it's time for another round of the classic club spin and this time I'm hoping to get something from Wales or Ireland

The Silence in Between was inspired by a true story of a mother separated from her baby when the border between West and East Berlin was closed in 1961. In Josie Ferguson’s version, the separation of ...

Book reviews, snippets of book news, and alerts about books outside the glare of the publicity spotlight.

Reading Wales Month will be back for its ninth year in March, giving readers around the world a chance to celebrate literature from this Celtic nation. If you've ever wondered if there is more to Welsh writing than Dylan Thomas and Roald Dahl, then now is your chance to find out. The answer, of course, is YES. Last year was my first experience of running the event having picked up the baton from Paula at…

The Silence in Between was inspired by a true story of a mother separated from her baby when the border between West and East Berlin was closed in 1961. In Josie Ferguson's version, the separation of mother and child is used as a jumping off point for a novel about the legacy of war and particularly the sexual violence enacted as revenge upon the conquered.

"What I'm Reading" is my contribution to the WWW Wednesday meme run by Sam from Taking On a World of Words. The Ws represent three questions: What are you currently reading? What did you recently finish reading? What do you think you’ll read next? What I'm reading now I'm two thirds of the way through Human Acts by Han Kang, the book I selected as a result of my…

For Top Ten Tuesday this week I've been refreshing my memory about the authors I read last year for the first time. There were 19 of them, but only some of them interested me enough to want to read more of their work. Here are my 10 most interesting discoveries. I've included links to the books I've reviewed so far.

It took me a while to warm to Tell Me Everything by Elizabeth Strout. It's the most recent instalment of her 'Lucy Barton' series set in Maine. As that's what I thought it was going to be, so I was thrown by a statement right at the beginning of this novel that this was to be Bob Burgess's story not Lucy's.

This week’s Top Ten Tuesday topic is all about Goals for 2026. If I stuck strictly to that topic, this could turn out to be my shortest post of all time. Why? Because I've decided that my one and only goal for 2026 is not to have any goals. Some bloggers seem to relish having multiple and often very specific goals.

Book reviews, snippets of book news, and alerts about books outside the glare of the publicity spotlight.

1. When did you join The Classics Club? How many titles have you read for the club so far? Share a link to your latest classics club list. I joined the Classics Club in 2012. I confess that it took me a lot longer than the "required" five years to read 50 books from my initial list. Eight years in fact.

Celebrity culture and the power of social media to make and break reputations is the subject of Yomi Adegoke's 2023 debut novel. The issue is seen through the perspective of social media darlings and Michael, AKA “the king and queen of #BlackLove”. She's a big talent at Womxxxn magazine and he's just landed a plumb job as content creator for a big media company.

This week's Top Ten topic set by That Artsy Reader Girl) is "the best books I read in 2025". I often have trouble getting to 10 books that match the prompt but this week it was hard to limit myself to just ten. One thing that struck me about my list is how few of my choices are contemporary novels — only three were published in 2025.

I neglected my TBR Book Jar last year but this is a new year so it's a good opportunity to get back into the habit of using it to help guide my decision on what to read next. For the benefit of anyone new to this blog, the idea of my TBR book jar is to select three titles on the first of each month and committ to reading one of those titles within two months.

Cranford was a huge disappointment when I first read it some ten years ago. I was expecting the same hard hitting social commentary found in North and South. Instead, I found some rambling stories about a bunch of elderly female residents who seemed to spend their entire life gossiping, eating and worrying about social etiquette and propriety. It felt skimpy and insubstantial, not really a novel so much as a series of episodes.

In keeping with tradition in this final month of the year, here is my version of the My Life in Book Titles tag (or is a meme?). The idea is to answer a series of questions using the titles of books read in 2025, making sure not to use the same title more than once. You'll find a variety of questions for …

Take Penguin's Ultimate Book Trivia Quiz to test your knowledge of all things book-related, from authors to genres, classics and quotes.

Tracy Chevalier entered new territory with her eleventh novel The Glassmaker. As in all her previous novels, it has a vividly explored historical setting and a strong female protagonist. What's different is Chevalier's use of a time-shifting mechanism to show one woman's life and the history of Venice over the course of some five hundred years. The Glassmaker begins in 1486 with a glassmaking family on Murano Island in the Venetian Lagoon …

Seascraper is a gem of a novel; the kind that you really hope will win the Booker Prize. Sadly, though the 2025 judges deemed it worthy of longlisting, Benjamin Wood's novella never made the shortlist let alone walk away with the ultimate accolade. So once again I find myself out of kilter with the judges. This is a book that sucks you in right from the first page.

If the meteorologists have got their calculations right, the UK will be hit by a snow barrage this weekend. Forecasts like this always get people excited because we so rarely get snow in the UK (Scotland excepted) but I prefer to read about it rather than experience the real thing. I've picked ten books that are either set in a location where snow is just a way of life or where snowy weather is part of the plot.

This update comes to you via the brain fog of a winter cold. There is precious little sign of it being "the season to be merry" in the BookerTalk household right now with both of us competing to win the coughing and sniffling heats. Fortunately for you there are no sound effects to accompany this update on my reading life in November.

The fractured relationship between a mother and daughter is laid bare in Hanna Stoltenberg's award-winning debut work. This relationship is seen entirely from the perspective of the mother Karin, a restless creature who seems more of a spectator in life than an active participant. She picks up strangers in bars; has a series of casual relationships via dating apps and doesn't much care for her job in a jewellery shop.

It's been a long while since I last did a Top Ten Tuesday list. Some weeks I couldn't get enthused by the topic but this week I thought sounded easy enough. It's a freebie which meant I could pick any topic that took my fancy. Hah! I had so many options I got myself into a knot trying to decide between them.