These days it is rare to see people reading print books on public transport. Hence it was quite a delight to discover the following three books being perused by fellow train passengers yesterday. (Plus a bonus one.)
I was happy to see a guy standing near the carriage door reading North Woods (2023) by American author Daniel Mason, because the book was also recommended by my local library. Based on the review by Alice Jolly via The Guardian, who praises Mason’s book as a “dazzling fragmentary history of a small patch of woodland in New England [that] travels to the limits of what the novel can do”, I am intrigued. Not to mention that gorgeous cover!
Meanwhile, Jolly’s own The Matchbox Girl (2025) also looks interesting. In the author’s words: “12-year-old Adelheid became the narrator of my book when I discovered that one of Asperger’s real life young patients was a boy who was obsessed with collecting 1000 matchboxes. I decided to turn this real boy into a fictional girl because we are only now understanding that girls’ experiences of autism / neurodiversity are different from boys.” Read about Dr Hans Asperger HERE.
The guy sitting next to me was reading Last One Out (2025) by Jane Harper. It made me wonder why I have never read any of the bestselling author’s books.
The lady sitting three rows across the aisle from me was reading The Elements (2025) by John Boyne. It took me a while to find the book on the Internet, because I didn’t know it consists of four novellas — Water, Earth, Fire, and Air. Neither did I know that Boyne is the author of the 2016 novel The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas. So, today’s discovery is how ignorant I am…
Voices under the Sun 陽光下的聲音 