Featured
Featured
Japan is shrinking. On a visit last year I noticed older people everywhere still working — in the konbinis late at night, directing traffic in Kyoto. It sent me down a rabbit hole, and eventually to Alone in Japan by Tom Feiling, a compelling look at a country facing a demographic crisis unlike anything the world has seen before.
I first read this seventeen years ago and still remembered being impressed. Now, with a Netflix adaptation filming in Co. Wicklow — and a chance encounter with the crew — it felt like exactly the right time to return to Claire Keegan's Walk the Blue Fields.
A father and his three children are the sole caretakers of Shearwater, a remote island north of Antarctica housing the world's largest seed depository. When a woman named Rowan washes ashore during a storm, the question is whether to trust her. Charlotte McConaghy's Wild Dark Shore is atmospheric, bleak, and quietly devastating.
Stillness in Surrey, music on the streets of Belfast, summertime in England. A Spring/Summer round up.
Long hikes in Wicklow, Korean cop and period films, another favourite bench and Velvets in the Sun in a March April Spring round up.
I’ve been using a morning journal for a number of years. Here are some morning journal prompts to get your creative juices flowing.
The TBR pile continues to expand, no matter how many books I manage to read. Time to develop a new approach for dealing with this first world bibliophilic crisis…..
Where should you start with Haruki Murakami, and where do you go next? I've grouped his novels, story collections and non-fiction by theme rather than release date — from the essential starting points to the parallel-world epics, the quiet interior novels, and the strange corners in between.
From cosy reading chairs to e-readers and bookish stationery — the best gifts for the reader in your life, tried and tested.
Every Mickey Haller book in order, from The Lincoln Lawyer to The Proving Ground. Includes the Netflix series and all Harry Bosch crossovers.
A missing cat, a vanished wife, and a dry well pull Toru Okada into Japan's buried wartime past in Murakami's sprawling, strange Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. Twenty years ago it was my introduction to him, so I went back to see if it would hit the same way — and found even more in it this time.