Blog Archives

Halfway to my official target, I’m below where I thought I’d be

30/6/2021

Reading isn’t a race, but when Goodreads invites me to set myself a target, and offers to monitor my progress, I’m happy to join in. For the past few years, I’ve aimed for 100 books, smugly confident I’ll sail across the finishing line before the trees shed their leaves. But not this year. Based on my stats so far, I’ll be lucky to reach my centenary by Christmas.

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Forced migrations: Moth & American Dirt

22/6/2021

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Here are two novels about forced migrations and which focus on structural inequalities and the particular dangers to women and girls. The first is about the partition of India in the mid-1940s and the second a contemporary novel set in the Americas.

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Novel perspectives on 20th-century fascism: Tonight Is Already Tomorrow & Widowland

12/6/2021

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Both these novels address mid-20th-century fascism from unusual angles: the first through the preoccupations of a Jewish family in Mussolini’s Italy; the second through an alternative history in which Britain, instead of going to war against the Nazis, has succumbed to colonisation in everything but name.

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Women’s historical oppression: The Pull of the Stars & The Spinning House Affair

5/6/2021

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These two historical novels, set near the dawn of the twentieth century, illustrate how appallingly women’s freedoms, even – or especially – over custody of their own bodies, have been controlled by men. Both stories take place in or around institutions: the first an Irish hospital battling the pandemic; the second a university battling the ordinary citizens of an English town.