitage. I’ve amassed quite a collection of his books and pamphlets, several…

Back in 2023, I read and loved Claire Kilroy’s Soldier Sailor, a superb novel in which ‘Soldier’, a married woman in the early months of motherhood, experiences a loss of identity, an erasure of he…

As I do keep saying, books lead to other books… I was unsure what to pick up after the Borges/di Giovanni and did spend a little time reading up on the state of Borges’ literary estate.…

It was inevitable that after finishing “Trafalgar”, with its echoes of Borges (amongst others), that I would be drawn towards a book by or about him; and I realised I had the perfect ti…

…aaaand inevitably, my plans go out of the window… As I mentioned at the end of July, I had made a modest pile of books for August’s Women in Translation Month, and for two titles…

In the novel I’m currently revising (it’s a new Patricia Stanley novel), one of the characters died a hundred years before the novel takes place. So, the present-day characters can only get to know…

I seem to have spent a lot of time recently involved in books which deal with the horrors of the 20th century; maybe it’s a reaction to what’s happening in our current world where it se…

For once, my reading plans are actually proceeding as expected. My first read for Women in Translation Month is a book which was on my pile of possibles and is a relatively recent arrival – &…

Despite my best efforts to focus on the books which are languishing on the TBR, there are occasions when my eye is caught by a fascinating new title and I have to source a copy to read straight awa…

One of the tropes in romance novels and films is forced proximity. People who don’t know each other well, and often don’t like each other much, have to work together. In that genre, those people often end up falling in love. You also see that sort of trope in crime fiction, where people who don’t like each other have to work together anyway.

One of the tropes in romance novels and films is forced proximity. People who don’t know each other well, and often don’t like each other much, have to work together. In that genre, those people of…

Margaret Drabble explores Haworth Parsonage, home of the famous Brontë family.

Back in 2018 I was lucky enough to cover a marvellous book from Notting Hill Editions, “How Shostakovich Changed My Life” by Stephen Johnson. A powerful and personal book, it touched on…

I’ve always been fond of a good essay, and a search through the archives of the Ramblings would no doubt reveal a number of essay collections I’ve covered. Some of these would have been…