I
really enjoy Donna Leon’s series about the Venice police detective, Guido
Brunetti, and am about to start her latest (no 32 in the series!).
Give Unto
Others is an enjoyable murder mystery story, but the aspects of these books
I most love are the characters and the setting. Leon makes you feel you are
wandering in and out of Venice bars and restaurants and jumping on and off
vaporetti and police launches with Brunetti. He navigates the city and the
social networks on the trail of clues. Leon’s lead character is intelligent,
compassionate, and humorous.
His interactions with colleagues and family feel
real and textured. Brunetti loves books, food, wine, his children, and, above
all, his wife, Paola, who is an English professor specialising in Henry James. The new book, So Shall You Reap, begins with an
amusing scene of Brunetti culling his bookshelves. I’m enjoying curling up with
it and a cup of tea – just off to Venice for a few hours.
Brunetti is forced to confront the price of loyalty, to his past and in his work, as a seemingly innocent request leads him into troubling waters
What role can or should loyalty play in the life of a police inspector? It’s a question Commissario Guido Brunetti must face and ultimately answer in Give unto Others, Donna Leon’s splendid thirty-first installment of her acclaimed Venetian crime series.
Brunetti is approached for a favor by Elisabetta Foscarini, a woman he knows casually, but her mother was good to Brunetti’s mother, so he feels obliged to at…
This
is the story of a family in India, centering around an aging mother and
grandmother. It is a well-observed account of family dynamics.
Ma is in search
of her younger self, lost in the violent upheavals of the 1947 Partition of
India and Pakistan.My reading group
friends were divided over this book, mostly because of its substantial length,
but I found it delightful and it has stayed with me. An often joyous, sometimes nightmarish, baggy novel full of
whimsical flights of fancy with butterflies, blackbirds, crows, saris, and
bangles.
You can wander around in this book and become part of this family. I
enjoyed the unusual form of the novel. It is presented in mostly very short chapters, which punctuate the flow
of the text like the stanzas of a poem, as Shree explores consciousness,
borders, and divisions.
A playful, feminist, and utterly original epic set in contemporary northern India, about a family and the inimitable octogenarian matriarch at its heart.
“A tale tells itself. It can be complete, but also incomplete, the way all tales are. This particular tale has a border and women who come and go as they please. Once you’ve got women and a border, a story can write itself . . .”
Eighty-year-old Ma slips into a deep depression after the death of her husband. Despite her family’s cajoling, she refuses to leave her bed. Her…
Loh’s
gorgeous book pursues Renaissance artists, including Michelangelo, Raphael,
Titian, and Dürer, into their studios, bedrooms, and graves to examine
artists’ self-portraits and portraits.
I found the self-portraits of Sofonisba
Anguissola, Parmigianino, Jacopo da Pontormo, Nicolas Poussin, and the Carracci
family particularly remarkable. Loh evokes the fear and pathos of living in an
age of plague and syphilis. She told tales of art-world friendship and
rivalries, including pranks and poisonings.
The book is lavishly illustrated,
and I enjoyed her evident delight in the vivacious text she was generating.
This book took me on a fascinating journey into the necromantic powers of the
portrait, as all bodies inexorably become still lives. A nonfiction book that was
as unputdownable as any fine novel.
Michelangelo was one of the biggest international art stars of his time, but being Michelangelo was no easy thing: he was stalked by fans, lauded and lambasted by critics, and depicted in unauthorized portraits. Still Lives traces the process by which artists such as Michelangelo, Durer, and Titian became early modern celebrities. Artists had been subjects of biographies since antiquity, but Renaissance artists were the first whose faces were sometimes as recognizable as their art. Maria Loh shows how this transformation was aided by the rapid expansion of portraiture and self-portraiture as independent genres in painting and sculpture. She examines…
Forbidden love and murder underpin this extraordinary story based on the
life of a scandalous female lord whose descendants went on to rule in
France, Spain, and England. Almodis de la Marche was ‘afflicted with a Godless
female itch,’ according to the monk chronicler William of Malmesbury, but she
was ‘radiant upon Earth,’ according to her third husband, Ramon Berenger, count
of Barcelona. At a time when a noblewoman’s purpose was to produce heirs,
Almodis resolved to create her own dynasty. A novel based on the life of the
real Almodis de la Marche, an eleventh-century countess of Toulouse and
Barcelona.
He loves the scary dragon and asks me, his mum,
dad, and brother to read it over and over again.
He likes flying stuff so the
bird, the dragon and the broom come into that category. He also likes the shiny
and the big stuff in the story. He enjoys learning how to say ‘dog’, ‘cat’, and
‘frog’. He enjoys the ups and downs and surprises of the story.
How the cat purred and how the witch grinned, As they sat on their broomstick and flew through the wind.
A very funny story of quick wits and friendship, Room on the Broom is another smash hit from the unparalleled picture book partnership of Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler, creators of The Gruffalo.
The witch and her cat fly happily over forests, rivers and mountains on their broomstick until a stormy wind blows away the witch's hat, bow and wand. Luckily, they are retrieved by a dog, a bird and a frog, who are all keen for a ride on…
He loves the whole series. He loves touching
and feeling the pages and learning words, such as ‘soft’ and ‘shiny’.
He never
tires of reading this book over and over with whoever he can persuade to sit
down with him and read it to him, turning the pages and letting him check if it
is the right dinosaur or not.
Meet five funny monsters in this exciting addition to the much-loved That's not my... series. Babies love the best-selling That's not my... books with their bold illustrations, patches to stroke, and a mouse to spot on every page, all designed to develop sensory and language awareness.
He has had three bedtime stories every night
ever since he was tiny and is now reading books himself. He loves reading and
is working on writing his own novel. This is his all-time favourite book.
It is
a great story about a boy who is trying to solve a big mystery concerning bums.
It really makes him laugh. He likes how the story develops and ends. He did an
art project all about the book for Book Week at school.
He
loves this amazing story about a tall tree with holes in it that look like
doors and indeed they are doors that open into a different magical world in
each chapter.
He loves all the extraordinary characters he meets in the book,
including tinman and moonman. He made his own model figure of the saucepan man
as a project for school.
The first magical story in the Faraway Tree series by one of the world's most popular children's authors, Enid Blyton.
Joe, Beth and Frannie find the Enchanted Wood on the doorstep of their new home, and when they discover the Faraway Tree they fall into all sorts of adventures!
Join them and their friends Moonface, Saucepan Man and Silky the fairy as they discover which new land is at the top of the Faraway Tree. Will it be the Land of Spells, the Land of Treats, or the Land of Do-As-You-Please? Discover the magic!
He enjoys this brilliant story about a girl
who develops a friendship with a wild leopard.
He really likes the leopard and
the jungle. The jungle is next door to the girl’s school. One day, the leopard
gets stolen and the girl wants to rescue him. The author of this book came to
talk at his school. Now he is looking for her other books to read too.
From the author of The Girl Who Stole an Elephant comes another brilliant escapade. The third thrilling adventure set in a fictional Sri Lanka is jam-packed with peril, poachers and an endangered leopard!
Selvi is a wild child who loves climbing in the beautiful mountains behind her home. She is often joined by Lokka, a leopard with a beautiful coat and huge golden eyes. When hunters come for Lokka, Selvi is determined to fight.
But what can she do against such powerful enemies? Turn to her friends, of course! Now they just need the perfect plan...
