Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


About Merryn

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Merryn's Reviews:

“So thank God, quite literally, for music”

Faith, Hope and Carnage by Nick Cave and Seán O’Hagan

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Bingo: On Air Passport: Interview Faith, Hope and Carnage documents a series of conversations between musician Nick Cave and journalist Seán O’Hagan. The long and intimate relationship between the collaborators and Cave’s ease with self-examination have enabled this book to dig much deeper than the standard rock star memoir. This project was born out of the pandemic. In March 2020 Cave’s world tour was cancelled, and all the work put into preparing his Ghosteen album for live performance had come to nothing, bringing an extraordinary […]

A master distills fantasy down to its essence

Treacle Walker by Alan Garner

The Owl Service by Alan Garner

The Weirdstone of Brisingamen by Alan Garner

The Moon of Gomrath by Alan Garner

Boneland by Alan Garner

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Bingo (In order):  Guide, Relationships, Nostalgia, Europe, Adulthood Passport: England When Alan Garner’s Treacle Walker was shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize I was surprised, not because I don’t think he’s a brilliant writer worthy of a major literary award, but because awards like this don’t seem to take fantasy seriously, despite the depth of the ideas and the beauty of the prose, and I hadn’t realised that this author I loved in my childhood was still alive and still writing.  Treacle Walker is not […]

On the road to nowhere

Nomadland by Jessica Bruder

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Bingo: On the Road; Passport: USA Jessica Bruder’s Nomadland documents several years of immersion into the subculture of vandwellers, people who call themselves houseless rather than homeless, living in their vehicles and moving between seasonal jobs such as camp hosting in national parks, Amazon’s Camperforce, and harvesting crops.  The narrative follows a number of members and leaders of the vandweller community, but the focus character is Linda May who lives  with her dog Coco in a 1974 ten-foot trailer towed behind a Jeep. Like most […]

A charming story about a girl and her dog

Runt by Craig Silvey

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Bingo: Taking Flight; Passport: Australia In the tradition of Roald Dahl, Runt is an absolutely charming story about a girl and her dog overcoming adversity, finding community, spreading positivity, and being celebrated for being their deliciously odd selves.   Annie Shearer lives in the down-on-its-luck rural Australian town of Upson Downs, where local baddie Earl Robert-Barren is hoarding water to drive his neighbours off their land so he can buy up their properties.  Her family of oddballs struggles on.   Annie hatches a plan to save the […]

Getting paid to stand around being scary

Standing Heavy by gauZ'

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Bingo: Africa; Postcard: Côte d’Ivoire In Nouchi, the popular slang of the Ivoirian city of Abidjan, standing heavy means a lowly paid job that keeps the employee on their feet.  This witty novel takes us into the heads of young men from Côte d’Ivoire at the end of long chains of Parisian subcontracted security services, their lack of papers overlooked so long as they meet the racist morphological profile – heavy-set, tall, strong, deferential, and scary.  Getting paid for standing is not as easy as […]

A book to read in bed

Cockroach and Other Stories by Jane Cornes Maclean

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Bingo:  You are here – the author lives in my city and my friend circle.  Jane calls this collection of short stories ficto-memoir, created by slicing off little pieces of her life and frying them up in the spice of fiction to make something delicious.   Within the span of twenty-one tales, some don’t stray far from the woman I know, an Englishwoman who has lived in Australia most of her life, a wife, a mother, a sister, a daughter, who looks at life with insight, […]



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