“My Angel,” Carol said. “Flung out of space.” Fans of the film adaptation of Carol may find the novel to be not quite as polished or romantic. I, for one, find the novel’s elusiveness and opaqueness to be entrancing. Unlike other books by Highsmith Carol is not a thriller or a crime novel, however, it […]
More“They could only stitch themselves back together if they did something irreversible.” Heavenly Creatures by way of Patricia Highsmith, plus a sprinkle of Like Minds, and with the kind of teenage morbidity one could find in Hangsaman or Stoker. Adroit and gripping, These Violent Delights is a superlative debut novel. Being the self-proclaimed connoisseur of […]
More“When I think back on that it’s always with a sense of having lost something fragile and fleeting, something I can’t quite name.” I loved every single page of The Great Godden. This is one of those rare novels that is simultaneously simple and mesmerising: an unmanned narrator recounts the summer in which they fell […]
MoreBad Love is a compelling debut novel that is part modern love story, part coming of age. The novel’s narrator and protagonist recounts her first relationship, one that blurred the line between ‘good’ love and ‘bad’ love. Ekuah, a British-Ghanaian university student in London, meets Dee on a night out with her friends. From this […]
More“He was filled with a vast sense of the momentous, of unknown mysteries. He did not know what he should demand of himself, nor did it seem to matter, for he had not chosen this music he moved to, it had chosen him.” This is the fourth time I’ve read The Charioteer and once again […]
More“And so that was what love led to. To wound and be wounded. ” Set in a French finishing school Dorothy Strachey’s Olivia tells the story of a schoolgirl’s infatuation with her headmistress. Narrated by its titular character, Olivia perfectly evokes adolescent love. Olivia becomes enamoured with Mlle. Julie, and experiences an awakening of sorts. […]
More“No tradition overawed the boys. No convention settled what was poetic, what absurd. They were concerned with a passion that few English minds have admitted, and so created untrammelled. Something of exquisite beauty arose in the mind of each at last, something unforgettable and eternal, but built of the humblest scraps of speech and from […]
MoreRebecca is a work of Gothic suspense that is told in a mesmerising prose and makes for an enthralling and evocative read. “Colour and scent and sound, rain and the lapping of water, even the mists of autumn and the smell of the flood tide, these are memories of Manderley that will not be denied.” […]
More“It’s best to start with the beginning—or at least what feels like it. I realise now that we never much talked about our pasts. Maybe it would changed something if we had, maybe we would have understood each other better and everything would have been different. Who can say?” Swimming in the Dark is a […]
MoreNon mentirmi (Lie with me) by Philippe Besson ★★★✰✰ 3.5 of 5 stars Initially, I was torn between reading the English and the Italian translations of « Arrête avec tes mensonges ». I settled for the Italian because —to my mind at least— it seems closer to the original French language (at least they are both […]
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