Samantha Harvey (1) (1975–)

This is the story of Jake, 65 year old Jake, whose wife has died, whose son is in prison, whose daughter ..... well, Jake has Alzheimers, and we tumble with him into a tangle of reminiscence, misleading timelines and confusion, as like him, we try to make sense of his new helplessness and puzzlement about the fates of those he holds dear.

This is a wonderfully imagined book, which gave me real insight (and fears) into an existence entirely dominated by unreliable memories, whether of mothers, lovers, or where to store the coffee cups. Here is a man who was once an architect with vision, now reduced to dependency and frustration.

Beautifully written, it had me gripped till the last page.… (mere)

Six astronauts (two of them are cosmonauts), all from different countries, some male, some female, orbit the earth in their International Space Station. We visit them for one day only, as they travel 16 times round the globe. We experience with them the wonder of this journey: the brush-stroke beauty of the landscapes they view from afar, as well as tiny detail - headlights, fishing boats. We accompany them as they go about their often mundane daily tasks - inspecting the cabbages one of them is experimentally growing, or the mice another is charged with studying. Or the treadmills that are part of their daily routine to keep muscle-wastage at bay. Or we see their sleeping bags, billowing in weightlessness: the spoons they eat with attached by velcro to the cabin wall. We perceive aspects of their life back on earth - children, a loveless marriage, a trusting partnership. Through all this, the astronauts and cosmonauts never lose their ecstasy at looking at the earth below. The book moves through the spectacular and the ordinary, distance and intimacy and invites us, the readers, to wonder too.… (mere)

Roman, Anton, Shaun, Nell, Chie and Pietro are 4 astronauts and 2 cosmonauts who are orbiting the earth for 9 months, 16 orbits a day. This short novel lets us into their thoughts and gives us the opportunity to sense what such a rare experience might feel like as each character explores their recent history and how they ended up on the project. Certainly the first half I found mesmerising, but sometimes the repetition, which would be hard to avoid baring in mind that the orbit occurs so often in a 24 hour period, dulled sometimes, which is probably the point. It did, and will continue to make me think about life, space, and a possible future for humankind ‘out there’ might mean.

One of the final things Stephen Hawking said was that what we needed to plan for is a home for humankind in the future.… (mere)

John Reve is the priest in a small, dismal English town during the Middle Ages. When, on the day before Lent, the town's most prosperous and worldly resident is drowned without having confessed his sins, Reve invites his dean to investigate the death. The book provides a n engaging portrait of rural life in the Middle Ages.

The author utilized some unusual techniques in this book. First, we learn about the town and it's people from their confessions to Reve in the confessional. Second, the author starts the book four days after the drowning occurred and then moves backward in time to the day the drowning occurred. The problem with this approach is that once events are revealed at the end of the book, numerous threads are left dangling that would normally be addressed after the time point that the book begins. As a result of these dangling threads, I found the book to be disappointing. An epilogue set one year later would have addressed this problem.… (mere)