Nature Protection in Action: A Scurry of Squirrels by Polly Pullar

I habitually go searching for new nature writing, and one area I have been paying particular attention to is books on squirrels. You would think such an enigmatic beloved woodland creature featured in at least as much books as foxes do, alas you would be wrong. So when I heard A Scurry of Squirrels was …

The Eternal Season of Summer

My favourite sentence in a nature book belongs to J. A. Baker: 'The hardest of all to see is what is really there.' It particularly resonates for me in the discrepancy between the surface appearance and the actual state of nature. You could walk into a wood on a summer's day, pretty and green, and …

An I-Novel – Portrait of a Japanese immigrant

Minae Mizumura's most recent book to appear in an English translation, An I-Novel, captures a single day in 1980s America from the perspective of a Japanese immigrant. Twenty years have passed since her family moved from Japan to the US, and when the book opens she has come to the decision that she will return …

Spirals of Psychosis | Inferno – Catherine Cho

Inferno by Catherine Cho is another excellent example of mental illness centered memoirs to come out in the last few years. Closely following the birth of her son Cato, Catherine Cho went traveling to the US with her husband and child to visit family and friends. Some three months after Cato’s birth she falls into …

Written in Bones – Sue Black | Forensic Science and what it can tell us about human stories

Written in Bone is a chronological journey through the human body, one skeletal piece at a time. Sue Black, a forensic anthropologist, explores the different parts that make up our anatomy - in the ways that biology, history and forensic knowledge intersect. With each part explored we gain a deeper understanding into its place in …

REVIEW: Untold Night and Day – Bae Suah

Bae Suah's Untold Night and Day is a hard book to read, and perhaps even harder to write about. It's hard not in terms of subject but structurally - because by its very essence, it's not a story in the singular nor is it linearly told. Instead, as the translator Deborah Smith puts it, the …

Nature Sciences, Gothic Mysteries, and Tree Growth | The Lie Tree – Frances Hardinge

On my quest to read my own damn books (a.k.a. the books I own and keep ignoring for any other book coming my way) I decided to give The Lie Tree by Frances Hardinge a listen through the audiobook, narrated by Emilia Fox. It was a great decision, if I do say so myself. The …

Review: Woman at Point Zero – Nawal El Saadawi

In “Woman at Point Zero”, Nawal El Saadawi offers a sharp and unflinching critique of patriarchal societies where women cannot win - no matter who they are or the choices they make, they will always be subjugated as long as their lives are forcibly dependent on men ‘taking care’ of them. The problems faced by …

Journey from Sexual Violence to Justice | Black Box – Shiori Ito

In Black Box, Shiori Ito shares her story as the victim of rape and her fight for justice within the legal system of Japan. For those of us who have read Chanel Miller’s popular memoir “Know my name” much of this book will be familiar territory - the shattering effect on the self as a …

Japan as seen from the Margins | Tokyo Ueno Station – Yu Miri

Yu Miri's Tokyo Ueno Station brings attention to a Japan rarely seen in the English-speaking world - the country as seen from the margins. The novel follows a homeless narrator chronicling his life from the early 1930s living in Fukushima, moving to Tokyo for work in the 1960s, moving back to the countryside and later …