Haruki Murakami is one of my favourite authors but after reading all three volumes of ‘1Q84‘ when I finished my degree, I decided to take a break from his writing for a while. Somehow, two years seems to have gone by in a flash and his next novel ‘Colourless Tsukuru Tazaki and his Years of Pilgrimage’ is due to be published in the UK in August. I borrowed Murakami’s collection of short stories about the Kobe earthquake ‘after the quake’ from the library some time ago but I thought I should finally investigate the other two volumes of his short stories that I had yet to read. I recently bought ‘The Elephant Vanishes’ from a charity shop (by recently, I mean about eight months ago) and ‘Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman’ has been on my shelves for some time. Continue reading
‘The Insult’ by Rupert Thomson tells the story of Martin Blom who is shot in the head in a random attack in a supermarket car park after buying groceries on a Thursday evening. When he wakes up in hospital, he is told that his occipital cortex has been irreparably damaged and he will be completely blind for the rest of his life. However, while his doctors tell him that he is likely to experience hallucinations, Martin believes he has regained his vision but only at night time and he later uses this to search for Nina, his lover who has suddenly gone missing. 
Last summer, I read ‘
‘Apple Tree Yard’ by Louise Doughty tells the story of Yvonne Carmichael, a middle-aged geneticist who begins an affair with a man she meets while she is giving evidence to a Select Committee at the Houses of Parliament. It is revealed at the beginning of the book that the affair has been exposed in dramatic circumstances while Yvonne is on trial at the Old Bailey. However, even though it is clear that she is doomed from the beginning, the story behind how she became embroiled in the most serious of crimes and who her lover really is still offers many twists and turns.
‘Big Brother’ by Lionel Shriver tells the story of Pandora Halfdanarson and her relationship with her brother, Edison, a jazz musician who is coming to visit her in Iowa where she lives with her husband and two teenage stepchildren. On arrival, Pandora is horrified to discover that Edison has become morbidly obese in the time since she last saw him four years ago and has to decide whether or not she will take matters into her own hands.
Nominated last year for the Waterstones Book of the Year, ‘Love, Nina: Despatches from Family Life’ has recently become a popular bestseller through word-of-mouth. The book contains letters written by Nina Stibbe to her sister Victoria when she started working as a nanny in London at the age of twenty in 1982 and later as a student at Thames Polytechnic. She worked for Mary-Kay Wilmers, who has been the editor of the London Review of Books since 1992, and looked after her two sons, Sam aged ten, and Will aged nine.
A Little Blog of Books 
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