I had expected Girl in the Walls to be a gothic thriller, perhaps with ghostly goings-on in the vein of Sarah Perry or Laura Purcell, and was very pleasantly surprised to discover this is a literary thriller, whose story leaps off the page and demands to be read to its conclusion. While reading, I could easily imagine this book in movie form. Elise is a young orphan, returned to the house she considered her true home, though as another family now lives there, she survives by secreting herself in the walls.Her occupancy does not go wholly unnoticed: Eddie, the younger of two teenage boys, often thinks he sees someone from the corner of his eye. An awkward boy, he wonders if the presence is a figment of his overactive imagination. Until his boisterous older brother confesses that he's noticed things too. I truly don't want to share any more of this fast-paced plot. Suffice to stay that events unfold which spiral out of control and put the lives of all the main protagonists in ...
I was really pleased to discover that Claire North had written a new title. Everything of hers I've read so far has been insightful, intelligent and hugely enjoyable. Sweet Harmony is no exception: though a shorter novella than her standard books, it packs a punch in its exploration of human nature through a slightly dystopian setting in the near future. The plot centers around Harmony: a young woman dissatisfied with her appearance and her life, who chooses to seek assistance from"nanos": a new technology to physically aid and enhance our bodies. The plot shifts between the recent past and the present, in which Harmony is in debt, and unable to continue payments for her nano packages. We learn how Harmony found herself in this situation: her dissatisfaction that her "plain" physical appearance proved a barrier to her career; the abusive relationship which led to a breakdown... It reads like an episode of the TV series, Black Mirror, in which every word and sent...
Since 2008, Penguin have published classic literature in a beautifully packaged format: the Clothbound Classics serie s. Each edition is bound in cloth, with covers individually designed by the talented Coralie Bickford-Smith . Several new titles have been published since I first created a complete list of this collection, including all three volumes of Proust's Rememberance of Things Past and Jule's Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea . So I decided to update the list to include these new titles, along with a free printable download with full details of each title to assist in completing your own collection. In order of publication, here is the complete list of Penguin Clothbound Classics to date (August 2017): Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert Great Expectations by Charles Dickens Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell Tess of the d'Urbervilles...
Comments
Post a Comment