Book news, reviews and recommendations
Six Degrees of Separation is a meme hosted by Kate over at Books Are My Favourite and Best. It works like this: each month a book is chosen as a starting point and linked to six others to form a chain. A book doesn’t need to be connected to all the titles on the list, […]
Six Degrees of Separation – Knife to Any Human Heart Read More »
This is the latest in a series of occasional posts featuring books I read years ago about which I was wildly enthusiastic at the time, wanting to press a copy in as many hands as I could. Victoria Glendinning is best known for her literary biographies of such luminaries as Rebecca West, Vita Sackville-West and
Blasts from the Past: Electricity by Victoria Glendinning (1995) Read More »
Louise Hegarty’s debut, Fair Play, had such an intriguing premise I put up my hand as soon as I spotted it on NetGalley. She’s also a Stinging Fly contributor which always sways me in an author’s favour. For several years Abigail has arranged a murder mystery weekend to celebrate her brother’s birthday which falls on
Fair Play by Louise Hegarty: An inventive take on cosy crime Read More »
When I first discovered Elizabeth Strout’s writing, the UK editions of her books came with off-putting, wish-washy covers. Fortunately, they were reissued by another publisher with much more appropriate jackets and Strout became a household literary name. Four of the following five are also by American writers, several likely much better known in the US
Five Novels by Underrated Writers I’ve Read Read More »
Almost three years ago I reviewed Benjamin Markovits’s The Sidekick, a surprising choice for me as there’s a good deal about basketball in it but I enjoyed it enough to accept the offer of a review copy of The Rest of Our Lives. Billed appealingly as a road novel, it follows fifty-five-year-old Tom Layward whose
The Rest of Our Lives by Benjamin Markovits: A mid-life odyssey Read More »
When I’m feeling particularly depressed about the state of the world, I remind myself that equal marriage has been enshrined in law for over a decade here in the UK and has been legalised in many other countries. Set in a small Welsh village in the late 1980s, not so very long ago, Anthony Shapland’s
A Room Above a Shop by Anthony Shapland: A love story Read More »
I’m beginning with the only one I’ve read from this second instalment of April paperbacks. Narrated by the self-deprecating Rocky, Catherine Newman’s Sandwich spans a week in the holiday let she and her husband have rented for almost twenty years. They and their grown-up children cram themselves into the tiny cottage, joined later by Rocky’s
Paperbacks to Look Out For in April 2025: Part Two Read More »
Theft is Abdulrazak Gurnah’s first novel since winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2021. Described as ‘one of the world’s most prominent postcolonial writers’ by the chairman of the Nobel committee, he continues to explore that theme through three young people in 1990s Zanzibar, his native country, whose lives become closely intertwined. He would
Theft by Abdulrazak Gurnah: A multi-layered exploration of postcolonialism Read More »
The blurb for Paul McVeigh’s short story collection, I Hear You, put me in mind a little of Jhumpa Lahiri’s Roman Stories with its structure of a few standalone pieces plus ten stories linked to a location, in McVeigh’s case The Circus, a renovated club where a talent contest is to be held. The collection
I Hear You by Paul McVeigh: Belfast tales Read More »
I’m kicking off April’s paperback preview with two favourites from last year beginning with Sarah Leipciger’s Moon Road, the story of a missing girl and her parents, now divorced, who receive news decades after she disappeared. Yannick persuades Kathleen to travel to Vancouver, where Una had been living, to talk to the police. Although we
Paperbacks to Look Out For in April 2025: Part One Read More »
I spotted Madeleine Watts’s Elegy, Southwest on social media thanks to a passionately enthusiastic post from its editor. The premise of a road novel set in the desert of the American Southwest, a landscape which I’ve visited several times and loved, made me put up my hand immediately. Watts’s novel follows Eloise and Lewis over
Elegy, Southwest by Madeleine Watts: ‘Our time, perhaps, is shorter than we think’ Read More »