
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
A lovely eclectic collection of playful, poignant and haunting stories, hard to choose a favourite (although mine might be The Fear of Ghosts), each one is a gem.

My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Evenhanded exploration of the vaccine debate embedded in a page turning story of feuding friends.

My rating: 2 of 5 stars
The fictionalised account of the life of a German impressionist painter in the 1900s, battling misogyny to stay true to her art. Would have made a lovely novella but, at 300 plus pages, it dragged. And of course the title seems an unintended irony – wasn’t she a woman?

My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Jim Harrison loves his wife, but he's wedded to his job as a US Air Force test pilot. When his family is thrown into crisis, he's caught up in the space race. A lovely novel about the human costs of ambition and the sacrifices forced upon military wives.

My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Beautifully haunting novella about our tendency to turn a blind eye to atrocities on our doorsteps, in this case the Magdalen laundries in 1980s Ireland. Although I admire the understatement, I felt she could have taken the story further into the consequences of the main character's actions. Also there were a couple of places where I felt logic was sacrificed for poignancy.

My rating: 3 of 5 stars
The fear of outsiders turns to violence when a young man brings home his wife from another caste. I know such things happen in rural India, but I feel the novel would've been stronger if we could have had a shred of sympathy for the hostile villagers. Translated from the Tamil by Aniruddhan Vasudevan.

My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Lovely novel about warring widows in an affluent suburb of Cape Town forced by circumstances into a reckoning with their pasts, both personal and political regarding the unjust treatment of the previous occupants of the land.

My rating: 4 of 5 stars
A wonderful feminist retelling of Shakespeare's Dark Lady and one of the first female published poets in England.

My rating: 2 of 5 stars
Some nice touches of humour alongside farce as people share their life stories in a retirement village but I'd have enjoyed it better if the author had followed the maxim 'show don't tell'.
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