Have got an insanely busy month at work sorting out the world of Teacher Assessed Grades for my faculty – believe me when I say that we are at the stage where both teachers and students would have preferred for the exams to have gone ahead! But I’ve picked three books I would like to try and read this month.

Hamlet by Maggie O’Farrell

I have heard nothing but good things about this book. It ticks off the prompt for winner of the Women’s Prize for Fiction and I bought this copy as part of a Tandem Collective Christmas books.so it came with discussion prompts to think about as I read.

What it’s about?

From Goodreads:

Drawing on Maggie O’Farrell’s long-term fascination with the little-known story behind Shakespeare’s most enigmatic play, HAMNET is a luminous portrait of a marriage, at its heart the loss of a beloved child.

Warwickshire in the 1580s. Agnes is a woman as feared as she is sought after for her unusual gifts. She settles with her husband in Henley street, Stratford, and has three children: a daughter, Susanna, and then twins, Hamnet and Judith. The boy, Hamnet, dies in 1596, aged eleven. Four years or so later, the husband writes a play called Hamlet.

Award-winning author Maggie O’Farrell’s new novel breathes full-blooded life into the story of a loss usually consigned to literary footnotes, and provides an unforgettable vindication of Agnes, a woman intriguingly absent from history.

When the Crawdads Sing by Della Owens

I have had this on my TBR since last year. I’m finally going to read it for the book mostly set outside prompt.

What it’s about?

From Goodreads:

For years, rumors of the “Marsh Girl” haunted Barkley Cove, a quiet fishing village. Kya Clark is barefoot and wild; unfit for polite society. So in late 1969, when the popular Chase Andrews is found dead, locals immediately suspect her.

But Kya is not what they say. A born naturalist with just one day of school, she takes life’s lessons from the land, learning the real ways of the world from the dishonest signals of fireflies. But while she has the skills to live in solitude forever, the time comes when she yearns to be touched and loved. Drawn to two young men from town, who are each intrigued by her wild beauty, Kya opens herself to a new and startling world–until the unthinkable happens.

In Where the Crawdads Sing, Owens juxtaposes an exquisite ode to the natural world against a profound coming of age story and haunting mystery. Thought-provoking, wise, and deeply moving, Owens’s debut novel reminds us that we are forever shaped by the child within us, while also subject to the beautiful and violent secrets that nature keeps.

The story asks how isolation influences the behavior of a young woman, who like all of us, has the genetic propensity to belong to a group. The clues to the mystery are brushed into the lush habitat and natural histories of its wild creatures.

Girl, Woman, Other by Bernadine Evaristo

Another book I’ve had on my tbr for an age! I’ve got it downloaded on my Kindle but decided to buy a paperback. The cover is so gorgeous. One of my A Level English Lit student wants to write about this for her coursework so reading it will me I can support her too.

What it’s about?

From Goodreads:

Teeming with life and crackling with energy — a love song to modern Britain and black womanhood

Girl, Woman, Other follows the lives and struggles of twelve very different characters. Mostly women, black and British, they tell the stories of their families, friends and lovers, across the country and through the years.

Joyfully polyphonic and vibrantly contemporary, this is a gloriously new kind of history, a novel of our times: celebratory, ever-dynamic and utterly irresistible.

Have a great month bookworms!

Happy Reading x