I launched my book blog 10 years ago, on 18th March 2016. So this month I am celebrating 10 years of book blogging! To mark the occasion, I’ve selected my Top Ten books for Ten years of Book Blogging… and I’m also partnering with local bookshop, Book Space Cardiff, to offer free copies of How to Start a Book Blog: A Step by Step Guide via Instagram (scroll down for more details).
A lot has changed in those ten years. I started the book blog because (after being made redundant from a job I loved) I was fed up, bored, and jealous of a friend who had a blog, and I also had quite a lot of time on my hands… Continue reading
I have always admired those who can fold an entire world into a short story, and the novella form appears to perform this feat with deceptive ease. I like the fact that you can read a novella in one sitting, but that its narrative stays with you long after you have finished reading. Perhaps the novella has more in common with the poem than we might think. 
For me, this year has been both immensely exciting and unbelievably challenging, in more ways than one, and through it all, these novels have kept me going. I struggled to pick my top five fiction books, so I’ve added a special mention at the end. These books were not all published in 2023, but they are all fairly new… 
The other day I was searching for something new to read, and I spotted my own review of a Bernard Cornwell novel, here, on my blog. The benefit of blogging is that, despite my imperfect memory, I have an accurate record of many of the books I’ve enjoyed. This post inspired me to look up his other work, and I am now part-way through the third book of Cornwell’s King Arthur trilogy, thoroughly enjoying every page. 
Where The Crawdads Sing is full of despair, poverty, prejudice and loneliness beyond all imagining. But it is also a book that delights in the wonderous gifts of the natural world. It tells the heart-breaking story of Kya, the ‘marsh girl’. Her mother walks off when she is still a young child, walking away without saying goodbye or even waving. She’s too young to understand what’s going on, but then her older brothers and sisters leave too, and soon she is left alone with her father, a veteran of the war, drinking his way steadily through their small income, unpredictable in his rages. 
I’ve been busy lately (with PhD work etc.) so rather than reviewing lots of books in separate blog posts, I decided to review a few of them together. I love historical fiction, both as time travel and escapism. It’s also a genre that makes you compare your own attitudes to those of others – other people living in different times and different cultures. And though it’s difficult to pinpoint how, I am sure that some of these characters and ideas are subsumed into my subconscious and resurface, often years later, in my own poems. 
The Word is a compelling dystopian novel, set in a future that feels unnervingly familiar. It follows the stories of five youngsters born with supernatural powers: they can compel others to obey their commands. This strange plot device could have felt gimmicky, but J L George succeeds in creating a world that is believable, and particularly unsettling as a result. It’s also an emotional rollercoaster, and a gripping read. I read the book in just two sittings. 
Based on a true story, Salt begins in Cardiff, in 1883, where young Ellen lives a dull and lonely life, working as a domestic. She longs to escape, but is forced to witness her mother’s daily turmoil, as she confronts the ghosts of her past. Then, one day, Ellen meets Samuel, a ship’s cook from Barbados. Despite the disapproval of some, they fall in love and get married, and Ellen is able to fulfill her childhood dream of running away to sea. Together, they set sail for San Francisco, working their way across the Atlantic Ocean, getting to know each other along the way. 
I have read several books by Robin Hobb, but I’ve never read a trilogy as utterly un-put-downable as this one. It begins with Shaman’s Crossing, following the story of Nevare Burvelle from the time when he is old enough to begin training for his destined career as a Cavalla Officer in the King’s army. From a young age Nevare begins to realise that the society in which he lives is riddled with conflict and inequality, where justice is often neglected in order to maintain the status quo. Nevare is a privileged Gernian, but he soon comes into contact with the Plainspeople and their mysterious magical abilities. Yet they have been subjugated by the might of the Gernian race, and even their magic cannot compete against the power of iron. 
I read Human Traces several years ago, and it is no less incredible on a second reading. Set in the latter half of the nineteenth century, the story begins when Jacques Rebière (from France) and Thomas Midwinter (from England) meet each other at the age of sixteen. They discover that they share a common fascination with the growing field of psychiatry and its quest to solve one of humanity’s greatest mysteries: the complex workings of the human mind. 
On opening Girl, Woman, Other, I was immediately struck by the simplicity of its verse form – the text on the page looks like poetry, and it flows too, with line breaks instead of full stops. It is easy to read, easy to become immersed, one by one, in the lives of these twelve women. And what makes this book exceptional is the intricate way in which each individual’s story weaves in and out of the stories and lives of the other women. We get the perspective, for example, of the mother, and then the daughter, the pupil, then the teacher, nearly all of whom are black or mixed-race, women whose voices often go unheard, even in fiction. 
The Thirteenth Tale is full of gothic mysteries and ghosts, stories and secrets. It is a tale of sibling rivalry and love on many different levels, yet it is also a story of loneliness and unimaginable grief.
Back in July, as lockdown began to ease and things started to happen once more, Dogs Darnborough launched a new independent publishing house: Abergavenny Small Press. They plan to publish one or two books each year, and the inaugural issue of their journal has just been published online (featuring two of my poems). I thought I’d interview Dogs to find out a bit more about this new publishing venture. 
Hilary Mantel’s 
It was the beautiful cover design that attracted me to Once Upon A River by Diane Setterfield and, as soon as I began to read, I was hooked. It’s a wonderfully mysterious, ghostly tale, set in a time before people travelled far, and centred around The Swan Inn, on the edge of the Thames, at Radcot, where the age-old tradition of storytelling holds sway. 
The Downstairs Girl is set in 1890s Atlanta, and it reminded me very much of Louisa May Alcott’s novel 
What makes someone a great artist? The Italian Teacher by Tom Rachman provides a fascinating answer to this question, as it tracks the life of Charles Bavinsky, known as ‘Pinch’, son of the great artist, Bear Bavinsky. It begins in Italy, when Pinch is just five years old, watching his father entertain the crowds, desperate for his affection and approval. His mother Natalie is also an artist, working with ceramics, but she is eclipsed by Bear’s extravagant personality, and her work always comes second to his. 
The Overstory is an epic tale which moves at an incredible pace, following the stories of disparate people, and trees, over several decades. I was uncertain, to begin with, what to make of the present tense omniscient narrator style, but soon became swept along, mesmerised by the way in which the lives of people and trees are intertwined: