BOOKM A RKS
By Carolyn Camilleri
FALL STYLE How to Get Dressed: A Costume Designer’s Secrets for Making Your Clothes Look, Fit, and Feel Amazing By Alison Freer | Penguin Random House, Softcover, 256 pages
Everything you could ever possibly need to know about fitting clothes, including which alterations are worth doing and remarkably simple tips for improving fit. Freer covers it all: clothing hacks and wardrobe tools, laundry and shoe care, how to break fashion rules, closet organization (so helpful!) and a guide to shopping for vintage clothes. I rushed out and bought safety pins, Topstick and moleskin, which Freer calls her “Holy Trinity” and uses in very clever ways not intended by the manufacturers.
In Your Prime: Older, Wiser, Happier By India Knight | Fig Tree, Hardcover, 272 pages
A British columnist and author, Knight offers a whole lifetime’s worth of guidance for women on aging: from clothes, hair and makeup to raising kids, managing elderly parents and coping with menopause. And she does it all with such blunt humour and no nonsense advice, that you can’t help but see the bright side of reaching a certain age. She does prattle on at times and skips over bits like she’s crossing them off a list, but she is ambitiously covering a lot of territory. Well worth reading … when you get to “that age.”
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YAM MAGAZINE
The Heart Goes Last
The Buried Giant
By Margaret Atwood McClelland & Stewart, 320 pages
By Kazuo Ishiguro Knopf Canada, 345 pages
Atwood’s newest novel, due out at the end of September, is set in Positron, the same nearfuture universe in her e-book series, released 2012-2013. Though it has the same title, setting and characters as the fourth installment, this is a standalone novel. In it, the world’s economy has collapsed and the story opens with Stan and Charmaine, who have lost their jobs and home and are living in their car. In desperation, they agree to join a social experiment in Positron, wherein civilians and prisoners switch places every month: the jailers become the jailed and vice versa. It’s funny — they are living double lives, which leads to all kinds of humour — but more than that, it’s an intensely dark, gripping tale that feels nightmarishly possible.
Set in the days just after King Arthur, this is the tale of Axl and Beatrice, a married couple of charming older Britons. It’s a time of dragons, of superstition mingled with Christianity, where a mysterious mist has erased everyone’s memories. But Axl and Beatrice have glimmers of memory about their son and believe he is expecting them in another town. As they travel, they are aided by a Saxon warrior, a Saxon youth and an elderly Sir Gawain. This isn’t the easiest book to get into — it can drag — but it is as beautifully written as anything Ishiguro writes, and curiosity pushed me through. Somewhere along the journey, I got hooked and I was so very sad to reach the last page.