I’ve written before about rivalry between women – a common theme in literature – in Rosamond Lehmann’s 1953 novel The Echoing Grove and Zoe Heller’s 2003 novel Notes on a Scandal. Female rivalry also appears in Elizabeth Day’s psychological thriller Magpie, entwining with the theme of infertility and the devastating emotional and psychological impact it can have on those affected. Published in 2021 Magpie is a gripping read with a clever, unexpected twist a third of the way through which forces the reader to reappraise what they have read so far. Continue reading “Culinary competitiveness”
Category: The Novel
A Christmas Tale
Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These might be a slip of a book – it is only 110 pages long – but it packs a mighty punch. Continue reading “A Christmas Tale”
Food and paranoia
In Virginia Feito’s debut novel Mrs March, a food establishment – the eponymous protagonist’s ‘favorite patisserie – a lovely little place with a red awning and a whitewashed bench in front’ – is the site of a humiliating episode that precipitates a nightmareish journey into paranoia. Continue reading “Food and paranoia”
Food and the nun’s life
When I started my A Level English Literature studies in the late 1980s, the first text I had to read was one of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (The Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale). I’d never encountered medieval literature before, but from the outset I was hooked. Continue reading “Food and the nun’s life”