Beautiful Books

This is about Sam a very lonely man who lives beside the sea up on the cliffs. He is  a lovely gentle character who has lived in the house on the cliff since he was a child and loves nothing more than to listen to the sounds of the sea and watch the birds dipping and diving over the cliff down to the water below.

‘After 400 years, Shakespeare breaks his silence', proclaims the front cover of Christopher Rush's 459 page stream of consciousness reconstruction of Shakespeare's deathbed thoughts and memories. Yes, ‘Will' is a quasi Elizabethan pun, since Will (Shakespeare) and his gourmandising Stratford lawyer Francis Collins are engaged in drawing up the famous will in which Anne Hathaway is left her husband's ‘second best bed', a bequest which has tantalised commentators ever since 1616.

Speaking of Love is a wonderful first novel by Angela Young. The book is written in four parts - told over a period of four days in July 1996. But the parts do not just encompass those four days but many years before, until the charactors meet again at a castle in Wales.