Book news, reviews and recommendations
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 into as many hands as I could. Coupling sensual prose with perceptive, sometimes chilling, characterisation, Joanna Briscoe’s Sleep with Me grips from the first page […]
Blasts from the Past: Sleep with Me by Joanna Briscoe (2005) Read More »
Some very tempting paperback goodies to look out for this May, most of which I’ve already read beginning with one that made it on to both my books of the year list last year and this year’s Women’s Prize for Fiction wishlist. Megan Hunter’s gorgeously written The Harpy sees Lucy’s anger unleashed when she discovers
Paperbacks to Look Out For in May 2021: Part One Read More »
Many years ago, I was commissioned to write a reading guide for Joanna Briscoe’s Sleep with Me. Its perceptive exploration of desire and manipulation in a three-cornered relationship read like a modern take on Simone de Beauvoir’s She Came to Stay but with the page-turning pace of a thriller. I loved it. Hopes were high
The Seduction by Joanna Briscoe: Manipulation, obsession and dark secrets Read More »
June is usually the month when publishers present us with a plethora of summer reading designed to keep us entertained by the pool, although there’s not much chance of that this year unless you have your own. Not my kind of novel, on the whole, but Rebecca Kauffman’s The House on Fripp Island might be
Books to Look Out For in June 2020 Read More »
I tend to read what’s often described as literary rather than commercial fiction – I’d be hard pressed to tell you what the difference is although I know it when I see it – but, for me, David Nicolls is king of the commercial fiction castle which is why Us is top of my May
Paperbacks to Look Out For in May 2015 Read More »
A few years ago Random House began publishing novellas under the Hammer imprint. They’re all either horror or ghost stories – hardly a surprise given the connotations of the name – but what is surprising are some of the authors they’ve commissioned to write for them. I’ve already read Helen Dunmore’s The Greatcoat, a subtle,
Touched by Joanna Briscoe: A Touch of the Horrors Read More »