Fire Season, Philip Connors

For nearly ten summers Philip Connors has been returning to the Gila National Forest in New Mexico to watch for wildfires. Fire Season, Field Notes from a Wilderness Lookout, tells of Connor's experiences.

It is a beautifully written, atmospheric book. Connor has a real flare for description, and imbues the book with a very strong sense of place and personality. Anecdotes, history, autobiography and musings make up Fire Season, it is romantic and practical, informative and funny. It beats Kerouac's 'Alone on a Mountaintop' hands down. Highly recommended.

Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, Jeanette Winterson

Oranges is a vivid coming of age novel, exploring the early life of an girl who was adopted by an overzealous Evangelical woman and her barely-there husband. The plan for Jeanette is a missionary life, she will be her adoptive mother's gift to the world and the Lord. Unfortunately for the mother, Jeanette finds out she is gay. For the latter half of the novel Jeanette attempts to reconcile her two selves.

Oranges.. is brilliantly written in snapshots which carefully and thoroughly build a picture of a childhood & adolescence. It is not bitter or disparaging towards the church, it lightheartedly points out the hypocrisies whilst clearly showing the warmth and community it provides. Winterson draws you in with her wit and wry observations, by the end of the novel you realise her dilemma is a distilled version of the universal push and pull between home/early family life and carving a life as an adult. Oranges.. deserves it's reputation.