claire_fuller_writer's reviews
1030 reviews

We Used to Live Here by Marcus Kliewer

dark mysterious fast-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Plot
• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes

4.0

Entertaining, scary, great sense of place. I listened to this and it makes a great audio book, but because I wasn't able to flick back, I know I missed some of the clues and breadcrumb trails that Kliewer leaves for the observant reader. I went and found a Reddit thread when I'd finished and that revealed an awful lot I missed. Eve and Charlie have just bought a remote doer-upper house, and one day when Charlie is out, a family knock on the door and ask if they can look around because the father - Thomas - grew up there. Reluctantly, Eve lets them in, but really they never leave, or maybe they've been there all along. Stories, people and timelines shift until everything becomes unstable. It's a story of parallel universes that genuinely made me shiver in places. 

You Are Here by David Nicholls

funny hopeful inspiring lighthearted medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character

4.0

Sweet, funny, romantic. Marnie and Michael and a few others are invited on a walk across England by a mutual friend, but one by one the others drop out. Michael intends to walk from coast to coast, and along the way the two discuss their histories, their loves and losses, and what they want out of life. There are some great jokes, some awkwardness, and some romance of course - this is David Nicholls. 

Intimacies by Lucy Caldwell

reflective slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character

3.75

I really enjoyed many of these, and especially loved, All the People were Mean and Bad about a woman travelling on a long flight with her daughter, who makes a connection with the man sitting in the next seat. I suppose I like my short stories to have more of a structure than many of these did. I really liked the writing and the subject matter: motherhood, and sometimes travel, and I know that it's me and my taste that gave it 3.75.

The Wilderness by Samantha Harvey

challenging dark emotional reflective sad slow-paced

4.5

Beautiful, tragic, moving. This is Samantha Harvey's (winner of The Booker Prize 2024 with Orbital) debut and it really deserves to be better known. The book starts as Jake, in his sixties, has a trip in a plane given as a present by his adult son, Henry. Jake's plane flies over the prison where Henry is incarcerated. Four years later, at the end of the novel, when Henry has been released, the two men, and Jake's girlfriend / carer look through a book of photographs. In between these two events we see, feel, experience the unraveling of Jake's mind as Alzheimer's takes hold. We learn about Jake's life with his parents, his birth, his affair, his marriage, the birth of his children, and his tragedies in a series of spirals that change and fracture each time Jake remembers them - are they even memories or are they simply taken from the photographs he looks at? It's a wonderful novel but also sometimes difficult to read - not just because of how this man loses so much as he loses his mind, but the writing is dense, sometimes unfathomable, complicated and twisty, which of course befits the subject. Recommended. 

Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri

3.0

Clearly something in this collection of short stories that everyone else can see that I can't. I've tried one of her novels too and I felt much the same, so perhaps she simply isn't for me. I found the ones that used the first person plural particularly problematic, like the 'we' was an archetype, and my brain kept saying, a whole apartment block of people would not feel the same way. I think it must be my problem, except that my husband (we read them to each other) felt more or less the same. 

Memento Mori by Muriel Spark

4.0

A group of interconnected friends and companions, now elderly, each receive telephone calls telling them that they must die. Not so much a warning that they are about to be murdered but that they, and of course everyone, will one day die. Memento Mori is littered with eccentric English characters, suspecting each other, bitching behind backs, planning little schemes. It is hilarious in a kind of Ealing Comedy kind of way. It was also fascinating to read about London in the early 50s, and the care of the elderly: it was always so easy for Godfrey to drive into London and park on the Kings Road, or sometimes on a lane off it in case he car was recognised; and how the elderly and the demented were kept in bed in hospital wards. The back of the book says it's a mystery that the recipients of the telephone calls set out to unravel, but really that's just the thing that links them. 

Beyond the Sea by Paul Lynch

challenging dark reflective tense slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes

3.0

I love a disaster at sea, whether it's fiction or non-fiction, there's something about it being the ultimate survival story. This is not so different to many I've read, and while I enjoyed the dynamics between the two storm-surviving South American fishermen as things gradually get worse, at times towards the end there was just a little too much 'am I going mad, am I seeing things' sections. 

All the Wide Border: Wales, England and the Places Between by Mike Parker

adventurous informative inspiring slow-paced

The Light Years by Elizabeth Jane Howard

4.0

I was surprised to like this as much as I did. A family saga? Normally, I'd say 'no thanks'. But my step mother-in-law posted me the whole series, and since nothing is nicer than receiving an unexpected parcel of books, I thought I should read the first one.

I loved how we got to dip in and out of the characters' heads, sometimes for only a couple of paragraphs. Although I would have liked to see inside Edward's head more to understand what he was thinking about the things that he did.

Other reviews have said 'but nothing happened!', but I liked that. Wealthy domestic lives between the wars: suet puddings, kippers for breakfast, affairs and falling-outs.

One complaint about the edition I read: The end of the book looked a way off judging by the number of pages still in my right hand, and then suddenly - bam! - it was over. What I had thought was the last section, was in fact a teaser for the next book. Frustrating.

Fourth of July Creek by Smith Henderson

4.0

Smith Henderson can write. Wonderfully. Flawed people who I loved despite all the things they did wrong; the rural Montana landscape; complex personal relationships - all of it so well drawn. And plot... a lot happens in this book, perhaps almost too much, but Henderson knew how to keep me staying up late turning pages.

Jeremiah Pearl and his son, outlaws living in the woods, were really interesting characters, and Henderson very cleverly led me to believe something about Pearl and then in within a page spun that around.

Without giving anything away, the Jeremiah Pearl strand of the novel was resolved a little too neatly for me, whilst another, that of what happens to the daughter of the protagonist (Pete Snow), was handled beautifully with just the tiniest possibility of resolution.

Highly recommended.