Small Island

Who ever thought I would like a book that held the sentences "Me nuh know, Miss Hortense. When me mudda did pregnant dem seh smaddy obeah'r. A likkle spell yah no"? Certainly not me. But I did like Andrea Levy's Small Island very much. It's a story of the Jamaican experience of England back after the Second World War. Something you never hear about. The Jamaican men have fought for England, their motherland that they have learned about ever since they were small at school. They're taught to revere it, expected to fight for it but are completely unwelcome when they arrive on it's shores looking for a home and work. Despite the above horror she does capture the cadence of the voices nicely. The ending is a bit over the top but still it's quite a good book. And something that me nuh know nutin about, until now.

Lest We Forget

In all the bustle forgot I read this too in June and the Unattached House by Emily Eden too. Oh wait---is that the collected works of Proust right next to Kate Atkinson??? Hmm...must of read that too....funny how I forgot....

Surprise!

I knew nothing about this book and read the first chapter sample on the Kindle. I couldn't stop reading it. It was the literary equivalent of Memento or the Usual Suspects where you had to constantly be realigning your understanding of what was going on. It's three separate storylines that become interwoven in the end. Very clever.
The fun too was since I read it on the Kindle I had no physical measure of how much further the book was going. I was too involved in the story to keep an eye on the percentage on the bottom of the screen.  I had just figured everything out and ---pouf---it was over!