Discovering this joyous, sharp, witty book - thanks to a mention on the #Backlisted podcast. Brilliant, brilliant writing that makes storytelling & characterisation look easy.

Reading this at the moment - a tremendous book full of heart & a love of possibility - and remembered that E.B. White letter to the man who had lost faith:

"Sailors have an expression about the weather: they say, the weather is a great bluffer."

Here's hoping the clouds covering us all clear soon.

Gorgeously dark; I LOVED this book. Imagine "Perfume" if it had been written by Melinda Salisbury and you're on the right track. Wonderful and frightening and alive: just like falling in love with the wrong person can be...

Sunday lunchtime, with my three most-used cookery books: Delia Smith's Complete Cookery Course (so well thumbed it's missing most of the index, which fell off 8 years ago); Good Housekeeping (bought when I went to college in 1998), & Bill's Restaurant "Cook, Eat, Smile" which is always cheering.

"The watermen who carry fruit from the mainland to the city say that the pineapples fly out of their boats as if they had been fired out of a cannon," said Lord Sidmouth, [...] "Why the magician should have taken such a dislike to this particular fruit, no-one knows."

Loving reading both this & the first Knitbone Pepper book with my son (and one of our very own tigers...)

"Because he maintained perfect silence about his unspeakable past, never exploiting it to puff his later success, it was impossible for his contemporaries to comprehend the exceptional nature of his personal triumph."