The Overbooked Bibliophile

  My Rating: 3.5+⭐ “Maureen was not an easy person. She knew this. She was not an easy person to like and she wasn’t good at making friends. She had once joined a book club but she objected to the things they read, and gave up. There was always someone between her and everyone else and that was her son. This year he would have turned fifty.” The third and final book in the Harold Fry trilogy by Rachel Joyce revolves around Maureen Fry, Harold’s wife, who we have met in the previous two installments but get to know a bit better in this short novel. We meet Maureen ten years after Harold’s “unlikely pilgrimage “ from Kingsbridge to Berwick-upon-Tweed to meet the terminally ill Queenie. Their relationship is now more stable and we see them as a caring couple in post-pandemic 2022. Rex, their neighbor remains a friend and agrees to look out for Harold when Maureen embarks on a short trip up north for a purpose close to her heart. As she drives up to Embleton Bay, we are privy to Mauree...

My Rating:  2.5⭐ The Things We Do to Our Friends  by Heather Darwent   tells the story of our protagonist Clare from when she was a newly enrolled student in the University of Edinburgh History of Art degree embarking on a new life away from Hull where she lived with her grandmother. Viewing her move to Edinburgh as an opportunity to become a new person she promptly moves into a new flat with two other students, finds a job working in a bar befriending her boss, Finn and strikes an unlikely friendship with the charismatic Tabitha and Tabitha’s group of friends (a group of people Clare privately compares with a shiver of sharks, “The Shiver” for short) whom she is drawn to, curious about and eager to fit in with. As the story progresses we see Clare being drawn into The Shiver and groomed to participate in an ambitious venture that will push them in a direction that spells nothing but trouble. Clare, for her part, has a past that she intends to keep hidden but apparen...

My Rating : 3.5⭐  (Audio Narration 4/5; Book: 3/5) “People’s true feelings are not in plain sight. The other person might not be thinking anything, but there is a tendency to just assume what the other is feeling without reaching out and asking.” DA-DING-DONG Before Your Memory Fades by  Toshikazu Kawaguchi  (translated by  Geoffrey Trousselot ), Book #3 in the Before the Coffee Gets Cold Series takes us back to a special café where customers can embark on a journey to a different time. However, unlike the first two books of the series which were set in Café Funiculi Funicula in Tokyo, we meet Nagare and Kazu along with her seven-year-old daughter Sachi at Café Donna Donna in Hakodate. Nagare’s mother, Yukari who owns and runs the café is currently traveling, leaving Nagare and Kazu to fill in. The rules of time travel are the same (among which are the fact that nothing can change the present and the time traveler needs to return to the present before the specially ...

My Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐ “My mom used to say that the only difference between a con artist and a lawyer was that the lawyer wore a better suit. I’m a lawyer, so I have to disagree with that statement; a con artist would always wear the better suit.” Originally published in 2015,  The Cross  by  Steve Cavanagh  introduces us to conman turned lawyer Eddie Flynn and his “partner in the law”, Jack Halloran and leads into the first full-length novel in the series,  The Defense  (though there is no direct overlap/ link between the books and Book 1 can be read independently). Halloran and Flynn’s latest client is the wife of ex-con Chilli Hernandez, who was choked to death by an NYPD police officer in a struggle for a knife that was used to murder a man. Already financially strapped, suing the NYPD puts them in a precarious position with the NYPD but it seems that there is more to Chilli’s death than meets the eye. As the lawyers delve deeper into the case they find themse...

My Rating:4.5⭐ “Imagine the places you grew up, the places you studied, places that belonged to your people, burned. But I should stop pretending that I know you. Perhaps you do not have to imagine. Perhaps your library, too, went up in smoke.” In 1981 Jaffna, sixteen-year-old Sashikala “Sashi” Kulenthiren dreams of becoming a doctor just like her eldest brother Niranjan and her late grandfather who was a renowned physician in Colombo. But as the civil war in Sri Lanka intensifies and violence ensues between the warring factions- the Sinhalese government and the Tamil militants who are fighting for an independent state free of persecution of the Tamils, life as she has known it shall be changed forever. When one of her brothers loses his life in an act of anti-Tamil violence and two of her brothers and a family friend join the “movement” Sashi finds herself making choices and being drawn into a life she had never imagined for herself- a medical student also working as a medic for those...