Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca (1938) is one of those books that still excites people years after their first reading. When I posted on Facebook that I was revisiting it, friends responded with digital squees and great laments that they could not relive the experience of reading it for the first time. I too wish I…
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Is this novella the history of a deluded spinster who lusts for a little boy, or is it the tale of a respectable, selfless woman struggling against forces of supernatural evil? The answer is not so simple: The Turn of the Screw by Henry James is famously an irresolvable exercise in ambiguity. It’s a trap,…
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For so many of us, our first interaction with a classic novel is through the movie adaptation: Pride and Prejudice, The Great Gatsby, and for me, The Painted Veil by W Somerset Maugham. This 2006 film starred Naomi Watts and Edward Norton, looked incredible, and featured a stunning soundtrack. Ultimately, the story was about the…
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While this edition of ‘books you should have read by now’ will focus on one book (as usual), it’s still fruitful to speak about the novella in general. A once dying art form, the novella has experienced a resurgence. So there’s no time like the present (or as the concept of ‘books you should have…
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McEwan is among my favourite writers. I first came across him through his novel Atonement (2001), which I found profoundly touching. I then watched the very good film adaptation of this novel directed by Joe Wright and fell even more in love with the story. However, what I didn’t know about McEwan was that his…
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I am not merely talking to myself, that is in the wilderness, something I could never bear to do – Winnie in Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days, published in 1960. In Happy Days (1960), Samuel Beckett stages a play of extreme physical isolation, filled with modern angst yet steeped in the tradition of European philosophy and…
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Considering that Bloomsday is imminent (16th June), I thought it might be appropriate to produce a short piece of writing on one of my favourite short stories from James Joyce’s Dubliners: “The Dead”. It is a story mesmerising in its beauty; its recreation of reality profound. It is, in the minds of many, one of the greatest works of…
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First published in 1886, Robert Louis Stevenson’s novella The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is the sort of book I like to read at nighttime, under a blanket, with only a torch to light up the words on the page. The novella devolves upon the story of Dr Jekyll, a middle class…
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I imagine being the “crème de la crème” sounds tantalisingly delicious to children of an impressionable age. For one, foreign words to young ears always sound exotic and important, for another, it is the sort of phrase likely to be picked up from an adult, and most children wish to be older than they are,…
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The Member of the Wedding (1946) is a tale of the search for belonging, played out against the individual struggle of adolescence, and the larger catastrophe of World War II. Frankie Adams is a lanky twelve year-old girl, desperate to find a group to belong to. She becomes fixated with the idea of joining her…
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Before there was 50 Shades of Grey, there was Lace. Not that I’ve read 50 Shades (an admission which ironically undermines my status as a reviewer), but you think BDSM is shocking? Shirley Conran, author of Lace, describes it as ‘baby porn’. She shocked everyone with Lace, it’s frank discussions and depictions of sex (from…
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Published in 1856, Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary was kind of obscene for tastes of the time. The book depicts the eponymous Emma Bovary have several affairs. The fact that it was put on trial for obscenity ensured the publication’s success. It became – and has largely stayed – a popular novel. Emma Bovary is a…
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Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood is a classic because it’s one of the first non-fiction novels ever written. In its essence, a non-fiction novel tells a story the same way a fictional novel would, the only difference being that the non-fiction novel is true (or at least, largely so). It’s kind of an extended piece…
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Sylvia Plath is a bit of a feminist icon. In her book The Bell Jar, there are plenty of hints as to why that might be. Set in the 1950s, Esther Greenwood, the narrator, is an ambitious character, smart and well-educated. She professes to never wanting to marry because she didn’t much like the idea…
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