Category: Reviews
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This Boy’s Life
[This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, April 2018.] It’s a great relief to read something as authentic as this memoir of Tobias Wolff’s childhood. In 2018, when (even for adults) predictable superhero and action movies are dominating the western world’s popular culture as a form of escapism, my bowels were nicely warmed…
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Between Two Fires
This book is exactly the kind of thing you would hope to find when you are aimlessly looking through the shelves in that slowly dying place called a bookshop. Focusing mainly on the area around his adopted home town of Frigiliana David Baird has used immaculate research to write in compelling detail…
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Poor But Sexy
[This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, May 2016.] How little we know about the culture of that ‘area of darkness:’ Eastern Europe. Living within a few hundred kilometres of this region, most of us would be hard pressed to give the names of more than a handful of directors, actors or…
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Balancing Act
[This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, June 2015.] Here is a blatantly upper middle-class British family. They work together in a pottery-making business and this is the story of what happens to them in an eventful period of change in all of their lives. Joanna Trollope, a former chair of the…
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By Its Cover
[This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, May 2015.] It’s not often that you read a book that is so absolutely propelled by dialogue. Thankfully though, with Donna Leon it is high quality and as colourful as a medieval pageant. Set in modern day Venice, at a relaxed and leisurely…
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The Woman Who Went to Bed for a Year
[This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, April 2015.] Reading a book is never a neutral, objective experience. We can send our eyeballs through the first page to the last page in one stage of our lives then do this with the same book when we are older and it will…
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1984
[This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, March 2015.] It’s not easy for me to be objective about this masterpiece of a book. Whenever I write any non-fiction, I always have one man (figuratively) looking over my shoulder and that man is George Orwell – he is nothing less than a literary…
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An Englishman in Madrid
[This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, January 2015.] "Look, I’ll tell you how things really are," says one of the author’s characters (speaking in 1936,) "whatever they say, this is not a poor country. This is a country of poor people." And it is the elements of social class, poverty and…
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To Rise Again at a Decent Hour
[This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, December 2014.] Paul O’Rourke is certainly the first dentist as a contemporary anti-hero in literature that I know of. He’s that species of character that from the opening pages of his narrating, in turn I thought was the kind of brilliant, insightful observer of life…
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The Son
[This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, November 2014.] Some books don’t really start until half way through. For me, this was one of those. Once it finally did get going (after about two hundred and fifty pages) it asked some intelligent questions of the reader and started to put flesh…
Brett Hetherington 