my thoughts on… promising young women by caroline o’donoghue

I first came across the Irish writer Caroline O'Donoghue when I was listening to one of my favourite podcasts on a morning run. For a brilliant episode titled 'How to Write That Novel', O'Donoghue was a guest on the sensational 'Nobody Panic', a light-hearted audio guidebook to adulthood hosted by the hilarious comedians Stevie Martin…

what I’ve read recently

I picked these books up around November - December time. They were engrossing and marvellous and shocking and bewildering and I adored them all. Right now, I'm suffering through mock exams for my a levels (help!) so I don't have too much time to read but, when I can, I'm making my way through the…

nineteen books I want to read in twenty nineteen

2018 has been the year of reading. I discovered my taste. Beautiful, brilliant books. Heartbreaking poems and shocking novels. Contemporary as well as some pretty ancient literature. I loved it all. I dived into Shakespeare and Milton and the Romantics and my head spun. Modernism became my calling and I absorbed T.S. Eliot and Katherine…

my thoughts on… the wasp factory by iain banks

Like Everything Under by Daisy Johnson, The Wasp Factory is twisted, abnormal and deranged. It follows the life of the rather disturbed Frank Cauldhame, a teenager who lives alone on a secluded island in Scotland with his manic father. In the attic of his home, he has built a Wasp Factory. This is a strange device,…

my thoughts on… everything under by daisy johnson

“I'd always understood that the past did not die just because we wanted it to. The past signed to us: clicks and cracks in the night, misspelled words, the jargon of adverts, the bodies that attracted us or did not, the sounds that reminded us of this or that. The past was not a thread…