8. Title: The Shock of the Fall
Author: Nathan Filer
Recommended by: someone at London Book Club - apologies, I can't remember who - and given a copy by Holly
Read: 28 February - 4 March

I had high hopes for this - it's been lauded all over the place, and won the Costa Book Award earlier this year. Clearly I have very different tastes to the Costa panel. It's about grief and mental illness - chunky subjects that, handled well, could make for an extremely affecting book. Except this one doesn't. It's clumsy, the writing doesn't engender any sympathy whatsoever for the characters, and the whole thing made me frankly cross that I'd wasted four days reading it. Not one I can recommend.

5/10

9. Title: We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves
Author: Karen Joy Fowler
Recommended by: Books on the Underground, who provided copies to London Book Club for the March meeting
Read: 4 - 9 March

The one thing I will say for this book is that it stands on its own as an original read - not something that I've felt too often about books of late. It's told from the point of view of a girl who's treated as the subject of a psychology experiment by her family. A twist in the narrative in the first hundred pages made me really quite cross, but after that it picked up, and is an interesting exploration of an unusual family.

7/10

10. Title: In Between Days
Author: Andrew Porter
Recommended by: Holly, who gave me her copy
Read: 10 - 18 March

I really should stop being taken in by a book's cover. The arty photography did it for me, but unfortunately the text inside didn't. The story, of a guy struggling with his estranged wife and daughter, and the familial struggles just didn't feel original, the characters didn't inspire empathy, and the writing was meh at best. Another irritating one.

6/10

11. Title: Memoirs of a Foxhunting Man
Author: Siegfried Sassoon
Recommended by: a former colleague, and bought from Amazon
Read: 19 - 27 March

This was recommended to me by a former colleague, who read it because she was on a war writer binge and thought it might appeal to me. And it did. It's an incredible portrait of a very particular time in England that's been lost to the ages, of young men who had incredible freedom, of a country idyll that I don't think has been known for generations. Even if you've never so much as seen a hunt, this is worth reading (although you might need a glossary of hunting and horsey terms) as an elegy to an England gone. The last few chapters, clearly written from Sassoon's own experiences in the trenches of Northern France are utterly heartbreaking and in such stark contrast to the rollicking fun over rolling hills that it's hard to believe the experiences came from the same heart and the same pen. Highly recommended.

8.5/10

12. Title: The Love Affairs of Nathanial P
Author: Adelle Waldman
Recommended by: several members of London Book Club, the collective copy of which I read, and which I'll be passing on
Read: 27 - 31 March

Having said I've struggled with the lack of originality of many books recently, it's interesting that this - a book about a young New York writer and his dealings with women - didn't suffer from that. I'm inclined to say that anyone in their twenties or thirties who's lived in a big city and done the dating thing will find that some, if not all, of this book rings alarmingly true, down to changing who you are for someone you like, and being a dick, just because...

9/10