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A Long Way Down |
Four people meet on a roof top where they are going to commit suicide, but they make a pact to stay in touch while they reconsider their decision. The book employs an interesting but sometimes confusing four-way narrative. While some of the characters don't elicit much sympathy and at times the story drags a little, there are some amusing moments in what is a wry and ultimately uplifting comedy.
(Annie Noble - bwl 36 September 2006) |
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About a Boy |
This is a book about today's life: broken relationships, single-parent families, difficulties of growing up in such contexts but it's written in a casual sort of way, which seems effortless but it's probably not so effortless to write. And it's funny and sweet.
(Laurence Martin Euler - bwl 7 February 2001) |
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Funny Girl |
Nick Hornby misses nothing in recreating the attitudes and atmosphere of the 1960s with uncanny accuracy. Barbara Parker realises that becoming Miss Blackpool is never going to fulfil her yearning to make people laugh so instantly escapes to London. There she becomes "Sophia Straw", the star of a spectacularly successful domestic sitcom produced within a television scene in which innovation is struggling to overcome old-fashioned convention and respectability which eventually it does. The swinging sixties have arrived!
(Jane Grey-Edwards - bwl 82 Autumn 2016) |
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High Fidelity |
High Fidelity by Nick Hornby will probably confirm any lingering doubt about my taste in literature. I loved the book so much that I am preparing to pay good money to see the Americanised film version at the local cinema. This first person account of Rob's record shop in North London together with his search for self-identification and reciprocal love, I found educational, hilarious and very moving. Read it Murray!
(James Baker - bwl 5 October 2000) |
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How to Be Good |
It starts well with a sentence like 'I've thought about divorce before, of course. Who hasn't?' and you think you're going to learn some useful information about how to stay married for forty years or more! But no, the doctor heroine Katie Carr doesn't find any answers and finally stays with an unbearable husband because it's what a woman vicar told her to do! A bit disappointing.
(Laurence Martin Euler - bwl 9 June 2001) |
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