Category: Reviews
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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…
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The Blazing World
[This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, October 2014.] By it’s nature every book is unique but The Blazing World is not at all like any other work of fiction I have read before. The author has published as many non-fiction titles as she has fiction and her journalist-like ability as a…
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The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime
[This review was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, June 2014.] In a former life as a secondary school teacher I taught several students with (the then poorly-understood) Asperger’s syndrome. One girl in a class of mine almost never did the work I asked her to do and sometimes I would get very…
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Never Let Me Go
[This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, April 2014.] This book is the story of three unusual friends but they are distinctly different to the people in the wider world, those they call "normals," because they have been cloned only to donate their organs. This is in fact their main function in…
Brett Hetherington 