Sarah Wray Writer

Looking Glass Sound – (Audiobook) – Catriona Ward – 29.04.24

This is a bit of a mindbender of a book.

It starts off feeling like a run of the mill, American teenager coming of age, summer of sexual awakening etc with three friends kicking about the coastal town during the summer holidays – there are love triangles, experiments with alcohol, disillusionment with parents and so on.

Then it gets darker with a serial murder mystery to solve.

Then the characters grow up and it gets a bit freaky and I’m like, wait, what? Is this whole book a fiction written by one of the characters, or is it a fiction about a fiction written by one of the other characters, and why do people keep changing names and genders and what is going on????!!!

This goes on for a while, but then the ending does kind of explain things in a way that made me say, oh, okay, I guess that makes sense after all then.

Overall it was a fun read (I think?).

Hagstone (Audiobook) – Sinéad Gleeson – 23.04.24

This is a dark and atmospheric literary novel set on a wild secluded Irish island.

Nell is an artist, trying to make a living while staying true to her art and she is approached by a woman from a mysterious all female community that live in an old remote nunnery on the island. She is asked to make a book about the community as well as some pieces of art. To do this she has to spend time with them and learns some of the women’s stories.

It’s a bit about how it’s hard to draw the line between a community and a cult, and how leadership can go from wanting the best for the collective to something darker. Also, the book explores relationships both in the all female group and in the wider community. It manages to be both beautiful and also gripping.

The Three-body Problem – Cixin Liu – 22.04.24

I remember trying this book in the past, after hearing it lauded as one of the greatest sci-fi novels ever, and giving up quite early on because it was too heavy for me. Then I started watching and loving the Netflix adaptation and so I went back to the book and this time found myself engaging with it more.

Unlike the tv adaptation, this book is set entirely in China and the majority of the characters are Chinese. There are a lot of cultural and historical references which are pretty much lost on me, although there are footnotes giving some context and explanation.

Several cutting edge scientists start dying in mysterious circumstances, some academics are invited into a vast virtual reality role playing game based in a world with three suns whose orbits are regularly thrown into chaos causing devastating effects on the worlds climate and the life of it’s inhabitants, and one physicist starts seeing numbers counting down in his field of vision.

How are these things connected and what do they mean for the future of planet Earth?

I like the policeman character, and in my mind see him as the actor who played the equivalent role in the tv show. I also like the real, intelligent, sciency way they explore the theories about what’s happening and the options for responding.

As I’m writing this, I’m still slogging through book two in the series so trying not to give spoilers about what’s coming!

Noise Floor: The Vinyl Detective Mysteries, Book 7 (Audiobook) – Andrew Cartmel – 20.04024

After dipping my toes in the icy waters of the first book in Andrew Cartmel’s Paperback Sleuth series, reading this was like sinking into a comforting warm bath. Back to the lovely mix of characters that are the unnamed Vinyl detective, his girlfriend, Nevada and their friends Tinkler and Clean Head.

Once again they are thrown into danger and mystery in the seedy underworld of classic records with lots of nostalgia in this instalment around eighties raves.

As always there are fun foody facts and cat shenanigans aplenty. I do really like this series.

Death in Fine Condition (Audiobook) – Andrew Cartmel – 15.04.24

I really love Andrew Cartmel’s Vinyl Detective series, and when looking at reviews of his latest (Noise Floor) I saw people mentioning this new spin off series about the Paperback Sleuth. Like many of the reviewers, I really didn’t know what to make of this new series. There is a character in the Vinyl Detective series (Tinkler) who is constantly stoned and randy and a bit of a comic foil for the main characters. If you imagine a female version of Tinkler, you get the main character of this new series, Cordelia. Instead of tracking down rare vinyl records, Cordelia deals in expensive rare paperbacks and is not above dodgy or even downright illegal tactics to get them. Her path crosses with our Vinyl Detective heroes at events that sell both old books and old records, which is quite fun. I’m not sure I like Cordelia enough to feel invested in the series yet, but perhaps she will go on a redemptive journey and I’ll warm to her more.

All the Murmuring Bones (Audiobook) – A.G. Slatter – 12.04.24

I enjoyed this book – a gothic, spooky, Irish folklore fairy tale with a strong and powerful heroine who has to fight controlling men (and women) family curses and angry creatures to save herself and right her family’s wrongs from the past.

I think I’ll look out for more novels from this author now. (I just added Vigil to my audible wish list – the first in Angela Slatter’s urban fantasy detective series!)

Quantum Radio – A.G. Riddle – 11.04.24

I bought this because I loved A.G. Riddle’s Lost in Time, and because I am fascinated by the world of quantum mechanics (at least, what little I can understand of it) which always seems very sci-fi even in the real world.

I didn’t love this one as much. I liked how is started out, and I quite liked the ending, but the middle was too actiony for my taste – like a sci-fi James Bond movie.

When academic Ty Klein spots a pattern in data from the large hadron collider in CERN he is thrown into a dangerous world of cat and mouse chases across the world and even across parallel worlds. There is some nice story development and some nice character and relationship development, but, like I said, too much action for me.

Making Money (Audiobook) – Terry Pratchett – 09.04.24

This is my latest in the buy any Terry Pratchett book that comes up cheaply on kindle or audible scheme. In Making Money, Sir Terry gives his wry and wise and witty commentary on the world of economics while telling a rollicking good tale. What can I say – it’s Terry Pratchett – if you haven’t read it – why not?!

Fourteen Days: A Collaborative Novel (Audiobook) – Margaret Atwood – 02.04.24

This book was written and set during the covid lockdown period and is a collaborative novel, which means it was written by lots of different people. A lot of big names in the world of literature, in fact, contributed, and the proceeds were to support writers losing money due to lockdown.

The premise is that a woman starts a new job as building supervisor to a New York apartment block during the covid lockdown and every evening the few remaining inhabitants (it’s a topic of much complaining that all the people who could afford it left New York for their county homes when lockdown struck) converge on the rooftop terrace every evening initially to bang pans and clap in support of key workers, but in what develops into a platform for each person to tell their story to the group.

The different stories are written by different authors (we are not told who wrote what) and vary quite a lot in how much they held my interest – some where great, others not so much. One thing that annoyed me was that the stories were supposed to be spoken to the group and some where so not the way anyone would speak when recounting a story and very much the way someone might write a novel.

From other reviews I’ve looked at, it seems the ending divided opinion, but I did like how the novel ended.

Death and the Penguin – Andrey Kurkov – 01.04.24

What a strange and beautiful book this was. Set in Ukraine in the immediate post Soviet era the book follows Viktor, a wannabe writer who takes a job for a newspaper writing obituaries for (not yet dead) important people.

Viktor lives in a small flat with his penguin (the local zoo was so short of funding it gave away animals to anyone who would take them) and drinks a lot of vodka. The book is funny and touching while also being deeply tragic and bleak and very compelling – I wouldn’t have expected to be so gripped by a book with this description!