I’ve been away for a long time. Not too long after March I took an unexpected hiatus from blogging, reading and life in general.

I had just finished Sarah Lotz’s chilling latest novel Day Four when the I got caught up in the woes of moving house. If you’ve ever had the displeasure of moving you’ll understand how truly horrible it was. Add in the hassle of setting up broadband in a new home, I knew I wasn’t to get much reading or blogging done. After I had settled into my new home I picked up Stephen King’s Wind Through the Keyhole. I wanted more than anything to become lost once again in Mid-World.  Roughly 30 pages into The Wind Through the Keyhole something very unexpected happened… my baby arrived a whole two months early. Thus to say I did not finish this final dip into Mid-World.

So, catching me off guard I found myself so overwhelmed with life, reading had to go on the back burner. Over the past two months I managed to read one book in full and that was Stephen King’s follow up to Mr Mercedes, Finders Keepers. Finders Keepers got me through the toughest three weeks of my life. I spent between 10 and 12 hours a day sitting next to an incubator in a hospital waiting for the the fantastic doctors and nurses to let my daughter come home. It felt like I was waiting forever but I passed the time by ploughing through Finder Keepers. The day I finished Finders Keepers I got the fantastic news that my daughter had gained enough weight to come home. That’s when the reading stopped.

Some insane logic had made me think, “I’ll get so much reading done with a newborn baby in tow”. As any parent will tell you, you’ll get absolute nothing done. During her first few weeks home I tried to finished Wind Through the Keyhole but I could only get about 10 pages in before another baby related issue arose. I then came to the conclusion that it wasn’t me, it was the book! I needed something I could be completely swept up in. So I started Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke, this was one of the stupidest ideas I’d ever had. At over 700 pages there was no hope of me finishing this book. I then figured I needed to read an author I was more familiar with.

That’s when I started David Mitchell’s The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet, this is a book that’s defeated me before. And it defeated me again.

But yesterday something magical happened…

Friend and colleague @CatrionaRoseann (follow her, she’s got some great recommendations) told me about one of her much loved reads. The Unit by Ninni Holmqvist. I could honestly say I had never heard of this book, but this was the book that got me back on track.  This is a dark, dystopic and bleak to boot. The Unit tells the tale of fifty year old Dorrit who is forced to leave everything behind when she becomes a resident of the Second Reserve Bank Unit. For the first time in that felt like forever I devoured this book. I started The Unit just around 3AM as I couldn’t get back to sleep after my daughter’s feed, I finished The Unit at 10PM the same day.

Get a copy of this book! And in short… I’m back!

Up next is The Loney by Andrew Michael Hurley.