Do you know what I've learned in the past year? Life is busy. I love it so much but I'm terrible for being one of those people who says "I need to blog about this...I will blog about that..." and then suddenly I realised it's been about 9 months since my last post! So I have kicked myself into gear and I've given the blog a little makeover which will hopefully make it look clean and fresh. I've also read millions (almost) of books between my last post and now so instead of talking about them all, I've picked a couple of my favourite reads recently, which also have turned out to be fresh new talent on the block that I feel deserve highlighting. Both The Pearl That Broke Its Shell and The Versions of Us are both debuts and Silent Scream, although not Angela Marsons' first book, it's a debut signed with Bookouture so I'd say that counts!

I will endeavor to post up regularly, about books, life, or anything else and get back into the blogging world. I've written it down now, so it will happen.



The Pearl that Broke its Shell
by Nadia Hashimi

It's hard to put into words how much this book moved me. The story is both heart breaking and uplifting and it has opened my eyes up to a whole side of the world that I did not know. I have only just recently started exploring this sort of fiction, set in Afghanistan, and I quickly fell in love with Khaled Hosseini's books and desperately wanted more. The Pearl That Broke Its Shell has provided me with what I was looking for and although it is very easy to put this book in the shadow of Hosseini's work, I think that it has enough power and charisma that it deserves to stand out in its own right.

In Kabul, 2007, with a drug-addicted father and no brothers, Rahima and her sisters can only sporadically attend school, and can rarely leave the house. Their only hope lies in the ancient custom of bacha posh, which allows young Rahima to dress and be treated as a boy until she is of marriageable age. As a son, she can attend school, go to the market, and chaperone her older sisters.
But Rahima is not the first in her family to adopt this unusual custom. A century earlier, her great-aunt, Shekiba, left orphaned by an epidemic, saved herself and built a new life the same way.
Crisscrossing in time, The Pearl the Broke Its Shell interweaves the tales of these two women separated by a century who share similar destinies. But what will happen once Rahima is of marriageable age? Will Shekiba always live as a man? And if Rahima cannot adapt to life as a bride, how will she survive? 
(Goodreads)

The parallel stories of Rahima and Shekiba were truly incredible, following their journeys as they both become a bacha posh, a girl dressed as a boy, generations apart. I had no knowledge of this before this book and it sent me through a range of emotions as I was reading it. Both characters get constantly pulled between being girls and boys, women and men and to spend your whole life being told which gender you are going to represent, on top of who you will marry and how you will behave is such a tragic thing yet the courage that keeps them going is remarkable. I felt angry for these women who's identities are treated as disposable just because they are not male. I also, slightly selfishly, couldn't help but feel thankful for the freedom that women have in this country - I know that there is a long way to go with gender equality still but in comparison we have it good.

I became well and truly engrossed in this story, Nadia Hashimi's writing is incredible, it flows beautifully and paints such vivid pictures throughout the entire book. It is hard to believe that this is her debut novel and I really hope to see many more to come.

1. A holocaust – the concern being that this would quickly become politicised and  that wasn’t what she wanted from her book;
2. A pandemic – the basics of the flu are already there in the world so it is easy to do anything with it. A winner!

We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves is such a remarkable book. It's been on my radar for a long time, largely because I think the title is fab and the hardback cover (right image) is gorgeous, but I patiently waited for the paperback version before giving in and buying it. And I have to say, it was worth the wait - I was blown away by this book, it took me to places I didn't expect it to, and I would honestly say it's probably one of my books of the year.

The best and only way to read this book is to just pick it up without reading anymore than what is given on the blurb. The purpose of the book is based around the big reveal on Page 77 and I challenge anyone to see that coming - it plays along the same way that books like Room and Never Let Me Go do; lulls you in a false sense of comfort before turning things on its head. I read it having to contain every little bit of my excitement (and there was alot of it), desperate to talk about what just happened but not wanting to give away the fundamentals to people who I will no doubt force this book upon.

Blissful ignorance is one of my favourite ways to start reading a book - Room by Emma Donoghue is another definite book that needs to be read in ignorance - it can either work in your favour and blow you away or it can throw you off what you expected and potentially disappoint, but isn't that the fun of not knowing?
We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves is too good to ruin prior to reading it, but it's far too good not to read at all.

This book is so beautiful and compassionate, it has just about something that everyone can relate to; family politics, sibling love and rivalry, but also an even further depth that noone could understand unless they were living it. It will make you re-evaluate your own philosophical and moral values. It's eye opening as well as entertaining. You won't want to stop reading this.

Once finished, if you can, read the author's note about writing the book too - it gives a great account of why she wrote it and how close to her heart this story was from her own experiences.

That is all I can say. I don't want to discuss it further and destroy the magic of this book, but it is too good not to give mention at all.
Just trust me and read it: you won't regret it!

You can read an extract here from Serpent's Tail. #WAACBO

I Am Pilgrim - Terry Hayes


I will start out by holding my hands up and admitting that I didn't give this book quite the attention I should have. My excuses being that it is a 700 page hardback that puts a brick to shame. It was not a commuter-friendly choice, but I was far too keen to wait the extra few months for the paperback to come out (I think I've now learnt my lesson about patience). Therefore, my perfect excuse to read it was a cottage holiday with the family for a week in Cornwall. I had high ambitions to finish it in the week, but *insert excuses here* I got about half way through before I had to return to handbag-compatable reads in London. That was about 3 months ago and shamefully I rarely found opportunity to pick it up again until last week when I decided it was time. The mistake I made was stopping at the point where the story dipped slightly and so I didn't have much compulsion to keep at it. The first 400 pages took me a week months ago, the latter 300 pages took me an evening. It turned out that good.

Do not be fooled by the length it took me to read this - all you need to do is read all of the reviews on Goodreads (of which majority are 5*s) to see that I am definitely in the minority, most people couldn't put it down and I genuinely believe if I'd been reading it on my commutes, I too would have read it solidly from cover to cover in a week or 2. 

Plot:
Pilgrim is the codename for a man who doesn't exist. The adopted son of a wealthy American family, he once headed up a secret espionage unit for US intelligence. Before he disappeared into anonymous retirement, he wrote the definitive book on forensic criminal investigation.

But that book will come back to haunt him. It will help NYPD detective Ben Bradley track him down. And it will take him to a rundown New York hotel room where the body of a woman is found facedown in a bath of acid, her features erased, her teeth missing, her fingerprints gone. It is a textbook murder - and Pilgrim wrote the book.

What begins as an unusual and challenging investigation will become a terrifying race-against-time to save America from oblivion. Pilgrim will have to make a journey from a public beheading in Mecca to a deserted ruins on the Turkish coast via a Nazi death camp in Alsace and the barren wilderness of the Hindu Kush in search of the faceless man who would commit an appalling act of mass murder in the name of his God.
(Goodreads)

It is a great book. It is extremely clever, it is one thing to mention one of the most exceptional, infallible detectives/secret agents, but to actually create this character and plot line with every detail as to why he is the best is something else.
The book starts off pacey - there's been a murder, it has been considered and planned down to the last detail to make it near impossible to solve. We're intrigued. It then skips off to a whole other plot line, which is the main, dominating purpose of the book, following an extremist trying to destroy the human race for the sake of his religion. This is when it gets clever. Again the details are so precise that it's a wonder a reader couldn't recreate it themselves in real life (fingers crossed they won't) - not many books go in to the detail of terrorism, not only from the action side of things but into the person's past and present mind. This makes it exceptional to read and really intriguing. However, it goes into so much detail and back story that it becomes quite long. This was the point where my holiday ended and I put down the book for a while - I couldn't yet piece together the connection between the beginning sequences and the middle back story and so it became easy to stop reading.

I recently read S J Bolton's review on this book and she sums up exactly how I felt: "It was interesting enough, well-written enough to hold my attention, but not the epic, race against time, most thrilling thriller ever written I’d been hoping for. 
It gets there – Oh, my, but it get’s there – it just doesn’t do it fast."
She says it - it gets there, it just takes its time about it, and having read it now, why shouldn't it? About 50 pages further from where I stopped (if only I had preserved a little more), there is suddenly revelations that blow things out of the water; the pace suddenly accelerates into overdrive, pieces start to fall into place and the timer starts ticking down very fast.The ending pulls it together perfectly, it leaves no burning question unanswered and does so in a way that you won't want to stop thinking about it.

As I said, I wish I had given this book more attention initially that I know it definitely deserved and I am pleased to hear that the film rights have been bought too. It is made for the big screen - they may have to condense it down some, but it will make a block buster!
Plus it means I can force the story upon my friends who would not be interested in reading such a hefty book!

This book should come with 2 rules:
1 - do not read it in public if you're afraid of emotional outbursts.
2 - read it anyway, it is completely worth it.

A story of how love can break our hearts – and heal them.

A year ago I met the love of my life. For two people who didn’t believe in love at first sight, we came pretty close.

Lilah MacDonald – beautiful, opinionated, stubborn and all kinds of wonderful in ways that words could never quite capture. The woman who taught me to live again. 

My Lilah, who gave me so much, and yet kept from me a secret that she knew would break my heart.

My name is Callum Roberts, and this is our story.

Me Without You is a book to make you smile, bring you to tears and remind you to hold on tightly to those you love.
(Goodreads)

Mrs Hemingway is a beautiful representation of the relationship Hemingway had with his wives as well as the relationship they had with each other and how this shaped his career. It is eloquent and elegant but at the same time harrowing to read.

It is a story about how far you are willing to go to hold on to your husband and how long you are prepared to fight to be Mrs Hemingway.
Each wife in turn has a voice in the novel, Hadley, Fifi, Martha then Mary and each recounts how she captures Hemingway's attention and then watches as the next one makes her mark. Each story is entirely different from the others, they all went about their marriage in different ways, in different parts of the world and I willed each wife not to make the same mistake as the last. Although the marriages ended in the same way, it didn't feel predictable, it still felt fresh and it made the sense of foreboding unbearable - no matter how different they were to eachother, each wife faced the same fate - it was sad, it was angering, but what can be done? Hemingway's attention span for his women pretty much lasted as long as his novels before he was on to the next one.

I was gripped from page one with this book. I really felt that I traveled with the ups and downs of this book.
I loved that it was based around real love letters and telegrams and  Naomi wrote it with such confidence that you have to remind yourself that this is still only fiction.

It will stick in your head for a long time after reading and the descriptive scenes of Paris or on the beach in Cuba will make you wish you were there without a doubt!

May We Be Forgiven
A.M. Homes

May we be forgiven is one of those books that I have seen on the shelves and twitter posts and never read but thought I should to see what the fuss is about. It won the Women's Fiction prize, so it must be good. As it happens for the SYP February bookclub this book was voted in as the read.
I don't want to say that I hated it, as hate seems like such a strong word, but this book was definitely not for me, in any way.

It is one of those books that when someone asks what it is about, it is really hard to describe... 'so there's this guy who's brother gets in a car accident and kills a family, then comes home to find the guy (his brother) in bed with the brother's wife and so he kills her over the head with a lamp...' so that sums up the first, say, 20 pages and the premise to the story, it then goes on to describe a life of fostering the children, internet sex dates, lesbian relationships with teachers and stranger's abandoned parents.
Yeah. It felt abit like that when I was reading it. With every new escapade I was thinking 'what is going on here? What is going to happen next?'

I think there are a few fundamentals that really jarred me with this book:
1. I didn't get on with the writing style at all. Some people love the style of Austen or Dicken's works, some hate it. Not everyone can get on with them. It's like that, but this is the polar opposite of Austen/Dickens. I found the style very crude, it spent far too long describing the dirty condom left in the bin after sleeping with Jane (the brother's wife before she was killed) and an episode where a tampon was put in the wrong place (don't ask) and subsequently the girl pooed on the floor (really). Some at my book club thought this style to be gripping and realistic, but maybe I'm old-fashioned (and ignorant enough to want to live in a fairy tale land of books where harsh realities are glossed over), but I just found it crude and unenjoyable. In fact I found it very masculine as well, not just because it was told from a male character's point of view, but because of the crude nature of it, yet I discovered about half way through that A.M. Homes is actually a woman!

2. What some found as 'darkly humorous' and 'intensely gripping' I found to be pretty ridiculous (see back to list of plot points). It was argued at the book club that it was describing the realities of nature but I found nothing realistic about a mysterious girl leaving her senile parents on Harry's doorstep with all the legal forms handing over all power of attorney to him without him knowing, and then just leaving him to get on with it so she can go live her life. or when the murderous brother is dropped into a wilderness camp with other convicts and his brother seemlessly sends him a fulled data-loaded ipad of which his Israeli terrorist-looking friend starts to order guns and bombs off of it and it takes the authorities a while to bat an eyelid. When would that ever happen??
I got that it was trying to satirize society in parts and how harsh it can be, and it was quite amusing in parts but I just found it emotionally detached and plain ridiculous. I wanted more from it, more emotion over the grief of the wife and less focus instead on the dirty condom left in the bin.

I think the happy ever after almost swayed me at the end. I contemplated giving it 3 stars instead of 2 (until I was reminded how much i disliked the first 90%), it seemed to wind down at the end towards this happy ending of redemption and the functioning dysfunctional family, which was sweet, but could've happened without all the rest.

Although I may not understand why, I'm glad others liked it, it makes for a good debate at book clubs, but it is not the kind of book I would suggest anyone read if there was a choice.