Christmas Reading

Christmas is a time to be spent with the ones we love but sometimes a little time to escape into a book is much needed. So while folk might be passed out on the sofa and you're still chipper but don't fancy much on Telly, why not give one of these reads a go. These are the books I am making my way through before 2014 is out, some I have read before but have decided to revisit and others are new to me.

Hope you all have a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year

Hx

1. A Gathering Light by Jennifer Donnelly

Mattie is torn between her familial responsibilities, her desire to be a writer, and the excitement of a first romance. Her dilemmas and choices are quietly reflected in the life of a young woman found drowned in a lake, a woman that Mattie only gets to know through reading her letters.

2. The Rings of Saturn by W.G Sebald

A record of a journey on foot through coastal East Anglia, in part a memoir, a travel account and an exploration of local history.

3. A Night of the Miraj by Zoë Ferraris

When Nouf ash-Shrawi, the sixteen-year-old daughter of a wealthy Saudi dynasty, disappears from her home in Jeddah just days before her arranged marriage, desert guide Nayir is asked to bring her home. But when Nouf's battered body is found, Nayir feels compelled to uncover the disturbing truth, travelling away from the endless desert to the vast city of Jeddah, where, most troubling of all, he finds himself having to work closely with Katya Hijazi, a forensic scientist. The further into the investigation he goes, the more Nayir begins to question his loyalties: to his friends, faith and culture.

4. Trains and Lovers by Alexander McCall Smith

Taking in Paris, Poussin, New England and the best-maintained railway siding in Australia, this is a story of four people - all strangers to one another - who meet on a train, and of how love touched their lives in very different ways.

5. Three Ply Yarn by Caeia March

A passionate story narrated by three women, Dee, Lotte and Esther who all choose different paths. Lotte marries for money, Esther seeks education and politics, Dee loves women and learns, through her relationship with her lover's black daughter, about an oppression different from her own. Yet their lives increasingly intertwine , and their realisation grows of the importance of other women to each of them.