The blurb: August 9th, 1945, Nagasaki. Hiroko Tanaka steps out onto her veranda, taking in the view of the terraced slopes leading up to the sky. Wrapped in a kimono with three black cranes swooping across the back, she is twenty-one, in love with the man she is to marry, Konrad Weiss. In a split [...]
All posts by Sarah
Burnt Shadows by Kamila Shamsie
Posted by Sarah on January 19, 2012
http://belperbookchat.wordpress.com/2012/01/19/burnt-shadows-by-kamila-shamsie/
Death’s Jest-Book by Thomas Lovell Beddoes
Comments taken from back cover of this edition: Beddoes called his play “A Dithyrambic in the florid Gothic style.” Modelled on the “revenge” tragedies of the Jacobeans it it sustained by a poetry of glittering surface with an ever-present undertow of death and destruction tempered by humour deriving out of a remorseless sense of absurdity [...]
Posted by Sarah on January 9, 2012
http://belperbookchat.wordpress.com/2012/01/09/deaths-jest-book-by-thomas-lovell-beddoes/
The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim by Jonathan Coe
Taken from Wikipedia: The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim is the ninth novel by British author Jonathan Coe, first published in the UK on 27 May 2010. It has a picaresque plot, told by the title character in the first person as he journeys first from Australia to his home in Watford, England and then [...]
Posted by Sarah on November 16, 2011
http://belperbookchat.wordpress.com/2011/11/16/the-terrible-privacy-of-maxwell-sim-jonathan-coe/
Dracula by Bram Stoker
Synopsis from Penguin Classics cover: When Jonathan Harker visits Transylvania to help Count Dracula with the purchase of a London house, he makes a series of horrific discoveries about his client. Soon after wards, various bizarre incidents unfold in England: an apparently unmanned ship is wrecked off the coast of Whitby; a young woman discovers [...]
Posted by Sarah on November 2, 2011
http://belperbookchat.wordpress.com/2011/11/02/dracula-by-bram-stoker/
Darwin: A Life in Poems by Ruth Padel
Synopsis from Blackwells: Includes poems that use multiple viewpoints – from Darwin himself, to his beloved wife Emma, and even, at one point, the orangutang at London Zoo – and illuminates the development of Darwin’s thought, the drama of the discovery of evolution, and the fluctuating emotions of Darwin the husband, and the naturalist and [...]
Posted by Sarah on September 21, 2011
http://belperbookchat.wordpress.com/2011/09/21/darwin-a-life-in-poems-by-ruth-padel/
The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling
Synopsis found at Blackwells: A collection of short stories and poems that revolve round the boy Mowgli, who was raised by a pack of wolves in India. It features the tiger Shere Khan who attacked and drove off Mowgli’s parents, Bagheera, the black panther, Baloo ‘the sleepy brown bear, and the evil python, Kaa.
Posted by Sarah on September 21, 2011
http://belperbookchat.wordpress.com/2011/09/21/the-jungle-book-by-rudyard-kipling/
Sister by Rosamund Lupton
Synopsis taken from Blackwell Bookshop Online: Nothing can break the bond between sisters …When Beatrice gets a frantic call in the middle of Sunday lunch to say that her younger sister, Tess, is missing, she boards the first flight home to London. But as she learns about the circumstances surrounding her sister’s disappearance, she is [...]
Posted by Sarah on August 23, 2011
http://belperbookchat.wordpress.com/2011/08/23/sister-by-rosamund-lupton/
The Nemesis List by RJ Frith
Synopsis from dust jacket: Humanity has expanded into the stars but at the price of its freedom. An autocratic and overbearing Government now rigidly controls every technical and scientific advancement. Deviation is punishable by death. Out on the edges of space, criminals thwart the law, making money out of illegal tech, their ships jumping from [...]
Posted by Sarah on July 21, 2011
http://belperbookchat.wordpress.com/2011/07/21/the-nemesis-list-by-rj-frith/
The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins
Synopsis provided by Blackwells Books: The Woman in White (1859-60) is the first and greatest ‘Sensation Novel’. Walter Hartright’s mysterious midnight encounter with the woman in white draws him into a vortex of crime, poison, kidnapping, and international intrigue. The novel is dominated by two of the finest creations in all Victorian fiction – Marion [...]
Posted by Sarah on July 6, 2011
http://belperbookchat.wordpress.com/2011/07/06/the-woman-in-white-by-wilkie-collins/
