‘Humbling women seems to me a chief pastime of poets. As if there can be no story unless we crawl and weep.’ In her novel Circe, nominated this year for the Women’s Prize for Fiction, […]

‘Humbling women seems to me a chief pastime of poets. As if there can be no story unless we crawl and weep.’ In her novel Circe, nominated this year for the Women’s Prize for Fiction, […]
In her beautifully written novella, strewn with numerous references to literature, music, and pop culture that allow readers to immerse themselves into the protagonist’s universe, the author Mixie Plum takes her readers on an emotional […]
As Elizabethan literary theorist Sir Philip Sidney claims in his 16th century work titled The Defence of Poesie, the purpose of poetry, later extended to encompass all literary genres, is to simultaneously teach and delight […]
The idea of a completely reliable narrator is quite a questionable subject, since we are all unreliable when it comes to telling our own stories, hence, as the term ‘omniscient’ suggests, the reliable narrator must […]
After I’d completed A.J. Finn’s The Woman in the Window, I put the book down in my lap, leaned back, and stared somewhere into the middle distance while my mind went through the events in […]
It is oft said that even the best of novelists hone their skills on short stories since they contain more or less the same elements as novels yet on a smaller scale. Kazuo Ishiguro’s charming […]
Ernest Cline’s highly popular novel, Ready Player One, has been widely acclaimed for its originality and deep immersion into the 1980s, the decade when the video-gaming as we know it today set root in the […]
Jessie Burton again turns to the past to harness inspiration for her second book, The Muse. This time the plot moves back and forth between the 1930s civil-war-ravaged Spain and the 1960s London, yet the […]
This is one of the very few books that has managed to leave me in tears (of joy and uncontrolled laughter) after every few pages. Good Omens, written by the unsurpassable Neil Gaiman and Terry […]
Jessie Burton’s debut, The Miniaturist, derives inspiration from a 17th-century hobby for young wives, an ostentatious curiosity cabinet on display at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, that was built in the late 17th century, commissioned by Petronella Oortman, who wanted a replica of the luxurious townhouse in which she lived in the centre of Amsterdam. Burton’s Petronella Oortman is an 18-year-old country girl, from an impoverished aristocratic family, married off to a wealthy merchant, who, instead of his affection, presents her with the minute replica of the house that she was brought to. The purpose of the gift is to distract curious Nella from focusing on her rather distant husband, but she sees it as ‘no more than an insult to her fragile status.’ It all begins like a naive child’s play, but it eventually turns into something rather ominous with disastrous consequences. The Miniaturist is a true reading delight, well-structured, well-worded, with intriguing characters who go through a major metamorphosis by the time the novel reaches its thrilling denouement.