Category: Uncategorized
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Ellen Willott Our Wives Under the Sea is a devastating tale of love, loss, and the sea. Julia Armfield writes about Leah’s return from the bottom of the ocean, a research trip in a submarine which was meant to be three weeks and not five months. The book is told through her and her wife,…
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Ellen Willott I read Chelsea Girls, Eileen Myles’ autobiography, without knowing anything about the author. I was told that the book would tell me all I needed to know. It starts in the middle and continues as a series of distinct stories which go back and forth from Myles’ childhood to their present where they…
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Ellen Willott Fans are clamouring for a sequel to How to be a Bad Book Lover, and who am I to disappoint them? Here is another instalment of hot takes on the bookish world. Try not to gasp. Don’t Read the Classics (if you don’t want to) Be wary of the classics. There are a…
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Ellen Willott Film Club is a gem of a series. It follows Evie, who is bound to the house by anxiety, her friend Noa, and their long-standing, very serious weekly film club which comes under threat when Noa gets a job in another city. We are let into Evie’s small cocoon as it is on…
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Ellen Willott The Shipping News is one of my favourite books. But years have passed since I read it, and I wanted to remember why I liked it. Annie Proulx, author of Brokeback Mountain, writes about a bumbling, self-conscious man called Quoyle who moves with his aunt and two daughters up to where his family…
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Ellen Willott Hear ye, hear ye, come one and all. For we have been blessed by a very good show. Riot Women is a blazing, unflinching wrecking-ball of a BBC series and I for one want more. For those who haven’t heard the naff-sounding advertisements for the series, Riot Women, written by Sally Wainwright, follows…
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Ellen Willott I have never been a fan of the Romantics. To read The Wild Irish Girl is to reach the end of a whole page of swooning, throbbing, blushing, and blanching, only to return to the moment of the scene and find that no time has passed at all, and nothing has happened except…
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Ellen Willott The Cemetery of Untold Stories is a whimsical-yet-gritty magical realism novel by Julia Alvarez. This might feel like an unlikely combination, but think 100 Years of Solitude. It certainly shares a heritage with Colombian Garcia Marquez, Alvarez herself American-Dominican, so continuing the Latin American tradition of magical realism. I liked how the Spanish…
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Ellen Willott Hello! It is I, an avowed book-lover. I did a four-year undergrad in English literature and then came back for more. I have read many books: many for fun, many not for fun, and I have met a lot of other people who have read a lot of books. I’ve come to appreciate…
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Ellen Willott I’m going to come out and say it: I picked Sea Bean off the shelf because it was sparkly. Like a sea bean itself, it stood out against the texture of the background and I was drawn in, magpie-like. For that reason, I didn’t know what I was reading. Yes, I could have…
Dog-eared Press 