My first Roth.
As is so often the way, the way when "finishing a newspaper article is like going to a rave" (sic Julian Barratt), when life and the young unruly children who inhabit it takes you into the slipstream and as an added bonus, swirls you round very quickly, if you are fortunate enough to appreciate the seven minutes in each day that you can call your own, enjoy them, they are truly yours.
Then, as you sit in the bathroom and you pick up that novel, then the hope is that you might come across something as enjoyable, slightly challenging and historically thoughtful as this book.
This was a recommendation from the previous book, the book full of books, the one I enjoyed and the one that took me through the whole uncertain summer of moving house and living as a squatter in other people's homes. This book settled me into our new, beautiful home, the home with space enough to laugh and the freedom to feel alive again after too long in a very small and angry location.
As I fell into my pillow each night, my pillow in the room without the fragile sleep of baby twins, I read a few pages. Not as many as I had hoped when I picked this book up, I didn't hurl myself through it in the fashion I had anticipated, but i did hang onto the end, a good ending, the right ending.
