I loved Ice Cream girls Violet and totally agree that it was not what i was expecting, in a good way though though. A gritty subject but written perfectly, Dorothy Koomson I find easy to read. I have her new nivel waiting for in my pile...The woman he loved before me' I'll let you know how it goes! x
I have a few of her books in the cupboard that I got from a friend, I'm not sure if I'll ever read them, some seem to chick lit for me..Ice Creams Girls was great though
You belong to me is a fantastic book.
I saw this in Asda and nearly bought it, I'm not sure if her books follow on though...I hate starting mid way between a series.
I've just read the synopsis for Ice Cream Girls & it looks amazing, it's now on my ever growing list of books to read
If you like the sound of this, I think you'd like Sophie Hannah
Hi. Just found you lot. Ive just started A Tiny Bit Marvellous by Dawn French. Not sure. :-/ like her style but a bit jumpy. Finished Bella by Leslie Pierce. A good page turner but little bit predictable. And also read Fallen by Karen Slaughter. Would like to read her others. Love seeing what others are reading.
I have this book on my pile, I only bought it because it was Dawn French, it's not really my style but I thought it might be fun.
I am currently reading Blindness by Jose Saramago...
In an unnamed city in an unnamed country, a man sitting in his car waiting for a traffic light to change is suddenly struck blind. But instead of being plunged into darkness, this man sees everything white, as if he "were caught in a mist or had fallen into a milky sea." A Good Samaritan offers to drive him home (and later steals his car); his wife takes him by taxi to a nearby eye clinic where they are ushered past other patients into the doctor's office. Within a day the man's wife, the taxi driver, the doctor and his patients, and the car thief have all succumbed to blindness. As the epidemic spreads, the government panics and begins quarantining victims in an abandoned mental asylum--guarded by soldiers with orders to shoot anyone who tries to escape.
In this community of blind people there is still one set of functioning eyes: the doctor's wife has affected blindness in order to accompany her husband to the asylum. As the number of victims grows and the asylum becomes overcrowded, systems begin to break down: toilets back up, food deliveries become sporadic; there is no medical treatment for the sick and no proper way to bury the dead. Inevitably, social conventions begin to crumble as well, with one group of blind inmates taking control of the dwindling food supply and using it to exploit the others. Through it all, the doctor's wife does her best to protect her little band of blind charges, eventually leading them out of the hospital and back into the horribly changed landscape of the city.
Blindness is in many ways a horrific novel, detailing as it does the total breakdown in society that follows upon this most unnatural disaster. Saramago takes his characters to the very edge of humanity and then pushes them over the precipice. His people learn to live in inexpressible filth, they commit acts of both unspeakable violence and amazing generosity that would have been unimaginable to them before the tragedy. The very structure of society itself alters to suit the circumstances as once-civilized, urban dwellers become ragged nomads traveling by touch from building to building in search of food. The devil is in the details, and Saramago has imagined for us in all its devastation a hell where those who went blind in the streets can never find their homes again, where people are reduced to eating chickens raw and packs of dogs roam the excrement-covered sidewalks scavenging from corpses. And yet in the midst of all this horror Saramago has written passages of unsurpassed beauty.
Upon being told she is beautiful by three of her charges, women who have never seen her, "the doctor's wife is reduced to tears because of a personal pronoun, an adverb, a verb, an adjective, mere grammatical categories, mere labels, just like the two women, the others, indefinite pronouns, they too are crying, they embrace the woman of the whole sentence, three graces beneath the falling rain." In this one woman Saramago has created an enduring, fully developed character who serves both as the eyes and ears of the reader and as the conscience of the race. And in
Blindness he has written a profound, ultimately transcendent meditation on what it means to be human.
