I'm just back from a week's wifi-free holiday, so got quite a lot of reading done, and also had a couple of books I read before leaving but didn't review, so here's my catch-up list:
18 The Night Guest - Fiona McFarlane
Australian novel. Ruth, an elderly widow, is living alone in a beach house on the New South Wales Coast. One night she is sure she can hear a tiger prowling around her living room. A few days later, a cheerful woman, Frida, turns up saying the government has sent her to help Ruth; gradually, she gets more and more involved in Ruth's life, until there comes a point where Ruth starts to wonder if she can trust neither Frida nor her own senses. What starts out as a warm, quirky novel becomes increasingly psychologically intense. A good read.
19 My Falling Down House - Jayne Joso
Set in Japan, but by a British author. A young man has lost his job, his girlfriend and his home, so starts living in a rickety abandoned house attached to a temple in the outskirts of Tokyo. He spends his days alone, thinking, not eating much, trying to repair the house and also designing cardboard-box homes. He withdraws further and further into himself, to the point of madness and almost physical self-destruction. A thought-provoking book, which although it is set very much in contemporary Japan tackles some universal themes about how we understand ourselves and our relation to society and the outside world. Probably a bit of a niche one but I am glad I stumbled upon it.
20 The Little Breton Bistro - Nina George
I was holidaying in Brittany, so this seemed appropriate, but I regretted the choice.
Up-lit/chick-lit for the more mature market, with a large dollop of new-age Arthurian mysticism and a message that it is never too late to find yourself (and also find love, of course). The author is German, so the main character is a 60-ish German woman with an awful husband, who tries to escape him by throwing herself into the Seine on a holiday in Paris, but is rescued. She ends up fleeing to a little village in Brittany, where she is immediately given a job and accommodation at the bistro of the title, and despite hardly speaking French to start with, learns both French and Breton almost instantly, forming deep friendships and having meaningful conversations with a cast of quirky characters with troubled pasts etc etc. No cliche of rural French life is left untroubled, and the plot twists can be seen a mile off.
21 Clever Girl - Tessa Hadley
This is the third book of Tessa Hadley's I have read; after the first two, I wouldn't have picked it myself, but it is for my book group and is actually much better than the other two.
The book follows the life from childhood of Stella, a girl growing up with her single mother in a grotty flat in a war-damaged part of Bristol in the 50s and 60s. She is clever, and seems to have the chance to use her intelligence to escape, but not clever enough to avoid some of life's more obvious pitfalls. Introspective, and possibly a little monotonous in tone, but an interesting take on the choices we make (or are forced to make) in life.
22 Le Chien de Madame Halberstadt - Stephane Carlier
This was on a 'new books we love' table in the local bookshop in Brittany, so I picked it up as a holiday read to stretch my French a little (but not so far as needing to read with a dictionary in the other hand). It's basically sort of Nick Hornby-lite: novelist in his late 30s sinks into depression after his latest book flops (he obsessively checks Amazon, where it is languishing at around number 470,000 in the best-seller lists...), his girlfriend leaves him for their dentist and even his mother only gives his book a 3* review. But then his neighbour asks him to look after her pug for a few days, and life seems to take a miraculous turn for the better...
I would guess this one is unlikely ever to be translated into English, but if it were, I'd rate it much higher as holiday reading than the Breton Bistro book, though the final scene featuring an eagle was little traumatic for dog-lovers.