The Luminaries

by Eleanor Catton
Let me start by saying this was a long book. It also has a very intricate structure set around star signs and astrological charts that I did not fully get.
It has a lot of characters and it took me until well after half way through the book to work out who everybody was.
Having said all this there was something strangely compelling about the book that drew me in to the story. The story takes place in New Zealand at the time of the gold rush in the 1860's. We find out very quickly that someone has died(murdered?), somebody appears to have attempted suicide(but did they) and somebody else has disappeared-all on the same evening. We spend the rest of the book trying to find out what actually happened and why. Definitely a book to read in print rather than on a kindle-I seemed to be forever going back to recall what had happened earlier or which date we were at. 7/10

A tale for the time being

by Ruth Ozeki
This is a fascinating book.
It is the story of a diary written by a Japanese teenager who has returned from California with her family and is horribly bullied at school. Her father is depressed and suicidal and her diary together with the influence of her great grandmother is her only way through her troubles.
The diary is found washed up on the beach by a couple who live on an island in Canada. This is not long after the earthquake and tsunami in the north of Japan and throughout the book we are longing to know how this diary got there and whether its author is still alive.
The book is really absorbing as it moves from the second world war to the dot com crash to 9/11 to the present day, introducing the reader to zen and quantum physics along the way. I can't begin to do the book justice but it made me laugh, it made me sad, it made me think and it has the most realistic cat you will ever find described in a novel! I loved this book 9/10