Category: Everything Else

Last year I raved about The Ghosts of Eden. It is a wonderful book about twin boys growing up in Uganda. The author, Andrew Sharp, is a medical doctor and so it is packed with all those intelligent observations about life that doctors seem to acquire in abundance. The book ended up on my top ten of 2009 list, but a quick Internet search has leads me to believe that no other bloggers have reviewed it yet. I am saddened that such a wonderful book is slipping under the radar. Can I be the only person in the world that loved this book? Well, luckily it seems not!

I’m delighted to announce that The Ghosts of Eden has just won the 2009/2010 Waverton Good Read Award.

Don’t worry – I’d never heard of the Waverton Award before either, but after doing a bit of research I think it is a prize worth following.

Waverton is a beautiful village in Cheshire, England where local readers have got together to form their own literary award.

The award is for debut novels written by British or Irish authors, published for the first time between 1st September 2009 and 31st August 2010.

100 keen readers score each book that they read and from all the books submitted a short list of 5 is produced. These 5 books are then distributed around the village and everyone is invited to read them. Ballot papers are sent out, votes are cast and then the winner is announced at the village fete. I love it!! I want to move to Waverton!!

Apart from being a wonderful way to celebrate books and bring a community together it seems as though the people of Waverton are very good at discovering the best new talent.

A quick flick through the previous winners reveals several books that you may have heard of:

2004 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon

2005 Boy A – Jonathan Trigell

2006 A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian – Marina Lewycka

2007 The Killing Jar – Nicola Monaghan

2008 Salmon Fishing in the Yemen – Paul Torday

2009 Child 44 – Tom Rob Smith

It is wonderful to know that a whole community of readers loved The Ghosts of Eden as much as I did and I hope that word of mouth will ensure that this book reaches the audience it deserves.

Have I persuaded you to:

a) Read The Ghosts of Eden?

b) Think about moving to Waverton?

c) Set up your own literary award?!!

d) None of the above 🙁

White is for Witching has been dividing the opinion of readers for a while. I am always intrigued by books that create a love-hate divide and so set out to find out which side of the fence I’d fall.

White is for Witching is supposed to be a creepy book. Unfortunately I was too confused to feel any ghostly chills, but there were a lot of strange happenings in this short novel.

The book centres on a pair of twins, Eliot and Miranda, who move into their ancestral home – a crumbling house on the cliffs of Dover. The twins are mourning the death of their mother, but the house does more to scare than comfort them.

The book is narrated by four different characters, one of which is the house. This was a great idea, but I found the narrative to be disjointed and confusing. I felt that the experimental writing style was given priority over plot.

There were frequent sections of beautiful writing, but the lack of any real plot meant that I frequently lost interest in the book and had to force myself to pick it up again.

The sun was setting into storm clouds; there was a smoky brightness outside, as if the world was being inspected by candlelight. I saw the woman who’d brushed me on the stairs the first time I’d gone up them. This time when I saw her I knew she wasn’t a house guest. She was standing under one of the trees, standing so deep in the ground that the earth levelled around her ankles.  As if she had no feet, as if she was growing.

I think this is one of those books that would benefit from re-reading, but although some things would probably become clearer there would still be a lot of questions left unanswered. Some people think this ambiguity is spooky, but I just found it frustrating – when I finish a book I like to have some idea of what happened!

If you’re the sort of person who loves reading modern fairy tales and gets excited by the appearance of unexplained apples then you could be one of the people who love this book. Unfortunately I prefer books with a more conventional narrative. 

The thoughts of other bloggers:

I could seriously go on and on about all the things I loved in the book A Striped Armchair

…as confused as I may have been, I was also in awe of Oyeyemi’s fresh voice… The Indextrious Reader

 I really didn’t have a clue as to what was going on for the majority of the book. Serendipity

…a little too much structural experiment for my liking… Stuck in a Book

Did you enjoy White is for Witching?