John Boyne and Maya Angelou ~ Remarkable writers. Outstanding writing. My thoughts.

John Boyne and Maya Angelou

Occasionally I dip into my own personal TBR pile with the intention of reading a few books for pure pleasure. No review. Just for me. As a blogger I find this extremely difficult as I love to spread the word….so I caved 🙂

I have for you all today two very different books that I have read and have encouraged me to immediately make further purchases from both authors.

John Boyne and Maya Angelou are known to many of you for varied reasons. You may have read their books already or, if not, you have most certainly heard of their work. John Boyne will always be synonymous with The Boy in The Striped Pajamas and Maya Angelou is now infamous for her inspiring words.

Please do read on for my few words and recommendations. I would love to hear your thoughts if you have read, or even considered reading, any novel by either author!!

Every so often a book comes along that captures your attention to the full. Nothing will get in the way of your reading of it. This was my reaction to A Ladder to The Sky, the latest release from John Boyne. I got a hardback version and the cover is just fabulous. For me it just captures the essence of the book perfectly.

‘Ambition ~ like setting a ladder to the sky. A pointless waste of energy’

It is described as ‘a dark and twisted psychological drama‘, which it most certainly is, but it is also a superbly written satire on the life of the writer.

John Boyne has written a masterpiece of a novel, one that has a very sophisticated tale at it’s core. It is complex. It is dark. It is a riveting piece of writing and one that I highly recommend.

So needless to say I immediately went out and got John Boyne’s previous novel, a beautiful hardback copy of The Heart’s Invisible Furies. I have no idea when I will get the opportunity to read it but I just like having it!!

A Ladder to The Sky ~ About the Book

If you look hard enough, you can find stories pretty much anywhere. They don’t even have to be your own. Or so would-be writer Maurice Swift decides very early on in his career.

A chance encounter in a Berlin hotel with celebrated novelist Erich Ackermann gives him an opportunity to ingratiate himself with someone more powerful than him. For Erich is lonely, and he has a story to tell. Whether or not he should do so is another matter entirely.

Once Maurice has made his name, he sets off in pursuit of other people’s stories. He doesn’t care where he finds them – or to whom they belong – as long as they help him rise to the top.

Stories will make him famous but they will also make him beg, borrow and steal. They may even make him do worse

The Heart’s Invisible Furies ~ About the Book

Cyril Avery is not a real Avery or at least that’s what his adoptive parents tell him. And he never will be. But if he isn’t a real Avery, then who is he?

Born out of wedlock to a teenage girl cast out from her rural Irish community and adopted by a well-to-do if eccentric Dublin couple via the intervention of a hunchbacked Redemptorist nun, Cyril is adrift in the world, anchored only tenuously by his heartfelt friendship with the infinitely more glamourous and dangerous Julian Woodbead.

At the mercy of fortune and coincidence, he will spend a lifetime coming to know himself and where he came from – and over his three score years and ten, will struggle to discover an identity, a home, a country and much more.

‘Then there was the pain. A breaking and entering when even the senses are torn apart’

I have to admit I began reading Maya Angelou’s I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings with reservations. I just wasn’t ‘feeling it’ initially and then it happened, that moment when a book just creeps into your heart.

This is the first of seven autobiographies written by Maya Angelou, as she recounts the hardships and challenges of her early years. As a child Maya Angelou experienced trauma that no child should ever be exposed to and her ability to survive with such determination and courage is a testament to the woman that she was.

This first chapter of her life takes us up to Maya aged fifteen and I now need and want to know what happened to her next.

The full listing of autobiographies is as follows:

I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings

Gather Together in My Name

Singin’ and Swingin’ and Gettin’ Merry Like Christmas

The Heart of A Woman

All God’s Children Need Travelling Shoes

A Song Flung Up to Heaven

Mom & Me & Mom

Needless to say I have now gone and purchased book two!!

I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings ~ About the Book

Maya Angelou’s seven volumes of autobiography are a testament to the talents and resilience of this extraordinary writer. Loving the world, she also knows its cruelty.

As a Black woman she has known discrimination and extreme poverty, but also hope, joy, achievement and celebration. In this first volume of her six books of autobiography,

Maya Angelou beautifully evokes her childhood with her grandmother in the American south of the 1930s. She learns the power of the white folks at the other end of town and suffers the terrible trauma of rape by her mother’s lover.

Gather Together In My Name ~ About the Book

Maya Angelou’s volumes of autobiography are a testament to the talents and resilience of this extraordinary writer. Loving the world, she also knows its cruelty. As a black woman she has known discrimination and extreme poverty, but also hope, joy, achievement and celebration.

In the sequel to her best-selling I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings Maya Angelou is a young mother in California, unemployed, embarking on brief affairs and transient jobs in shops and night-clubs, turning to prostitution and the world of narcotics.