I cheated a little by reading this at the end of October! I’ve been reading Sarah Moss’s books since I was lucky enough to receive a proof copy of her eerie fiction debut, Cold Ear…| Laura Tisdall
Torrey Peters’s Detransition, Baby flips between present and past to tell the story of Reese, a trans woman; her ex Ames, who once lived as a trans woman called Amy but has now detransitioned…| Laura Tisdall
King’s tower and queen’s bower, And weed and reed in the gloom; And a lost city in Semmerwater, Deep asleep till Doom. I read Sarah Moss’s latest novel, Summerwater, in a couple o…| Laura Tisdall
At first glance, it might seem perverse to pair Sarah Moss’s Night Waking and Melissa Broder’s The Pisces. One is about an harassed, exhausted mother trying to write an academic …| Laura Tisdall
For the first year since records began, I’m well ahead with one of my reading resolutions, having read 20 books so far in 2017. Here’s the first of two posts summarising my thoughts. Th…| Laura Tisdall
Work is very busy at the moment, so I decided to do some quick-fire reviews: Kate Folk, Sky Daddy. Yep, it’s the novel about the woman who is sexually attracted to planes! I was a big fan of …| Laura Tisdall
I read the unfortunate orange version but I just had to showcase some of these earlier covers! Can you spoil The Stepford Wives? I don’t think you can, but I do talk about the plot in detail.…| Laura Tisdall
I feel very sorry for these three April ARCs. Not only have these three authors had to deal with being published in the middle of a global pandemic, they’ve also been personally neglected by …| Laura Tisdall
I’m taking part in the Readers Imbibing Peril (RIP) challenge for the fifth time this year! This challenge runs from 1st September to 31st October, and involves reading books classified as mystery, suspense, thriller, dark fantasy, gothic, horror or supernatural. You can find my earlier round-ups here: 2018, 2022, 2023, 2024. To kick off, I’m reviewing two … Continue reading RIP XX: Short Reads| Laura Tisdall
Christine Murphy, Notes on Surviving The Fire. Sarah is trying to finish her PhD in religious studies at a university in southern California, considering the threefold nature of Buddhist justifications for violence. Her fellow student and best friend Nathan has spent time in a Catholic monastery in the Dolomites and been celibate for over a … Continue reading Reading Diary, September 12th to 23rd, 2025| Laura Tisdall
Lisa of ANZ Lit Lovers is hosting Short Story September this year, and it fits beautifully with the upcoming Novellas in November, hosted by Rebecca and Cathy, and the new challenge I’m hosting this year, Doorstoppers in December. Lisa has prompted us to focus on one story from each collection we review, but I’m also giving … Continue reading #ShortStorySeptember: Graham Swift & Leone Ross| Laura Tisdall
Graeme Macrae Burnet, His Bloody Project. This Booker-shortlisted novel purports to be a collection of papers concerning a (fictional) notorious murder case; in 1869, a seventeen-year-old crofter c…| Laura Tisdall
It’s time for another top ten books of the year list! (You can find my 2019 post here, my 2018 post here, my 2017 post here, my 2016 post here, my 2015 post here, and my 2014, 2013, 2012 and 2011 p…| Laura Tisdall
Miryem is the daughter of a Jewish moneylender, viewed with suspicion by her tiny community because of her faith and her father’s profession, even though her father is so kind-hearted he rare…| Laura Tisdall
The back cover copy for Uprooted is, very unusually, a beautiful piece of prose in its own right: Agnieszka loves her village, set deep in a peaceful valley. But the nearby enchanted forest casts a…| Laura Tisdall
Grace Chan’s debut, Every Version of You, one of my most anticipated 2025 releases, focuses on a couple, Malaysian-Chinese Tao-Yi and Taiwanese-Chinese Navin, who already spend most of their time in a virtual reality called Gaia. When technology advances and humans are now able to upload their selves into Gaia, leaving their physical bodies behind … Continue reading Digital sprites: Every Version of You by Grace Chan| Laura Tisdall
20 Books of Summer 2025 is over, and I read all of my 20 books! What did I think of the books I read? [Links are to my reviews]. I’ll group them in the same way as I did in 2024. This time, the absolute standouts were The Bombshell, The Echo Maker and Basilisk. All will … Continue reading 20 Books of Summer 2025: A Retrospective| Laura Tisdall
At the final hour… I’m reviewing the last of my 20 Books of Summer. While it was by no means my least favourite, it was definitely the hardest to get done in time! I discovered the femi…| Laura Tisdall
First, a warning: this book is not a book, it is a TIME PORTAL. Like Rach, Kel and Shaz, the teenage protagonists of Colwill Brown’s We Pretty Pieces of Flesh, I started secondary school in 1…| Laura Tisdall
Manda Scott, Any Human Power. This long and weird novel focuses on a single British family who recognise that the world is swiftly being destroyed by those in power and decide to create a grassroots movement to promote true democracy. It’s narrated from the point of view of the grandmother, Lan, who in fact dies at the … Continue reading 20 Books of Summer, #18 and #19: Any Human Power and Helm| Laura Tisdall
The final image at the end of Stranger Things season 4. This post contains minor spoilers for all four seasons of Stranger Things, although they relate only to character arcs rather than the main plot-lines. One of the seminars I’ve run for years now for the undergraduate students who take our second-year team-taught module at Newcastle on histories of … Continue reading Don’t Bury Your Gays: Queer-Coding and Stranger Things| Laura Tisdall
Álvaro Enrigue trans. Natasha Wittner, You Dreamed of Empires. This short but incredibly intense speculative historical novel spans a few days in 1519, focusing on the infamous encounter between co…| Laura Tisdall
Every year, I say I’m not going to shadow the Women’s Prize this year, but after the disappointment that was the 2024 longlist (although we did end up with a worthy winner, hooray!) thi…| Laura Tisdall
A short reading diary for the end of January as I’m currently nearing the end of three (excellent) books which I will post about separately. Nussaibah Younis, Fundamentally. I had intensely m…| Laura Tisdall
I’ve attended the Durham Book Festival every year since I first moved to the north-east in 2017. It’s a fantastic festival, very well-organised, showcasing some brilliant writers. This …| Laura Tisdall
Two more reviews from the Booker longlist today, plus my rankings and predictions before the shortlist is announced TONIGHT! Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner: Ah, I really don’t know what to m…| Laura Tisdall
In this post, I’ve picked twelve 2023 releases that I am particularly looking forward to, then, as always, added a further eighteen books that I want to read in 2023, whether they are new this year…| Laura Tisdall
Again, the Superlatives format is borrowed from Elle. I only feature books that I read for the first time this month, not rereads (otherwise the worst book would obviously be Skellig) The Best Book…| Laura Tisdall
Kate Reed Petty’s debut True Story, like many other contemporary novels over the past few years, tackles the topic of sexual violence – but with a twist. Alice is a teenager a…| Laura Tisdall
I wasn’t going to read My Dark Vanessa. Not even when I saw how many rave reviews it was getting from bloggers I trust. Based on this, I was sure that it was a good book; that it dealt though…| Laura Tisdall
Quick-fire reviews of some more books that are not included in my 20 Books of Summer challenge! Antonia Hodgson, The Raven Scholar. In the walled capital city of Orrun, seven contenders arrive to c…| Laura Tisdall
I’ve been racing through my 20 Books of Summer partly because I went on a holiday with lots of long bus journeys and partly because a lot of them were NetGalley ARCs that publish in June or J…| Laura Tisdall
An early Superlatives post this month because I’ll do my round-ups at the end of December. If I read anything especially good or bad before then, I’ll find a way of talking about it! Th…| Laura Tisdall
Frances Cha’s debut novel, If I Had Your Face, is narrated in first person by four women in their late twenties and early thirties living precarious lives in contemporary Seoul (they actually…| Laura Tisdall
Keiko Furukara is thirty-six and works in a convenience store. She has no partner and very few friends, so her family are consistently worried about her, especially her younger sister, who gives he…| Laura Tisdall
Angela Chadwick’s debut, XX, imagines a world where two women are able to have their own biological child – who will always be female – through ovum-to-ovum fertilisation. Jules a…| Laura Tisdall
Having read Louise O’Neill’s debut, Only Ever Yours, virtually in one sitting, I still can’t decide if it’s a messy triumph or an occasionally-brilliant mess. It gets worse:…| Laura Tisdall
If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere wellIt were done quickly. Miranda is a college theatre director working on a production of All’s Well That Ends Well, one of Shakespear…| Laura Tisdall
Naomi Novik’s Spinning Silver, her second immersive folktale retelling, was one of my top ten books of 2020. Her latest novel, A Deadly Education, is both utterly different and equally brilli…| Laura Tisdall
I read a lot of short stories, but I feel like they rarely get the recognition from me that they deserve because it’s unusual that a whole collection is so good as to, say, make it into my to…| Laura Tisdall
Sarah Moss, Ripeness. Having read all of Moss’s fiction to date (plus her memoir Names for the Sea), I’ve become very familiar with her thought-world, and have started to wonder if she&…| Laura Tisdall
20 Books of Summer is no longer being hosted by Cathy of 746 Books, but Annabel of AnnaBookBel and Emma of Words and Peace have stepped in instead – hooray! This year, it runs from 1st June t…| Laura Tisdall
I read this as part of the Readers Imbibing Peril Challenge, now in its thirteenth year! Looking for a ghost story for Halloween? This may not be the place to start. Kate Murray-Browne’s debut, The…| Laura Tisdall
A personal note: THANK GOD I finally read a book I loved in 2023! Bodie is returning to her old prep school, Granby, for the first time since the 1990s to teach a couple of elective classes in film…| Laura Tisdall
Again, the Superlatives format is borrowed from Elle. Much of my reading this month has been from the Women’s Prize longlist, so I won’t rehearse that. See this post for my rankings and…| Laura Tisdall
Joanna Miller, The Eights. Set over the course of the academic year 1920-1, Miller’s debut novel follows four female undergraduates who start at Oxford at the same time women are finally perm…| Laura Tisdall
The two big US/Canadian and British women’s fiction prizes have just posted their longlists! (The Australian Stella Prize also announced its longlist on Tuesday.) I don’t intend to do a…| Laura Tisdall
NB. I’m still working on my post about three standout novels I read earlier this month – not to say these ones were bad! Andrew McMillan, Pity. This Barnsley-set novella traces both hom…| Laura Tisdall
Kate van der Borgh, And He Shall Appear. Dark academia is en vogue at the moment, spawning its own sub-sub-genres all over the place. And He Shall Appear is what I shall refer to as classic dark ac…| Laura Tisdall
In this post, I’ve picked twelve 2025 releases that I am particularly looking forward to, then, as always, added a further eighteen books that I want to read in 2025, whether they are new this year…| Laura Tisdall
It’s time for another top ten books of the year list! (You can find my 2023 post here, my 2022 post here, my 2021 post here, my 2020 post here, my 2019 post here, my 2018 post here, my 2017 post he…| Laura Tisdall
Hiking solo in Boulder, Colorado, November 2024. This felt incredibly appropriate because at the time Tepper published this book, she had lived all her life in Colorado, and, but for the mentions o…| Laura Tisdall
The Reformatory by Tananarive Due: This is a full-blown old-fashioned horror novel, but in the very best way. Like Colson Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys, Due draws on the real-life atrocities committe…| Laura Tisdall
