Cold Mountain, by Charles Frazier

While book lovers almost universally malign their favourite books being turned into movies, reading books simply because one has seen the movie is also often frowned upon. After the books are tarted up with movie covers and showered in media coverage, their new mass appeal gives them a sort of nouveau-riche celebrity. But really, this [...]

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The Hours, by Michael Cunningham

It is one of the greatest acts of literary audacity that I can think of not only to write as Virginia Woolf, but to write Virginia Woolf herself. One of the essential modernist writers who reconceived the novel, her prose is instantly identifiable with its rivers of breathless clauses. Of course she is also infamous [...]

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The Reader, by Bernhard Schlink

There are many books out there that claim to be about morality (two I’ve read recently – Mercy Among the Children and Fifth Business), but some seem to encourage a more passive, guided exploration of morality, while others leave the readers adrift in the situations, daring them to reach their own conclusions. Bernhard Schlink’s The [...]

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